Anthony Heald, longtime OSF actor, has had quite a year. It’s taken him to Broadway and the West End to appear in the acclaimed Elephant Man, then on to portray Lear in the Bay Area, star in an independent film, and now play the title role in Timon of Athens. Along the way, he’s learned much about celebrity, the best ways to prepare for big parts and the loneliness of being on the road.
The term “year” is being used rather loosely. All of this actually started at the end of the 2014 season, when he was playing the Narrator in Into the Woods and Buckingham in Richard III and got a call to replace an actor in The Elephant Man. OSF let him out of his contract two weeks early so he could start rehearsals for Elephant Man, in which he played two roles: the gruff sideshow manager, Ross, and the kindly Bishop How. It was Heald’s seventh Broadway show and the third he’d gone into as a replacement. The experience, he says in an interview at OSF, was “really terrific. I was treated extremely well, and got on with the company just wonderfully. I felt very good about the production. It was a big thing in that Broadway season; we were absolutely sold out.”
The apartment he found in New York was in a fifth-floor walkup on 46th Street, between Sixth and Broadway. “So it was smack-dab in the middle of everything,” he said, “which I wanted, because I didn’t want to have to take cabs home from the theatre, or go out for a drink and then have to get to Queens or somewhere.”
Convenient, yes, but tiny and cramped—and then there were all those stairs. “God, was it depressing,” recalls Heald. “And lonely.”
Loneliness and depression for actors on the road, far from family, is an occupational hazard. But Heald made the most of it. He hired an actor to come to the dressing room for two hours a day, several days a week, to cue him on his lines for Lear, a role he’d be playing in eight months. Under the guidance of a personal trainer, Heald lost weight, toned up and ate sensibly. His wife, Robin Herskowitz, came for six weeks, and they “did a million different social engagements,” he says. “We saw friends from all parts of our lives, so all that was great.”
But after five months in New York, Heald ended up losing money because the production did not provide housing. So when he was offered the opportunity to go with the production to London, he was not sure he should take it. “Everybody told me, ‘You’re not going to get paid anything in London.’ But I have family in London. This would be an opportunity to be there for three months and really get to know the city.”
He demurred long enough that the producers ended up paying him more than he’d expected, and they put him up in a nice place close to the Theatre Royal Haymarket, near Trafalgar Square and the Thames.
On to Lear
After The Elephant Man ended in August, Heald was home for about a week and then traveled to Berkeley, where he spent eight weeks rehearsing and then performing King Lear at California Shakespeare Festival, directed by Amanda Dehnert (Into the Woods, My Fair Lady, Julius Caesar, All’s Well That Ends Well).
The line study he did in New York paid off: When he came into rehearsals, he really knew the text. “I had some ideas about the character, but with Amanda, it’s always best to have considered a range of options,” Heald says. “Often the concept of the character needs to go through a shift in order to fully enjoy the benefits of the production idea that she has.” That was true in Lear, because part of her approach was having a very small cast with lots of doubling of roles. Cordelia and the Fool were played by the same actor, Kjerstine Rose Anderson (The Unfortunates). “The Fool was actually Lear’s remembrance of Cordelia when she was eight,” he says, “when he loved to tussle with her and teach her archery, and encourage the tomboy in her. He called her 'Boy' and 'Fool,' and she could tell him stuff that nobody else could. And after that horrible first scene where he throws her out, she recurs in his head. So the very first time you see the Fool, he has the line, ‘But where’s my knave? My Fool? I have not seen him these three days.’ And the way Amanda staged it, Kjerstine would dart across the stage or dash through the audience.”
A key challenge in any Lear production, says Heald, is how you deal with the storm. “Set designer Daniel Ostling designed these three large rolling cages with very heavy metal mesh fencing on the sides, and ladders inside and trap doors. The stagehands would bring them together and C-clamp them and bungee-cord them, and roll them around in the storm, as I came on, drenched. It played outdoors, so it was freezing. It was a very smart way to show Lear at the mercy of powers way beyond him. The production was a very strong—as you would expect from Amanda—consistent, logical, swift two hours and 25 minutes, with a wonderful company of actors.”
