San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. actor a fixture as Marley’s ghost
“As an actor, Ken was indispensable. He was always with you in the moment.”
When the American Conservatory Theater last staged its annual production of “A Christmas Carol” in 2019, the play hinged, as always, on Ken Ruta as the Ghost of Jacob Marley, wrapped in heavy chains and draped in boxes of money as he rose up from a bed and passionately warned Ebeneezer Scrooge of the three spirits that were soon to visit.
Ruta embodied that role for 14 consecutive seasons and he was cast as Marley again for this year’s production at the Geary Theater, the first after a two-year pandemic hiatus.
At age 89, Ruta had been vaccinated and boosted for COVID-19 and was preparing to begin rehearsal when he caught the coronavirus in early August. He went into steady decline with dramatic weight loss as his case was worsened by pneumonia. He died Aug. 28 at his home in San Francisco. His death was confirmed by his sister Gayl Sorrentino.
“Ken brought his character to life through his own wisdom and gravitas,” said James Carpenter, who played Scrooge opposite Ruta’s Marley for 14 consecutive Christmas seasons. “Ken knew the weight of each word in the message he was delivering, no matter what the role he was playing.”
Ruta performed in about 70 shows with the company, going back to its inaugural season in 1967.
ACT audiences will have their favorites — Ruta as the charming swindler Voysey in the “The Voysey Inheritance;” as Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” as the aunt in men’s clothing in “Travels With My Aunt” and in and out of doors in the cocktail party madcap “Dinner at Eight.”
Ruta was both a leading man and a character actor with an elastic visage and perfect comic timing. When he entered a scene, veteran ACT subscribers were conditioned to lean forward in their seats.
“As an audience member, he always made you feel that you were in good hands,” said retired longtime Chronicle and Examiner theater critic Robert Hurwitt. “He was a member of the ACT company for so long, virtually from the beginning, that you always thought of him in that context and in so many great performances.” Though Ruta secured a smattering of screen roles, including one memorable part as a bad guy in the TV serial “Kojak,” he was fundamentally a stage actor who performed on Broadway and in national touring productions.
But his home base was always San Francisco, where he bounced between apartments always within walking district of the theater district — a necessity because Ruta never learned to drive.
He turned up at theaters Bay Area-wide, large and small. He played Berkeley Rep, San Jose Rep and Center Rep in Walnut Creek. He was also a regular at any number of Shakespeare festivals, at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto and the tiny Exit Theatre off Market Street. He originated a solo show as the witty Victorian playwright Oscar Wilde at the Stage Door in 1997 and took it to Boston.
“As an actor, Ken was indispensable,” said actor Joy Carlin, who both directed and performed with Ruta, going back to 1969. “He was always with you in the moment.” Kenneth Edward Ruta was born April 6, 1933, in Chicago, where he grew up on the South Side. His dad was an engineer at International Harvester, and his mother was an operator at Illinois Bell. In high school, Ruta developed an interest in puppetry, which required him to voice a wide range of characters during performances in the family living room. He attended Northwestern University but left after one semester to study acting at the Goodman Theatre.
His made his debut at the Goodman as Elwood P. Dowd, opposite the imaginary rabbit in “Harvey.” He did summer stock in Wisconsin and Nantucket, Mass. and then joined the Guthrie Theater in Minne
apolis. In 1961, he was cast in the stage adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s radio drama “Under Milk Wood” at Circle in the Square in Greenwich Village. It later went on national tour. The director was William Ball, who would go on to form ACT in Pittsburgh.
When ACT relocated from Pittsburgh to San Francisco in 1967, Ruta became an inaugural member of a company of 20 or 30 actors who would mount 16 plays in rotating repertory per season. Actors could be expected to do separate plays in a single day, a matinee and an evening show at either of two stages — the Geary and the Marines’ Memorial Theatre.
One memorable role came in 1971, when ACT mounted William Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” with Ruta in the role of Joe, a boozer who anchors the play as he sits at a table in a bar. It was a role Chronicle columnist Herb Caen could understand.
“As Joe, Ken Ruta is perfect: sentimentally drunk without ever getting sloppy,” Caen wrote in his column on Feb. 4, 1971. So it went until the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 brought down the ceiling of the beloved and cramped Geary.
By the time Carey Perloff took over as artistic director in 1992, ACT was no longer a repertory company of actors. Auditions were national, but Perloff cast Ruta as King Creon in the Greek tragedy “Antigone.”
“I wanted Ken in my first season,” Perloff said. “He was so powerful and complicated and dangerous and he had that amazing voice.” Perloff likes to repeat a line she heard from actor Anthony Fusco. “‘When you acted across from Ken Ruta, his voice was so powerful that your chest vibrated,’ ” recounted Perloff. “It was true.”
And not just in English: Ruta spoke German, Italian and some Latin, was a devotee of the opera and read widely.
“He had a wonderful habit of walking into my office and saying ‘I have a play for you,’ ” Perloff said. “When Ken said that, I listened. He had loads of ideas. He came from an era when actors were much more steeped in literature from the past.”
When he wasn’t on the stage, he was in the audience. Ruta was a supporter of the master of fine arts program at ACT and always saw student productions. His last time onstage was in the company of MFA students in a reading of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline” at the Strand Theater last November.
“With his basso voice and grounded presence, mustering full energy from reserves that only come onstage, he gave us all a look at a life in the theater,” said ACT Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon, who directed “Cymbeline.”
“Ken always showed up for ACT from the theater’s very beginnings to the graduation of the final MFA class in May of 2022.”
Ruta originated the role of Marley’s Ghost in “A Christmas Carol” in 2005. When Carpenter was cast as Scrooge in 2006, he and Ruta shared a dressing room. Makeup took an hour or more, so Carpenter asked Ruta whether he minded if he played music on his iPad.
“He turned to me in his full Marley makeup with green face and long nails and said “Only Peggy Lee,” Carpenter said.
So it will be only Peggy Lee in the dressing room on Nov. 30, the first performance of “A Christmas Carol” without Ruta as Marley in chains since 2005.
“Ken was a wonderful, generous actor who could play anything,” Carpenter said. “He never forgot a face, and he will never be forgotten in the Bay Area.”
ACT will host a celebration of Ruta’s life in December. Survivors include his sister, Gayl Sorrentino of Willow Springs, Ill., and nephew, Jeffrey Birks of Frankfurt, Ill.