The Comeback Kid

 

The gods, we know, must be crazy. But you can excuse Tony Simotes if he thinks they’re downright psychotic. No sooner does he feel he has all of Shakespeare & Company’s ducks in a row—refinancing the company’s debt, settling a pesky lawsuit, putting the finishing touches on the 2010 season—than he gets the news. The benign mass in his throat, he found out last March, is not at all benign; it’s a Stage III cancerous tumor.

 

What’s a new artistic director to do? Give up the top job with the company he helped found? Leave the beloved Berkshires where he met his wife, Lucy, and hightail it back to the University of Wisconsin, where he had tenure as a professor and great health benefits?

 

Not on his life—literally. Though he certainly gave it some thought. “We had been trying to find a place to live, trying to sell our home in Wisconsin, trying to make all this work here,” he says of the transition. “And then to face this life-threatening disease, you kind of thought, Maybe we should just go back to Wisconsin. We have a home, a medical plan in place with the university; it would be a lot easier to do that. But we really felt that with the emotional support of the company, even with all the things to do here, this is the best place and the best care, and the most positive place I could put my energy into.”

 

Simotes, 59, says his treatment has an eighty percent survival rate, and he intends to be among that group, as he’s taking a mixture of old and new therapies at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “I worked really hard this past year to put the company into turnaround, and I want to carry the banner forward with the help of all these terrific people. I’m going to be successful, and I’m going to see this through.’’

 

So how did he get to this place to begin with? The long story goes back to Joliet, Illinois, where he grew up in a family of five. His father owned a grocery store, and Simotes eventually ran an open-air market for him while learning to play the drums. There’s an element of a 1940s Hollywood tearjerker to the story, what with his father getting angry at him for ruining all his No. 2 pencils by using them as drumsticks on coffee cans. (Trying to save the pencils, he gave Simotes a pair of bongo drums.) Neither of his parents had finished high school, and Simotes was the only one of three siblings to attend college.

 

His parents didn’t mind when the sixteen-year-old went off on the “Shindig ’67” tour with Bobby Vee and Del Shannon—along with the dancing girls and backup singers—playing everything from tractor-pulls to state fairs. After all, he was earning good money. He started veering off toward acting when he realized that idols such as Ginger Baker and Gene Krupa would never be threatened by this young upstart, and after a high school teacher told him he’d flunk Simotes if he didn’t audition for the school play. Goodbye Keith Moon; hello Thornton Wilder.

 

But the Shakespeare & Company story really begins at New York University (NYU) in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Simotes as a graduate student met many of the merry men and women who would go on to form the nucleus of the company—Dennis Krausnick, Kevin Coleman, Rocco Sisto, Kristin Linklater. Oh, and there was a visiting director on the faculty named Tina Packer, who would become the larger-than-life first artistic director of the company. She directed Simotes as Richard III in The Story of a War, which incorporated the Henry VI plays, Richard III, and parts of other history plays. He was also developing a taste for fighting, at least on the stage. Legendary fight director B.H. Barry was his mentor, teaching him how to put his theatrical dukes up, which became one of his specialties at Shakespeare & Company.

 

In the flesh, Simotes seems like the last person you’d expect to find fighting. He comes across as the quintessential nice guy—humble, friendly, diplomatic, something of a spark plug in both demeanor and body type. He makes people comfortable, whether they’re actors in the Othello rehearsal room last summer or interviewers chatting him up over soup and sandwiches at Haven Café & Bakery, the bustling restaurant that took Carol’s place in Lenox, Massachusetts. He is easy to smile, easy to make light of things, and by his own admission, he was never one of the Shakespeare & Company alpha males (of whom there have been many).

 

But he isn’t the least bit shy or unassertive. After NYU, Simotes grabbed the attention of another legendary artistic director, Joseph Papp, at New York’s Public Theater. He had been cast in the Central Park production of Henry V with Meryl Streep and Michael Moriarty. As Papp was going through a rehearsal and mimicking a drum roll, Simotes raised his hand to say, “You know, Joe, I also play the drums.” Papp responded, “Get that kid a drum.” Simotes continues, “And there I was, I was the king’s drummer, I created this whole role, I got extra money….” A year later, he was in Measure for Measure with Streep and her then-boyfriend, John Cazale, and then cast in All’s Well That Ends Well.

 

The Public-ans were a little stunned, to say the least, when Simotes up and left Papp and company for Packer and company. Tina had called to say that the NYU crowd was pulling up stakes and heading for the Berkshires, where they had come across Edith Wharton’s property and were planning on liberating it—to use the lingo of the day—from developers.

