The Play’s His Thing

IIn the middle of the 1950s, the University of Arkansas was a lofty destination for a “clodhopper” from Fort Smith.

Larry Luckinbill’s parents wanted their son, the first in the family to pursue higher education, to be a doctor - or at least a dentist.

“I tried. I tried really hard,” Luckinbill says ruefully, but even his best efforts earned D’s and F’s.

Instead, Luckinbill took a detour into the brand-new Fine Arts Building on the Fayetteville campus and was cast in a play translated from the French by George Kernodle, the late, great patriarch of the UA drama department. When the show was over, Luckinbill told his parents he was changing his major.

“There was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,” he remembers. “But that’s something you have to recognize with your children: They’re lucky if they find a passion - I don’t care if it promises to make them 2 cents or $2 billion.

“Today we call it ‘following your bliss.’ Follow what your actual self is telling you is your interest in life, and you will succeed, even if you don’t succeed according to the world.”

By traditional measure, Luckinbill has had the career of any actor’s dreams. He’s starred on Broadway, off-Broadway, in television and in movies; earned an Emmy Award, a Critic’s Choice Circle Award and a Silver Gavel Award, as well as a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk Award nomination; and in 2007, he was inducted into theArkansas Entertainer’s Hall of Fame.

By his own estimation, Luckinbill has been successful beyond a small-town boy’s wildest dreams. He’s played at least one role he thinks changed the world. In his late 70s, he’s still in demand for one-man shows about historical figures he thinks speak to the world today. He’s still happily married to Lucie Arnaz after more than 30 years. And he has five children - ages 42, 36, 31, 29 and 27 - he says are “the reason for existence that I never knew when I was a mad youth.”

“My younger sister has always told me she took such heart from the fact I struck outon my own and didn’t do what my parents wanted me to do,” Luckinbill says. “I had no idea what my existence was for, other than I had to be an actor or I would die.”

While Luckinbill’s career has run the theatrical gamut - during the Kennedy administration, he joined the State Department as director and lecturer on theater for the U.S. Foreign Service and worked in Africa and Italy, for example, then in 1993, he wrote “Lucy & Desi: A Home Movie,” a two-hour TV special about his wife’s parents - one particular role stands out in his mind as the one that made a difference.

Mart Crowley’s “The Boysin the Band,” which premiered in 1967, “was the first time gay people were seen on stage as real humans,” Luckinbill remembers. His character, Hank, was a married man who discovered his real sexual orientation and fell in love with “a nightmare of a partner,” he remembers. “I meet people still in my travels about that say, ‘You changed my life; I went home after I saw that movie or that play and I told my parents I was gay.’ I say, ‘You mean Hank changed your life,’ and they say, ‘No, you did, the way you played it.’”

That’s not to say that Luckinbill doesn’t see worldchanging potential in the one-man shows he’ll present June 22-23 as part of the Boar’s Head Players New Play Showcase at the UA.

“It’s powerful stuff that this country needs to hear again and again about the value of human life,” he says.

Then he pauses.

“Now I’m figuring out how to deal with that first moment I walk back on that stage,” he says of returning to University Theater. “It’s a magical place that took me away from being a s*-kicking clodhopper.”