Home again

Ed Shea returns to 2nd Story Theatre

by Bill Rodriguez

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Especially if the starting point is to figure out and strive for the simple essence of theater.

Once again, more than 20 years after it began above Harry's Harbor Front Bar in Newport, 2nd Story Theatre is doing its thing, this time on the second floor above the A.J. Dylan's restaurant in Warren (see review below).

After the recent opening-night performance, sitting in one of the 70 black canvas director's chairs that an enthusiastic capacity audience had just filed out of, is Ed Shea, looking properly pleased. Having founded 2nd Story with Pat Hegnauer as a 19-year-old kid, the 42-year-old actor has now, after several years of exploring professional and existential options, found his heart's desire.

"I want to do full-length plays as well," Shea says, looking around the room. "I'd love to do a musical up here."

He's home again, and he didn't even need the aid of ruby slippers.

He wants to get back to teaching acting. Of the 55 actors performing in the five groups of one-acts through Labor Day, all but 10 are students of his, past and present. He envisions working with up to 80 students eventually in the classes that Actor's Workshop will offer in the theater.

"What I learned in the last four years or so is that this is what I should be doing," he declares. For about a year before this spring he had been in Los Angeles, waiting for a break in film or television.

"I sat out in L.A., sitting in Starbucks, smoking and drinking coffee and waiting for the phone to ring, trying to get that going," he says. "There are all those thousands of actors out there, thousands of them. And I thought, you know, this isn't for me."

Finding what is for him has meant walking and trudging a long, winding road.

Hegnauer recalls, in a phone chat, when she first met him back in 1978. A year out of high school, Shea "flipped" over a production of When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? that she was acting in, and he told her so. Hegnauer suggested that he check out an acting class she was teaching. He did.

"He came in and performed, and I went: `Holy Cow!! This is really a talent -- big time,' " she says.

They formed the theater that very year.

What made 2nd Story unarguably the top off-Trinity theater for many years after it opened in 1978 -- for the first year it was called the Harbor Front Theatre -- was its focus on intimate little character-driven dramas and comedies, often with just two or three actors. Although sometimes their sets got elaborate, by and large the payoff was in combining a compelling play with superb acting. Pat Hegnauer almost always did the directing, although she acted now and then, and Ed Shea was always an actor, in roles as diverse as Danish irascibility in Hamlet and droll hilarity in Larry Shue's The Foreigner.

They produced up to a dozen plays a year in their five years in Newport, a total of nearly 60 in that time. For Shea it was an intense learning experience.

"I got to choose what I wanted to do," he recalls. "That was the really cool thing about it, in all those years choosing plays that I wanted to do and roles that I wanted to do, and learning from that experience."

Time went on. The theater moved to Providence, into the basement of School One. In 1987 Shea filled in last-minute as Bob Cratchit in the perennial A Christmas Carol at Trinity Repertory Company, and since his remarkable talent was evident, he became not just a regular company member but a mainstay. Yet during his first five years at Trinity, he continued to produce productions at 2nd Story.

In 1997, on the cusp of 40, Shea decided to go to college for the first time. Taking a few courses between acting gigs -- such as at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, working with Tony Kushner in A Dybbuk -- he entered full-time for a while at Brown University, where now he has resumed his BA studies.

"I miss teaching, I miss going to school," Shea says. "The whole going-to-Brown thing has been an amazing part of my life. The last semester I was in a senior seminar in Shakespeare in the afternoon, and then was using what I had learned that afternoon teaching at night. Instantly translating in a day, putting it to use. What a luxury! It's a tremendous luxury.

"Even if I got roles [in L.A.], anybody could do that. Not everybody can do this, you know?"

When he decided to come back east, he also decided to set up an actors studio, if not a theater as well. "I thought there was a need for it. I wasn't sure, but I found out through the enthusiastic response to this. I can't believe how many people are out there who want to do this."

"Second Story Theatre was important to a lot of people's lives," he observes.

The floor above the Warren restaurant is an excellent theater space, sight lines unobstructed by columns, windows on two sides for summertime ventilation. Now a lighting grid is affixed to the ceiling, and colored banners hang around it. A former Franco-American club, the large room appeared more like an enormous, cluttered attic when Shea looked it over at the beginning of the year, since it had been used as a storage area for some 20 years. Second Story co-founder Hegnauer, who hasn't been participating in the reincarnation because of health problems, says that when she first saw the room she was impressed with the opportunity.

