ARTS In the Shadow of the Master

SITTING IN A TALL BACKED WOODEN

chair, Ken Bryant is king of the room. He greets the actors coming into rehearsal with tight hugs and air kisses, and now he is sitting at the head of the horseshoe of tables, toying with a sharpened yellow pencil, rocking forward slightly in his seat, and blinking laboriously as if he is barely able to contain his energy. It is the first meeting of the Dallas Theater Center’s acting company since the old king and artistic leader of six years, Adrian Hall, was fired, one long summer ago. Ken Bryant, heir to the throne, is about to speak.

“We are embarking on an adventure here,” he says, the words spilling out quickly, the pitch of his voice rising. He is pumped up, nervous. At thirty-four, he has become one of the youngest artistic directors of a regional theater in the nation by entering the vacuum left by Adrian Hall, a superstar director in American theater. If Bryant can withstand the pressure and fill that void, then he himself will be a master.

“I have friends who tell me every time I see them that, hey, this is my chance to make it or not, that this is probably my one big chance in life that will never come around again. And I say, well’- and Bryant makes the Italian “up yours” sign, hand slapping on bicep. They’re just kidding him and he knows it, but it adds another granule of pressure, pressure that is building up around him and within him. “There’s all these things,” he says, “hammering in at me. It’s like I’m surrounded.” What about publicity photographs of the actors, Ken? What kind of costumes for the servants in this scene, Ken? How about this for a marketing idea, Ken? Are we on schedule, Ken? Hey, Ken, Ken, Ken.

But he handles it. Some-times he’s so deep in concentration that people stand beside him, waiting for a break in his thoughts so that they can jump in and get his response on something. And always, in a kind of well-measured way, he gives them his attention, then his decision. He is never pushed off balance. His only sign of pressure is that occasionally he slips away and sneaks a cigarette.

“His job never leaves us,” says Bryant’s wife, Linda Gehringer, a Dallas Theater Center company actress. “He’s always been very busy, but now the weight of the responsibility is heavy on him.”



BRYANT FIRST MET ADRIAN HALL IN 1982 WHEN BRYANT WAS DOING office work for a Broadway producer. But what he really wanted to do was direct. When Bryant heard that Hall was going to come to the theater to produce a play, he went to his boss and begged to stage-direct Hairs play. His boss let him. Hall was so impressed by Bryant that two years later he offered him a job at his Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence, Rhode Island. Bryant jumped at the offer.

Three months later, Hall got the job as artistic director for the DTC. Almost immediately, he sent for Bryant. “I walked into work one day,” says Bryant, “and the assistant told me, ’Son, you’re going to Dallas.1 The only thing 1 knew about Dallas was the football team and the TV show.” Still, he came without hesitation. You don’t say no to the master.

Hall and Bryant walked into a theatrical firestorm in Dallas. Paul Baker, the founding artistic director of the DTC, had just been booted out, and the Dallas audience was reacting negatively to Hall’s productions. Although he’s considered a genius back East, Dallas audiences were shocked by Hall’s gripping and straightforward portrayals of homosexuality and family violence. Attendance plummeted. The DTC struggled. Hall scrambled to keep his two theaters afloat, and Bryant filled in all the gaping holes left by Hall in Dallas: attending committee meetings, supervising schedules, keeping the shows in shape after they opened, and communicating with the actors. The plays Bryant directed were well received.

When Hall poured his attentions into a production, the results were often outstanding, gaining him national attention. During these times Bryant absorbed the Hall genius like a sponge. But when the guru was away, things slipped. The DTC’s Board of Trustees became disenchanted. It’s true, they admitted, Hall was an artistic genius. But he was an administrative failure. He would never, it seemed, decide which plays would fill the following year’s slots until the latest possible moment. So last May, the board fired Hall and named Bryant interim artistic director, with a wink-of-the-eye implication that if Bryant does well, the full-time job is his.

