The New York Times profiles Col. Henson

By Randy Kennedy
Copyright© 1999 The New York Times

The name -- Col. Eben C. Henson -- conjures up images from Faulkner, of a grand Southern gentleman with a hunting dog at his feet.

But one morning last weekend, the stocky, gimlet-eyed 76-year-old could be found on West 44th Street, up a flight of carpeted stairs, perched on a wobbly chair in a theatrical audition room. At his feet was a young actress, who had asked permission to splay herself on the ground, maybe to give a little more emotional depth to the monologue she was about to begin.

She pouted. She emoted. She made it about 10 seconds, up to "There was a dead centipede in my tuna fish sandwich!" before the colonel -- it's an honorary title from the Kentucky legislature -- leaned forward and politely said, "O.K."

As he had reminded her and a dozen other nervous young actors earlier: "If I stop you in the middle, it doesn't mean you're bad.

"It just means I've seen enough of you."

It doesn't take the colonel long these days to figure out when he has seen enough.

This spring marks the 50th year he has packed a summer suit, knotted his Kentucky colonel tie and made his way to Manhattan from tiny Danville, Ky., to find eager young actors for his perpetually struggling summer stock theater, the Pioneer Playhouse.

And despite the damage that television commercials, soap operas and movie-extra roles have done to the tradition of acting in summer stock, New York is still the spring destination for stock theater owners. They come offering little more than a chance for inexperienced actors to flee New York for the summer, work 14-hour days and act in front of live audiences, increasingly made up of retirees on the Winnebago circuit.

It mattered little to those who responded to the colonel's annual advertisement in Backstage, the theater trade magazine. "Basically, you could cast a show in Guam here," said Richie Nash, who has been trying to make it as an actor in New York for four years and spent the summer of 1996 at the colonel's theater. "So many people are hungry for work, anywhere, for anything, as long as they get to act."

In that respect, things have changed very little over the years Colonel Henson has been coming to town. In 1969, for example, he hired an ambitious teen-ager from Englewood, N.J., named John Travolta, who spoke his first theatrical lines at the Playhouse. (The play, written by Colonel Henson himself, was about a Kentucky doctor who pioneered abdominal surgery. Travolta's first lines were: "Yes. Margaret Miller was suffering from pyloric stenosis and at the time of the operation I had no chance of success!")

But as part George M. Cohan, part Lee Strasberg, part used-car salesman, Colonel Henson is also one of a dying breed. In its heyday in the 1930's and 1940's, hundreds of little theaters made up the so-called straw-hat circuit, and the plucky "Let's put on a show in a barn!" esthetic entered American culture.

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland did it in the movie "Summer Stock." In "The Big Laugh," John O'Hara's novel about 1930's Hollywood, a future film icon, Hubie Ward, gets his start with the fictional East Sandwich Players on Cape Cod.

"Does it pay well?" Hubie asks a friend.

"Does it pay well?" she replies. "Pays nothing. But we get room and board and a chance to act in some very good plays. The best kind of experience for somebody just starting out."

Colonel Henson offers a lot of experience and a little pay -- $200 a week for principal actors; $50 a week for people who will mostly work on the technical side but can try out for small parts; room and board for those he calls apprentices, who can also try out. He says he has never made a dime from the theater and in fact has kept it alive with hundreds of thousands of dollars from rental properties that he and his wife, Charlotte, operate.

"A lot of people ask me, 'Colonel, why do you do it?' " he said between auditions. Then another actor came in, and he never got back around to what he tells them.

Somehow, Colonel Henson and his wife have managed to hang on as others have dimmed the lights for good. James B. McKenzie, executive producer of the successful Westport Playhouse in Connecticut, said that when he started at the theater 41 years ago, there were 52 large summer stock houses with union actors in the Northeast. Now there are three.

Summer stock theaters like Colonel Henson's, which uses nonunion actors, have fared better because their costs are lower. But Alleen Hussung, director of professional licensing for Samuel French, the theatrical publisher, said she thinks only about 20 to 30 are left.

"My hat's off to him," McKenzie said, "and to anybody who can stay in as long as this guy has."

Colonel Henson has been coming to New York so long that he has outlasted two of the cheap Times Square hotels he once frequented. Now he checks in at the Milford Plaza on 44th Street and until recently held auditions there. He allows himself few indulgences but always calls up Joe Allen, the Restaurant Row actors' canteen, and announces that "the colonel is in town." They always find him a table.

Raised in Danville, the son of a pistol-wielding Federal revenue agent known as Cruel Daddy, Colonel Henson started his theater company after studying acting briefly in New York.

He returned to Kentucky and began producing plays in a theater at a state mental hospital while he saved to build his own.

When he built the Playhouse, he scavenged floor boards from a school and lights from an ice-cream parlor, and he traded four bottles of rye whiskey for the main timber beams.

This year, as always, he was looking for something that invariably raises his opinion of a New York actor's abilities: a car.

"You do have a car?" he asked one actor, Jonathan Platt, whom he had cut off quickly in a scene from Richard II. "Well, good. We don't pay for transportation, but if you can round up a few other actors from here to drive down, we can pick up the gas."

He added hopefully: "I feel like you might have a little something on the ball."

He also told him to be sure to bring dress shoes, a white shirt and a suit, because costumes are always in short supply.

The season starts up in early June -- 5 plays in 10 weeks, including the chestnut "Arsenic and Old Lace," which Colonel Henson first staged at the theater in the mental institution. The actors and apprentices will pitch in to do jobs that would require a dozen union cards in New York, from leading roles to lighting to letting out hems.

He says that easily more than 1,000 actors have rotated through his theater in 50 years, and that he has recruited most from New York. They usually return to the city -- tanned and tired and full of confidence -- and few ever make it as actors. The only other notable Playhouse alumni Colonel Henson mentions beside Travolta are Lee Majors (then known as Harvey Yeary) and Jim Varney, of the "Ernest" movie series.

This year, Colonel Henson hired three new actors to go with three who will be returning, and he persuaded four of those who tried out to come down as apprentices.

"Listen, let me be honest," he told one. "I don't think you are mature enough in your craft for me to pay you the big salary I'm offering."

Later, at a diner, over a cheese-and-mustard sandwich, he smiled and seemed happy with the spring crop. "Sometimes, you know, I feel sorry for people and really just want to take them down to get them a start," he said. "People in New York can be very hard on these kids."

840 Stanford Rd. Danville, KY | 40422 859-236-2747 pioneer@mis.net