The world's a stage for Fr. Walling, here playing Bill Jennings in The Last Fare. The years he has spent on stage and working toward a PhD in theater give him a combination of practical and theoretical knowledge that works for the benefit of his students.
hy don't you become a professional actor?" asks Fr. Dan Flaherty, SJ.
"What?" I gasp.
"I've seen you act; you've got talent. Use it!" Flaherty answers.
It is March 1978, and my provincial is telling me, a 49-year-old Jesuit, to go to work as an actor. "You can meet and influence people that other Jesuits would never contact," he adds.
Dan electrifies me. Acting with college and community theaters had been a joyous relief from what I had been doing at that time, hacking away at a PhD dissertation in theater at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois. But now go out and act full time? Hamlet says, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," and God must have agreed in my case. A couple of days later, Northlight Theater in Evanston offered me a role and, with that, the chance to get what most actors covet: membership in the Actors Equity Association, the professional stage actors' union. That afternoon, with $300 in my pocket, I went downtown and got an Equity card.
With that card, getting an audition with a professional theater was easy; getting a role was not. During my years of amateur acting, I was cast in all but one play I tried out for. Now I was competing with seasoned actors. My first professional role was as the Royal Huntsman in a children's theater production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I was not an unqualified success. At one matinee, right in the middle of an impassioned soliloquy asking whether I would help the evil queen murder Snow White, one bored toddler cried out, "Aw, shut up!"
I recovered from that by December, and I auditioned at Lincolnshire Marriott Theater for The Rainmaker. I was cast as Sheriff Thomas to support Bill Starbuck, who was played by the future ambassador to Mexico, John Gavin.
Then I tried out for Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, a musical celebrating Catholic school days; a few days later the producer asked me to take the role of Fr. O'Reilly--I was the only auditionee who they thought could give that role the sternness it demanded. Shoes ran for three and a half years, a record for a Chicago musical at the time; I was with the show for six grueling months of daily performances Tuesday through Friday and two on Saturday and Sunday.
And then, movie stardom struck! Director John Landis cast me as prison guard #2 in The Blues Brothers and gave me three lines and an appearance with John Belushi in the opening scenes, shot on location at the old Joliet prison.
In 1980 I moved to New York and began auditioning rounds. Trying out for an Equity Library Showcase production of The Devil's Disciple, I was cast as William Dudgeon. I had a one-day role as "doctor seated at cafeteria table" on the soap opera One Life to Live. The most moving acting experience I had in New York was playing a tragic derelict, Skelly Mannor, in a production of The Rimers of Eldritch. Though we performed in the basement of a church on the Upper West Side, it was as exciting as Lincoln Center.
Fr. Walling (right) played Sheriff Thomas in The Rainmaker.
Summer-stock roles followed; at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia, I was cast in four plays. When I moved there, I found no Catholic church, so I began offering daily mass in a Lutheran church, attracting a small congregation of Catholics.
Since New York City had proved such a rewarding experience, I thought it would be challenging to gain acting experience in Los Angeles, the film and television capital, while continuing work on my dissertation. In April 1982 I moved there and began making auditioning rounds. There were fewer theaters in Los Angeles; it was a place whereÊa lot of the casting was done by casting directors. But, like Blanche Dubois, I've long depended on the kindness of strangers; that summer I landed a role as Captain Schmidt in a production of Full Circle.
PhD in hand, I moved to Milwaukee in 1986 to begin teaching in Marquette University's theater department. But I also continued acting these last ten years, chalking up roles with the Milwaukee Chamber Theater and the Acacia Theater, a Christian theater.
All of this would not have been possible without the support I received from my Jesuit superiors. While I was in theology studies at West Baden College in Indiana, Fr. Walt Farrell saw me act in community skits and urged me to study acting and directing, which I did for a summer at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. At St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, where I spent seven years teaching drama and directing the Harlequins, president Fr. Don Hayes urged me to stick with it those times when I was tempted to give it up. His successor, Fr. James Creighton, and the provincial, Fr. Robert Harvanek, both gave me the go-ahead to get an MA in theater, which I began at the Goodman School of Drama in 1970 and at Northwestern. It was Fr. Flaherty who, when he was provincial, urged me to continue at Northwestern for a PhD and to make that move to New York. Fr. Leo Klein, the next provincial, OK'd my years in Los Angeles, which I spent acting and finishing my dissertation. And in 1986, Santa Clara University's Fr. Fred Tollini gave me a postdoctoral fellowship to act in the university's production that summer of Catch Me If You Can.
I am deeply indebted to all of them. They were what we all want in life: people who make us do what we can. And what they made me do was complement my studies with real-life experience on stage. "Teaching grows out of performing; performing lays the foundations of teaching. I can't imagine teaching without having significant experience as a performer." I wish I had said that. These are the words of Northwestern professor of flute Walfrid Kujala. But they certainly resonate with my own experience. The combination of my study and acting experiences gave me something wonderful to share with students, and I did.
Over the years I've directed students in plays at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago and the Academy of the Sacred Heart there; Loyola University Chicago; Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Illinois; and Marquette University and Marquette University High in Milwaukee. This fall I returned to St. Ignatius to work with acting students and to teach theater at Loyola University Chicago.
My happiest moments during all these years have been those when I helped students gain self-expression and self-confidence. At Marquette I taught Acting for Non-Theater Majors, taking beginners through a gamut of acting experiences, from simple improvisations to scenes from plays. The demand for the course became so great I found myself teaching four sections a semester. One young woman who had struggled early in the semester came up after the last class and told me, "I'm not shy anymore." She had learned what Marlon Brando once said: "Acting is something that most people think they're incapable of but they do it from morning to night."
And I myself have grown; the years I've spent with acting students have made me more compassionate and more understanding of human weakness. I discovered what Anna says in The King and I: "By your pupils you will be taught." For me, the most precious grace from coaching acting students is finding Jesus in each one. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:
Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his to the Father through the features of men's faces.
Breaker Morant says, "I've had a good run"; I modify that by saying I continue to have good runs, finding Jesus in my students and rejoicing in my theater work.
Page maintained by R VandeVelde, vande@math.luc.edu. Updated: Sat., February 22 1997