“Adrian was like family to us,” says Gehr-inger. “So you don’t just jump up and down and say, ’Oh, lucky, lucky me.’ Yet it is a dream come true.” She says that the board obviously liked the artistic direction the theater was going or “they wouldn’t have chosen Adrian’s son” to carry on. “Ken was raised, artistically, by Adrian Hall.”

But the two directors are not clones. Hall was a hard driver who relished his role as master, director, giver of orders. He was dictatorial, autocratic, sometimes unreasonable and unlikable. Bryant simply isn’t like that. He’s a nice guy. Everybody loves him.

“Adrian was such a bright star,” says Bryant, “that everyone fell into line behind him and did exactly what he said. But 1 know I’m not like that. I’m not a genius. 1 know that. 1 need all the help I can get.” He says he expects all the actors to help guide the plays more than they have in the past. “They’re not going to be just actors anymore,” he says. “They’re going to be interpreters of their roles. The whole character of the company is changing.”

In rehearsals, Bryant backs away from giving direction to the point of seeming weak. When an actor asks for an explanation of why a character does or says something, he invariably responds with some rendition of, “Well, what do you think?” Even in such mundane matters as the correct pronunciation of a word, Bryant defers to the opinion of the actors.

Sean Hennigan, who has been acting for the DTC since 1984, calls Bryant an “actors’ director.” He says Bryant’s style is “not a weakness,” but it’s a style that is not always easy on the actors. “Too many actors tend to depend on the director to do the work and the thinking for them,” he says. “Ken’s not going to do that. He’s going to make us do more of our own dramatizing. It’s a profound change for the acting company. But I think it will be better in the long run.”

Bill Bolender, a twenty-year acting veteran, agrees, but is a little more cautious. “Yeah, Ken’s okay,” he says thoughtfully. “He’s younger; he’ll make more mistakes. But that’s okay. That’s good sometimes.” Bolender says the main difference between Hall and Bryant lies in what they each focus on in a play. “Adrian was good with the politics of the play,” he says. “One man’s struggle against a world of hunger or political oppression. Ken is more involved in the humanity-what it feels like for a character to be in a particular situation, or how characters deal with each other and feel about each other.” Bolender smiles. “I like the humanity. There’s humanity first, before there’s politics.”

While Bryant may seem timid in giving explicit direction, he is certainly bold in casting. In this season’s opener, Romeo and Juliet, he cast a black man as Romeo and a Hispanic woman as Juliet. He’s making a statement directly to Dallas. “I’m saying, ’yes, we live in a world of different races,’” he says. “But I’m also saying that it doesn’t make any difference. What Shakespeare wrote transcends race.”

Cecil O’Neal, chair of the theater division at SMU, says Bryant’s bold casting decision represents risk-taking of a major degree, although he respects him for doing it. O’Neal thinks these are the kinds of things the public will notice about Bryant’s tenure-challenges to the community in casting, play selection, and staging. And that’s exactly what Bryant expects. “1 want to knock people a little off balance,” he says.

Where Hall was weak, Bryant is strong. He plans to smooth out all the old administrative problems so that play selections are announced in a timely fashion (with a few to-be-announced holes for artistic leeway), and he is intent upon attracting younger audiences into the theater. To him, he says, that means keeping the quality of the plays high and then marketing them well. “Our average theater-goers are in their forties and make $70,000 a year,” Bryant says. “That’s not the audience we’d like to draw in the long run. We want people in their twenties and thirties who make somewhere around $35,000, and we want more minorities.” To draw that crowd he’s going to lower prices on some shows, go out into the community and give talks to high school and junior high students and civic groups, and maybe sponsor a theater festival later on. And he’s looking for good plays written by local talent, feeling that cultivating homegrown writers is part of the responsibility of a regional theater.

But meanwhile, he has to get through thisseason. The board of trustees hasn’t madehim any promises about staying on, butBryant tries not to think about that-it simply adds more pressure. “The death,” hesays, “metaphorically speaking, of people inthis job is very high from self-destruction. 1just have to know that I can keep going. If Ifind out I can’t do it, well, it’s good to findout now and I’m glad I tried.”