Equivocation opens Nov. 18; plays Tues.-Fri., 8 pm; Sat., 3 & 8 pm; Sun., 2 & 7 pm; through Dec. 20. Tickets: $35-$75. Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood; 310.208.5454 or geffenplayhouse.com

Joe Spano:  Holding Up His Half of the Sky

“I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.”
– Paul Newman

Most of us have had, still have, dreams of being famous. A star. Why not? It’s part of our ego structure. Some days it happens. Most days it’s still part of the fantasy. But always, it’s a guilty pleasure. So hey, let’s indulge…

Say you’re an actor, an actor in Hollywood. You’re zooming down Pacific Coast Highway on your way to work, rehearsal. The ocean sparkles around you. You’re on a hands-free telephone being interviewed about your latest role. Good so far?

You’re Sean Connery. You’re Brad Pitt. No wait, you’re Joe Spano. Yeah, Joe Spano…every character actor’s dream realized.

The story in your head doesn’t start at the Emmy podium. There’s always a whole back story to enjoy. So let’s start at…Berkeley, circa 1967.

Spano’s a drama major, debuts in Romeo and Juliet, he’s not Romeo. Through theatre there, he meets colorful grad student Michael Leibert who goes on his entrepreneurial way to found Berkeley Repertory Theatre down the street on College Avenue.

“I was never good at networking,” Spano says. “My philosophy was I’d do the work I loved, and do as much work as I could, and if I was good and fun to work with, then people would want to work with me again.”

And, they did. “Somebody said, see Michael. He’s starting a theatre. Remind him who you are.” Leibert remembered and offered Spano the opportunity to be a founding member of Berkeley Rep. A 10-year love/hate relationship began as did the great success of most all concerned.

Leibert also opened the restaurant Trespassers W down the alley from the theatre which had a Dutch door in the back so actors could travel to a waiting glass of wine, or two, at various points of performance. Good times.

But, maybe not that profitable for the actors. “It was non-union at Berkeley Rep,” Spano remembers, “and they weren’t going to make you union because it would cost more money. It was a continual irony. I wanted to get my Equity card. I had to get more. So I stole away to San Francisco to do Oh! Calcutta! in North Beach. I got my card. I was born in North Beach so it was like going home. Naked.” Say it isn’t so, Joe.

In 1978, Spano traveled with Berkeley Rep’s Dracula: A Musical Nightmare to Lee Sankowich’s Zephyr Theatre in Los Angeles. “It was a great success. I’d been in rep theatre in Northern California for 10 years and had an ambition to try something more visible, take a step forward. I had to stay in LA or go to New York. LA was closer, warmer and cheaper. So it won the contest. I told myself, in LA I’d make a grubstake to get to New York.”

From the show, Spano got an agent and ironically his grubstake with Hill Street Blues, a new series shot in LA about police life in New York. Plans changed.

It was a strange start. Playing Sgt. Lt. Henry Goldblume, Spano did the pilot and right after he got a call from Steven Spielberg, casting him in a film…Poltergeist. “Steven Bochco wouldn’t let me go from Hill Street,” Spano says. “As it turned out, I could have done the series and the movie. I resented it then. But, as I got older, I realized it’s not such a big thing in the long run. You come to terms with life as it is.”

Even as the hit series continued, Spano wanted out. “It’s different when you’re young. I wanted to get out after three years. I wanted to do something different, be a movie star, do more. We’re always dissatisfied with where we are. We are not happy here.

“But, Steven Bochco had the feeling at the time if you’re part of the show, you’re part of the show and my leaving the show would not have a good impact. Actually, I’m glad they didn’t cut me loose.” Seven years on a hit series and two Emmy nominations…it’s understandable.

The Emmy actually came to Spano for a different series, Midnight Caller. “It was the result of good writing and a big part,” says Spano. “It was a very atmospheric show and shot well. It was about the death penalty and people responded to the subject matter. I was a convicted murderer during my last night on death row. It was a lot about how to decide to end a person’s life.”

Television continues to offer Spano long-term employment. After Midnight Caller, he had recurring roles on NYPD Blue, Murder One and, most recently, NCIS which is often the No.1 show on television.

In NCIS, he plays FBI Special Agent Tobias Fornell who acts as a stern-humored foil to lead Mark Harmon. Spano attributes a lot of the credit for his success on the show to Harmon. “He’s an extraordinarily generous and wise actor. He knows that success is a fleeting and lucky thing and that everybody contributes. And, everybody knows he knows that. It comes from his being a great quarterback. He knows how to run a team.”

