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[12] Utopia

Within weeks of my arrival in Cambridge, the floodgates had opened and I was swept into the world of Harvard undergraduate drama. Days after that first visit to the Loeb, I auditioned for the first big Main Stage show of the year and landed a major role in it. I was to be Reverend Anthony Anderson, one of the two rival leading men in Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple (my father had played Dick Dudgeon, the other leading man, back in Oak Bluffs when I was five years old). I was the only freshman in the show, and as I rehearsed with the rest of the cast in the basement of the Loeb, I keenly felt my rookie status. I was an unlicked whelp among a lot of swaggering juniors and seniors, the youngest actor playing the oldest of the major roles. But my years of experience fortified me. In rehearsals I held my own, and in performance I was self-assured and commanding. The joke went around that in three more years I’d be running the place.

As it happened, my Harvard years were the most active and creative of my life. The fact that there was no academic program in theater meant that all of us operated in an atmosphere of reckless, unsupervised creative abandon. It was the last time I worked in the theater for the pure, unfettered joy of it. Some of the work was excellent, much of it was dreadful, but its quality was never really the point. Joy was the point. If someone wanted to try something, there was somewhere to do it, a starvation-level budget to pay for it, and an entire army of eager classmates ready to join in. These were smart young kids, brilliant students of science, math, economics, political science, you name it. Only a tiny fraction of them ever dreamed of actually pursuing a life in the creative arts. They were merely looking for an outlet, a social context, and a little fun outside the demands of a Harvard undergraduate education. And yet hundreds of them spent more than half their waking hours feverishly slaving away — as stagehands, set builders, costumers, lighting technicians, musicians, designers, producers, directors, and, yes, actors — on one of the fifty-odd shows which, at any given moment, were in various stages of production on that vast, sprawling campus.

Courtesy Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

To illustrate the variety and creative ferment of those Harvard years, here, in a rough chronology, is a sampling of my extracurricular entanglements there:

• I played the title roles in Tartuffe, Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, and Lord Byron’s Manfred (I bet you’ve never seen that one onstage).

• I played the ancient, blinded Duke of Gloucester in King Lear (I was eighteen at the time and wore a wig once worn by Sir John Gielgud).

• I directed and acted in a one-act play by Molière called The Forced Marriage (I also designed the set and created masks for all the characters).

• As president of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, I directed and played the Learned Judge and the Lord Chancellor in Trial by Jury and Iolanthe, respectively.

• I recruited dancers from the Boston Conservatory and staged a double-bill of one-act opera-ballets made up of Stravinsky’s Renard and Menotti’s The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore (I made the masks for that one, too).

• I directed, designed, and played the role of the Devil in a fully staged version of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat.

• In a Radcliffe College common room, I recited Dylan Thomas’s poetic reminiscence “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Beside me, a Radcliffe girl in a black leotard (future actress Lindsay Crouse) did a Jules Feifferesque dance interpretation of the entire piece.

• With a few ringers from the New England Conservatory of Music, I staged Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro in a dorm dining hall (the conductor grew up to be the Pulitzer Prize — winning composer John Adams).

• I played the role of Sparky in Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance by John Arden (the title role was played by a student from Texas, a year younger than I, named Tommy Lee Jones).

• I directed John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in yet another dining hall (the orchestra’s harpsichord was played by future world-class conductor William Christie, and the cast included a talented, bawdy young actress named Stockard Channing).

• I designed the sets for Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (though in truth they were the ugliest, most ungainly sets ever seen on the Main Stage of the Loeb Drama Center).

• I designed and directed an elaborate production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck at the Loeb. This is a dark, expressionistic German work, seething with hot-blooded sex, sulphurous jealousy, and murderous vengeance. Although I was a senior by this time and twenty-one years old, I didn’t have a clue about even the most basic of these primal human emotions. But more on that particular blind spot later.

MS Thr 546 (71), Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Of the many students swirling around me in those days, several were destined to intersect with my professional life in years to come. One of the actors in that Molière one-act was a fellow named Tim Hunter. He wasn’t much of an actor, but he later became a notable filmmaker and directed me in an episode of the TV drama Dexter. The stage manager of every show I directed was a peppy, tart New Yorker named Victoria Traube. Still one of my best friends, she is a longtime executive of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization and an indispensable fixture of the New York theater scene. In my senior year, an eager freshman named Tom Werner arrived on the scene. Although I never knew him at Harvard, years later he too became a good friend. He also became my boss. His company Carsey-Werner produced the six seasons of 3rd Rock from the Sun for NBC-TV. Also showing up that year was a young would-be journalist who immediately started writing for The Harvard Crimson. Before long his gimlet eye would be sizing up my performances on Broadway in his role as drama critic for the New York Times. His name was Frank Rich.

But all of these estimable figures in the cultural landscape of the future were happy amateurs like me in those days, with unformed notions of what was to come. We were all fiercely ambitious without being entirely sure what the object of that ambition was. For the moment, we were grabbing at everything Harvard had to offer, unguided missiles trying on different versions of ourselves in an effort to figure out who the hell we really were. True, I was wide open to periodic spasms of insecurity and self-doubt all through those years. But those moments were rare and fleeting. Mostly I was having a wonderful time.

Years later I had a rare opportunity to vicariously recapture the excitement of all that extracurricular activity. In the twenty years after I graduated from Harvard, I had little to do with the place. I rarely even told people that I had gone there. When you are struggling to establish yourself as a working actor — trying out for a soap opera, for example, or for a laxative commercial — you tend to keep a Harvard degree to yourself. But in my forties, in the midst of a thriving acting career, I finally restored the Harvard connection. I was elected to a six-year tenure on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, a thirty-person governing board chosen by the alumni. As the first candidate from the creative arts since Robert Frost in the 1930s, I was a shoo-in. I even outpolled Bishop Desmond Tutu. From 1989 to 1995, I attended seven Cambridge meetings a year, in the company of bankers, lawyers, corporate magnates, college presidents, and senators (among them Tommy Lee Jones’s old roommate, Al Gore). For the first three years of my service I was an empty suit, wondering what in the world I was doing in the company of such movers and shakers.