Lear closed on a Sunday, and the next morning, Heald flew to Los Angeles. A director/screenwriter friend, Zach Bandler, took him to get a haircut and get his beard shaved off. “At 6:00 that night, we started 10 hours of filming The Stairs, a short film. We did the same thing the next night.” The Stairs went on to become one of the shorts in the Ashland Independent Film Festival in April 2016.
Then it was back to Ashland to get ready for The Yeomen of the Guard. Heald is performing the role of Deputy Dick Chumlee as well as playing the flute, and, of course, since this is Gilbert and Sullivan, singing.
Boning up for Timon
Heald says he started his early preparation for OSF's Timon, also directed by Dehnert, last year when he was performing in London. He wanted to get some Timon materials from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford, but they were closed on his one day off, a Sunday. Fortunately, fellow actor Lisa Wolpe (who played Jason in Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella at OSF in 2012) was in London doing a one-woman show and was well connected. “She arranged for the materials that I needed to be taken to the Shakespeare Institute so that they would be there when I arrived on a Sunday. I was able to photocopy the whole prompt script of Gregory Doran’s 1999 production with Michael Pennington. I also watched the DVD of that production and I got six different editions of Timon.”
From all of that, Heald assembled a workable text. He familiarized himself with the play without totally memorizing it, because he knew Dehnert would be making cuts. During our interview, Heald pulled out of his back pocket a cheat sheet: a narrow, accordioned column of text that, at full length, is probably eight feet long. In tiny text are the 24 speeches, each longer than 10 lines.
He’d given himself such an early start because Timon is the fifth-largest role in Shakespeare. “It’s longer than Lear,” says Heald. “My God, you take this enormous text, and you have to get it into your head. And the only way to do that is to understand it . . . make sense of it and find connections. As I do it, I find ‘that’s a phrase that was used earlier,’ or, ‘boy, he uses that word a lot!’ There are so many lists in Timon, mostly terrible things he wants to have happen to people. And so finding the specificity of each item in the list, and how one item leads to another, and how the thought process works—which is the only way that the lines themselves can be imprinted in the short-term memory—that’s the essential preparation work. Character gradually reveals itself, but ultimately, I’m realizing as I get into my sixth decade as an actor, we can’t assume we’ll know who this character is going to be.”
But he recognizes that, preparation aside, the play takes on a life of its own once rehearsals begin. “It’s like a child, and you can’t pre-determine how it’s going to develop,” says Heald. “You just have to nurture it, and be true to it.”
And the experience of working with Amanda Dehnert on this, their fifth project together, is proving to be every bit as revelatory as Heald had hoped. “She’s done a masterful cutting of the text; the running time should be under two and a half hours. And her detailed and incisive understanding of that text gets the whole company’s creative juices flowing. I’m finding the character of Timon to be much more complex than I anticipated. Amanda has me exploring the idea of him struggling against his own deep misanthropy during the bleak second half, and that just opens up a whole raft of intriguing possibilities. And we’ve got a dream cast, so I am truly having the time of my life!”
A bountiful career
Timon was not on Heald’s must-play list of Shakespeare roles. “You know, there was a whole thing about Timon being this impossible play. I read it, and I thought, ‘Yep, impossible play. Absolutely, you got it, that’s what it is!’ Then I had a long talk with Bill [Rauch, OSF’s artistic director], and the subject strayed to dream roles. He said, ‘Could you list 10 roles in Shakespeare that you’d really love to play?’ And I said, ‘Oh, in a heartbeat!’ And so I rattled them off and I included Timon. Months later, Bill said, ‘We’d like you to do Timon.’ ”
Heald’s been based in Ashland since the late 1990s. He’s done a lot of film and TV work over the years, but that can be hard to get when you’re not living in LA or New York. Two years ago, Heald spent some time in LA looking for work. “Oh, boy, what a bust that was!” he says ruefully. “Cost me a fortune. I was there for a total of probably three and a half months, and I think I had four appointments.
“So, it’s interesting to have a year like 2015, which was a real Bucket List year, and to come away from it feeling like, ‘Is that all there is?’ And then to start a year where you’re doing a silly Gilbert and Sullivan adaptation, and one of the most difficult and rarely performed of Shakespeare’s plays, and you feel, ‘Aaahh!’ It’s a really good lesson, especially at 71, to be reminded that, as Dorothy says, there’s just no place like home. Especially when the home is Ashland and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.”