I first saw Jim Doherty in the form of an 8 x 10 glossy, stuck on a sandwich board in front of a church basement theatre on Park Avenue. We were casting VENUS OBSERVED, and I should mention that the casting process at VTM is usually nasty, brutish and extremely prolonged. We were desperate to find an actor to play the lead, the Duke of Altair, and Jim's picture looked like he might work. I contacted the theatre, got his phone number and asked him come in to read. Though we ultimately cast another actor as the Duke, we did offer Jim a wonderful comic role, that of the cockney manservant, Reddleman (Jim's accent was perfect). Unfortunately, Jim got another, higher-paying job, and we parted ways, saying we would definitely keep him "in the file."
Time, as they say, passed, and we started casting our production of Christopher Logue's KINGS. I remembered this big, burly guy with the big, booming voice, and there he was "in the file," just like he was supposed to be. He read for us and demonstrated beyond a doubt that he could handle Logue's tricky verse; what's more, he had the commanding presence and the chops to play not only Agamemnon, but Priam, Thersites, Hera (!) and a host of other Homeric heroes and villains. When the lights came up on KINGS, Jim sat in his chair, looked out at the audience, took them in and then opened the play with:
Think of the east Aegean sea by night,
And in an open bay before that sea
Upwards of 30,000 men
Asleep like spoons among their hightailed ships.
Now look along the moonlit beach, and note
Among the keels that hatch its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall
Faced with black clay and split by a double-doored gate;
Then through that gate a naked man,
Whose beauty's silent power stops your heart,
Half walk, half trot, face wet with tears, out past its guard,
And having vanished from their sight
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across a mile of dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other's luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, beggar his arms, and pray.
Note that the preceding is a single sentence. Jim didn't exactly do it in one breath, but he was able to immediately draw the audience into Logue's world of beauty and terror and make them experience it all. His work was recognized by excellent reviews in the NY Times, the NY Post and several other publications and online theatre outlets.
When we did our follow-up production of WAR MUSIC, there was no part for Jim onstage because we did the show with a cast of three women. However, there was a voice-over at the end at the beginning of the script, and Jim did these short narrative recordings for us with his usual professionalism. As a result, he not only "appeared" in the New York production of WAR MUSIC (two, actually, since one was cut short by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and had to be re-mounted), but toured at least in disembodied form - the Midwest and England, the only lad in an all-girl Iliad.
The following year, I had a perfect part for Jim: Harry Haden, the crusty, poetry-spouting bartender at the Urban Stampede, who just happened to also be the god of the underworld. THE URBAN STAMPEDE is an opera by Franklin Reeve and Andrew Gant, but Harry is a non-singing part, and I left a message on Jim's answering machine, offering him the role. No need here for one of those protracted casting torture sessions.
A day or two later, I received a call from Jim's wife, who told me he had suffered a heart attack some months earlier and was no longer with us. But, of course, Jim is still with us. We have him on the WAR MUSIC CD, concluding that show by summing up the violence and splendor of Logue's stark vision. I cannot read the text without hearing Jim's reading of it:
During the ensuing battle, Achilles cornered Hector outside the walls of Troy and cut him down. He dragged the corpse around the city for all to see before returning to the Greek camp, where he presided over the funeral of Patroclus.
Protected by the gods, King Priam came to the Greeks and offered ransom in exchange for Hector's body. Achilles finally released the corpse and declared a truce of twelve days in honor of the dead. He himself would be dead within the month.
Jim Milton
Artistic Director
Verse Theater Manhattan