Long afternoon shadows fall across Kennedy Plaza as Richard Donelly hops the red and blue Bonanza express to Boston. He’s just gotten off work installing pipes at the new Brown University science complex. Now, dressed in jeans and bomber jacket, he’s off to play a cop in Shear Madness, the long-running whodunit at Boston’s Charles Playhouse.
For three decades, Donelly has led this strange double life—plumber by day, actor by night. Things would be so much easier if he put in eight hours installing water heaters and headed home to meatloaf and a sitcom. But ever since he stepped on stage as a spear carrier in an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet, Donelly hasn’t had much choice.
“Theater is my mistress,” he confesses, “and she can be a pain. Acting has cost me relationships and a lot of money. But I’m addicted.”
Having a creative outlet is nothing unusual. Plenty of people putter in their basements on weekends, making knotty pine bookshelves and painting seascapes. Then there are the Richard Donellys of the world, who are so passionate about their avocations that it’s hard to imagine life without them.
Consider Brown University anthropologist, William O. Beeman, an international authority on the Islamic world, who so loves singing that he went back to school to get a degree in voice. For the past 18 months, he’s been on leave from Brown singing Wagner and Puccini in a German opera house.
Elaine Bearer, a Brown University medical researcher, finds her lab work suffers if she is not writing string quartets and concertos. “Composing seems to leave my brain open to think creatively in everything I do,” said Bearer, a medical doctor who began improvising on the violin at the age of six and has written more than 50 scores. “It’s nourishing, like food and sleep.”
Untold sacrifices
It’s hard to say what drives these people—why, after spending all day cutting pipe and toiling in a jewelry factory, they feel compelled to labor over a turn of phrase or a pesky high note. The struggle yields great joys, but just as many heartaches.
When Beeman got serious about singing, he “went at it like gangbusters.’’ After a year of lessons at Boston Conservatory, he had little more to show for his efforts than frustration and ulcers on his vocal cords. “This is not something you do in the shower,’’ he said. “That you can do it at all is a kind of miracle that takes untold sacrifices.’’
Bearer talks about composing as though training for the Olympics, about refining a score until it can’t be improved upon, then taking it two steps further. That’s why she bristles when people refer to her interest in music as a ‘“hobby.’’ “There’s a sense of self-esteem involved when you realize something is valuable to others that drives you to make it as perfect as you can,’’ said Bearer.
Donelly tells of leading such a hectic existence that he used to keep a fresh set of clothes spread across his bedroom floor so he could dash home from work, shower up and be off to Second Story Theater or Alias Stage in a flash.
Juggling two careers also means constant tradeoffs. For Donelly, taking time off from work for auditions means not putting in hours required for a union pension. But signing on for a lucrative job like the one at Brown means not being available when the juicy parts come along. Once a boss asked Donelly to put in overtime on a night he was in a play. “Look,’’ barked the foreman. “You’ve got to make up your mind whether you’re a plumber or an actor.’’
“Sorry,’’ said Donelly, “I’ve got an audience waiting,’’ and slammed down his tools. The boss capitulated and let him off the hook. “If I hated my job,’’ he said, “I’d probably be a better actor. But the thing is, I love both, which means it’s always a sacrifice.’’
Going with the flow
So why put up with the headaches? The answer lies in what athletes like to refer to as the “zone,’’ what some call “flow,’’ being in that place where, as Beeman puts it, “…you don’t sing the song, the song sings you.’’ At that point, actors, singers or painters loses all sense of themselves, forget about niggling technical concerns and are one with their art. Moments such as these are rare, but so intoxicating that creative types spend their lives chasing after them.
“It borders on a physical need,’’ said Beeman. Beeman, a bearded bear of a man, not only derives great pleasure from singing, but the anthropologist in him is fascinated by the nature of creativity itself. Why is it people feel driven to spend their lives singing Mozart? What magic do music, theater and dance possess that they can bring an audience to tears or make them laugh?
In search of answers, Beeman has traveled the globe observing national art forms such as kabuki theater, Indian dancing and Iranian passion plays, trying to figure out how they can move an entire country. He also spent many a night discussing this very topic with Jay Leno. Beeman said his sister used to date the comic, who often slept on his couch. “Stand-up comics can read an audience better than anyone,’’ Beeman said. “They can get an audience so worked up that it feeds on itself. All they have to do is lift their little finger to make them laugh.’’
Frustrated with the lack of first-hand research in this area, Beeman felt the only way to get a bead on the subtle forces at play in live performance was to head out on stage himself. He took part in a lot of musicals as a high school student growing up in Tulsa, where his father sold farm equipment, but hadn’t sung for a decade when he came to Brown in the late 1970s. At that point, he began appearing at Cabot Street Playhouse, a zany Gilbert & Sullivan troupe housed at Wheeler School. He decided it was time to “get back in the saddle,” and, while still teaching at Brown, enrolled in Boston Conservatory.
