by dan pine
staff writer
When Wendy Wasserstein succumbed to cancer last year, America lost one of its most esteemed playwrights, leaving her many admirers devastated.
Although saddened by her death, Gerald Hiken never considered himself a Wasserstein fan. Plays like “The Sisters Rosenzweig” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Heidi Chronicles” left him cold.
But not “Third.”
Wasserstein’s last completed play, “Third,” opened in 2006 to mixed reviews. It makes its Bay Area premiere with a TheatreWorks production in Mountain View, opening Jan. 16. Hiken, one of the stars, loves the play.
“When I was told I was up for a play she had written I was not overly enthusiastic,” said the Palo Alto actor. “But when I read it, I was moved. I felt she had stretched beyond what she had done before.”
Set in a college town, “Third” tells the story of a middle-aged female professor confronting a student she suspects of committing plagiarism. She also must deal with an argumentative daughter and a father (played by Hiken) facing Alzheimer’s disease. For good measure, Wasserstein even throws in echoes of King Lear.
“He is not full blown, but close,” Hiken says of his character’s dementia. “In his moments of clarity, he recognizes the fact that having Alzheimer’s puts a burden on people around him. He tells [his daughter] he’s sorry about the problems he causes her.”
Though his character is not Jewish, Hiken is the son of two Yiddish-speaking immigrants. He grew up in a German neighborhood of Milwaukee.
“In the ’30s that was not good,” Hiken says. “I grew up terrified. The teachers were protecting me.”
Eventually, he found solace in the theater. His career on the New York stage includes a turn as the husband of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in “Golda,” opposite the late Anne Bancroft.
One night, Meir herself came to see the play. “Golda did not like looking at me because her husband died while she was with another man,” Hiken recalls. “Her kids told me how much I looked like her father.”
He was also cast as Tevye in the original 1964 Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” but ultimately lost the role to Zero Mostel. He could have been Mostel’s standby, but instead Hiken and his wife decided to move to the Bay Area, where he headed Stanford University’s then-nascent Stanford Repertory Theatre.
He bought a house in Palo Alto where he and his wife raised their two children. He’s still there.
As far as religious practice goes, it’s not a high priority for Hiken. But Jewish ethics loom large for him.
“If I were to say what I feel most about being Jewish, it is the precept that an unexamined life is not worth living,” he says. “That was a major effect on me in being a Jew: the life of the mind.”
Though he’s done plenty of TV and local stage work, these days Hiken’s favorite theater is his living room. For three years, on any given Friday or Saturday night, Hiken has opened his home to the public as he takes on the personas of Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, poet W.H. Auden or Marcel Proust, and delivers extended dramatic monologues.
He even recites a self-penned monologue based on King Lear’s night out in the storm. Convenient for someone playing a Lear-like dad in “Third.”
Hiken says doing these at-home salon performances “not only keeps me sharp, but has created community. There’s a growing knowledge that here is a place people can get together. It’s relaxed and comfortable.”
He’s now preparing to add an evening of cabaret to his home-theater repertoire, singing 30 of his favorite songs right there in the living room. A cappella.
With his home theater and many roles in local productions from ACT, Cal Shakes and more, Hiken remains a busy working actor. So busy, he fired his agent. But as for preparing for any role, nothing has changed for this stage veteran.
“I don’t know how it’s going to be until we start working,” he says. “I play from the inside.”
TheatreWorks production of “Third” plays 7: 30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays, Jan. 16-Feb. 10, at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets: $21-$57. Information: (650) 903-6000 or online at www.theatreworks.org.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California