Actor Steps Into Star Role, Sight Unseen

Esau Pritchett is Mr. Othello, having played Shakespeare’s great tragic hero nine times and counting. Yet he has never seen the Shakespeare’s great tragedy acted on a stage. Any stage. Anywhere.

Pritchett takes the stage in New Haven Wednesday night to step into another huge role, the embittered yet noble Negro Leagues ball player Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s Fences. He has never seen that play either.

That’s all by choice.

The revival of Wilson’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning play — arguably the major work in the playwright’s ten-play Century Cycle chronicling the modern African-American experience — opens (previews) at the Long Wharf Theatre Wednesday night, directed by Phylicia Rashad, an actress turned director and best known for her role on TV’s Cosby Show.

Pritchett (pictured above in Long Wharf’s dressing room) has a reason for not seeing the venerable plays he stars in: Never studying the great stars’ previous interpretations of the roles gives him the freedom to inhabit the characters on his own.

“That particular pressure is not there. I can interpret the life of this character [only] by what we discuss in that [rehearsal] room with Phylicia,” Pritchett said.

Pritchett, a six-foot-five former competitive swimmer, shared that personal approach to acting during aninterview before rehearsal of the show that runs through Dec. 22 on the Long Wharf’s main stage.

Of course Pritchett has studied the play in print, having discovered it while performing and training as an actor at Oakland University in Michigan, his home state.

Like Wilson’s Troy Maxson, Pritchett has a forcefulness driving him to do things his own way. Let the auditions fall as they may.

At 18, without any theater training and on the energy simply of having attended some local plays, Pritchett showed up to audition for the university’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

“I knew how to stand up straight and to speak loud,” he said, recollecting that first audition.

Pritchett nabbed the role of Duke Orsino, and he was launched. At 19 he appeared in his first Othello. He has played the role eight or nine times in the 20 years since, including appearances in film and on TV, he estimated.

“I’ve never seen it, because I’m always in it,” he joked.

He never finds it boring to play to Moor of Venice in so many regional productions. ​“There’s always something to learn,” he said.

When he did Othello at age 19, his performance was more physical. When he did his most recent Othello, at age 38, he found more depth in the part, he said.

Pritchett nabbed the role of Wilson’s tragic hero Troy Maxson in the same way he did his very first roles, through a cold audition. The play’s well-connected director could have turned to her Rolodex and called on any number of well-known actors, but she chose open auditions instead. Pritchett said Rashad told him she wanted to give actors a chance, the way she herself had been given a chance to compete for roles.

Pritchett was given a monologue and a scene to do. He was called back, then got the role.

He deemed Wilson’s Troy Maxson just as deep and juicy a challenge as Othello. Maybe more so.

“Troy Maxson makes Othello seem like Cliff’s Notes,” Pritchett said.

He was not referring to what actors call the ​“line load,” the large amount of text to be memorized and the fact Maxson is on stage nearly all the time in Wilson’s drama.

“It’s not volume. It’s about keeping it interesting” and finding what Pritchett called the ​“wave of variation” in the many tirades and loud-mouthed, heart-breaking, ineffectual expressions of love and story-telling that come out of Troy. Troy, Pritchett observed, ​“never shuts up.”

Swimming and Acting?
Pritchett was a competitive swimmer from age 6 until the theater bug bit him. Troy Maxson was a talented Negro Leagues baseball player who never got his chance to play in the Major Leagues, not only because of race, but because in his view the wrong black players were chosen. He never lets anyone forget it. Not his best friend Bono, whose praise of Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron Troy is quick to shoot down. And not his son Corey, whose interest in another sport, football, Troy quashes, with tragic results.

Did Pritchett find a point of connection with his character, one athlete to another? ​“As a swimmer, you need to know when to flip, when to turn, when to hit your spots,” Pritchett said. The same applies to acting.

Could Pritchett see himself doing Troy eight or nine times?

“Absolutely,” he said. Even though Troy’s character talks endlessly and seems to empty out with each speech, Pritchett said, ​“there’s a lot of subtext there,” a lot to explore in future performances. Pritchett called Troy as tragic a hero as Othello, each with a flaw and a fall.

What if Troy met Othello?

“That would be a slug fest,” he said.

He will play Troy at least a second time: The Long Wharf Fences is a co-production with the McCarter Theater in Princeton, where the show will run from Jan. 10 to Feb. 9.

Other members of the cast include Taylor Dior as Raynell, Troy’s daughter; Phil McGlaston as Troy’s best drinking buddy Bono; Jared McNeil as his struggling older son Lyons; Chris Myers as the younger son Corey who challenges him; Portia as his long-suffering wife Rose; and G. Alvarez Reid as Troy’s younger brother Gabe, a WWII vet with a brain injury, who receives Troy’s most unalloyed tenderness.