Bill Irwin, a celebrated actor and master clown, visited Brunswick to speak with students about his long career in theater and film, including his most recent stagecraft that famously blends expert clowning with the bleak writings of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. 

Irwin, a MacArthur Fellow who won a Tony Award for his role in the 2005 Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, sat with students in the Black Box adjacent to Baker Theater for an intimate, thought-provoking conversation moderated by Robert Tichio, father of Parker ’26 and Luca ’29.

“It’s a privilege, not just to be amongst students but also with a teacher and instructor who I think is singular in trying to educate,” Tichio said, tipping his hat to Theater Teacher Seth Potter and his 12th-grade English students, before introducing Irwin.

Tichio asked Irwin to share thoughts on the decisions that took him from a childhood in Santa Monica, California, to his education with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College and beyond. 

“It’s not an education path that’s going to be familiar to the people in this room,” Tichio said.

“Tell us, from Santa Monica to clown college, what were the drivers of the decisions along the way that led you to that point?”

Irwin told students he spent part of his childhood in Oklahoma and went on to study at Oberlin College and UCLA before transferring to the California Institute of the Arts. 

He said he wanted to be an acrobat but landed initially in a place that taught him critical job skills.

“And I got thrown in an experimental theater direction, which I’m very grateful for,” he said.

“I’m also grateful that my first grounding was in basic scene work. Because that is auditioning in a nutshell. And I’ve worked with a lot of incredible performers, especially in the world of circus, who could do the most amazing things that we who were normative actors could only dream of, but they didn’t have the grounding in how you sit and just think about the conversation; listen and talk, listen and talk.”

Irwin delighted students with snippets of the famous nonsense monologues from On Beckett, his one-man homage to Beckett, which opened in Washington, D.C., a short time after his visit to Brunswick.

“And it is a great help, because I’m about to do this, you know, on a stage in Washington, D.C., and just to share it with you, thank you so much!” Irwin said.