Sunday, November 02, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Editor

Mark Rylance is a beguiling combination of offhand and charismatic, pragmatic and visionary, insider and outsider -- American upbringing, no Oxbridge education, an actor in a job usually given to a director, a man of enthusiasms some would regard as eccentric.

In England, he counts as an American, even though he was born in Kent on Jan. 18, 1960. His family moved to the United States when he was 2 -- first Connecticut and then, when he was 9, Milwaukee, where he went to high school.

From 1978-80, he studied at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then acted for a half-dozen British companies, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he met his wife and where Ron Daniels directed him in a noteworthy "Hamlet." Pittsburgh saw this brilliant, pajama-clad prince (with an American supporting cast) at Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1991.

That's pretty establishment. But in addition to his foreign framing, there's Rylance's questing interest in arcane knowledge -- alchemy, the cabala, Eastern mysticism, Ficino, sacred cycles, dreams. He is said to doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays ascribed to him, though he downplays that in service to the Globe.

He forged a special though brief bond with Sam Wanamaker, a transplanted American with blazing blue eyes who drove the Globe from impossible dream to near completion. Their connection completes a cycle of the 20th-century recovery of Shakespearean theater craft. Begun under William Poel in England, it was spread by Ben Iden Payne, who directed in Manchester and Dublin before spending 50 years training Americans, mainly at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Tech and then the University of Texas. Payne also directed Chicago's Goodman Theater and in San Diego and Ashland, Ore., where Elizabethan-style theaters still show his influence.

One of those influenced greatly was Wanamaker, the Chicago-bred actor/director who brought that recovery back to the very spot where Shakespeare's plays first flourished.

With his soft accent, neither unambiguously British nor American, Rylance is very approachable. He laughs easily -- you could call it a giggle. He appreciates absurdity. His general air is modest, even diffident, but his convictions are strong.

On stage, he combines informality with charisma. "People know I sometimes forget my lines and make up something else," he admits, referring both to supportive fellow actors and to the Globe audience, which clearly loves him.

Rylance "plays Shakespeare like Shakespeare wrote it for him the night before," Al Pacino has said. But his career has not been all Shakespeare. He's also a star in commercial theater -- in Yasmina Reza's "Life X 3" in London, he raised to excellence a play that was just passable on Broadway. His movies include "Prospero's Books," "Angels & Insects" and "Intimacy."

But what is it about Rylance and hats? Off stage, he is hardly ever seen without one. Maybe it's his thinning hair -- or maybe he knows something we don't about cranial energy.

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