STAGEPERSONA_The Eclectic Career of Nick Sandys

BY Jenn Q. Goddu

Nick Sandys

Ask Nick Sandys his favorite role and his self-described “smug” answer is: “The one I’m working on right now.”

But, when pressed, he admits that typically he can’t decide. Also, the smug answer stops him from thinking about what he did the last time when he is trying to approach a new role.

Even when he tries to honestly respond to the question, no single role rises to the top of his list. Instead, he answers: “I would say everything I have done Shakespeare-wise basically. I loved playing Henry V, I loved Iago, I loved playing Benedict. I loved played Lear’s fool. I based it on my brother who has [cerebral palsy] and just did him on stage and it was just one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever done. The reviewers couldn’t quite take it. They said, ‘It was a little too truthful for comfort.’ Then I love everything [by Stoppard]. I’ve done four, five Stoppards and each one is a joy. I look at those and go, ‘I couldn’t pick a favorite.’”

No wonder about that smug reply. It’s too much for a man who feels “so fortunate” to settle on a single choice. In Chicago, Sandys’ rush of good roles began in 2005. He was back to back in shows playing roles such as Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Darcy and Tartuffe, Henry in Stoppard’s The Real Thing and now Freud in the Oedipus Complex at the Goodman. “What a life! Who could ask for better roles? It’s just an astonishing set of roles…and that’s why I can’t answer what’s my favorite.”

But it wasn’t always this “astonishing” for Sandys. In fact, it took him a long time to establish himself as an actor in Chicago.

It also took a while for Sandys to even come to think of himself as an actor. Born of an actress mother and a professional singer father in England, Sandys was a “massively embarrassed” teenager who was exposed to the arts as a youth watching his parents perform.

He only got hooked on performing when in college. Yet, he never really thought he was going to be an actor. “I always thought I was going to be an English lit teacher,” he said. “I was going to be a teacher who loved theatre.”

Sandys actually has a Master’s Degree from Cambridge in English literature and another from Loyola University here in Chicago, where he was aiming for a PhD but decided not to pursue his dissertation when all those acting gigs came up.

Yet he was prescient in a way. He is today a teacher who loves theatre. One of his jobs is teaching fight choreography at the Theatre School DePaul University. “I teach stage combat because there is no marking and I don’t have to do any paperwork. It’s much easier.”

But wait. Fight choreography? How did he end up doing that too?

“It came out of a huge love for sport,” Sandys said. He used to enjoy playing rugby and cricket (“All those English things,” he jokes) but found he couldn’t do them while acting. “As an actor you can’t play rugby because you can’t show up with 12 stitches the next day,” he said.

Although Sandys did just that before he learned his lesson. He was playing the King in Love’s Labor Lost at school and showed up for dress rehearsal “looking like Frankenstein” with a huge X of stitches on his forehead.

Fight choreography was only going to be a sideline, something he did to channel his athleticism, but he was good at it. When he moved to New York, he was able to make a living acting and fighting.

And he often did both in Shakespeare. It was doing summer rep at the Virginia Shakespeare Festival that Sandys met his wife Patrice Egleston. After sharing the stage in the “interesting combination” of Pirates of Penzance and The Tempest, Sandys moved to Dallas to share a life with the woman who would become his wife.

When she was hired at DePaul, where she helms the movement program, Sandys joined her, first doing little bits of work, trying to gain a foothold.

It was the fight choreography that gave Sandys his first theatre work in Chicago. He recalls auditioning back in 1992 at the Goodman generals and being told by the casting director, “You’re going to work here—meaning Chicago.”

Yet it took Sandys a long time to establish himself in the city’s theatre community—and at first it was as a fight choreographer.

“It’s a director’s town, to a certain extent, it seems to me,” he said. “Coming as an Equity actor to town…you need to get to know the directors and get them to trust you with their work and vice versa, obviously. That’s the key thing to me that you need to build a relationship.”

So Sandys built that relationship through fight choreography first. He found work  staging fights at the Goodman (after being brought in by a director he worked with at the Indiana Rep) or the Lyric Opera.

He also found an appetite for his English accent in the city’s voice-over industry and this was one more talent he could add to his ever-growing list.

Today, he says, “I think of myself as having four jobs. As an actor, as a voice-over talent, as a teacher and as a fight director—and I think as most actors in this town find, as working actors, that’s the way. You need those irons in the fire.”