When asked why he is cast so often as a detective on TV, Spano muses, “When you’ve made an impression on them in a certain type of role, and they look at their needs, it’s like going to the grocery store. When you’re looking for cereal, you get cereal.”

In the film world, Spano is anything but cereal. With 20 made-for-television movies and 30 feature films to his credit, he’s been working in diverse character roles from American Graffiti in his early career through last year’s Best Picture nominee Frost/Nixon.

One of his favorite film memories brings him back to his theatre roots. “When I went up for Apollo 13, I was told to go see Tom in the Vomit Comet.” Tom was Tom Hanks and the Vomit Comet was where the stars worked out getting ready for the weightlessness required for their roles. “Tom had gone to college in Oakland and often went to Berkeley Rep. He saw me there playing the Bartender in The Iceman Cometh and said it was one of the reasons he wanted to become an actor. Goes to show, you never know who’s going to be affected by what you do in theatre.”

What Spano does in theatre is never far from him. “I came back to theatre when I formed a relationship with the Rubicon in Ventura, now my home theatre. They offer very challenging shows that an actor wants to do.” There, he’s played in Shaw, Gurney,  Beckett, Albee and last year won  LA Stage Alliance’s 2008 Ovation Award for Lead Actor in D. W. Jacob’s one-man show R. Buckminster Fuller: the History [and Mystery] of the Universe.

“It was the most terrifying role I’ve ever done,” he recalls. “It’s so lonely out there alone. Very difficult but very gratifying. It taught me things I didn’t know about internalizing emotions. Audiences loved it. People stood up in the end, I think, because I finally finished talking. I wouldn’t do it as a steady diet. I like more of a cooperative venture.”

His favorite stage role to date? “It’s usually the last one,” he says. “George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He played the role earlier this year opposite Rubicon’s Karyl Lynn Burns as Martha and received another Ovation nomination. “It’s the perfect play,” he thinks.

The play’s the thing apparently which is a hint about Spano’s latest role. Remember he was tooling down PCH to rehearsal? It was to play Shakespeare or “Shag” as he is affectionately called by playwright Bill Cain in his new play Equivocation, having its LA premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, directed by David Esbjornson. Besides Harry Groener (see next interview), the cast includes Patrick J. Adams, Troian Bellisario, Brian Henderson and Connor Trinneer.

Equivocation was the recipient of the Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award for its world premiere production at the 2009 Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It had its development roots in California, however, at the Ojai Playwrights Conference and later was part of the New Works Festival at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto.

“It’s an extraordinary play,” Spano says, “about Shakespeare and his troupe as he reluctantly tries to write a propaganda play to please King James about the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot.”

Akin to our 4th of July, the Gunpowder Plot gave rise to Britain’s 5th of November when Guy Fawkes allegedly tried to tunnel under Parliament to blow it up it along with the King. The story of the King’s capture of the Catholic conspirators has been told for 400 years and now has become a British national myth.

But, back to Shakespeare and his troupe, they had to dramatize the King’s account without losing their integrity-or their heads. “It’s a moral dilemma for Shakespeare,” says Spano, “since he works in a theatre company. The humor comes from that. Anybody’s who’s been in a theatre company knows our psyches run rampant like desperate housewives.”

It sounds as if this trip back in history is less homework and more hilarity. It’s another challenging role to keep Spano engaged. But, the most challenging role he plays is offstage-as a parent. Rounding out the picture of this actor is the work he does on behalf of adopted children.

Spano and Joan Zerrien, whom he met when she was a box office manager at Berkeley Rep, are the parents of 14-year old Liana and 10-year old Meili whom they adopted in China.

“We were in a place in our lives, well off, living in a great house and we said to ourselves what is this for? We should have kids and take advantage of our great school district. We investigated domestic adoption and other ways. It was all rather mechanized-the bureaucratic and legal process. Then, we saw a television program that outlined the plight of Chinese little girls so we investigated it. We decided it wasn’t about passing them off as our own. We wanted more the opportunity to parent.”

In addition, Spano went the extra mile and became the director of the Southern California chapter of Families with Children from China.  He is also a founding board member of Half the Sky Foundation which brings early childhood development training and infant nurturing programs to China.

According to Mao Tse-Tung “Women hold up half the sky.” It’s not hard to figure out who’s helping with the other half.

