Amy Jo Herzberg : The play’s the thing
Posted on Sunday, March 12, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Northwest_Profiles/148458/
SELF-PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: Oct. 20, 1959, Phoenix Family: husband Robert Ford My favorite junk food is potato chips. My best time of day is not the morning. It’s the rest. I like to wear jeans, a T-shirt or a tank top and a sweater. When I’m in the shower, I sing music from The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown. People I’d invite to a fantasy dinner party are Bill Clinton, Patrick Stewart, Bob Saget and Sarah Silverman — and my husband, Bob. My favorite author is Bob. His book (The Student Conductor ) is one of the best books I’ve ever read. The last book I read was The Kite Runner (by Khaled Hosseini ) as part of The Whisperers book club. My favorite television shows are Six Feet Under, The West Wing, X-Files and Star Trek Next Generation. My all-time favorite movie is Cinema Paradiso. I’m compulsive about coffee. We get coffee from Peet’s Coffee and Tea, based in Berkeley, Calif. I hate smoking. If I just had more time, I’d plant a shrub for my dog in the backyard. One word to sum me up: happy
FAYETTEVILLE — Amy
Herzberg desperately
wanted to take piano
lessons, just like her
two older sisters. Just 4, she threw a two-hour fit. Her mother acquiesced but thought she’d just teach the youngster herself. When Herzberg began practicing two hours a day, her mother decided to turn her over to a regular teacher. That was in the early 1960 s, and Herzberg’s lifelong competitive streak was already developing. She wanted to play even better than her sisters. But piano was just the beginning, her start in the world of performance. She recalls a recital where she was the youngest, just 5, and first performer. She played and sang “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon.” The audience clapped for her. And she loved it.
“And then I ran back to the piano, and I played it and sang it again. And I looked out at the audience, waiting for them to applaud again,” she recalls.
This Arizona native is passionate about acting, directing, teaching and making theater an integral part of the community. She has striking good looks, with a thin figure, chiseled face and a mane of thick, black hair.
Now 46, she has been part of the University of Arkansas’ drama department since 1989. During her time at the UA, she has directed about 30 productions, many of them musicals, including Assassins, Parade and Cabaret.
Roger Gross, UA drama professor, says Herzberg spends more time than anyone else in rehearsal, refining and perfecting a show to meet her high personal standards. He also praises her dedication to her students.
“She can be the most demanding and strict teacher and director without alienating the people she’s working with. They love her with unbelievable fervor,” Gross says.
Herzberg was chosen as last year’s top teacher campuswide, winning the Charles and Nadine Baum Faculty Award for excellence in teaching. And, she’s part of a group founding a local professional theater company, TheatreSquared.
“The funny thing is, my whole life, all I wanted to do was theater,” she says. “I mean I’ve been involved with piano and all that. The whole time I was involved, all I wanted to do was theater.”
She’s completely at home on stage, but personally, she can be painfully shy. Herzberg’s not uncertain about her teaching or directing abilities. Nor is she unconfident in her theater knowledge and creativity. She’s just shy. And she can also act her way out of that. Acting is her addiction.
When she was in third grade, she inflated and popped her empty brown paper lunch sack. Her punishment: standing on the stage at one end of the cafeteria. From then on, she brought her lunch as much as possible. “It isn’t just work — it’s not like even it’s the paycheck, which it is,” she says. “It’s also like does your heart get to live and sing and do exactly what you strive and crave to do your whole life — or not ?”
MAKING CONNECTIONS Herzberg comes by that competitive streak naturally. Her parents, Art and Florence Herzberg, are professional bridge players, and she grew up around their genius and passion for games. Her parents played Scrabble about every night and had countless decks of cards ready for action. Herzberg says she learned to be analytical and developed shortcuts with Scrabble but doesn’t have as good a vocabulary as does her husband, Robert Ford, an author and playwright. He says one of her tricks is a song she wrote containing every two-letter word that can be used in the game.
Herzberg is a skilled sight reader of music and for several years didn’t practice between piano lessons. She stayed with piano largely because she was trying to better her sisters.
In seventh grade, she started taking lessons from a professor at Arizona State University. While preparing for rigorous piano competitions, she also acted in plays. That conflict and inner struggle would rage for years.
Herzberg describes her young self as awkward and nerdy. Performing, at piano recitals and in plays, connected her to others.
“I felt like I had a communication going, and it wasn’t so lonely,” she says. “And it seemed like I did that a whole lot better through the arts than I did as a human being,” she says, giggling. She often giggles, even when teaching. She’s funny, loves to make puns and seems carefree while juggling the many parts of her life. Herzberg acted in plays through junior high and began taking drama classes in high school. She also auditioned for everything she could, particularly at Phoenix’s community theater, the only theater in town. Potential actors were supposed to be 18, but, at 16, she lied about her age and won a part in Charlie’s Aunt.
