Content area
Full text
His hit-all-the-bases career has circled back to where it began-on the boards
MICHAEL CRISTOFER HAS FINALLY FIGURED out what he wants to be when he grows up.
The 66-year-old has been a prize-winning playwright, pocketing both a Pulitzer and a best-play Tony Award for his 1977 drama The Shadow Box. He has run a theatre, as co-artistic director of River Arts Repertory in Woodstock, N.Y., where he nurtured new plays like Edward Albee's Three Tall Women. He has been a director for stage (where his critically acclaimed productions included his own adaptation of Ghosts, starring Joanne Woodward) and screen (winning a Director's Guild of America Award for the television movie Gia).
Paul Newman (who directed the Shadow Box film adaptation) once remarked that Cristofer didn't have a game plan. Cristofer responded, "Not having one is the game plan."
Now, however, the game plan is finally in place. Cristofer has circled back to where he was in his twenties, when he first found his calling on stage as a performer. "I suspect I was always meant to be an actor, and that's it," Cristofer says today, without reservation. "I really love doing this."
Cristofer met with early success as an actor, and he performed periodically into the early 1990s, but then stopped cold (in part because of persistent stage fright) for IS years. It was in 2006 that he returned to the boards at Woodward's behest, in Old Wicked Songs at the Westport Country Playhouse. "Most people didn't know anymore that I did acting," he says of his comeback. "This play had two people on stage, and I had to speak with a Viennese accent, sing and play the piano. I thought, 'If I could do this. . ..'"
If he could do that, he felt could act in just about anything - so he set out to fulfill the fantasies he'd put on the back burner: Shakespeare in Central Park (Capulet in Romeo arid Juliet, 2007), Chekhov at Massachusetts 's Williamstown Theatre Festival (Chebutykin in Three Sisters, 2008), Arthur Miller on Broadway (Alfieri in A View from the Bridge, 2010). Every time he hit the boards, the accolades followed.
Beyond the classics, the other great challenge for any actor is putting one's stamp on...