On boycotting Greg Wood

The face is (too) familiar:
On boycotting Greg Wood

JIM RUTTER

From the time that I first moved to Philadelphia for grad school 12 years ago, I’ve loved watching Greg Wood perform on stage. His performances have colored some of my earliest and best memories of the evolving success of what’s affectionately referred to as the Philadelphia theater community. Whenever I hesitated on a play, seeing Wood’s name in the listings always encouraged me to buy a ticket.

But small communities often feel more like small towns. Eventually, I tired of seeing the same faces, and as Philadelphia theater grew into a phenomenon worthy of national respect, my tastes expanded and grew with it. Wood continued to perform, and I often caught his appearances on stage: in roles that I loved (Oleanna at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio Three), roles for which I thought him ill-suited (Brick in the Arden’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and roles in which a theater wholly under-utilized his talents (again the Arden, this time as Gaston in Picasso at the Lapin Agile).

In the latter case (and a few others like it), I found myself surmising that theater companies that could afford Wood (and his equity status) only put his name in the marquee to attract the theatergoers who (like me) attended a play based on name recognition. I felt as if I and my fellow theatergoers were being used.

A year of avoidance

So as a form of consumer backlash, I decided to avoid Wood’s performances altogether, especially after catching his turn in the Arden’s Opus (spring 2006). Although that role much more suited Wood’s forte as the boyish paramour, once again it marked his appearance in an underdeveloped role where I thought the Arden cast him only for his name recognition.

For the next year, I avoided any play in which Greg Wood appeared, and saw him only by default during last spring’s Galileo at the Wilma (which I wasn’t going to miss in any case). Considering how much talent Philadelphia’s community had developed over the past ten years, I didn’t even notice.

But after covering the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival this past summer, I realized that absence makes theatrical hearts grow fonder too.

Frenzied rage and anguish

Over the past decade, I’ve seen Wood perform many roles at the Shakespeare Festival, but nothing matched the evolution in his talent that I witnessed in a role that I would’ve thought beyond his range. Playing the lead role of Leontes in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Wood shed his customary boyish demeanor, dropped any pretense of his “inherent dignity,” and dove head first into his character’s jealous madness. Speaking his lines in frenzied bursts of rage and anguish, Wood literally crumbled on stage, deteriorating physically in gait and posture as a king wracked first by suspicion and later humiliated in contrition by guilt.

Later that summer—paired opposite Grace Gonglewski, about whom I could write this same article— Wood played the unlikely role of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, a young man seeking his fortune after his father’s death (Wood is well over 40). This time Wood (and director Russell Treyz) added an extra layer of humor to Shakespeare’s comedy by poking fun at his own casting in the role. Once he defused his own appearance in the play, Wood prowled the stage like a cat waiting to pounce—both relaxed and full of tension—and as always, declaimed Shakespeare’s lines with the ease of a native Elizabethan.

Molière’s demanding role

Which brings me to Wood’s current casting in the Lantern Theatre’s production of Molière’s The School for Wives, a role very well suited to his age and acting abilities. While Kathryn Nocero MacMillan deserves praise for crafting a production in which Wood flourishes, the credit for the success of execution goes entirely to him.

As Arnolphe, Wood begins as the confident man of the world, a 42-year-old bachelor who’s finally ready to marry because he’s thought of a way to outwit the “society of cuckolds” that he holds in contempt. He has literally raised up a girl to wed, having bought her at age four from an impoverished nurse and kept her ignorant by locking her in a convent until she age 15. Over the next two hours, this first appearance shifts into a façade as a young suitor (Luigi Sottile) causes Arnolphe’s plans to unravel, and at every turn, Wood the actor must struggle between becoming the laughingstock on society’s terms, or an object of ridicule as someone trying to escape the fate of cuckoldry in marriage.

The role requires great dexterity, and Wood displays a wide range of emotions— from pride and arrogance to an “I won’t lose” vanity, even into a humiliation-driven love— that flesh out this role into a character who’s far greater than the sum of his lines in the script. And here, more than any other local actor, Wood continues to demonstrate his fluency in declaiming classical verse (especially in this translation), nailing the timing required to effect all the humor of his lines.

Waltzing with the audience

But Wood also displayed something beyond his usual versatility: a manner of comedic acting that I’d never seen in him before. Dancing in and out of the aisles with a goofy Mummer’s strut, he pranced about the stage, hammed it up with the audience (even managing to waltz with an unlikely patron who tried to sneak out to the bathroom), and played off the audience responses to his direct-addressed lines with the skill of a veteran stand-up comic.

Is it possible that Wood evolved so much over the year in which I avoided his performances? Or did his previous casting directors fail to tap such reserves of talent?

In either case, Wood’s vicious performance as Leontes last summer showed me a depth and maturity beyond his boyish charm, and his zany antics in Taming of the Shrew and at the Lantern opened me up to the idea that he can tackle roles I’d have thought were reserved only for the comedic talents of Tony Lawton or Ben Lloyd.

I hope casting directors in this town paid attention, because this veteran theatergoer is once again willing to watch Greg Wood appear in anything.



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