No Act: Dreyfuss Does Honolulu
Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss is a history buff, and couldn’t turn down a role Joe Moore offered in his upcoming World War II play ‘Prophecy & Honor’
By Chad Pata
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is good stuff,” says Moore, whose father served in the original Army Air Corps. “Not just interesting history, but compelling drama, laced with some humor and with a little polishing and fine tuning it would be fun to do it again.”
All he needed now was a cast, and he credits the Islands in no small part for securing the stars.
“Doing the play in Hawaii helps,” admits Moore. “It’s a lot better selling point than saying come out to Toledo, Ohio! No offense to Toledo, but if this were Toledo, I think he (Dreyfuss) might have looked at it and said ‘This is great piece, I really like it. Thanks for sending it to me, good luck with it.’”
For Dreyfuss’ part, he did admit to Hawaii factoring in to his decision - he’ll be out here for 10 days total, and he is bringing his new wife Svetlana Erokhin with him.
For those unfamiliar with Dreyfuss, he owned the everyman role of the 1970s. His characters, while all a little neurotic, had a humanity with which the audiences could really identify.
Whether it was the love-at-first-sight mania of Curt Henderson in American Graffiti or the mashed potato architect of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, American audiences fell in love with the young man from Beverly Hills High School.
As far as his most famous role, that is generally divided by gender. Women loved him as the struggling actor Elliot Garfield in The Goodbye Girl, for which he earned his Oscar. Men can’t help but quote him as the book smart Matt Hooper in Jaws, where he served as the perfect foil to Robert Shaw’s brutish Quint.
But after a booming decade in the ‘70s, disappointing movies and a much-publicized battle with drug addiction marked the next decade. He rebounded commercially in the late ‘80s with hits such as Down and out in Beverly Hills, Stakeout and Tin Men, but it wasn’t until Mr. Holland’s Opus that he won the Academy back over, earning himself his second Oscar nomination.
These days he has put movies on the back burner as he focuses on what he feels is our most important duty, to be a citizen. He has been a very vocal critic of President Bush, even going so far in 2006 as to ask Congress to begin the process of impeachment.
“It’s like being told there is no more American Medical Association and anyone who wants to be a doctor can be a doctor,” says Dreyfuss to illustrate the lack of oversight for the president.
“Or if you buy stock in a company and you find out the chairman of the board of that company doesn’t care or know about the product, or what it takes to build the product or compete against other products, etc. You would feel valid in bringing suit against that company for stupidity, and that’s what we do.”
As for the critics in the media who dislike actors getting involved in politics, he believes that we all have a duty to our country.
“I think that people should be citizens,” says Dreyfuss. “Whether you are an actor or a chair builder you should be a citizen, which means you should feel connected to and responsible for your country. I don’t think anyone’s involvement has diminished anything. The only people who have diminished anything are the people in authority.”
To this end, Dreyfuss has begun to develop a curriculum to teach civics to grades K-12. This is an area he believes the schools are failing our children in preparing them to take over this country.
“It begins with government, it begins with understanding what democracy is and how it works here and how it doesn’t,” says Dreyfuss, who has three kids from his first wife Jeramie Rain.
“It means teaching our kids, the ones that come after us, the pre-partisan tools of civic expertise that created the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, where they came from, and why and how they are to be maintained, and none of that is being taught.”
Mitchell was a perfect example of the citizenship that Dreyfuss desires to see in young people: an unwavering belief in what you feel is right and the courage to speak your mind.
Maybe that is why Dreyfuss is doing this play, because sometimes acting is not about money, it’s about telling the stories that need to be remembered.
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