Faculty Stab at ‘Woolf’ Is More Than Academic

Who’s afraid of a big, bad three-hour play?

Not Thom B. Hill and Sheryl Donchey. Hill, dean of fine and performing arts at Santa Ana College, and Donchey, who chairs the theater department, are starring in a campus production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Edward Albee’s grimly funny case study of the damage done when academic life goes sour.

They’re doing it to raise money for a scholarship fund at the community college and, tangentially, to challenge that most rancid canard about academics: Those who can’t do, teach.

The two prime roles in Albee’s four-character classic are extremely large and demanding. Hill and Donchey have at it as George and Martha, the middle-aged professor and his wife whose marriage is a ceaseless sparring match of mutual psychological abuse stylishly inflicted with booze-fired wit.

What they’re doing is something of a rarity. For good, practical reasons, educators at Orange County colleges seldom perform in campus plays.

The object, after all, is to help student actors learn, and what better way to learn than to act? If professors routinely hog good parts, students routinely get left out.

What’s more, for teachers with lectures to give, students to counsel, papers to grade and home lives to live, the consuming, weeks- or months-long challenge of a big part is simply too burdensome.

There’s also a fear factor. All actors put themselves on the line, but the stakes are especially high when, after the curtain falls, there’s the prospect of facing the audience again in a classroom or at a faculty meeting.

Jim Volz, a veteran theater professor at Cal State Fullerton, witnessed a worst-case scenario about 20 years ago at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. A colleague flopped as the lead in a campus musical.

“It was absolutely embarrassing. I think he lost credibility. People never looked at him the same, and he moved on pretty quickly after that.”

Volz could recall just three instances of faculty members acting in university productions during his 10 years at Cal State Fullerton. He and other theater academics in Orange County say it usually happens once every few years, and then only when a particular teacher is perfect for a part and there are lots of other roles available for students.

“It’s very exciting when it works,” Volz said, because students get to watch a mentor at work on a day-to-day basis, “mastering what they’ve been talking about.”

It’s a brand of excitement Volz himself has forgone as a matter of policy in his 25-year teaching career.

“I never act with my students. The downside is too great. I think it’s fraught with peril.”

Robert Cohen has acted three times in his 35-year career as a professor of drama at UC Irvine. He recalls them as “absolutely fabulous and terrible”--terrible in the sense of inducing terror. In 1975 he played George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”--a part that seems to resonate with career academics--in a special late-summer production designed not to infringe on the regular schedule of student plays.

“Every now and then, one shows that one can do what one teaches,” said Cohen, who has also made a mark as a professional theater director and author of several textbooks on acting and theater. But, he cautions, “some wonderful acting teachers have never acted in their lives. It doesn’t necessarily follow” that those who teach need to be able to do.

It’s impressive when they can. Last Thursday night, Hill and Donchey were commanding presences as they jousted and parried or simply breathed fire at each other on stage in their first performance of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” which continues through Sunday.

Hill’s imposing girth, squarish, bearded face and marvelously resonant, finely tuned bass voice called the latter-day Orson Welles to mind. He played his rotundity for laughs at one point by slightly tweaking Albee’s text during George’s disquisition on his and Martha’s weight. But the potential spectacle of a very fat man on stage quickly dissolved into the enjoyment that comes when a very persuasive actor inhabits a well-written role.

Donchey, meanwhile, was suitably dangerous and pathetic as the seething, frustrated, grating and bawdy-minded Martha, half-bursting out of her blouse in pursuit of a younger professor, Nick. Donchey’s Martha was as vivid and volatile as Elizabeth Taylor’s screen creation of the role.

By the first intermission, Olicer Munoz was won over.

“[Hill] is a wonderful actor. Martha, she irritates, but that’s her job. They both do it really well,” said the sophomore film major from Villa Park, who doesn’t know the dean or the theater professor. “I was kind of skeptical at first [about the casting of faculty members]. You don’t know if they’re going to be that good. But it’s a wonderful idea. It shows the students that their teachers actually have the right stuff.”

Zeddrick Jones and Daenna Thomas came at the suggestion of John DeMita, who plays Nick, the ambitious young professor who becomes a helpless plaything in George and Martha’s marital games. DeMita, a professional actor, teaches part time at Santa Ana College and at El Camino College in Torrance, where Jones and Thomas take his course on intro to acting.

“I was overwhelmed,” Jones said. “We can understand more by seeing [what he does] rather than by his stating words.”

“I see him as an actor now, and not just a teacher,” Thomas added. “I can see that he teaches us things that he practices, and not just things out of a book.”

For Donchey, a 25-year member of the Santa Ana College faculty, playing Martha extended a fairly active acting career, although it was her first stage role in three years. The play marks Hill’s first time on stage since arriving as dean in 1990.

Donchey had long been after him to play a part.

“I made the mistake one day of saying I’d be willing to do ‘Virginia Woolf.’ It’s one of my favorite pieces of theater ever, though it is an endurance test,” Hill said. “[Donchey] wrote to get the rights, so it became ‘put up or shut up.’ ”

Hill, 53, had played George 30 years ago as a theater major at the University of South Dakota; this was a chance to revisit the role with an ample fund of life experience--and a much closer age match to the character, who is 46 but claims to look 55.

Donchey had never seen Hill act, but he came to the part with strong, classically steeped credits from his youth, and good reviews from associates who had seen him perform.

He had last acted 10 years ago while dean at Citrus College in Glendora, playing Oscar Madison in a campus production of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.” Donchey also knew Hill as a capable ham from their routine interactions as dean and professor: “I’ll come into the office and he’ll do little bits of scenes and monologues, teasing around.”

Being dean by day and George by night for the past eight weeks has been exhilarating, Hill said during an interview backstage the afternoon of the first performance of “Virginia Woolf.”

“As exhausting as it is, it’s almost rejuvenating in a sense. Normally by 5 in the afternoon my head is gone. Now, at midnight, I’m alive and awake.”

As a college administrator, Hill says, his working life is a nebulous, never-ending, “always up in the air” sequence of problems to solve. This is a chance to create something and put a lid on it--like the jars of garlic dill pickles Hill and his wife are famous for making and distributing as gifts.

With a play, Hill said, “There’s tangible evidence that something happened. There’s an audience, you hope they applaud, and it’s completed.”

And the fear factor?

“There’s always apprehension. That’s the process. But it’s like life. It opens and it closes, whether or not you want it to. Between, you’d better have as good a time as you can.”

When their current run ends, Donchey will look for other roles. She envisions making faculty plays a regular part of the campus schedule, perhaps once every two years or so, in hopes of inspiring students.

Hill said he is retiring from the boards and heading back to the academic boardroom.

“I miss acting, but you’re seeing a milestone. It’s the last time I’ll ever perform.”

Whereupon Donchey gave him a swift little Martha-like kick under the table.

“Well,” he amended. “If someone paid me, I suppose.”

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“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” by Edward Albee, at Phillips Hall Theatre on the Santa Ana College campus, 1530 W. 17th St. Today through Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2:30 p.m. $6-$8. (714) 564-5661.