Not Just the Goofy Guy

The
world’s greatest detective and the world’s greatest criminal mastermind are engaged in a tense showdown of wills.
The evil Professor Robert Moriarty has infiltrated the rooms of Sherlock
Holmes, and Holmes has confronted him. The two move and speak smoothly, both
making a great show of expressing outward calm, but the underlying tension
between them charges the air. Then, at the moment of supreme suspense, Moriarty
makes a face and Holmes just about cracks up laughing.

That scene was played out at Synergy Studio in January 1995, late in the run
of The Public Domain’s production of Sherlock Holmes. I was the Holmes
on the receiving end of that look and the actor who nearly caused me to lose it
was Michael Stuart. Stuart is a playful actor, one who occasionally likes to,
shall we say, try new things — fresh line readings, pauses, movements — even
during performances. During this particular show, he was inspired to give a
little goose to his exit in that scene. Moriarty has a final threat to toss at
Holmes before he strides offstage, and just as he was about to issue it,
Stuart… paused. He froze in mid-gesture, then pulled the gesture back, the
lips closing over the words, as if he thought better of what he was going to
say. The pause caught me off guard and when I looked at Stuart, his eyes
gleamed with mischief. He slowly raised an eyebrow; it was a challenge, an
invitation to a game: Can you keep a straight face? I had to marshal everything
within me to keep from laughing out loud.

For many people, the episode is Michael Stuart in a nutshell. For more than
10 years, this mainstay of the Austin theatre scene has been dishing up
delicious comic performances all over town. Stuart is almost as imposing for
his ability to elicit laughter from an audience as for his height. The 6′ 5″
actor can draw guffaws from the stoniest of houses, and he does it with any
trick in the comedian’s bag. He’ll whine, he’ll roll his eyes, he’ll dribble
ice cream down his chin. He’ll do a take that will stretch from here to
Sweetwater. If there’s a laugh to be had, he’ll get it, even if it means
sometimes doing something that maybe he shouldn’t. He’s a joker, they say, a
cut-up. Mr. Anything-for-a-laugh. The goofy guy.

But to the people who have worked closely with Stuart, he’s much more than an
overgrown class clown. Talk to some of his colleagues and you’ll hear the actor
praised for the thoughtfulness with which he approaches his performances, the
thoroughness of his research into roles, the support he provides to his fellow
actors, and — gasp — the seriousness with which he takes his craft. According
to Ken Webster, who has directed Stuart in nine shows over the last 10 years,
including the production of Educating Rita opening this week, “There
isn’t an actor in town who’s more serious about acting than Michael.”

Don’t misunderstand. Stuart is the goofy guy, and he’ll tell you as
much. “I like it. It’s fun. Goofy’s fun,” he says, his eyes taking on that
mischievous gleam. “I like goofy,” he jokes, before offering up a more
reflective comment on his creative approach. “I do always look for the funny
part, even if it’s a serious thing. I remember doing a monologue from
Streetcar for some voice and diction class in college — I was reading
Stanley — and I got some terrific laughs. Other people were doing the same
piece and everyone was acting it so seriously. I hit the serious moments, but I
made a few jokes, too. Maybe that’s why people expect it from me, ’cause I’m
gonna do it, whether I’m supposed to or not.”

Stuart has provided evidence for his claim in dozens of performances through
the years. A graduate of St. Edward’s University who made his big splash on the
local theatre scene in 1986 and has been performing steadily in Austin since,
Stuart has found humor in almost every role he’s taken. From long-suffering
manservants — Something’s Afoot and The Importance of Being
Earnest — to kind-hearted losers — a real specialty of Stuart’s, seen in
The Butterfingers Angel, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Fool
for Love, Sin, and Lone Star, among others — to the
ultra-intelligent, underworld kingpin Moriarty, Stuart has consistently
pinpointed the weak spot in his characters’ makeup and exploited it for comic
effect; he hits their Achilles’ funny bone, as it were.

