There are any number of intimidating ways for a young performer to break into the acting company of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, but when it comes to potentially nerve-wracking debuts, William DeMeritt’s entrée may take top honors.
DeMeritt is taking on no less than the title role in Shakespeare in Love, which opened in late February and runs all season in the Angus Bowmer Theatre. The challenge of playing young Will is perhaps doubly intense, as the actor has to not only grapple with embodying the mythos surrounding William Shakespeare and his genius, but also compete with the specter of British actor Joseph Fiennes, who memorably played the role opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the immensely popular 1998 Academy Award–winning film.
Yet if the Yale-trained DeMeritt (who goes by “Bill”) is feeling any pressure in bringing the Bard of Avon to life in Ashland, he is doing an awfully good job of hiding it. Both onstage and in person, he is charming, assured, humble and also confident that this is the right role at the right time for him.
“I really don’t have any trepidation about playing Shakespeare, because there’s a lot of myth, a few facts and a vast amount of disputed information about the person,” he said during dress rehearsals in mid-February. “Our dramaturg, Martine Kei Green-Rogers, has been wonderful in illuminating what we know and don’t know. There aren’t any recordings, or even a wealth of portraits. It’s not like playing Martin Luther King or Obama or someone you can research online and find images and recordings of them.”
A Shakespeare for everyone
While it’s true we aren’t sure what Shakespeare actually looked like, it’s unlikely that he came from black and Jewish parentage as DeMeritt does. How does DeMeritt feel about representing the greatest poet of the English language as a person of color? He cites the Tony Award–winning smash hit Hamilton as a major factor in reimagining what casting can look like in today’s America, and also gives major props to OSF for walking the walk when it comes to diversity onstage.
“If there is some little black Jewish kid out there, or any person who feels marginalized, who sees me onstage playing Shakespeare, or sees Jamie Ann Romero, who is of Mexican heritage, or Cristofer Jean of mixed heritage, playing these roles—the fact that I can be in this show and this company on the front lines changing the dynamic, that’s incredibly meaningful to me.”
DeMeritt is a self-professed “comic book dork” who was profoundly moved by what he saw last summer in the Marvel movie Captain America: Civil War. “Here you have Anthony Mackie and Don Cheadle. And there’s a scene that has all the heroes in it, but there’s one particular frame where it’s just those two talking to each other. And it was so profound. It was like two black superheroes talking to each other on screen, and I guess whatever the black-person version of the Bechdel test [a measure of a fictional work’s gender bias that counts how many times female characters speak to each other about anything other than a male character] is, it passed that, because they weren’t talking about the white guys; they were just talking. So for all those theatre geeks out there who are feeling ostracized in junior high school, come see Shakespeare in Love and look at all the people who look like you.”
“Bill’s casting is a fun comment on all of the mystery surrounding Shakespeare,” adds dramaturg Green-Rogers. “We know so much, yet so little about the historical Shakespeare, and to cast an actor with a mixed-race background in this role nods to that mystery. In addition, I think one of the things that lovers of Shakespeare like to tout is that Shakespeare is universal. To have an actor with a background like Bill’s in this role emphasizes that idea—Shakespeare is for all, and his language has the power to represent all.”
The leader of the band
DeMeritt is keenly aware of his role as a team captain through a long season of 122 performances of Shakespeare in Love. While he hasn’t had a wealth of experience playing roles of this size in the professional theatre, certainly not over a long eight-month run, he has worked with actors he considers role models in terms of leadership, including Mark Ruffalo in the HBO movie The Normal Heart. “Working with leading actors who take that role to heart, treating everyone with respect, deference and intelligence—I think about that often,” DeMeritt says. “I feel a great deal of responsibility in helping lead this remarkable cast of actors.”
DeMeritt’s partner-in-crime in shepherding the Shakespeare in Love cast on their journey is his co-star Jamie Ann Romero, who plays Viola de Lesseps, an aspiring performer who dons a clever disguise to enter an all-male acting troupe. In Romero, DeMeritt has clearly found a kindred spirit. “When I did the callback, Jamie was there, so I got to read with her. After I was cast, we had a coffee date in New York to get to know each other before we started this year of playing lovers—with all apologies to our respective real-life partners. She is without a doubt one of the most talented, generous, intelligent and supportive people I’ve ever worked with.”
Romero has high words of praise for her co-star as well. “Bill is such an incredibly kind, generous human being, and that immediately translated to the rehearsal room and onstage. He brings a jovial presence to the room and it’s infectious. Bill's Shakespeare is much the same: a bright, funny, fiery meteor that streaks across the play and lights up the stage. I am grateful I get to share this stage with him and cannot wait to share our play with OSF’s audiences.”
Life after Will
In addition to his duties in Shakespeare in Love, DeMeritt will also play Fenton in this summer’s The Merry Wives of Windsor in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre. After the season closes, the lifelong New Yorker isn’t entirely sure where he will head, but he hopes some travel is in the cards. Just before coming to Ashland, he squeezed in a Christmas trip with his girlfriend to Cuba, which he describes as “gorgeous, dilapidated, magical and time-warped” all at once. He hopes that a trip to Vietnam might be next on his travel itinerary.
DeMeritt is also carving out an impressive career in narration and audiobooks. Two of his most notable credits to date are voicing the audio version of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “My President Was Black” for The Atlantic magazine, and the audiobook version of the novel Underground Airlines by Ben Winters. The most challenging assignment has certainly been the animal-fantasy/adventure series The Wild Ones by C. Alexander London, he says. “I had to do 35 different animal voices, and I got to the point where I was doing Christopher Walken impressions for the turtle since I was running out of voices to do!”
With film, television, theatre and voiceover credits already filling his resumé, there’s no telling whether New York, Los Angeles or somewhere beyond will be DeMeritt’s next stop. But for this season at least, Ashland audiences have a chance to see him bring a certain playwright from Stratford to life in mightily entertaining form.
Shakespeare in Love runs through October 29 in the Angus Bowmer Theatre.