Interview: Theatre Life with Danny Gavigan

Today's subject is currently living his theatre life onstage at Ford's Theatre in Edward Albee's masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In the production, which runs through February 19, Danny Gavigan plays Nick, the "sane" one.

You have most likely seen Danny in a production or two around town. Select area credits include the world premieres of Zorro at Constellation Theatre Company, Really, Really at Signature Theatre, and The Admission at Theater J. His many productions at Round House Theatre include NSFW, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Pride and Prejudice, and most recently Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley. As a company member of Baltimore's esteemed Everyman Theatre, Danny has portrayed such diverse roles as Doc in Crimes of the Heart and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. How is that for both ends of the theatrical spectrum? Regionally, Danny also performed in Peer Gynt at La Jolla Playhouse. He was part of the Keegan Theatre production of Of Mice and Men. The production took Danny on tour to Ireland.

Danny is also a film and television actor. You might have seen him on America's Most Wanted or Saving Corporate America. He also won awards for his work on the films Last Night and Under the Bourbon Moon.

Danny is back in another stage classic with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Danny and his cast mates - the unstoppable Holly Twyford (Martha), Gregory Linington (George) and Maggie Wilder (Honey) - make the show one of the best theatrical experiences you are likely to find this season. It is helmed by Aaron Posner so that should tell you something right there. Danny Gavigan is just another reason why our local theatre scene is so vibrant. When you have great performers like Danny turning out consistently high quality work, everybody wins.

Tell us about the defining moment in your life where you said "I want to become a performer."

I watched a lot of TV as a kid and the earliest I had a sense of performing was when I was like eight or nine years old doing my voices and impressions of characters that Jim Carrey, David Allen Grier, or Damon Wayans did on In Living Color; or the ones that Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman and Mike Myers did on SNL. I also used to do this Chucky impression, that demonic animatronic doll from Child's Play. It would kill at bus stops. There's a home movie of me doing impressions of Fire Marshall Bill, and Eddie Vedder in my sisters' remake of the Jeremy music video, so maybe Jeremy from Pearl Jam did it. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Toshiro Mifune did it.

I distinctly remember discovering how much people got such joy and laughter from seeing me be silly and me wanting always to do that for them. I have five sisters who were the perfect focus group and test audience from a very early age, and gave me more cultural influences than a kid in the 90s could hope for. My dad used to bounce me on his knee like a horse and dip me suddenly and sit me on his lap behind the wheel of our station wagon and let me steer. My mom used to sing along with us to the radio and make faces and laugh when I quoted old movies in those funny voices actors used to speak in. I always thought silliness was powerful, contagious, and necessary. Never stop being silly. Could you imagine if we all greeted each other as we greeted and treated babies...?

It's honestly what keeps George and Martha together, I think, absurd silly wit.

Is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? your first time performing a play written by Edward Albee?

Yes.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is one of those plays that, I imagine, is on every performer's bucket list. Was this the case for you?

I honestly hadn't read the play entirely until I auditioned for it last year. I had seen parts of the movie over the years and knew of it, but never really knew it until now. It's one of, if not the best, American play ever written. It is up there with A Streetcar Named Desire which it, ironically enough, quotes.

Some might say that your character, Nick, is the only sane person in the show. Do you agree with this assessment and can you talk about how you prepared to play the role?

Sure; that makes the most sense to look at it through that lens. That's absolutely the way in for an audience when the play starts. It's also what makes the crude spat between George and Martha so brutally funny, I think-these earnest, innocent and serious young Midwesterners contrasting the older couple's vulgar absurdity. But I don't think Nick, or Honey for that matter, are without intense narratives that they're avoiding. They're just as guilty and afraid of the wrong narratives in life as George and Martha.

Preparing for the role involved meeting with the cast and director, Aaron Posner, in the Ford's board room for a read-through about six months before rehearsal; running lines with the cast weeks before rehearsal; and consistently running the play from start to finish at least each week in rehearsal because it was the only way we could learn a real-time narrative.

That adage "If you're not thinking faster than you ever have, you're not in an Edward Albee play." has got to come from the spontaneity he mastered with this play. We're mentally juggling at least five things in a given beat. Honestly, most of the work aside from rehearsal of lines/intention/objective/tactic/etc. was to find the love, realize why our characters stay in the room, figure out what the truth about our past is, and why we make up what we make up. This is because everyone lies and misleads the other [characters] and the script has evidence throughout of what is fact and what is fiction, as long as you make a choice that coincides with those constants. It's really quite satisfyingly magnificent when every day in rehearsal we were still celebrating an 'aha moment' three weeks in or even during the final days of tech.

Nick kept bringing my young married life back up for me of 10 or 11 years ago - the self-doubt, brooding, strength, anger and regret during those years of desperately searching for stability and love wherever I could. I think he's always found himself the man in the wrong place, even if sometimes he put himself there.

As for George and Martha's sanity, their narratives are no different than yours or mine. Whoever reads this interview is developing a completely different narrative about me than you or I have.

Why do you think Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is one of those plays that theatre companies continue to produce?

Edward Albee broke tropes; he defied expectations, pushed language, and created one of the most seemingly impregnable, yet infallibly sound, plot structures. He has George begin one conversation as he interrupts Nick to return to another conversation. He has Martha repeat herself only to later realize she misquoted her earlier lies. It's heady gymnastics. It's jazz. It's Bach. It's a symphony quartet.

But above all I think we come back to it because of the everlasting pain Albee epiphanized for his redraft of the third act. In Martha and George we fall in love and if we see the love-and you certainly see the love in performances by Holly Twyford and Gregory Linington, if I may say so-then the play's revelation is all the more devastating. I think it taps into an inherent fear and sadness that is universal to life.

You were part of the Great American Rep at Baltimore's Everyman Theatre, which included Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire. Can you please talk about the experience of rehearsing two behemoth plays of the American theatre at the same time?

It was, along with this show, one of the most demanding artistic experiences I've ever had but, like with Woolf, it was one of the most rewarding. It's a time I will never forget and will always cherish with pride. When you work on classics that have resonated for generations and firmly etched impressions into the psyche of audiences, it's an infinitely humbling privilege to do so. It is a chance to dance with the infinite, the theatre Gods, all that which is universal. For me experiences like that Rep. were why I became a storyteller in the first place: to connect that which is universal to the personal, and communicate that which has come before us so that a human being in the audience on a given night may feel that they are, in fact, not alone, important, and deeply connected to the other strangers in the dark theater, the world outside, and the history before. Maybe it's my fond sacred memory of it, but I find it hard not to speak about it now in any other terms than abstract grandiosities.

Kiirstn Pagan in the marketing department at Everyman produced a wonderful "day in the life" video that follows me during a two show day performing both plays. It unpacks- a lot of what that experience was like behind the scenes and personally. I highly recommend checking it out on YouTube. To view it, click here.

What does 2017 hold for you after Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? closes?

Noises Off at Everyman Theatre in May 2017. ...And more to be announced!

Special thanks to Ford's Theatre publicist Lauren Beyea for her assistance in coordinating this interview.

Theatre Life logo designed by Kevin Laughon.

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