Robert S. Ulrich

I think it was Winter 1955. I was in a freshman composition class at Southeastern high school in Detroit. It was the first or second day of my first semester. Mr. Ulrich was the teacher, a pleasant enough man, a little short but athletic build, thinning hair. A noticeable feature was his perpetual smile. At first encounter, it was hard to know whether it expressed an inner humor or a quirk of how his mouth was shaped. As he was introducing himself and outlining the course, I was entertaining my seat mate with sotto remarks I thought were clever.
"You, there. What's your name?" He said, looking at me.
"Who? Me?"
" Is there someone else disrupting my class?"
"Jim Pallas"
"Mr. Pallas, I will see you ninth hour." Ninth hour was standard punishment. It meant returning to the classroom at the school day's end and sitting for fifty-five minutes in the classroom doing nothing. Not an auspicious beginning to my high school career.
Mr. Ulrich added, " Come to the auditorium. That's where I'll be."
At 3;15 P.M., I arrived at the auditorium, checked in with Mr. Ulrich and took a seat in the back near another hapless ne'er do well boy. We exchanged sheepish smiles and shrugs. The auditorium was dark, Mr. Ulrich was sitting halfway back. the stage was brightly lit. Older students were reading from play books as Mr. Ulrich was shouting stage directions, blocking out their movements.
At one point everything stopped. Mr. Ulrich said ,"Why are you stopping. A girl said, "That's the cue for the ghost soldiers to enter but they're not here."
"Where are they?"
A boy spoke up. "The're at swim practice." Mr. Ulrich slammed his play book on the floor.
"You go to the pool and tell those two that if they're not here in ten minutes, they're out of the play." The boy left. The actors skipped ahead to another scene and the rehearsal continued. The boy returned.
"They said they have a meet with Denby next week. They say they'll come by when practice is over. Mr. Ulrich said, "Go back and tell them not to bother. They're out of the play."
He then turned to me and the other guy and asked, "What's your names. We told him. He asked me what year I was. I told him I was an entering freshman.
He said, "Perfect. Have you ever been in a play?"
"No, sir"
He smiled. "Even better."
"You're ghost soldier 1 and you're ghost soldier 2. Go up there and when they come to your part read this." He pointed to the place in the script and handed them to us.
As a pimply faced 15 year old, I suddenly was the ghost of a revolutionary war soldier in George Washington's army, sent back among the living to recall a derelict ghost haunting a new England house in the 1942 Broadway comedy,. "George Washington Slept Here" by Moss Hart.and George S. Kaufman.
The lesson of how easily cast members could be replaced was not lost on the rest of the cast.
The experience of being in a play was thrilling but nerve racking. Mr. Ulrich was a serious director who knew what he wanted and was determined that we would deliver it. He coached us with strange techniques. If we spoke our lines too fast, he would make us say the lines excruciatingly slowly, so slowly that they were incomprehensible. He explained that if we spoke the lines fast in rehearsal, on the night of the performance - and there was only one night performance -with the packed house, we would nervously deliver the lines even faster, too fast to be understood. He set a deadline for when we needed to know our lines and cues and when the play books would come out of our hands.
Mr. Ulrich directed us from the back of the darkened auditorium. And if he could not hear us plainly, he would shout, "AGAIN LOUDER, PLEASE."
One of my lines was, "George Washington sent us."
"What did you say?" came belowing out of the dark. I repeated the line.
He said, "George WERSHINGTIN? wershingtin? The father of our Country's name is WAAASHING TON! You.re supposed to be a back woods revolutionary. You know General Washington personally. You say his name correctly."
I said, " My folks are back woods people from Kentucky. Their ancestors fought in that revolution and they say "Wershingtin."
He came slowly walking out of the darkness, his eyes fixed on mine. He stopped at the rim of the stage and , with that permanent little smile flitting about his lips. The flootlights illuminated his face from below giving him the visage of demon, said, "Not in my play, they don't."
Rehearsals went on for hours every school day after class. It was exciting and as the performance day approached the nervous tension tightened.
The day of the performance, Mr. Ulrich had a severe case of laryngitis. In whispered voice, he struggled to convey to us last minute instructions from his notes. He emphasized that we must freeze each time the audience laughed to wait for the laughter to die down. He said there will be big laughs, sometimes where you don't expect them, and before the laughter dies away completely, deliver the next line, but deliver it loud enough to be heard.
That night, our performance was strong, energized by the responsive audience. Laughs rocked the house. Thefinal curatin standing ovation was prolonged with many curtain calls. In the hallways afterward, people thronged Mr. Ulrich and the cast, to congratulate them on the performance and remark how professional it was. Some experienced players from the Grosse Pointe Theater Association said it was remarkable that high school students could perform at that level. Mr. Ulrich enjoyed the adulation. His laryngitis had disappeared.
I was bitten by the bug. The experience of making a thousand people laugh was thrilling. I was fortunate enough to be in the next three plays: Moss and Kaufmann's 1939 "The Man Who Came to Dinner", Ayn Rand's 1934 "The Night of January 16", and "Harvey" (1944) by Mary Chase Although, I didn't have a role in Harvey, Mr. Ulrich let me don a costume and take a bow at the curtain call as Harvey the big rabbit who does not appear in the play.
Every day of performance, Mr. Ulrich had laryngitis. His last minute instructions for all of those next three plays were given the day before the night performance. He told us he expected to loose his voice the next day. He recognized that his laryngitis was related to the performances. He always encouraged us and expressed his belief that we would do well. Yet, he was relying on a troupe of inexperienced teenage novices to entertainn paying customers - granted a lot of them were related to the cast. I believe his laryngitis sprang from the terror of a failed performance. We students were clueless enough not to see it as his secret doubt that we might not be able to pull it off. We were able to perform with confidence.

