Edward Gero is an American stage actor active primarily in the Washington, DC area, acclaimed for his performances in Shakespeare and other classical plays.
Gero, an Italian-American, was raised in Madison, New Jersey; his mother was a housemaid and his father a union president. Gero decided on a career in acting after seeing a production of Hamlet starring Stacy Keach in New York’s Delacorte amphitheater as a teenager. After his education at Montclair State University, Gero began playing small roles at Classic Stage Company, an off-Broadway theater in New York, and later was invited to play a full season at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. By 1983 he was appearing in productions at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, where he remains a fixture to this day. He has appeared in seventy productions there, including roles in all the major works of Shakespeare as well as plays by Molière and Chekhov. Gero has branched out into non-classical plays as well, appearing to great acclaim as President Richard Nixon in the two-man play Nixon’s Nixon at Roundhouse Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland. In November 2009 Gero made his debut at Ford’s Theatre, playing the role of Ebeneezer Scrooge in the company’s annual version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol . Gero has done voice-over work for documentaries on the Discovery Channel and PBS. He is an Associate Professor of drama and Performance Area Head in the School of Theater at George Mason University, and also teaches for the University of Maryland and George Washington University. Gero has won four Helen Hayes awards: in 1989 (for Macbeth ), 1994 (for Richard II ), 1995 (for Henry IV ), and 1998 (for Skylight ). He played Mark Rothko in John Logan's Red at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. In 2015, Gero played Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in John Strand's The Originalist , also at Arena Stage. [1] He is married to Marijke Ebbinge, a former Ford model. Their son, Christian, is a sound designer and audio engineer. [2]
His Scalia role was first performed in Washington DC in 2015 and The New York Times gave it a positive review stating: "Mr. Gero’s portrayal is a more reflective version of Justice Scalia than the one the public sees. It is also more sympathetic than many might expect." [3] The play is set for stage production to start performances at the Pasadena Playhouse in California on April 11, 2017. [4]
Year | Title | Role | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1990 | Die Hard 2 | Engineer #5 | |
1993 | Striking Distance | Officer Lulley |
The Little Foxes is a 1939 play by Lillian Hellman, considered a classic of 20th century drama. Its title comes from Chapter 2, Verse 15 of the Song of Solomon in the King James version of the Bible, which reads, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes." Set in a small town in Alabama in 1900, it focuses on the struggle for control of a family business. Tallulah Bankhead starred in the original production as Regina Hubbard Giddens.
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the Supreme Court's history. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018 by President Donald Trump, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.
Samuel Atkinson Waterston is an American actor, producer, and director. Waterston is known for his work in theater, television and film. Waterston, having studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and the American Actors Workshop, started his career in theater on the New York stage, appearing in multiple revivals of Shakespeare. In 1977, he starred in an off-Broadway production of Measure for Measure as Duke Vincentio alongside Meryl Streep and John Cazale at the Delacorte Theatre. Throughout Waterston's theater career, he continued to appear alongside actors such as Raul Julia in Indians (1969), James Woods in The Trial of Catonsville Nine (1970), Liv Ullmann in A Doll's House (1975), Jane Alexander in Hamlet (1975), and Glenn Close in Benefactors (1980). In 1993, he portrayed Abraham Lincoln onstage in Abe Lincoln in Illinois where he received a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations for his performance.
A theatre in the round, arena theatre or central staging is a space for theatre in which the audience surrounds the stage.
Frank A. Langella Jr. is an American stage and film actor. He has won four Tony Awards: two for Best Leading Actor in a Play for his performance as Richard Nixon in Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon and as André in Florian Zeller's The Father, and two for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performances in Edward Albee's Seascape and Ivan Turgenev's Fortune's Fool. His reprisal of the Nixon role in the film production of Frost/Nixon earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
Roger Rees was a Welsh actor and director, widely known for his stage work. He won an Olivier Award and a Tony Award for his performance as the lead in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. He also received Obie Awards for his role in The End of the Day and as co-director of Peter and the Starcatcher. Rees was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in November 2015.
The Helen Hayes Awards are given for acting in resident theatre productions in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The awards are generally divided between male and female performers, between lead and supporting performers, and since the early 1990s between dramatic plays and musicals.
