Youngsters, theater are open portal to her bliss

The daughter of a successful actress and an accomplished stage performer herself, Eden Lee Murray has never known a life without the edifying influence of the theater.

But stepping into a character and working in concert with other actors and teaching such heart-and-mind craft to others are two very different disciplines, and Murray, founder of Hawaii Pacific University’s Young Actors Ensemble, vividly recalls the first reticent yet inspired step she took to becoming a shaper of young theatrical talent.

A graduate of Harvard University with a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, Lee had ample opportunity to teach while in graduate school but felt strongly that she couldn’t “presume to teach what I was still learning.”

It was some years later, after she met and married publishing professional Roger Jellinek and relocated to New York, that Lee attended a rehearsal of a middle-school production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” in which her stepdaughter Claire had a role. As the rehearsal drew to a close, the director called out to Lee and asked whether the veteran actor had anything to share with his young charges.

“We ended up working together for an hour, and I just loved it,” Murray recalled. “Since then my happy place has been working with children in theater.”

For Murray, theater represents much more than sets and actors and those magical moments when actors find themselves embodying their characters and delivering their lines in ways that resonate deeply with their audience. At its best, she says, it is also instructive, especially to young people still becoming their own unique selves.

“Theater is really just thinly veiled life skills,” she said. “It teaches empathy. It builds confidence. It’s magical in that way.”

Murray said she tries to reach young actors and actresses “before the harm is done,” that is, before the ignoble gases of early success cause their heads to swell and a sense of entitlement to rise. For Murray, understanding theater is understanding self-discipline, humility and gratitude.

Murray brought these convictions with her when she and Jellinek moved to Hawaii in the early 1990s, and kept them in constant practice during the seven years that she oversaw an earlier version of the Young Actors Ensemble for Hawaii Theatre for Youth.

At HTY, Murray worked with youth from middle school through high school, instilling enthusiasm and respect for the craft in her younger students and offering intensive, high-level instruction to those advanced students interested in pursuing a career onstage.

Now offered as an extension program at HPU, the ensemble continues to provide theatrical training to young actors. It also continues to stage a full Shakespearean production each year as a showcase for the students’ achievement.

This year the 15-­member ensemble is tackling the Bard’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — with an added dimension that speaks to Murray’s belief in the beneficial qualities of theater.

In researching fairies for the supernatural production, in which quibbling fairies subject errant human lovers to their vexing influence, Murray noticed a common theme in the low regard with which fairies regarded humans. And yet, she thought, by the conclusion of the play, even the troublemaking fairy Puck finds cause to seek forgiveness (“If you pardon, we will mend”).

In Murray’s production, then, a premise is offered in which the fairies themselves have taken to the stage to present a story of human weakness and folly — “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” — yet by the end find themselves illuminated by its very telling and unexpectedly more understanding of the mortal fools whose roles they have adopted.

“It’s about empathy,” Murray said. “It’s a box in a box of what theater can do.”

The play will run May 12-14 at the Paul and Vi Loo Theatre at HPU’s Windward campus. For more information, visit hpu.edu/theatre or call 236-7917.

In addition, the cast will present a lighthearted scene from the play as a free, public performance at the Hawaii Book & Music Festival on Sunday, 4:30 p.m., at the Keiki Pavilion at Honolulu Hale.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.