There have been lots of famous “returns.” The Return of the Jedi, The Return of the Pink Panther, The Return of Tarzan, even the Shaggy Dog. But none is quite as special to UD theatre fans as The Return of the Alumni—the moniker for the 1999-2000 season of the Professional Theatre Training Program (PTTP).

While faculty and staff are busy scouring the country to recruit the PTTP class of 2003, seasoned alums are returning to campus to present a variety of shows that range from Shakespeare’s Henry V to the wacky Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged). The world premiere of Orson by Daniel Mark Feldman opened the season that also includes Betrayal, Dear Liar, The Real Thing and The Triumph of Love.

Tim Gregory, AS ’95M, returned to campus in September as Orson Welles a role for which he literally had to learn to swallow fire.

Bearing an eerie resemblance to a young Orson Welles, with a voice that easily echoes those famed radio intonations, Gregory found, in researching the part, that he and Welles also shared an almost identical repertoire as stage actors.

“I think I was preordained to dance with this gentleman at some point in my career,” he says.

Two years ago, Gregory played Welles in another show about the making of his film, Citizen Kane.

“The reviews were great. It was as if they’d all been written by my mom,” the modest actor says. “When this play (Orson) came around, a casting agent remembered me from the first show. That’s how I got involved in the project.”

Asked about the stress of doing a one-person show, Gregory exclaims, “Oh my God, it’s hard! There’s no one else up there. No one to lean on!”

That may be especially true in the case of Orson, where, in addition to learning an hour-and-a-half worth of lines, Gregory also had to remember the timing of several multi-media scenes and change both costume and make-up right on stage. The legend about Welles wanting to become a magician is built into the show and, for that, Gregory had to learn to swallow fire, pull a rabbit out of a hat and make a cane and handkerchief disappear.

And, just how does one learn to swallow fire for a role? Hire a fire-eating coach, of course.

“Let’s just say I did McBeth about a year and half ago and there were some guys in it who ate fire and ate it very well. They stayed at my apartment in New York for about three days this spring and taught me. We had to practice outside, of course, and we did draw crowds. I think my fianc´e was impressed,” he says, sounding dubious.

The second offering in the PTTP season, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, uses flashbacks to look at all the aspects of betrayal in an extramarital triangle. In real life, the husband and wife acting team of Steve Tague and Kathleen Pirkl Tague have a much more enduring marriage.

Tague, now an assistant professor of theatre at UD, worked as a professional actor for seven years after graduating in 1984 from PTTP when it was located in Wisconsin. A suprise offer to come back and teach voice for a semester has stretched into a new-found dedication to teaching.

“I fell in love with the process and the rewards of teaching,” he says. “I never expected that it would become my ‘real’ job.”

Tague, who also has several roles in The Compleat Works says he enjoys the challenge and change from the intensity of Betrayal to the frivolousness of the Shakespeare parody.

He met Pirkl, AS ’92M, after both had completed the program. They returned to Newark when Tague was offered the job at UD.

The two have acted together before in productions in Cleveland and in communities near the Great Lakes. In the previous PTTP alumni season, they appeared in MacBeth and Arsenic and Old Lace. Most summers they travel to the Idaho Shakespeare Festival to perform for the season, but because of their young children, Isabel and Simon, the two actors have cut back on travel.

Pirkl Tague says she decided to return to graduate school after several years of acting in New York. Her search for a program grounded in the classics led her to PTTP. While a student, some of her favorite productions were The Cherry Orchard, Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Glass Menagerie.

Betrayal, Pirkl Tague says, is a play she has known and loved for a long time. As she was preparing for its Oct. 28-Nov. 20 run, she says she was finding the character of Emma “complex and challenging for her capacity to live a double life.”

After the heavy drama of Betrayal, the season turned to the wacky play, The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged), which ran Nov. 5-21. Wayne Pyle, AS ’95M, was part of the cast and described the show’s humor as “a mix of Saturday Night Live and Austin Powers.”

“It’s all very sophomoric, but lots of fun,” he says. “It’s a show about three guys trying to perform all of Shakespeare’s plays in two hours. It’s a great parody. In the first act, Titus Andronicus gets turned into a cooking show and the histories are presented as a football game.

“In the second act, we do Hamlet three times and, at one point, I get to run out of the theatre screaming.”

The show, Pyle says, has hundreds of costume changes and is a perennial hit at regional Shakespeare festivals.

“It’s fun to work on and very adaptable,” he says. “When it was written, for example, there were references to Princess Diana, which wouldn’t be appropriate today. We’ve changed those and added some local humor—even some references to UD professors.”

Pyle was acting in Chicago when he got the urge to return to graduate school. He choose PTTP, he says, because of the faculty’s commitment to helping students “make a life in the theatre—not just get a job.”

By his third year in the program, Pyle was involved in a season that included 16 plays produced in rotating repertoire. An experience he terms “amazing.”

Pyle, who teaches undergraduate theatre classes at UD, lives in Newark with his wife, Kim, who teaches choral music at Newark High School. It’s a great location for an actor, he says, and he keeps busy with projects as varied as industrial films in Philadelphia to the Shakespeare Festival in Baltimore.

He maintains strong ties to many of his former professors and classmates and is currently working with several to mount a production of Hamlet in Taiwan in the near future.

Five alumni returned in December as members of The Independent Shakespeare Co. to present Henry V from Dec. 2-5. Performances were sold out well in advance.

An international group of performers, The Independent Shakespeare Co. includes Melissa Chalsma, AS ‘92M; Ron Bashford, AS ’92M; Kelli Kerslake, AS ‘95M; Danny Camiel, AS ‘95M; and Carine Montbertrand, AS ‘99M. All played numerous roles in the production.

Working in an updated Elizabethan style, this highly skilled group of professionals presented Shakespeare as the Bard himself might recognize it. Sets, light and costumes were pared down to their emblematic essentials and flights of directorial fancy were kept strictly under wraps.

In a practical sense, this meant looking at the conditions that Shakespeare’s own theatre company might have faced. Since an outdoor theatre would have no artificial lighting, the company restricts the production to a general wash light with no changes during the performance. Actors on an Elizabethan stage generally wore their own clothes unless they needed a special costume piece—a crown for a king or a miter for a bishop, for example, and the company does the same. Any sound effects are generated by the performers themselves.

Looking toward the spring, casting is not yet complete for The Real Thing and The Triumph of Love, although Tague and Pirkl have been cast in Dear Liar, slated for March.

–Beth Thomas