Theater the Kavinoky:
Two Englishmen Engaging the Imagination
By Ted Pelton
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David Lamb and Robert Waterhouse at the Kavinoky.
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It’s been five years since the British-born Waterhouse last prepared for a Buffalo theatre season. The former Artistic Director of the Buffalo Ensemble Theatre has since lived in Atlanta and approached theatre from a number of different angles — staging works in a teen psychiatric hospital as part of a drama therapy program, helping create plays from scratch in collaboration with actors from Georgia’s Academy Theatre and, most recently, guest directing avant-garde work with the Cygnet Theatre of Exeter, England, a company whose patron is the famed master of avant-garde theatre, Peter Brook.
Now Waterhouse is back in Buffalo, lured by long-time Kavinoky Theatre actor-impresario David Lamb to help choose and direct the 1999-2000 season. Waterhouse has come a long way from the role of Charles Dickens he used to perform as part of the BET’s annual performance of A Christmas Carol in the 1980s, partially on the strength of his authentic British accent. “It’s great to have Bob here with us this year,” says Lamb. “I’ve always been someone who works well in tandem. And Bob and I have a shared culture, both being English. We both get each other’s silly jokes. We’d worked together before on Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, which was written by his father [playwright and journalist Keith Waterhouse]. Bob brought insights to that play and I expect much more of the same as we continue collaborating.”
The Kavinoky’s 20th Anniversary Season features three plays chosen by Waterhouse, three by Lamb. They are all comedies, beginning with Guys and Dolls, a musical based on the writing of Damon Runyon which opened in September to rave reviews. Four of the five plays have never been staged in Buffalo. The fifth, Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves, is the reprise of a Kavinoky favorite.
But after talking about collaboration with Waterhouse in the light of Peter Brook, the man who once filmed King Lear as a Japanese Noh play and staged Midsummer Night’s Dream with trapeze artists, I wonder, What does he mean by innovative, collaborative theatre? Does Guys and Dolls fit the bill?
“Oh, yes!” exclaims Waterhouse, practically hopping in his seat across the table from me in a local coffeehouse. “It’s a very high-energy show. Every song is terrific. Damon Runyon is a great writer. It’s a huge cast! Choreographer Lynne Kurdziel-Formato really did a great job in getting them to go that much beyond what they’d normally give to a performance. This is what I mean by collaboration—working together, each cast member getting the next to stretch beyond what would normally be satisfactory.”
Indeed, the cast’s ability to come together under adverse circumstances was tested during a performance when the plug connecting the orchestra to the sound system was accidentally pulled. “They were absolutely brilliant,”says Lamb. “They did the song a cappella, and wonderfully. But that’s what’s exciting about theatre. It’s always LIVE!” He pronounces the word with the authority of a man who over two decades has seen all of the wonders and horrors of the tightrope act that is live performance, and has a deep appreciation for how its particular demands can yield surprising, even magical results. “Live,” he says. “Live live live live live!”
The Memory of Water, the first of Waterhouse’s selections, opens this month. Waterhouse explains, “I first saw it in England with what’s her name, the chick who was the daughter in Absolutely Fabulous? It’s a very funny play about three sisters going to a funeral.”
Lamb, too, is excited about the emphasis on comedy this season: “It’s a season for fun. I thought that after all the heavy shows we’ve had in the past, let’s lighten it up, on the surface at least. It’s a pretty poor play if you don’t have a few giggles in it.”
The Kavinoky’s first play in 2000 will feature Lamb in the title role of Barrymore. Having himself given an acclaimed performance as Richard III last season, Lamb now will play John Barrymore as the legendary actor-boozer attempts, a month before his death, to relive his glory in the role which gave him his greatest triumph as a serious actor. “In a sense, I know where he’s coming from,” says Lamb with a laugh.
When asked about Dealer’s Choice, the fourth play of the Kavinoky season and the first he will direct, Waterhouse has a question for me: “Have you a deck of cards?” As luck would have it, I do. He takes them from me and begins shuffling, then deals a strange game with four common cards in the center of the table. Each of us only has two cards in our hands. “This game is called ‘Omaha,’ and it’s one of the games the characters play in Dealer’s Choice. As they go on into the night playing, the games get more and complex and ornate, and you really get into the mind of obsessive poker players, of addicts, real insight into issues of power and ownership. Like in this game—we each have most of our hands in common, so what we don’t know about each other is actually very little. How do we manipulate that knowledge? How do we use those things that aren’t really even in the game to influence it?”
Waterhouse also helped to import Booth, Brother Booth, by John Ammerman, whom Waterhouse met while living in Atlanta. Ammerman is Director of the Georgia Shakespeare Festival. Booth, Brother Booth is a one-man show featuring John Wilkes Booth’s actor brother Edwin, a famous actor in what was then a renowned acting family. In the aftermath of his brother’s bold and rash assassination of Lincoln, Edwin destroys John Wilkes’ old theatrical trunk. The play recently played triumphantly at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London.
Both Lamb and Waterhouse approach the subject of theatre in Buffalo with thoughtful circumspection. Each believes passionately in theatre’s relevance to people’s lives. “I think the very existence of the theatre is in question,” says Lamb. “People want to be ‘entertained.’ Often they almost want to hide. Really, I think they want to be shown themselves. They think it’s irrelevant to their lives, but actually it’s the essence of their lives, truth as an unconcealment process. You think without being aware that you’re thinking. That realization, when you see a character onstage making a realization, that’s an element of self-knowledge.”
If these two Englishmen have anything to say about it, the Kavinoky season of comedy will be serious business. “Buffalo theatre has become good enough to take itself seriously,” says Lamb. “I’ve seen a lot of productions around the world, in Ireland, in the West End. What’s done in Buffalo is just as good—not always, but frequently. It will become even better as it stops taking itself so seriously.”
Novelist and theatre-lover Ted Pelton currently teaches at Medaille College.
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