Photo by Sarah Elmquist
Actor Corey Allen is a new face for the 2010 season of the Great River Shakespeare Festival. |
As the rest of Corey Allen’s young audience at the Maplewood Townhomes Community Center scampered off Thursday, one boy hung back, waiting for the others to leave.
Allen, starring as Othello with the Great River Shakespeare Festival, had just given a presentation about his life as an actor, and this particular boy had been a bit of a cutup during the talk.
Serious now, the boy said he had one more question. “Do you like what you do?” he asked Allen, who for a moment was struck by the weight of the question.
It’s something no one really asks him, Allen said, but he was glad to tell this boy the answer: “I told him that I really do, and his face lit up. He said that he might want to be an actor someday. Or a football player.”
It’s a conundrum Allen knows very well.
Allen was a football player, and on the track team. He dated cheerleaders, hung out with athletes and immersed himself in student government. It was what cool teenage boys did in his suburban San Diego community.
But inside Allen was the remnants of a little boy, an only child of divorced parents, who learned to while away his time in a land of make believe.
“At five I spent a lot of time by myself,” Allen said, “and I had a Nintendo but I had like three Nintendo games. Once you beat them all they’re not much fun.”
Instead Allen turned to a cache of toys, through them creating characters, personalities and scenarios that came alive in his hands. “Some people had imaginary friends, I had an imaginary village,” he joked. Story lines were fueled by films like Clash of the Titans and Labyrinth, even a 1970s remake of Alice in Wonderland starring Carol Channing that Allen remembers now as especially awful.
But he loved the mystical powers and magical stories that came from such movies, and he would intertwine them with figures from Greek mythology to bring his make believe village to life.
But there is no place for magical kings or the epic battles of Zeus on the football field, and over time Allen tucked his imagination away save for an occasional church production.
But then he discovered the theater department.
“When I got to high school I found out there is an organization where people actually do that kind of thing and don’t think you’re crazy,” he said. “The first part of my high school experience was going with the grain. But once I discovered theater, I tended to think those people are cooler, and I found out actresses are far better kissers than cheerleaders.”
Besides the requisite performance of Oklahoma!, Allen’s first real role in the theater was as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a fanciful play by William Shakespeare.
He was hooked.
His parents, not so much. “The challenge was not in high school, it was convincing my parents to pay for it in college,” Allen said.
His mother, he said, was a fan, but wanted him to have a job that would support him. His father just plain didn’t understand.
To gain their support, Allen did the only thing he could: he tricked them.
“I was initially a psychology major,” he said, though at the time he perhaps mumbled the part about double majoring in theater. Over time Allen found himself immersed in theater at the University of California-Irvine, and psychology gradually faded off the map until he finally had to confess to his mother somewhere close to his senior year.
But now 29, Allen has proven himself time and again to his parents, earning a masters degree in theater and landing consistently substantial roles From New York to California.
Allen performs in modern plays, but still has a special affinity for Shakespeare and has performed in several productions around the country. And his portrayal of Shakespeare’s work these days is considerably better than his first efforts at Oberon, he admits ruefully.
In a high school production, actors learn lines and concentrate on just getting the words out of their mouths. The unusual words and specific tempo can be an intimidating combination, Allen said, and the more an actor must focus on those, the more the actual character gets lost. “You have to find the rhythm of the language in you and speak the words as if they are coming out of you,” he said. “It has to become second nature.”
Today Allen can feel that beautiful cadence of the language, concentrating instead on the nuances of the character’s personality and its relationship to the story.
The role of Othello, Allen said, is one he’s been told since graduate school he would end up playing because under Shakespeare’s definition, Othello is a black man.
As such, it was a role Allen originally held a love-hate feeling towards, not wanting to be typecast but intrigued by the character as he watched it portrayed in other productions. Delving deeper now into the mind of Othello with the Great River Shakespeare Festival, and having the shared insight of festival gurus Alec Wild and Chris Gerson, Allen has discovered something deeper about the character and is now glad for the opportunity to bring that to the stage.
Being an actor has its challenges, being an African American actor has its own challenges, Allen said, but he does not buy into the “starving artist” image sometimes painted of actors. “It’s a romantic idea. It gives us a certain tragic air about our sacrifices,” Allen mused. “But if you are smart there are ways to augment your income. It is a high risk profession, you never know where your next job is, but the payout can be huge.”
Also a teacher and a playwright, Allen is talking about money, but he is also talking about an intangible payout that happens along the way when an actor realizes that he is living the dream. “I feel like I just keep lucking out,” he said. “I said this is what I wanted to do, and the dream gets validated. I don’t think there’s a check that can be written for that.”
And there is a different kind of payout, the kind you feel when a little boy from a disadvantaged neighborhood tugs on your arm and asks you if you like what you do, said Allen.
“It’s important to be inspired,” he said. Too often African American youth gravitate towards the most obvious roles — models, professional athletes and musicians, yet there is so much more in the world for them, Allen believes, but children might not believe it unless they see it.
Having a black president is an awfully good start, Allen said. But seeing black actors play kings and lords and angels instead of gangsters is important too, even if it plants the seed in just one child. “Seeing that boy light up and thinking that he might do this someday,” Allen said, “that’s payment too.”
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