A different angle

Mark Peckham directs a ‘scary piece’

April 2, 2008 4:52:10 PM

"A brutal world: 2nd Story’s Orpheus Descending." By Bill Rodriguez.

Mark Peckham directing Orpheus Descending is an unusual event, to say the least. Not because he has anything against Tennessee Williams, but because 2nd Story Theater artistic director Ed Shea has something against anyone but himself, meticulous helmsman he is, doing so. The only previous main stage guest directors there have been Bob Colonna and John Michael Richardson.

“I’ve always admired his directorial sensibilities,” Shea declared in a written statement about Peckham. “Mark was also on the vanguard of the intimate theater scene in Rhode Island back in the ’80s. When many smaller theater companies were starting up, Mark put his stamp on that scene and has received little recognition for the contribution he made.”

That harks back to Wickenden Gate Theatre, which Peckham formed with Janice Duclos, now a Trinity Rep company member and his partner, and some other young acting students, such as Russell Berrigan and Lindsay Reid. The company was an offshoot of an acting class they were taking in 1981, taught by Trinity’s Melanie Jones.

“We worked with her for a long time,” Peckham recalls. “We pool our money and work with her for six weeks, and then we pool our money some more and get her for eight weeks. And the work was so exciting that she wanted to direct something with people who were in the class. So it just kind of evolved from there.”

He is sitting in front of the unpopulated Orpheus stage, speaking before a rehearsal.

“To me, those were the glory days,” he says, recalling that first professional theater experience in the ’80s. “We were behind Amara’s [restaurant] and searching for spaces for theater with nothing, no money. It was really exciting.”

So Peckham is quite aware that actors in a resident company such as 2nd Story, who have been working together, can make all the difference in directing them.

“You come in to do a show and these people already have a history, they have a kind of language,” he says. “You get somebody like Rae Mancini and Kyle Maddock and there is this chemistry that you often can’t find in rehearsal. First rehearsal it was just there. You can’t buy it.”

Peckham says that considering how Shea tends to direct just about everything at 2nd Story, he was “thrilled” to be asked to take charge of Orpheus Descending, which he calls “a scary piece.”

“It’s huge,” he says. “It’s epic. It’s mythic. It’s not kitchen sink drama. And it differs a little bit from Streetcar and Glass Menagerie, which are really, I think, more clearly focused on one theme. This really is bigger than that.”

He compares Orpheus to Camino Real, another Williams play that deals with universal themes.

“And that’s what this does on so many levels,” Peckham says. “It’s a play about isolation and bigotry and closed-mindedness and how we survive it, how we deal with it. And it’s about art and music too, and how that has the power to redeem us or save us or pull us through.”

That last observation about the play comes up again when he speaks about his greatest challenge in directing in general and directing this play in particular — namely letting go, not imposing on the actors such complexities as that savior symbolism.

“His name is Xavier,” he says of the central character in the play, “which is pronounced ‘Zavior’ in the South, you know.”

Having started in theater as an actor himself — and getting plenty of that work up in Boston these days — he’s always looking for such conceptual understandings to help create a character he plays.

“Because I’m an actor, I can see what they’re doing before it would be clear to somebody else, and that pushes me in the direction that I need to go,” he says. “Because it’s organic to them, it’s in the moment, I see it forming and I just take it. Take it further, but 90 percent of it is coming from them.

“That’s what I demand of my actors, that they come in with ideas and work,” Peckham insists. “I’m not interested in someone who stands there and says, ‘What do you want me to do?’”