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Life & Arts

Theater passion pays for UH prof

UH's Cravens has dedicated years to acting career that began on a whim

by MELLISSA SEUFFERT
The Daily Cougar

Rutherford Cravens wasn't exactly born with the desire to act; he just happened to roll into it.

"I was in detention in high school and this guy came up to me and said he had a walk-on role in the school play but also had a debate tournament the same weekend," Cravens said. "He asked me if I could take over his role, and I wasn't doing anything, so I said ‘OK, fine.'"

The small role entailed Cravens being rolled across a stage three times in a wheelchair, he said.

"I got three laughs," Cravens said. "I was totally hooked."

Cravens is a 58-year-old adjunct professor in the UH School of Theatre and a Houston native. After high school, he decided he would pursue his dream of acting in New York City. He enrolled in a two-year program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and was convinced he was going to spend the rest of his life in New York. 

"It was a wonderful school, and the nice thing about it is the second year, you have to be invited back. It's a very small group that comes back, and you get a lot of exposure to agents who do showcase productions," Cravens said.

"I was thinking that was where I was going to live, except the Alley (Theatre) needed a Piglet," Cravens said.

Cravens heard the Alley Theatre was looking for someone to play the role of Piglet in their production of Winnie the Pooh. After Cravens graduated, he came back to his friends and family in Houston and decided to audition for the role. He stayed in that role for 11 years and built a life in Houston.

Throughout his nearly 40-year career, Cravens estimates he has been in 150 to 200 productions and about 30 smaller roles in TV and movies. Among them are parts in Friday Night Lights and Ray, the 2004 biopic about singer Ray Charles that won two Oscars. Cravens said Ray is probably the biggest project he's ever worked on, though he admits he hasn't even watched it.

"Apparently, I'm the worst person in it," Cravens said. "I'm a racist concert promoter who bars Ray Charles from playing in Georgia."

He said he didn't attend the Oscars that year, which anyone who is in a nominated film may do, because he "didn't want to be mobbed by fans."

Though he says movies are fun, his real passion is for theater. Cravens is involved in various projects throughout the Houston area, all of which help to promote theater and Houston-area artists.

One program, Shakespeare Outreach, brings free performances of Shakespeare's plays to Houston schools. UH students help to put on the plays, and Cravens said they even get paid for doing so.

Cravens said he also does a lot of work with drug addicts, people living with AIDS and at-risk youth.

Project Roadhouse, which works with the predominately black neighborhoods near UH off Elgin Avenue, takes roadhouses from the early 20th century and restores them for Houston artists to use as either installation or work spaces. Cravens said some nonprofit organizations use the space for their offices, and after-school programs are also housed there.

Cravens' latest project is fairly new territory for him. He wrote a play called Wondergirl, which marks the first time he has ever written a play solely based on his experiences and out of his own imagination.

Cravens said he originally wrote it for the Edward Albee Playwright Workshop three years ago. The Workshop, which is designed to aid budding playwrights, allows the writer to work with actors and a director to put on a "barebones" performance of their play, Cravens said. 

In order to be accepted into the workshop, Cravens had to send Albee samples of plays he had written. When those were accepted to be in the workshop, Cravens said he didn't want to use them because they weren't his stories, and so he wrote Wondergirl.

The opening scene of the play is modeled after a similar situation Cravens said he and his wife, Jane, went through when she went into premature labor. Unlike the play, doctors were able to stop Jane's contractions, and Cravens said she spent the next six weeks "flat on her back" until she gave birth to twins: a girl, Sarah Jane, and boy, Ford, who died six months after being born. Sarah Jane is now 7 years old. 

The play is showing through Sunday at the Main Street Theater, 2540 Times Blvd., in Rice Village, and Cravens said he couldn't be happier with how it turned out.

"I think that cast is as strong as a cast as I've ever seen," Cravens said. "They are amazing, and the director (Cheryl L. Kaplan) was wonderful. I can't imagine a first-time playwright being luckier, being as lucky, as I am in getting that cast and that director."

When it comes to his teaching philosophy, Cravens said he doesn't have one. But Lilliana Castillo, a pre-law sophomore who is taking Cravens' acting class, said he teaches in a way that helps students learn.

"Ruddy wants us to experience theater how it really is," Castillo said. "Right now (in class) we're doing another scene with somebody else, and it teaches you the responsibility of being an actor, because if our partner doesn't show up, we're screwed. It teaches us that people depend on us, and I don't think that any other professor can do that."

Castillo said she has worked in the theater department and known Cravens for two years. She said she decided to take an acting class because she needed to learn how to perform if she wanted to be a lawyer, and once she heard Cravens was teaching it, she was sold.

"I thought, ‘Ruddy's teaching it, so why not? Might as well take it,'" Castillo said.

Cravens said he inherited the nickname Ruddy from this father, who is also named Rutherford, and carried the nickname through his life. 

Cravens said students need to do whatever works for them and makes sense when they're trying to learn.

"I never learned anything from classes," Cravens said. "I learned from working on scenes with somebody else. If you're lucky you have a good director or a teacher who can sort of guide you and help you discover what's going on."

Teaching a lot of non-theater majors keeps Cravens in awe of that raw talent that he finds.

"I never knew there was a talent that is real. It is something that is ingrained, and I see it every year in people who have never picked up a script in their life," Cravens said.

He doesn't, however, advocate switching majors on a whim.

"I say, ‘No! Do not drop out of the business school to become an actor. Do not do this — even if you have the talent,'" he said.

Whether or not Cravens decides to concentrate on acting, write more plays or continue to do both, he said he finds it amazing to teach students, especially those unaware of their talents.

"It's amazing to see someone who can pick up everything like that without having had any experience whatsoever," Cravens said. "It is extraordinary, and every year I see it."
 

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