Actors Denise Crosby, Gale Harold & Claudia Mason: Tennessee Ascending

We start with Gale Harold as Valentine “Snakeskin” Xavier. It would be more polite or conventional to start with one of the ladies, but Snakeskin and perhaps Harold himself are anything but conventional. Williams describes this Orpheus as “having a wild beauty about him,” a drifter who “can burn a woman down.” Wow!

As you know Harold from his television and film work, he certainly has the wild beauty and burn ’em down business pretty well handled. Among his many roles, he’s been the lead Brian Kinney on Showtime’s hit series Queer as Folk, Susan Meyers’ lover on Desperate Housewives and Wyatt Earp on HBO’s Deadwood.  But, did you know he began as an intern at A Noise Within?

Harold’s memories may be even more recognizable to theatre actors. “We were doing Cymbeline at LATC, he recounts, “and I was getting to that stage in my career where I was thinking New York or Chicago. I wasn’t a good auditioner in LA. I hadn’t mastered the Shurtleff style. But, my manager wanted me to audition for Queer as Folk. It was presented more like a movie for cable so I went to read.

“I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care how I looked. I had $5 to my name and ran out of gas on the way to the audition. I had to hunt around in my car to find enough change to get there.

“I had seen the original British version of the show and I knew how an American would play the role-unapologetically OUT, take it or leave it. So I opened up my guns and let them blaze.  When I was done, I let them know ‘if you want me back, I can’t read Monday…I have to strike Cymbeline.'”

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.  –TW

Why choose Orpheus Descending to perform?

Harold is big on his coach Kim Gillingham. “I am fascinated,” he says, “by how she guided me to make choices amidst all the chaos and to find the feelings that allow me to hold onto those choices. At the end of last year, I called and asked her if she knew of something more rigorous that I could work on every day. She called back and recommended this play. Val. It was a very terrifying thought, and exciting.

“First and foremost, there are the words. He built this man’s way of speaking-‘a peculiar talker.’ I’m from Atlanta and spent my formative years in Florida, Georgia and Alabama.  There’s French, Spanish, Italian and black culture. It’s phraseology.

“It’s like a symphonic arrangement and, when we’re all talking to each other, the strings play together on stage. They talk to each other with echoes of a mandolin or violin. As our director Lou Pepe says ‘it’s an incantation.'”

Harold, that “younger man,” says “I have a 1001 fears. We can sit around on a blanket with some wine and grapes and get to them all. But mostly, when there’s such a great playwright, you don’t want to sully his adaptation of a myth that makes rocks cry.

“There’s also the fear of the next trap – don’t play the metaphor. Val is a singer and a hustler…a man on the run, not a man with a lute serenading a nymph. I do perform ‘Heavenly Grass’ though, the most terrifying thing of all.” Terrifying perhaps because Williams wrote it himself. An ethereal ode to his audience.