August 26–September 2, 1999

noises off

The Perfect Marriage

by David Warner

The news came out almost accidentally, in a setting hardly conducive to romantic confessions.

Greg Wood, the gifted Philadelphia actor, was waiting for an orthopedist in Thomas Jefferson University Hospital’s surgical cast room to finish the removable plaster cast Wood will wear on his leg in the role of Brick in the Arden’s fall production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (opening Sept. 16). He’d been at the hospital two hours already when I arrived; the occasion seemed like it might yield a behind-the-scenes story, or at least lots of bad puns about casting and being cast and how often Greg Wood gets cast, etc., etc.

And then it occurred to him:

He and Grace Gonglewski, the town’s reigning leading lady, have been married for months.

And not in secret, either, despite the fact that Wood already has a wife, makeup artist Michelle Powers, and Gonglewski a significant other, SCRAP and Fringe co-founder Eric Schoefer.

To anyone who follows the local theater scene, this is no surprise. Gonglewski and Wood have been more or less married to each other seven, maybe eight times already — on stage. But this year they’ve been together more than ever: When Cat closes October 17, they will have spent almost half the year in marital union, in three consecutive shows. (This summer’s PA Shakespeare Festival featured them as Charles and Elvira Condomine in Blithe Spirit and Mr. and Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor.)

"Pretty soon," says Wood, "we’ll be common-law."

So how have they managed to remain married so successfully and for so long?

"Because we don’t sleep together," suggests Gonglewski, speaking on the phone a few days later during a break from watching a movie (Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage — for research).

She says the chemistry between her and Wood was evident right away, at least to her. After their initial matchup in Philadelphia Area Repertory Theater’s 1988 production of Good, Gonglewski’s first show in Philadelphia, they appeared as the dueling almost-married Jack Tanner and Anne Whitefield in the Arden’s 1993 Man and Superman.

It was during that production, she says, that "I fell in love with Greg Wood." Though nothing ever came of the crush offstage (she was engaged to actor Robert Christophe at the time), "it definitely fueled what went on onstage."

	So how have they managed to remain married so successfully and for so long? "Because we don’t sleep together," suggests Gonglewski.

As Wood points out, though, "We’ve always been in dysfunctional marriages.… We’ve been through hell and back seven times."

Take Hedda Gabler, for instance, at the Arden in 1998, in which both gave quietly astonishing performances as the dreadfully unhappy Hedda and Tesman.

Arden Producing Artistic Director Terry Nolen directed the pair in that show, and has cast them again as unhappily marrieds in Cat. There’s no risk of redundancy, he says, because "the relationships are so drastically different.

"Brick and Maggie have a very complex, twisted, just screwed-up relationship that’s full of so much denial and still some odd sense of love and attraction — and Grace and Greg’s knowledge of each other really allows them to be more courageous.… They won’t make safe choices based on paranoia" — fear, that is, of the other actor.

"Deeply looking into one another’s eyes, there’s a history," confirms Gonglewski. "And I think automatically that gets us to a place that sometimes takes weeks, months for actors to get to."

Wood says that friendships like his and Grace’s, as well as many others in the local theater community (he’s been acting professionally here for almost 20 years), power more than just performances. "It’s why a lot of us stay in Philly… we like each other. We genuinely do."

Wood’s only recent experience with bone breakage, by the way, was in that production of Man and Superman; he broke a thumb doing a pratfall. Despite his inexperience with, um, the casting process, he got good marks from the Jefferson staff.

"He was one of my better patients," said Michael Keene, acting manager for the orthopedic department, which performed the casting job gratis (Jefferson orthopedist Dr. David Eshelman is an Arden subscriber and donor). "Usually they’re yelling at me, calling me all kinds of names. Or they’re unconscious."

Flowering anew…

Mimi Smith — accomplished actress and theater community stalwart, active board member of the Theater Alliance of Greater Philadelphia and director of Villanova Theater’s marketing and publicity — says farewell Sunday at a party in her honor at Villanova’s conference center. But she’s not going far — just far enough to realize her dream of opening a theater company of her own, Amaryllis. Its first production, opening March 15, 2000, is Medea, directed by East German director Heinz-Uwe Haus, followed by an unusual American Sign Language version of Twelfth Night directed by Yale’s Peter Novak.