Local director turns focus on audience

Shreveport-Bossier City is blessed, some might say overly so, with an abundance of entertainment options. Among those are a number of theaters offering live performances featuring local actors and, occasionally, visiting professionals.

One of the people responsible for those performances is the director, whose job it is to make sure the actors are in place, know their parts and don’t wander too far afield from the author’s words.

Richard King has been directing and acting in the area for a long time. He got the bug in the eighth grade when he saw a production of “Love Rides the Rails: Or Will the Mail Train Run Tonight?” at Cloverdale Junior High School in Montgomery, Ala. When he saw the other eighth graders on stage, it changed things for him. “It looked like it was just so much fun. I was thrilled by that.”

The son of an Air Force father who was stationed in various places around the country, King attended South Hadley High School in Massachusetts. While he was a freshman, he learned that auditions were being held for a play put on by the drama club. Ironically, it was “Love Rides the Rails.”

He went to the auditions and the next day joined the crowd rushing to the bulletin board to see who had been cast. Way down the list, young King found his name among the list of railroad workers. Disappointed at the size of the role, King was encouraged by the director who saw him looking at the cast list. “[He] came up behind me and said, ‘I thought you read very well. I’m hoping that you’ll get a bigger part down the line.’” Once bitten by the acting bug, King was convinced his future lay on the stage. He applied for and was accepted to Boston University’s Ithaca College at Carnegie Tech. “A turning point between the acting thing and the directing thing happened there,” King said. “A mentor of mine by the name of Word Baker was an acting coach and a director there.” He said, at the time, all he wanted to do was act, but Baker said King’s enthusiasm about the stage was always from the audience’s perspective.

King said he once told Baker he wouldn’t know what to do if he were asked to direct. He told Baker, “I would probably get carried away with the costumes, or the lights, or the props, or the music, or whatever. That would just be terrible.” Baker said, “I directed a show one time, and I got carried away with the props, and the costumes, and the lights, and the music, and now it’s the longest running musical in the history of American theater.” That show was the original production of “The Fantasticks,” which opened in 1960.

Uprooted once again, King landed in West Texas and soon directed a community theater one-act play of “The Trojan Women” for the high school in Happy, Texas. The school was the smallest 1-A school in the state, but King’s troupe of locals won their division competitions all the way to the state championship. As King described the reaction, “I could have been elected mayor.”

Since he’s come to this area, King has directed a number of productions and acted in as many more. He said if you are interested in becoming a director, you must be an actor first. The director is just an audience member, he said. “An audience member who came six weeks early. My job as a theater director is just to be an audience member and to correct mistakes before the real audience gets there. To eliminate those things that the real audience might be jarred by.

“A lot of people think that directing is telling actors to move here and move there. That’s not the total thing. What I’m directing is the audience’s viewpoint. I’m focusing the audience.”

King said most people come to the theater to be entertained, but the effort to go to the theater is too much for those who would rather sit at home or go to the movies to be entertained. “I’ve often said that I am just personally waiting until this television and motion picture fad has run its course. And then those of us in the theater will be rich, rich I tell you,” he added with a deeply mellifluous laugh.

King’s next project is “The Trip to Bountiful” at The Shreveport Little Theatre. Additional auditions are being held for the production in November.

Joe Todaro may be reached at [email protected].