 

The twenty-six-year-old got off the bus in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1978, and was met by Dennis Krausnick, who told him that they weren’t going to do Romeo and Juliet as planned but A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he’d play Puck, a part he loathed. So Simotes drew on his unhappiness over the role to play a “most-reluctant-Puck,” rather than the more traditional most-happy-fairy. “The naughty Puck,” Packer says with a laugh. “He’s always been a bit of a naughty lad,” she adds with another laugh. “But he’s really matured, and Lucy makes sure he toes the line now.”

 

The company’s philosophy of actors being as invested in the work as directors was already taking hold. It was also a period of great experimentation, in which Packer and Linklater developed their unique style of integrating voice training and personal experience to develop the technique of “dropping in.”

 

“Tina brought this strong, strong sense that the psychological was attached to the emotional within the language,” Simotes says. “And she was interested in us as artists, not, ‘Do this,’ but, ‘What’s really going on for you in that moment?’ You could lie and hide or you could say, ‘What I’m going through is this,’ and then it would be ‘OK, let’s see where that takes you.’ It wasn’t about theater as therapy; it was really a way of understanding that when you’re an artist … you create out of who you really are.”

 

It wasn’t to everyone’s liking; some disbelievers started talking about the “Berserkshires” and flew the coop. But Simotes loved it even when he hated it. Not only did he use his personal story in creating the bad Puck, but he also borrowed some Method method and stayed in character outside the play, playing tricks on his fellow Mount-mates. There’s more than a bit of nostalgia when Simotes remembers talking about the moon rising in the sky and looking up to see the crescent, dealing with the elements much as Shakespeare did. “The relationship to the audience was immediate…. We were blown away by how many people came. They brought their chairs. They were used to Tanglewood, so they brought their candelabras, their wine….”

 

While Packer recalls those early days with Simotes fondly, she wasn’t laughing the following spring when he was one of the first to leave the nest. He had met Richard Dreyfuss at one of the company’s “stars” workshops with Christine Lahti, Peter Firth, and Chris Sarandon. Dreyfuss asked Simotes to coach him as Iago at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, opposite Paul Winfield as Othello.

 

From there, he was California-bound. He went out to Los Angeles to edit a tape of the Othello production, staying at Rob Reiner and Penny Marshall’s guest house. “Tina was saying, ‘You’re playing these roles this summer,’ and I said, ‘They’ve kind of invited me out to California.’ She was not very happy with me at the time,” Simotes says. “Had I not done that,” he adds, “I probably would not be in the position I am. It’s where I learned to be behind the scenes and not just work as an actor out front.”

 

Accurate on all counts, Packer says. “I thought he was choosing fame over the hard work of building the company. But in retrospect, I think he was right.” At any rate, it wasn’t a case of “Tony ’n’ Tina’s Great Breakup” or anything like that. “It didn’t really damage the relationship. I was just a bit pissed,” Packer adds with her trademark laugh.

 

A Tony Simotes film festival would include some pretty good stuff, even if he wasn’t exactly the star. There’s the absorbing Eric Stoltz/Helen Hunt film about a paraplegic, The Waterdance, where he was Phone Operator #1; an excellent TV-movie that helped blow the lid off daycare molestation convictions, Indictment: The McMartin Trial, where he was Reporter #13. And who can forget his Desk Clerk, Ambulance Driver, Construction Foreman, and Vault Guard (Terminator 2) in a handful of other films?

 

His drumming, along with his acting, did get him one big “name” part, however: Buddy Rich in the TV-movie, Sinatra. “I actually auditioned for another role. The casting director saw that I was a drummer and said, ‘You really look like the young Buddy Rich.’ I said, ‘OK.’ Thank God I didn’t say, ‘But Gene Krupa was really my hero.’” Another old pal from NYU, Olympia Dukakis, played young Frank’s mother.

 

Meanwhile, Simotes was coming back to the Berkshires whenever he got a break. Packer and others had also talked him into directing, which he took to pretty readily. Says Simotes, “I remember that Mel Brooks line—‘It’s good to be king.’”

 

The Northridge Earthquake of 1994 and a divorce from his first wife brought him back East. “My agent said, ‘You can’t leave’,” but Simotes had other ideas. He threw himself back into the theater. A teaching job followed at Florida State, where he took actors over to Tallahassee to do improvisational street theater in the middle of the raging debate about the 2000 election fiasco. It’s also where he learned more about arts administration.

 

After his second divorce he came back to Lenox, where, at the company’s twenty-fifth gala in 2002, “literally across a crowded room,” he met his future wife, Lucy. She had gone to the gala, hoping to connect with Jason Asprey, Packer’s son. Here’s how she remembers it: “I had gone to the last show at the Mount, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Jason was Puck, and I went on a mission to meet him.… I took my mom to the gala, where he showed no interest in me—I wonder why; he was dating a younger woman. Jason was talking to Tony, who was saying, ‘I’ve been dating these crazy women. I want to date someone like her,’ and pointed to me.”

