Thomas Derrah
A consummate clown who’s not afraid of the dark
By Nicole Estvanik
Boston: “How to characterize Boston audiences?” Thomas Derrah (known to most as Tommy) pauses. “They know what they like.”
It’s safe to say they like Tommy Derrah, though he wouldn’t be the one to point that out. In his third decade as a fixture (80 roles and counting) at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., Derrah has shown versatility from the start. He’s best known as an accomplished comic actor with a taste for the outrageous. Yet his appeal also lies in keeping even the zaniest characters relatable, and in knowing when restraint is the funniest option.
“There are certainly ways to win people over. You can drop your pants,” points out Derrah, who has. Over the phone, his voice is amiable, modest, polite—in short, nothing like the wildcard characters that are his trademark. “You can stick a piece of toilet paper on your shoe. But to earn a laugh from a place of truth—that’s a much more resonant laugh.”
Still, the truth is plenty strange. Derrah has earned guffaws doing a spot-on Einstein in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile; careening madly across the stage in a wheelchair and a dress as Constance Garnett in The Idiots Karamazov (a role originated by Meryl Streep); and hiding schizophrenically behind a crass puppet named Hinky Binky in Fuddy Meers, in a rare guest appearance at Boston’s SpeakEasy Stage Company.
It’s the word “clown” that is probably applied to his style most often—not just for his comic timing, but in the particular theatrical sense that suggests transgression and a tinge of cruelty behind the humor. He has, in fact, most of Shakespeare’s clowns to his credit. His 1980 Boston debut, recruited fresh out of Yale Drama School by ART’s founding artistic director Robert Brustein, was as Touchstone in As You Like It. It was the first of his many shows in Boston with Romanian director Andrei Belgrader, and with several soon-to-be-mainstay ART actors, including Cherry Jones and Karen MacDonald.
He’s clowned in the commedia dell’arte tradition, notably as Truffaldino in 1992’s Servant of Two Masters, also with Belgrader, in which he simultaneously grossed-out, delighted and harassed the audience. As Charlie Chaplin in 1999’s Charlie in the House of Rue, he blurred the line between slapstick and physical punishment. And he performed the U.S. premiere of seminal clown Dario Fo’s Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas, a politically charged solo tour de force. Padan’s director, Ron Jenkins, said of Derrah at the time, “I think he’s one of the great actors of his generation. He’s also one of the only actors who understands Fo’s style.”
Even at their most infuriating, Derrah’s characters can be fun to hate. A former rock band singer, he has a powerful baritone that he’s used to sometimes ignoble ends: During a 1995 run of Ubu Rock (yet another Belgrader production) forewarned spectators showed up with bags of fruit, underwear and other missiles to pelt him with while his character, a grotesque general, delivered the notoriously repetitive “Button Song.” The number unraveled into the gleeful shouting of obscenities from both sides, and concluded with the floor literally dropping out from under him.
Belgrader, who also taught Derrah at Yale and considers him a close friend, looks back on “The Button Song” as representative of many of the actor’s best attributes—for one, his remarkable physical capacity. “Falling through the floor is not something every actor would do. But he never hesitates,” marvels the director. “He’s been tortured by other directors and myself into amazing physical feats.”
For Belgrader, that scene also epitomized the actor’s “improvisational talent beyond belief,” his “pure instinct” in connecting with an audience. On any given night he somehow knew which taunts, however wincingly rude, would be taken in good humor. When a critic wrote recently of Derrah that he “always does repulsive so well,” she meant it as a compliment.
At some point, the local press took to using phrases like “always,” “as usual,” “consistently delivers the goods” to punctuate their praise of Derrah. Frequently, critics cite him as a saving grace of productions that otherwise miss the mark; he’s even earned comparison in print to another hometown Tom, the New England Patriots’s star quarterback. His madcap Constance Garnett was declared by the Boston Globe to be “the latest notch on Derrah’s belt of terrific comedic turns.”
