No small part of the power in Richard Thomas‘ Tony-nominated performance in the current production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s subtly scalding play The Balusters might, in fact, be something the audience itself carries into the theater: We are programmed to love this actor. Not just to admire his tremendous talent and the nuanced character study he offers up nightly, but him, the actual man we watched grow up on our TV screens on one of the most beloved family dramas of all time. Plenty of people still watch that show – got cable? Then you probably got The Waltons – so the once (and let’s be honest) always John-Boy Walton carries a load of good will that few of us could even imagine.
Though he’s certainly too well-mannered – too nice – to cop to it, Thomas must be fully aware that audience expectation is just one hammer in his box of actor tools. When Elliot Emerson, his nominally upstanding guardian of a local Brownstone Brooklyn-ish neighborhood volunteer group tasked with maintaining the standards, architectural and otherwise, of their lovely landmarked community, comes up against the new – newcomers, new ideas, new tactics – that don’t quite mesh with his long-established way of doing things, nice goes out the stringently designed-to-meet-building-code window.
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Even if you’ve had the good fortune to see Thomas in any of the many stage productions of his 68-year career – he’s been on Broadway 16 times since his 1958 debut in Sunrise at Campobello that also featured Ralph Bellamy and James Earl Jones, and in many theater productions in Los Angeles and elsewhere – there likely will be at least some small neighborhood of your brain that simply wants to like this actor, maybe even the characters he plays. No small part of the fun of watching Thomas perform is to observe how he both taps into that desire and, at just the right moment, upends it, all to serve what, in the case of the Lindsay-Abaire play, directed by Kenny Leon and presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club, is a vision of our times that is at once cunning, uncompromising and oddly compassionate, a critique but also an embrace for all of us who make messes of things despite our firmly held intentions. Even in a place as lovely as a picture-perfect brownstone neighborhood.
The play’s synopsis: “The Balusters is a raucous, wild ride through a small community with big feelings. The Vernon Point Neighborhood Association is a passionate bunch, whether squabbling over historically inaccurate porch railings or debating trash can protocol. Still, no one is prepared for the neighbor-versus-neighbor battle royale that ensues when a newcomer to the board suggests the unthinkable: installing a stop sign on the corner of the enclave’s prettiest block.”
In addition to Thomas, The Balusters stars Anika Noni Rose, Marylouise Burke, Kayli Carter, Ricardo Chavira, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Margaret Colin, Michael Esper, Maria-Christina Oliveras and Jeena Yi. Playing at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, The Balusters has been nominated for five Tony Awards including Best Play, Best Featured Actress in a Play (Burke), Best Featured Actor in a Play (Thomas), Best Direction of a Play, and Best Costume Design of a Play (Emilio Sosa).
In this interview, Thomas chats about the play, his life in the theater, The Waltons and even a particularly memorable long-ago episode of the 1970s horror anthology series Night Gallery that remains a favorite of no less an expert than a modern-day master of the fantastical.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
DEADLINE: First question, did you know what a baluster was before you took this project?
RICHARD THOMAS: I did. Don’t ask me how or why, but I did know what a baluster is.
DEADLINE: I’m trying to think, is this the darkest character maybe you’ve ever played?
THOMAS: Oh, God no, no, no. This is not darker than Iago or Richard the Third.
DEADLINE: Okay, but Shakespeare not included.
THOMAS: Shakespeare is always included. [Laughs] I played Peter in Enemy of the People, which is a very dark part.
DEADLINE: But even in The Little Foxes, which is full of awful characters, you played the nice guy.
THOMAS: Horace. Yeah, but Horace is a foxy character himself.
DEADLINE: When you heard that Balusters was going to Broadway, what were your thoughts?
THOMAS: I was thrilled. It’s a wonderful play. I was delighted. I mean, it’s where it should be.
DEADLINE: We know – now – that a baluster is a pillar or a post or something that holds up a stairwell, usually on a porch, but it’s a lot more than that here. What’s the subtext of all this talk about stop signs and posts and porches.
THOMAS: It’s about holding on or moving forward. It’s about impermanence and the pain of letting go of things that are established and the fear of that and the need for things to move forward. It takes place in a landmark district and the board of a landmark district is charged fundamentally with the task of maintaining a certain look and a certain feel and holding the old order in place, and Elliot, as the president and as a lifelong resident of the neighborhood, is holding on to more than just the established rules, he’s holding on to his childhood, he’s holding on to life as it once was. The balusters are just the smallest version of that.