 

Asprey, apparently, was only too happy to introduce the two of them. They talked, and Tony finally said, “I’ve never asked anyone out in front of her mother before.” A ten-hour date followed, and the rest, says Lucy, is history.

 

They didn’t live happily ever after in the Berkshires, though. Simotes then got the University of Wisconsin job. But when it turned out that Shakespeare & Company was launching a real search for Packer’s successor a couple of years ago, he threw his hat into the ring after hearing that the board was unconvinced that Packer’s heir apparent—Simotes’s friend, Michael Hammond—should get the job.

 

 

Packer’s direction has often been notable for psychology and politics, the latter with a heavy dose of squaring Shakespeare’s plays with her own feminism (as seen in her own production this summer, Women of Will, for example). Simotes talks about a less linear approach to theater—more visual and more musical, in pursuit of the melody and rhythms of the language.

 

 He wouldn’t be a member in good standing, though, if he didn’t share the company’s fascination with psychology. His training has made him particularly interested in the violence committed by Shakespeare’s characters. “What Shakespeare was putting into his plays, that struggle between Hotspur and his wife or between Kate and Petruchio … there was something there beyond the struggle itself. He had really tapped into a deeper psychology, whether he knew it or not, that was playing out in our generation. We were ready; the consciousness was raised to ask the questions on a deeper level.”

 

In Othello, for example, Simotes wasn’t as interested in the Venetian and Cypriot plot as the politics about gender and relationships and love and marriage. “And in that, I have a lot of experience,” Simotes says with a wry smile acknowledging he’s on wife number three.

 

But when John Douglas Thompson turns his attention from Othello’s naïve romanticism to Richard III’s evil ways this summer, Simotes isn’t sure how actively he’ll be directing him. Jonathan Croy will be on hand to play the role that Simotes used to play with Packer—something akin to associate director, trying to make sure that the focus of the play stays the same if Simotes is reacting poorly to chemotherapy or radiation treatments.

 

 

Simotes also has to deal with all the other issues attendant with the new economic realities—less rehearsal time (considered so important to the company’s methodology in the past); more fundraising; fewer staff positions; pressures to compromise on the artistry. But that’s where all that personal history of balancing art and commerce comes in handy, he says, dating back to running the open-air market for his father while forging a career in the arts. Now he’s the one who has to worry about the No. 2 pencils.

 

Packer talks exuberantly about her confidence in Simotes both personally and professionally. “His personality is so outgoing and generous. He’s funny. His public face is absolutely terrific. I thought I was handing over an organization that was financially stable, but it all went rapidly downhill. Instead of just learning the job, he was handed all these crises, and he followed his heart and gut and stood his ground. He did it all extraordinarily well.” That carries over to his medical problems, she says. “He has an enormous capacity to withstand pain. And he really is an optimist, and he’s taking part in his own course of treatment. Those are the people who have the great survival rates.”

 

As he looks beyond personal medical woes and the company’s financial problems, he looks forward to the challenges of the job of artistic director—creating new plays in Lenox; finding an outdoor spot to recreate the magic at the Mount; forging alliances with other Berkshire theaters and arts organizations. He also talks about a possible collaboration with Boston’s Actors’ Shakespeare Project, where former company stalwart Allyn Burrows is now artistic director.

 

Burrows likes the idea, too. “We’re all part of the family,” he says. “Tony and I have done so much. We did Henry IV and Henry V. We just have a ball together, and there’s a lot of cross-pollination between the two companies. A lot of our members have done the voice training, text training, and it’s just a drive down the [Mass] Pike. And he is a joker. The most recent thing he directed me in was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), and he just gives so much permission.”

 

For now, though, Simotes’s focus is on the Berkshires, on places like the trails at Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary and Ice Glen that he enjoys hiking, and on getting well with a little help from his friends, some of whom he knew when that Beatles song first came out.

 

Even before he had an inkling that he was sick, Simotes would talk about the inspiration of his sister, Annette. “I felt like I took this job because of what my sister had represented in our life and the challenges she faced going from breast cancer to lung cancer to brain cancer,” he says. “One day when I was directing Merry Wives, she had had a seizure. I was talking to her afterward, and I was blown away by the courage she had. She used to tell me, ‘I just put my face into the wind and I go forward.’”

 

Call it fate or what you will, but the thought that his sister’s message brought him back to where he discovered that theater was about more than entertainment brings a catch to his throat, as well as a determination to put his own face into the wind, to lead both himself and the company back to a full recovery. [JULY 2010]

 

Ed Siegel is a former theater and television critic at the Boston Globe and a regular contributor to Boston public radio station WBUR-FM.