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He’s on a new case
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, November 26, 2006
William Petersen on stage at Trinity Rep. Petersen, best known for the CBS television drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, is in town to act in Trinity’s second Christmas show, A Dublin Carol.
The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy
William Petersen’s Dr. Gil Grissom investigated the case of a psychic with visions of her own demise in an epsidode of CSI that aired this year.
CBS / ROBERT VOETS
When William Petersen, star of CBS’ C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation series, got a call from his old friend Curt Columbus asking him to drop everything and come to Providence, Petersen knew he had to.
“I went to CBS and told them I just had to do it,” said Petersen, during a break before rehearsal for Dublin Carol, the other Christmas tale gracing Trinity stages this holiday season. The show opens Thursday.
“I didn’t know he had taken over Trinity. I’m proud of him. I said, ‘God, I’d love to do this for him.’ ”
For the next five weeks, Petersen, who on television plays crime scene investigator Dr. Gil Grissom, will be playing alcoholic funeral parlor worker John Plunkett in Conor McPherson’s tale of Christmas redemption.
Tackling Dublin Carol has been a big change for someone who has not been on stage in eight years.
Petersen, dressed in jeans and a football T-shirt, took time out the other day to talk about his work at Trinity, how challenging it has been.
In television, Petersen said, you learn things in snippets. For Dublin Carol, he has had to walk around with an 80-page script in his head. It’s using a “completely different muscle,” he said.
Petersen said he’s been a little freaked out by the experience, and feels like he’s starting all over again, like a 20-year-old doing his first Equity play.
The show’s director, Amy Morton, from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, told him that stage work is like riding a bike. You never forget how.
Said Petersen, 53, “It’s more like dragging a boulder up the Matterhorn.
“It’s tougher than I thought it would be,” he said of his return to the stage. Although he did seem to be slowly getting used to it.
Because of holiday breaks and the short run of Dublin Carol, Petersen will only miss a couple of episodes of CSI, which airs Thursday nights. The script writers have sent him on sabbatical to study mosquito life at Walden Pond.
Peterson said he had hoped to bring along a camera crew to shoot footage of Walden and of him lecturing students at Brown, as though he were leading a biology class. But the demands of CSI are such that that was impossible, he said.
“We’re so crammed for the show,” he said. “It eats up the whole day,” leaving no time for excursions to Providence.
Petersen has known Columbus, Trinity’s new artistic director, for about two decades, ever since Columbus crashed at a Chicago apartment Petersen lent to a nephew. A friend of Columbus’ at Yale knew the nephew and hooked them up.
Petersen was out on the West Coast shooting a film at the time. He returned to find this “theater nerd” someone one who was “smart, a nice guy.”
Petersen introduced him to the Remains Theater Ensemble, where Columbus became an intern and got his start.
By then, Petersen had a solid foothold in the Chicago theater scene, largely from playing Jack Abbott in Adrian Hall’s adaptation of In the Belly of the Beast.
“I was 30 at the time and wondering if I should be an actor, a director or just quit,” said Petersen. “And this was it. Belly had a profound impact.”
Belly led to more stage work and then film, to a small part in Thief, and To Live and Die in L.A. and Manhunter (the prequel to Silence of the Lambs, later remade as Red Dragon.).
Petersen wanted so much to rid himself of Manhunter’s Will Graham that he shaved his beard and dyed his hair blonde.
Petersen joined CSI seven years and 152 episodes ago, which means he has not done theater since. That’s why this stint at Trinity is so important to him, to see if he still has the chops.
“There are a lot of guys who grew up in theater and went on to movies and never went back to the stage,” he said. “Part of doing TV was to get myself in a place where I could do stage.
“So I thought I better start doing it and not get caught in the corporate money grab that is Hollywood.”
In fact, Petersen was talking about the time he will leave CSI. He has one more year on his contract, and as the star and a producer has made enough to coast for quite a while. But he wants to leave when the time is right: right for the show, for his co-workers and the more than 20 million fans.
“A job like this in Hollywood comes along once in a lifetime,” he said. “I don’t want it to sound like sour grapes. It’s really about managing your soul. That’s what it’s about in Hollywood.”
In CSI, Petersen plays the head of a crime lab that solves murders by piecing together the most minute bits of forensic evidence. The show has become increasingly graphic to the point of being grisly. But none of this gets to Petersen, who is just as cool off-set as he is on.
He said he’ll go out for lunch while shooting a scene of a corpse and forget the actor is still alive.
“Mostly I feel bad for actors playing dead people. We put bugs on them and bury them naked in the sand.”
Once CSI is behind him, Petersen sees himself back in Chicago, where he got his start.
Petersen grew up in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, and dropped out of high school to live with a brother in Idaho. He was caught up in the tumult of the late 1960s, the Vietnam War, Kent State and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Petersen went on to finish high school in Idaho and to enter Idaho State University. He had hoped to play football, but his grades from high school were so spotty, he needed courses to pull up his average. He signed up for theater, and quickly took to the stage.
He spent his second year of college in Spain, taking part in a Hamlet held in a small church in Basque country. Petersen got married to his first wife that year and had their first child, Maite, a daughter born the day the Vietnam War ended. Maite, who is now in her early 30s, teaches preschool and has a 3-year-old daughter.
Petersen, who got married three years ago to his longtime girlfriend, came back to Chicago, kicked around for a while and started his own company, Remains. He also worked at Steppenwolf, where Columbus would later become associate director.
For his first foray back onto the stage, Petersen has picked a fairly dark play. He called Dublin Carol a “little Christmas ditty about alcoholism, death and divorce.”
In it, he plays an alcoholic who has been given a job in a funeral home. It is Christmas Eve and the owner is in the hospital when Petersen’s estranged daughter (Rachael Warren) shows up to say that his character’s ex-wife is in the hospital dying of cancer. She wants him to visit her.
Petersen said McPherson does not spell out the ending, but there is a redemptive ring to the show.
“I have never read anything associated with Christmas of this ilk,” he said.
Dublin Carol opens in previews Thursday and runs through Jan. 7 at Trinity Rep, 201 Washington St., Providence. Tickets are $20 to $60. Call (401) 351-4242 or visit www.trinityrep.com.
“There are a lot of guys who grew up in theater and went on to movies and never went back to the stage.
Part of doing TV was to get myself in a place where I could do stage.”
“There are a lot of guys who grew up in theater and went on to movies and never went back to the stage.
Part of doing TV was to get myself in a place where I could do stage.”
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