He’s a very interesting character in so many ways, because he is clearly the antagonist, but everybody has good points and qualities that are admirable, including Elliot. Nobody in the play is a bad person. Nobody’s trying to do the wrong thing. Everybody in the play thinks they’re a good person and thinks they’re trying to do the right thing, which is one of the things that’s so human about it.
DEADLINE: To me the big question that the play asks is who gets to make the decisions about what changes and what stays the same. We have these self-appointed guardians such as Elliot who have always made the decisions and believe that entitles them to continue to do so, without making room for anyone else.
THOMAS: Well, that’s right. One of the things that’s so canny about the play is David [Lindsay-Abaire] comes down on the side of progress because it’s unavoidable, but he does not really come down on the side of any particular character. Every character has an opportunity to express a very valid point of view, and everybody gets spanked, including Kyra [the forward-looking new neighbor and nominal protagonist played by Anika Noni Rose]. They’re all flawed and yet they all have very good points to make about things. That’s the beauty of it. It’s messy, as the Ruth character [played by Margaret Colin] says. Of course, somebody else is eventually going to take the helm, and the people who end up in charge after Elliot are going to have the same problems of maintaining their power and pushing the agenda that they think is correct. And eventually they’ll go down too, because this is the way the world.
DEADLINE: But Elliot is the one who actually weaponizes a baluster, literally and figuratively. He’s not entirely an antagonist, but he tips that balance a little bit more than the others do.
THOMAS: Oh, he’s absolutely an antagonist, and he’s also ill. Elliot is on his way to his death, and he’s enraged and grief-stricken about the fact that he’s not only losing power, he’s losing his life, which is ultimately what allows [Lindsay-Abaire] to give him his humanity, because this rage and grief and remorse that he expresses at the end is what most deeply humanizes him. As for me personally, I mean, I’ve been chewing the scenery my whole life, so beating up the set with a baluster is not a big step.
DEADLINE: Without spoiling anything, there’s a great moment in the play when we realize that something really nasty that Elliot did, well, he wasn’t alone.
THOMAS: Exactly. In beautifully Shakespearean fashion, David lets everyone share the burden of human frailty. It’s what makes the play so great, because we are all wrong in some ways, and we just have to get together in the room and try to make something positive happen. It’s not easy and it takes struggle. Antagonists are notoriously wonderful roles to play and they’re more profoundly pleasurable in direct proportion to how much humanity they’re given. And Elliot is a great villain. There’s a beautiful scene, a two-hander scene between him and Kyra when you realize that a lot of this is blindness. He’s crafty and he wants to get his way, but he’s also blind to the ways in which he doesn’t see the things he’s done and things he’s endorsed. It’s not a willful opposition to the right path, but he needs to have his eyes opened, and part of what happens in the play, and from my perspective, is that his eyes get opened.
DEADLINE: I read that of all of this year’s Tony nominees you hold the greatest time span between your Broadway debut and this year’s nominations. Sixty-seven years?
THOMAS: My Equity card will be 67 years old. But I was on stage in summer stock as a child, so it actually goes back a little farther, 68 years, but at this point, who’s counting?
DEADLINE: Can you reflect on that? I’m not sure there’s anyone – not just the nominees – but anyone who can say that.
THOMAS: It’s been a long, long road, and I did start very young. My life starts in the theater, with my birth, because my parents were in the ballet, and I was literally raised backstage, and there are actual photographs of me sleeping in trunks. My parents were with Balanchine’s company, so I’ve been living in the bosom of the theater literally my whole life, and practicing it for almost 70 years. But you know, it’s just one damn thing after another, just like history, isn’t it?
I think one of the great things I was able to be a part of, which no longer exists, was the live television era, when I was coming up. I never had any formal training. I never went to acting school or academy or anything. That doesn’t make it any better, it’s just the way my life rolled out, but one of the great apprenticeship experiences from my day starting in the late 1950s was the experience of doing all those wonderful live television dramas and soap operas in New York. That world sort of brought together camera technique and theater technique at the same time. It was a wonderful way to learn. We would go into the room with a teleplay and we’d rehearse for a few weeks, like you would with a play, and then we’d get together, and we’d do it live. We’d usually only do it once, or sometimes we would do it twice, a live thing and then again for tape. And then the training of doing live soap opera, which was amazing, because we were like, you know, you just get the script and do it the next day. For a child actor, these were wonderful, wonderful days of training.
