The thing one quickly realizes when one sets out to do a profile on Dakin Matthews is that he is a man of many talents. Although he has primarily been known as an actor (most recently on Gilmore Girls and House, M.D.), bridging the worlds of theatre and film and television with consistent skill, he's also a teacher (who taught at Cal. State Hayward, ACT, and Juilliard), a director (Mercadet), a dramaturg (last year's Henry IV on Broadway, for which he won a Drama Desk award), a translator of classic plays from their original foreign-language texts (Spite for Spite), and a fine playwright in his own right (The Prince of L.A., the just-closed The Savannah Option). Among other awards and nominations, last week Matthews received a Back Stage West Garland award for writing The Prince of L.A., and he'll be receiving two special awards from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle on March 21: the Schmitt Award for the world premiere of an outstanding new play, and the Harford Award for sustained excellence in theatre. Matthews is an indisputable treasure of the theatre world, which makes it all the more surprising that he says he never intended to act professionally at all.
"I sort of got fooled into acting, actually," says Matthews. "I never intended to do it. I was teaching school [at Cal. State Hayward]. I had not studied acting or done that much when I was in school myself. I had done some extracurricular acting, and I'd mentioned to someone that I'd played Falstaff in college. They said, 'Well, I see they're auditioning for Henry IV, Part 1 at the local Shakespeare festival; why don't you go down there?' It was a dare, and I said, 'Yeah, okay.' I [auditioned], and they hired me—well, in those days you didn't work for money, so they cast me—and I did it. I kept teaching, and in summers I would do Shakespeare festivals from time to time. Then somebody offered me a professional job or two during the school year, so I rearranged my teaching schedule so I could do it. I taught university for 25 years, and I kept acting, so finally when it came time to retire from teaching I thought, 'Well, I guess I'll try this acting full-time now.' That's kind of how it happened. I didn't ever intend to or want to be an actor. I'm not one of those people of whom they say, 'If you can't live without it, that's the only reason you should be an actor.' It was kind of a sideline that became my whole life."
Matthews taught English literature, but as the years progressed he added linguistics and modern dramatic theory to his slate. When his wife, the acclaimed director Anne McNaughton, was accepted into the program at Juilliard, Matthews took a three-year leave of absence from Hayward to teach there.
In one year, one of the classes included students such as Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline, and David Ogden Stiers. Toward the end of the graduation period Drama Division director John Houseman saw that he had 16 very good actors. According to Matthews, "He thought, 'I want to keep these people together, I want to form an acting company with them.' He decided he was one person short for most of the plays in their repertoire, so he asked me if I would be interested in joining them when they graduated and becoming sort of the ringer. I was fairly young at the time, 28 or 29, so I said, 'Yeah, that would be fun.' I cut back my teaching schedule at Juilliard, where I was teaching academics and theatre, and worked with them and their plays. When they graduated they formed The Acting Company, and I was the 17th guy. I was acting with them. My wife was directing them; she was a member of the group."
Matthews returned to his job at Cal State Hayward later, and began teaching and performing at the American Conservatory Theatre concurrently. "It worked very well," he says. "I was very fortunate to be in an English department, because if you were in the drama department, you'd be working at night. In the English department I would take all the 8 a.m. classes and work five days a week. Most professors prefer to work a three-day week, but I didn't mind the 8 to 12 schedule, because then I could jump in my car and drive over to ACT, rehearse from 1 to 6, have dinner, perform from 7 to 10, drive home, and then start all over again. Teaching English was very helpful for me in that regard. Also, it gave me a different take on the literature, which allowed me to expand beyond acting into directing and dramaturgy and translation and things like that. I'm not saying that theatre is a doomed profession, but if a person wants to stay in it very long, they'd better develop theatre skills beyond just acting."
One of the skills Matthews developed was playwriting, from translations of foreign classics to original works. "I actually only speak English and Latin," says Matthews. "Medieval philosophy was my major, so we pretty much had to study in Latin. I read three or four [languages] besides that, with help. I studied in Italy for three years, so my Italian's pretty good in terms of reading, but, since I read all of these classical texts, I could probably order a carriage much easier than I could order a meal. I started [translating] because every once in a while people would ask me, 'We were thinking of doing a production of such-and-such, and we'd like a new translation; is that something that would interest you?' Also I wasn't much of a playwright 40 years ago, but I thought it might be in my future. I thought, 'One way of maybe learning to be a playwright would be to spend some time translating, get a sense of stage language and then gradually move into doing my own original plays.' I have to admit that I really did have that thought as a 20-year-old. I began translating then. Then I stopped and wrote a few plays, but didn't do that much writing because I was teaching and acting full-time. In the last 10–15 years I started writing a little bit more, and then got on this hook with [translating classic] Spanish plays about seven years ago, purely by accident, and I've fallen in love with that. Now I find that I'm writing even more plays than I used to.
"I was very fortunate with my translations that almost all of them were commissioned," he continues. "I knew they were going to be produced, and that was really nice…. Then I started writing plays, and it was sometimes hard to get them produced, and I'd have to do the readings or semi-produce them myself. ACT did one in its Plays in Progress series, which was very helpful, and then The Globe commissioned a specialty one that I did there. The Prince of L.A. was interesting because it came from a desire to deal with [controversy in the Catholic Church], but also I'd been translating Spanish plays into rhyming verse for so long I thought, 'I wonder if it's possible to write an original play in rhyming verse?' So that was kind of an exercise for me. From that I got very emboldened and started writing a lot more. I feel like I finally have something to say. I'm not a very disciplined writer: I sort of mull, mull, mull, and then suddenly I sit down, and if I can get the first line I can probably write the play in about a month. But until I get the first couple of lines I'm just sitting there waiting. If you're very lucky and you've done enough mulling, sometimes the damn thing writes itself."
Upon moving down to Los Angeles, Matthews became the founding artistic director for the Antaeus Company, and in the last few years he and his wife founded the Andak Stage Company. When asked what some acting highlights from his long career were for him, he had plenty to choose from.
"Recently, doing Henry IV on Broadway last year was a real highlight for me," he says. "The Shadowlands that I did at SCR was a really wonderful experience. The last two plays I did at SCR [Major Barbara and The School for Wives] were both really terrific experiences. The Globe Coriolanus I did, and their Midsummer Night's Dream was one of the high points of my life, I must say. Mostly they're times when it's usually a classical play, and it takes a company of actors to do it. Those have been the times I remember most. Doing Three Sisters at ACT with this wonderful company; it's not individual triumphs. I grew up at a time in the San Francisco Bay area when it was all theatre company organized. Everybody belonged to a company, and all of my best work has always been as a member of a company, and I keep trying to get back to that, what I really love most." BSW
The LADCC Awards are scheduled for March 21, 7:30 pm, at the Coronet Theatre, 366 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood. $35. (818) 754-4785.