Floyd Gaffney and James Avery

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Floyd and James

Okay, I did not address Dr. Gaffney as Floyd; he was the director and a brilliant man, and although others presumed to address him familiarly, I did not. James Avery was equally brilliant but my age, and so he was James.

The play was a middle-1970s mediocrity, leaden in its preachiness, but that was what the committee had given Dr. Floyd Gaffney, a forgettable play and a cast of amateurs. Some were well-intentioned but bumbling, and others were princesses of both sexes whose purposes in donning the buskins and trodding the boards remain a mystery. Tardiness, inattention, and self-indulgence were constants – no wonder Dr. Gaffney looked like a man with a secret sorrow. One of the cast, a former Miss Famous Name Brand Beauty Pageant Something-or-Other™, spent more time rehearsing her Academy Award acceptance speech than her immediate lines. She was insolent, incompetent, and barely literate. Oh, yeah. Another cast member worked diligently on his I’m-an-actor-‘tude and considered taking direction and even showing up for rehearsal beneath his level of creativity.

He may have been the walking, talking cliché’ who stopped a rehearsal to ask “What’s my motivation?”

The exception to this Dysfunction Junction was James Avery, then a young college graduate and Viet-Nam veteran. His purpose – not his dream, his purpose – was to write and act. And he did. James was always in the old theatre for rehearsals before anyone else and remained late. He not only knew his part, he knew everyone’s. If you missed a line or a blocking point, he saved you. Despite his relative youth he was fully as professional as Dr. Gaffney, and less acerbic. He had no patience with folly, but was supportive and an eager teacher.

At this point it is relevant to mention that I was the only white performer in an otherwise all black play, and the only goof in an otherwise serious narrative. My limited function was that of the traditional Shakespearean Clown, the oaf whose comic irrelevance serves to break the tension.

One of my encounters with the lead was to insult him with a crudity. Verbally abusing, even in jest, a man the size and presence of James Avery was quite a challenge, and as supportive as he was in person, his character was intimidating. During a rehearsal or a performance, he never stepped out of character.

Dr. Gaffney and James formed a committee of two to solve the problem.

At this point the convention is to insert a life-changing quotation from them, some glowing words That Will Live Forever. Well, it’s not going to happen. I really don’t remember what James and Dr. Gaffney said to me. Whatever they said was immediately practical and functional. They didn’t give inspirational speeches; they solved the problem in a workmanlike manner, and the rehearsal went on.

Neither Dr. Gaffney nor James Avery babbled about following your dreams. They expected you to do your job, learn your lines, come to rehearsal, and think.

That’s not florid or gaseous, but it’s a pretty good lesson.

Both Floyd Gaffney and James Avery are gone now, but they continued the old, old tradition of theatre given to them by their mentors, enriched the tradition with their own special gifts, and passed it to the young. They left behind bodies of work that are excellent in themselves, and new generations of actors, writers, and directors to help civilization carry on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Avery_(actor)

http://theatre.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/InMemoriam/FGaffney/index.html

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