THEATER: John Douglas Thompson: Looking for Richard III

 

If you want to take lessons in how to light up a room, you couldn’t do much better than to hang out with John Douglas Thompson. The striking, charismatic Shakespeare & Company mainstay makes it look effortless. Think Kobe Bryant hitting a three-pointer or Roger Federer flicking a forehand down the line.

 

But forget the sports metaphors. Despite having been an accomplished athlete in school, Thompson is a man of the theater. So think instead of Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, in which the denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon stare into their beers until Hickey arrives with a jolt and the party begins.

 

Following Thompson from the Shakespeare & Company rehearsal room to Haven Café & Bakery in Lenox, Massachusetts, is a little like that. As Thompson, who plays the title role in The Life and Death of King Richard III through September 5, walks through the door of the company hangout, folks are practically taking numbers to greet him, whether they’re members of the company having lunch, restaurant staffers, or Lenox year-rounders. And there seems to be a particular glimmer from the females.

 

It’s not as if the forty-six-year-old actor seeks out the attention, but he feeds off of the energy as well as into it. Thompson is quick to laugh and seems genuinely interested in what people have been up to since he saw them last summer. He’s been up to good things himself, following up an Obie- and Lucille Lortel-award-winning performance as Othello (he also starred in that role at Shakespeare & Company last year and in 2008) by wowing New York critics again in the lead role of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones.

 

It’s not only the critics who are raving. Robert Brustein was artistic director at the American Repertory Theater (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Thompson was a company member from 1997 to 2000. “Everyone loves him,” Brustein says. “He’s simply a sweet, extraordinary man that you can’t help but love. He’s good-looking; he has a strong presence with a profound sense of character. He can transform himself easily, which is central to an actor.” As if that isn’t enough, Brustein adds, “He’s completely modest. There’s no ego there that I can see. There’s a generosity and unselfishness there, a support of other actors.”

 

Thomas Derrah, who played Iago to Thompson’s Othello in yet another production, this one at ART, concurs. “There’s nothing I could say about John that wouldn’t be glowing.”

 

So what does John Douglas Thompson have to say for himself? “Ultimately, we’re all storytellers,” he says with a jocularity that segues smoothly to his serious side. “So imposing your personal will on a production … I’ve never felt is the way to go. Theater is a collaborative art form. I try to be as generous as I can to everybody I work with.”

 

He lives up to the billing in rehearsal rooms, listening intently to what directors and fellow actors have to say before taking a role out for a test drive. The ART production of Othello is a case in point about why theater people like working with Thompson. It was actually two different productions. The original Russian director, Yuri Yeremin, who had a romantic vision of the Moor as a nobleman, was replaced by David Wheeler, who, as he describes it, saw Othello more as a hired hand who didn’t live up to the social code. “John had to spend a lot of time working against what he had assimilated from the other director,” Wheeler says. “But he was singularly intelligent and adaptable, down to behavior and gestures. He was totally able to throw off the shackles of this Russian interpreter and deliver a fine Othello.”

 

For his part, Thompson thought both men had valid interpretations and was eager to explore each. In fact, none of his Othellos have much to do with one another. He was ferocious at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island; pitiful at ART in Cambridge; inner-directed and soft-spoken in Lenox; and “majestic” in New York City, according to Ben Brantley’s review in the New York Times.

 

While Thompson might be cast as Othello as often as he is because he’s black, that’s not what particularly interests him about the part or about his acting. “Race, unless you’re doing an August Wilson play or something that requires the whole cast to be of a particular race, is redundant. It becomes a choice that can get you only so much mileage. Your better choices are those that are inclusive,” he says, over a steak sandwich at Haven.

 

“When I was in Emperor Jones, it wasn’t so much about tapping into the African-American experience, it was about tapping into love, redemption, guilt. Part of it was about Brutus Jones feeling upset about his lot in life and making a decision to change that by any means necessary,” Thompson continues. “And that’s something I don’t think belongs to a black person or a white person. It belongs to humanity, anybody who feels that somehow they’ve been marginalized through life, and it’s part of capitalism, woven into our society. What I was trying to get across is that the society has to take some responsibility for the environment it creates.”

 

Thompson is a true multicultural global citizen. He was born in England to Jamaican parents who had individually followed the path to Britain after World War II. (They dated in Jamaica, then met again in England and married.) They moved to Montreal when Thompson was two-and-a-half years old and to Rochester, New York, when he was ten. Now that he lives in Brooklyn, it’s almost as if he’s come full circle with the West Indian migration, which often followed a similar arc. Brooklyn and Toronto, says Thompson, have the largest West Indian populations outside of Jamaica.

Thompson was a late bloomer when it came to theater. He was an executive computer sales rep, but when Unisys started laying people off eighteen years ago he decided to rekindle a romance he had developed in college. For all the problems that theater has these days, one virtue it has above all the other narrative arts is the ability for a great production to change one’s life.

 

 For Thompson, it was August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which he saw in his early twenties after a woman stood him up—which might make her unique in Thompson’s dating life. “I decided, Why waste a ticket,” Thompson says. “What I saw on stage—the words that I heard, the actors that I saw, the story that was there—really, for all intents and purposes, blew my mind. At that point I didn’t know that there was this thing called ‘theater’ where people committed their time and made a career out of it.”

