At Lincoln Center Theater this week, Camelot is opening and The Coast Starlight is closing. To commemorate the former I am certain there will be relief to have completed the ardor of rehearsals and previews and the merriment of an opening night shared with family and friends. I wasn’t sure of the emotions swirling backstage around the latter production. So I consulted cast member Rhys Coiro to take the temperature.
Before I relay his thoughts I hope he won’t mind if I name The Coast Starlight cast: in addition to Coiro they are Mia Barron, Camila Canó-Flaviá, Will Harrison, Jon Norman Schneider, and Michelle Wilson. They play disparate characters on scene but have been bound in their affection for each other backstage. “Ensembles are not always united,” Coiro told me, “but this cast has been very familial.”
The general mood of the company upon closing, Coiro said, “is wistful. Pangs of slight melancholy. Three of us did the play pre-pandemic in La Jolla. And I’m among those who took part in an earlier reading. So it feels as if this is the third time I’ve visited this material. After all these years, I have a sense of satisfaction.”
That satisfaction, said Coiro, exists on many levels. “There has been the satisfaction of watching the story grow – to have been a witness to the evolution of this wonderful piece of writing.” He continued: “There has been the immense satisfaction of collaborating with this group of people: our director, Tyne [Rafaeli]; everyone backstage; my fellow actors; and perhaps most of all the playwright Keith Bunin. You can’t say enough about Keith as a dedicated artist. He was at every rehearsal and at almost every performance. He is so not precious and has been the ultimate collaborator.”
Coiro is too modest to note the excellence of his own performance, so let me here insert that it has nightly provided satisfactions to the audience. He plays Noah, a person, Coiro said, “who has served in the military and who is now committed to being truthful. That attitude has not exactly built him any kind of conventional career. He’s bounced around between jobs. But his going here and there is emblematic of what this play is about: the wandering spirit of America.”
Coiro mentioned a further source of satisfaction: the interplay between the actors and the audiences. “As the run has gone on, I have found more intimacy with the audience. It hasn’t been an us-and-them experience. They have been on the train too.” That closeness, Coiro explained, has been fostered in part by the intimacy of the Newhouse space and the relationship between the patrons and the rotating set. “Our pet name for the set has been Sheila. I’m not sure who started calling her that or why. I can say that Sheila was always revered even though she has given us a few bumps along the way.”
Coiro’s final sense of satisfaction comes from the fact that The Coast Starlight marks his return to Lincoln Center Theater. “My first professional job out of college was in Dinner at Eight, in the Beaumont. I was 22 and I played a bellboy. It has been wonderful to have this homecoming. It has been an interim of 20 years. And I have lived a lifetime in between.”
Forgive me if earlier in this article I did not sketch the outline of Coiro’s lifetime – did not provide what the super-fine American writer and revered teacher Elizabeth Hardwick used to call “the needful facts.” Coiro grew up in New York City, where, he says, he had the good fortune to be exposed to a lot of theater. He lived in California for 23 years. During the pandemic, he and his family moved to the Atlanta area, where – a very needful fact here —they keep chickens. Dozens of them. Coiro revealed he isn’t exactly sure what he will be doing after The Coast Starlight ends. “Except going back to Georgia, family, and the chickens,” I said. “Yes,” he answered. “Except going back to Georgia, the family, and the chickens.”
Brendan Lemon is a freelance journalist in New York.
