OLD FOUR EYES

I have made my triumphant return to the stage! Since moving to Dickinson, Susan and I have kept our past involvement in the arts pretty low-key. As a consequence, few people have asked us to join any choirs, audition for any plays, direct any plays or choirs, accompany any singers or choirs, etc.--not knowing, of course, that we could do any of that--and we've had time to spend with our family in the evenings. Fancy that!

Well, after our children auditioned for, and got parts in, the musical at the university, the suspicions of the theatre personnel were raised. (Could it have been the professional theatre résumés and head shots that I prepared for the girls to bring to auditions? Not even the university-aged theatre majors themselves brought those.) When it came time to assemble a cast for a theatre project that he was directing, the chair of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts phoned me to ask if I'd be interested in participating. It didn't involve much of a time commitment, so I said "yes."

The university hosts annual humanities symposia on Theodore Roosevelt, each of which features a theatrical diversion after the second night's banquet. This year it was a cutting of the play Old Four Eyes by Thomas Patterson. 40 years ago the play was the featured evening event of the Medora experience, offering theatre-goers a fully developed plot and characters in a full-length reenactment of some of Roosevelt's experiences from his time spent in Dakota Territory. It has long since been replaced by the Medora Musical, a song-and-dance extravaganza with modern production values and a "plot" only insofar as one is needed to tie one country or patriotic song to the next.

So the department chair directing this year's symposium production dusted off the original play, cut it to about 40 minutes, and invited several men to play the roles in a staged reading following tonight's banquet. We had just three meetings beforehand: one to block the play, one to read through it and practice our blocking, and one for a dress rehearsal. I played two characters: Rancher #2 and Sylvane. Rancher #2 is a rabble-rouser, a representative of the angry masses of homesteading ranchers who are sick and tired of having their horses and cattle stolen in the night with no follow-up by the crooked federal marshal appointed to keep peace in Dakota.

Sylvane is a rancher whom Roosevelt hires to run his ranching enterprise in what is now southwest ND. Sylvane shares Roosevelt's view that the law must be enforced even in the wild Badlands, but that it must not be done by citizens themselves using means such as lynching suspected horse thieves. Sylvane and Roosevelt believe in capturing criminals and turning them over instead to officials of the law. The plot of tonight's cutting culminates with the capture of one such baddie. It also features, as a theme throughout, the idea that Dakotans turned to Roosevelt to offer his sound perspective on their problems and to take a leadership role while he was living here.

The banquet was delicious: spinach salad, wheat buns, steak filet, garlic mashed potatoes, steamed carrots and green beans, and three-layer frosted birthday cake for dessert (in honor of Roosevelt's 150th birthday this month). Afterward we performed to a very receptive audience who "bought" the combination of actors reading from small black scripts yet wearing costumes and moving about stage as in a typical play. In fact, in tonight's audience were three people who performed in Old Four Eyes during the first few years of its run in Medora! No pressure on us actors tonight, huh?!

Actually it was quite a low-pressure event--an easy way to slip back into acting. Still I can't imagine that I'll find many plays in the future that expect so little of me: no auditions, no memorizing, and only three rehearsals. Well, at least I've discovered that I can live quite happily without the hectic play schedule that I used to have (as both director and actor). When not in the audience watching our children perform, Susan and I can be at home cuddling with them. "Dad" is a better role than anything I could possibly be offered on stage, anyway.