Raphael Parry

Actor, teacher, director. He embraces all aspects of theater

By Mario Tarradell / The Dallas Morning News

 
Raphael Parry surveys the stage area of his Undermain Theatre with a sly yet incredulous grin on his rubbery face. On this Monday evening, the theater is in disarray. Props are strewn about - a velvet pillow here, a skeleton face there, even a rolled-up metal fence - making the space look like an arty junkyard.

He apologizes for the mess. Undermain is between productions, he quickly states, before shifting his attention to the famous pillars. The Undermain Theatre, which derives its name from its unique location, a basement facility that sits beneath Main Street in Deep Ellum, sports four mammoth columns that surround the stage.
 
They once were beige, but 15 years of artistic primping have left their marks. If you take a close look, you can read a bit of graffiti, pick out a few shades of spray paint and wonder about other peculiar smudges and stains.

"We made the decision early on not to paint the columns," Mr. Parry says. "It gives it that underground look."

A metaphor that fits his own left-of-center career. As an actor, director and co-founder of the Undermain, Mr. Parry has spent the past 16 years bringing alternative theater to Dallas audiences. Acclaimed performances in controversial productions such as Austin Pendleton's  Uncle Bob  and Howard Barker's  The Castle , and directorial kudos for Tennessee Williams'  Camino Real  and John O'Keefe's  Disgrace  have cemented the Undermain's reputation for cutting-edge theater.

That alone would garner Mr. Parry respect from peers and admirers. But there's more. Mr. Parry, a wiry dynamo who speaks with dramatic inflections and unbridled zest, revels in the performance arts and craves the adrenalin rush of the stage, fellow actors and thunderous applause.

He's currently part of an ensemble cast starring in the Dallas Theater Center's world premiere of  Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl , a play that New York-based Karen Hartman adapted from Lewis Carroll's  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  and  Through the Looking-Glass.  Among Mr. Parry's array of characters - some one-liners, some scene-stealers - is the Red Queen, a delicious, draglike role that he tackles with campy finesse.

On March 15, his fourth season as director of Arts & Letters Live's  Texas Bound  series opens at the Dallas Museum of Art. The four-installment  Texas Bound  program, which showcases actors offering dramatic readings of fiction  by Texas authors, also will feature Mr. Parry tackling Janet Peery's coming-of-age tale,  Huevos , on March 29.

Then there's the educational component of this 39-year-old artist. Mr. Parry teaches acting Tuesday and Thursday mornings at the University of Dallas. He's an adjunct faculty member of the drama department handling beginning and advanced acting courses.

Finally, last December, Mr. Parry accepted the position of artistic director for Young Audiences of Greater Dallas, an organization that brings the visual and Performance arts to schoolchildren.
 
Breathless yet? Not Mr. Parry. This is when his motor glides into cruise control.

"I personally need them," he says, referring to acting, art and culture. "It's essential; there's a release that occurs in the act, in the ritual of theater. That's another important phrase for me: Theater is total ritual. There's a sacredness in that process that transcends even entertainment.

"It's like why is religion important? Well, for the same reason that religion is important to the community, I think art is important to the community, too. Specifically, theater has that importance because it brings people together and they celebrate, they participate in an event together, and that's really, really important."
 
Acting was Mr. Parry's only career choice. As a skinny, shy, awkward kid growing up in San Antonio and then Corpus Christi, Mr. Parry quickly learned he didn't fit in with the jocks, the brains or the "in" clique. In 1971, while at Ed White Middle School in San Antonio, Mr. Parry signed up for a drama class and was cast in a play called  Which Witch.

It was a terrible play, he remembers, and he says he was awful in it. But something monumental happened when he stepped onstage.