But Stuart’s comic dexterity doesn’t end with his ability to unearth the
potential for humor in a part; it extends to his uncanny skill at playing it
for all it’s worth. In describing Stuart’s qualities as a performer, actor
after actor mentioned his masterful sense of timing. Bernadette Nason, who
first met Stuart during Sherlock Holmes and is now working with him in
the current production of Educating Rita, sees in Stuart an innate
understanding of comedy. “When Michael gets a laugh from an audience, he knows
where the laughter is coming from,” she says, “and he knows how to manipulate
it.”

Because Stuart is so adept at snagging laughs, his comic work often eclipses
the other qualities the actor brings to a role. “Michael is so much more
versatile than people think,” insists Webster. “He’s basically known as being a
comic actor, but I’ve seen him do things on stage that could just tear your
heart out. Even playing basically goofy characters like Ray in Lone
Star, Richie in Bleacher Bums, Lust in Sin, or Boo in The
Marriage of Bette and Boo, he is able to make those characters so real and
human, and so sympathetic. Many actors could be as funny playing those roles,
but very few could play them with the depth that Michael can.”

Margaret Hoard, who has both performed with and directed Stuart and is an
unabashed fan, echoes Webster’s praise. Stuart, she says, “can display all the
colors of the human heart on stage. I loved his performance in Sin. It
had so many layers to it, and it sent me in so many directions. It was full of
surprise. There was a lot of mystery. You were wondering how the mind of the
character worked. Was the character manipulative? How guilty is he? To me,
Michael honors the essence of acting, which is being `in the moment.’ So much
of the time, we come to the theatre with the blueprint in our mind of how we’re
going to do it. He creates on the stage as he goes along.”

There is a sense of spontaneity that pervades a Stuart performance, a sense
that nothing is set and anything might happen. “He is very comfortable with
himself as an actor,” observes Nason, “so when he goes into a role, he is very
open. He’s not afraid of taking risks. Give him free rein and he’ll take the
character as far as it can go.”

To the audience, this sometimes takes the appearance of looseness, but Nason
is quick to dispel the notion that Stuart is a lazy actor. “He studies a lot
outside the theatre,” she says. During Sherlock Holmes, she recalls, “He
knew everything there was to know about the character of Moriarty. He lent me a
copy of the Sherlock Holmes story on which the play was based so I could see
something of where my character was coming from.” For Rita, the two have
fleshed out the histories andbackgrounds of their respective characters. “We’ll
get very intent on the thought process, some understanding, some appreciation
of what the other person is experiencing. He makes it great fun to do, but if I
have a serious moment, he’s terribly focused.” She describes a rehearsal in
which they were running lines for the scene where Rita considers leaving the
course taught by Frank, Stuart’s character. The character of Rita is very
upset, nearly in tears, and as she spoke the lines, Nason felt her eyes welling
up. Then, she says, she looked at Stuart and “his eyes had filled with tears,
too. We were not on a stage; we were in Frank’s room, and I thought, `He really
understands what I’m saying.’ It really wasn’t expected. It was wonderful.”

That he is also tremendously sensitive may be the most surprising hidden
aspect to “the goofy guy.” According to Hoard, Stuart “really takes pains to
take care of people on stage. If you’re inexperienced or shaky in any way, you
just feel so protected with him.” That may sound at odds with the image of
Stuart trying to provoke laughter from one of his fellow actors, but Kathy
Catmull, whose most recently worked with Stuart in the production of
Sin, says that in her experience, most of Stuart’s onstage antics are
nothing more than “tiny, amusing signals to let you know he’s in there.” She
thinks this is his way of saying “Hi!” on stage and says it can be kind of
comforting if you’re feeling shaky, although she admits she’s had to bite her
lip a few times. Catmull says that there probably isn’t an actor she feels
safer with on stage than Stuart, because, “No matter what happens, he always
remains unfazed and keeps the scene moving right along.”

