Until then my connection to the profession came partly from Shakespeare. I always felt so welcome in the theater world and so free.”ĭonovan said he took theater seriously “but didn’t realize where it was all headed until I was a junior in high school and my acting teacher said I could apply to a conservatory program. I got to travel around the state, seeing other folks’ plays.
“In Massachusetts,” he said, “there’s this thing called the Drama Guild Festival. I loved telling stories – I’ve always been a very narrative-oriented person.” Having spent his first 7 years in Connecticut, followed by 3 years in England, and a return to Massachusetts, where he had been born, Donovan embarked upon the theater circuit. “When I was in second grade, we all did the school play,” Donovan told me. But whereas Joe is a Westerner, not highly educated, and struggling to find his place in the world, Edmund is a New Englander, well-educated (Boston University, Yale), and enamored of acting since childhood. This is not to slight Joe and Edmund’s commonalities, chief of which is that actor and character are essentially the same age. So it proved when, after having watched Edmund Donovan four times perform Joe in Greater Clements, I sat down with the actor to talk and discovered a person quite unlike the troubled 27-year-old of playwright Samuel D.
There is another sense in which Wilkes’s remark can be construed: You can watch an actor many times in a role and be quite sure the man himself is, in person, very little like the character – the him - he is portraying. Of David Garrick, titan of the 18th-century London theater, his contemporary Thomas Wilkes once said: “Whenever I see him perform a role I never see HIM.” According to the literary scholar Leo Damrosch, Wilkes meant that “you could see Garrick in the same role many times, and still be overwhelmed.”
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