MAKING THE JUMP Herzberg got a full scholarship to Arizona State University as a piano performance major. Her second day, she auditioned for a play. Her piano teacher told her she couldn’t prepare for a forthcoming piano competition and be in a play, so she dropped the play.
“But then, I just couldn’t bear it. So then I went again and auditioned for something. And this time, I decided I just wouldn’t tell him,” she says.
Her teacher found out, and she soon realized her life was moving in another direction. Playing piano in a room by herself all day was too lonely. Theater was calling her.
“There was never a choosing. It chooses you. And that’s what’s true for almost everybody in theater,” she says. “Because if one was to choose, no one in their right mind would choose theater.”
In summers, she acted at summer stock theaters and attended training at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
For her graduate work, she sought the prestigious California Institute of the Arts. The work she did then greatly influences the way she teaches, largely because she felt the program there was too harsh on students. At that time, it was about “closing you and forcing” acting.
“I don’t think you can be closed and prickly and guarded and be a good actor,” she says. “I think the idea of expanding and opening and uncovering and unguarding and risking is what you need.”
Then, she went to La Jolla Playhouse, which had big-money show budgets and “opening night parties were on yachts.”
She auditioned for San Diego Repertory Theatre, spunkily insisting she be a company member. It was her dream job: mornings spent training, afternoons rehearsing and nights performing. Every night for a month, she dreamed she was flying.
During down times, she also worked with theater companies and taught in Colorado. Then, a friend put her name in the hat for a teaching job at Trinity University in San Antonio.
She was 28 and considered turning down the job. Seeing her nameplate on her office door was “one of the most terrifying moments of my life.” Yet, she was about to launch into teaching. “I didn’t realize, which I then realized, that I would fall in love with it harder than I had fallen really for anything,” she says. She would soon face another hard fall, this time for true love.
A NATURAL STATE FIT For much of her life, Herzberg has felt that she wasn’t in charge. She has often voiced this feeling of her life choosing her path for her, of things just falling into place. For instance, she engaged in an 11-year, onand-off romantic relationship when she was 18. She admits she was a terrible girlfriend because theater came first. Every time.
One of the last things that boyfriend ever said to her was that the University of Arkansas had called.
She’d applied at the UA because five people she knew — students in Texas and colleagues in California — had been from Fayetteville. That seemed too bizarre to ignore. At the least, she’d thought, she could visit her friends during an interview.
Herzberg did visit a friend. In her interview at the drama department, she insisted she’d only stay at the job a year.
“Who says that ?” she marvels.
Kent Brown, then department chairman, told her he was willing to take that chance. That was almost 17 years ago.
“I always say that getting this job was like winning the lottery without knowing I’d bought a ticket,” she says.
She discovered a drama department filled with people who felt like family. They all take on extra classes and students, and commit their lives to their craft and teaching it, she says.
“When you’re in a classroom, you can do the kind of [creative ] work you desperately want to do that you can’t always do when you’re being paid,” she says. “It’s work, but it’s also a calling, you know. And so you just sort of wind up, eagerly, happily, doing more, just because you want the experience to be the right experience.”
“Hers is a genuine, outgoing, compassionate, enlightened demeanor,” says Andy Gibbs, current department chairman. “I think she believes very much in the value of the group as opposed to any kind of personal, solo performance.”
Nathan Riley, a graduate student, says Herzberg supported him even when the UA’s drama program was full. He drove from Oklahoma, and she coached him for two days to prepare him for an audition that landed him a year-long job. He got in the program the next year.
“She asks the students to start with their hearts and go from there,” Riley says.
A couple of years back, Herzberg had a painful neck injury. She has improved with therapy, but she never considered not teaching.
“Every day I would wake up with his horrible pain and want to go to work,” she says. “It’s so much fun, and if you’re in this creative mode with these wonderful, generous people, you can be transported.”
She has a love-hate relationship with directing, stemming from the collaborative yet unpredictable nature of shows. Her normal insomnia typically worsens when she’s in the middle of a show. She’s often working out solutions in her sleep, says her husband, who goes by Bob. She says he’s sweet, and often talks her back to sleep.
Herzberg met him at a threeweek playwriting retreat in 1994 when she acted in a play he’d written. As soon as she saw him, she knew she was in trouble. They said five words to each other the whole time — until the last night. Then they talked until 6 a. m.
She was so excited, she literally couldn’t sit down. They knew they’d met their future. They “quirkily” have the same interests, including both going from classical music to theater. Previously not a coffee drinker, he now shares in the morning French roast coffee they order from Peet’s Coffee and Tea, which they even take with them on vacation.
