Lady's man

Catching fire with Timothy Crowe

by Bill Rodriguez

When I saw Tim Crowe as Henry Higgins at Theatre-by-the-Sea in '95, I thought that Rex Harrison, and probably George Bernard Shaw, would approve. Both the character in the musical My Fair Lady and the actor so familiar at Trinity Rep share a presence we've come to identify with both. The part requires a grown-up -- the professor is a world-renowned linguistics expert, after all -- with a lot of boy in him; the females in the play often want to take him by the ear and bring him to his room.

In Crowe's more than 80 roles, almost all at Trinity Repertory Company, one common theme has been the edgy energy of the irascible Higgins, which could come out as playful or dangerous, depending on the character. Watching Crowe on stage is like staring at tinder: in a drama a spark can ignite it, as with his feral Roy Cohn in Angels in America; in a comedy, that locked-up energy is all wet, as with his deflated Harpagon in The Miser; in a dramedy or melodrama it can go either way, as with his definitive, back-by-popular-demand Scrooge for nine productions of A Christmas Carol at Trinity since 1984.

In a tragedy, Crowe can reach way, way down and come up with something besides the requisite bloody lump of anguish. I'll never forget his take on the familiar "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy of Macbeth, when the king has just learned that his scheming queen is dead: along with the wrenching sorrow are giggles over the absurdity of life. Bingo! Timothy Crowe can span the range, from giddy, freshly redeemed Scrooge to tortured royal usurper. Amazing.

The opportunity to play the colorful Professor Higgins again should be fun for him as well as us. Trinity whiz-kid Amanda Dehnert is directing in a more presentational style than did Judith Swift in her lavish traditional staging at Theatre-by-the-Sea. There will be on-stage costume changes for the chorus and a two-piano score, plus occasional other instruments, instead of an orchestra. Trinity's Fred Sullivan Jr. will reprise his role as Eliza Doolittle's wry, sly father, from the Matunuck production. New York actress Rachael Warren will play transformed flower-girl Eliza.

Crowe too likes the idea of playing Henry Higgins again.

"I feel very good about it, because I feel I'm right for the role. The right age and the right temperament," he says. "This particular role is akin to not necessarily what I am but what I have been raised in. I mean, I went to all-boy schools. It was very academic; it was very rigid. And Henry Higgins believes that language is the framework in which civilization can flourish, but it's language as he defines it and he describes it. So that idea of structure is something that I was very much raised with. So I understand where he's coming from."

Crowe is sitting at a café table near the downstairs theater concession counter, and as the discussion moves to other parts he's played at Trinity, to remind himself he glances to the pictures and posters of previous shows on the walls. The actor has come a long way since the day in 1970, a spunky 24 and just graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, he joined the six-year-old Trinity company. Why Providence instead of Baltimore, where he had successfully auditioned for Center Stage?

"I really wanted a company situation. Going back to the Greeks, [theater] came from a group of people in a community. Shakespeare had his company, Molière had his company," he explains, changing an upturned palm into a fist. "This seems to be the major river from which our experience in the West has sprung. So that's why I came here."

But work at Trinity was not smooth going right away.

"The major burden of a young actor -- and I had it in spades -- is the need to prove something," he says. "It's inevitable. It comes with needing to accomplish. I came from a family of accomplishment."

Raised in St. Louis, Crowe is the oldest of three boys, whose second-generation Irish-Catholic father bootstrapped himself up to being a lawyer.

"It was a very masculine environment, an environment of doing -- and succeeding. I was too young, too immature to understand that it's vital in life to have a goal. If it becomes, as John Dean says, a blind ambition, one will be consumed. It got in the way of my personal life and it got in the way of my acting," Crowe says. "I was not trusting the audience."

Not trusting that they would understand if he simply performed an action. Instead, he says, he would show them. He's not saying he was hammy, is he?

"No, I'm saying I was too intense," he replies.

Ahhh. Tinder again. Potential energy. Coiled beneath the surface of performances. Ready to spring forth, surprise.

Off-stage -- and eventually on -- one surprise was his slide into alcoholism.

"Drink and drugs are a tremendously seductive thing to a younger person, number one, but to a person involved in the arts," he says, and trails off. "You read about the poets and you say, `I'm going to enter the deep chambers of the heart, I've got to follow the paths of the great ones who did this.' Well, it's the biggest crock of shit in the world."

After drinking destroyed his marriage, it wasn't until 1983 that he crawled out of the bottle and quit. Not, he stresses, out of any courage but out of nothing left to try.

But we're talking about a man who'd spent five years in a Roman-Catholic seminary -- from age 15. He wasn't about to ignore the spiritual satisfactions of theater.

"There is a tremendous, deep, ancient relationship between religion and the theater, of course. Our Western theater began as religious rites and festivals," he notes. "The idea of putting words together and then creating live characters, putting it up there on a created space, a set, is exactly what happens in liturgies. We create this space that we call a church or a cathedral. We create these vestments. We get this smoke going and music and words going in order to elicit something from ourselves.

"I think that's why there's been such tension over the centuries between the two mind-sets, between the arts and organized religion, in that they're both dealing in the same arena," Crowe observes.

So both churchgoers and theatergoers are looking for an inner satisfaction?

"Absolutely, absolutely," Crowe responds. "And they want to seek an experience of something -- something -- transcendent. Something."