“…Gammon gripped audiences most tightly when he was on stage. A
co-founder of the MET Theatre, he received several Los Angeles Drama
Critics Circle Awards for acting and directing. Gammon helped establish
…the old MET, a 50-seat theater on Poinsettia Place near Melrose Avenue
in the Fairfax district, in the 1970s with a trilogy of William Inge
plays, “Bus Stop,” “Picnic” and “Dark at the Top of the Stairs.”
“He did a lot of movies and TV, but I think his great presence and power
was on the stage,” Paul Koslo, an actor and director who worked with
Gammon at the MET, said Saturday. “He always had something unexpected,
riveting and real. “
In 1978 Gammon appeared in his first Shepard
drama, “Curse of the Starving Class,” at the Public Theater in New
York. The playwright called Gammon “astounding” after seeing him reprise
the role of Weston in the West Coast premiere at the MET a year later.
Said theater critic Sylvie Drake in a review in The Times of the MET
production: “His is a performance cut from flesh — a riveting, drunken,
brawling, blind portrayal of a man at sea in a life he had abandoned
years before, too long ago to ever hope to find it again.”
……
We’ll miss you, Jimmy.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/18/local/la-me-james-gammon-20100718
