The Actor Musters His Forces at Shakespeare
Andrew Long Makes Quick Study of Roles As Mark Antony

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Andrew Long's run-up to taking on a major character by the world's greatest playwright normally entails a painstaking quest for comprehension. Long before rehearsals begin, he's got the Oxford English Dictionary out, as well as books by scholars with relevant things to say about Shakespeare.

"You have to become familiar enough with the phrasing," he says. "You have to look up every word that you have questions about the interpretation of. I look up meanings, I copy punctuation into the script, I read notes from different versions."

The usual way of casting by a troupe such as the Shakespeare Theatre Company allows for this admirably arduous boning-up.

But this was not the usual way.

No, Long on this occasion was propelled headlong into rehearsals for not one, but two crucial parts: the roles of Mark Antony in Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, "Julius Caesar" and "Antony and Cleopatra." The actor originally hired to perform this double duty, Patrick Page, had to bow out because of a scheduling conflict. Page had been pivotal to Artistic Director Michael Kahn's plans to present the two plays in repertory -- the first Shakespeares to be produced in the new Sidney Harman Hall -- and as a result, the search for his replacement had been wide-ranging and nerve-rackingly drawn out.

Which is why Long, a company stalwart, was not offered the parts until just before the start of rehearsals Feb. 26. And why, he says, for weeks after, "I felt I was trying to catch up to Day One."

The answers to a third "why" should be self-evident. He took on the hand-me-down assignment because the challenge was simply too delicious to pass up. And because he's proved to be the sort of actor with the resources to make such a heavy lift appear quite effortless.

"The thing about Andrew is that he's a very quick study," says David Muse, who directed Long in the Studio Theatre production of "Frozen," in which he played a serial child killer, and directs him again in "Julius Caesar," which opens this week in tandem with Kahn's "Antony and Cleopatra." "He's going to come in, and he's not going to let you watch him learning the part. He just wants to stand up and try it. Which is cool."

"Cool" is an apt term, too, for the demeanor of this actor in his early 40s, a onetime Navy brat who over the past decade has made Washington his major theatrical port of call. Intense of countenance on a stage -- let's just say he was more than convincing as a brutal, painfully tormented serial killer -- he continues to hold something in reserve when you sit down with him. As if an actor's gift for seeming to harbor secrets comes naturally to him.

That illusion has served Long well in his impressive run on the city's stages. Since his 1999 debut in a Kahn production of "King John," the actor, who honed his classical technique in a variety of roles at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Guthrie Theater and Alabama Shakespeare Festival, has cemented a position as one of the most dynamic Shakespeare interpreters in town.

You might recall him as the Shakespeare Theatre's feral Hotspur in "Henry IV, Part 1" or in the title role of "Coriolanus" or even as a sniveling de Guiche in a lively adaptation of Edmond Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac." Still, it was his 2006 turn at the more intimate Studio as scary-pitiful Ralph in "Frozen," Bryony Lavery's examination of derangement and despair in the aftermath of murder, that alerted audiences to Long's broader range.

"I had seen him play great big classical parts, but I wasn't sure of his ability to work in a small house and do nuanced things," Muse says. "I knew there was a trap in that role -- to make him a creepy bad guy -- which Andrew plays all the time. So I did have a moment of, 'Is this Andrew's cup of tea, or was it pushing the role in a direction that the play won't work?' "

Muse needn't have fretted. Despite Ralph's unspeakable crimes, Long's performance compelled spectators to confront a killer's humanity. His take on the character pointed to something more complex than mere depravity; he managed to float the idea of a tortured soul not yet completely past the point of redemption.

"I thought the play provided evidence that forced you to at least ask questions, that even if you perceived him as the biggest monster, you might have the ability to feel sorry for him," Long says.

His work earned him a heap of praise and accolades, if not a lot of money. " 'Frozen,' " he says with a little laugh, "was the lowest-paid job I'd had since grad school."

Such is the lot of any actor whose eyes are bigger than his wallet. Since "Frozen," he's only gotten busier, both at work and at home. He's a newlywed, having married an actress, Katherine E. Hill, who was one of the witches in Synetic Theater's "Macbeth" last year, and with whom he has a 6-month-old, Annabelle. (Although his most recent address has been Baltimore, they're all living at the moment in a Shakespeare Theatre apartment in Penn Quarter.) He has continued to diversify his professional diet, most notably through a stint as an icy-veined Henry Higgins in Signature Theatre's stripped-down "My Fair Lady" late in 2006.

It's the classical life that has sustained him, however, a specialty that in this country mandates an itinerant existence. A childhood spent trailing in the wake of a Navy father was probably a useful internship. As a kid, Long lived on naval bases in such places as Taiwan and Morocco, where his parents indulged their own yen for acting in the bases' productions of Broadway musicals.

From an early age, he says, he had a special facility for language, but aside from appearing in those amateur productions of "Pajama Game" and "Once Upon a Mattress," he didn't do anything with it until college, at the University of Nevada, where he majored in theater. A turning point came after graduation, when he was cast as the sheriff in a USO production of "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," a musical that toured military installations and hopped from Okinawa to Japan to the Korean demilitarized zone.

"Some of them were bases my father was stationed in before I was born," he recalls. "I felt I was performing for people I knew."

A master's degree from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival -- classmates included the eventual Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz, and Michael Emerson (now of "Lost") -- solidified an Elizabethan career track. He was living in New York when Kahn cast him in Washington. The association has become a core connection for him.

"He did a general audition for us," Kahn says. "I hired him immediately. He's a man with a really strong technique in verse-speaking, a great voice, a real personality on stage, masculine, all of the above."

Being all-around is mostly a blessing. But an actor can run the risk with a company of repeating himself, and Long seems to understand the downside, how one's value to an artistic director goes in cycles. Which probably helps get a talented actor over the slightly discomfiting knowledge that you weren't the first choice. Kahn says the delay in picking Long as Page's replacement mostly had to do with Long's overburdened schedule: In addition to learning the role of father, he was performing a formidable supporting part in the Shakespeare's production of "Major Barbara" when rehearsals were underway for "Julius Caesar" and "Antony and Cleopatra."

And adding yet more pressure, in a sense: Kahn's Cleopatra is Suzanne Bertish, the superb Royal Shakespeare Company actress, whose multiple roles in the original "Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby" remain fixed in memory nearly 30 years on.

Playing Mark Antony in two plays at two stages of the Roman general's life is thrilling, daunting, exhausting. "The sheer number of cues," Long marvels, sitting in the Founders Room at the Harman Center and gazing at his bible of the moment, a binder containing both scripts, as hefty as a phone book. "I'm here from early in the morning until late at night."

It's a little like, if it's Tuesday, this must be "Caesar." He's eager on this early weekday afternoon to get back to the stage, for whichever of the plays he's rehearsing. The experience is exhilarating, and not only because of what he's absorbing, but also because of what he's wearing. For all the classical training of Andrew Long, the job is a stretch in another surprising way:

He's never before performed in a toga.