 

After getting a better severance package than Willy Loman, Thompson went to Boston, saw an ad for an audition at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (founded by Derek Walcott) and, without any acting experience, got the lead part in a play by African playwright Nabi Swaray. He remembers being told at another audition, “Hey, John, you can do this. There are schools that teach acting.” He eventually passed an audition at Trinity Repertory Conservatory in Providence, where one of his classmates was another late bloomer who’s been knocking them dead in Lenox and Boston: Nigel Gore. Gore was born—and bred—in England. “We were the number-one and -two oldest students in the class,” Thompson says. “We all thought he was from the Royal Shakespeare Company,” he says with a laugh before mimicking how he and his fellow students felt. “What’s he doing here? That’s not fair.” (Gore plays Buckingham to Thompson’s Richard this summer; it’s the first time they’ve worked together since A Lesson from Aloes in their student days.)

 

Thompson turned down acting in a showcase in New York City and, after hearing about a woman named Tina Packer, made his way to the Berkshires. “I wanted to do more Shakespeare,” he recalls. “We only touched on Shakespeare at Trinity. What I really wanted to learn was how to turn text into performance. I heard that the workshop was really a good place to start to immerse yourself in Shakespeare, do a lot of body work, a lot of voice work, a lot of breath work, and what Tina was accomplishing was allowing you to bring yourself to the work, as opposed to feeling you had to be something else to be a classical actor.

 

“That was a very big thing for me. It’s simple, but it was very big because as actors you sometimes feel you have to do something else with this, maybe even speak British to get something across. I would say that the workshop I took in 1994 was one of the most productive and creative times of my life. I felt so free, coming up to the Berkshires, in the country. We did the workshop at Simon’s Rock College, a beautiful campus. The teachers, the flow of the classes, it induced creativity, it induced joy, it induced these really wonderful places for an actor to go to that were totally outside of the realm of what my classroom stuff was at Trinity.”

 

He told Packer at the end of the workshop that he’d really like to join the company—some of his other teachers were Jonathan Epstein, Dennis Krausnick, and current artistic director Tony Simotes. No fool she, Packer signed him up. Thompson resonated to the Packer approach and is still a big advocate for actors exposing things they might have repressed in their own personalities by a deep reading of the text. For actors and audience members alike, “It’s that power of transformation that great language has,” Thompson says. “That’s one of the reasons [why] I do it.… This may be trite, but somehow making me a better person in a way that’s palpable, that I can feel and understand and witness.”

 

He also doesn’t think it’s for everybody. “The sole backbone of my classical work is Shakespeare & Company. There’s no doubt about it. I know for some people that isn’t their way of working, and that’s absolutely fine.… If it works, who cares how you got there?”

 

It’s been a treat for Shakespeare & Company followers to watch Thompson go from minor to major parts and pretty much excel in each, particularly as Edmund, the bad boy of King Lear, one of the productions in which he felt he really came of age. He also points to Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train at Philadelphia’s Wilma Theatre and several productions at ART, particularly János Szász’s staging of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.

 

“I thought maybe that was the most beautiful production I had been in. I thought the acting, the production values, the show itself were all of such high quality that it became this wonderfully theatrical experience for just about everybody who saw it.” He felt the same about last year’s Emperor Jones.

 

Now comes Richard III. Brustein wonders how such a nice man will play such a malevolent character.

 

“He’ll always be considered a villain, Machiavellian, we all know what he is,” Thompson says. “But one of the things I’ve been trying to do is give some justification to his villainy, to finding his humanity. The justification for Richard’s ambition was he’s concerned about kingdom. He’s a warrior. He thinks the only way to maintain peace is through war, which is true with many contemporary leaders.”

 

He’s also intrigued by Richard’s relationship with his parents. “He had a strong one with his father. From his mother, he didn’t get much. I felt the relationship he had with his mother didn’t bode well for the other women in the play. And then there’s the deformity and what he was subjected to as a child. It taught him how to shut himself off from the world at times.”

 

It’s a far cry from Thompson the actor, who seems to enjoy every aspect of being in the world. And being in the Berkshires. “I think much of the quality of the work, not just at Shakespeare & Company, comes from the nature you’re surrounded by, and I look forward to that. The Berkshires, Lenox, and the surrounding areas are a very healing community. The modalities are there for the betterment of self.” Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health is another place where he likes to better his self, as are the Berkshire Co-op Market and Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington, Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, and the Bombay Bar & Grill in Lee.

 

If you bump into him at any of these places, expect to find someone who’s the polar opposite of the hunchbacked warrior he plays at Shakespeare & Company. But at either extreme, he’s probably the one lighting up the room. [AUGUST 2010]

A contributing editor to Berkshire Living, Ed Siegel is a former theater and television critic at the Boston Globe. He is a regular contributor to Boston public radio station WBUR-FM.
 

 

THE GOODS

The Life and Death of King Richard III
Through Sept 5
Shakespeare & Company
.
Lenox, Mass.