Reflections on the Season's End

It is 8:30am on closing day of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 90th season. Last night I finished a 97-show run of As You Like It as Rosalind (would’ve been 98, but we had to cancel one). Today we will wrap up Julius Caesar after 119 shows, four of which I missed due to a pulled tendon and exhaustion. It’s been the most challenging and fulfilling 10 months I think I’ve ever experienced.

I didn’t sleep well last night. The celebratory cocktails and bone-weariness conspired to keep me up with a stomachache and racing thoughts. I wouldn’t change it for anything. So now I’m really up for the day, puttering but not too hard. My YouTube feed produces a 12-minute Dick Cavett clip of Orson Welles. He’s describing hiking the Tyrolean Alps in his youth. Also a dinner party in Innsbruck with an utterly forgettable Adolph Hitler:
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Ken Albers as Lear and Ray Porter as Kent, OSF 2004

Welles’ distinct baritone washes over me, his jocular haughtiness, his masterful control of narrative and punchline. Just as he’s mentioning how proudly uneducated he is, I find myself thinking of an interaction I had outside the theater on the previous day. A young woman who works in the box office named Samantha caught me to pay a compliment. She said “I can only imagine what your training must be”, to which I replied “I never went to college, I grew up here, my father was an actor in the company.” Now I think it might have sounded like a boast, but that’s not how I meant it. What I was trying to say – what I wish I’d said was: “I didn’t go to college, I apprenticed myself here at OSF.”

I’ve been very lucky. I grew up in dressing rooms, backstage and in the booth, watching rehearsals and playing with Ben Nye bruise wheels and stippling sponges since I was very, very young. When I skipped out of Bennington after just 3 months to do Idiot’s Delight at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I received no real pushback from my artsy parents. The theater was calling, I had been promised an apprentice’s stipend, and I had everyone’s blessing in pursuing the opportunity.

And I believe, having started in this way, that if you really want to do this, you can learn the ropes without putting down tens of thousands of dollars for a higher education. Primarily watching, listening, being in the company of actors and theater artists. That’s what I did for 20+ years at OSF and elsewhere. It seems to have worked out, as it did for thousands of actors over thousands of years before educational institutions (corporations?) began selling the lie that they know best how to prepare a person to do what we can all do naturally – think and feel.

It's a message I’d like to spread, but I’m wary of being irresponsible. How many theaters these days will take a chance, however small and spear-holdery, on someone who hasn’t been through a professional training program? OSF doesn’t do it anymore, and in fact they only used to offer apprenticeships to Southern Oregon University students here in Ashland. They made an exception for me, because my father was an actor in this company. And there’s the NEPOTISM I’ve been trying to justify with hard work my whole life. The word blinks on and off in ten-foot-tall neon in my mind’s eye.

So it’s complicated.

But wouldn’t it be a way to pay back my good fortune if, one day, I could take on an apprentice myself? I’d invite them to come with me to rehearsal, observe backstage, understudy my parts. Learn by doing, in a real, professional theater…

Orson is still going on, now about Cornelia Lundt (I make a mental note to look her up, it sounds like her life is the stuff of a musical), and now about how Churchill once helped him get a film financed. It feels like coming home, listening to him talk. He reminds me of Ken Albers, the person to whom I really apprenticed myself.

A giant of the theater (and Wellesian in stature), a rarity who could direct and act with equal genius, Ken would pace back and forth in the moat of the Elizabethan theater, chain smoking and bellowing notes of pure gold. He took me under his wing. He kissed me on the mouth every chance he got and it never bothered me. He got me drunk on deliciously strong margaritas and told me stories of going up sky high and breaking and backstage shenanigans. He gave me encouragement and advice and a geode, flattering me by saying it was like what I’d done with a bit part in his adaptation of The Visit – taken something rough and unremarkable and turned it into a gem. I keep the stone on my dressing table wherever I’m staying when I am working on a play.

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Ensemble, Ken Albers' production of The Visit (OSF. 2004). I'm in braids and pleated skirt, left.

Ken is gone now, as his darling wife Catie. I found myself slinking into their estate sale in the Spring, searching for unwanted copies of his adaptation of the Dürrenmatt play. Just as I was about to give up, overwhelmed by the morass of mementos and memories, I found two. One for me, and one for Linda Alper – another great who still does the Herculean lift of 8 shows a week while offering kindness and encouragement to those coming up in the company who are much younger. There were so many like Linda and Ken, who helped and encouraged me along the way. Who taught me what to do by their brilliant examples.

The truth is, I want to be like Orson Welles (just not as swollen). I want to direct, to write, to act. I admit to being proud that I’m formally uneducated, as he was. I want there to be a path into our strange world that doesn’t involve debt and delay, for those who hear its siren song. Money shouldn’t be an object for anyone who wants to be a priest or priestess, which is what my husband insists I’m doing up there on the stage, bless his heart.

Money wasn’t an object for Welles, or at least he didn’t let it stand in his way. But then again, he had Winston Churchill backing him up.

And I had Ken Albers.

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Me and Ken, 2013