10 Weekender Friday, November 17, 1978
Actor Cairbeu not Kk&p
By ANN SMALLWOOD
Though Allan Carlson has the seemingly
easy task of portraying another actor in the
Playmakers Repertory Company's
production of Threads, his theater career
and that of the fictional character he
portrays are, in many ways, vastly different.
Threads is a new play by native North
Carolinian Jonathan Bolt which recently
premiered at the O'Neill Theatre Center in
Waterford. Conn. The story revolves
around the return of a fledgling actor,
Clyde Owens, to his home in a mill town in
rural Piedmont North Carolina.
Owens has fled "an unhappy home and a
buried future of mill work only to face
unemployment in New York eased only by
occasional bit parts in television.
Nevertheless, he has the status of a hero
among the townspeople a, condition he
enjoys more and more as the summer wears
on. As much as he wants to leave, he fears
future failures and feels fied to his past by
both emotional and economic threads.
Allan Carlsen, on the other hand, grew up
in an industrial suburb of Chicago during
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the'50s. He was a war baby of 1943 who went
to a large high school characterized, he said,
by a majority of "chains and leather types"
and a minority of clean-cut, studious types
like himself.
The resemblance of his high school
experience to the hit musical Grease is no
coincidence, Carlson explained. Two of his
Chicago friends in the late '60s. Jim Jacobs
and Warren Casey, enjoyed getting stoned
at parties and singing '50s songs. So they
wrote Grease, he said, and it premiered at
Chicago's Kingston Mines Theater, which
had been an old stable and carriage house
before Carlsen and his fellow players
renovated it.
When Carlsen and his peers were living
the Grease story in high school, he
participated in school musicals, but didn't
plan to make theater his career. His prowess
on the football field (he was an all-Chicago
quarterback) and his good grades won him a
scholarship to the University of
Pennsylvania where he studied electrical
engineering.
He and some friends went to New York
where they made a theater out of a White
Plains school that had been closed due to
integration problems. After a few years he
returned to Chicago to work at a more
lucrative job as manager of a department
store. But true to the great American dream,
Carlsen eventually got a job in the mailroom
of ABC and quickly rose to the executive
level. - .
was likely to grow with it.
Carlsen didn't give up theater while he
was at ABC, though. With some of his
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friends (including the Grease authors) he
built up a reputation doing modern avant
garde plays, and in the early 70s Carlsen
gave up his executive office, high salary and
two secretaries to work in the theater full
time. He made his Broadway debut in 1973 in
the premiere of Brian Friel's The Freedom of
the City and since then has acted and
directed on Broadway, in Washington,
D.C., and with regional theaters like PRC.
Carlsen also portrayed John Adams II in the
historical television series The Adams
Chronicles.
Threads will be performed at 8 p.m. today
and Saturday in the Paul Green, Theater.
Ann Smallwood is assistant arts editor for
the Daily Tar Heel.
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