On a fine evening in late June with a hundred celebrants in the Green Room at Yotel on 10th Avenue and 42nd Street, I was with my partner, Christian Foy, and two friends– the cartoonist Tom Kleh and actor John Quilty–attending the Actors Equity annual awards as the sponsor of an award for a male and a female actor who had appeared on or off Broadway in the just concluding season. For the Seff Award, a committee of critics had chosen Kecia Lewis for her brilliant work in Hell’s Kitchen and Ciarán O’Reilly for his virtuoso directing and acting in Philadelphia, Here I Come, but both were celebrating over 40 years of excellent work on stages all over the world, including (for O’Reilly) long stints with the Irish Rep Company and so many other theatre groups where their work has always been singled out for notice. Although never stars, theirs are exactly the sort of richly satisfying lifetime careers I love making a fuss over–the sort that continue to pay big dividends until their final closing night…which I hope will still be a long way off.
Ciarán O’Reilly, Richard Seff, Kecia Lewis
A lavishly catered “meet and greet” hour where we mingled with celebrants and honorees preceded the presentation of these other awards including mine: Clarence Derwent, Joe A. Calloway, Paul Robeson, Michael McCarty and Patrick Quinn, and the ACCA group where the seventeen members of the Broadway chorus of The Heart of Rock and Roll each received an Award leading to a rousing acclaim from the deeply committed theatre audience of which I was honored to be a part. I can’t imagine a more joyous way of sharing the satisfactions of one’s life work.