Does Sandys have a preference for one of those jobs over the others?

“I don’t really care if I’m acting or fight directing as long as I’m part of the production,” he begins, before conceding he enjoys the acting most. “I prefer it in a way because it’s a more in-depth part of the team.

“I used to say this really glibly: My definition of an actor is an intellectual athlete of the imagination. And each one of those terms was in balance.”

For him, the actor needn’t necessarily be “book smart” but he should be “curious and into the world.” The actor also needn’t be “athletic in normal terms” but he or she does have to stay in shape and be flexible. “Your body has to do and change and shift and deal with a really hellish schedule.” Add to that the imagination, because it is the imagination that lets the actor tap into the emotions.

“To me the acting is this more holistic thing,” Sandys said. “It’s going to call on every part of your humanity, and what is more challenging than that? You can never know enough, you can never learn enough. You can never be a good enough human being. You can never exceed the possibilities that are presented to you as an actor.

“In every other job you can get to a point when you say, ‘I know.’ [Acting] is constantly expansive and as you change as a human being you are going to be using those skills—you’re not going to grow out of the skills.”

Another skill Sandys has but didn’t list as one of his “irons in the fire” is directing. Yet he’s done that too—a lot of it out of state.

“The directing has always been something I’ve never pursued but that has always come my way. Partly because of my literature background,” he said. “It’s always been coming out of that I’ve worked with people as an actor and we’ve got on and they’ve said, ‘You’d be great to direct this. Why don’t you direct this?’”

His directorial debut in the Chicago area was Twelfth Night at Noble Fool.

“I started as a Shakespearean director saying, ‘I’m not going to cut a line. It’s going to be great.’ And now I will cut and dice and slice and do whatever I need to make a piece of theatre that an audience can sit through. Now for me the thing with doing Shakespeare is the skill of the concept.”

His Twelfth Night focused on the emotional journey of Viola, which Sandys points out, is typically pretty much lost late in the play. “I had a ball and nobody came to see it.”

He can hope for more of an audience when he directs Fiction next season for Remy Bummpo, where he’s an artistic associate.

“It’s kind of scary. I feel less confident with that material than I do with Shakespeare,” Sandys said. Working with a modern piece, particularly a new piece (this is the Midwest premiere from playwright Steven Dietz) is venturing into “unknown territory.”

“There is no format. I can do the play as it comes off the page to me. I don’t have to think, ‘How do I have to couch this for an audience to get?’ It’s very exciting.”

He hopes the play will prompt audiences to think, get engaged in the dialogue Fiction prompts. “Dialogue to me is every part of the theatre process,” he said. “That’s what theatre’s all about. It’s a debate.”

This perspective on theatre is part of what makes Sandys a good fit at Remy Bummpo where his focus is on the literary managing for the company.

“Remy Bummpo is a blessing to me,” Sandys said. “It’s a gift because it says immediately, ‘I trust you. I like the way you work.’ We live in the most unstable ego-smashing career that you could possibly have. Even when you’ve got one job, you’re always looking for the next three and hoping and going through stages when you don’t work for six months. To have someone say, ‘Be on my team. You will work with me at least once a year on something.’ How many people can say that someone came and gave you an artistic home? They just gave it to me. James Bohnen is my savior.”

Savior may seem a strong word, but it was Remy Bummpo’s artistic director who finally took “the risk” in casting Sandys as an actor. He had to go through a two-hour personal audition callback in Bohnen’s living room, but at the end of extensive interviews Sandys was cast as Ridley in Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood—the role that first opened doors for him in Chicago as an actor.

 “I liked his energy and his commitment to the task and we just got each other. We understand each other,” Bohnen said. “He’s not afraid to state his mind, and I mean that fondly.”

What changes has Bohnen noted in Sandys since casting the actor in Hapgood?

“What he always brought was a tremendous mental agility and huge verbal skills and an aggressive intelligence,” Bohnen said. Yet now Sandys is “much more emotionally-based. Much more willing to trust himself in the moment, more than I’ve ever seen before.”

Perhaps its because he’s having such a good moment in his career, keeping busy doing work he loves. After all, he’s so “blessed with roles” he can’t even pinpoint one favorite one.