When actor Dan Lauria, best known as the straight-arrow Dad in TV’s “The Wonder Years,” was playing football at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, he had no idea his gridiron skills would come in handy in his stage career.
Now he’s playing legendary Green Bay Packers football coach Vince Lombardi in a new play, “Lombardi,” which recently wrapped up a July workshop production in the Massachusetts Berkshires and now moves to Broadway’s Circle-in-the-Square Theatre, where it is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 23 before opening Oct. 21.
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Tony Award-nominated Thomas Kail, a Wesleyan graduate who directed the Broadway musical “In the Heights,” is staging the new work. Also cast are Judith Light (TV’s “Who’s the Boss?”), Keith Nobbs as Michael McCormick, Bill Dawes as Paul Hornung, Robert Christopher Riley as Dave Robinson and Chris Sullivan as Jim Taylor.
Lauria, 63, has returned to Connecticut for stage work several times over the years. The first time was at the request of fellow SCSU alum Semina De Laurentis, who runs the Seven Angels Theater in Waterbury. In 1994, Lauria directed Stephanie Zimbalist, Shanna Reed and Kathleen Noon in the world premiere of “The Crimson Thread” at that theater.
Inn 2002, he returned to the Connecticut stage to star in Willy Holzman’s “Hearts” at New Haven Theatre’s Long Wharf Theatre.
Lauria grew up on Long Island, where he was a star middle linebacker at his high school in Lindenhurst. After his junior year, his winning team won a major sports award from Lombardi, and Lauria, as the player chosen to be the team’s captain for the next school year, accepted the team prize from the future Hall of Fame coach.
In 1965, Lauria was wooed by Southern to play football, but in his junior year he turned to theater, tutored by Constance Welch, a respected acting coach at Yale who also taught speech at Southern.
“She was the greatest acting coach in the world,” says Lauria during a recent break in rehearsals in Manhattan. “We were as afraid of her as Vince’s players were of him.”
“She asked me, ‘Would you like to be in a play?’” he recalls. “She needed a big ugly guy for Caliban in a production of William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.’”
He played football at Southern all four years, majoring in secondary education with a U.S. history concentration.
“But I managed to get a minor in theater,” he says. “I knew it from the very first play I did. By my senior year, I was doing every play they had.”
He won his football teammates over when he directed a student production and cast them in “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.”
“I was Queeg and there were two students from the acting department — and all the rest were athletes. And they did well. Miss Welch was very pleased. If I got grief, it was from the players I didn’t ask to be in the play.”
After Southern, he joined the Marine Corps for three years during the Vietnam War, then coached for a year in his hometown, then went to the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where he studied playwriting under Cecil Hinkle.
To prepare for the Lombardi role, Lauria read books, watched film clips and talked to people who played for Lombardi or knew him personally.
“We know all the stories and I love to hear them firsthand,” says Lauria. “Both Sonny Jurgensen and Sam Huff started crying when I talked to them. They get very emotional when they talk about Lombardi. It’s amazing the effect he had. He was a son of a bitch, but they wouldn’t play for anyone else.
“The thing I always ask them after all the stories is what do you want to see in the show? Most of the people I talked to, say ‘that he taught.’ That’s the most common response. He was a teacher. He yelled, sure, and there’s a lot of that in the play, but the yelling was to get everything else out of the way.
The author of “Lombardi,” Eric Simonson, also an Oscar-winning documentarian and Steppenwolf Theater Company member, based the play on the biography “When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi” by David Maraniss, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting at The Washington Post about Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“In David’s book, one of his (Lombardi’s) proudest accomplishments was when he received an award for teaching from Fordham,” Lauria says. “He always referred to himself as a teacher first.”
“A lot of people got it wrong about the winning and losing thing. He never said that winning was the only thing. It comes from an old John Wayne movie. He wasn’t about that. He was about the effort. It was about giving your commitment to whatever it is.”
(What Lombardi said was: “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.” The quote from the 1953 film, “Trouble Along the Way,” which starred Wayne as a college football coach: “Winning isn’t everything … it’s the only thing.”)
Lauria says he learned a lot from a trip he took in June to Green Bay, Wis., to visit Lombardi’s turf and some of the people who knew the coach, including friends of the family. More than 300 people turned out for a question-and-answer session with the play’s creative team at the Legends Club at Lambeau Field, the Packers’ stadium.
“It was like playing for the home team and the home team knows this guy,” says Kail, the director. “There’s something in the air out there. It’s much more palpable than I thought it would be. Very moving. They’re embracing (Lombardi) now. He’s absolutely in their lives today.”
On casting Lauria, Kail says, “There’s a feeling you need to have with this character, that he’s made something with his hands, that he’s someone who’s been out in the world, and it’s not always easy to find that (in an actor).”
Among the producers for “Lombardi” is the National Football League, which has authorized the use of its logos and film footage, an unusual alliance between theater and sports.
“The audience should leave wanting to be better at whatever their endeavor in life is,” says Lauria. “It doesn’t have to be about football.”
What would Lombardi, who died in 1970 at the age of 57, think about professional football as a sport now?
“He adapted more than people think,” says Lauria. “People think he coached just one way but he didn’t. He had his favorites. He treated people differently. He adapted very well. But one piece of advice that Vince Lombardi could give coaches today is that they should start looking at character instead of statistics.”
Online: www.lombardibroadway.com
By FRANK RIZZO,The Hartford Courant
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.
