By Sharon Eberson
It was a good omen at just the right time for Kyle Haden, the Steelers’ overtime win on Sunday. He was talking about the boost from his beloved team on the eve of opening night, a theater director sounding like a coach facing the next big game.
Haden was gearing up for The Chief, the bio-play about Steelers founding father Art Rooney Sr., a man he calls “The Patron Saint of Pittsburgh.”
There was bound to be a playoff atmosphere at this particular opening night for Haden and Philip Winters, the actor who portrays Rooney in the solo show. The Chief marks the comeback of Pittsburgh Public Theater at its Cultural District home, the O’Reilly Theater, for in-person performances.
It comes after 19 long months of the pandemic shutdown that kept audiences and companies apart.
For the Public’s return to the O’Reilly, artistic director Marya Sea Kaminski has chosen one of the most successful productions in the history of the 46-year-old theater and given it a makeover.
The chief change to The Chief, aside from the actor portraying Rooney, is an in-the-round set designed by Britton Mauk and incorporating a rotating turntable.
Pittsburgh native and Hollywood actor Tom Atkins originated the role on the thrust set of the O’Reilly and went on to a handful of revivals at the Public, plus a 2010 film version of the work by Rob Zellers and Gene Collier.
Besides the set, there has been some tweaking of the script for the 2021 production. Still, it mostly remains the same: It’s 1976, two months after the Steelers have won their second Super Bowl, and Art Rooney Sr. is in his office, sharing memories of his remarkable life with the audience. Franco Harris’ Immaculate Reception also gets Its due.
The opportunity to direct The Chief came up while Haden was working with the co-writer on Zellers’ new play, Redux, and was rooted in a meeting with Kaminski.
“On our first walk together Downtown, we talked about, what were good football plays, and we said, The Chief, but I’m sure we couldn’t do that again,” Haden recalled. “So, it was a full circle for her to come back and say, ‘We’re thinking of doing this, would you have any interest?’
“I was like, of course.”
The Bethel Park native, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon, is an actor-director who for six years was head of the Ashland (Ore.) New Plays Festival. In the Zoom call for this interview, he was seated in front of a wall that shouted his Steelers fandom.
Haden is working with Winters, an actor and educator at Point Park University who also is a lifelong Steelers fan; by way of Connellsville and Indiana (Pa.), Winters grew up going to games with his father, who divided his season tickets among his three sons.
This is Winters’ second stint as Rooney — he played the role in a 2017 production at St. Vincent College.
“I love the play, I love the stories, I love Pittsburgh,” he said. “To me, it’s just a little bit of everything I like. I’m a history buff and a huge football fan.”
He came to the role for the Public in a roundabout way, after Australian actor John Noble was announced, came to Pittsburgh to prepare, then dropped out for “personal reasons.”
“I did this weird thing that I normally don’t do. I reached out to somebody,” Winters said. “I heard [the Public] was doing it, and since I had done it before, I just thought I’d throw my hat in the ring.”
Winters heard back that it had already been cast with Noble, known for the “Lord of the Rings” movies and TV’s “Fringe,” among other screen roles.
But, the Pittsburgh actor was asked, might he be interested in being an understudy?
“And I was happy to sign up for that because I didn’t know it would end up like this,” Winters said with a laugh.
At the time, he thought he would be in the room where it happens with theater folks and maybe have a chance to do it once or twice during Noble’s run.
All photos by Michael Henninger.
Suddenly, Winters was the lead.
“We had already talked about a schedule in which we were going to play a little bit with it, get a chance to wrestle with it, and then I was super excited to have Phil actually do it,” Haden said.
The director, who worked with Noble before the actor’s departure, said, “John is a tremendous actor and an awesome person. It just didn’t work out this time, and we wish him well. But I do feel like, at the end of the day, having someone here who understands the role, the city, the team — because I’m from here, too — having someone who matches that is the best fit. So it feels like the best outcome is to have Phil do it and have me work with him in this reimagined format.”
Among the things Winters has had to prepare for is having an audience all around him and acting while on a turntable.
Winters described his ability to move about the spartan set as liberating, also noting that the stage movements were “nice and slow” and deliberate.
“The idea,” said Haden, “was for us to use the full set of the office, to be able to take advantage of all those different areas, which could be super static. It’s natural staging for Phil, but then also it gives the audience different glimpses of it. It really feels like anyone sitting anywhere is going to have full access to him.”
The director believes theater-goers will connect with Winters as he has during their collaboration, calling the actor “a natural storyteller.”
Winters dove into storytelling mode to explain why someone who “tends to get antsy” on most projects feels like, as the Chief, “I could do it forever,”
“I think,” Winters said, “it’s knowing it’s not an imitation of Art Rooney by any means. It’s using Art Rooney’s life and story to tell this bigger story, about Pittsburgh at the turn of the century through the late 20th century. All the changes that Art Rooney goes through, the city goes through, too. And I just find that it never loses interest to me.”
Every night, he continued, something he has said many times before will make him say, “Wow, think about that.” For example, he gives that the Rooney kids would swim in the Allegheny River — scaring the heck out of their mother — and occasionally witness a dead horse floating by.
“I used to say that line without even thinking about it. But lately, I’ve been thinking, ‘Can you imagine? That’s your playground? And look at how far we’ve come.'”
When Winters finished, Haden said, “I feel like, Phil, you respond to this on an elemental level.”
The director believes that comes through loud and clear in the actor’s portrayal of Rooney, who died in 1988, at age 87. Haden had not seen any of the Atkins performances that so many Pittsburghers associate with the role, but he talked with original set designer Anne Mundell, his colleague at Carnegie Mellon, about doing the show in the round.
“The way we are approaching it, Phil’s portrayal, certainly the container of it is going to be different,” Haden said. “So I think that’s the way people are really going to feel the difference, in that engagement.”
Both the director and actor addressed what it was like to return to the theater after so many months and do it with this particular play in their hometown.
Haden talked about how last year, the Steelers’ 11-0 start had buoyed his spirits, but mostly about the Patron Saint of Pittsburgh.
“Thinking of all we’ve been through, and looking at all the social justice and racial justice reckonings we’re having, Art Rooney is still held up as the type of person you want to be,” Haden said. “He was fair-minded. He was a champion for diversity. He cared about those things. And I think that at the end of the day, he’s the type of person I want to be like, he’s the type of neighbor I want to be, and husband. He cares about the right things. I think holding that up as this is the way we want to be as Pittsburgh is a really good way to come back.”
Winters used Rooney’s words to describe how he feels about the Public welcoming audiences back to the O’Reilly.
“Thinking about reopening the theater after all this time, in a larger sense, what the play is about is resiliency and not letting things get you down,” Winters said. “I say two or three times in the play, ‘That’s the way the world goes. You get knocked down, and you gotta get back up.”
The Chief is at the O’Reilly Theater through Nov. 7. For tickets ($40-$85) and COVID safety protocols, visit https://ppt.org/production/76165/the-chief.
Categories: Show Previews
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