Skip ads and navigation
Advertising
Our network sites seattlepi.comHelp

Seattle actor is staged for success

UW graduate excels at playing men in the margins; his life is anything but

Saturday, January 15, 2000

By JEFFREY ERIC JENKINS
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

NEW YORK -- Whoever said you can't make a living in the theater forgot to tell Christopher Evan Welch.

For this 34-year-old University of Washington graduate, acting in the theater is a passion that has provided steady work. Since his 1997 Broadway debut with Bill Irwin in the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of "Scapin," Welch has enjoyed a string of challenging roles in theaters both off and on Broadway. But he still considers the Seattle Repertory Theatre -- where "Scapin" originated -- to be his "theatrical stomping grounds."

"I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a kinship there," says Welch. "I talk occasionally with Kurt Beattie, who's a good pal. Seattle has been nothing but great for me. It's such a great city for theater. The theater audiences are so lively, so active. It's a volatile audience energy; the audience leans forward and says, 'Let's do it.' "

After graduation from UW's Professional Actor Training Program in 1991 -- where he studied with Jack Clay, Robyn Hunt and Steve Pearson -- Welch's career took a favorable bounce. David Ira Goldstein of A Contemporary Theatre had directed Welch in a production at the university and was impressed with his work.

"He was doing a production of Tony Kushner's adaptation of 'The Illusion' at ACT and asked me to read for the lead," Welch says. "I went straight from graduation into rehearsal for my first lead role on a major stage in Seattle."

For the next six years, until love and work beckoned him east to New York, Welch kept busy playing a variety of character parts and performing with his band, the Ottoman Bigwigs. In 1996 the band's "antic, pop sound with a hypersexual, twisty energy," as lyricist-singer Welch calls it, led to recording the group's self-titled first album.

While performing Hamlet at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival a few years ago, Welch fell in love with his Ophelia, Florencia Lozano, and decided to move to New York to be near her. Since then, the couple has enjoyed a rare thing: two successful show business careers. Complementing Welch's busy theater schedule, Lozano has been a regular cast member of daytime TV's "One Life to Live" for the past three years. According to Welch, though, she plans to resume her theater career soon.

Welch just completed a run opposite the formidable Ron Leibman in the off-Broadway production of "Adam Baum and the Jew Movie" by Daniel Goldfarb. He landed the job of playing the "only goyisher screenwriter in Hollywood" directly after a controversial production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" staged by the experimental Dutch director Ivo van Hove. In "Streetcar," Welch played Mitch, the sometime suitor to Blanche DuBois.

It's a challenge that Welch tackled with relish. "It was strange," he says, "to go from 'Streetcar' to 'Adam Baum,' which are so different in terms of style and rhythm and delivery. It's like going through the looking glass and then trying to come back."

Van Hove's "re-excavation" of the Tennessee Williams play at New York Theatre Workshop last fall raised more than a few critical eyebrows. Recently deemed the most significant American play of the 20th century by the American Theatre Critics Association, "Streetcar" is most often viewed through the lens of Marlon Brando's performance. His earthy bellowing of "Stella, Baby!" has driven two generations of actors and directors to excessively naturalistic performance styles.

But van Hove, unencumbered by American naturalism, sought the essential center of the play. "It was a seminal experience," says Welch, "a watershed theatrical experience. Ivo had a very, very clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish theatrically. It was incredible."

Welch's Mitch, a lonely middle-age man who cares for his sickly mother, existed on the fringe of the production's reality. Although often perfectly still, the character seemed unsure of what to do next. Gangling and awkward, frighteningly lacking in emotional affect, Mitch became a near-passive instrument of Blanche's demise. As a result, his ultimate confrontation and manhandling of her became all the more potent.

For all of his versatility, Welch excels at playing men who live on the margins. One of his early successes at the Seattle Rep was the role of troublemaker Tony Lumpkin in "She Stoops to Conquer." He played the role twice more for his good friend (and former Rep associate artistic director) Doug Hughes at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and at the Long Wharf in New Haven. Also at the Guthrie, he played the officious student Trofimov in Joe Dowling's production of "The Cherry Orchard." Even back in 1993 he played nail-biting neurotic George Tesman in an Eisenhower-era updating of Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" -- called "Hedda '55" -- for Seattle's Triad Ensemble.

Perhaps it's Welch's ability to play the periphery that made him such an asset to the recent production of "Adam Baum and the Jew Movie." The play revolves around a Jewish producer in 1946, Sam Baum (Ron Leibman), who wants to make a movie about the Jewish American experience. He hires an Oscar-winning screenwriter (and gentile), Gar Hampson (Welch), to adapt a book into a film. Their working relationship leads to a conflict between Jew and gentile that also reflects the clash of American dreams and American reality.

Against the atorly bombast employed by Leibman, Welch was a deep pool of rationalist calm. Subtly discomfited by the producer's unpolished behavior, Welch's Gar remained nonetheless unruffled as he argued for an "authentic" vision of Jewish American existence. The character complains that Jews in Hollywood have "built an American dream that excludes them" and create movies perpetuating "the myth that everyone is rich and white."

"It was really intriguing for me," Welch says, "to play this gentile, certainly on the Upper West Side of New York, where there's such a large Jewish audience. Very often in performance I definitely felt like the bad guy."

Welch's understated performance again demonstrated his ability to portray someone living on the fringe -- in this case a WASP-y screenwriter in Jewish-dominated Hollywood. Unfortunately for "Adam Baum," the play never manages to beneath the surface and examine the ironies of that insider-outsider relationship.

As Welch unwinds from his hectic recent schedule, he is also preparing for the upcoming TV pilot season. "I'll be taking pilot season more seriously than I have before this year," he says. "I decided to turn down plays here in New York so that I have the ability to do pilots. I've tried before and been close on some things."

But Seattle theater lovers needn't worry -- Welch hopes to return to Emerald City stages sometime soon. "We have so many reasons to go to Seattle," he says. "Florencia's sister and brother-in-law live there and my band is there. I'm just waiting for something that feels exactly right. I hope they'll call me with it."

Jeffrey Eric Jenkins is a New York-based theater writer for the P-I. He can be reached at 718-789-5553 or by email at Crritic@compuserve.com

OUR AFFILIATES
NWsource KOMO
Pacific Publishing

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
101 Elliott Ave. W.
Seattle, WA 98119
(206) 448-8000

Home Delivery: (206) 464-2121 or (800) 542-0820
seattlepi.com serves about 1.7 million unique visitors
and 30 million page views each month.

Send comments to newmedia@seattlepi.com
Send investigative tips to iteam@seattlepi.com
©1996-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Terms of Use/Privacy Policy

Hearst Newspapers