Katselas Shapes “Romeo’ At Equity Waiver Level

By Lawrence Christon

Tybalt is ready to kill Mercutio. “You want to go all the way?” he asks.

“Yeah,” says director Milton Katselas.

Tybalt pokes the foil in the vicinity of Mercutio’s rib cage. There’s a pause. “I don’t think you can kill anybody like that,” says Katselas skeptically.

The scene is the Skylight Theater on North Vermont Avenue (formally the space occupied by the Provisional Theater), where “Romeo and Juliet” opens Friday. Michael Arabian plays Tybalt. Raye Birk plays Mercutio and Peter Schreiner plays Benvolio, who at the moment is attempting to separate them.-to no avail.

“I’m afraid I’m going to hurt somebody,” Arabian worries aloud.

“If you do it this way, it’ll be all right,” responds fencing instructor J.R. Beardsley. He choreographs the move in which the three lock in like dancers-Tybalt thrusts, and Benvolio’s attempted intervention is just enough to distract Mercutio, who spins into the lethal point.

“Don’t worry about where it’s going,” Katselas says. “Everything is in your intent. That’s the secret of playing violence. The more force you put into intention, the less people will be looking at your object.”

There’s no mistaking Katselas, a powerful-looking man with dark hair thinning over his forehead and a close-cut graying beard, who occupies dual role of observer and center of the action. He doesn’t say much and he hardly moves at all, but clearly the agenda has been set by him. Paradoxically, it’s his greater stillness that lends him greater authority.

“I still feel inhibited when I interrupt an actor,” he said later. “But I think anyone’s motive for wanting to do a play is that you see something in it you want to articulate. If you teach or direct, it’s the same thing-you set out to say something. I never like to stop actors, but you have to step in.?”

“Romeo and Juliet” represents Katselas’ first foray into local theater directing since his “Streamers” played the Westwood Playhouse in 1977, and his first Equity Waiver production ever.

Not that he’s been woolgathering. He directed the film version of Matk Medoff’s “When You Comin’ Back Red Ryder? as well two TV films, “Strangers” with Bette Davis and Gena Rowlands, and the four-hour series. “Rules of Marriage,” with Elizabeth Montgomery and Elliot Gould. And he continues as one of Los Angeles’ elite acting teachers.

But the theater is never far from view. “Like most Greeks, my father owned a restaurant when I was growing up in Pittsburg,” he recalled while plucking sculptural bits of sushi from a tray at Katsu’s, located near the theater.

“Eventually he bought a movie house with a pool hall under it.

That’s where I started to do my studies in human psychology-I did some hustling there. “My father was an actor and a singer. He knew everybody. Caruso was a friend-when he came to Pittsburgh, my father sat on stage. I was successful basketball player up through my second year at Carnegie Tech, but when it came time to do theater, I gave it up without the slightest regret.”

Katselas went to New York “Scared stiff” after graduation. “I lived in an artist’s loft and had to be out of there between 2 and 6 everyday so that he could work. Sometimes I had no place to go, and walked around in the snow. I was broke, living on pretzels. But I was happy as a lark.” He saw Elia Kazan in the street one day and ran after him to introduce himself-it didn’t hurt that he spoke Greek. Eventually he became Kazan’s protégé, as well as Joshua Logan’s . His first success was his direction of the American premiere of a new play by an obscure playwright, “The Zoo Story” by Edward Albee. Later, he had two hit Broadway comedies, “Butterflies Are Free” and “Forty Carats.”

Of “Romeo and Juliet,” he said: “This is the one I’ve been waiting to do a long time. I’ve always had a certain concept for it, but I don’t want to say what it is. You never know if your idea is what people are seeing; someone may come up to me afterward and say, ‘I didn’t see what you were doing at all.”

“the play is full of beauty, romance and violence. It seems fancy on the surface, but it’s not fancy. What Romeo and Juliet do is not minor; the play is not some dumb little horror movie. They’re committed to something no matter what. And they bring peace. There’s a Zen saying, ‘You have to be sick before you can be well.’ Something terrible has to happen before Verona can wake up.”

Back at the theater, the pre-rehersal energies were once again heating up. The cast (numbering 35) grew still as Katselas stood up and said,” “I don’t want to be passive. I want you to play the impulse of the moment, to take it and link it to the moment before.

“we’re forgettinh that there’s a story to here and that we have to tell it. And there are little stories within’ the big stories. That’s why I’m moving the Tybalt scene stage center. That’s a moment. Why? Because he kils Mercutio. Mercutio’s a friend to both houses, as well as great fighter. Hew’s the cello, the peacemakler.

It’s nothing for Tybalt and Romeo to fight. But when Mercutio gets into it, that’s somethingh no one in Veroina thought would ever happen. It makes a difference.

“when Paris askes for Juliet’s hand-that’s a moment. The unlikely things are as important as Romeo and Juliet’s dance, their balkcony scene. Each of you plays something important. Don’t comment on it. Experience it for us.”

The lighting technician needed Katsales advice on a cue. While he was distractd, actors resumed the self-preoccupied movement on stage. A musician struch a clarion chord on a synthesizer. The scaffold sets were spun noisly on there little wheels. The production mamanger stood stage center, raised his arms and yelled, “Two minutes, everybody! Places in two minutes!”