Thirty-five years ago, before his Broadway career and faculty position at Elon University, Richard Gang was denied the lead role of Don Quixote when a small community theatre in Maine performed "The Man of La Mancha." Now he’ll have his chance. Gang stars this month in the same show at the Open Space Café Theatre in Greensboro, N.C., where eight students in the Department of Performing Arts will join him onstage.
The show opens on Thursday, May 12, at 8 p.m. and plays through Saturday, May 14. It reopens the following week for 8 p.m. shows May 20-21, and closes Sunday, May 22, at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 each with discounts for seniors.
Elon student performers include:
Chelsey Levalley, a music theatre senior, as Aldonza
Kristina Loeffke, a rising BFA acting student, as Antonia
Sean Liang, rising junior BFA actor, as Sancho Panza
Keith Hale and Will Daniel, freshmen acting students, as the Barber and the Captain/Pedro, respectively
Andrew Keeler, rising MTE junior, as Doctor Carrasco and the Duke
Matthew Summers, rising junior MTE as Juan
Kristin Sandler, rising BFA dancer as Fermina and the gypsy Moor
The Don Quixote performance brings Gang’s acting credits full-circle from his earliest days auditioning in the Lewiston/Auburn region of Maine. It was 1975, and Gang, who spent the first part of his career as an audiologist who worked with young children, decided the time was right to join a community theatre production.
The stage was nothing new for the Brooklyn native. Indeed, for much of his adolescence and early adulthood, Gang would attend and later work each summer for a theatre camp in upstate New York. His parents, however, saw no future for him as an actor and pushed him toward accounting, the same career Gang’s father enjoyed.
He compromised and earned a degree studying educational theatre and speech. Gang then followed a girlfriend to Boston, where he picked up a master’s degree in speech pathology and audiology before moving to Maine. His spare time found him auditioning for community theatre roles.
“I always got to play the parts that nobody else could do,” Gang said in a recent interview.
As Gang tells it, the director was knocked over by his audition for Don Quixote, but because Gang was new to the area, the director wanted the lead role to go to someone whose reputation was already established. Gang agreed to play the innkeeper.
Life went by. He accepted other roles in community theatre while practicing speech and hearing therapy. By the late 1980s, Gang couldn’t take any more and quit the profession. A series of business ventures soon led to him meeting influential Broadway names, and before long, he was appearing in New York City performances.
“I had made it!” he said. “I started to get paid for what I was doing. I also got some commercials that paid me a little bit of money.”
Gang would move to California to pursue additional graduate studies at California State University, Long Beach, later transferring to the Professional Actor’s Training Program at Rutgers University and earning his MFA in theatre arts. His next stop? Elon University, where since 2001 he has taught method acting and voice, speech and dialects to hundreds of performing arts students.
His wife’s death from pancreatic cancer in 2009 floored the professor. A year and a half later and 60 pounds lighter, he has found therapy in returning to the stage. Gang first played the old man, Norman, in the Open Space Café Theatre’s “On Golden Pond” show, which in turn led to the Don Quixote opportunity in “The Man of La Mancha.”
Never one to hog the spotlight, Gang is quick to praise his cast, especially those from the Department of Performing Arts and their ability to inspire actors around them.
“We produce the best actors in the country here,” he said.
For more information on “The Man of La Mancha,” call 336-292-2285 or visit the Open Space Café Theatre online at http://www.osctheatre.com.