What's Up, Stacy Keach? The Other Desert Cities Star on Highlights of His 50-Year Career

Forty-five years after he directed a Chekhov workshop production in the newly constructed Mitzi Newhouse Theatre (then called the Forum), Stacy Keach is back in Lincoln Center’s underground space starring as patriarch Lyman Wyeth in Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities. Although Keach is a living legend of the classical stage—from Hamlet in Central Park to King Lear at D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre—the 69-year-old actor is just as comfortable playing a father from hell in the sitcom Titus, a warden in Prison Break and the patriarch of a boxing family in the new FX series Lights Out. Keach reminisced about his five-decade career in a recent chat with Broadway.com.

It’s been almost 20 years since you were on stage in New York. Welcome back!
It’s like coming home, particularly at Lincoln Center. I opened the Vivian Beaumont Theater 45 years ago with Danton’s Death, followed by The Country Wife, The Condemned of Altona and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. No show was scheduled in the Newhouse that first season, but I directed Daniel Sullivan, who was an actor then, in Chekhov’s Marriage Proposal in the very space where we are currently performing Other Desert Cities.

The Lincoln Center area looked a bit different then, I'll bet.
The whole landscape has changed, and it’s continuing to change. I’m so pleased they’re going to build a new black box theater on top of [the Beaumont].

Are you enjoying being back in a juicy new play?
I couldn’t be happier—it's a wonderful piece of writing and a great cast. I first met Robbie Baitz when I did [the L.A. production of] Ten Unknowns, another terrific play. It is such a joy to run with thoroughbreds!

With a starry cast like this, it’s natural to wonder if the play will move to Broadway.
People have been talking about that, but I can’t imagine a better spot for it than this theater. It's like the audience is actually in the living room with this family. Joe Mantello is a brilliant director, so I’m convinced that he and the designer [John Lee Beatty] could come up with a concept that would work equally well on Broadway. With this cast, I think the play would work on Broadway.

How cool is it that you and James Earl Jones are on the New York stage at the same time? [The Driving Miss Daisy star played Claudius to Keach’s Hamlet in Central Park in 1972.]
Oh, I love Jimmy. I carried a spear in one of his early incarnations of Othello in 1964, the summer I got my Equity card doing Marcellus and the Player King in Hamlet. Some years later, I did my first major movie with Jimmy, End of the Road.

You acted in Central Park many times in the 60s and 70s. What’s your fondest memory?
Playing Falstaff [in 1968] when we did both parts of Henry IV. We would start at 10 o’clock at night and finish as the sun was coming up in the morning. I got to do the whole Falstaffian experience in one night. It was absolutely breathtaking.

You don’t seem to mind jumping from playing, say, a narc in a Cheech and Chong movie to King Lear.
I loved doing both Lear and [Up in Smoke's] Sgt. Stedenko! It’s much more enjoyable to do as many different styles and characters as you can—high/low, tragedy/comedy. It’s like a classical pianist playing a jazz fugue.

And now you're in the new FX series Lights Out.
It’s a very well made piece of television. We’ve never had a series about boxing, so that in itself has a certain freshness. The great coincidence is that Elizabeth Marvel [Keach’s daughter in Other Desert Cities] plays my daughter in the series as well. It’s serendipity. I just adore her. She such a wonderful actress. I loved seeing her in True Grit.

Speaking of True Grit, did you see that Joel and Ethan Coen singled you out in Entertainment Weekly for appearing in two of their top five westerns of all time, Doc and Judge Roy Bean? You are on their radar.
That’s good. Now put me on their payroll! [Laughs.] I look forward to the possibility of one day working with them. I thought True Grit was a spectacular western, very originally done.

You became a father rather late in life. What has that meant to you?
My family is my treasure. My wife, Malgosia, and I are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary this year, and our kids are 22 and 20. Our son, Shannon, is a senior at U.S.C. studying international business relations and our daughter, Karolina, is studying acting and theater. I saw her play Varya in The Cherry Orchard at Cal Lutheran University, and she was wonderful. I’m very happy that my son doesn’t want to go into the business. I used reverse psychology on him: I said, “Why don’t you consider becoming an actor?” He said, “Oh, no,” and I said, “Thank god!”