In recent years, Beeman has sung in regional opera houses in Iowa, Virginia and California for short stints. But his goal was to understand what it was like to be a pro, immersed in music day in and day out. To do that, he felt he had to go to Germany. “Not another place on the planet is more serious about music.” He ended up in the town of Chemnitz, where every taxi driver can whistle The Magic Flute and the city fathers lavish $27 million each year on their bustling 720-seat theater.
“I didn’t want people to think this was just a research project,” said Beeman, from his book-lined attic office on the Brown campus. “My commitment is 100 percent to both sides of what I do. I just felt I couldn’t be a decent performer unless I was as serious as I could be.”
For 18 months Beeman lived opera. He awoke to reviewing scores, spent all day in rehearsals, all night in performance. Months were spent preparing for new shows until roles were “in the bones and blood.” It got to the point where Beeman said he could walk on stage after a six-month break from La Bohéme and the arias were still all there. That kind of total absorption, where he didn’t fret over lines and notes, allowed him —on that rare occasion —to be swept up in the performance, he said, like a surfer catching the perfect wave.
“Nothing feels quite like singing,” said Beeman, who kept a diary during his stay in Germany and plans to write a book about his experiences. “It involves your whole body, makes it tingle all over.
“And when you’re on stage with an orchestra and can project beyond it, it’s a thrill that can’t be duplicated. At that point, you want to do it all the time, like sex.”
A presence onstage
It is mid-morning. Richard Donelly, barrel-chested, with a glittering smile and steel-blue eyes, is snaking plastic vents through the metal skeleton of the new science complex at Brown. He picked up plumbing in his teens, working for his uncle, and went into the trade right out of high school, attracted by the rewards of working with his hands. He was a pretty rough-hewn sort back then, plumbing during the day and putting in time-and-a-half in bars along the Newport waterfront. But he got it into his head he wanted to try his hand at acting and auditioned for the Newport Players Guild’s Romeo and Juliet.
The director was impressed, figured Donelly had done a fair amount of acting, and offered him the important role of Mercutio.
“Mercutio, are you kidding? I just wanted to step on stage and see what it felt like. So I took this bit part as a dancer. That was the last time I ever turned down a role.”
For years Donelly worked the off-Trinity circuit, but felt it was time to stretch. Not long ago he got his Equity actors-union card, hired a New York agent, and has begun talking about hanging up his tools and seeing if he can make it in show business. Last season saw a month stint in New York for the play Global Village and an episode of Law & Order, the popular prime-time cops-and-court show. Donelly landed the bit part of a building super on the TV show and was told to hose down the sidewalk in front of the apartment complex. Seconds into the scene, the director shouted, “Cut.” Hoping to have some fun at Donelly’s expense, he yelled, “Hey, have you taken the class? You know, you’re handling a piece of equipment there.”
Without missing a beat, Donelly reached for his wallet and pulled out his plumber’s license.
He’s also been a regular in Shear Madness, a zany show about a murder that takes place above a unisex hair salon. Last month, he was asked to fill in for a week, as the play entered its 19th season. Donelly has about an hour after Brown to change up and make the 4:15 bus to South Station. He catches a bowl of soup in Chinatown, heads over to the Charles Playhouse and slips into costume—a plaid vest, hard hat and lunch pail that looks just like the getup he was wearing a few hours earlier. He’s playing the bumbling, undercover cop Nick Rossetti, whose job it is to draw the audience into the action, get them to recall clues and narrow down suspects. But tonight’s audience, a group of elementary school teachers who seem a little sloshed, isn’t into the show.
Going through the motions is not something Donelly does well, and he is clearly bummed out that the performance never caught fire. It’s the unpredictability of live theater that turns him on. “It’s kind of like going fishing,” he says, “and you hook this 38-pound bass, something bigger than you ever dreamed of. At that point, you can either yank on the rod and risk snapping the line, or start letting out line and running with it.”
After the show, Donelly hitches a ride home with a fellow cast member who lives in Warwick. He’s back in Providence about 11:30, in time to catch a couple of beers before heading home to his apartment at the Regency. In about five hours he’ll be getting up, grabbing his tools and going back to Brown. But Donelly seems immune to fatigue. “I get to live two lives instead of one,” he says, hoisting a pint of India pale ale. “If I could live three, I would. But I have to take a nap every now and then.
“Most people don’t get it, though. They start some job in their 20s and that becomes their profession. They invest years in it and feel they can’t quit because of the investment. In fact, they should be saying, ‘What’s left?’ What, I’m supposed to end up on my death bed, look back and say, ‘Gee, I could have put in 10 more toilets.’”
Copyright © 1998 The Providence Journal Company. Produced by www.projo.com
