Backstage With Marc Pouhé for '"Master Harold" ... and the Boys'

Over the weekend, Austin Shakespeare brought together three magnetic actors for South African playwright Athol Fugard’s humorous and stirring “Master Harold” … and the Boys at KMFA’s intimate Draylen Mason Studio. I was fortunate enough to speak with the talented Marc Pouhé about the production and his process as an actor.

Marc Pouhé. Courtesy photo.

If you’re not familiar with Pouhé, you should be. He’s played leading roles at Austin Shakespeare including Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Noel Coward’s Present Laughter as well as title roles in Macbeth, Othello and Cyrano De Bergerac. He has also performed with Austin Playhouse: The Mountaintop's Martin Luther King, Satchel Paige and the Kansas City Swing, and Death of a Salesman. He’s also been a mainstay at ZACH Theatre, having been “Scrooge” in A Christmas Carol since 2019. Needless to say, his talent speaks for itself; and it all began as so many stories do — with a woman.

“In college in 1999, there was a girl that suggested we audition for a play together, and I had a crush on the girl, and I was like, ‘well, sure, why not?’ I'd never done theater before, but I auditioned for the play. It was Pericles, it was a Shakespeare play,” Pouhé recalled. “It didn't work out with a girl, but I got into the play and developed a love for theater early on and stuck with it ever since.”

Fast-forward to the present, and Pouhé is taking up the role of a servant that helps maintain the tea shop that belongs to Hally’s mother in South Africa during apartheid.

“I play Sam. He’s the older of the two gentlemen, and he's been kind of a father figure to Hally since Hally was a young child,” Pouhé asserted. “I really enjoyed the character. He's got a lot of depth, he's got a lot of humor, but he's also wise beyond any formal education that he would've been allowed to have in 1950s South Africa as a Black man. But he's very wise and a great role model for Hally, even when Hally doesn't necessarily appreciate that or see it.”

As fate would have it, this production is more of a revisiting of the character for Pouhé, having taken up the role once before in 2005 for a full stage production. But Pouhé didn’t take this as a chance to rest on his laurels. He continued to delve into the character to gain understanding of the person and the time in which he exists.

“I did my own research about apartheid and some of the racism that South Africans had to face. It was not very dissimilar to American racism as well,” he explained. “The apartheid system that they built there was not that dissimilar to the segregation that was happening in America at the same time. But I really wanted to focus on his speech patterns. I spent a lot of time making sure that I was able to honor his dialect, the South African dialect as well.”

“I worked with a speech coach and watched some of a production from the early 1980s, I think probably one of the original ones that was done to see some of the speech patterns there,” Pouhé continued. “Those are some of the basic tools that I use to get inside the character. But you always analyze the script. I've done that with every play I ever do, but I do that a lot with some of the classic work that I do in Shakespeare as well. But being able to analyze his discussions with Hally and his conversations with Willie as well — seeing how those relationships exist. The differences between the relationships between himself and Holly and himself and Willie as well. All those different tools, those are different tools that you use as an actor to prepare.”

Though this was only a staged reading of the play, Pouhé’s character development wasn’t for naught. Austin Shakespeare has been known to take the state read up a notch or two.

“Austin Shakespeare stage readings are different than most because a lot of times stage readings can be anything, you know, some stools and some music stands and actors are just reading the material out loud with intention and doing the best they can. And they might get up a little bit and move around,” he said with a bit of a laugh. “But, you know, when Ann Ciccolella directs a stage reading — last year I did The Glass Menagerie, and it was a play. We had our full costumes. We were holding the script, but we put our full intention into it. We had a set, we had props and everything, and we moved around. If you pay enough attention to it, you forget that the scripts are there. When you put that much extra detail into it — you know, costumes and intention and music and lighting and all that other stuff — it becomes something special.”

Although it’s too late to catch this special something, fans of local theatre can look forward to Austin Shakespeare’s production of The Read Thing, also directed by Ann Ciccolella, running from February 17 to Mar 5, 2023.