Twenty-one years ago, Palm Beach Dramaworks was a fledgling troupe trying to gain an audience and critical attention in the county’s crowded cultural scene. As its co-founder and current producing artistic director William Hayes recalls, the company turned a corner towards those goals by mounting Ronald Harwood’s World War II backstage tale, The Dresser, is which Hayes appeared in the title role.
“That was really our first play that started to draw an audience, and we extended it,” Hayes remembers. “We had had some missteps along the way, and we said, ‘OK, we’re going to give this one all we got.’ We had a little postage stamp-size stage. Although it’s got a large cast I thought the intimate nature of the piece was really suited to our space. You really felt like you were in the dressing room with these guys. But it really stretched us to the limits.”
Over the years, theatergoers kept asking Hayes whether Dramaworks was ever going to revive The Dresser. In its current much larger playhouse, he felt they could do the work greater justice, so he added it to the 20th anniversary line-up in 2020. But that put the play on a collision course with the pandemic and its canceled season. Add in a few years of recovery and Hayes then re-scheduled the play for now — PBD’s 25th anniversary season — opening this Friday for a three-week run.
Hayes will be returning to the stage as Norman, the all-around factotum to the British touring company’s leading player and business manager Sir, to be played by Dramaworks veteran, Colin McPhillamy.
“I’ve worked with Colin now for well over 10 years,” says J. Barry Lewis, who directs this production. “The diversity of his library of work is extraordinary. It was ‘Of course we want Colin to play this role.’ It just seemed to be the perfect fit.”
Playwright Harwood (1934-2020), whose bio includes such stage scripts as Taking Sides,Quartet and the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Pianist, spent most of the 1950s as personal assistant to the renowned Sir Donald Wolfit (1902-1968), whose symbiotic relationship inspired The Dresser. In the play, the aging, weary Sir must be cajoled by Norman to persevere through a performance of Shakespeare’s epic tragedy, King Lear.
At its core, The Dresser is a love story, the unrequited love of Norman for Sir. And it is a valentine to theater itself. “I always find people have long had a fascination with that backstage world,’ says Lewis. “We in the audience usually only see the results, that final glitz, the glamour. Well, here it’s just the opposite. So we’re looking at the struggle, the challenge of what it is to maintain and survive. Two words in the text keep popping out at me, ‘struggle’ and ‘survival,’ which is in essence the life of any theater. So we are opening up the backstage world to our audiences.”
In addition to the two juicy leading roles — in a cast of 10 — The Dresser is a thought-provoking text, a classic Dramaworks play that adheres to its mission statement of “theater to think about.”
“I think it has a lot of dimensions about the backstage world and how it functions. But it’s also about coming to a point in one’s life where you have to make amends and come to terms with the past,” offers Lewis. “And that is a very powerful story, a storyline that needs thought. It’s more than just an entertainment piece, because it deals with the issue of what your life has amounted to.”
The play’s life-or-death theme is heightened by the ever-present awareness of wartime. “What is very important, almost like an unspoken character, is that it is taking place during World War II. There were bombings on a daily basis, and the potential for loss of life was evident,” Lewis adds. “And because of that, the play deals with end of life. It asks us to sort of look back and try to analyze whether we have made a difference, has my life meant something.”
McPhillamy has long been an admirer of The Dresser and its high-stakes setting. “I suppose it’s just such a brilliant portrait of what live theater is, against all odds,” he says. “I mean we’re seldom in a situation quite as extreme as that — in wartime — but sometimes you can really be up against it.”
He had been talking for years to Hayes about doing The Dresser and recalls that he was interested from the first mention of the play. “I didn’t have to think about it. He said ‘The Dresser’? And I went, ‘Yes’,” McPhillamy explains. “Could I do it? I didn’t know, but there’s only one way to find out.”
Sir and his troupe are traveling the provinces of England with a rotating repertoire of Shakespeare plays. And it is no accident that Harwood has them performing King Lear this particular night, for there are substantial parallels between Sir and Norman and Lear and his Fool. “[Sir] has an enormous ego, he’s bombastic, he’s self-obsessed, he’s a bit of a ham and a hugely talented Shakespearean actor,” says McPhillamy of the role he will play. “It’s not ‘King Lear,’ but it’s ‘King Lear’-adjacent. So it’s a great opportunity to have fun with that character. He’s a lovable monster, if you like. But he’s also in a moment of great crisis.”
Asked about the challenges the role presents him with, McPhillamy responds, “Well, it’s quite demanding technically. Costume, make-up, there’s a lot of all of that. There’s not a lot of time to prepare so you’ve got to be in the moment. You’ve got to stay present the whole time. Because you’re playing someone who isn’t present. There’s a contradiction there.”
Hayes fully expects that this return to the role of Norman after two decades will result in a more meaningful performance on his part. “With 20 added years of life experience, I feel I understand the character more,” he says. “There were just some things that I was missing in the earlier version. Hopefully I can now bring it more depth.” He concedes with a tiny chuckle that he can be his harshest critic. “I’m one of those actors who thinks there’s always room for improvement. But I guess people were responding to that production, so there must have been something right about it, on the surface anyway.”
So even if you were around in 2020 and saw The Dresser at Dramaworks back then, Lewis feels certain you will want to see it again now. “For any play we see over again, it’s because it speaks to us personally. It’s like visiting an old friend. And hopefully, if you’re seeing it for the seventh time, you’ll see something new in it.”
“Oh, it’s a great play,” chimes in McPhillamy. “You can see great plays more than once, can’t you? It’s got it all. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you really wonder why. You’ll be entertained, but more than that you’ll get an insight as to why we need theater as much as we need law or medicine and engineering.”
THE DRESSER, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. From Fri., Dec. 20 to Sun., Jan. 5. $72-$107. 561-514-4042.