The musical 1776 opens in the Pennsylvania statehouse, where it’s oppressively hot and the unpopular John Adams is making a poorly received pitch for independence. In the production mounted this summer at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, Kevin Gudahl dominated the stage as the overbearing Adams, sweating and carrying on. Only the most discerning theatergoer would’ve paid any heed to Ron Keaton–the actor portraying congressional janitor Andrew McNair–sweeping up on the outskirts of the action.
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Discerning theatergoers agree: Dominic Missimi, an associate theater professor at Northwestern and the director of the production, had cast Keaton as Andrew McNair once before, in 1987 at the same venue, and didn’t even ask him to audition this time around. “Ron has a wonderful character-actor look,” Missimi says. “Like an angry leprechaun.” In reviewing 1776, the Trib’s Chris Jones referred to Keaton as one of the “top-tier Chicago theater veterans” appearing in the production. Hedy Weiss of the Sun-Times went one further, lauding him for “a wonderfully winking performance as the put-upon custodian who witnesses the proceedings as if a fly on the wall.”
But Keaton once hoped for much more. He grew up in New Castle, Indiana, about 20 miles south of Muncie. His parents, a milkman and a bartender, didn’t encourage his artistic tendencies. “When I was a kid, I wanted to take piano lessons, but my dad frowned on that and so there were none,” he says. “I’m being cryptic here, but let’s just say I was not supported. My family has not seen me work professionally.”
By the end of the next winter he was destitute. “I was broke and living in Oak Park, near North and Harlem,” he says. “One day I was fishing around for money in my junk drawer when I found a dollar and 26 cents. I’m not a particularly religious person, but I walked up to North Avenue and found a Catholic church. I put the money in a collection plate, sat down in one of the pews, and cried like a baby. I must have sat there for an hour or so. When I got back to my apartment, there was a message on my machine from the Marriott casting me as Andrew McNair.”
Agent Harrise Davidson briefly represented Keaton for film, commercials, and voiceovers before she closed her office in July 2000. “Ron’s a fine performer and a wonderful singer,” she says, “but he doesn’t look like a dramatic actor, and unfortunately in show business it’s hard to break out of your physical type, except if you’re somebody like Danny DeVito.” Davidson did handle comic types Richard Kind and Alan Ruck (who both went on to key supporting roles on TV’s Spin City) early in their careers, and says she regrets that she couldn’t have similarly packaged Keaton. “The film and TV business was going to Canada just before I quit,” she says. “Yet had I been around longer, we might have been successful.”
Keaton will play a cobbler, Lucilius, and Decius Brutus–three roles with a total of around 50 lines–in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s upcoming production of Julius Caesar, which opens December 7. “I see my career as endless,” he says. “I can’t afford to retire–but then even when I’m 75 years old there will always be a character part for me to take.”
