"You could make an argument..." is how actor Matthew Rauch often begins his sentences. He might say it before asserting that Shakespeare and Marlowe are the best writers in the English language or that the brutal villain Mortimer, a role Rauch played in Marlowe's Edward II, was actually an altruist.
Fiercely analytical, boyish-looking, and with a mischievous glint, Rauch once aspired to be a lawyer, and his enthusiasm for questioning and debate permeates his personality, including his approach to his role in Red Dog Howls by Alexander Dinelaris (Zanna, Don't!; The Chaos Theories), currently running at El Portal Theatre in Los Angeles. He plays Michael, an anxious father-to-be who delves into a family mystery after meeting a long-lost relative, played by Kathleen Chalfant. To Rauch, the play's structure resembles a trial in which Michael, narrating the discovery of his Armenian heritage, holds himself accountable for a violent transgression in his recent past. "By the end," the actor says, "he is, in his own mind, redeemed. You have to make hard choices to save the people you love."
Complicated characters, particularly with a streak of menace, are right up Rauch's alley. For Off-Broadway's Red Bull Theater, for which he played Mortimer, Rauch was the calculating antihero Vindice in the Jacobean gorefest The Revenger's Tragedy. In the acclaimed Off-Broadway production of Jason Grote's 1001, he channeled an affable Columbia University grad student as well as a merciless prince beguiled by the tales of Scheherazade. While Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen dominated his early career—he studied at the American Repertory Theatre's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in Cambridge, Mass.—he is equally at home with contemporary fare, having appeared on Broadway in the 2007 revival of Craig Lucas' Prelude to a Kiss and Off-Broadway in Keen Company's staging of Heinar Kipphardt's docudrama In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
For Red Dog Howls, Rauch memorized his 13 monologues before rehearsals began, a practice that helps him free up much-needed time to define his character. But that accomplishment pales compared with one of his most unusual feats of memorization: For the New Group's 2005 Off-Broadway revival of David Rabe's Hurlyburly, he understudied all four male leads (played by Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, Wallace Shawn, and Josh Hamilton). "I abandoned my iPod for three weeks and replaced it with a Dictaphone," says Rauch, who recorded himself doing the entire play. Initially daunted by the task of interpreting four roles at once, he realized that hearing the play continuously "would help me understand the music of David Rabe's writing. One of the things that started to happen was that each guy just came out of my mouth differently—the sound, the rhythm, the tone."
The trust that Rauch puts in playwrights is fundamental to his approach. Although one of the subjects of Red Dog Howls—the mass killing of Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire—motivated him to familiarize himself with Mediterranean history, his philosophy is to work within the text, not outside it. "I have much respect for people who do a lot of research," he says, "but I want all my information to come from my writer." Rauch credits his ART training—and a mentor, director Ron Daniels—for his stance that "a play is a map to a character."
"There's so much information in the verse," says Rauch, recalling his preparation last year to play Mortimer, a fierce nobleman scheming to topple the king, for which the actor shaved his head and wore a meandering scar. Rauch concluded that truly threatening individuals "never have to act scary. What really scared me about this guy was how people behaved towards him, the words they used to describe him: gentle Mortimer, kind Mortimer." He adds, "The guy you're going to be nicest to is the guy you're most afraid of." To visually convey the character's authority, Rauch opted for "stillness. Mortimer just watches and watches and then finally says, 'Excuse me, that's not how it's going to go. Let me tell you how this is going to go.' "
The ability of live theatre to convey a potent sense of danger had a significant impact on Rauch long before he chose his career. Growing up in Manhattan, he frequently attended plays and musicals, first with his parents, then on his own. As a teen he was unnerved and awed by Sam Shepard's True West, convinced that John Malkovich and Gary Sinise were really going to kill each other. "It was so real to me," he recalls.
Yet the acting bug didn't bite until his undergraduate days at Princeton, where auditioning on a lark led to a bit part, later followed by leads in shows such as Amadeus and Death of a Salesman. During his senior year, he studied Shakespeare with actor Brian McEleney, who encouraged him in his decision to pursue an MFA. "The next thing I know," Rauch says, "I had an Equity card, and I said, 'I don't think I'm going to be a lawyer, Dad. Sorry!' "
Work in regional theatre preceded a time of "drifting towards L.A.," Rauch says, when he tested for pilots and dabbled in film and TV. But an audition for Michael Murphy's play Sin (A Cardinal Deposed)—for director Carl Forsman, artistic director of Keen Company, and attended by Scott Elliott, artistic director of the New Group—catalyzed Rauch's return to the New York stage. Though he wasn't cast, his audition forged a professional relationship with Forsman and paved the way to Hurlyburly, which Elliott directed.
Red Bull Theater has also become something of an artistic home for Rauch. "What a blessing to be in a room with a director whom you trust and who trusts you," he says of Jesse Berger, the company's artistic director. When Berger announced his intention to produce The Revenger's Tragedy, Rauch says, "I thought, The hardest play ever? On purpose?" Yet in his audition he was won over by his own predilection for championing the power of words. "I feel incredibly lucky to have found Jesse," he says. "You can have a conversation without it being an insurrection. That, I believe, is how art gets made. It should be a struggle. It should be people differing and coming to an understanding."
Perhaps Rauch's lawyerly inclinations have not been eclipsed by his craft so much as absorbed by it. "I still like the idea of being a prosecutor, of trying cases," he says. "The logic of it, the intricacies of people's personalities and how they affect the course of a trial—all that is still fascinating to me. Though it occurs to me that if you substitute play for trial, you've got a rehearsal process."
