Theatrical Profile: Jack Marshall

This week’s profile is stage director Jack Marshall (pictured left), co-founder and Artistic Director of The American Century Theater, which specializes mainly in revivals of neglected classic American plays. Jack also launched the Georgetown Gilbert and Sullivan Society, the nation’s only student-run school theater group, in 1973.

I have known Jack for some time now, having appeared in two plays he directed, “Hellzapoppin” last summer and “The Andersonville Trial,” which was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Resident Play.

His current production is the world premiere of Robert M. McElwaine’s “The Titans,” an exciting dramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis. (For tickets, call 703-998-4555 or visit www.americancentury.com.)

One of Jack’s favorite shows was American Century’s premiere production of Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men.” (David Jourdan, who I profiled two weeks ago, was in the cast and also counts it among his favorites.) “It is a great director’s show, a continuous scene among twelve characters that must include carefully worked-out staging and overlapping dialogue,” says Jack, “And it is a beautifully written, intelligent play.”

Jack’s other two favorites both have ties to the great actor/director Orson Welles. The first one is American Century’s rediscovery of Welles’ long-forgotten “Moby Dick Rehearsed,” a stage adaptation of Melville’s classic novel. Jack describes the play as “a wonderfully theatrical concept that merges a great novelist’s words, characters and themes to a metaphor for the challenge of theater.”

The other is American Century’s recreation of the infamous opening night of the musical “The Cradle Will Rock” in which director Welles staged the show in defiance of a last-minute Federal ban. “Our riskiest idea,” Jack says, “We locked the audience and cast out of the theater every night to evoke the feel of Welles’ famous first performance of this radical show. The cast had to do the show in an empty space, taking costume pieces and props from the audience. Amazingly, people believed the set-up was real right to the end of the run.” (Obviously, the risk paid off as the show received a Helen Hayes nomination for Outstanding Resident Musical.)

Commenting on the current state of theater, Jack has the following to say: “The curse of today’s live theater is that brilliant works by brilliant minds are too frequently interpreted by arrogant directors who neither understand the scripts, nor respect the authors. As a result, what audiences experience are warped and distorted versions of plays that the playwrights would neither recognize nor approve were they alive. And if they were alive, these productions would probably kill them.”