A ‘GOOD MAN’ IS EASY TO FIND
Doug Hara performs with the cast of Two River Theater’s YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN during last month’s Town Lighting ceremony in Red Bank.
By TOM CHESEK
There’s Puck — that deviously devilish, mischievously manipulative imp of the perverse from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And there’s Charlie Brown — the round-headed, good-hearted star of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts; a kid whose lot in life seems to be so many empty mailboxes, rocks in his Trick-or-Treat bag, kites eaten by trees and footballs yanked away at the last second.
At first blush (and damn near every blush thereafter) you’d be hard pressed to find two characters with so little in common — and yet, these creations of Schulz and Shakespeare share a definite bond: they’ve both been channeled on the stage of Two River Theater by Doug Hara.
The actor, a New York native and current resident of Lambertville, recently wrapped a long and successful engagement in director Aaron Posner’s production of Dream — a gig that began months ago and thousands of miles away at California Shakespeare Company. Beginning this week and continuing into 2010 (in a run that’s already been extended through January 10), he’ll be taking on the title role in a new revival of the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Presented as the Two River company’s now-traditional year-end family offering, the production directed by Philly-based Matt Pfeiffer represents an attempt to reclaim the well-known show from the realm of schools and community children’s theater into which it’s been pigeonholed for some time. Adapted from Schulz’s sublime source material and featuring a score of songs by Clark Gesner, Charlie Brown began as a “concept album” in a way that would later be used to successful effect by the Webber-Rice partnership. The show — a signifier of an era when Peanuts really came into its own as a cultural force to be reckoned with — came to fully staged life in 1967 with M*A*S*H’s Gary Burghoff, and returned to Broadway in 1999 with RENT vet Anthony Rapp in the lead.
It’s actually that revised 1999 version of Charlie Brown that we’ll be seeing in Red Bank; a production that replaced the now-forgotten character of Patty with Charlie’s sister Sally — played here by Two River leading lady Erin Weaver (Our Town; Mary’s Wedding; A Murder, A Mystery and a Marriage), who cut a memorable figure as Hermia in Dream. A third member of that Dream team — Richard Ruiz (co-star of last year’s Frog and Toad) — takes on the plum part of Snoopy. Also on hand are Jordan Barbour as Schroeder, Matt Mundy as Linus, and Lauren Singerman as Lucy, all making their Two River debuts.
Equipped with hats, gloves and scarves along with their official show sweatshirts, the actors have been popping up in recent weeks with a series of free outdoor sneak-peek performances in places like downtown Red Bank (during the annual Town Lighting ceremony on Black Friday) and Long Branch’s Pier Village. Red Bank oRBit caught up with Doug Hara as he and his fellow cast members prepared for the first of several school-show previews, in advance of this Saturday’s opening night. Read on.
Another dip in the river: Erin Weaver (pictured in MARY’S WEDDING), Doug Hara (as Puck in MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM) and Richard Ruiz (as Toad in FROG & TOAD) all return to the Two River stage for YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN.
RED BANK ORBIT: So…Puck, and Charlie Brown. Could there be two more radically different parts for a guy to tackle at the same time? Do they have anything at all in common?
DOUG HARA: The two characters are certainly poles apart — Puck has limitless confidence, and Charlie Brown has zero confidence. Puck exerts a certain amount of control over the situation, and Charlie Brown’s not in control of anything at all. But both of them have their own kind of charm.
It’s an actor’s joy, anyway, to be able to stretch from one extreme to the other. I come from a background with the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago, where I lived for 13 years, and the appeal, when you have a stock company going, is that the audience likes to see us embodying different roles, bringing different parts of ourselves to bear. I like to try different things…certain roles invite you to do that.
Like the Stage Manager in OUR TOWN? I keep bringing up this thing that you did near the end of that show, in the cemetery, when you got down on one knee, back to the audience, and you voiced five different puppet characters, just pointing and focusing on them one at a time, as if you were literally giving life to them.
The Stage Manager, definitely — he’s probably the character most like myself, of the ones that I’ve done for Two River Theater. I did another show once, a Chinese epic called Journey to the West, about the spiritual journey of a monk. There were these animal characters, each of whom represented an aspect of the monk — the pig was the body, the horse was his will, the monkey was the mind, and so on. I’ve come to realize that Charles Schulz did something similar with his characters.
Charlie Brown is the everyman, the star of the strip really — “Peanuts featuring Good Ol’ Charlie Brown.” But what Schulz did with his main characters, was put a little something in all of them that we could identify with. Snoopy represents joy and fantasy, Lucy is aggressive and domineering, Linus is the intellectual and Schroeder is the artist, the creative side. They’re all parts of us.
Who do you identify with most in the PEANUTS cartoons? Do you consider yourself a Snoopy? A Linus or a Lucy? Maybe a Shermy?
I identify a lot with Charlie Brown — the futility of trying, the unrequited love — he’s someone we can all feel with. There’s a little Charlie Brown in everyone, even popular kids and grownups. We can all feel that we’re not a part of things sometimes. We all harbor that isolation.
So how do you go about prepping for this show? Would you say that you’ve been prepping for it since you were a little kid?
I got a huge coffee table book of Peanuts strips! I’ve been reading my way through it, and I find that I appreciate Schulz’s writing more as an adult. Schulz always said he wrote for adults, and when you revisit the strip after many years, you see it in a whole new way.
And how was it making that transition from Puck to Charlie; finishing one while you were starting to rehearse the other?
We closed the Shakespeare show on a Sunday afternoon, and I started on Charlie Brown on Monday. There was no overlap — just a very quick jump. But it was a natural transition for me — I just let it breathe through me; let it go. Art by nature is a temporal, fleeting thing; we set aside one character, say goodbye to that character, and hello to the next one.
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown begins (non-school show) previews on Thursday, December 17; opens Saturday, December 19; and runs through Sunday, January 10 (there are no performances scheduled for December 24-25 and December 31-January 1). Tickets are $24 - $48 and are available by calling the TRTC Box Office at (732)345-1400, or visit the TRTC website for ticket prices and availability.
Posted
December 15, 2009
in
under