"I just remember standing onstage and thinking how wonderful it was to look out into the audience and see people out there," he says, his expressive eyes gazing into an imaginary crowd. "You see the lights, and you feel this incredible rush of adrenalin. I still get adrenalin rushes like crazy, which makes me think that I'm kind of a freak for that. I have to have it. I remember that moment I was kind of like, 'Wow, this is cool!' "

To please his father, R.P. Parry, a career military man and a staunch Texan, Mr. Parry took shop classes and tried out for the football team. But it was no use, he admits.

"Everything else I couldn't do. At shop I was OK, but for some reason I just kept acting and I was better at it."

Acting, and the all-encompassing passion that accompanies it, consumed Mr. Parry. In 1981, he graduated from Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, earning a bachelor of fine arts degree with an acting specialization. College, he attests, not only taught him the process of being an actor but also nourished his do-everything philosophy.

"My professors, who are still there, would promote the idea of producing your own work, of getting out there with cutting-edge stuff," he says. "Although we did classical work, you were allowed so much freedom and creativity. I actually learned to be a producer at that school. You could say, 'I want the main stage' and you'd just do a show. If the space was there, you just went in and did it."

Mr. Parry found himself sucked into the theater world - building the sets, running the lights, learning the lines, everything. Well, everything except costumes. A year after graduation, he interned at the Alley Theater, a large regional theater in Houston. The Alley was putting on  Cyrano de Bergerac . Mr. Parry had a bit part in the play and also was put to work in the costume department.

"I can't sew," he says, a tone of humor and humiliation in his voice. "We were doing  Cyrano de Bergerac,  and it's like 200 costumes in that show. They said, 'Can you sew?' And I said, 'No.' And I tried, I tried to learn, I just couldn't. Finally, I got laundry detail."

He worked 12 hours a day for $25 a week. He washed, dry-cleaned and pressed more than 100 costumes. It was a daunting experience. By the time  Cyrano  finished its run, Mr. Parry moved back to Corpus Christi with his parents.
Brief odd-job stints followed: Mr. Parry worked as a stable boy and then assistant trainer at an Arabian horse farm. That didn't last long because he fell off a pregnant mare and landed in the hospital with a concussion. He later found employment as an announcer at an easy-listening AM radio station. He was awful at it, he says.

Then an old college roommate called from Dallas to tell him a local theater was looking for a carpenter to build sets. The job was guaranteed. So Mr. Parry packed his belongings and moved to Dallas.

"I had some carpentry skills," he says. "I was, like, 'Fantastic!' I'd been to visit, Dallas was a cool town. It was clean, it was big, it was north. I got up here, and there was no job. I moved to Dallas, lock, stock and barrel, and the job disappeared. The theater that said they had a job for me had lost their funding and then I was stuck in Dallas."

The enterprising young actor then gathered a couple of friends, including a would-be playwright who adapted the Greek comedy  Lysistrata , found a local investor who lent him $10,000 on a line of credit and embarked on the journey of staging the play.

"We promised him we'd pay him back, and we produced this play," he says. "Of course, we lost the $10,000. The play didn't make any money. We lost all of our own personal money."

But the experience proved invaluable for his future. Through the  Lysistrata  fiasco, he met Katherine Owens, a local actress who would become his best friend and his Undermain artistic partner and co-founder.

At home underground

While he and Ms. Owens dreamed of starting a theater company, Mr. Parry waited tables at the now-closed Caulfield's on Lower Greenville and landed a role in the Pocket Sandwich Theatre's production of  The Drunkard.  It was his first professional, paid acting gig. It also was the fuel needed to rekindle his entrepreneurial fire.

"I guess one day we hit on the idea we're going to find ourselves a little studio in this part of town called Deep Ellum that we read about in the  Morning News ," he says. "Deep Ellum back then was just pure warehouses. It was nothing, just wasteland and some cool artists living down there. So Kat and I started on this adventure of finding a place that we could make an actors' studio out of."
 
They found a communal artist spirit in Jim and Michele Herling, the late owners of the building that now houses the Undermain. The building was run-down, Mr. Parry remembers, but the couple, who ran an art gallery on an upper floor, let Mr. Parry and Ms. Owens have the basement rent-free.

