On-stage: Prince of 'Pain'
September 6, 2007
Angry-young-man specialist Casey Greig brings his brooding, intense style to "Thom Pain."
By Graydon Royce
Photo by David Brewster
Actor Casey Greig in "Thom Pain"There was Casey Greig clomping across Hennepin Avenue, his sweatshirt hood pulled up over a Chicago Bears stocking cap. Before stepping into an Uptown restaurant to discuss his solo performance in Emigrant Theater's "Thom Pain," the bad boy of Twin Cities theater shivered through a quick cigarette.
Greig first entered my consciousness in 2000 as a smart-ass punk hopped up on impudence in Eye of the Storm's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane." Since then, I've seen him as a gay-bashing prep in Neil LaBute's "Bash," an angry kid on a shooting spree in the Guthrie Lab's "Good Boys," and an arrogant, charismatic Achilles in Ten Thousand Things' "Iphigenia."
Then there were his stints as a boy toy, a dissolute grifter, a seething yet vulnerable abandoned son and an uptight mortician. Last summer he tagged the role of Tom, Tennessee Williams' brooding doppleganger in "The Glass Menagerie." He just finished a run of "Pillowman," Martin McDonagh's pitch-black comedy.
"I've spent a few years playing maladjusted young men, often with a gun in there," he conceded. "But I've always enjoyed plays with some blood in them."
Not blood as in gooey red stuff dripping from his hands, he's quick to add, but blood as in heart and anima -- "the messy human life we all lead."
The seventh of eight kids in a Coon Rapids clan headed by a truck-driving Bears fan, Greig is refreshingly blunt and open about his own life. He signed up for the Marines when he was 17 ("One of the stupidest things I've ever done"), wriggled off the hook, and took a few years off after high school to "get fat." Then he drifted off to St. Cloud State University "to get away" and wound up in an acting class.
"That was it. I was hooked."
Greig quickly landed a role in David Hare's "Skylight" at the old Eye of the Storm Theatre Company. There he was, a rough-edged punk sharing the stage with accomplished theater artists. Greig held his own, though, and soon Eye of the Storm came back to him for the wild and woolly "Beauty Queen."
His Irish accent in "Beauty Queen" was so good that artistic director Casey Stangl said it convinced Denny Spence, the British husband of actor Barbara Bryne, that Greig was native.
Greig has several times eschewed an audition if a piece doesn't interest him ("perhaps regretting that if nothing else comes along"). McDonagh is a favorite playwright, for all that pitch-black humor.
"I just dig his thing," he said. "Laughing despite all sorts of horrible things happening."
Greig also cited his work with the Jungle Theater as a seminal learning experience. In 2001, he acted in Craig Wright's "Molly's Delicious" with his friend Sam Rosen.
"I feel that Casey is one of those dudes that everything comes from the inner," Rosen said from New York. "You don't see him thinking or reaching, it just seems to be always there. He was so money. That show was the moment for me that I figured out more about acting and theater than any other time and to go through it with him was so awesome."
Emigrant asked Greig to do "Thom Pain," a choppy, intense monologue by playwright Will Eno. Greig said he's wanted to work with the small company, which is dedicated to new plays ("Pain" was a Pulitzer finalist in 2005). He's done some solo work, but this is his first long haul all alone on stage. He was attracted by the lack of artifice in Eno's work, the small human scale. It's just a man standing on a stage, talking to people, in their faces.
I surmise that Greig isn't the kind of guy who ruminates on the future. He disagrees.
"I don't know that I come up with much," he said. "I'm just an actor. I'm going to keep doing this because I don't know how to do anything else."
Many moons ago, MPLS sent this to me .
http://vita.mn/story.php?id=989540