Wearing a lemon-yellow blazer that popped out against the fogged-in, floor-to-ceiling windows of his Near North high-rise apartment, Andre De Shields was swaying to a tape of himself singing some gut-bucket blues.
The raucous number, “Rocks in My Bed,” was one of three he performed in last summer’s huge Goodman Theatre hit, “Play On!”
“This is the Andre De Shields most people are used to,” the performer told a visitor recently. “It’s the Andre who is tremendously theatrical, flamboyant, outrageous, daring, larger than life.”
And capable of stopping the show. “On closing night, there were four encores for that song,” he recalled. “The audience was screaming. There’s only one thing better — and you know what that is.”
Fast-forward, same stage. In this winter’s Goodman production of “Waiting for Godot,” with staging as stark as the angst-drenched dialogue, De Shields has morphed from the flashy, womanizing Jester in “Play On!” to a raggedy, brooding Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s landmark play.
“I’m hearing from a lot of people who have seen both productions that they can’t believe this is the same actor,” said De Shields.
For the veteran performer, whose speech is as precise as the trim on his graying goatee, playing Vladimir has been a critical milestone in his 30-year career. “I’m on a mission to alter the perception that I am (simply) a musical performer, and this production of `Waiting for Godot’ indicates to me that I’m turning that corner. Now when my name is printed it’s not `singer-dancer’ but `actor’ Andre De Shields.”
The 53-year-old De Shields, who has had no formal arts training, grew up in a “classic center-city impoverished ghetto situation” in Baltimore, the ninth of 11 children. “My mother wanted to sing and my father wanted to dance, but they did not because their parents thought (performing) was not the appropriate profession for a decent colored man or woman, that they had not come far enough from the plantation to be shuffling for a living. But it seemed to me that one of us (11 children) would have to make manifest the dream they deferred.”
As children, he and his sister Iris “put on playlets” and won dance contests. He sang falsetto tenor in an older brother’s “doo-wop” group, “and if they needed somebody at school to play Santa Claus, they put a white beard on me.”
Though he now lives permanently in New York City, the actor said that “Chicago claims me because my professional career began here.” In 1969, during his last semester as an English major at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, De Shields traveled to the Shubert to audition for “Hair.” He was cast after sleeping in Grant Park the night before callbacks because he didn’t have enough money for a hotel. His salary: $400 a week. “That was like Ft. Knox,” he recalled.
After “Hair,” he won other Chicago roles: in “The Me Nobody Knows” at the Civic Opera House and in the Organic Theatre Company’s “Warp!” which went to Broadway. There, he later starred in “The Wiz” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and won a Tony nomination for “Play On!”
In a departure from both the musical and the dramatic stage, he also currently appears as Rev. Calvin Dansby on CBS’ long-running soap opera “As the World Turns.” He flies from Chicago to New York to tape episodes on Mondays, when “Godot” is dark, leaving on a 6 a.m. plane and returning late the same day so he “can be back in the theater on Tuesday.”
(Though he said he has yet to confuse the characters of Calvin and Vladimir, he noted that soaps and “Godot” have striking similarities. In both, “there is never any satisfaction, and no one is ever happy or fulfilled, which is what keeps soap operas going for 35 or 40 years,” he noted.)
In spite of remarkable success on the musical stage, De Shields returned in the early ’80s from doing a production of “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” in Paris and found himself sinking into a melancholia that lasted “a good five years.”
“I had been part of the creation of two ground-breaking, Afro-centered musicals — `The Wiz’ and `Ain’t Misbehavin’.’ I was at the peak of my musical career on Broadway. But I had reached the ceiling in terms of being a black, male musical performer. I wanted to do something more, something better, something different. I wanted to grow. But then there was the existential question: Now what?”
He decided to pursue a master’s degree in African-American Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, which gave him “a second wind.” Feeling rejuvenated, he tackled some meaty, non-musical roles, including, most recently, Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” Sheridan Whiteside in “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and Vladimir in the Goodman’s “Godot,” which he calls the most difficult role of his life.
During “Godot” rehearsals, which began Dec. 15, he suffered enough “angst, insecurity and self-doubt” to fill up a Beckett trilogy. “I asked myself: Am I really up to this? Has the director made a mistake in casting me? Am I going to embarrass the legacy of the Goodman Theatre?”
Though learning lines had always been easy for him, when it came to “Waiting for Godot” De Shields said “nothing would stay in my head. My mind was like a sieve. I was apologizing to colleagues.”
“What I realized I had to do was enter the monastery — metaphorically. I had to live a monastic life for those three weeks before the opening.” He cut off all social contact — no movies, no cocktails, no phone chats. “Once I did that, the Beckett stuck, because that was all I was focusing on.”
He ran his lines constantly, saying them out loud on the CTA and as he walked to rehearsal. “I always know that when I am talking to myself, people think I’m just one of the (urban) crazies and they leave me alone.” He conquered the script, and though “Godot” reviews were mixed, his performance won critics’ praise.
Audiences don’t stand and scream at “Godot” as they did at “Play On!” In fact, said De Shields, some people leave at intermission. (During one performance, he added, a woman in the second row took not one but two calls on her cell phone — a critical comment of sorts.) Even so, the actor feels “exhilarated” playing the forlornly philosophical Vladimir.
“It gives me the opportunity to do what few people get to do: work on the question of who I am, where I am headed, what does it all mean. I’m taking on issues in a theatrical setting that in real life could send us to a shrink. But I don’t have to go to a shrink. I get my psychiatric work done every night at the theater.”
