Tue Mar 16 2010
by April Helms
Special Products Editor
Coach House Theatre will play host to "Barrymore's Ghost" for three performances, with opening night on Halloween.
Jason Miller's one-man play, directed by Nancy Cates, features actor Richard Figge and is presented by Ohio Shakespeare Festival. Shows are Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 at 8 p.m., and Nov. 2, at 2:30 p.m.
The play opens up the life of the legendary John Barrymore, who is presented as a ghost haunting an unknown theater, which, at the moment, is in rehearsal for a play.
Figge said that he was "born a few weeks after [Barrymore] died," and has performed this work before.
"I did it originally in 1992," he said. "I directed myself. I didn't have the incredible good fortune of knowing Nancy Cates. She took things from the script, which I thought I knew pretty well and took to a whole new level."
The gods have sentenced Barrymore to this purgatorial existence as penance for his abandonment of the theater and the squandering of his talents, in the pursuit of fame, greed, and dissipation. Barrymore disputes these assertions of the gods as he painfully and humorously examines the spectrum of his life. He chronicles his ascendancy to the throne as the finest classical actor of his generation; his arrival to the pinnacle of movie stardom; his intimate and compassionate relationships to his sister Ethel and his brother Lionel; and the explosive debacles of his four marriages.
"This is a terrific ghost story," Figge said. "John Barrymore believed in ghosts. He was talking with his good friend Gene Fowler, and said 'when I come back, don't gawk at me, be hospitable to my shade.'"
Barrymore "revolutionized Shakespeare with his realistic line delivery," Figge said.
"Before him, Shakespeare's plays tended to be stuffy and overdramatized," he said. "He spoke the lines as if they were everyday dialogue, and it really changed how Shakespeare was performed."
Figge is a character actor whose credits range from Prospero in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac" to modern comedy and drama. He is best known for his one-man performance as Clarence Darrow, with which he has toured in the United States and Europe and which he presented in 1985, under the sponsorship of President Reagan, in Washington, D. C.
Tickets are $25 for dinner (or brunch) and theater, with dinner prior to the performances at the adjacent Akron Woman's City Club. Tickets for theater-only are $10, general admission seating. Coach House and the City Club are at 732 W. Exchange St., at the intersection of N. Portage Path and Exchange Street.
For reservations or ticket information, call Ohio Shakespeare Festival at 330-673-8761, or the Coach House Theatre box office at 330-434-7741. Visit www.ohioshakespeare.com online for details.
E-mail: ahelms@recordpub.com
Phone: 330-688-0088 ext. 3153
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