On the surface , it would seem that the story of Anthony Heald is like that of so many other theatre talents: NYC stage success at a rather young age, a memorable supporting role in an Oscar-winning film, a move to the West Coast to capitalize on attention from the TV and movie industries, another loss to the American theatre. Those seem like fair assumptions, but just about everything in the prior sentence is wrong, save for the movie role (as Hannibal Lecter’s jailer in The Silence of the Lambs) and the move westward.
The real story? Heald—an Obie-winning actor who was ubiquitous on New York City stages in the 1980s and early ’90s, received Tony nominations for Anything Goes and Love! Valour! Compassion!, and created notable roles in Lips Together, Teeth Apart, The Foreigner and Later Life—didn’t in fact move to New York until he was 33, after appearing in a hundred or so regional productions, including two years with a street-theatre troupe during the Vietnam War. The move west came 16 years later, but it was to Ashland, Ore., not to Los Angeles. Heald largely gave up film and TV work in favor of eight seasons with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And in the past 12 months, he has made a return to the East Coast, first to Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage with the OSF production of Bill Cain’s Equivocation, and most recently to New York, for the first time in 16 years, to play the dual roles of Theseus and Oberon in Classic Stage Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
What prompted this atypical journey?
“When I was working on Broadway or Off Broadway,” Heald explains, “I was living in Montclair, N.J.”—with his wife Robin, a stage manager turned teacher—“and the deal was that I would have to leave the house at 5:45 or 6 and didn’t get home until after midnight. I had a two-year-old and a six-year-old, and I was never seeing them. So we moved to Oregon because we wanted the lifestyle. I wanted to raise my kids in a small town. I thought, it’s worth it to give up some of the artistic satisfaction of working in New York.
“We had vacationed in Ashland in ’93, when Henry Woronicz was OSF’s artistic director. In ’94 I spoke to him about my desire to join the company and he expressed his interest. In ’95 we bought a house there, then rented it out for a year. Right at the time we were going to be moving, I heard that Henry had left the theatre.” On learning that Libby Appel, whom he did not know, was coming in as artistic director, he asked a stage manager friend how to reach her. “A couple of hours later, Libby called and asked me what I wanted to play! So we moved and I started with the company in ’97. But the decision to relocate was taken before I had a job.”
After a shift in a film schedule during his second season forced Heald to drop out of playing Astrov in Uncle Vanya (with considerable tension all around), he determined that he couldn’t pursue work in L.A. and also be committed to the festival. Consequently, he stopped all film and TV work—but in 2000 came an offer he couldn’t refuse, a leading role in David E. Kelley’s series “Boston Public.” A year of shuttling home on weekends led to the decision to move the family to L.A., at which point he promised his daughter and son he wouldn’t move them again until they graduated from middle school and high school. As a result, explains Heald, “The series was canceled in 2004 and for the next two years I worked a grand total of seven or eight days. But finally 2006 rolled around, Libby offered me Tartuffe and The Cherry Orchard and I spent the next five seasons back at the festival.”
Among the many roles Heald played in those five years, perhaps the most intriguing was Shylock in Merchant of Venice in 2010—because the actor had converted to Judaism only a few years earlier and because he had vocally opposed artistic director Bill Rauch’s consideration of the play.
“I argued that it was a play that was offensive to the Jewish community—that Shylock was a character who was created as a villain with no real motivation other than the fact that he was Jewish.” So his response when Rauch informed him that the play would indeed be part of OSF’s 75th season was surprising.
“I said, ‘Well then you need to cast me as Shylock.’ Bill said, ‘But you’re opposed to the production.’ I said, ‘This is the 13th production of Merchant of Venice that’s going to be done at the festival, and Shylock has never been played by a Jewish actor. As a Jewish actor, I want to be in the room helping to make the decision about how to play it.’ So he ended up casting me. I decided that rather than fashioning Shylock on the template of Fagin, I saw him much more on the template of Tevye. Shylock is a life force, a source of vitality and juice in this society.”
When Heald was subsequently cast in an array of small roles in the 2011 production of Julius Caesar, he began to think about the broader world of theatre once again. During rehearsals with director Amanda Dehnert, Heald felt, “We were doing things that seemed to me, a traditionalist, a little bizarre. And to my amazement, it was a phenomenal hit. Audiences were beside themselves. And I thought, ‘Tony, you’ve got to question your conservative approach to the classics. What is it about the way you look at things that makes you hesitant to enter fully into this experimental kind of approach?’
“Since I left New York in 1996, I hadn’t seen any theatre outside of the festival. I wasn’t being exposed to alternative approaches. We were taking the production of Equivocation to Arena last November and December and I thought, ‘What if I take off from the festival and see some theatre?’ So after Equivocation closed on New Year’s Day, I went to New York and in 17 days I saw 16 productions. I was here during the Under the Radar Festival, and I concentrated on really out-there productions. I found it exhilarating.
“I noticed that CSC was planning a Midsummer with Bebe Neuwirth, so I called my agent and said, ‘What’s the deal with that? Do they have a company? Do they have any openings? Could I possibly get seen?’ And when I got to New York he had a meeting set up with the director, Tony Speciale. We talked for an hour, and three weeks later, I got a call saying I’d been offered Theseus and Oberon. We’d been planning to spend the spring in Los Angeles to make some money and see friends, but my wife said, ‘I’d much rather be in New York—why don’t we do it?’”
With a career marked by hiatuses from the stage, it’s easy to wonder whether Heald feels there are roles he’s missed. “It’s a great pain to me,” he admits. “All the years that I was in New York, I did one Shakespeare role—Fluellen in Henry V. I sometimes imagine my life as a Shakespearean actor—I see myself floating down a river, and along the shore, receding upriver, I see Romeo, I see Hamlet, Richard II, Richard III. I see all these roles that I never got a chance to play.”
Yet, at the same time, Heald says there are roles that are seemingly still far on the horizon. “The fact that I have looked, through most of my adult life, somewhat younger than I actually am, has been a benefit. As I get older, I’m desperate to play Lear, and I’m going to be 68 this summer. I’ve strongly pitched myself as Lear. I think my youthful appearance is going to work against me. So there’s part of me that thinks, ‘Come on, get older. Get older so you can play some of those great roles,’ and part of me that thinks, ‘God, I’m getting old.’ It’s a mixed blessing.”
Arts management consultant Howard Sherman has been executive director of the American Theatre Wing and the Eugene O ’Neill Theater Center.
