“We were too young to know any better and burning people out left and right,” Nichols says, remembering the austerity and long hours. Actors rehearsed 9-5 and performed six shows five nights a week, WednesdaySunday. “I laugh when people say we do too much today,” he says. “We did two shows on Saturday at 6 and 9. And when we closed a show, the next show opened five days later.” Crist, he says, fell right into the routine. actress and occasional activist put all her plans on hold to play the part of a demure, “She is extremely flexible,” Nichols says. Carter-era housewife. Or something like that. “She could do everything. We’re a resident “I joined the University Wives Club,” she company doing all different kinds of shows — says with a husky, cigarette-cured chuckle. Shakespeare, contemporary drama, comedy, “It was 1978 and it did not even occur to me you name it. She was all over it. Irene was to wonder why there was no such thing as a exactly what our company needed at that University Husbands Club.” To keep herself point in time. Enormously valuable.” occupied she joined a book club and signed The people Crist met in Overton Square up for a beginning tatting class even though weren’t like any she’d encountered anywhere else and she quickly decided the helpful people at Apartment Finders had done her no real favors by insisting that East Memphis was the key to her personal bliss. “I remember sitting at this little bistro right next to the theater with a banker and one of the Square owners,” Crist says, recounting her introduction to Midtown’s bohemian set, to which these two buttoned-down men clearly did not belong. To Crist’s surprise Memphis artist, puppeteer, washboard scratcher, and hippie hero Jimmy Crosthwait rounded out the dinIrene Crist makes her Memphis debut in Much Ado About ner party. Suits didn’t mingle with Nothing at Playhouse on the Square. the counterculture in the Beltway bedroom communities where she’d she didn’t really know what that was. “I knew come of age. This was all brand-new, endlesstatting had something to do with sewing,” she ly intriguing, and she wanted to move west as says, although it doesn’t, really. “I wasn’t very fast as she could. good at that sewing, but thought, ‘You know Crist left the theater for the second time what? I’m going to tatt!’” The first marriage in 1985 when she was pregnant with her proved rocky, and Crist, who would later earn first child. The pace was too hectic. The pay rave reviews as Edward Albee’s fierce uniwasn’t enough for a growing family. Through versity wife Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia connections she’d made on the Square, she Woolf, never did improve her tatting skills or found a job in marketing. She also spent time her sewing skills, nor did she make any of the working for The Commercial Appeal, developing club meetings she signed up for. newspaper-based education programs. She “I got a call from Playhouse on the Square,” missed the spotlight, but the new schedule she explains. “They were doing Shakespeare’s suited her better. Much Ado About Nothing and needed a Beatrice. “When I discovered you could leave a job So Crist, who was unaccustomed to audiat 5, go home, have the evening and weektioning, auditioned and landed the role of ends off too, I thought there was nothing Shakespeare’s famously combative advocate that could pull me back to theater. From high for gender equality. Two weeks later, Jackie school on, I’d never had any of that. It was Nichols invited her to join Playhouse on the marvelous.” Square’s resident company, where she’d take She was never fully reformed. Every couon principal roles in shows like Lillian Hellple of years Memphis actor/director Jerry man’s Another Part of the Forest and the Charles Chipman offered Crist a part in a show she Dickens musical Oliver! couldn’t say no to — roles like Anna in Lan“This is when Playhouse really was on the ford Wilson’s 80’s-era hit Burn This, or Eleanor Square,” Crist says. “Back when Jackie [Nichof Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. She’d never ols] would wash the plastic cups at the bar.” worked in community theater before, and
“All these people were coming out from different spaces, having seen different shows. It gave me such an incredible sense that all is well. It made my heart beat a little faster. It was the first sense I got that Overton Square really is a theater district. Memphis really is a theater town.” and work behind the scenes. But there have been health concerns. Learning lines isn’t always easy, like it used to be. Crist wants to say goodbye before someone has to tell her it’s time, so fans are on notice. After a remarkable 38-year run in Memphis theater, there’s officially a limited number of opportunities to watch a local treasure do the thing she’s done so well for so long. Before moving South with her first husband — a college professor who found employment teaching mime at Memphis State University — Crist worked as a full-time actress with a small startup theater company in Rockville, Maryland. “I didn’t have to work a regular 9 to 5 job until I was at least 30ish,” she brags. Street 70, the company where she cut her teeth, started out as a project of the Montgomery County Dept. of Recreation. It grew into the Round House Theatre, an award-winning Beltway company with an Equity venue in Bethesda and an education center in Silver Springs. Helping to launch this company was Crist’s first real job. It was also the continuation of a lifelong student/mentor relationship with Round House founder June Allen, a British actress who’d trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts under the guidance of British stage icons like Sir Michael Redgrave and Sir John Gielgud. “She fascinated me with her very British accent,” Crist says of Allen, whom she met while she was still in elementary school, because she seemed to be the only kid in all of Montgomery County interested in the English transplant’s first attempt to launch a municipal theater project. “And I must have fascinated her too because she called my mother and said she wanted to teach me privately.” Rigorous private lessons continued through high school, and the two women remained close until Allen passed away in 2016 at the age of 92. Marriage changes things, and Crist’s promising theater career ended for the first time when she moved with her husband from the affluent D.C. suburbs to East Memphis at the recommendation of real estate consultants who assured the young couple they wouldn’t be happy living anywhere else. She only had one role in mind back then. The outspoken 54 • M E M P H I S M A G A Z I N E . C O M • F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 7
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