5:35 p.m., May 7, 2007--Actors and spouses James Cromwell and Joan MacIntosh spoke Sunday night to the 40 graduates of UD's Professional Theatre Training Program's Class of 2007. The students, all completing PTTP's three-year graduate curriculum, have already landed summer theatre jobs and will be leaving campus before UD's official Commencement ceremonies on May 26.

Cromwell's recent acting credits include the role of Prince Philip in The Queen, the role of Jack Bauer's father in the television series 24 and the role of Capt. Stacey in Spiderman 3.

MacIntosh, an Obie and Drama Desk award winner, has enjoyed a long career in the American professional theatre, playing on and off Broadway, and in dozens of resident theatres throughout the country. She has also been seen in films and on television.

Looking decidedly more laid-back than his proper Farmer Hoggett in Babe or his corrupt Capt. Dudley Smith in L.A. Confidential, Cromwell addressed the graduates clad in jeans, a rumpled cotton jacket and bowling-style shoes, his hair tied back in a ponytail.

Cromwell told the graduates he has always tried to look at acting as service, a philosophy that, he said, “has allowed me to reach this vaunted age without becoming cynical of a system where people are a product.”

“It's up to artists who hold the key to shine the light so that other human beings can see themselves clearly and see the choices they have,” Cromwell said.

The product of a theatrical family, Cromwell said he went into acting “because I was not equipped to do anything else.” He began his career at the Cleveland Playhouse making $25 a week and it was there that he first heard the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot.

“Suddenly everything shifted,” he said, “it was not just fun and games; something had to be done.” He was inspired, he said, by stories of the theatre at Epidaurus, built near the Asklepieion, the most celebrated healing center of the classical world.

“When you got out of the hospital, cured of your physical ills, you went to the theatre to be cured emotionally and psychologically. That's where I first got the idea of theatre as service,” he explained.

Putting his beliefs into action, he joined the Free Southern Theatre in 1964, touring in an integrated production of Waiting for Godot. During that time he saw fire-bombed churches and plaques segregating public places. He got kicked out of a restaurant for eating with black cast members and chased out of a white church for trying to post flyers about the integrated performance.

“It was a shock,” he said, “for someone who had grown up in Westchester County, gone to prep school and toured Europe.”

“The world needs artists,” Cromwell told the graduates. “The world needs you. You have a unique opportunity to make a difference. In any venue if you speak from your heart, if you speak what is true, you can make an incredible difference--one gesture, one word, one person at a time.”

MacIntosh, active in the founding of the 1960s experimental theatre movement, spoke of that group's groundbreaking work “to make theatre relevant to the world in which we live.”

A one-time single mom, she encouraged the students to persevere and told them that she has always been able to make a living as an actor without going to Hollywood.

“I assure you, you can have the life you want. You can make it happen,” she said, quoting Goethe's “Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Article by Beth Thomas
Photos by Kevin Quinlan