Elice Rick - Finding Roger: an improbably theatrical love story

Copyright 2017 by Getting Home, Inc.

Oscar and Academy Award Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences

Grammy National Academy of Recording Arts & Science

Tony American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League

Roger Rees, Starcatcher of Williamstown by Alex Timbers.

Originally appeared in American Theatre online, 2 August 2015. Used by permission from Theatre Communications Group.

Image Credits

WENN Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo:

Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo:

Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo:

Moviestore collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo:

Paul Broadbent / Alamy Stock Photo:

Joe Cocks Studio Collection Shakespeare Birthplace trust:

Tom Holte Theatre Photographic Collection Shakespeare Birthplace trust:

Photos by Reg Wilson RSC:

Courtesy of The Royal Shakespeare Company:

Tom Bachtell: Book case,

Joan Marcus:

Jeremy Daniel:

Tom Bloom:

Photo by Kenn Duncan Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts:

Douglas Gates GatesPhotography.com:

Cover photo: Roger Rees as Nicholas Nickleby, with his handwritten message to the author, left on a pillow in December 1982. Joe Cocks Studio Collection Shakespeare Birthplace trust

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ISBN 978-1-368-00202-8

Cover design W INNIE H O

Interior design A LFRED G IULIANI

Layout and composition A RLENE S CHLEIFER G OLDBERG

Someone in a big hurry asked Hillel, the great rabbi and scholar, to summarize the meaning of the entire Old Testament, while standing on one foot.

Hillels reply: What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. Thats the whole thing; the rest is the explanation of this. Now go and study it!

Following in the hallowed tradition of Hillel, Roger Reesmy partner of thirty-three years and my husband for fourhas his own standing-on-one-foot philosophy of life, concise enough to fit on a T-shirt, and true enough to come in all sizes: B E J OLLY AND K IND; THATS ALL THAT MATTERS . Simple, short, and sweetly true. A way to make the world a better place.

In the Jewish tradition, this is called tikkun olamliterally to repair the world. But Roger was raised Church of England. He only converted to Judaism twenty-five years ago. How could he understand tikkun olam better than I do?

It turns out, of course, that Roger understands everything better than I do. Which is why our decades together are such a blessing for me.

And if tikkun olam is making the world a better place, Roger teaches me every day that you make the world a better place by first being a better man. Which for me was to be a man worthy of him, of irreplaceable Rogthe person I knew, from the moment I saw him, was my destiny. In fact, our being together struck us both as meant to be. Bshert, as they say. This little story will explain why. Its a story that dates back to our first meeting.

Actually, a couple of years before our first meeting.

It was 1979, and I was a young actor fresh out of Yale Drama School. On the same day that I received my masters degree, I wrote a letter to Trevor Nunn, then the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, saying, Hey, Im a brand-new Yale Drama MFA, and Im getting on a plane and coming over to be in the RSC! Just tell me when to show up! Two weeks later, I got a letter back from Nunn: Sorry, we dont hire Americans.

Well, I was shattered. I mean, I had an MFA from Yale! And heres this SOB telling me that my MFA was DOA at the RSC.

Instead, I spent a couple of years at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then I came home to New York. It was 1981, the same year that the mammoth eight-and-a-half-hour production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nicklebydirected by John Caird and that same Trevor Nunncame to New York. Came? It conquered.

I was incensed: A year before Nickleby, Amadeus, another British play, came to Broadway with its fancy British actors and their fancy British accentsand hogged all the attention and all the awards. A year before that, Piaf did exactly the same thing, and regretted nothing.

Now Nicholas Nickleby shows upand tickets are a hundred bucks a pop!! This was when Broadway tickets were only twenty dollars, you understand. And a hundred dollars to a twenty-five-year-old actorwell, it might as well have been a billion.

So here come the Brits, and the star of the show is on the cover of Time magazine, and the Royal Shakespeare Company is once again sucking up all the oxygen in New York, and Im working a pathetic gig as an assistant stage manager in a truly awful musical in the basement of St. Peters Church in the Citicorp building, and I have had enough!

So I go to Actors Equity and I say, I would like to start a committee to keep British actors out of Broadway. (British Out of BroadwayBOOBthat was our moniker.)

And literally, while Im protesting the RSCs presence on Broadway, my dear friend Kate, a wonderful actress, calls me and says, Rick, you have to go see Nicholas Nickleby. Itll change your life.

And I said, I wouldnt go to that play with their hundred-dollar tickets if it was the last show on earth.

And Kate said, But its everything you love. Its brilliant. It will change your life. And I said, I dont have a hundred dollars. And if I did, I sure wouldnt spend it on tickets. Id spend it on food.

But the seed was sown. So I ask my father for a hundred bucks to buy food, and I go to the Plymouth Theatre on Forty-Fifth Street to buy a ticket to Nicholas Nickleby instead.

Its for Saturday, December 5, 1981. Im sitting in the back on the side, with this giant Yale Drama School chip on my shoulder.

The actors are all milling about in the audience before the show starts. And all the way down front, kneeling at the edge of the stage, I see the most devastatingly beautiful person Ive ever laid eyes on. I wonder who that is, I thought.

Turns out it was the guy playing Nicholas Nickleby.

By the time the plays over, more than eight hours later, Ive learned a million times over that my friend Kate was quite correct. Being in the theater that day has profoundly changed my life.

At midnight, I stagger home to my little room on Fifty-Seventh Street. Flip on the TV to a new cable station that, like PBS, aired lots of British programs. A man in a tuxedo addresses the camera: And now, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Chekhovs Three Sisters. Turns out it features all the same actors Ive just watched on Broadway. Including Roger. Then, at three in the morning, the man in the tuxedo approaches the camera again: And now, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Shakespeares