By Victor Greto
CLAYMONT — What is she thinking?
Wringing her hands on the nearly empty stage during a rehearsal at the Archmere Theater, Molly Cahill’s contorted face reflects a painful realization.
Her character, Lady Anne, finally knows her husband, Richard III, is an ambitious psychopath. She learns that he is about to order the murders of two children, heirs to the throne of England, and sons of her friend, Queen Elizabeth.
And like just about everything else in the Medieval world, there’s nothing much a woman can do about it.
When she rehearses the scene again, fully a minute into staring transfixed as fellow actor Allyson Good tearfully emotes her own lines as Elizabeth, Cahill conjures the same feelings and contorts her expression.
It’s not easy.
Each time she acts the scene, “I’m truly thinking that he is going to kill the kids,” Cahill says later.
No wonder she and the other actors seem drained at the end.
As Good, 36, puts it, “Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances,” a tagline that helps describe the Meisner or “method” way of acting made famous after World War II by Marlon Brando and, later, by Robert DeNiro.
It’s a method under which both Cahill and Good have been trained.
Cahill will be featured in Richard III, the fifth production of the Delaware Shakespeare Festival, which she founded more than five years ago. The play opens this Friday at Rockwood Mansion in Wilmington and runs through Aug. 11.
Feeling the pain of each scene, Cahill says, is necessary.
“It’s better than just looking at my shoes,” she says.
True, but Cahill hasn’t been looking at much of anything but her career since she founded the Delaware Shakespeare Festival when she was only 23.
The Wilmington native splits her time between staying with her parents here, and living and working in Washington D.C., where she consistently auditions for, and acts in, plays, from Shakespeare and Chekhov to Ibsen and Irish theater.
She’s worked in a regionally-produced commercial, and was featured in one brief scene in HBO’s “The Wire,” playing a woman having a drink at a bar.
“They needed a redhead, my age,” she explains.
Such is the life of an ambitious actor who survives in part by not taking weekly rejections personally. After all, in casting — especially for commercials and TV — looks and fulfilling a type is everything.
Which may be one of the reasons why her heart beats most passionately for a playwright who has been dead for nearly four centuries, but whose characters feast on witty, gorgeous language while examining their inner lives and relationships.
This, despite the natural appeal of Cahill’s long red hair, hazel eyes, and sparkling mezzo-soprano voice tinged with a playful Shakespearean cadence each time she feels self-conscious.
Just before she began to rehearse Act IV, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Richard III during one rainy and humid early July evening, Cahill, 28, found out she needed to drive to Annapolis, Md., the next day to perform in a local commercial. They needed someone to play a young mom. With red hair, presumably.
She wasn’t even sure she’d have a line to say.
The following day she would drive further south to audition for the role of Hermione in the bard’s The Winter’s Tale for the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival.
Molly Cahill just doesn’t have the time to look at her shoes.
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Cahill wanted to be an actor from the time she saw her older brother and sister perform in the Delaware Children’s Theater.
But the six-year-old first-grader didn’t get the first part she tried out for a toy in a production of “Babes in Toyland.”
That initial rejection, however, did not deter her. Soon after, she auditioned for “Snow White,” and first walked on to the stage as a gray rabbit.
Marie Swajeski, who has run the Delaware Children’s Theater for more than three decades, remembers Cahill as a serious child.
“She was comical at times, but very intense,” Swajeski says. “She took her parts seriously.”
But as she grew, Cahill also wrestled with desires to become a painter, even a hairstylist.
She wanted to go to Archmere Academy in Claymont because, “I knew people who went there and they were all smart,” including her two older siblings.
So she worked hard on her grades, excelled and got in, and acted in several plays.
“When I’m on stage and in the moment, there is nothing else I want to do,” she says she discovered while at Archmere.
She attended Northwestern University near Chicago where she majored in both theater and English.
She discovered her true vocation when she learned the joy of acting in a Shakespeare play during a junior semester spent in England at the Marymount London Dramatic Academy.
Like many, it took Cahill a few years and lots of experience to catch on to the coolness of the bard.
The speech that turned her on to the playwright is the one she will be speaking this Friday: Lady Anne’s initial confrontation with Richard.
“It was Lady Anne’s intense emotions that won me over,” Cahill says. “She goes through all the dimensions of human emotion in that speech. It got me interested in more than acting.”
Shakespeare can be terribly demanding.
Those big words and strange turns of phrase; that iambic pentameter and those funky rhymes; those thee’s and thou’s, and kings and queens; those complex and cross-dressing plots; and the cultural burden of acting in plays that are considered the greatest written achievements in the English language.
It’s enough to turn the insides of any “method” actor to jelly.
Or, you can turn all of that on its head and consider it the ultimate acting challenge.
Often, all you really need to be inspired is to have a great teacher.
