Brett Marston is an actor’s director. He approaches every script from an actor’s perspective. But when Artistic Director Scott Lilly asked Marston to take a look at John Patrick Shanley’s “Prodigal Son” for the Golden Gate Community Center production, it wasn’t to have him direct, but rather play the role of Carl Schmitt, the stern headmaster of Thomas More Prep School.
“I didn’t know the play at the time,” said Marston.” But I knew the playwright. He wrote ‘Doubt’ and he also wrote the screenplay for ‘Moonstruck.’”
So Marston read the script.
“It’s just a very rich role,” Marston explained. “He’s a strict disciplinarian. They refer to him as a hard ass, which is not who I am as a person. So I just found it challenging as an actor to play a stern, disciplinarian type of character. The emotional complexity and depth made it really interesting.”
Returning to the stage has not been as seamless as Marston hoped. In fact, “Prodigal Son” may be his last time performing onstage.
“I don’t know if it’s just because I’m rusty with memorizing lines and not used to acting, but it’s got me in a little bit of a panic. I don’t want to freeze onstage. I just told Kevin, the director, I think maybe my acting days are done. I think I’m going to stay focused on directing.”
Marston turns in a commanding performance as the deeply conflicted Schmitt, who not only harbors a closely-guarded secret from his past, but also is called upon to deal with a psycho-social problem that has plagued the Catholic Church since the late 1960s, the era in which the play takes place.
“Prodigal Son” is at Golden Gate Community Center through June 1.
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Thomas More Prep is a boys’ school located in New Hampshire that specializes in troubled youth.
The protagonist is Jim Quinn, a troubled boy from the Bronx whose brother is fighting in Vietnam.
“In the 1960s, I was in grade school,” Marston noted. “I remember, specifically, we were living in a house and our high fi broke. We had a repair guy come. As I was sitting talking to him and watching him, I noticed his hands were shaking wildly. I said what’s going on. He had just received his draft papers to go to Vietnam, and I remember the fear that he had that he had no control over that.”
So the time period of the play and the social and political issues taking place at the time are of particular interest to Marston and another reason he decided to take on the role of Carl Schmitt.
“The other thing is that I directed a play called ‘Sticks and Bones’ by David Rabe,” Marston added. “It’s about a boy who was in Vietnam and comes back to his ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ background and kind of relives what his experience was in Vietnam. I interviewed a lot of Vietnam vets at that time, and they said the dichotomy, the most interesting piece was they were in this war they thought was horrific and horrible in one of the most beautiful places they had ever been. So that antithesis of beauty versus ugliness and war, is one of the things that comes to mind when I think about the Vietnam War.”
“Prodigal Son” is not about the war in Vietnam, but it does encapsulate that epoch of American history and recreate the cultural zeitgeist of that period of time.
Beyond the challenges posed by the character and the nostalgia of the 1960s era, there was another reason Marston agreed to play Carl Schmitt.
“The language in this play is so beautiful and the way [John Patrick Shanley] crafts the play is so thoughtful and challenging for an actor,” Marston explained. “He does a lot of emotional transitions within scenes. So you might be on one track with an emotion, then he writes something that makes you shift.”
In returning to the stage, Marston faced the same difficulties encountered by actors in their 60s, 70s and beyond. It’s just tougher to memorize lines of dialogue.
Marston indicated he’d developed some new strategies, although he did not divulge what they were. However, older actors resort to techniques like creating associations between the script and their body so that movement can activate recollection; visualizing the positions of their lines on the page; typing out their lines to imprint them on their memory; and adding an auditory element to the memorization process.
Marston said that his latest stint onstage is not likely to appreciably change the way he directs.
“I started out as an actor, so I always approach a play from the actor’s point of view. How are they going to perceive this? How is the experience going to work for them? Obviously, I try to be true to the text and true to the story, but I’m always approaching it from the actors’ point of view. So, I think I’ll just continue doing that.”
However, Marston did concede that he’ll undoubtedly be a bit more sympathetic to an actor occasionally forgetting a line or getting lost in the middle of a scene.
On balance, Marston said that playing Carl Schmitt has been a positive experience on multiple levels.
“I love what Scott does here. He really picks interesting pieces. He’s not afraid to pick challenging pieces that are thought-provoking and I don’t know that every theater company in the area could do this play.”
Marston has a bachelor’s degree from Temple University and studied acting and directing at the University of Arizona. He directed “On Golden Pond,” “Church and State” and "It's Only a Play" for The Studio Players. Other favorite projects include "Clever Little Lies" and "'night, Mother." In November, Marston will be directing "November" by David Mamet.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.