Patinkin delights students, fans in Murphy Hall

Patinkin delights students, fans in Murphy Hall van Grosshans must be destined for a career on-stage. He can sing, and more important, he doesn’t scare easily.

It’s a Saturday afternoon in the Crafton-Preyer Theatre, and Grosshans volunteers to sing a solo during class.This would not be a big deal, except for the fact that there, in the front row, sits Mandy Patinkin, winner of Tony and Emmy awards for his roles on Broadway and TV. Grosshans, a Lawrence senior majoring in theatre and theatre/voice, gamely forges ahead, his lush voice launching into a favorite from “Carousel”: “If I loved you—” “But you don’t,” Patinkin shouts.

Grosshans stops. “I don’t? I thought I did,” he replies.

Patinkin, ’74, grabs the momentum, turns to the students in this special master class, and begins to teach.Through a meandering monologue, the singer and actor talks about making a genuine connection with an audience, about the need to “go places in yourself that people spend a lifetime avoiding,” about the need to make each performance real and natural by drawing on emotions from your own life. Performers, he says, must strive to reach that point where “you don’t work at it, because it’s in you.”

The students hang on every word.

Grosshans tries his solo again. Patinkin stays quiet until the end, then offers his review: “That was great. And let me tell you why it was great to me.You were not performing at all.There were only two places were you became unfocused, only two bullshit moments.

“Mostly it was so natural, I’d hire you in a minute—” Grosshans sighs and smiles, relieved. But Patinkin’s not finished: “unless, of course, you were too tall, had the wrong hair, or just didn’t fit the part.”

Such is an actor’s life. Such are the indecipherable, indescribable dynamics when a master returns to his alma mater

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to share his craft with a new generation.

Patinkin taught and performed April 9 as part of a benefit for University Theatre.

The visit was his second to Lawrence in recent years.With Jack B.Wright, professor of theatre and film, he took the stage at Crafton-Preyer for “A Conversation with Mandy Patinkin,” loosely based on the “Inside the Actors’ Studio” on TV’s Bravo network. Patinkin, 52, talked about his career and his recent battle with prostate cancer, which had killed his father at 52.The event raised about $30,000 to provide theatre equipment and scholarships for film students.

—Jennifer Jackson Sanner

EARL RICHARDSON

possible lives for them. Though it’s not clear to him at the time, Church’s imaginings mark his first forays into the life of a writer.

Of particular interest are Billy and Benny McCrary, the world’s heaviest twins. A photograph of the brothers on motorcycles serves as “a window into another world.” He exploits the gaps in Guinness’ just-the-facts approach to dream up tensions and rifts between the brothers, who made a living performing stunts. For Church, this is a way to examine the close but complicated relationship he shares with his younger brother, Matt, an athletic, winning, confident kid who seems to be everything Steven is not. To explain the death of Billy, Church dreams up a death scene in which the estranged brothers are reconciled, Benny holding Billy’s head in his lap, “stroking his brother’s hair and humming old country songs their grammy used to sing ... until the sirens come and his twin heart stops pumping.”

The first half of The Guinness Book of Me is largely a paean to family life, but beneath tales of the mildly reckless adventures of the brothers and their father runs an undercurrent of barely discernible dread. Reading of their adventures with knives, guns and trucks, one feels a nagging worry that something could go wrong.

When those worries finally surface— abruptly—Church’s oddball memoir, in danger of foundering in shallow selfabsorption at its halfway point, strikes out for more profound depths. It becomes clear that it’s not the Guinness records that fascinate him so, but the record-holders. Why these unique people do what they do is essentially unknowable—but so are the motives of the so-called ordinary folks we encounter every day. In the gaps of their personal histories Steven Church finds a blank page on which to work through his own feelings of alienation and loss, and the journey to belonging that he chronicles suggests every human story, examined closely enough, is unique and record-worthy.

—Steven Hill

■ Patinkin left KU in 1972 for The Juilliard

School, but he fondly recalls his role as Tevye in KU’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” the last time his father saw him perform. His reprise of “If I Were a Rich Man” earned a standing ovation April 9.

ISSUE 3, 2005

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