David Ogden Stiers

Background

David Ogden Stiers may be best known for his role as the petulant Boston blueblood Major Winchester on M*A*S*H*, but the actor's career has ranged from TV to film to the concert stage. He's popped up on such series as Matlock, Cybill and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His protean voice has been heard in the animated features The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pocahontas and Beauty and the Beast, and recent film work includes Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You and Rodney Dangerfield's Meet Wally Sparks.

The Peoria, IL-born Stiers, 54, is in Philadelphia to direct Autumn Canticle, a new play by John Lowell that dramatizes the difficult romantic relationship of two classical musicians, one man a successful chamber singer and the other an ailing composer. The director is no stranger to the world of classical music. He first became interested in conducting while studying drama at Juilliard and has been a guest on the podium with several symphonies over the years. Taking a break from rehearsals at the Walnut Street Theatre, he looks more like a farmer than a conductor, dressed in a blue denim shirt and brown corduroys.

Do you have a sense of how gay culture has changed from the time Autumn Canticle takes place — the early 1970s — to now?

Jesus, I grew up the in `60s. Are you kidding? I think I have a fairly good idea. I was in New York when Stonewall happened and I had an extremely Midwest reaction: "Why don't those people shut up?" It was so strident. But I guess when there are strides made in any social issue it's because there are some very brave souls at the cutting edge who really do push like crazy.

Equal rights for homosexuals isn't an emotional issue to me as much as it is logical. The uproar over the Defense of Marriage Act struck me as very odd. If people of the same sex marry, then what happens? Where are the dominos that are going to fall over?

I guess some people are scared that it gives permission to children that may not be predisposed at all to experiment. But anybody's curious . . .

Are you gay?

No, I'm not. But, I believe that we're all the same person differently expressed.

How did you meet the author of Autumn Canticle, John Lowell?

He was a clerk at Tower Records in L.A. We had a sort of bantering acquaintance dishing conductors and making rude remarks like "Why do we need another Beethoven's Seventh?" One day he came up to me and said, "Oh yeah, I realize that your entire life you've only drawn breath all these years to bring you to this moment . . . I've written a play, do you want to read it?" I agreed, and two weeks later I'd made arrangements to start a full production of his play, Leo Tolstoy's in the Next Room, Dying.

Do you think there's a difference between the classical music culture on the West and East coasts?

There's a big middle of the country that's often overlooked. I went to see the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra once and the concert was packed on a bitterly cold night. I asked people in the orchestra about it and they explained that it's folk music for the people who live there. They're Czech and German and Dutch and they need to go hear Sibelius and Beethoven. That's their immediate shared background. It feels appended to me in New York: "We do it because we did it, it's traditional." In the West it feels like: "We've got one too, we can play loud and fast." What's most telling is who can't live without it — where there's an essential need for it.

How did you get your start in conducting?

I got onto the podium the same way everybody gets onto the podium — I bullshitted my way. I'd dreamt of doing it before and was pretty good with a knitting needle. Many of us in the drama division at Juilliard would cut classes to go hear Maria Callas' master class. I remember going to hear one of Callas' master classes with Patti Lupone. Now Lupone is replaying that experience many years later in Master Class on Broadway.

As far as conducting, I claimed to be able to do something that I hadn't done, thought I could do and got away with it at Juilliard. You have no idea how dictatorial it is. Everyone should know what it's like to make a movement with a stick and suddenly between 22 and 107 people scrape, blow and thump at the same time.

How would you compare the artistic egos you find in the world of classical music to television and film?

Not much different in the exercise. But I think there's a good amount of difference in which is deserving to exercise their ego. In the case of a concert musician, the training and focus has started at the age of 7 or 8. They've finished a level of study by high school that other people don't usually get to until post-graduate work. They're strung more tightly and there is a foreseeable perfection to attain. Of course there's perfection to attain in television, but damn if I know what it is.

Were you happy with your work in Everyone Says I love You?

I'm not really left in the final cut. It was a shock. I went to New York to help publicize the movie and when I saw it I was gone. The loss was fine, I just wish somebody had told me before I put myself on the line and said, "Yes, it's some of my finest work."

What was it like working on Star Trek: The Next Generation?

I remember it was raining in Los Angeles when we were filming and I was wearing a costume that just did not conform to how I was built then. My street clothes had been ruined because of a leak in the dressing room trailer and I was grumpy. I heard this little voice outside say, "Mr. Stiers, they'd like to rehearse Troi's cabin scene please . . . " I was just in no mood and I snapped through the wall [shouts]: "Beam Me In!" This little voice came back after a beat: " . . . I have your umbrella." That put me right where I needed to be and broke the tension.

Autumn Canticle will be at Walnut Street Theatre Studio 3, Ninth & Walnut Streets, 574-3550, from Feb. 18-March 9.