BWW Interviews: Brent Harris from THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS
By: Kathy Strain Oct. 10, 2015
Brent Harris is currently performing in his latest show, THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. As he plays the character more and more, he has learned so much about himself and feels this was a great opportunity .BWW caught up with Mr. Harris and he shared with us some wonderful insight into this timeless story.
Can you share with us how you first got involved in performing?
I have done most of my work in classical theater. I started working when I was in college at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. They had a Shakespeare Festival when I was in college. I worked for three summers there so I got a great experience before I graduated from college. I'd done nine professional productions of Shakespeare. I bounced around a little bit and tried to avoid becoming an actor and I kept falling back into it. I never went to drama school but I did go to graduate school in English at the University of Virginia and they also had a repertory theater so I started working there in the summers and kept falling back into it. Gradually, I wound up teaching acting at Cornell University and then found myself in New York. It was a round about way of becoming an actor. I just kept falling back into it by trying to avoid it. It was weird. Then finally, I was teaching at Cornell and I realized this is what I wanted to do and when I got to New York, I started working all over the country in regional theaters as I said mostly doing classical theater. I worked at Oregon Shakespeare Festival for two years and I worked at Shakespeare Theater Company in DC. American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Actors' Theater in Louisville, Denver Center and so I've had a pretty good continuous career in regional theater and I did a couple of years on the road in the National Tour of THE LION KING. I played Scar in that. Then I just got a call from a casting director for this production. I had no idea what it was and I went in and I got the job. I've been doing this for a couple of years off and on.
Tell us a little more about the audition process. You said you got a call from a casting director.
I was about to leave town to go back into LION KING for my second go round on the tour. I got a call so I really wasn't thinking about it very much. My mind was on packing and preparing for four months on the road, which is a lot, to get all your ducks in a row for four months on the road. I got this audition and I just saw the material and I started to read it and I thought it sounded interesting so I thought I should go in. I wasn't fully thinking about it and then in the audition, it started to become more and more fascinating for me and then I got a callback the day that I left to fly to Houston to start THE LION KING again. My mind was elsewhere but apparently I did well and they offered me the part. The more I looked at it the more I thought, this is really interesting. it is a two person show, but I'm the only one that talks in human language and so the challenge in doing what is a 90 minute monologue which I had never done was very interesting to me and I was trying to figure out how to do that. The process of rehearsal and the times I have done it on the road is very interesting because it is very different to do a play where you're just talking for 90 minutes and try to figure out how to make it interesting and varied and how to maintain your own stamina and how to get through it. It's very challenging technically. That's been fascinating for me because I've never done it before.
What can you tell us about your character without giving too much away?
Screwtape is a senior devil. He's not a chief devil, he's a senior devil in hell and he's in charge of training his nephew, Wormwood how to go about corrupting humans. So he does this through letters and he's dictating his letters to his secretary , Toadpipe, a little reptilian demon creature who takes dictation in very interesting and imaginative ways. Also, he's my blackboard. He illustrates all the characters that I'm talking about. So Screwtape is a confident master of the universe. He loves the way he looks and talks and acts. He thinks he's just the best of the best and he's very confident in the beginning that they will be successful in their venture to corrupt this one human, the human that they call the patient. Things don't go quite like the way they expect and there are complications. What the creators of this adaptation have been amazingly creative at maintaining a fidelity to the book but honing it down so they find the story in the book, the narrative arc that actually turns out to be very dramatic once you see it onstage. It's a book that you might read and not think that this would be very adaptable to the stage but I think it's very successful dramatically. It's something that has a beginning, middle and an end. You start to be very interested in the characters and their personalities and how they interact and how they evolve. I think it will be interesting for people who know the book well because it is a version of it, it's very faithful to it but it's edited down and for those people it will be a different angle on it. I think for people who started the book and tried to read it and not finish it because it's so challenging, I think for them this will be very useful because it does synopsize the book and it is very faithful to it. It retains the main ideas but it's a little easier to digest. A lot of the people that have read the book and they know and they comment, they're just amazed by it because they have that inside (information). It's very challenging material and a lot of people are intimidated by it. It's a lot of ideas. It's a lot of words. I've had people come see it and they say they got so much more out of it. It's still very entertaining and a lot of people who see it the first time don't realize how funny it is. It's witty. It's not all heaviness. It's not all overly cerebral. There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of recognition in the human psychology.
What advice do you have for anyone who is thinking about pursuing an acting career?
I just tell people to do it. If you want to act, act wherever you can get the opportunity to act. It doesn't matter what level it is, if it's community theater, at a commercial agency, if it's at your local regional theater, just do it. Get as much experience as you can because you don't know what it's all about until you do it. I think that you discover yourself as an actor and just discover the whole art by doing it. I think they turn down things or pass up opportunities because they're waiting because they don't think it's the right thing. So, I tell people do it wherever you can do it. And if there's nothing going on then make your own, create your own production, just do it as much as you can and get as much experience as you can. There's nothing as valuable as experience.
Don't miss out. This plays two shows only in San Antonio, Saturday October 10, 2015. Get your tickets by going to www.majestic/empire.net
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