Bringing the Lines to Life

Frank Dwyer has pulled off what might seem impossible in latter-day Los Angeles. He’s taken a passion for classical theater and fashioned a multifaceted career out of it--as an actor, director, dramaturge, translator and all-around man of the theater.

An associate artist and former literary manager at the Mark Taper Forum as well as a longtime member of the Antaeus company, Dwyer has been an influential figure in Los Angeles theater for more than a decade. So it is particularly fitting that it is here he adds yet another title to his credits, taking his first major bow as a dramatist.

Dwyer’s play, “The Affliction of Glory: A Comedy About Tragedy,” opens at the Getty Center on Thursday, directed by Corey Madden. Commissioned by the Getty, the play examines the phenomenal celebrity of 18th century English tragic actress Sarah Siddons. It is produced in association with the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum and presented in conjunction with ongoing Siddons exhibitions at the Getty and at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

Dwyer brings to playwriting not only a wealth of knowledge, but also the conviction that his various pursuits are complementary and inseparable. “My primary love is for the word--the plays of Shakespeare or the poetry of Keats or George Herbert or whatever,” he says. “And you really can’t experience that fully unless you learn the words and say them out loud.

“If you know a speech and say it, you know it in a totally different way than if you just read it,” he continues. “And once that’s true, you want to act it and to direct it. And then you evolve naturally into a writer. It seems to me it’s all the same thing. I can’t act without being aware of what’s going on in the world of the play, and I can’t direct without being aware of what the actors’ opportunities and liabilities are. And in translating you need to be an actor and a director and a writer.”

*

Sitting in a Taper office just after the first day of rehearsals for “The Affliction of Glory,” Dwyer proves a charming conversationalist. Friendly and open, the 54-year-old artist is more than willing to answer queries about his career. Yet he’s infinitely more engaged when he’s talking about the arts.

In fact, the ardor with which Dwyer speaks about culture reveals more about him than any biographical details possibly could. “Plays can change the lives of people who come and see them,” he says. “You can see ‘Twelfth Night’ and come away more at peace with the fact of your own mortality. That’s what art can do. I just can’t imagine why anybody would do anything else, why you wouldn’t try and arrange your life so you can go to galleries and concerts and see plays.”

“The world that he lives in is the world of ideas,” says actor Patrick Egan, who has worked with Dwyer on many occasions since the early 1970s. “His feelings about opera, theater and literature are very personal. He very specifically applies all the ideas he culls from these arts to his life. He’s spent a lot of time thinking about what he’s read or seen and what it means, where it lies in the great scope of things. That’s why, when you get into discussions with Frank, they can become quite heated. It’s really very personal to him.”

“He’s very informed and bright and opinionated,” concurs actor Dakin Matthews, one of Dwyer’s colleagues in the Antaeus company. “He seems to have read everything I can think of and to have remembered it. One of Frank’s favorite words about theater and literature is ‘information.’ He loves the fact that people come to an event and carry away knowledge and wisdom.”

“I think he’s a treasure, a dream theater person,” adds actress-director-playwright Lillian Garrett-Groag, another of Dwyer’s fellow Antaeus members. “He’s also one of the best-read people I know. Not only does he know theater, but he knows the context: how it was created and how it lives today.”

These are the qualities that brought Dwyer to mind when Getty paintings conservator Mark Leonard first asked Madden to suggest a writer to pen a piece about the legendary Siddons, to accompany planned exhibitions at the Getty and Huntington.

“Frank is a man of tremendous erudition, particularly about England from the period of Shakespeare to the present,” says Madden, who is associate artistic director at the Taper. “I knew he would bring a kind of single-mindedness to the project, that he would really dive into and do the kind of research that was necessary. I thought that he could harmonize with what an art museum is interested in and [also be] someone who truly understands what a good evening in the theater is.”

Dwyer had little experience as a playwright per se, apart from a couple of short works he had written in the early 1970s. Yet he was extremely knowledgeable about dramatic texts, having served as the Taper’s literary manager for much of the ‘90s--a job that includes evaluating countless manuscripts submitted to the theater. Then, too, he also had the benefit of his experience as a translator, with Nicholas Saunders, of more than half a dozen classic Russian works.

Clearly, Dwyer was equipped to handle both the research and the writing. “I felt like I needed to read everything about the 18th century and read all of Siddons’ old plays before I wrote a line,” he says. “For 30 years, from 1782 to her retirement in 1812, she played a few Shakespeare parts, but most famously, the six or seven now-unreadable tragedies, these plays in which a woman is a victim, something is bad for the woman and it’s going to get worse. And when she played, men wept regularly, and women had hysterics and had to be helped from the theater.

“She was an 18th century wife with everything that meant in terms of the oppression of women, playing again and again a victim woman in what were called ‘she-tragedies,’ ” Dwyer says. “Yet she elevated her profession in such a way that she became like a queen.

