In March, actor and University of South Carolina double alumnus Stan Brown made his Broadway debut as Camel in Water for Elephants — at the age of 61. The Tony award-nominated musical, which is set against the backdrop of a traveling circus during the Great Depression, is now his life six days a week.
Brown completed his bachelors in theatre at the University of South Carolina in 1984 and his MFA in 1989, and acting has been a constant in his life over the past three decades. But the Northwestern University theatre professor has devoted most of his creative energy to educating other actors. Asked how it feels to land a major role on Broadway after so many years, he quotes the poet Langston Hughes: “It’s a dream deferred.”
“I never expected to do Broadway when I came here as a younger man,” he explains from a box overlooking the stage of the Imperial Theater as a pair of acrobats prepare for tonight’s show. “I couldn’t get an agent to meet with me, let alone represent me, so I just kind of changed my plans. I had my degree from USC, so I could teach, and I fell in love with that.”
To take the part in Water for Elephants, he took a leave absence from his day job. But just as he never gave up acting, he is still very much a teacher. Asked about his long road to the Great White Way — he estimates that he has moved 47 times since he was 17, mostly because of his career — he shares an anecdote he also shares with students.
It’s the mid 1990s. His resume includes a coveted fellowship with the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. plus plenty of local success back in Columbia, where he was a founding member of Trustus Theatre. But his career trajectory hasn’t exactly been meteoric, so after failing to break through in New York he has relocated to the U.K.
That’s where he is when one of his old USC theatre professors, Robby Benson, casts him in an Andrew Lloyd Webber tribute at Columbia’s Koger Center for the Arts. To pass time on the trip home, he packs a couple of books, including The Actor and the Text, by longtime Royal Shakespeare Company voice director Cicely Berry. And that’s when everything changed.
“I got on the train to Gatwick, sat down, and there’s two men and a woman sitting across from me,” Brown explains. “They’re engaged in a lively conversation, and the woman’s voice is amazing. She just has a wonderful voice. And then, um, I turn over the book that I’m reading, look at the author photo and — It’s Cicely Berry! One of the biggest voice people in the world was sitting right across from me!”
Striking up a conversation with the legendary voice director begged a certain amount of improv, but Brown was up to the task. “I wasn’t going to go, ‘Hey, I’ve got your book here,’” he says with a laugh. “So I just thought, ‘Hold the book up a little bit higher. Ego will take care of the rest.’”
His instinct was correct. Berry ended up inviting Brown to participate in numerous workshops at RSC, recruited him to work as an assistant at international voice conferences and became a mentor, helping him land other gigs. In time, he landed in the theatre department at Northwestern.
“I tell frightened theatre major seniors this story to reassure them about the power of their intentions, motives and dreams,” he explains. “There was no way I could have planned which book to grab, which train to take or which car or seat to choose that day, but it changed the course of my life.”
He glances down at the acrobats warming up on stage. In a couple hours he will be down there too, helping bring the play to life for another Broadway audience, once again realizing his dream deferred.
“I came back from England understanding that you can’t wait for people just to give you things,” he says. “It refocused how I think as an actor, so I didn’t worry about it as much. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t happening in New York or anywhere else. I would create my own work.”