DEADLINE: Having started so young on stage, is there ever a sense, when you look back, that when The Waltons came along your career went in a direction you hadn’t planned?
THOMAS: Oh, no! I had total control, as much as anyone has control over anything, which is hardly at all. But no, I’d started in theater when I was like seven years old, and I started on television when I was eight or nine with my first Hallmark show. So I’d been doing TV, and when The Waltons came when I was 21 I’d already had a lot of TV under my belt. But The Waltons was wonderful, are you kidding? It’s such a great show, and was such wonderful company. I’m so proud of it, and it gave me what it gave me, which is still functioning to this day over half a century later. It’s staggering to me. I can hardly imagine how many people still appreciate and enjoy it. The resonance of that show has been so long lasting, and it’s been so helpful and wonderful for me and my career.
When the series came along, it took a while for me to get back in stride with the theater work. My last Broadway show, I think it might have been Edward Albee’s play Everything in the Garden when I was maybe 16 or something like that, and then I was going up to LA and doing movies and TV shows, and then it took a while for me to get back to Broadway. But I would go away during hiatus and do a lot of theater work in LA, because that’s where I was at the time and it was a pathway to get back on stage.
I left The Waltons after five years, because even though it would have been much more lucrative for me to stay…I think that the longer I stayed in the show the longer it would have taken to sort of balance the scales and get to do the other kind of work I wanted to do. So I exercised some control in that respect. I mean, you just do the best you can, you know? I never really had a strategy.
In terms of the impact of that show, I mean, it’s still on many times a day. It’s amazing.
DEADLINE: The actress who played your teacher on the show just recently passed away.
THOMAS: Yes, Mariclare Costello. She has a memorial in New York on Wednesday but alas it’s a matinee day for me. I was so fond of her, she was such a wonderful actress, a wonderful person. We’ve all stayed very close. It really is still like a family. All of the siblings are together still, we stay in touch and see each other whenever we can. It was a family then, and it’s still a family.
DEADLINE: Speaking of other shows you did, you were in one of the greatest Night Gallery episodes of all time back in ’72.
THOMAS: I agree! “Sins of the Fathers!” I love that show! Talk about chewing the scenery. That was one of the last gasps of maximalist melodramatic acting, not just on my part, but the whole cast. It was over the top in the most delicious way. [Editor’s Note: Even the low-quality copies of the episode on YouTube prove that Thomas is 100% correct in his assessment.] And it was another chance to work with Geri [Geraldine] Page. She was my mom on Broadway, too, in Strange Interludes, 1962 I think. I think I had my birthday on that show. She was one of the greats, and again, when you’re a child actor, the people who play your parents, when they’re wonderful actors, they teach you so much. So Geri did that twice for me. I just learned recently that Guillermo del Toro absolutely loved that episode, which really makes me happy.
DEADLINE: There’s been a lot of discussion lately about Broadway audiences yelling out things at actors about their TV roles. When Michael Imperioli did Enemy of the People a couple years back someone yelled out “Christofuh!” And someone yelled something about The Pitt at Isa Briones during her performance in Just In Time on Broadway. Has that ever happened to you – and you know the quote I’m wondering about.
THOMAS: I get Good Night John Boys all the time. Not usually during the show, but very frequently at curtain calls. You know, people watch TV and yell at their screens all the time, but we’re not a screen, we’re a bunch of people up there doing a show. I mean, my job on stage is to not be distracted by all of the phones. It’s my job that it should not distract me, so it doesn’t. I’m also hard of hearing, so that helps, but what annoys me about people yelling out is it distracts the audience. Our job is to keep the audience focused, so when someone breaks that focus for the audience, that’s an egregious violation in my opinion. But I would also remind people that I doubt the audience at the Globe Theater 400 and some years ago was a very constrained and well-behaved bunch. I think the theater has always been a place where people will shout out, and you can say it’s good, you can say it’s bad, but it’s never gonna change.