CRITICS CALLED HIM ‘OTHERWORLDLY’ Brent Carver, the Canadian actor who won a Tony Award for “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” died on Aug. 4.
BRENT CARVER DIED LAST month at the age of 68. And no one — neither his devoted siblings nor his heartbroken friends at the Stratford Festival, his longtime theatrical home — would say why. Or how.
Looking back, it seems clear that he had been sick for at least two and a half years. In early 2018 he had already been cast for that year’s season at Stratford — in “The Tempest” and “Coriolanus.” But in February he apologetically dropped out.
“He’s had a long year and a half,” his agent, Richard Zimmerman, said in a formal statement released to the press. “It was recommended he take some time off.” To avoid exhaustion. No one ever said publicly who had done the recommending. A doctor?
COME HEAR THE MUSIC PLAY Carver, whose career began with ‘Jacques Brel,” had become well known for his cabaret act.
AT THE TIME, WHEN he told the people at Stratford the bad news, he said he might still be able to do that Stratford Festival Forum concert scheduled for late August (music and cabaret had become his priorities, some said), “depending on how things go.” But he didn’t come back. They knew better than to ask why, a Stratford staff member said. Carver was a very private man.
I had the honor to write his obituary for The New York Times. Now Press Nights has the opportunity to share some more of that life story.
READ THE OBITUARY. The New York Times, Aug., 7, 2020
DREAM GIRL Chita Rivera and Carver in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993). The color photo below shows them with their matching Tonys after the awards ceremony.
HIS MOST FAMOUS ROLE — to New York theatergoers, anyway — was in the Broadway production of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993). He won a Tony Award for best actor in a musical for his portrayal of a political prisoner, a gay window dresser named Molina, trying to survive the psychological horrors of a Latin American prison with musical-theater fantasies starring an alluring and glamorous woman (Chita Rivera).
In his review of the show in The New York Times, Frank Rich described Carver as a “riveting actor” and praised the character, who “arrives at his own heroic definition of masculinity.” The Washington Post called Carver’s work a “star-making performance.”
U.S. theatergoers — with the exception of those who drove up to Stratford now and then for a hit of classical theater — didn’t realize this “new guy” already had a stellar 15-year-or-so acting and musical career behind him.
DEATH ROW 1916 Carver as Leo Frank in “Parade” (1998) with Carolee Carmello, who played his wife.
HIS SECOND MOST FAMOUS — Carver returned to Broadway in 1998 to play Leo Frank in “Parade,” directed by Harold Prince, who had also done “Spider Woman.” The show put Carver behind bars again; his character was a doomed Atlanta factory manager unjustly accused and convicted of a girl’s murder in the early 20th century. He won the Drama Desk Award for best actor in a musical and earned another Tony nomination.
ANGELS UNAWARES Carver with Nicky Guadagni in “Romeo and Juliet” in 1976. He was a 25-year-old college dropout at the time.
CARVER WAS BORN AND grew up in Cranbrook, British Columbia, a small city near the Rocky Mountains. One of eight children of a lumber-truck driver and his busy wife, Brent headed off to the University of British Columbia to study drama. But he left school after three years to make his professional stage debut as a swing cast member in “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” (1972) in Vancouver.
By 1976 he was playing leads, among them Romeo at the Citadel Theater in Alberta. (When he did “Romeo and Jluliet” on Broadway in 2013, he happily played a much smaller role, the sympathetic friar who sells Juliet the fake poison. Ann Swerdfager, who handles public relations for Stratford, said Carver never showed an urgent need to be in the spotlight. It was always about the production, the role, the work.)
When he made his debut at the Stratford Festival eight years later, it was in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” as Edmund Tyrone, the likable, tubercular son .
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS Carver in the title role of “Hamlet,” remembering his dead friend Yorick. He also played Cyrano de Bergerac, Pontius Pilate, Merlin and Tevye.
