Art and Aging

Meet Actor Jim Hunt

       

Jim Hunt in The Field, Victorian Playhouse

When Jim Hunt was given the Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Colorado Theatre Guild in 2013, he seemed delighted, gobsmacked, and just a little bit unsettled all at once. "It's kind of fortuitous turning seventy and having this award happen," he said in an interview at the time. "I guess I would be lying if I didn't say ... It doesn't feel ominous, but you think this is very late in life when you get one of these. Should you be alarmed? And I'm still so busy. In the last thirty months I've been in thirteen shows. Five a year for the last couple of years, and every year in different venues. I love the opportunities I get. And at my age, I thank my lucky stars every day that my brain still holds words. That is the deal breaker. If you can't remember lines, you don't get to play anymore."

            If you’re a theater fan, I'm guessing you’ve seen Jim Hunt in several performances. One of my favorite theatre memories is seeing him in Sarah Ruhl's wondrous Eurydice at Curious Theatre, where he struck me as everyone's dream of a loving father. Jim was always terrific in roles that required avuncular warmth, but he was versatile and could be wildly energetic and insanely funny, as he was as a Donald Trumpian god in Buntport's brilliant The Zeus Problem. Here's how I described him in my review: "The company has slipped the leash and given him immense power--and you know how power corrupts. Wearing a plum-colored jacket, white socks and sweatpants (to facilitate his 'rise' he explains more than once, gesturing lewdly toward his testicles), Hunt's Zeus is a cruel, sneering, narcissistic tyrant, a god who can call down thunderbolts and--if he so chooses--obliterate humanity."

            Jim, now eighty, is still at work, preparing to open as Aslaksen in the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company's production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and also for Downstate, which opens at Curious Theatre in March. For the holiday season, he will play Scrooge in the humorous Miners Alley version of A Christmas Carol (written by playwright Josh Hartwell) and will need all his energy: "My Scrooge is very physical.

            "My father used to say I was born acting," Jim tells me. "When I was two years old I could recite the entire 'Night Before Christmas.' I still make myself memorize things, but two years old seems too early. I was always acting as far as my father was concerned."

            But if his father was supportive, Jim's stepmother was not: "My stepmother was truly wicked and my most vivid theatre memory is that I had been cast in a classroom play--Cinderella--and I was Prince Charming. She wouldn't let me go."

            In high school he watched a production of Our Town, and "It blew my mind. I later directed it twice over the years." As recently as 2019, Jim played the leading role of Stage Manager in the Miners Alley production. Later, attending the University of Northern Colorado, Jim was able to work with the Little Theatre of the Rockies. His final role there was Thomas Cromwell in A Man For all Seasons. "A very young Nick Nolte was Henry VIII," he says. "This was before he became remotely famous."

            But at one point in his career, Jim says, during a production of George Bernard Shaw's Overruled at Germinal Stage, he suddenly developed severe stage fright. "It was terrifying," he says now. "Acting was kind of how I defined myself. I was in my 40s, had mildly high blood pressure, and it fucked with my head. I'd be onstage sure I was going to blank, to go blue sky. The next day I'd wake up terrified. I got through that production and then felt I can't do that anymore."

            Eventually he began to recuperate: "I walked myself back very slowly. I started with readers' theatre, and then I would do a tiny part in a tiny venue. A bigger part. It was seven years, and I was back in the saddle."  

            He went on to do several more shows and felt "I was in my full power." But then the Covid pandemic arrived and a production he was cast in and that was a day away from opening was closed down. After this, he says, he was involved in "A lot of things on Zoom."

            On his return to work, Jim was cast in The Minutes at Curious Theatre and "My first time back on the boards was a romp. I had a ball. Here I am thinking, I'm eighty. I'm supposed to stop and part of me is going, Oh, I hope that I can do it.

            He could: "Performing in The Minutes felt like I'm back. I've got this. My brain was clear.

            "I said to my sister, 'I hope I'll know when it's time to get off the stage,' and she said, 'Do you think you will?' I feel like it's very charged for me. I'm not afraid I'll go blue sky or drop dead onstage. You just wonder how many tricks you have in you or how hard you should be pushing those last tricks. I'm feeling excited and at the same time apprehensive. I've said so many times in the last year or two, I am not building a career. I'm at the end of a career I never really intended to have.

            "I think I give less of a damn than I used to. I take direction well. I love to keep growing. I'm mostly in new plays. I always thought I'd be a classical actor--Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen--but almost everything in my resume is 20th or 21st century.

            "It took me years to say I'm an actor. A word that has only recently been allowed into my lexicon is to say I'm an artist. That is still hard for me. I just had good training. I didn't go to any academy. Never did the New York thing, always thought I'd feel a little like an imposter: I don't really do this. I get away with this.

            "Maybe age is a factor. I've aways felt imposter is too strong a word. A lot of people I know think I'm an actor. I'm an artist. But also someone who can be terrible. I've gotten better over the last ten years. I think it's important to believe in the thing you're in when you're in it.

            "It feels kind of terrifying having gotten so used to getting so much time to myself. All of a sudden I'm going to have to impose a kind of discipline on myself, show I still do this. I used to tell people I'm an amateur motivated by love of the thing. Part of me wonders why didn't I ever go to New York or work at the Denver Center. But now I think I'm just letting myself be swept along by what's there.

            "People who don't think their shit ever stinks kind of drive me crazy. I don't think I've ever wanted to be that assured. I still want to be searching."

            It's a certainty those searches will intrigue.

Hunt as a hilarious and malignant Zeus, Buntport

****

An Enemy of the People, Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company: September 26-October 13, Savoy, Denver and November 8-17 in the Dairy Arts Center, Boulder. https://betc.org/event/enemy-of-the-people/

Downstate, Curious Theatre Company, Denver: March 15-April 20. https://www.curioustheatre.org/season27info/

A Christmas Carol, Miners Alley, Golden, November 29-December 29. https://minersalley.com/shows/a-christmas-carol-2024/