Thanks, Pat.
Fascinating, Gothick, thanks!
The next panel was Lisa Richards, Jerry Lacy (taking Roger Davis’ place), and Chris Pennock.
A fan found Reverend Trask to be sympathetic. “Trask was really a nice guy at heart,” Lacy told us, getting laughter. He just got some bad info. Regarding the fly that landed on the top of his nose, he said he should’ve hit it with the cross [in his hand]. Instead, he blew on it, which ended up looking like it had flown into his mouth and he was spitting it out.
What have you all done in the past year? Richards: She played Amanda [in The Glass Menagerie at The Greenway Court Theatre]. She teaches at the Actor’s Studio, her daughter got married, and she’s been writing a book. She doesn’t have any other projects in the works. Her son, musician Alex Ebert, was with her there earlier.
Pennock asked for a show of hands… Who is going to vote? Thanks to Stephen Mendillo he continues to thrive as an actor and doesn’t have to audition. He’ll be performing again at the Odyssey Theatre in “Waiting for Grace” [opening November 12]. He asked how many saw him in [Wendy Wasserman’s] “Third”. There were some whoops from the audience. He was in Ansel Faraj’s web series “Theatre Fantastique" [in “The Job Interview”] playing a vampire-- something he’d never done before.
Richards says she’ll keep working for Big Finish as long as they keep asking, and she just received notice of another one. She recently played a small part in a movie called Frank and Ava as Harry Dean Stanton’s wife. She said he’s funny in it.
Lacy: Just today, he learned that he and Lara will do more in the BF detective series. They each wrote one and performed them recently; his was out the time of the Tarrytown Fest and hers will be out soon. He also made a movie about Frankenstein [“Tales of Frankenstein”] with Don Glut producing and directing. The series was timed for the 200th anniversary of the publication. He’s in one of the 4 or 5 vignettes. His play premiered this past summer in Pennsylvania [“A Reunion of Sorts”]. Some fans made the trek to see it, and Marie Wallace and Sharon Smyth were at the opening. It’s about two elderly gentlemen that dated the same girl 30 years before. Now, one is married and the other is divorced with a son. The girl contacts them that she wants a reunion. They always got in fights over her. They start talking and drinking and it “turns into quite a riot.” You have to see the play, he said, it was a huge success. He’s been talking to Jim Storm about the two of them doing the play. It’s only lacking a theater and a producer. Storms calls out from a side aisle, “There’s a lot of bars around.”
Lacy brought up the scene with Vicki running out of the house because of Lara’s fire. He grabbed and turned with her held tightly, but she stepped on the inside of his cape and did it again and once more and together they disappeared below the camera.
Pennock (creepy voice): “You want to know my secrets?” His is that he badly imitated other actors… Geraldine Page in “Sweet Bird of Youth” or David Niven. At the Actor’s Studio, he fooled them, he said. He’s been lucky. “Thank you Dan Curtis, wherever you are.”
Lela Swift? Lacy: She was terrific, hard-driven, and insistent. Instead of a bit of blocking, she wanted a performance at 7:30 a.m. She pressed him hard. One day, expecting her to be on him all morning, he decided this is it, I’m going to let her have it, so he screamed. Oh stop, stop; save it, save it, she told him.
Where did he get his voices? Lacy: For Bogart, I stole the voice from him. For Trask, he made it up himself. He added a little bit of Bennet’s mid-Atlantic accent to it.
While discussing their BF characters, Lacy explained that they’ve done so many, they sometimes get them mixed up. You go into the studio, you tape them, and you’re out of there, he explained. There was discussion about a character he played named Isaiah who was killed off, but “you never know,” he said.
How about a story from each where something went wrong? Richards: The lotus blossom was supposed to open and save her from the werewolf. The audience was trying to help her. I was to feed it to him? she asked one helper. There was a string behind a window that was supposed to open it, but it wouldn’t open. It wasn’t my fault, she said.
Lacy: Things were going wrong all the time.
Pennock returned to the Fest stage to applause, and we learn he has the flu! Do you remember anything going wrong, the others asked him. He smiled and laughed. After 3 weeks as Jeb, he was sick as he is now. His nose started to bleed but he had to keep going. So, like Donald Trump, he was sniffing it back. He staggered off and let it go. Now, he’d be told, “Use it, man.” There was the scene in which he had the wrong cane, and it was against Elizabeth's neck. He was doing his James Earl Jones imitation when both realized it was the cane with the knife, but they kept going. Afterwards, she said, “You could’ve killed me, assh*le.” It’s good for the memoirs, he said.
Don Briscoe? Lacy: “What a talent. He could have been a huge star.” Richards: He was my story, she added... A dear dear person. I was so sorry when he left the show. Very sad.
Richards: When she was performing in Marat/Sade [in the ‘60s] as Charlotte Corday, John Karlen was in the tub being swabbed. He didn’t like sitting in a tub, so sometimes he would run around the theater. “We had to catch him. You never knew what John was doing or where he would be.”
Next was Roger Davis, who took questions during the autograph/dinner break. Lara Parker followed, but she was terribly congested, so she discussed her 4th book “Heiress of Collinwood” instead of reading from it. She didn’t seem (to me) to show all that much respect toward its main character (Victoria), which I hoped was because she wasn’t feeling well, though at 1/3 of the way into the book I’m thinking it wasn’t the cold’s fault. The rest of the time, she seemed very much like the English teacher she used to be as she called on different audience members while debating the appeal of Dark Shadows.
Jim Storm took the stage next but this is where my report ends. Thank you for reading.
