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  Dakin Mathews, Prince of Old Globe

By Jennifer de Poyen
Union-Tribune [San Diego CA]
October 9, 2005

A few years ago, when revelations of sexual abuse catapulted the Catholic Church into deep crisis, Dakin Matthews started scribbling in his notebook.

Dakin Matthews as Matthew Cardinal John in "The Prince of L.A." Matthews has played a priest on a number of TV shows, including "Desperate Housewives."

As horrible stories emerged from one diocese after another, the actor would sit in his dressing room between turns on the stage, or stay up late into the night, ruminating on what had gone wrong.

Much of the news coverage centered on the errant priests and their traumatized victims. But for Matthews, those accounts mostly skirted the fundamental question of how and why church leaders came to protect the small but pernicious group of men who preyed on children in their charge.

"Beyond the horrors and devastation of the abusers' actions, the really shocking thing was that just about a hundred percent of Catholic bishops participated in the cover-up," Matthews said during a recent conversation at the Old Globe, where his "Prince of L.A." – the play that resulted from all that soul-searching – is on view through Oct. 30.

"How could the bishops – these apparently smart, apparently devout, apparently thoughtful men – behave in such an un-Christian way in response to the horrible abuse that was going on?"

At 64, Matthews has made a career of posing such penetrating questions about human psychology and behavior, mostly as a classical actor but also as a dramaturge, producer, director, translator and teacher. In the process, he has evolved into one of the country's foremost interpreters of Shakespeare.

Though he has worked steadily at many leading regional theaters, and occasionally in New York, he has chosen, over the years, to make the Old Globe his theatrical home.

Commuting first from the Bay Area and then from Hollywood, where he has lived for almost two decades, he has performed dozens of roles here – including a magnificently droll Casca in Dan Sullivan's trenchant production of "Julius Caesar" and a jocular Sir Toby Belch in Jack O'Brien's radiant version of "Twelfth Night."

"He's a Renaissance man, really," O'Brien said. "He's a great actor – his reviews for 'Henry IV' in New York (in 2003) were as good as Kevin Kline's (as Falstaff), and deservedly so."

Matthews' interest in the current turmoil in the Catholic Church is rooted not only in intellectual curiousity and theatrical ambition but personal history. Long before he fell into a life in the theater – "completely by accident," as Matthews tells it – he felt the call to the priesthood.

For five years he went to seminary, first in the Bay Area and, later, in Rome. A year before he was to be ordained, he realized he wanted to marry and live in the world. Still, he kept his faith and stayed in touch with his classmates, some of whom ascended to prominent positions in the church.

"I knew these men," said Matthews, who plays Matthew Cardinal John, the fictional archbishop of Los Angeles at the heart of his new play. "I could have been one of these men. How did they let this happen? And why did they think they could get away with it?"

A happy accident

When Matthews left the seminary in the early 1960s, he had few plans, but two long-dead spiritual mentors to guide him: his namesake, Thomas Aquinas (Dakin is an Anglicized version of D'Aquino) and his favorite writer, William Shakespeare.

"I moved into a house that had two little niches where you could put a statue, so I put Shakespeare in one and Aquinas in the other," Matthews recalled. "After awhile, I found I didn't need the Aquinas.

"Shakespeare's picture of human existence – the conflict between reason and passion, between the individual and society, between illusion and reality – is so complete and so completely tolerant that across 400 years his characters leap off the page and the stage. I realized his wisdom was all I needed."

He was teaching college-level English when a friend suggested he audition for the role of Falstaff in "Henry IV." That amateur turn proved a life-changing event: "After that, I began re-arranging my life so I could spend my mornings in the classroom, my afternoons in rehearsal and my nights in the theater," he said.

He met his future wife, fellow dramatist Anne McNaughton, who is directing "Prince of L.A.," and for several years they commuted back and forth to New York, so that she could attend drama school at New York University.

"I followed Anne to New York and begged John Houseman (the first director of Julliard's drama department) to give me a job," said Matthews, who taught the now-legendary first-year class at Julliard, known as Group 1, which included actor Kevin Kline.

During that first year at Julliard, Matthews took a turn on the stage in Brendan Behan's 1958 song-and-dance farce "The Hostage" and caught the eye of O'Brien, then an aspiring young director.

"I thought, 'Who the hell is that?' " O'Brien said. "It's been a long, wonderful trajectory from that day to this. Dakin is vital to me, vital to the theater."

Matthews well remembers the hectic days of commuting between the Bay Area, where his family and teaching job beckoned, and San Diego, where he eagerly joined the Globe's Shakespeare company.

Despite his schedule, he wasn't earning enough money to put his four kids through college, so with some reluctance, Matthews and McNaughton moved the family to Los Angeles. Over the last two decades, he has played dozens of screen roles – including, weirdly, many priests, most recently on ABC's hit series "Desperate Housewives."

As a priest, "he just plays himself," said fellow actor Jonathan McMurtry, who called Matthews "an extremely generous, totally unegocentric and very funny man."

If Matthews needed Hollywood to pay the bills, he also needed the theater to nurture his spirit. A memorable Southern-flavored Menenius in John Hirsch's 1988 production of "Coriolanus" at the Globe, he also created inspired portraits of C.S. Lewis in a 1993 version of William Nicholson's "Shad-owlands" and of munitions maker Andrew Undershaft in a 2002 production of George Bernard Shaw's classic "Major Barbara" (both at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa).

He wowed audiences in New York with his double role as Glendower and the Lord Chief Justice in O'Brien's landmark 2003 production of "Henry IV" at Lincoln Center Theater.

For a long time, Matthews tried his hand at everything but writing. Scholarly and thus perhaps cautious by nature, he got serious about writing only after many years spent translating 17th-century Spanish verse drama, a "total immersion," he says, in the art and craft of theatrical language. Somewhere along the line, he began to find his own voice.

These days, he usually has two plays going at once: one original work, to "create a little bubble of art" in his workaday life in film and television, and one translation, to keep his writing muscles flexed.

A week after "The Prince of L.A." closes at the Globe, Matthews will turn 65. He has no plans to retire: "I think I inherited my father's workaholic genes," he said. "He's 91 and still working some." But his retirement income will allow him to do more stage work, and dig deeper into his writing.

"When I was a young person, I didn't think I knew enough about human nature to write anything, and now I think I do," Matthews said. "After all these years, I finally have something to say."

 
 

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