Caugt in the act

Ed Shea's lerarning experience

by Bill Rodriguez

He stands there watching and listening and occasionally smiling wryly, commanding the stage at the off-Broadway Joseph Papp Public Theatre. That's the intended function of The Messenger in A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, Tony Kushner's adaptation of S. Ansky's shtetl folk tale play. Whether an emissary of God or Lucifer, the character is self-assured, bemused, downright smug.

The same certainly could be said of the actor playing the part.

Ed Shea has come a long way from the cramped little theater space above Harry's Harbor Front bar on Long Wharf in Newport, an even 20 years ago. That's when a callow 19-year-old, unsure of himself but talented, co-founded 2nd Story Theater with Pat Hegnauer.

The day after the performance of A Dybbuk, Shea was on the phone responding to a question about that morning's New York Times assessment by Ben Brantley. The critic had dismissed the entire production as inferior to the Hartford Stage version. Shea was mentioned in passing. So, wasn't it nice to finally hit the big time?

"It's fine," he said, sounding pleased but hardly excited. "In truth, at this point in my life, with all that's going on in my life, a review in the New York Times, even a positive one, would not compare with an A in a medieval history paper. I've been more nervous about getting papers back at Brown than with getting reviewed in the New York papers."

Flashback. It's the Monday before, on the one "dark" day that theaters traditionally take off. Shea steps into Trinity Brewhouse behind Trinity Repertory Company, slides into a window booth and orders a big mid-afternoon bowl of vegetable soup. The waitress knows to bring him plenty of bread -- he's a regular customer once a week, when he comes in to teach directing at Trinity Conservatory.

One of the first questions is, So how is it to work with Tony Kushner?

"Kushner's amazing," Shea responds. "He has a brilliant, brilliant mind. To be in his presence is a great thing. He's a phenomenally talented guy with big ideas and a great way to express those ideas."

The author of Angels in America had A Dybbuk produced twice before, but he took the occasion of the important off-Broadway run to tighten it up some, make the story clearer. Mainly the romance between the young rabbi and the girl he later inhabits.

To us in the audience, when an actor really nails a role we can get the impression that success was inevitable, that it came from spontaneity rather than hard work. But Shea says that he never managed to really get into his character all through rehearsals. "I had quite a time dealing with it. In the last few days in previews I really changed it a lot, in talking to Brian," he says. "Now it's a much stronger take on the whole thing. A more physically powerful presence. Before, I think I had a much softer take on it, both vocally and physically."

Brian is Brian Kulick, the director and artistic associate at the Public, who maintains his links with Trinity. Kulick had directed Shea in that brilliant Waterworld adaptation of Romeo and Juliet last season, and he asked Shea down specifically for the role of the Messenger.

Shea has been at Trinity for an even decade. In 1987 he first stepped onto the Lederer Theatre stage in the annual A Christmas Carol as, to my mind, the theaters definitive Bob Cratchit. Amiable, vulnerable, and potentially bursting with buoyant fun. That encompassed a sprawling range that served him, and audiences, well. He played a dwarf servant, on his knees and trailing his robe. He played a Chinese waiter. He played a German lesbian dying of consumption. Two years after joining the company, he got the lead role in an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, playing the anguished epileptic Myshkin. Shea has since become a Trinity mainstay, always one of the power sources of a play, whether a love-struck Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night or a guilt-stricken lover in Angels in America.

In past interviews he has spoken about learning at Trinity how to broaden his range from the sensitive soul and grow into such an expansive, chest-thumping character as Orsino. He is asked about the process of gaining such confidence on stage.

"There's a quote, I believe it's Stanislavsky, that says it takes 15 years to become an actor, to learn to act. I think it took me 15 years. I was in my early '30s, about 33 or 34," Shea says.

"I remember when it was that I started to get it. It was around the time of Lips Together, Teeth Apart. I got it. I no longer worked on how to act, I just started doing it, so that the kind of obsession that I had as a 20-year-old, a 25-year-old, was gone. The challenge to do well is still there, but I don't struggle with how to act."

Shea then gets to the heart of what he couldn't learn in his 20s. "We spend so much time looking outside, and every year it just gets a little closer until you realize, you know, like Dorothy, you don't have to go any further then your own backyard. The best thing that you could possibly do is bringing as much of yourself to a role as possible."

Speaking of his current role in A Dybbuk, he smiles and says he's not nervous at all. "And 10 years ago I would've been around the bend, with my first off-Broadway play. I would have had so much baggage attached to it, and that's just not there anymore. I really don't have anything to prove anymore. That's what I am, that's what I do, I'll do it the best that I can, and if people like that that's fine and if they don't like it, that's fine too. If it's meant to lead to something else, then it will, and if it doesn't lead to something else then there's no way I can force it to."

He's come a long way from the 23-year-old I was first impressed with in a 2nd Story Theater production of Bent, where he portrayed a German concentration camp prisoner, hauling rocks across stage, with a fervent intensity. Only four years earlier he had started the impressive Newport theater with Pat Hegnauer, who became by far the best of the state's off-Trinity directors of intimate dramas. By and large, Hegnauer did the directing and he did the male leads, though he would direct her in occasional roles.

"That was the only formal training that I had, those years spent with Pat doing 2nd Story Theater," Shea says. "She really knows what she's doing when it comes to truthful acting. I don't think that anybody molds like she does."

He's been doing plenty of molding himself for the past four years, mostly teaching directing at the Trinity Conservatory. But the major changing going on in the near future will be with Shea himself. He's taking temporary leave from the company to begin full-time studies in January at Brown University, getting the undergraduate degree that acting diverted him from an even 30 years ago. He's keeping plans loose, not closing the door to a can't-resist role if an agent, or Oskar Eustis, calls. But as he sits over an empty soup bowl and waxes ecstatic over a professor inspiring him about Scandinavian mythology, you can see where his heart is right now. He doesn't want to focus on theater for his BA, but he does plan on getting a Master's degree in the subject so he can have the formal credentials to teach.

It would be annoying to have to do without Ed Shea at Trinity for the next few years. We've gotten spoiled. But considering the usual flamboyant options chosen by many men pushing 40, the role of Freddie Freshman is one we should applaud seeing him in.

"Yes," he agrees. "Things are pretty rosy right now."