“Nothing fazes him,” insists Nason, and the comment is echoed by Catherine
Uldrich, who played Beatrice to Stuart’s Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado
About Nothing last year. Uldrich should know; she and the other actresses
in The Public Domain’s production did their best to break Stuart’s
concentration. During one performance, they stood offstage and collectively
mooned Stuart and two other actors who were onstage in the middle of a scene.
Uldrich says that none of the actors ever looked in their direction, but one
wonders whether Stuart would have missed a beat even if he had. Possibly not,
for, as Nason puts it, he has an incredible ability “to go with the flow. He
takes what comes.”

The Stuart stereotype would explain away his unflappability as just an
overdeveloped degree of laid-backness. Stuart acknowledges his laconic
qualities — “I like to think of myself as a laid-back guy. I think of myself
as being lazy.” — but he attributes more of his cool self-control to the two
years he spent performing in audience participation murder mysteries. “We were
doing totally improvised shows,” he says. “For two hours, you’re out there
without a net and you have to entertain people who are shoving salad in their
faces. Make ’em laugh enough but not too much so they don’t spit all over you.
I realized I could go out there and not know what was going on. I feel safe on
stage, and I think that’s what it is.” Most actors, he says, suffer from “that
fear of not doing it right. But there is no right or wrong. There’s the way
you’re doing it. That’s all. I do fret about missing a line or something but I
know that if I do, something will happen and it will get covered up. I like to
goof around. It’s good for me, to keep me light, but more than for me, I try to
keep everybody else from getting scared. It’s not scary, what we do.”

Acting is fun. That’s the credo for Michael Stuart. “It’s been really fun to
work with Ken Bradley in Lone Star because he feels that way, too. He’s
out there having a good time, as am I. We’re just Roy and Ray, out there havin’
a good time behind Angel’s. That doesn’t mean we’re not very serious as actors,
that we’re not just learning the lines and going up there and goofing around.
We know what we’re doing technically. We’ve looked at the characters and
studied the backgrounds. There’s that, but you have to have that other part,
that happy part.”

That Stuart continues to find the fun in acting may explain why he does so
much of it. When he opens Educating Rita this weekend, he will be
starting his third show of the summer, with no weekend in which he hasn’t been
performing. It completes a 12-month period in which he’s also appeared in
Scenes From an Execution, the Radio War of the Worlds, Radio A
Christmas Carol, and Radio Romeo and Juliet, all for The Public
Domain; plus The Importance of Being Earnest for Live Oak at the State
Theatre; The Company’s production of Barefoot in the Park produced in
Columbus; and even a skit for the Chamber of Commerce in which he played Mr.
Spock (“This was at the Erwin Center,” says Stuart. “They had all these tables,
thousands of people. We’re on this teeny eight-by-eight stage, I’m in the ears,
and I turn to say something to Tom Parker, and I notice the
40-foot
screen’s on, and there’s my head. Whoa! Wait a minute! I didn’t know people
were lookin’. I thought I was going to be a speck!”).

Stuart is already busy lining up projects for the next year, too. In the
spring of 1997, The Public Domain will revive Sherlock Holmes with
Stuart reprising the role of Moriarty. But before that comes a role which will
call upon all the resources in Stuart’s considerable bag of tricks: Cyrano de
Bergerac, in The Public Domain’s production of the Edmond Rostand play as
adapted by Anthony Burgess. True, it’s a character part and a role requiring
the skills of a comedian, but it also demands great heart, panache, a stirring
sense of adventure, and an exquisite sensitivity to romantic poetry. If Stuart
can pull it off — or when, as his fans are more likely to say — we may
no longer be able to consider him just a joker or to call him by Ken Webster’s
longstanding label of choice: “The most underrated actor in town.”

This article appears in August 2 • 1996 and August 2 • 1996 (Cover).