“The thing that pleases me most is that at the end of it, [the play] turns out to have something that feels good to me to say about women and their lives--actresses in particular, but also women in the world of men, women trying to function as professionals.”

That’s not to say that the writing of “The Affliction of Glory” was entirely pain-free. In truth, Dwyer recalls wrestling with a number of strategic problems, including how to negotiate the differences between the sensibilities of an 18th century audience and those of a modern one.

“You can’t recover historical truth,” he says. “Everybody who writes history has an agenda: You push it this way or push it that way. So I thought, all right, let’s push it all different ways, see what we can get of her if different people with different agendas are working to recover this. I don’t want to tell what happens, but it’s a playful play.”

*

Raised in Shawnee Mission, Kan., Dwyer is the eldest of six children born to a physician and his wife. “I come from a big family, all doctors,” he says with a glow that suggests happy memories. “I didn’t get any of that, except that I often, as an actor, play doctors.”

An admiration for the written word was instilled early. “It’s because my mother read me the nursery rhymes, which seemed so wonderful and exotic and musical to me, and it made me love poetry,” Dwyer says. “Then, very early, I got obsessed with Shakespeare.”

Dwyer attended Northwestern University, majoring in English and performing in “a lot” of plays, before transferring to New York University to complete his degree. He continued with graduate studies, also in English, at State University of New York at Buffalo.

“I passed my PhD orals and then got drafted and ended up teaching junior high school in New York to get out of the draft,” he recalls. “When I was old enough to be reclassified so I wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam, I was directing and acting off-off-Broadway, and the job market for English PhDs had closed behind me.”

But life as an academic wasn’t really what Dwyer had wanted anyway. So he pursued the stage, working at first primarily as an actor and later also as a director. During the 1970s and ‘80s, he found a home in classical companies, including the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center and CSC Repertory Theater.

“I stayed in New York and worked off and on as a classical actor and director for a long time before I had to admit to myself that this is a profession that really doesn’t exist in America,” Dwyer says. “I worked different places, but never enough.”

By the time the late ‘80s rolled around, New York had begun to feel like a tough place to live. That led Dwyer, who had recently married his second wife, actress Mary Stark, to consider California.

“I said, ‘I understand there’s a city in this country where we could live in the same house and stay in the city and work at what is roughly this profession, and even if we don’t work enough, make enough to coast. Let’s go try it.’ ”

The couple moved to L.A. in 1987, taking odd jobs such as script reading to supplement their acting incomes. Then, just when things were looking grim, Dwyer got the job as Taper literary manager in 1990.

“I had an appointment to become a substitute teacher in the L.A. Unified School District,” he says. “I had my third interview [for teaching] the day I got the [literary manager] job.”

*

Also around this time, Dwyer became involved with the fledgling Antaeus company, a group of classical theater artists then based at the Taper. In fact, the first major Antaeus production, seen on the Taper main stage in 1994, turned out to be Anton Chekhov’s “The Wood Demon,” in a translation by Dwyer and Saunders, staged by Dwyer.

“I was just lucky,” says Dwyer, who also went on to direct Antaeus’ second production, John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” at the Ventura Court Theatre in 1996. “It’s been invaluable to work in Antaeus, to become in some fashion a company, to know what everybody’s imagination and boldness and frailties are, but to know [as well] how everybody grows together and makes something happen.”

And Dwyer’s collaborators are as grateful for his presence as he is for theirs.

“As a director, he’s able to guide you with a minimum of fuss,” Garrett-Groag says. “He’s also extremely kind and patient, and longsighted. As a director, he’s extremely pigheaded, but he’s also adorable, so seductive that you go with him in two seconds.

“He’s one of the funniest actors I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s a wonderful farceur, and farceurs are rare,” she says. “I think Frank can play innocent like nobody else in the world, because Frank himself is an innocent man. He’s the most honest individual in the world, and that’s why he gets in trouble. He has a capacity for outrage, and he is the least political human being you will ever encounter.”

Dwyer has been less active with Antaeus in the past couple of years, in large part because he has changed jobs at the Taper and begun to focus more on his own work again. “I’m now called an associate artist, which gives me a [creative] home and a salary and benefits and time to still do the things that I love to do,” he says. Dwyer’s new duties include speaking and writing about the productions, editing and writing for the programs and leading subscriber tours to London and Edinburgh.

“Playwright” is, of course, his newest job description. But it’s one that Dwyer is quite happy to add to the list. “For me, it’s a title of great honor,” he says. “For better or for worse, the fraternity and sorority is one that I feel very proud to enter because so many of my friends and people I respect are there.”*

*

“The Affliction of Glory: A Comedy About Tragedy,” Harold M. Williams Auditorium, Getty Center. Thursday-Saturday, Aug. 26-28 and Sept.2-4, 8 p.m.; Saturday-next Sunday, Aug. 28-29 and Sept. 4-5, 2:30 p.m. $28. (Includes parking for up to three hours before the performance.) (213) 628-2772.