“Roll on, Belch a Little”: A Chat With David Schramm of the Westport Country Playhouse’s Twelfth Night

David Schramm as Toby Belch and Jordan Coughty as Andrew Aguecheek in Mark Lamos' Westport Country Playhouse production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which closes Nov. 5. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

David Schramm works when he wants to. He’s just been offered a new play, but doesn’t like the idea of spending six weeks in the Midwest in the middle of winter.

Playing Toby Belch in Twelfth Night in Connecticut in autumn—during storms which rage as wildly as the one which wrecks ships at the beginning of Shakespeare’s otherwise funny and romantic play—was another story.

The Westport Country Playhouse production of Twelfth ends this weekend. The final performances are Friday, Nov. 4 at 8 p.m. and Saturday, Nov. 5 at 3 & 8 p.m.

“When this came up, I thought it fits like a glove,” Schramm says. “The way I remembered it, I thought it was a much smaller part—roll on, belch a little. But it’s this excessive, energetic role where he’s always thinking.”

This is not one of those situations where you can say an actor is a “revelation” in a role. Schramm is exactly as great in the part as you expect him to be. Some actors are just born to play Shakespeare’s clowns, and David Schramm is one of them.

Strangely, though, he hasn’t hardly done it before. This is his first Toby Belch, and he’s only just been asked to do Falstaff somewhere. “You HAVE to,” I berate him. “I know,” he says.

Schramm’s best known as the repellent Aeromass Airline mini-magnate Roy Biggins. The TV role paid him well enough throughout the ‘90s that he can afford to be choosy when returning to the stage.  “I’d been in every regional theater in America. That’s what got me Wings; they saw me in something in L.A.” Some actors complain about the grind of series TV, but for Schramm, “I didn’t known you could work and have weekends and evenings free.” It didn’t hurt that “Wings had the perfect cast, and except for just one, Crystal Bernard, we were all theater people.”

One dream role, besides Falstaff, which could lure Schramm back to the boards these days is Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner. He also has a soft spot for  the 1954 Marcel Pagnol musical Fanny.

Schramm deems the Westport Country Playhouse to be “an enormously intimate space, with very good sound.” He marvels at the old posters on the walls and wonders which roles some of the aging stars played in certain productions. He’s old enough to remember the era when Hollywood stars would tour nationally around theaters like Westport’s. He tells of seeing Tallulah Bankhead in Here Today in the early ‘60s, and audiences laughing at everything Bankhead said, however incomprehensible, “because she was Tallulah Bankhead.”

Today’s stage actors have to work somewhat harder for the laughs. They certainly earn them in Twelfth Night, a boisterous and colorful production appropriately tinged with grief and confusion as the assorted inhabitants of the isle of Illyria deal with natural disasters, mistaken identities, unrequited love and some cruel and unusual pranks.

Schramm worked “four or five times” previously with director Mark Lamos, when Lamos was running Hartford Stage. Lamos is famous for his Shakespeares, but not at Westport, where this confidently comic and emotionally complex production is not only his first Shakespeare for the theater but just the third in the institution’s history.

“He really does know the plays,” Schramm says of Lamos, by way of explaining how fluid, clear and well-spoken the production is. “He would often, without the book in his hand, be able to correct you in a line reading.

Justin Kruger (Fabian), David Schramm (Toby Belch), Jordan Coughtry (Andrew Aguecheek) and Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Maria) in the vaguely Edwardian-styled Twelfth Night at the Westport Country Playhouse through November 5. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

As for the reblocking required when Darius De Haas, who plays Feste in Twelfth Night, tore his Achille’s tendon during the curtain call at a preview performance, Schramm shrugs, “You do what you have to do. When Darius got hurt, I thought he’d have to leave the production. That would have been harder.”

Which is a lot more considerate than Toby Belch is to many of his onstage boozing buddies. It’s a grand, take-no-prisoners (except Malvolio) role, and Schramm’s the guy grand enough to play it.