MICHAEL KARR,
A FULLY COMMITTED ACTOR
By Anthony Chase
Michael Karr is an actor who likes to lose himself in a role, but when he took on Fully Committed, a one-man play in which he was required to play dozens of characters at the Kavinoky Theatre this fall, there was no place to hide.
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“The attention was nice,” he said, thinking back to the experience. “I liked that the audience appreciated my work and had a good time. But I was really wary of doing that show.”
In Fully Committed, Karr played Sam, the lowly assistant reservation manager at an absurdly fashionable Manhattan restaurant. Sitting alone onstage at the reservation desk, the actor had to answer a telephone that rang non-stop. The virtuosity of the piece comes from the fact he had to impersonate all the callers, too— the men, the women, the young, the old. He had to do foreign and regional accents. He had to establish the characters of the chef, the kitchen staff, and the host. And all of this was done at breakneck speed. Nothing less than a phenomenal performance would suffice, and Karr rose to the occasion admirably.
Surprisingly, the complexity itself was not the element that gave Karr pause about taking on the show. Bottom line, he doesn’t usually like doing solo pieces.
“Monologues can be so preachy,” he explains. “Fully Committed wasn’t a monologue— there were lots of characters, but it’s just one actor, and I don’t like to take on the persona of ‘Hey, I’m an actor doing this part.’ I like to be genuine. I don’t like to be self conscious—that takes me out of the play.
“When I do a character,” he continues, “I get into the character. I am the character and whatever happens I can deal—as the character. If a light falls or a prop is missing, I can react from within the character and cope with that. During Fully Committed, where I was playing so many different people, I would forget what was coming next as each character absorbed me!”
It didn’t show, but as a consequence of this, Karr felt unusually exposed and vulnerable in the show.
“It was impossible to become all those people, mentally, in a meaningful way, and so I mocked the characters I had created. So it really was me up there. That caused anxiety, because I can’t stand up in front of people! As a character, I can. But as myself, I can’t. My nerves were like a knot in my stomach. Some of that is great — it keeps you sharp. But what I was experiencing was just uncomfortable.”
Karr devised a few strategies to help himself along.
“The reservation book that the character used actually had the order of characters written into it, so I could remind myself who was calling next. I had to remember why they were calling, but at least I had help in case I forgot the order. Once I accidentally skipped ahead. The chef called by accident when he shouldn’t have. So I put him on hold. Thank God they were paying attention in the sound booth, because they made the phone ring again. If the phone hadn’t rung, I would have been stuck, because you can’t answer a phone on stage if it’s not ringing!”
Obviously, the actor who takes on Fully Committed is at the mercy of the technical staff.
“We started the tech process a week earlier than you usually would, because it was so important. The timing had to be right; the phone had to work. Early on they got the idea to have a live earpiece for me, so the stage manager could talk to me, cue me, rescue me if necessary. But that was weird too, because unlike a telephone, in which you can hear your own voice, an earpiece is like a dead instrument blocking your ear.”
In addition to talent, Karr had a lot of experience to support him on stage. A native of Ravenswood, West Virginia, he attended West Virginia University as an accounting major in the early 1980s. When his mother offered to pay for him to attend West Liberty State College in Wheeling, he transferred. He had played sports in high school, but had also appeared in a few school plays. “You know how they recruit football players.” To make friends at his new college, he investigated the theater program. That sealed his fate.
For one of the department shows, the usual director was on sabbatical, so Wheeling hired a visiting director, Michael Koegel, who cast Karr in the Larry Shue comedy, The Foreigner. Karr was a sensation.
Koegel hired Karr again to appear in Enter a Free Man at the Kavinoky in Buffalo, and Karr made Buffalo his home.
Koegel, who now also lives in Buffalo, had occasion to again direct Karr in The Foreigner, this time at the Kavinoky; he also directed Fully Committed. Karr’s next project is Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn, to be followed by Book of Days by Lanford Wilson.
Anthony Chase’s writing on theater appears in a number of local and national publications. he can be heard every Friday morning as the co-host of WBFO’s Theater Talk.
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