The basement "was filled with junk and water and rats and everything," he says. "We said, 'Can we have a place to hang out?' and they said, 'Sure, because we're going to build an artist colony here.' That's how it started. The Undermain started as just an idea of a place to hang out."

That was 1984. In its 15-year existence, the Undermain has weathered many monsoons. Plagued by the usual viruses that infect regional, alternative theater - rent hikes, funding, fire marshals, poor attendance - the Undermain has managed to survive and flourish.

In 1995, the Undermain was one of only 30 nationwide recipients of a National Endowment for the Arts advancement grant. The following year, the Undermain ensemble was invited by the Republic of Macedonia to perform Goran Stefanovski's  Sarajevo  for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.

 Partners in art
 
Mr. Parry has received several honors for his work. He's taken home two Leon Rabin Awards for directing Sam Shepard's  Fool for Love   in 1994 and Tennessee Williams'  Camino Real   in 1996. Acting kudos include a Dallas Critics Forum Award in 1991 for  The Anger of Ernest and Ernestine.

Working collaboratively with Ms. Owens has benefited the company, Mr. Parry assures, even if they don't always agree. "We're very different," Ms. Owens says. "But the principle of opposites is fundamental in the theater. It's a fundamental part of dramatics. It's germane to the structuring of theater, so perhaps it stems from the platform to the organizational structure."

But their artistic vision has never blurred.

"In some ways, I think Katherine and I knew," Mr. Parry says. "We'd go to parties and see all the theater luminaries back then and say, 'Oh, that's so-and-so.' We'd whisper to each other [pointing out] the top guns in theater in Dallas. Even early on we said, 'I want to do that. I want to be one of them. I want to be one of the leaders in the theater community in this town.' "

Mr. Parry's reputation in Dallas' artistic community has afforded him a few prestigious - and profitable - fringe opportunities. Although he doesn't have the educational background of traditional professors - most of whom have a master's degree or a Ph.D. - he figures he's allowed to teach because of his acting and directing credentials.

He's eternally grateful to have the chance, because teaching does as much for him as he hopes it does for his students. "It helps me understand my own discipline. I really believe in discipline a lot for my own personal artistry. Sometimes it's hard to quantify it. By teaching it, it helps me understand my own process. I try as much as I can to explain to those students that this is my process. They'll have to evolve their own, but for now they have to use mine. When they mature and graduate, they'll discover their own."

Such genuine passion for the craft, for the arts, enthralls Kay Cattarulla, producer of Arts & Letters Live. This is her fourth year working with Mr. Parry on the  Texas Bound  series. "It is one of the most delightful parts of my job to go over this material with him, because he's so smart," she says. "He responds incredibly to literary material. What's great about him is he is not afraid to try things, particularly dark material. We've tried touchier things in recent years. He's an adventurous partner to have. It's been a wonderful way to broaden  Texas Bound ."

Keeping home fires burning

But there's a price to pay for creative freedom and artistic breadth. Mr. Parry has built a personal life around his career, around his demanding life's work. In 1981, he met actress Connie Gold while he was an artist in residence (he acted and served as guest lecturer during the academic year) at Texas A&I University in Kingsville.

They met onstage, a fitting environment for two actors, but didn't get along at first.  "Connie is a very unusual woman, a fantastic actress, but she was very cold," he says. "Immediately, I was drawn to her, but also it made me kind of mad. We were doing a two-person show, and we didn't get along very well until the night before opening. And all of a sudden, in some horrible, tense moment, we kissed each other in the trauma backstage."

They were married almost 12 years ago at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Dallas. In typically unconventional fashion, Mr. Parry chose best friend Ms. Owens as his best man. The request stumped the priest. "That challenged canonical law because I said, 'Does it have to be a male to be our best man?' I mean, she was my closest friend. So the poor father had to get the book down. 'Let me look this up. Nope, just says it has to have a witness. So I guess you can have a woman as your best man.' "
 
Mr. Parry's wife, who now goes by Connie Gold-Parry, earned a degree in physical therapy. She is a team leader in physical therapy at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The steady, Monday-through-Friday, 9-to-5 type job has helped Ms. Gold-Parry raise the couple's two children, 4-year-old Alexander and Claire, who turns 2 in May.

