Love’s Labor’s Lost (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 1980): Barry Kraft, Casey Childs. Directed by Dennis Bigelow. Photo by Hank Kranzler. Cover Photo: The Merry Wives of Windsor (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 1980): Casey Childs, Patti Slover. Directed by Jon Cranney. Photo by Hank Kranzler.
Words, Words, Words
In 1975 I transferred from the BFA in Acting Program at the University of Southern California to the BFA in Acting Program at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. During the intervening summer of 1975, I was an intern at The Globe of the Great Southwest in Odessa, Texas. The Globe was a vague replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater except it was indoors with seats and air conditioning.
I had always been enamored of Shakespeare’s plays from an early age. My family often visited the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, and I had seen many productions of his plays growing up in Michigan. During that summer in Odessa, I was cast as Menelaus in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA and as a member of Dogberry’s watch in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. We ran these shows in repertory with DAMES AT SEA and THE LIFE OF CHRIST. (Yes, this theater was in the southern Bible Belt.)
I suddenly found myself careening on a Shakespeare career course. Between 1975 and 1983 I worked as an actor at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder, Colorado, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon and I got my Equity card doing five plays at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival in Madison, New Jersey. During that period I also directed productions of Shakespeare’s plays at Carnegie-Mellon University, (for my MFA in Directing), the University of South Florida and Duke University.
By the time I was 27 I had acted in or directed over two dozen plays by Shakespeare. I could have had a very happy career remounting the well-worn chestnuts of the Bard, but fate intervened. I had a change of course and was headed off into the exhilarating world of new American plays by living playwrights.
