New York Times
August 28, 1981
New Face: John Vickery
How to Become a Madcap Prince
A decade ago, John Vickery had two passions, abstract mathematics and acting. He was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley then, and thanks to a double major, he was able to indulge both interests. When the time came to make a living, he chose the theater and started thinking mathematically about the problems he faced as an actor.
''I get the same excitement from acting that I used to get from mathematics,'' he said the other day at a restaurant near his midtown Manhattan apartment. ''In math, the excitement comes when a logical order of steps brings you to an answer. As an actor, you say, 'Aha, now I see how this character at the beginning of the play got to be this character at the end of the play.' ''
In his highly praised performance as Prince Hal in the New York Shakespeare Festival's ''Henry IV, Part 1,'' which has been extended at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park through Sept.6, Mr. Vickery convincingly shows how Prince Hal's character can change midway in the play.
The Prince, heir apparent to the throne of England, appears at the beginning of the play as a dissolute tavern lout and companion to Sir John Falstaff, a hard-drinking soldier who reigns with sharp wit in the tavern underworld. By play's end, however, Prince Hal has emerged as a martial leader, skilled enough as a warrior to kill the kingdom's most fearsome rebel in hand-to-hand combat and dispassionate enough to tell his old friend Falstaff before battle, ''Thou owest God a death.''
''More than most actors I have seen in the role, Mr. Vickery makes it clear that Hal's quick maturing is deeply imbedded in his character,'' wrote Mel Gussow, reviewing the production in The New York Times and calling him ''a gifted young actor with all the attributes necessary to play Shakespeare.''
Math Whiz to Actor
How Mr. Vickery transformed himself from a high school math whiz into an accomplished 30-year-old Shakespearean actor is something of a problem in itself. While he remembers having always been in love with numbers, he dates his love for the stage from a day at high school in Alameda, Calif., where he grew up. He was suddenly drafted to play Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare's ''Twelfth Night.''
''I hadn't really thought of acting before,'' he remembered. ''I was a skinny kid with pillows stuffed down his trousers. But the first time I walked out on stage in front of an audience, I just said, 'This is the greatest thing in the world.' ''
It was several years, though, before he thought of acting as a career. He appeared in numerous college productions at Berkeley, but when he graduated, he set out to roam in Europe for a year. Eventually, he settled in Paris.
''It was the nadir of my life,'' Mr. Vickery recalled. ''Paris, 1971. Broke. A string of stupid jobs. A tortured love affair. I was getting nowhere. I asked myself: 'What do I know how to do?' I had done plays in college, and it was really what I liked to do. So, I decided to be an actor.''
He returned to the United States and enrolled at the University of California at Davis, where he acted mostly in experimental theater. After earning an M.F.A. degree in acting, he moved to San Francisco and became more deeply involved in experimental theater, even writing three plays.
By 1979, Mr. Vickery was rapidly establishing a solid career. But he began to feel that his training as an actor was lacking something essential. ''I had a natural ability for getting under the skin of a character,'' Mr. Vickery said. ''But I wanted to learn, in a very technical sense, what was the best way of presenting that character on stage. I wanted some veneer training.''
Inside Out and Outside In
So, he went back to Europe, this time to the Drama Studio in London. For a year he studied phonetic alphabets, stage movement and the physical structure of bones and vocal cords. By the time he graduated, he had found a personal technique for developing characters, which he describes as a mixture of ''the American approach, which is working from the inside out, and the English approach, which is working from the outside in.''
He applied that technique to preparing for ''Henry IV, Part 1.'' Starting from the ''outside in,'' he wrote out all of Prince Hal's speeches in a phonetic alphabet. Studying the phonetic patterns of Shakespeare's writing, Mr. Vickery said, often reveals dramatic devices that affect audiences at an unconscious level.
One example comes from a speech in which Prince Hal swears to his father that he will end his wanton ways and redeem himself by killing the rebel leader, Hotspur. ''The last line of the king's speech is, 'To show how much thou art degenerate,' and the first one of mine is, 'Do not think so,' '' Mr. Vickery said. ''Simply emphasizing that 'duh' sound of 'Do not think so' gives the attack that Prince Hal needs at the beginning of the speech. It grabs the ear and involves the audience in the character, probably at an unconscious level.''
The next step was to study Prince Hal from the ''inside out.'' Mr. Vickery read Machiavelli's classic work on political leadership, ''The Prince.''
A Machiavellian Approach
''A lot of productions have Prince Hal hanging around in the tavern at the beginning, having a great time,'' he explained. ''Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he becomes somber, as if he was thinking, 'Oh, what a drag, I have to go to war.' ''
From reading ''The Prince'' and from a close study of Shakespeare's script, Mr. Vickery concluded that there was a good reason for Prince Hal's sudden emergence as a leader. ''Prince Hal is a very ambitious young man from the very start,'' he said. ''He's exploring that underworld in a very calculated way. Falstaff represents the forces of anarchy and chaos, and those are the forces that he is going to have to control when he becomes king.''
With that, Mr. Vickery grinned. ''Sounds a bit academic, doesn't it? But then, I'm an academic type of person.'' Academic or not, Mr. Vickery's methods have worked well for him. After returning from the Drama Studio in 1980, he played the title role in ''Pericles'' and Dr. Caius in ''The Merry Wives of Windsor'' at the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, winning a San Francisco Drama Critics Circle award for each performance.
Since his arrival in New York eight months ago, Mr. Vickery has followed those triumphs with critically praised performances in a Lincoln Center production of ''Macbeth'' and now the Shakespeare Festival's ''Henry.''
''Doing Shakespeare is very fulfilling,'' he said. ''You have to go with everything you've got, all at once. Your brain, your heart, your guts, your pharynx, your fibula. Still, you never feel like you're doing enough. You never feel like you've got it.''