Joe Spano. What a character.

Harry Groener:  Still Swimming in the Big Pool

“The human voice is the organ of the soul.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The late great Los Angeles theatre critic Polly Warfield was very generous to actors in her reviews. Well, usually. If she couldn’t hear actors, if they didn’t have the “Voice,” they were labeled “television” and the little lady gave them something akin to a Bronx cheer. In writing.

I came home the other day to a “Voice” on my answering machine. A voice Ms. Warfield would have written volumes about, and probably did. All I could do was save it on my machine…”Hello, Geo. Geo, this is Harry Groener–in Los Angeles.”

Lucky Los Angeles. Broadway has lent its three-time Tony Award nominee to the Geffen Playhouse where he is starring with Joe Spano in Bill Cain’s Equivocation. “It’s ironic,” admits Groener, “that in New York-a theatre town-I do glitzy things, musicals. And, in LA-a glitzy town-I do plays.”

It’s difficult to figure which he’s been doing longer. On the musical theatre side, there were his parents with their German song and dance talents rooted in the old country. His mom studied opera and later, at her singing teacher’s studio, met dad and joined his troupe “Harry Fox and his Singing Stars.”

According to Groener, “My dad was all over Europe before World War II. A real hustler when it came to work. He would dance in tails like Fred Astaire, then “Rubber Man” dance in floppy pants. He was also a quick-change artist, a concert pianist and a composer in the 1930s.”

Harry Fox wrote an operetta that was to be produced but was closed down by the Catholic Church and never again saw its way to the boards. The war began. The Nazis were even more restrictive, even to the point of requiring Harry Fox to change his stage name back to Groener.

When little Harry was two years old, the Groeners immigrated to the United States. His father hoped for more opportunities in his music here instead of dealing with the aftermath of war in Europe. They moved in with Groener’s grandmother, aunts and uncles in a tiny apartment. Eventually, they all moved to a larger Victorian in the San Francisco area, the top floor of which was the home where Groener grew up.

Survival was key, musical theatre became secondary. His mom worked in an underwriter’s office and other jobs to get money. His dad worked at Hartford Insurance Company, running a huge industrial mimeograph machine for 25 years. Groener remembers his father’s thinking…”If I stay here, we’ll have insurance. Dad started a little Bavarian dance band on the side. Mom played leads in operettas at the German-American Club in San Francisco and did cabaret.”

Little Harry, now getting older, played drums for the oom-pah music of his father’s band. “My parents were supportive of my ambitions in show business. Being of German background, they insisted I work hard and be serious about it. Then, they would help me.

“They were very happy to criticize me, very instructive…’I can’t hear you, don’t move so much, stand up straight, you’re talking too fast, don’t make so many faces.’ They didn’t coddle me and say everything was wonderful. For that I’ll always be grateful.”

Groener tells the amazing story of his learning to dance at home. “My mother used to help me with tap in the kitchen. We had a linoleum floor of yellow and green squares, each 1×1 foot. She taught me a time step and told me to do it within one square and make all the sounds. What a great lesson. I didn’t have metal taps. You had to make all the beats with your feet. I wish we’d go back to practicing like that. If you were barefoot and able to make the beats, the muscles in your feet would be developed.

“West Side Story really did it for me, especially all the jazz stuff. But, my mom said if I really wanted to be good I had to go to the Conservatory of Ballet in San Francisco. So, I did. I was the only guy in class. Very dorky. But, I got to play the Prince in The Nutcracker. I didn’t have to dance much, just walk around looking princely.”

That led to bus and truck tours of the show and other ballets. “We’d get up early in the morning, wash our tights and dance belts, and hang them in the bus as we traveled. “We’d play national parks and the staff there would cook for us in the Redwoods. I loved ballet…and then I didn’t.”

In the last year of junior high, he got into acting and dancing took a back seat. He started high school playing Peter in The Diary of Anne Frank. “I acted and acted, and danced once in a while. My dancing suffered because of that. There’s a time limit on dancing. There isn’t one on acting.”

After high school, Groener couldn’t afford the Actors Conservatory Theater in San Francisco so he continued his education at University of Washington and Santa Maria’s Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts (PCPA) where he did everything and choreographed a lot.

Groener remembers, “PCPA was like summer stock, only not just in the summer. We did five musicals and three straight plays in rotating repertory. We’d have a few days of auditions, then the ‘Casting Blues’ dinner where we got to be sad about what parts we didn’t get, then we started. We rehearsed three shows a day. Five shows opened within a month and then we played in repertory. The same shows we did indoors in Santa Maria, we did outdoors in Solvang.”

