Liz Lauren
Payton (right) plays Mabel Chiltern opposite Lord Goring (Marcus Truschinski) in "An Ideal Husband."
Jade Payton prefers “sword collector” to “spear carrier.” Whatever the term, that’s what she’ll be doing as an apprentice actor in this season’s production of King Lear at American Players Theatre.
But Payton, 23, doesn’t mind picking up after the leads. Becoming an apprentice at APT is a coveted opportunity for aspiring actors, and she competed hard to land the gig. It will look great on her resume. The 36-year-old company has established a national reputation; the theater critic for the Wall Street Journal crowned APT “the finest classical repertory company in the U.S.”
Traditionally, APT’s apprentices appear in non-speaking roles and portray minor characters with names one might half remember from college lit classes: Fortinbras in Hamlet, Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet, Margaret in Much Ado About Nothing. In Death of a Salesman, Payton plays Letta, who shares an awkward dinner with the Loman men. It’s only one scene, but it’s an intense one. Her third role, Mabel Chiltern in An Ideal Husband, is an unusually large role for an apprentice, both in lines and in importance.
Brenda DeVita, APT’s artistic director, first noticed Payton on a scouting mission to the Utah Shakespeare Festival last summer. The young actor looked like she had the potential to play the wide variety of roles required for the company’s broad classical repertoire.
“We spend as much time vetting apprentices as we do principal actors,” says casting director Carey Cannon. After passing the initial audition and submitting a callback tape, Payton was added to a list of 500 actors that had to be whittled down to five. There were months of interviews with actors and references.
“We interview everyone all the way back to their second grade teachers,” says APT’s director of communication, Sara Young.
Cannon adds, “That’s not a joke. Once someone gave their second grade teacher as a reference, and we did call her.”
It was quickly evident to DeVita and Cannon that Payton had not only talent, range and charisma, but intelligence, maturity and a passion for language and theater. A very strong candidate, but there was still more vetting to do.
Even if an actor seems like a perfect fit, the casting director has to be sure that the actors understand what they are getting themselves into. Of course, all actors want paying work in a prestigious theater, but APT has distinct demands. “Half the process,” says Cannon, “is to convince them not to come.” She doesn’t want an actor to regret passing up an opportunity in a big city only to suffer culture shock in a southwestern Wisconsin farming community.
But that didn’t scare Payton. She chose APT over an option in Los Angeles.
And she wasn’t concerned about the company’s relative obscurity. “Civilians back home haven’t heard of this theater,” says Payton, “but when I talk to my peers they say, ‘I would love to work there.’ I hear that over and over again.”
Payton was chosen from a field of 500.
The apprenticeship program dates to 1980, APT’s first season. Founders Randall Duk Kim, Anne Occhiogrosso and Charles Bright saw their company not just as a way to bring classical theater to the masses in an outdoor setting, but as a training ground for a select group of young actors. The apprenticeship program was meant to serve as a bridge between the academic and professional worlds of theater, offering instruction in the classroom and on stage.
As part of the apprenticeship program, APT provides four series of classes tailored to the needs of these young actors, to help them better communicate Shakespeare’s dense poetic text to an audience. The classes also provide movement and vocal training so actors can meet the challenge of performing in the hilltop amphitheater.
“It’s a complicated house to be great in,” says Cannon. Someone can show promise in a rehearsal space, but acting in front of 1,100 audience members with roaring planes and cooing whip-poor-wills can drown out an actor’s best lines — in the case of the apprentices, maybe their only lines.
Payton says it’s not easy. “How do you send your voice to the back of the house and honestly connect with the person next to you and swat a mosquito and sweat through your stockings and stay in the moment and make it all look easy?” But that’s what the training is all about — teaching actors like Payton to be grandly nuanced.
Some of the biggest lessons come from working directly with professionals. Cannon says what distinguishes the apprenticeship from a more mundane-sounding “internship” is that APT’s apprentices are “working alongside later-career actors...just as in the guild days.” It’s the way actors who first gave voice to Shakespeare 400-plus years ago learned to act. Whether it is a class taught by APT mainstay James DeVita or getting a few moments on stage with other lifers, it all adds to the learning process.
After years of playing leads in local and college productions, the apprentices are mostly out of the spotlight at APT, but Payton does not view it as a demotion. “I think a small role here is comparable to having a large role in school,” she says. “I’m finding my footing with my own process. Being able to do that with a smaller role and not a larger one is a real blessing. You get to use your responsibility without risk of ruining the play.”
Someday she may play Goneril or Regan in King Lear, but for now, Payton and her fellow apprentices are merely their servants, soldiers and subjects. They relearn the thousand little things an actor must do to avoid stealing focus, while still being an active part of the scene. They get to observe up close, absorbing how some of the nation’s finest actors approach their work. The rain falls upon them all equally. The mosquitoes don’t play favorites — both Lear and Guard No. 2 are potential victims.
The guards know, though, that the king was once like them. Back in APT’s first season, 36 years ago, Jonathan Smoots served as an apprentice, standing quietly behind other giants, and now he’s starring as old Lear himself.
