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Stage Preview: Youthful actor Darren Eliker finds Pittsburgh, and 'All My Sons' role, suits his style
Friday, February 02, 2001 By Anna Rosenstein
Let's play a hypothetical game with a hypothetical Carnegie Mellon drama student. Ask her to say the first word that comes to mind in response to whatever you say. You start with "Hollywood." She says "star." You: "Broadway." She: "star." Finally: "Pittsburgh." "Airport," she shoots back.
Where: Hazlett Theater, North Side.
When: Feb. 7-18.
Tickets: 412-394-3353.
It happens all the time. Before the cap and gown are cold, actors trained in Pittsburgh depart for the reputedly more lucrative markets of New York and Los Angeles. But not all of them. Darren Eliker, for instance, who graduated from CMU in 1992, stayed. Or, more exactly, he did leave, but he decided to come back.
Eliker, who plays Chris Keller in Starlight Productions' "All My Sons," by Arthur Miller, was good enough to get into CMU on early decision. They offered him a place the day of his audition, his first trip to the university from his home in southern New Jersey. After two grueling years, Eliker took some time off to reassess his goals. "I just needed to step away from everything for a little bit. You feel like you're on a treadmill, you get so much thrown at you," Eliker recalls.
That year off was Eliker's first taste of the Pittsburgh theater community. After working with Saltworks Theatre Company, he ended up taking some unmemorable odd jobs and decided to head back to CMU. "When I went back, I was a lot more focused. I just knuckled down and got on with the business of working on my craft," he says.
His dedication paid off. Several talent agencies expressed interest in signing him and Eliker succumbed to the lure of New York. A year of frustrating auditions in which he heard the same thing over and over -- "you look too young" -- convinced him that it wasn't the right time to ply his trade in the Big Apple.
Knowing that he had friends and contacts in Pittsburgh, Eliker decided to return. Since then, he has established close ties with two theater companies: Starlight Productions (performing in "Death of a Salesman," "The Grapes of Wrath" and, currently, "All My Sons"), and Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre ("Translations," "The Rivals" and "The Cripple of Inishmaan"). The opportunity to establish close and ongoing working relationships is one of the things Eliker appreciates about Pittsburgh theater. His other recent roles include Fred in CLO's "A Musical Christmas Carol" and Elvis Presley in City Theatre's "Picasso at the Lapin Agile."
Eliker is also impressed with the number of acting opportunities he's found in Pittsburgh outside of theater. Upon his return, he began working at WORD-FM as an announcer, a job that led to work at the station as a writer, assistant production manager and, eventually, creative and production director. Eliker does voiceovers at WORD but free-lances as well, with a typical morning including the recording of several commercials, an industrial and the voiceover for an awards ceremony.
He bristles a bit in noting that he occasionally has to defend the legitimacy of such work. The bottom line is, of course, that he's acting, he's making a living at it and he has the freedom to accept only the roles he wants. "I don't worry about how success comes, or fret over not being in New York City right now. My life happens pretty providentially," says Eliker, who confesses that he rather unwillingly fell into acting at the behest of his friends. "My success is not bound up in what I do, it's in who I am," he concludes.
It's a sentiment that easily could have blossomed from his work on "All My Sons." This early play of Miller's premiered in 1947, his second Broadway production, and includes themes that would reappear later in "Death of a Salesman."
"All My Sons" is set after World War II and focuses on the family of Joe Keller, a factory owner who made his money selling airplane parts to the Army during the war. In many ways, the drama revolves around his wife Kate, who holds the family hostage to her irrational belief that her missing son will return from the war. It later becomes apparent that Kate's insistence is linked to a darker family secret, a secret that threatens to destroy the tentative stability of the Kellers' middle-class home. Most at stake is the relationship of Joe to his son Chris.
Eliker points out that the father-son relationship in "All My Sons" is similar to that of Biff and Willy in "Death of a Salesman." The similarities are further highlighted in Starlight's production since Eliker, who played Biff in Starlight's 1999 production of "Death of a Salesman," now plays Chris and Bingo O'Malley, who played Willy, plays Joe. Both productions were directed by Starlight's artistic director, Scott Lee DeNier.
A profoundly moral play, "All My Sons" explores the tension between man's responsibility to his family and his society. It cries out against an America that increasingly links money with identity and self-worth. In its dramaturgy, it recalls Ibsen, perhaps even Greek tragedy, asking that we see the inevitability of catastrophe stemming from a past riddled with guilt.
Which is one of the reasons the play maintains its relevance. It's an echo from our own past that reminds us we're never free from that which came before and always accountable to that which will follow.
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