It's a struggle, though, because Mr. Parry is not home most of the time, what with his acting ( Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl  runs through March 21 at the Dallas Theater Center), directing ( Texas Bound  begins March 15 and continues on intermittent Mondays through April 26), his Young Audiences daytime gig and the Undermain work.  "It's kind of a Catch-22," Ms. Gold-Parry says about their marriage. "One reason we get along so well is because we aren't together all the time. Absence does make the heart grow fonder. Before the children came, he was either busy in theater and I was busy doing theater and working. Now that the children are here, I miss him more as a father and a partner.
 
"But it does work," she says. "Raphael and I have always communicated real well. We try not to hold things in. He leaves me voice mails and I do the same for him. We communicate through voice mails a lot. Our quality time is usually Saturday and Sunday mornings when he has the schedule he has now. We have breakfast together as a family."

Simplifying life

Family is important to Mr. Parry. It has prompted him to make a few changes in his work schedule. Last spring, his son, Alexander, was diagnosed with mild autism. It was a sobering blow, an event that Mr. Parry sees as a sign that he must stabilize his future. Particularly his financial future, since Mr. Parry chooses not to get paid for his Undermain work. "Before we understood what his diagnosis was, I was just doing it because I love to do it," he says. "Now there are other factors. That's why, frankly, I took the Young Audiences job. It was a huge motivator. I needed some stability, I needed a paycheck, I needed to do a little bit less at night and some other things."

 Gigi Antoni, executive director of Young Audiences, is sensitive to Mr. Parry's family situation. But, above all else, she's just thrilled to have him as part of her ensemble. "I hired him because he's brilliant, talented, committed to his community," Ms. Antoni says. "I've always been an admirer of his work and a supporter of the Undermain. I feel what we put in front of our children is very important. It's important to find artists that will spend time giving back to the community. It's not unusual for an artist at some point in their career, particularly when they have children of their own, to turn their eye in that direction."
 
The idea of settling down, the thought of leading a more structured life, still hangs heavy over Mr. Parry's conscience. He keeps promising himself he'll take on less acting work, delegate more at the Undermain, focus more on the Young Audiences and teaching gigs.  "The fantasy would be that I could work like a wild man for seven months out of the year and then have the other five to just be at home," he says. "Or more regular, work 20 or 30 hours a week, and then have that intense creative period. I find I'm at my best when I'm really zooming, when I'm going all the way to the floor. When I'm directing, I feel so much better when I'm going crazy just generating ideas, just going and going and going. It takes a while for my motor to heat up, for my fire to get burning, but when it's burning, I gotta go."
 
 He's interested in films. Not Hollywood films, mind you, but independent, art-house motion pictures. He has two projects in the works: One is a feature-length, avant-garde effort tentatively titled  Cold.  The other would be a possible directorial debut that's still in the pre-production stages. "I like to think of myself as a scientist sometimes, an artist scientist," he says with a chuckle. "I'm really interested in where does film and theater come together. It's a little more than a hobby only inasmuch that I'm interested in the whole operation. Again, I'm not just interested in acting in it. I want to direct it, I want to act in it, I want to edit it, I want to shoot it."
 
There's a gleam in Mr. Parry's bold, hypnotic eyes. His mind is racing again. You can almost see his creative juices churning. The pioneer re-emerges.  "Set your own standards ...," he says. "To me, that's the key element of it, because a lot of the ground we go through, nobody's been there before, or if they have, it's not documented. You can't just pick up a book and say, 'How did they stage that play?' There's a whole lot of creating, a whole lot of thinking outside the box, a whole lot of trusting your intuition."