Ron Vawter was one of the most celebrated actors in New York’s experimental theater scene. As one of the founding members of the Wooster Group, Vawter acted in every production that the group produced until his death in 1994. As an individual actor and playwright, his solo work drew from his lived experiences as a gay man, a background as a military chaplain, and an HIV diagnosis. When not on the stage or writing, Vawter also appeared in minor roles in film such as sex, lies and videotape (1989), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Philadelphia (1993).
Early Life
Ron Vawter was born in Glens Falls, New York, and grew up in Latham, New York. Born into a military family, Vawter received enlistment papers for his seventeenth birthday. After completing 18 months of training, Vawter responded to the need for replacements of Green Beret chaplains and was then sent to a Franciscan Seminary in upstate New York for the next four years. However, after completing seminary, Vawter no longer wanted to be a priest or in the military and started work as a recruiting officer in downtown Manhattan. Often walking past the Performing Garage on his way home in Greenwich Village, he would hear sounds coming from within.
Early Work
In the summer of 1973, Vawter quit the military and joined the Performance Group as its business manager. After working closely with two other founding members of the Wooster Group, Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray, Vawter debuted as an actor in Rumstick Road in April 1977. This critically acclaimed piece examines the suicide of Gray’s mother through the characters Spud, Woman, Operator, and Man—the latter of which was portrayed by Vawter. This experimental performance used Gray’s personal recorded conversations, family letters, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 35mm slides, music, and dance to interrogate the objectification of people on stage and in life. After this debut, Vawter also joined the cast of Sakonnet Point (1975). In 1977, Vawter collaborated with Gray and LeCompte on Nayatt School, acted in productions, and served as the group’s assistant director.
Later Work
Perhaps one of the group’s most controversial pieces was Route 1 & 9 (1981). The piece juxtaposed Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) with a reconstruction of a Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham comedy routine. The four-part piece featured actors wearing blackface at a time when the Wooster Group did not have any black members. The piece set out to address the ideal white world that Wilder created, peeling apart the racism laden in the piece as well as in the liberal audience members’ consciousnesses. From 1990 to 1993, Vawter acted in the role of Colonel Alexander Ignatyevich Vershinin in performances of Brace Up!, an homage to Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Before his health deteriorated, Vawter also acted in a production based on the Greek tragedy Philoctetes in 1994.
Roy Cohn/Jack Smith
His most celebrated and remembered performance was the one-person show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, which premiered in 1992. The piece examines the lives and characters of two very different figures, the artist, underground filmmaker, and actor Jack Smith, and the conservative political figure and lawyer Roy Cohn. Although he felt most comfortable in the collaborative environment of the Wooster Group, the 1989 death of Jack Smith, a close friend and colleague, prompted the production as a memorial. A co-commission by the Walker Art Center, the piece was directed by Gregory Mehrten and consisted of two parts: Roy Cohn written by Gary Indiana, and Jack Smith written by Jack Smith. The stage play juxtaposes moments in the two men’s lives, drawing on contrasts between Smith and Cohn, whose only similarities were that they were both gay, white men who died of AIDS-related complications in the 1980s. Both characters were played by Vawter to show two ends of a complicated spectrum of men grappling with their sexuality. Using video and audio of Cohn, Vawter and Indiana created an alternative portrait of the contentious political figure. In this section of the performance, Vawter reimagines a speech that Cohn gave at a dinner for the American Society for the Protection of the Family in 1976 in which he attacked homosexuality. In the portion of the performance focused on Smith, Vawter used tapes, photographs, posters, and slides, to reconstruct a 1981 performance of Smith’s What’s Underground About Marshmallows?
Philoctetes Variations
His last role, in Philoctetes Variations, was staged at Kaaitheater in Brussels in March 1994. The production was directed by Jan Ritsema and drew from three versions of Philoctetes written by John Jesurun, Heiner Müller, and André Gide. The Greek tragedy tells the story of the warrior, Philoctetes, whose festering wound smelled unbearably. Philoctetes’s friends avoided him because of the stench and banished him to the uninhabited island of Lemnos, near the island of Lesbos. In the production, Vawter played the injured Philoctetes, blending myth and reality through the display of the actor’s own wounds to the audience. Late in his battle with AIDS by the time of the performance, Vawter’s wounds were due to Kaposi’s sarcoma, an HIV-related skin cancer. In the third and final part of the production, Vawter showed the Kaposi lesions which covered his entire body and said, “this is what it is all about.” Vawter’s embodiment of Philoctetes functioned as a metaphor for those living with AIDS. The actor died of a heart attack in April 1994, while flying home from Brussels, only one month after the production.
Awards, Recognition, and Legacy
During his career, Vawter received an OBIE Award for Sustained Achievement in Acting (1985), the Professor Joseph A. Buff Award for Career Achievement from his alma mater, Siena College (1986), and a Bessie Award for Acting (1988). In 1992, Vawter was awarded a special citation from the OBIE Awards for Roy Cohn/Jack Smith.
“I’m always amazed that we homosexuals are doing as well as we are. Despite those signals from society, whatever is there is going to come out, either in a healthy or in a destructive way. I pray to God that it will be positive.” —Ron Vawter
