The accidental actor

After four decades of tumbling, fighting and rolling on stage floorboards, actor James Craven is feeling sore. He still has a desire to knock about the stage -- "I'm an actor, and I love my work," he said. But at 60, his knees, hips and shoulders are not what they used to be. Like a volume knob, the pain can be turned down but not off.

"It's getting harder and harder for me to do all the physical stunts," Craven said recently in a rehearsal room at Pillsbury House Theatre, where he stars in "Broke-ology," which opens Friday. "That's primarily how I've kept working. I am the guy that was willing to fall."

Directors and audience members who have watched him onstage over the past few decades may say he's underselling himself. Perhaps best known for playing combustible characters in August Wilson's oeuvre -- on Sunday he finished a stirring turn as trombone player Cutler in Penumbra's sublime production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" at the Guthrie -- Craven is now headlining a play that hits close to home, given the state of his body. And it does not involve physical abuse.

A story of love, ambition and family, Nathan Jackson's play revolves around brothers Malcolm and Ennis King. One has gone to college while the other has remained at home. Their divergent dreams come into sharp focus as their widower father, William, who has multiple sclerosis, makes a stark choice.

William may be at the center of the play but it's not about him, said Craven.

"He's like a huge rock with a diamond in it," he said. "One guy says, let's take a sledgehammer and smash it open. The other wants to use an X-Acto knife. That's the central battle right there."

Theater as lifeline

The declining father is Craven's first role at Pillsbury House, which is not far from the south Minneapolis neighborhood where he grew up. An only child born in Harlem, Craven did not intend to become an actor. He might have followed his social worker mother, Erma, into civil service, or become a boxer, a sport his grandfather fancied.

Singing in the chorus of a church production of "H.M.S. Pinafore" when he was 10 was his sole childhood theater experience, one he associates with the appendicitis he developed then.

But theater later became a lifeline at a time when young men his age were being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Craven was six credits shy of graduation from Minneapolis' Roosevelt High School in 1969 when he had a verbal encounter with a drafting teacher.

"I don't remember any detail about the incident, but I know that it was racial in nature," he said. "You have to remember, in those days, people didn't have a problem calling you a derogatory name, even in class."

He was suspended from school. When he returned, "a drama teacher said, come over here, you can get three credits, and I can get you an audition at the Guthrie for the summer institute, and that'll be three credits," he recalled.

He jumped at the chance, and got the small job at the Guthrie. He played an extra in Edward Payson Call's production of "Julius Caesar" and became a factotum around the playhouse, fetching coffee, making copies and doing whatever was necessary. One season stretched into the next.

"I knew everything about the theater, so people came to rely on me," he said.

Craven worked on the last show directed by Tyrone Guthrie, "Uncle Vanya," and later with Michael Langham. The latter encouraged him to go to college, and helped get Craven into Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Craven recalled that before he left for school, which he completed after a spell hopping trains, he had a meeting at the Guthrie with then-managing director Donald Schoenbaum.

"He told me, 'you can carry spears here. You might get a couple of minor roles. But if you really want to do something good, go ... someplace else,'" he said. Craven has never looked back.

Three guys in the lobby

In 1977, Craven got his first professional role as Roger in Lou Salerni's production of "Streamers" at Cricket Theatre.

"During the first week, I came out of the theater and Claude [Purdy, director] and August [Wilson] were standing in the lobby," he said. "They were a couple of guys I'd known from Pittsburgh. I said, 'What are you guys doing here?' They said, 'Well, we came here to work with this guy named Lou Bellamy.' Lou was standing there with his huge afro. I said, 'Well, I'm going to New York to be an actor.'"

He went to New York and Los Angeles for a spell before coming home.

"Jim is one of the anchors, one of the pillars of Penumbra," said Bellamy. "He's intelligent, fierce, committed and has got an incredible work ethic. I'm careful to cast younger actors with him so they can learn that they can still be true to who they are, culturally, while still having this sense of refinement and learning."

Craven has acted in Wilson's work nationwide, including with Roscoe Lee Brown in a national tour of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." Craven's accolades include the prestigious Lunt-Fontanne Fellowship. Still, he marvels that he ended up in the theater.

"Being an artist, theater, sculptor, musician, whatever, is the finest thing a person can do," he said, recalling a chat with former Guthrie artistic director Garland Wright.

"Garland once said to me that people dismiss what we do," he continued. "But know that laughter can cure illness. Good comedy is very therapeutic. Teaching people about things, about culture, is important work. Garland was right."

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390