In Memoriam

Skip Ascheim, 1943-2000

by Carolyn Clay

Boston theater lost one of its most thoughtful voices last weekend with the death of long-time critic and occasional director Skip Ascheim. Ascheim, who died August 6 following a battle with cancer, had for the past four years been a theater critic for the Boston Globe; he previously wrote for many years for the Phoenix and was for several years critic for the Improper Bostonian. Whatever the venue, his commentary was marked by perception, scholarship, balance, and sensitivity. He had recently left the Globe, hoping to return to his first love, directing.

In 1990, between stints as a critic, Ascheim founded the Boston Theatre Project, for which he helmed a respectful and intelligent staging of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale that featured some of the area's finest actors, including Jonathan Epstein, Jeremiah Kissel, the late Frances West, and Elliot Norton Award winner Dee Nelson, who was his companion of the past 10 years. Reviewing that production of the Bard's tricky late romance, I called it the best-integrated Winter's Tale I'd seen and looked forward to a second season for the ambitious company. Because of financial constraints, it failed to materialize.

A midlife prodigy in the then-burgeoning world of computers, Ascheim wrote print and online technical help for several well-known software products. Later, he generously offered his skills to the Elliot Norton Awards, on whose selection committee he was a careful, discerning juror. A man of many and varied interests, he was also a leading American player of the chess-like Japanese board game Go and was president of the Massachusetts Go Association. He taught Go at the Neuropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and English at Tufts University.

But the theater was Ascheim's abiding passion. A Harvard graduate, he was a leading player in the glory days of Harvard-Radcliffe stages -- the 1960s and early '70s, when the Loeb Drama Center was a big new toy and the Agassiz Theatre a scene of many memorable productions. The dramatis personae of that fabled era included the playwright-director Thomas Babe, the late director Timothy Mayer, the late actor/director/translator Paul Schmidt, and performers who included Stockard Channing, John Lithgow, Kathryn Walker, and Tommy Lee Jones. In 1971, Ascheim trod the Agassiz boards in a still-talked-about production of Alice in Wonderland that was directed by long-time area theater critic Arthur Friedman and featured Channing as Alice and Jones as the White Knight. Ascheim played the Caterpillar, puffing on a hookah, and Phoenix classical-music critic Lloyd Schwartz was the Mock Turtle. But Ascheim's theater art of choice was directing. Playgoers who saw his mid-'60s staging of The Importance of Being Earnest still conjure vivid memories of the production.

Those of us who were his friends will miss Ascheim's intellectual and political intensity, his wry humor, and his soft-spoken charisma. But the larger community has been deprived of the directorial visions he still had up his sleeve.