Growing up in Rhode Island, the Tony-Award-winning regional theatre Trinity Repertory Company, located in Providence, was an engrained part of my childhood. I saw productions there every year. Every year they put on a production of A Christmas Carol, with rotating cast members playing all the parts, and every year my school would attend on a field trip. I saw my first Shakespearean plays there. I saw my first Moliere plays there. As well as Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. You got to know the different actors, and you saw them in the widest variety of roles (farce, drama, kitchen-sink Odets, Chekhov, Ibsen, everything) so that the actors were both comfortably familiar and totally transformed. You accepted them in anything because they were all so excellent. One of the company actresses, Anne Scurria, still there today, was my movement teacher in undergrad, and I still remember her classes and some of the exercises she put us through. And then, even better, going to see her act at the same time that she was my teacher. Trinity Rep was a really great local example of the collaborative aspect of “show business,” the “family” aspect, as well as the fact that many of these actors (Richard Jenkins, Peter Gerety) were better than anyone I saw on television or movies or anything else. They could (and did) do anything.
So I was so sad this morning to hear of the death of long-time company member Barbara Meek, who joined the company with her husband in 1968.
I saw her in everything. Contemporary, classical, American classics. The Providence Journal has a wonderful obituary.
If you go to Trinity Rep’s Resident Artists page, and click on Barbara Meek, you can see her unbelievable list of credits. A lifetime of good work. There isn’t a theatrical genre or style or era she didn’t inhabit.
Meek in the center in Trinity’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun.”
She had a career in television, on well-known shows like Archie Bunker’s Place and other sit-coms that didn’t get that far. But at Trinity she could spread her wings. She played it all. One year, she played Ebenezer Scrooge! I am so sorry I didn’t get to see that production. Casting like that is what a regional theatre company can do, bold, radical and RIGHT, and any community is the better for it.
Barbara Meek was 81 years old. She appeared in a production at Trinity just last year, using her cane. A beautiful example of an artist devoted to her craft, to excellence, and to her community.
All of Rhode Island is in mourning today.