But Derrah has been loosening that belt. “I’m moving out of clown-land,” he says. “I’m starting to be entrusted with the older, more tragic characters, like Uncle Vanya. Roles which in my own mind I didn’t see myself in—but I guess we never like to think of ourselves as getting old,” reflects the actor, who is 53.
In 2001, the same year he performed Padan, Derrah delivered an unconventional Richard II—flamboyant and cynical, the nihilistic engineer of his own destruction—that shocked a few of the scholars on Harvard’s doorstep. “You’re always going to find in an intellectual community that there are groups of people outraged when you mess with something iconic like Shakespeare,” Derrah says. He insists the production hit the bull’s-eye, but also admits he was “pushing the limits of what I could get away with, with goodwill from the audience.”
The body-centered, art-influenced world of that production was the result of close collaboration between Derrah and ART’s artistic director, Robert Woodruff, who took over for Brustein in 2002. When asked what sets Derrah apart, Woodruff muses, “He has a supreme understanding of the event he’s participating in. It’s not just about his performance, but his performance in relation to the event. He’s aware of the whole stage and the whole room.”
Popularity can trap an actor into repeating himself. Luckily, says Woodruff, Derrah is willing to “risk the audience’s affection.” More luckily still, it seems that Derrah’s crowd-pleasing tenure in Boston has earned him some artistic capital, a willingness on the part of the community to follow him into darker territory. The last five years have brought unsettling turns as the Marquis de Sade, Shakespeare’s Iago and Caliban (the latter with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company), and a depressed war veteran. In that last role, in Rinde Eckert’s Highway Ulysses, Woodruff explored new ground with Derrah by pulling him way back: “I wanted a faraway, emotionally muted performance. And he could do it.”
Derrah has watched his home theatre’s following grow in adventurousness over the years. “They’re willing to test themselves. They work a little harder.” For that, he credits a steady diet of challenging texts, interpreted by inventive directors. Belgrader and Woodruff are among these, of course, as is another Romanian, Andrei Serban, and such auteurs as Anne Bogart, Marcus Stern and János Szász.
“You have to reset all the counters in your head and try to understand exactly what they want from you. There’s no recipe for that,” Derrah says with satisfaction. The constant importing of visionaries is a key to his fulfillment in staying put in Cambridge over the years.
Well, not exactly staying put. He did spend a season at Houston’s Alley Theatre in the early ’90s. He says he meant to act in only one show there—The Front Page (“Once in a while I hunger to do a play where you open a door and sit on a couch and, you know, have a cocktail and wisecrack”)—but ended up staying for five when he realized Robert Wilson and José Quintero would both be directing that season. He spent several months on Broadway later that decade, tackling more than two dozen comic personas, including Ted Kennedy and Truman Capote, in the musical Jackie.
Even with ART, he’s had ample opportunity to tour. He has just returned this fall from closing the Edinburgh Festival in ART’s Three Sisters, and among his new assignments in 2007, will play several roles in a co-produced remount of Neil Bartlett’s Oliver Twist that will travel to Theatre for a New Audience in New York and California’s Berkeley Rep.
But first, he joins a list of talented predecessors in performing Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife. The one-man show runs this month at Boston Theatre Works, which was founded by an alum of the ART/Moscow Art Theatre School Institute, where Derrah is an instructor. He says a break in his schedule was the perfect chance to tackle another meaty solo play. (“Plus, the theatre’s really close to my house.”)
Being based at ART has allowed him to direct a recurring production—this fall brings the 15th iteration—called Island of Anyplace, designed to get kids excited about the workings of theatre. And having an artistic home has its practical advantages, too. “I’m very bad at self-marketing. I don’t like when the minute you land a job you have to worry about where the next one’s going to come from,” he says—amiably, modestly. “It’s always been exciting to be able to focus on the community of the company and the actual work of creating the character.”