HE PLAYED THE GREAT ROLES — You could say Brent Carver was typecast. Or you could say he transcended that trap. He was seen as the gentle, sensitive, even moody sort: The depressed Danish prince mourning his father in “Hamlet.” The poetic soul who cannot declare his love to Roxane’s face in “Cyrano,” because of his own face. A beleaguered, hard-working Russian milkman with a housefull of daughters to find husbands for in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Sometimes his sensitivity had a supernatural touch. He was Merlin the magician in “Camelot'“ and Gandalf the wizard in “Lord of the Rings.” Sometimes it hid behind a veneer of ruthlessness, as Pontius Pilate, with blood on his hands, in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” One of sinister satire, as the naughty emcee in “Cabaret.” Or one of comic bravado, as the Pirate King in “The Pirates of Penzance.”
TOWARD THE END Carver, right, in “The School for Scandal,” part of the Stratford Festival’s 2017 season. It turned out to be his last.
HIS FINAL STAGE ROLES were as Rowley, the caring former steward to the Surface family, in Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal,” and Feste the clown in “Twelfth Night.” (2017). The season ended in October, and four months later he was announcing that he’d be skipping 2018.
Richard Ouzounian, who directed and acted alongside Carver before becoming the theater critic of The Star in Toronto, remembers asking Carver over lunch last summer why he had decided to give up performing. “I just don’t feel like it now,” he had said.
Ouzonian has since returned to the theater world and said he would have no trouble believing that Carver had cancer or some other life-threatening disease and simply never told anyone. He could get away with the deception, because he always looked a bit sick. In a handsome way.
He was not a smoker or a drug user and no more than a social drinker, Ouzounian explained, but “he was underweight and he never slept well.” (In photo: Carver as Ichabod Crane in a 1999 television version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”)
Some friends wondered aloud if Carver had committed suicide. After all, the family had waited a day and a half to announce the news — and no cause of death was given, even when journalists asked for it. “I can’t imagine his taking his own life,” Ouzounian said.
It didn’t help that an article in a local Cranbook newspaper used the phrase “how and where he would take his life.” The writer was referring to the direction Carver would take in his future years, but the word choice was unfortunate.
One part of the family’s official statement was less than straightforward. It said he had died “at home” in Cranbrook, his hometown.
For the last 20 years or so, Carver had spent most of his time at his home in Niagara-on-the-Lake. A Niagara neighbor who learned of his death when she returned from quarantining in Toronto said he had told her “he was going out to B.C. to see his relatives — and stay with the family.” There had been no discussion of his having moved there or planning to.
WHO WAS SUSAN? Susan Wright starring in “Mother Courage” and in a publicity photo. Wright died tragically in 1991.
THERE WAS ANOTHER MYSTERY — In 1993, when Carver won his Tony for “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” he dedicated the award to “my dear, dear Susan … death be not proud!” No more was said. In 2014, when he received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement in theater, he quoted her (“my friend Susan Wright — great actress”) on an actor’s need for “three C’s — courage, confidence and conviction.”
Carver was gay. He didn’t like to discuss it in interviews, because he said he felt it was just another way of labeling him, but he acknowledged it. So this Susan was probably not a lover or a secret wife.
The real story was that Wright was a close pal. “They were wonderful, deep friends,” recalled a writer who worked at Stratford a few years afterward. Wright and her parents were staying at Carver’s house in Stratford over the Christmas holidays in 1991 while he was out of town. It was and is common for repertory actors to lend or rent their homes to colleagues when both are traveling.
But on Dec. 29, the house caught fire — one story was that it started with a smoldering cigarette; another friend said, “I heard it was candles” — and Wright died there, as did her parents. There was no question of blame or of a fault with the house, but the news devastated Carver.
“The house was rebuilt following the fire, and then Brent sold it,” the former Stratford Festival employee recalled. ”I can understand why he wouldn’t want to own a place in Stratford again.”
In 2004, during his newspaper days, Ouzounian did a Star interview with Carver that focused on the subject of death. When Carver was asked if he saw the afterlife as nothing more than oblivion, he protested, seeming horrified.
“Oh, no!” he said. “It can’t be sans everything.”
“