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A peer of Richard Gere at stage school, Dick Stille is at the helm of Proof, which opens in Victoria on Friday
Melissa Taylor and Liam McDonald star in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof, previewing tonight and opening Friday at Langham Court Theatre.
What: Proof Where: Langham Court Theatre When: Previews tonight, opens Friday, continues to June 24 Tickets: $16, $20, $22 (250-384-2142)
From clashing with cops at Haight-Ashbury to hanging out with Richard Gere, to becoming a psychologist for Vietnam veterans, it’s been a long, strange trip for Victoria’s Dick Stille.
Stille’s latest project is directing David Auburn’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning play Proof at Langham Court Theatre. The 2000 drama is about a young woman who nursed her father, a once-brilliant mathematician whose mental health has deteriorated.
Proof has its share of intriguing plot elements, including a mystery and a blossoming romance. It is text-heavy and demands a strong cast, which Stille believes he has found.
“The actors have to capture the audience well enough to make them listen when there are no gunshots,” he joked. “The challenging thing is that this play is like a piece of music. It’s very subtle. It has its rhythms. It builds very slowly. It doesn’t have the giant ‘hit-you-over-the-head’ thing.”
Stille has worked in Victoria’s theatre scene regularly since taking a master of fine arts in directing from the University of Victoria 20 years ago.
As well as directing a dozen plays for Langham Court Theatre, he has overseen productions for his Island Repertory Company, William Head on Stage and other companies.
American-born Stille originally studied theatre at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington, but dropped out. He later joined the Seattle Repertory Theatre as an apprentice.
His fellow apprentices were Dirk Niewoehner (later Dirk Benedict of The A-Team fame) and Richard Gere. Niewoehner wasn’t a particularly close friend (“he was kind of uptight”), but Stille became pals with Gere, a ladies’ man even back then.
“He was very talented. But we were all young. It was our first professional gig,” Stille said.
For a time, Stille hung out with the Diggers, a radical gaggle of activists and actors living in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in the 1960s. The Diggers staged street events such as driving a truckful of belly-dancers through the city’s financial district (inviting brokers to join in the fun) and staging “The Death of Money,” in which a coffin full of fake cash was paraded down Haight Street.
As a young long-hair, Stille participated in a stunt intended to staunch the flow of tourist buses prowling Haight-Ashbury to see the hippies (“We felt like animals in a zoo”). His gang dropped off a truck-load of instruments and amplifiers on one end of Haight Street, then blocked off the other end using oil-drums stuffed with burning paper.
The ensuing street party caused a “semi-riot,” attracting police on horseback and media coverage. Afterward, the City of San Francisco granted the hippies access to Golden Gate Park to stage events on Sundays.
A concert with Janis Joplin was organized. However police, again on horseback, returned because they believed the rock show would extend beyond the city’s agreed-upon time.
“We turned to Janice and said: ‘It’s your call. You’re playing the music.’ She said: ‘Let’s play.’ ”
The cops’ attempt to break up what was now a “huge melee” backfired when hippies mounted the horses and started galloping around. “They found police horses two or three days later, grazing on the beach,” Stille said.
By the early 1970s, Stille was part of an Esalen encounter group in California. He decided he’d like to do what the group leader was doing. Stille took a PhD in psychology from the University of Manitoba, then worked at a treatment centre in North Dakota for Vietnam war veterans suffering post-traumatic stress.
Stille ended up working with victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence. He found the job stressful, especially cases involving children.
“I remember one mother asked me to fix her child. And the reality was we didn’t know how. We were just doing the best we could . . . it was too much.”
He moved to Canada. Stille’s then-wife, also a psychologist, took a teaching position at UVic. Stille enrolled in creativewriting classes. He took a drama course as an elective, which rekindled his early interest in theatre.
Stille took a master’s degree in directing. He had come full circle.
“I loved it,” he said with a grin. “I just went back.”