Local audiences will have a chance to see one of the last of the great American touring theater troupes Friday when The Acting Company presents “Moby Dick Rehearsed” by Orson Welles at Fairfield University’s Quick Center.
The Acting Company was founded 36 years by the late great John Houseman and dancer-turned-arts administrator Margot Harley as an adjunct to the work they did training actors at the Drama Division of the Juilliard School in Manhattan.
Houseman and Harley wanted graduates of the theater program to have the opportunity for the added education that can only come from the practical experience of working in a real company designed to perform plays in repertory all over the country.
Among the many alumni of The Acting Company are Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, Frances Conroy and David Ogden Stiers.
The first company stayed together for four years of touring. As actors peeled off for other professional work, new company members came in from Juilliard and other acting schools.
Although acting companies have been the foundation of theater overseas, it is very challenging to create such troupes in the United States.
“Most companies choose a season and hire (different) actors for each play,” Harley said in a phone interview from Manhattan last week.
The Acting Company began in an optimistic era when growing federal and state subsidies for the arts produced the explosion in regional theaters (such as our own Long Wharf Theatre and Hartford Stage) and dance companies around the country.
“People were able to take more chances then,” Harley said of the arts climate in the 1970s when the National Endowment for the Arts was still many years away from facing its terrible battles over photography exhibits by Robert Mapplethorpe and experimental theater by Karen Finley and Tim Miller (and the resulting funding cuts).
“As the country got more and more conservative that placed more pressure on the box office,” Harley said of the retrenchment of non-profit theater over the past two decades.
“We only get a tenth of what we used to get,” the producing artistic director said of her company’s subsidies. “And we don’t have that home base or subscription audience (of the regional theaters).”
Presenting non-commercial theater is a major financial struggle in 2008, but Harley is determined to see that The Acting Company continues (the important work done by the troupe was recognized with a special Tony Award in 2003).
“There is a crisis now…theater is just so expensive to produce…(but) the theater isn’t dying because too many people want to do it, and enough people want to see it.”
Harley believes the continuing national presence of The Acting Company is as important for building audiences of the future as it is for the training and employment of our finest young actors.
“Young people are not getting in the habit of seeing theater,” Harley said of her troupe’s mandate to do special performances for students around the country. (In Fairfield on Friday there will be a special 10 a.m. performance of “Moby Dick Rehearsed” for students in grades 5 and up, in addition to the regular 8 p.m. evening performance.)
One of the struggles faced by theater in America is the vast size of the country and the scattering of fine regional operations from coast to coast. The size and diversity of the country has made it virtually impossible to establish one “National Theatre” such as the renowned subsidized company in London.
“In a sense we are kind of a national company — not like the National Theatre of England — but we are taking theater all over the country,” Harley said.
The impetus for starting The Acting Company 36 years ago was simply to keep an extraordinary group of Juilliard graduates together for a few years.
“But then (Houseman) saw that we could create a company out of that…obviously we couldn’t keep it in New York, but then we saw that touring is a kind of experience you can’t match any other way,” Harley said.
“Our actors play a 400 seat theater one night and a 2,000 seat house the next…it is the best possible experience…Kevin Kline said that after his four years (in The Acting Company) he felt he had learned what would have taken 20 years of experience in New York,” she added.
The artistic director is especially pleased by the production of “Moby Dick Rehearsed” since Welles and Houseman were such an important team in the American theater of the pre-World War II era.
The two men eventually parted ways, with Welles going on to Hollywood and Houseman working in film and a variety of theatrical endeavors (including running the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford during its 1950s heyday).
“John said many times that (Welles) was the only genius he ever knew,” Harley noted.
(Tickets for “Moby Dick Rehearsed” are $30 for the 8 p.m. Friday night performance and $7 for the 10 a.m. student performance. For more information call the box office at 254-4010 or go online to www.quickcenter.com)
