Juneau Color: Falcon breathes life into curmudgeonly puppet
Zach Falcon has appeared on stage in Juneau many times, but says he wouldn't want to tread the boards anywhere but here.
There's something particularly satisfying about performing for an audience of people you know, particularly when that audience is as informed and discerning as Juneau's community of theatergoers, Falcon said.
"Everyone's a critic - in a good way. You'll run into people in the grocery store and they'll tell you how something in a show reminded them of (German playwright Bertolt) Brecht," he said. "They don't mind telling you when you're lousy, and that's good."
By day, Falcon, 31, is an attorney with Faulkner Banfield. On the side, he is president of the Perseverance Theater board and a local stage veteran, currently playing Ebenezer Scrooge in Theatre in the Rough's production of "A Christmas Carol." Other roles include Polonius in a TR production of "Hamlet" and Edgar in the theater group's "King Lear." Falcon has also appeared in nine plays at Perseverance, including last season's "Winesberg" and "The Enchanted Halibut" some 20 years earlier.
"I got $400 for being a tree, which, at 9 years old, was pretty sweet," he said.
But despite his extensive theater resume, Falcon didn't act at all during college at Columbia University in New York, or law school at the University of Michigan, or while working in the U.S. House of Representatives on the Resources Committee.
"I always associate theater with Juneau and not any place else. There's something very unique to telling stories to people in your town that wouldn't exist if you were on stage and didn't know who your audience was."
Falcon knows the Juneau audience because he grew up here. He was born in a log cabin in Kodiak, and moved to Juneau with his mother and sister at age 8. They lived for a couple of years in Perseverance Theatre - or rather, in an efficiency apartment that was where the front lobby is now. That apartment contained the closest bathroom for actors exiting the side of the stage that didn't have its own restroom, so Falcon got an up-close look at theater even when he wasn't in the audience.
"I'd be sitting there, doing my homework, and people would run through in costumes and makeup to use our john," he said.
In this manner his life became infused with theater. He hung around the scene shop and stage so much that finally people began to put him to work. The tasks were mostly janitorial, but Falcon says his experiences growing up at Perseverance have everything to do with his love for acting.
"It's great when you're a kid and lots of people are taking an active interest in teaching you things and giving you things to do," he said.
Terry Cramer was one of those people. Falcon played her child in a scene from Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale" in a 1981 Perseverance production, and helped out behind the scenes in other shows.
"He was very reliable, very responsible and always willing to take on more. You felt that things were in good hands when he agreed to do something. He was a kid, but he wasn't a flaky kid," Cramer said.
She directed Falcon in a 2000 production of "Wit," in which he played a doctor. Cramer describes him as a very focused person and a very focused actor.
"It's wonderful to watch the subtlety and depth that he brings, that grows as he gets more experience. He really works on the detail and the inner life that gets shown in subtleties you don't even know you're seeing," she said.
Falcon says each character he plays requires new thought and technique. Scrooge in particular has been challenging because Falcon plays him through a puppet. In puppetry, unlike in usual stage acting, actors can't rely on facial expressions and gestures to help convey emotions and character. The voice becomes even more important and Falcon has an expressive one remarkably suited to playing men twice his age - in addition to Polonius, he played Justice Shallow in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" with Theatre in the Rough.
"I tend to think about older people as static and set in their ways," Falcon admits. "Scrooge certainly begins as set in his ways. To see a person so set make such a transformation ... was a challenge and a delight for me."