It was in Solvang that legendary agent Susan Smith spotted Groener. “She loved my performance and asked me what I wanted to do. Los Angeles? No. New York? No. I didn’t want to go into the big pool yet. I wanted to practice what I had been taught. Okay, she said. But, let me know where you are.”

Where he was brought him to Chicago for the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) auditions. He was the only one from his college class selected to go From there, he went to the Actors Theatre of Louisville where he got his Equity card and a “match” from playing in The Matchmaker. There he met his bride-to-be, actress Dawn Didawick.

After Louisville, they went to the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven where Groener performed in Hobson’s Choice and Journey’s End. It was there Smith spotted him again. She was opening her office in New York. This time, he said yes and has been with her for the 33 years since.

Broadway was now in reach. Groener started his ascent in the musical version of Playboy of the Western World called Back Country. But, it closed in tryouts in Boston. “I got that information,” Groener says, “on September 19th, the day Dawn and I got married. Everybody was sad but I said ‘Honeymoon!’ We packed up a car lent to us by a friend, found a place in Cape Cod - was it the Trade Winds in Hyannisport? Then, we went back to New York and started our lives.”

Groener made his Broadway debut as Will Parker in Oklahoma! For that, he was nominated for his first Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award and he won the Theatre World Award. Not bad for a first swim in the big pool.

The other big diving board, Southern California, came next with work at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. “I was in Billy Bishop Goes to War at the Old Globe when the call for Cats came,” Groener said. “Portraying the title character in Billy Bishop was theatre at its purest.

“You have a man on stage just telling a story. He’s in a costume and he has another guy playing a piano. Some music. Very few props. It’s basically just one guy, telling this story about his life in World War I. That’s what we are. We’re storytellers.

“I didn’t want to leave there but it was pretty well-known that Cats was going to be a hit, even before it came over from London. And I wanted to work with Trevor Nunn.” That collaboration led to Groener’s second Tony nomination for his role of Munkustrap, the leader and protector of the cat pack.

Life after Cats would bring Groener to the West Coast at least once a year, adding the Ahmanson Theatre, South Coast Repertory, the Falcon Theatre in Burbank and now the Geffen Playhouse to his credits. He has also become an Associate Artist at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego.

According to Groener, “It means you’re considered part of the family. A very loose company of actors. There’s no real power behind it. Just a ‘let us know if there’s a part you want to play’ kind of thing. I love that theatre.”

He also loves Broadway. His many shows there include Is There Life After High School?, Sunday in the Park with George and Monty Python’s Spamalot. He is probably best known for his creation of the role of Bobby Child in Crazy for You for which he received his third Tony nomination as well as ones for a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award.

In 1987, Groener and Dawn moved to Southern California where he quickly won the supporting role of dim-witted, sweet-natured Ralph on the TV series Dear John. That is contrasted by his well-known work as Sunnydale’s evil Mayor Richard Wilkins III in the hit cult series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And, okay, Trekkie Alert! He’s possibly the only actor to be nicely featured on three Star Trek series as three different characters. Can you name them? Huh? I didn’t think so. But, good for him.

“I don’t necessarily prefer television over theatre,” Groener says. “But it’s a reality. You just go where the work is. So my wife and I went. The Dear John money bought the house in LA and in 2002 we gave up the apartment in New York. The lease was up. We’re in LA permanently now.”

Following the work has brought Groener to his latest role, that of Richard Burbage in Equivocation. “It’s a fascinating play,” says Groener. Burbage is in Shakespeare’s company of actors but we play multiple roles.

“We’re in modern dress with costume pieces to suggest the period. There are no ‘period’ accents.  We speak the way we speak now. And, you won’t be puzzled by it. As our writer Bill Cain says, ‘The truth is, people then sounded more like we do in America now than the British do today’.”

It all gets back to sound, doesn’t it? And, just so you don’t think Harry Groener is only about ballet, jazz, television and a move to Hollywood, you can still find the “Voice,” as Polly Warfield would say, on the Varese Sarabande label. He’s a regular vocalist doing among other things Shakespeare on Broadway.

He’s also doing Shakespeare at the Geffen…check out the fun he brings to Equivocation.

Feature image of Groener and Spano and production photos by Michael Lamont

Article by Geo Hartley