Mr. Ulrich taught us things about public performance, stage presence, public speaking, role playing and character insights that served me well as I worked my way through college as a museum guide and later when I became a college professor. Good classroom teaching is theater. Many of us came away from those experiences with Mr. Ulrich with an appreciation of the value of thorough preparation and the self confidence to be comfortable speaking publically.

But it was another experience he gave some of us that was more profound.
He initiated and sponsored the Drama Club. . He presented us with a short play whose plot was weak. It involved nuanced emotional interactions between a group of teenagers. There were no tryouts for parts. They were assigned to us individually by Mr. Ulrich. By that time, he knew most of us pretty well. I was assigned the part of a boy who was nervous and lacked self confidence. My character was teased, bullied and dismissed by stronger characters in the play. At that time, I, myself, was very confident, strong, even aggressive in my interaction with peers and held my own in banter. I was president of the student council, my home room council and a social club (fraternity). I was full of myself. What Mr. Ulrich did was the opposite of "type casting". Others were also cast against type. The glamorous popular girl was cast as an unattractive, shunned person. A quiet contemplative person was given a role as an extrovert, dominating situations. It was a short play. difficult to do. We had to work to get into the character of our roles. We performed it only once. That performance was done at the local university for a graduate class Mr. Ulrich was taking for an advanced degree.
He drove us to the university. We left us in the hall as he spoke to the class. Eventually we were called in and performed the play. Then he asked us to leave the classroom and wait in the hall. He closed the door. After a while he came out, thanked us all and drove us back to school. He never talked to us about it again. He never explained why or how how he assigned the roles. He never told us what the university class was or what how play related to it. He never discussed with us what we were supposed to gain from the experience, but the experience left me changed.
Playing the role I was assigned required me to empathize with the character and his situation. I had to feel his emotions as he was abused and mistreated by his peers, emotions which were unfamiliar to me. I began to think about how my own behavior affected others. I began to see that many of the social interactions in high school were hurtful to others. That some social structures were unfair. Cliques and exclusivity abounded. Eventually, I withdrew from many of the social activities I was involved in. I began to be attracted to the ideas starting to be "blowing in the wind." at the end of the 1950's. I became aware of the situation of minorities in the larger society, The "colored', homosexuals, disadvantaged and handicapped people who were marginalized by our society.
Robert S. Ulrich used art ,without teaching or even telling us, to let us step outside of ourselves and look at our behavior. Because of him, some of us were more prepared for the impending momentous changes in our culture.

Jim Pallas
May 19, 2013
Applegate, Mi.

I think it was Winter 1955. I was in a freshman composition class at Southeastern high school in Detroit. It was the first or second day of my first semester. Mr. Ulrich was the teacher, a pleasant enough man, a little short but athletic build, thinning hair. A noticeable feature was his perpetual smile. At first encounter, it was hard to know whether it expressed an inner humor or a quirk of how his mouth was shaped. As he was introducing himself and outlining the course, I was entertaining my seat mate with sotto remarks I thought were clever.
"You, there. What's your name?" He said, looking at me.
"Who? Me?"
" Is there someone else disrupting my class?"
"Jim Pallas"
"Mr. Pallas, I will see you ninth hour." Ninth hour was standard punishment. It meant returning to the classroom at the school... READ MORE →