Classical gas The Acting Company’s rich tradition BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The touring troupe bringing Shakeseare’s Richard III to Rhode Island College on Wednesday, February 4 isn’t just any bunch of itinerant actors. It’s the Acting Company.

A few years ago, the New York Times’ normally reserved Mel Gussow went so far as to gush that "the Acting Company endures as the major classical theatre in the United States."

A 2003 Tony Honoree for Excellence in Theatre, the company has also won Obie and Los Angeles Critics Awards. It was formed in 1972 in New York City, co-founded by the late theater legend John Houseman. His experience giving birth to acting companies stretched back to 1937, when he and Orson Welles started the legendary Mercury Theatre. The occasion 32 years ago was that the first class of acting majors was about to graduate from what was then the Julliard School of Music, and they were still revved up to keep on learning their craft.

Kevin Kline was one of those first students in the company, which has trained such familiar performers as Patti LuPone, David Ogden Stiers, and Jeffrey Wright. The Acting Company started out as a Manhattan theater company, post-grad acting conservatory, travelling troupe, and arts education provider, all of which it remains to this day.

Acting Company students have staged nearly 100 productions and taken them on the road, visiting some 50 cities annually and nine foreign countries over the three decades. Although their Providence performance will have no accompanying workshop, theater education has always been an integral component of their offerings, reaching more than 25,000 yearly.

Houseman had help in founding the company, in the form of Margot Harley, a seasoned actor and dancer before coming to Juilliard to head the Drama Division from 1968 to 1980. Her productions include the New York premiere of Eric Overmyer’s On the Verge and Houseman’s revival of Marc Blitzstein’s famous leftist opera The Cradle Will Rock.

Harley spoke by phone recently.

Q: The company has followed the English touring company tradition of bringing classics to the countryside. How well received was the company at the beginning by audiences that weren’t familiar with more than community theater?

A: The company was a "wow" when it started. Those actors had been together for four years. The whole graduating class created the company. So not only were they enormously talented, but they had been honed down from hundreds of actors. We started with 35 actors in the first class and ended up with 17.

Q: You immediately plunged into something as difficult as touring.

A: We knew perfectly well that in order to keep them together we had to tour, because nobody would come and see, over a long period of time, a young company in New York. And touring is historically a great training ground for an actor.

Q: So you started touring out of practicality. But these days is touring necessary in order to stay in the black?

A: It’s more expensive to tour a company than to stand still. Most stand-still companies, they take about 60 percent of their money in box office. We do about 40 percent in touring fees. It’s much more expensive to run a touring company. We don’t make money.

Q: Dealing with young actors must be enormously stimulating and rewarding for a teacher.

A: It is. Thrilling, of course, because you can follow their careers after that. People who have seen the Acting Company for years have seen some of the major actors in America when they were very young. It’s also exciting to look at young actors and think, "Hmmm, what’s going to happen with them?"

Q: Do actors you’ve trained tend to stay in touch? What feedback do they give about how the company has helped them?

A: I think almost without exception actors will tell you that that was perhaps the greatest time of their lives, that made the greatest difference in their careers. We have a great quote from Mr. Kline, who said that four years in the Acting Company was equivalent to 20 years in the theater.

Q: Are there particular acting theories and techniques studied by the company, or are they eclectic?

A: They’re all classically trained. Which means they’ve got good voices and they have worked on elevated texts. You can’t come out of a school that doesn’t deal with the classics and just throw yourself into Shakespeare; it just doesn’t work.

Q: Can more than technique be taught to an aspiring actor? Can someone be inspired into exceptional ability?

A: Oh, I think that you’re talented and then you learn a technique that allows you to get that talent across to the audience. I don’t think that you can teach anybody talent that doesn’t have it.

The Acting Company will perform Richard III on Wednesday, February 4 at 8 p.m. at the Auditorium at Roberts Hall at Rhode Island College, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence. Tickets are $26 ($23 seniors, $12 students). Call (401) 456-8144.