And Cahill got one, in England, by the name of Bill Homewood.
“He showed me,” she says. “It’s words and people and emotion. The characters are amazing. Shakespeare loves women and makes them the smartest in the plays.”
Plays that mostly center on relationships — no matter how much they are shrouded in the guise of war or history or the search for individual meaning — often center on the unpredictable dynamic between men and women.
And if Shakespeare did one thing better than any writer before or since, it was to completely lose himself inside a sharply observed character, something great actors (like himself) instinctively know how to do.
Mingle that with a facility for poetry and coining evocative words, and one gets an astonishingly successful body of work.
Cahill has played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Rosalind in As You Like It, Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Bianca in a Chicago production of Othello.
After her semester in London, Cahill could no longer resist her soulmate, and knew her future.
“I would do Shakespeare the rest of my life and be happy.”
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The idea of creating a Shakespeare Festival in the First State became a way for Cahill to remain in the region, do the thing she loves the most, and put her home state on the Shakespearean map.
She wasn’t sure it would succeed.
Neither did the man she got to help her start it, Greg Robleto of Hockessin.
“This is Molly’s vision, and I was brought in on the early stages in spring 2003,” Robleto, 31, says. “We first saw if we could even put on a show.”
“She loves Shakespeare,” says David Binet, 30, who is directing Richard III. “When she wants to do something, she will create the opportunity to do so. This is how the Delaware festival began.”
Cahill and Robleto borrowed money, bartered, and got Archmere to offer them its stage.
“We put up a show and 500 people came over five nights,” Robleto said, recalling the success of their first production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
After the enthusiastic response, Robleto and Cahill learned just how hard it was to start an annual festival.
There was incorporating a non-profit, marketing and publicity — and the continual soliciting for money.
“A troupe of actors putting on a show doesn’t think about all the facets it takes to put on a show,” Robleto says.
Actually, Shakespeare would have understood. His troupes — the Lord’s Chamberlain’s Men, and, later, the King’s Men — expertly combined both commercial and artistic success.
Shakespeare ended up a wealthy man with one of the biggest homes in Stratford when he retired from the theater just after he turned 50.
Cahill admits she doesn’t have a head for greasing corporate wheels. Robleto, who majored in business at the University of Delaware, does.
“Molly does the artistic things,” he says, “and I focus on management, advertising, marketing and sponsorships.”
Cahill and Robleto discovered that a play they could put on for less than $5,000 five years ago requires 10 times that amount after incorporation and years of scratching to attain a level of professionalism.
“The goal of the festival is to grow to a level of sustained professionalism, to become an Actors Equity theater company,” Robleto says, referring to the professional actors’ union.
Robleto said that by next year, the Delaware Shakespeare Festival will be eligible for regional awards that will raise it to a new level.
It’s not just about the quality of acting.
“It’s metrics,” he says. “The number of shows you put on, the pay scale of the quality actors. We’re very close to that, and by next year we should be there.”
The problem with making a career of traditional stage acting is its unstable nature, says Gary Sloan, associate professor and head of M.F.A. acting program at Catholic University in Washington D.C., from where Cahill graduated last year.
And geography matters.
“If you’re not from a major metropolitan area, you get caught in a local actor syndrome,” he says.
A local actor may wander from small-town play to small-town play, with barely a hope of making it nationally.
Most major regional theaters, including those in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, mainly hire out of New York. If you want a national career, you have to be in Los Angeles or New York City.
Cahill effectively gave herself a job for half of the year by founding the festival.
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Upgrading the festival also involves the choice of plays.
Cahill chose to do Richard III this year, “to step it up. It’s the fifth year, and we’d only done comedies before. Richard is Shakespeare’s greatest villain. You love to hate him, and he’s so brilliant.”
But he’s such a big meanie.
And the women in the play — especially Lady Anne, Cahill’s character — seem as helpless as children.
At the beginning of the play, Lady Anne decides only after a handful of lines between herself and Richard to marry him, the known murderer of her husband and father-in-law.
It’s a moment often ridiculed by Shakespeare critics as an unlikely turn of events written by a young dramatist (Shakespeare was only about 30 when he wrote this play) who knows nothing about women.
No, says Cahill and David Stradley, 31, who plays Richard in the production.
“We’ve been talking about this scene a lot,” Stradley says. “We didn’t want Richard to be a stereotypical villain. We wanted to go a little bit deeper.”
So, Cahill and Stradley are playing it straight.
“We decided to make the scene as honest as possible,” Stradley says. “I put my heart out there and try to win hers. It’s not just a power play, but an honest, emotional situation.”
For a woman of the time, however, no matter how honest either character is played, it’s inevitably about power, Cahill says.
“What is she going to do if she doesn’t marry him?” she says. “He’s killed everyone who’s important to her. Shakespeare asks here: What’s a woman to do?”