"He found this space and couldn't figure out whether to start a brand-new theater," she recalls. "And I said, `Ed, if you don't use 2nd Story, go with that, you're out of your mind.' "

Shea is, in fact, mad about theater. To paraphrase the Bard: the lunatic, the lover and the actor are of imagination all compact.

And what could be crazier than the floor above Dylan's restaurant remaining unused from the first days of 2nd Story Theatre, as though waiting for its big chance, waiting for show time?

Sharp short stuff

It's been a while, but 2nd Story Theatre is back in fine style. Two years after Pat Hegnauer stopped staging evenings of one-acts called Short Attention Span Theatre, co-founder Ed Shea is back with a whole summer-full of them.

The first of five groups of playlets -- each will run for two weeks -- range from silly to spoofy to serious. Minimum costumes and props. Brash irreverence is the main offering, whether it's a matter of offending a sacrosanct playwright, Greek deities or the Catholic priesthood.

The opener is an entertaining, toga-ed toss-off by Garrison Keillor. The Midlife Crisis of Dionysus is the sort of name-dropping skit that might have been written by a clever sophomore for a fraternity bash, except that the quips are all spot-on and the subject matter is a grown-up's obsession. Dionysus (Tom Roberts), a.k.a. Bacchus, is 50 eons old and fretting about aging as he looks toward his birthday orgy. He is the god of wine -- "not the god of iced tea," he blurts to his wife Ariadne (Margarita Cottam) when she suggests that he cut down on the tippling -- although his dad Zeus (J.P. Cottam) wants to demote him to chairman of wine and put day-to-day operations in more youthful, with-it hands. Not even the ministrations of a giggly, enthusiastic virgin (Lara Hakeem) can cheer him up. It's all good fun but, well, get a life, Garrison.

A nifty little stage exercise that doesn't overstay its welcome is Awkward Silence, by Jay Reiss. It sounds like a gimmick but it does work: a couple (Hillary Webster and Christian O'Brien) meet on a blind date and we hear not their awkward conversation but rather their self-conscious internal narratives (She: "I stare into my glass." He: "I avoid eye contact") and impressions (He: "I utter a clever remark." She: "He says something stupid"). It's not as cynical as that might sound, though. By the end of the 10-minute play, each has come to terms with the fact that critical judgments are falling rocks on the mountain road to interpersonal communication, and they drop their shields.

Rules of Love, by Joe Pintauro, is another two-person conversation under fraught circumstances: in a confessional. Maisie (Trisha McManus) hasn't been to confession for two years, for good reason. She has been having an affair with a priest. Her confessor, Jim (Tom Oakes), is properly appalled, but not for the expected reason. He, you see, is her conflicted lover. Much can be made of this set-up, more by the questions it raises than by answers it provides. Did she seduce him? How torn is he? Pintauro helps focus the conflict by having the priest adamantly married to the church, or so he insists, which keeps the exchange an open wound rather than a problem solved by his quitting his vocation. In fact, she has done more damage than she knows, since if he absolves her and continues their affair only the Pope can forgive him, he explains. Their inner turmoil isn't as clearly delineated as in other performances of this I've seen, but the tension is engrossing.

The concluding treat is For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, by the satirizing smart-ass Christopher Durang, who gave us Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, which did even more damage to the image of the Church than the likes of the above cleric. Poor Tennessee Williams's venerated The Glass Menagerie has all its venerable melodrama exposed for our amusement. Marilyn Murphy Meardon gets to wax sweetly passive aggressive as the mother. Mark McClure gets the Julie Harris role, transgendered into Lawrence, a fey grab bag of psychosomatic ills, the glass animals collection transformed into glass cocktail stirrers. Jesse Reiswig doesn't have much to do as son Tom, except to bring home a mate candidate for Lawrence from the warehouse where he works. Although Ginny (Laura Sorensen) has the name "Betty" boldly tattooed over a heart on her arm, this family is too dim and distracted to notice that she is a lesbian. ("Why, there hasn't been a lesbian in this house since your grandmother died!" Mother laments.) Durang's barbs aim for the obviousness of the target play, and while much of the satire depends on our familiarity with it, there are plenty of laughs and sight gags left over for the nonplused.

Shea directed all of these plays snappily, and while the acting skills on display vary as widely as the acting opportunities, no one does a dull job and most get to sparkle at least occasionally. At 10 bucks a seat and this level of fun, plus the terrific post-performance cabaret downstairs, it looks like the road to Warren is going to get plenty of extra traffic this summer.

-- B.R.