At that 1994 retreat, he recalls, she played three very different lead roles in three plays.
“She just nailed every one,” Ford says. “She gets to an understanding of a character, intellectually, very quickly.”
After dating long distance, he finally moved here, and they married in October 2000. They share their Mount Sequoyah home with their cats and Scudderpup, an 8-year-old terrier mix she rescued from the animal shelter.
THEATER REFLECTS LIFE Despite her experience, Herzberg says she can’t sing and is a poor musical theater performer. She was successful once in a musical only because she learned to properly integrate her acting skills. For actors, thinking about singing can take away from their acting performance, she says. But, music can add an emotional element to a show and enhance its message. Her piano teacher from seventh grade also taught her the language of music, how to analyze it to guide theatrical decisions. She uses that skill when directing musicals, looking to the musical accompaniment rather than the melody to assess a character’s inner life. “I look very strongly at the analysis of the music to help me figure out the acting choice and the life of the character,” she says.
Everything Herzberg knows about theater came from the quality training and teachers she has encountered in her life. Her students continue to inspire and invigorate her.
“They are in love with theater and with words and with the human heart and what it means to tell the story of being a human being. And what it means to explore the story of being a human being,” she says.
People produce theater, and people watch it, for the shared humanity.
“We get to go there and see the truth of what can happen to the human heart put in various situations. And it’s immensely interesting,” she says.
She pushes her students to find themselves, to use their own emotions while telling other people’s stories.
“But you can’t put on somebody else’s heart. You have to find how to tell that story within your heart. Ah, that’s what’s so interesting,” she says.
During a recent musical theater performance class, she watches three actresses perform songs on stage, giving each feedback afterward. Seated in the seventh row, among the students, she’s more concerned with “process” than “product.” She wants more fight in their voices, so has them sing while pushing full-body against a wall. She tells them to think about their character’s inner life, informing that from the musical accompaniment.
As drama department pianist, Jeannie Lee has worked extensively with Herzberg for more than 10 years. Lee says Herzberg has a generous heart and tries every way possible to elicit the best a student can offer.
“She’s just so tenacious that way. She just won’t give up on a student, write them off,” she says.
Ford says his wife overworks herself and doesn’t delegate or say “no” enough. Her students are free to call her at home. She’s ambitious, but that ambition is directed toward her students ’ work and the shows she directs to be the best possible.
“She’s not egoless because she sees everything she does as a reflection of herself,” Ford says.
EXPONENTIAL THEATER Building theater into children’s education and a community’s lives greatly affects society, Herzberg says. People witness worlds and ideas they might never encounter in real life. Whether whimsical musical or thought-provoking play, audiences simply share space and experience. “[Theater ] discusses things we’re afraid to discuss. It gets conversations going on inside of us that need to happen, that we don’t always have with other people,” she says. Herzberg particularly enjoyed directing Proof, which tackles mental illness. Seeing Wit helped her understand ovarian cancer when her sister faced breast cancer. She also points to a play she saw during a trip to Atlanta, Lips Together Teeth Apart. The play touches on the subject of homosexuality, but more directly looks at people’s fear. The title isn’t sexual innuendo, but rather refers to a character who grinds his teeth together from tension. “It’s about the suppression and what it does to us,” she says.
She’s not a big crier, but she sat in her car at the Marietta, Ga., theater parking lot, in tears.
“This is what theater does for you. That came along and discussed something that I needed discussed in my own life that I wasn’t discussing,” she says.
To continue and expand theater’s impact in the region, Herzberg, her husband and other theater professionals have founded TheatreSquared, a regional company of professional artists similar to Little Rock’s Arkansas Repertory Theatre. She will direct the first production, a one-woman show called Bad Dates, in May, and then The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown in November.
“One of the reasons I always would talk about wanting to start a theater was because it’s so frustrating to work with these people and train these people — and train them to be exactly what you want to work with — and then never see them again. Because there’s no place that they can work here,” she says.
That doesn’t keep them away from theater — they’ve been involved in various community theater opportunities. But that’s not professional theater.
The result of a Kennedy Center teaching fellowship she received in 2003, Herzberg is also involved with the New York-based Actors Center, founded by J. Michael Miller, a veteran actor and director. She’s also part of the Congress of Actors and Acting Teachers, an invitation-only event held in January, along with actors such as Billy Crudup and Olympia Dukakis. By Miller’s design, future meetings will be held around the country, as members discuss the roles of actors and theater in society.
“Acting and theater can be so New York-central,” Herzberg says. “And [Miller ] really has this vision that if theater is to be an important part of society, culture, everyone’s lives — which it is — then we need to embrace it and nurture it for every person and not just New York.”