An Actress Who’s Happier Behind the Scenes

As Barbara Beckley spoke to a roomful of theatrical producers and marketers at a conference earlier this year, her listeners hung on every word.

She described her pre-show talks, in which she welcomes audiences and pitches subscriptions to the Colony Theatre Company--where she’s producing director.

The speeches apparently work. At its previous 99-seat venue, the Colony attracted more than 3,500 regular subscribers. It often was difficult to obtain single, nonsubscription tickets. The seating crunch led the Colony to larger quarters at the 276-seat Burbank Center Stage.

The Colony continues to thrive, winning acclaim this year for its L.A. premieres of the Broadway musical “Side Show” and the docudrama “The Laramie Project.” The latter marked the first use of the venue’s full capacity on a regular Actors’ Equity contract--a hallmark of professionalism in a region where most theater companies can’t afford contracts. The Colony’s current “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” also drew critical cheers.

But all that success doesn’t mean that Beckley can stop the curtain speeches. In front of her peers at the conference, Beckley disclosed her deep dark secret: “I hate doing curtain speeches. I loathe it.

“But you would be amazed what a difference it makes,” she added. “It provides a face you can relate to.”

There was an irony in those words. For Beckley’s personal turning point was when she realized that she is just as happy behind the scenes as she is on stage.

“She has scrubbed the bathrooms, given up her own acting, put in a lifetime of service for that theater,” said Joe Stern, a TV producer who also runs L.A.’s 99-seat Matrix Theatre and has often worked with Beckley as a colleague on theater-community issues.

Indeed, two hours before curtain time on opening night of “The Laramie Project,” Beckley said, she mopped the theater restroom floors. The janitors hadn’t shown up that day. “Everybody was doing whatever needed to be done,” she said, a familiar scene to those who run small theaters.

Born in Oklahoma but raised in New Rochelle, N.Y., young Barbara Jean Beckley’s introduction to theater was “Peter Pan,” with Mary Martin, on Broadway. She saw other Broadway musicals of the era with her older sister.

After the matinees, Barbara Jean begged to go backstage. But her sister said no. “I thought she was weird. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she was normal,” Beckley recalled.

Seized With Inspiration

At home, Beckley sang along with cast albums. But at school, “the cool kids were in music, not drama,” she said. Besides, her father didn’t think highly of acting, and “I was very much a pleaser, a conformist.” At age 12 or 13, “I realized I didn’t have much of a voice, one of my great tragedies.”

Her theatrical ambitions received a jump-start from a new drama teacher, Jack Kissell. He even brought the then-unknown Martin Sheen to talk to the class.

Beckley apprenticed with a local musical theater company when she was 16. Then, after a year at Middlebury College in Vermont, during which her father died, she was seized with inspiration while watching a New York Shakespeare Festival play in Central Park.

At intermission, she found the stage manager and volunteered her services. Soon, she was running the reel-to-reel tape machines for “King Lear.”

One night, she forgot a cue, panicked and impulsively flicked a switch that yielded a long, moaning sound--which was followed by the line, “Hark, the king’s trumpets.” The audience laughed.

The festival’s producer, Joseph Papp, was on hand that night and told Beckley, “That was nice. What do you do for an encore?”

“I’m astonished I didn’t die on the spot,” Beckley said. “To this day, if a techie screws up and it doesn’t kill them with shame, I want to kill them.”

Beckley dropped out of college after one more semester and studied acting in New York with the venerated Sanford Meisner. She got some jobs and an Equity card. But she began to realize that “I didn’t have quite the same drive as the other actors I knew.”

She moved to L.A. and found plenty of unpaid opportunities, for Equity had recently relaxed its rules to allow “waiver” productions in sub-100-seat theaters. Beckley joined the nascent Colony, which rented the Odyssey Theatre (then on Ohio Avenue in West L.A.) in 1974 to stage “The Crucible.”

‘I Needed a Place to Act’

Looking for a site for the loosely knit group’s “Enter Laughing,” Beckley found the Studio Theatre on the isolated east side of Silver Lake--”the land that time forgot,” Beckley calls it. “Enter Laughing” landed at Hollywood’s Cast Theatre, but when the group decided to try a subscription season, it settled at the Studio.

Terrence Shank was the artistic leader, but Beckley was the Colony’s main manager. “I was still telling myself that it was because I needed a place to act,” she said.

Shank recalls that by 1984 he felt the group should try to expand into larger quarters and Equity wages. Most of the others felt the company wasn’t ready. Beckley doesn’t even recall this as a major issue then. At any rate, Shank left.

Now the artistic director of a small theater in Florida, Shank recalled no friction with Beckley over his departure from the Colony. “Our working partnership was like butter,” he said. “I knew Barbara would continue to lead the group.”

Sure enough, “it landed in my lap,” Beckley recalled. “For a few years, I thought of myself as a caretaker, expecting someone else would come along and lead us. I thought of myself as the grunt. And then I had an epiphany.”

It occurred in 1986. A new play was causing problems in rehearsals. But the company--including Beckley, the stage manager--kept plugging away. On opening night, “when I called the final cue, a huge roar went up. The leading actor looked like he was taking a warm shower in the cheers--and sitting there in the dark, completely anonymous in the booth, I realized I felt exactly the same way.”

“That’s when I got it--there’s such joy in the process, in creating an environment for talented people, watching their work meet the audience. I stopped trying to find someone else to take over.”

A year later, the Colony began telemarketing. Subscriptions rose from 835 to 1,845 in three months.

Beckley didn’t receive a salary until 1996, after a friendly separation from her then-husband, fellow Colony member Michael Wadler (they divorced this year).

But she’s been the Colony’s chief programmer for longer than that. “My evolution into queen,” Beckley quipped, “took many years.”

“She’s very good at picking shows that she loves and that the audience can relate to,” Wadler said.

“If I get a chorus of no’s” from her advisory committee, Beckley said, “I rethink. I don’t engrave my decisions on stone tablets.” But ultimately, “I’m the final word.”

The Colony began looking for a larger space in 1992.

After a few false starts, the company moved to Burbank and opened its first show there--directed by the visiting Shank--in 2000.

Promoting the L.A. Stage

Beckley hasn’t acted on the Colony stage since 1995. But she’s a key figure in the larger L.A. theater scene. In the late ‘80s, she campaigned to preserve some form of Equity’s “waiver” against opposition from union activists. The dispute, heated at times, was known as the “waiver wars.”

Edward Weston, who was a Beckley opponent as Equity’s western regional director, now says he’s delighted the Colony moved up to a contract “after all these years. We may have disagreed about whether and when they should have made their move, but I always liked Barbara.” When he saw the Colony’s “Side Show,” he said of Beckley, “She could not have been nicer.”

In a mid-’90s stint as board president of Theatre LA, the organization that represents most L.A. theaters, Beckley became a vehement promoter of the L.A. stage.

So it’s somewhat surprising to hear her say this: “I find it difficult to go to the theater when I’m not involved in the production. I can’t surrender to the experience, as I do at the movies. I find myself looking at the props, at the lights.”

“I’m wondering how they did it.”