Five Decades of Ooms and Wilkens

In a break from shooting the 2009 movie Midnight Chronicles, actor Steve Sweere noticed that Richard Ooms, standing there in his wizard robe, was giggling to himself. “We had been shooting all day,” Sweere was quoted in a 2007 article by Quinton Skinner. “A location shot, and it was really cold. We had orcs and thieves, chickens and sheep, 50 extras and horses charging through. There was a lot of standing around, end of the day, and nobody was talking anymore.

“I asked Ooms what was so funny, and he turns around and goes, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if this was our job?’”

As a matter of fact, acting (though seldom in the middle of a Wisconsin field in winter) has been Ooms’ job and that of his wife, Claudia Wilkins, for going on 50 years, including the 37 years they’ve been married.

They’re back at Door Shakespeare this summer for the fourth season since 2005. They have roles in both productions, The Comedy of Errors and King Lear. Ooms is the director of King Lear as well as playing King Lear and Duke Solinus in The Comedy of Errors. Wilkens is the assistant director of King Lear as well as playing the Fool and Emilia in The Comedy of Errors.

Ooms grew up in the south Chicago suburb of Roseland, settled in the 1840s by Dutch immigrants who were staunch Calvinists. His father, who had a wonderful voice and a great gift for expression, dreamed of being a radio announcer and regretted never pursuing it. But he passed on to his son the willingness to try a lifestyle other than what the Calvinists thought was appropriate.

After high school, when Ooms was working in the display department at Marshall Field’s, co-workers felt he had a gift for theater and encouraged him to audition for a scholarship to the Goodman Theatre School. One of them helped him prepare two audition pieces, and he won the four-year scholarship. At the end of the four years, he was invited to stay on as artist in residence for a year and was supposed to also use the time to complete the academic courses for a BFA at the University of Chicago.

“The theater kept me so busy,” he says, “that I dropped the classes and immediately lost my student deferment. I was sent to Vietnam, the strangest thing that ever happened to me.”

At that time, the army had a program that allowed seasonal workers serving in combat zones to get out up to 60 days early. Acting can, indeed, be seasonal, but ten days after his discharge, Ooms was working at the Playhouse in the Park in Cincinnati. He spent a season there, then was off to New York.

It was a different world at that time. Ooms rented an apartment in Brooklyn for $100 a month and got a job with a touring company headed by Fran and Barry Weissler, who have gone on to win three Tony Awards. In 1971 Ooms appeared off-Broadway in Anna K, and the following year became a founding member of John Housman’s brand new The Acting Company, associated with the Julliard School. In eight years with the troupe, he performed in more than 35 plays throughout the U.S., the Virgin Islands and Australia.

At the beginning of year six, a young woman named Claudia Wilkens joined The Acting Company. She was from Torrance, California, near L.A., and was fortunate to have inherited her mother’s lovely voice. “I remember leading my first-grade class in singing ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ every morning, and in eighth grade I played the part of the mother in Caddie Woodlawn. I had just one line – shouting ‘Massacre’ when the Indians attacked, but it certainly got the attention of the audience. That was the moment I knew I wanted to become an actress and ‘knock ’em dead.’”

After graduation from UC-Long Beach, she got a scholarship for graduate study at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she was part of a repertory company and earned a master’s degree.

Then off to New York and The Acting Company, where her story soon merged with that of Ooms. “We began by sharing a seat on the tour bus,” Wilkens says, “and moved on to sharing dinner and dancing, and then he met my parents and in 1977 we were married after a six-month courtship.”

Their son Michael, now a successful actor in the Twin Cities, was born in 1979. While he wasn’t quite “born in a trunk,” he did sleep in some dresser drawers while traveling with the theater troupe. “We were back on the road when he was five days old,” Wilkens says. “Most of his first year was spent in Australia, a country that caters to mothers and babies. When we went out to dinner, a member of the restaurant staff always appeared to hold Michael while we ate. He turned over for the first time in Brisbane – we have front and back pictures! – and was weaned by a ‘magical nanny’ in Adelaide.”

Back in the U.S. when the baby was nine months old, his parents decided it was time to “get off the bus” and find a place with a backyard. They bought a house in Minneapolis in 1992, where Michael began his stage career early, appearing for several years in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, directed by his dad. He made his movie debut in The Mighty Ducks when he was 12.

For the past 30 years Ooms has been a member of the acting company at the renowned Guthrie Theater. Although based in Minneapolis, both Ooms and Wilkens have wide-ranging careers, appearing on stage and in films from coast to coast.

Among Wilkens’ favorite roles are Amanda in Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor’s movie role) in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “I really enjoyed playing Martha twice,” she says, “but Richard

said, ‘No more.’ He said I was bringing the role home and picking fights.”

Coincidentally, at the time they were married, Ooms was playing Elyot, another Virginia Woolf character, and they chose Elyot as their son’s middle name.

Ooms loves the role of Lear, which he first played 20 years ago. “So often,” he says, “an actor plays a part just once in his career. I’m so happy to have a second chance. There has been time to think about it, and the meaning of what I’m doing is so much more apparent to me.”

He also enjoyed the lead role of Argan in Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, but the experience of which he speaks most extensively is playing Old Ekdal, “a wonderful old soul” in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.

“The director,” Ooms says, “was a Romanian who had already done the play seven times. His direction was very specific. ‘You are holding a pipe in your mouth. When you say this line, the pipe drops a bit. When you say this line, it drops a bit more. When you say this line, it falls.’

“He only let me have the part ‘on speculation,’ because he thought at 40 I was too young for the role. It was a wonderful moment when, at the end of the two-week trial period, I was accepted and knew that I had come up to his standards. On opening night, the cast sat down and read the play, as if it were our second rehearsal. It was magnificent. We realized that everything he had told us was exactly true.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way about that director!” Wilkens exclaimed. After 37 years, there are obviously very few stories they haven’t already shared. And they have a vast store of them. Ooms remembers a long-ago performance of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost with a many-layered set that unfolded like an old-fashioned honeycomb Valentine. “Usually,” he says, “we performed on stages with no curtains, but on this occasion, there was a curtain, and as it went up, it caught the front edge of the set and down it came, layer by layer. It was hastily reassembled, and the first actor on the stage read his line: ‘Something is amiss in Navarre!’”

Wilkens remembers a mishap of a different sort. Waiting backstage in a dress with huge panniers during a performance of Maid of the Mill, a little musical dating to Shakespeare’s day, she suddenly realized that her skirt was caught on a rising backdrop. “Up went the backdrop, and way up went my skirt in full view of the audience,” she recalls. “Fortunately, I was wearing pantalets.”

Ooms and Wilkens love Door County and, through the years of performing and visiting, have made many friends here. When Door Shakespeare’s season ends on Aug. 16, they’ll move on to other stages – Wilkens to the one-woman show, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, which she’s done before, and both of them to Julia Cho’s play, The Language Archive, in St. Paul.

They consider themselves lucky to have had careers in repertory theater, which many companies can no longer afford to do. “It’s a good life we’ve lived,” Wilkens says, and Ooms adds, “For my whole career, I’ve been in the right place at the right time. We’ve worked steadily since the ‘70s and have earned a good middle-class living doing exactly what we wanted to do.”

And, for going on five decades, their performances have been exactly what audiences wanted to see!