Morris Carnovsky was an American stage and film actor. He was one of the founders of the Group Theatre (1931-1940) in New York City and had a thriving acting career both on Broadway and in films until, in the early 1950s, professional colleagues told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Carnovsky had been a Communist Party member. He was blacklisted and worked less frequently for a few years, but then re-established his acting career, taking on many Shakespearean roles at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and performing the title roles in college campus productions of King Lear and The Merchant of Venice. Carnovsky's nephew is veteran character actor and longtime "Pathmark Guy" James Karen.
Arena Stage is a not-for-profit regional theater based in Southwest Washington, D.C. It was a pioneer in 1950 of the Regional Theater Movement.
The Shakespeare Theatre Company is a regional theatre company located in Washington, D.C. The theatre company focuses primarily on plays from the Shakespeare canon, but its seasons include works by other classic playwrights such as Euripides, Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, Schiller, Coward and Tennessee Williams. The company manages and performs in the Harman Center for the Arts, consisting of the Lansburgh Theatre and Sidney Harman Hall. In cooperation with George Washington University, they run the Academy for Classical Acting.
Michael Kahn is an American theatre director and drama educator. He has, since 1986, been the Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. He held the position of Richard Rodgers Director of the Drama Division of the Juilliard School from 1992 to 2006.
Tazewell Thompson, is an African-American theatre director, the former artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse (2006–07) in Westport, Connecticut and the Syracuse Stage (1992–95) in New York state. Prior to that he was an assistant director at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. He is the Director of Opera Studies at Manhattan School of Music.
Henry Hodges is an American actor, voice actor and singer. Beginning his acting career at the age of four, Hodges is best known for his musical theatre roles on Broadway; starring as "Chip" in Beauty and the Beast, as "Jeremy Potts" in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and as "Michael Banks" in Mary Poppins.
Ari Roth is an American theatrical producer, playwright, director and educator. From 2014 to 2020 Roth served as the Artistic Director of Mosaic Theater Company of DC and was formerly the Artistic Director of Theater J at the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center from 1997 to 2014. Over 18 seasons at Theater J, he produced more than 129 productions and created festivals including “Locally Grown: Community Supported Art,” “Voices from a Changing Middle East”, and Theater J's acclaimed "Beyond The Stage" and "Artistic Director's Roundtable" series. In 2010, Roth was named as one of the Forward 50, honoring nationally prominent “men and women who are leading the American Jewish community into the 21st century.”
John Douglas Thompson is an English-American actor. He is a Tony Award nominee and the recipient of two Drama Desk Awards, two Obie Awards, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award.
Pippa Nixon is an English actress. She trained at Manchester School of Theatre.
Avant Bard Theatre is a small, primarily non-Equity theater based in Arlington, VA. The company was founded in 1990 under the name Washington Shakespeare Company; its name was changed to WSC Avant Bard in August 2011; its name was subsequently changed to Avant Bard Theatre in October 2017. Avant Bard focuses on producing "bold and experimental productions of classic and contemporary works".
Caesar is the title of Orson Welles's innovative 1937 adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a modern-dress bare-stage production that evoked comparison to contemporary Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Considered Welles's highest achievement in the theatre, it premiered November 11, 1937, as the first production of the Mercury Theatre, an independent repertory theatre company that presented an acclaimed series of productions on Broadway through 1941.
The Originalist is a 2015 play that depicts the relationship between United States Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) and a fictional Supreme Court law clerk whose views differ from his. Written by John Strand, the play was originally produced for stage performance in Washington, DC in 2015 under director Molly Smith; actor Edward Gero portrayed Scalia. The play received a positive review in The New York Times and has been produced at multiple theaters. In March 2017, the play was broadcast on public television.
Jeorge Bennett Watson is an American Film/TV and theatre actor who has appeared as Thomas Wilson in ABC's For Life, Pete in the Hallmark Channel's movie Holiday for Heroes., Mark Higgins in Netflix’ Luke Cage, Lifetime Movie Network’s pilot My Sordid Affair, as Officer Ahearn, FX series Justified, Showtime’s Shameless, CBS’ The Defenders, Cold Case, and NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street. He is best known for his recurring role in the first season of HBO’s The Wire as Marvin Browning. He resides in New York City.
Berg, Scott W. 2009. "The Other Guy", The Washington Post Magazine, Dec. 13.