Judith Newmark; Post-Dispatch Theater Critic
19 September 1997
KEVIN KLINE sat on the stage at Saint Louis Priory School, one long leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee to support his arm, and mourned in a hard, despairing voice:
For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings!
Kline owned the stage; he owned the crowded theater.
That seemed appropriate, considering that the theater was recently named for him.
Kline is having a busy fall. His new comedy, "In & Out," opens nationwide today; his new drama, "The Ice Storm," opens the New York Film Festival next week and will open the St. Louis Film Festival in early November. And he's just started rehearsals for Anton Chekhov' s "Ivanov," opening in November at Lincoln Center.
But last Friday night, Kline - a 1965 graduate of Priory School - came home to accept the plaque christening the school's Kevin Kline Theatre, a modern, expandable 196-seat playhouse that was completed in January.
Kline also performed selections from Shakespeare for an intimate audience made up of the most generous donors to Priory's $7 million capital campaign, now over the halfway mark. It was the school's way of thanking them - and Kline's way of thanking the school.
"The Priory gave me a wonderful education," he said in an interview a few days before the performance, "not just academically but in every way. I owe it a great deal.
"This is a way that I can give something back. Of course, there are many other alumni who give back a great deal and who do wonderful things.
"But I am one of the few who performs. They can't ask all their successful surgeons to come back and present entertaining operations.
"It's one of the most harrowing crowds I will ever face, though. I'm going to have a lot of old buddies in the audience, and old teachers. Maybe that will make it fun.
"I just hope," he continued, reaching into his bag of acting tricks for a snooty voice, "that nobody comes to pay their cultural debt, my dear .
"You know - you listened to Shakespeare, now you're excused from the opera for the next two years. Those things are painful."
The day before the program, Kline was also at Priory School for an informal dress-rehearsal/assembly and a chance to talk with students.
The 375 boys in grades 7 through 12 and their teachers, many of them dressed in the traditional robes of Benedictine monks, were treated to a selection of Shakespeare's Biggest Hits: Jacques' "seven ages of man" speech from "As You Like It," the mournful "hollow crown" speech from "Richard II," and, of course, Hamlet's soliloquy.
Kline teased the audience with that one a little - he'll do it, he won't do it - until he had them yelling for "To be or not to be."
"Do It! Do it!" they cheered him. It was a little like a rock concert and Kline, commanding the nearly bare stage in black pants and sweatshirt, exuded the allure that's now most associated with rock stars - but was once the province of matinee idols.
If that term isn't utterly antique, it might be a workable definition of Kline's place in the performing arts: classicist and comedian, blessed with dashing good looks and a virile voice, he's an honest-to-goodness matinee idol built for the '90s.
True, he won his first Tony Award skewering matinee idols when he played a vain, bumbling actor in the musical comedy "On the Twentieth Century." A similar kind of role, once described as the "suave buffoon, " brought him another Tony when he played the pirate king in "The Pirates of Penzance."
He might have had yet another go at that sort of bravura character as the star of the upcoming Broadway musical "The Scarlet Pimpernel, " but he turned down the role. (He turns down so many roles, agents call him Kevin Decline.) He's doing Chekhov instead.
"Ivanov," Chekhov's first play, is rarely performed. Its opening night - after only four rehearsals, with a drunken leading man - was such a disaster that Chekhov himself stormed out, Kline said.
A new translation by David Hare, however, has been well-received in London. "I had read translations before, but they were all pretty drab," Kline said. "When I read Hare's, it blew me away.
"At the end, Ivanov blows his brains out. Strangely, though, it's a farce. It's very funny. And you see in it the beginnings of a lot of the characters Chekhov would continue to explore throughout his work."
Chekhov's work, Kline says, derives its gem-like quality from its particularity. "Chekhov's plays were about a certain class of people in a certain period of history, their mores and their thoughts, who are all gone now," he said, observing that much the same might be said about his new movie with Sigourney Weaver, "The Ice Storm."
Based on a "very depressing novel by Rick Moody," Kline said, it's "about a time in the 1970s when the sexual revolution came to the suburbs." Like much of Chekhov, he said, it takes a tragicomic tone.
"The Ice Storm" suggests some of the emotionally sweeping movies that have helped to define his film career: "Sophie's Choice," "Grand Canyon," "The Big Chill." His other new movie, "In & Out," is a farce. Audiences have already enjoyed Kline in comedies like "Dave," "Soap Dish" and "A Fish Called Wanda," for which he won an Oscar as best supporting actor. Some people think of him primarily as a film comedian.
But Kline and his wife, actress Phoebe Cates, make their home in Manhattan largely to stay close to live theater. They also think the city provides a more down-to-earth atmosphere for their children, 5-year-old Owen and 3-year-old Greta, than the lavish Los Angeles wonderland.
That sounds especially right for Cates, who grew up in New York. But for Kline, either glamorous big city is far from his own upbringing in Clayton. His parents, Peggy and the late Robert Kline, owned The Record Bar, a popular hang-out in Clayton. Their house was full of music; music was Kline's original major at Indiana University, before he switched to drama.
After he graduated, he studied at the Juilliard School, where the distinguished actor John Houseman chose him for the first Acting Company. For four years, Kline basically lived on a bus, touring the country and playing the classics.
It was terrific training, he says now, and led him to pursue a serious theatrical career in New York. Then, he "did what I vowed that I would never do, because I was an artist. I had vowed that I would never do a commercial and never do a soap.
"But I did both - because an artist's first duty is to eat. And I learned a lot from both - a lot about cameras, and a lot about discipline."
In fact, he already had a healthy degree of discipline, thanks to Priory School. In his senior year, he starred in "Mostellaria" by Plautus. (Kline's big coup: He persuaded Father Timothy Horner, Priory's founding headmaster, to present the play in English, not Latin as planned. "If we don't," he insisted, "the audience won't know when to laugh.")
He made his Shakespearean debut at Indiana, playing the bleeding captain in "Macbeth." "It's about 25 lines in the second scene," he said. "Then he faints - `But I am faint; my gashes cry for help' - and they carry him offstage. "It is one thing to read `Macbeth.' It's another to have only 25 lines and watch the other actors night after night for weeks. You really start to learn the play and to appreciate the genius of Shakespeare."
He fell for the glamour of theater, too, the wholehearted romance of backstage and stage center. "I love working in the old Broadway houses, grungy and filthy, places where work gets done," he said. "Those are places with an imperative, places where people have to deal with the moment. We collude, actors and audience, to get deeper and deeper inside of ourselves in the dark."
Kline loves making movies and derives most of his fame and fortune from them. But at Priory School, when one of his old teachers nailed him with the "If you were forced to choose" question, he didn't hesitate: Forced to choose, he'd pick the stage over the movies.
"When you've reached the heights of a great role, it's like living with the gods," he said. "The theater is magic."
Copyright © 1997, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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