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Harvey Johnson returns to the theater that started his career.
Johnson is directing the John Osborne drama "Look Back in Anger," which opens Friday at Kent State University at Trumbull
The Pittsburgh native came to Warren to live with his grandparents and started attending the branch campus in the mid-'60s after graduating from Warren G. Harding High School. Originally a music major, Johnson said he switched to theater because of Jack Lynn Brizzi Sr., who started the theater program there. Brizzi died last November.
"He was the one who really got me started, the first mentor who took a real personal interest in my career, and I learned a lot from him," Johnson said. "He had a real love of theater, a love for quality scripts. That's how I really got my interest. I was attracted to the theater because of scripts that really had a lot of content to them and spoke on a personal level to my life."
Johnson earned his bachelor's degree from Kent State and a master's degree in directing from Carnegie Mellon University. He's worked as a freelance director and actor as well as an educator.
He came back last year for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the theater program at Kent-Trumbull and met Associate Professor Eric Kildow, who offered him a chance to return to the campus to direct "Look Back in Anger."
The cast for the Kent-Trumbull production features Nick Shearer, Adrienne Mackey, Adam Garon, Maggi Rihel and Robert Spain.
A casting change in the middle of rehearsals delayed the opening by a week, so "Look Back in Anger" only will run for one weekend instead of two.
The play is set in a cramped English apartment, where a man takes out his rage about his life on those around him, particularly his wife Alison. Osborne is credited with creating the "angry young man" genre that became popular in British theater, and Johnson said it influenced many of the scripts and characters he played studying theater in the late '60s. He believes the work remains relevant today.
"This piece deals with psychological battering," he said. "He never actually physically hits his wife, but he beats her to the ground by his attitude toward her and her family … Over the course of the play, he literally breaks her down. It's relevant to a lot of what's going on today with people. We get alarmed when we hear about a man who beat his wife, but you can tear up a woman's life without touching her."