Chautauqua County’s reputation as a rich locale for lovers of theater and the arts will be growing another bump richer within the coming week.

Next Saturday at the Robert H. Jackson Center in downtown Jamestown, a company of actors headed by Dr. James Ivey, professor of Theater and Dance at the State University of New York at Fredonia, will perform a biographical play, dramatizing the life of our country’s longest-serving Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court: William O. Douglas.

Performing with Ivey will be two of his students: Lindsay Zimmerman and Steve Russell.

I recently paid a visit to the Fredonia campus to talk with Ivey and Russell. Alas, my scheduled interview with the lovely Ms. Zimmerman fell afoul of the savage storm of March 12, because she had flown to Charlotte, N.C., to audition for a role in a professional production, and her return flight was postponed for two days. Still, the gents had plenty to say, and I’m eager to share it all with you.

In the meanwhile, let’s look at the facts of Saturday’s performance: The play to be performed is a dramatic reading of “Mountain – the Journey of Justice Douglas.” It was written by Douglas Scott and published in 1990. A dramatic reading means that the actors will hold their scripts in their hands and read it aloud, but they will move and speak in character.

The performance will take place in the Carl Cappa Theater, which is located inside the Robert H. Jackson Center, at the intersection of Prendergast Avenue and East Fifth Street. The performance begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 for the general public, and $5 for students and senior citizens.

Two other events will take place at the Jackson Center on Saturday, both immediately before the performance. The Alumni Association of the State University at Fredonia will hold a reception, with food and beverages, to which only alumni of the university are invited.

Allegheny College, in Meadville, Pa., has invited its alumni to hear a factual lecture on the life and career of Justice Douglas, offered by Dr. Robert Seddig, of Allegheny’s Department of Political Science, before the beginning of the performance. Those wanting to attend one of those alumni functions should contact their alumni associations, well in advance of the lecture, and make sure that tickets have been reserved for them.

Members of the public who wish to attend the performance may purchase tickets at the Jackson Center, during its regular business hours. Any tickets not sold by the beginning of the performance will be sold at the door. The phone number of the Jackson Center is 483-6646.

JAMES IVEY

Ivey has given two earlier performances at the Jackson Center in Jamestown. He performed a one-person biographical play in which he portrayed famed trial attorney Clarence Darrow, and a two-actor play in which he played the principal American judge at the Nuremberg Trials: Francis Biddle. He has taught at Fredonia State since the fall of the year 2000, where he has also established a solid reputation as an actor, director and theatrical scholar.

A native of Texas, Ivey earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Kansas and an M.A. degree at Illinois State University, where during his studies for the degree he was part of a company which performed in a Noel Coward Review which was performed at Washington, D.C.’s famed John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He earned his Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. He said that his 14 years of living in Fredonia is the longest he has ever lived anywhere.

Before beginning his career at Fredonia State, he taught at Hardin-Simmons University, in Abilene, Texas, for nine years, and rose to be chair of the Department of Theatre. He began at Fredonia as associate professor of theater, and served a term as department chair. He was elevated to full professorship not long ago.

At Fredonia, he has directed, performed in or had major participation of a great many plays, including “Damn Yankees,” “The Learned Ladies,” “The Cherry Orchard,” “Candide” and Sophocles’ “Electra.” In the southern part of the county, in addition to his performances at the Jackson Center, he has performed with the Chautauqua Opera Company, in productions of “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Music Man” and “Street Scene.”

During a sabbatical leave, in 2006, Ivey traveled to Italy, where he trained in the Italian tradition of Commedia dell’ Arte with Antonio Fava, at the Scoula Internationale dell’ Attore Comico.

Both Ivey and his students are doing the Justice Douglas play as a public service, in addition to very busy academic schedules.

“Theater is always growing and changing,” he said. “It’s important to keep your hand in, to learn and grow. I’ve enjoyed my past performances in Jamestown, and I certainly admire the Jackson Center and believe in their mission. Neither the students nor I am receiving payment nor academic credit, nor any other payment for this performance. We believe that the university ought to be part of its surrounding community, and it’s a way to offer them something of value.”

The actor said he received a copy of “Mountain” about a year ago, and it had rested on a bookshelf in his office until he loaned it to someone, and it had never been returned.

“Even though I no longer owned the script, it stuck in my mind,” he said. “I called Jim Johnson, the new director at the Jackson Center, and asked if he would be interested in hosting a performance, and he responded very positively.”

Ivey said that the play begins and ends on the last day of the life of Justice William O. Douglas. As he lies on his deathbed, he thinks back on things which have happened to him throughout his 82 years of life, which included four marriages and 36 years as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. The two students both play multiple roles, each representing people who played important parts in his life, including his parents, his wives, the presidents under whom he served and many more.

Some of the actor’s favorite elements of the play include how strongly he believed in natural conservation and preservation, and how hard he worked in the political and legal systems to advocate for nature. Also, he admired how hard Douglas worked for the things which happened to him in his life. For example, when he was accepted to study law at Columbia University, the future judge had no money to travel to New York City. So, he sought out a job in which he accepted sole responsibility for several thousand sheep, which were being sent by rail to Chicago.

When he arrived safely in Chicago with the sheep, Douglas simply stayed on the train as it headed toward New York, and got most of the way there before being caught and removed from the train just outside the city.

When the current school year is over, Ivey and his wife will be accompanying 15 Fredonia State students on a program in Italy, where he will deal with arrangements for their travel, and his wife will teach classes in art. This is the eighth consecutive year in which the Iveys have taken such a trip.

In the fall of 2014, James Ivey will be taking another sabbatical leave from his teaching duties in Fredonia, during which he plans to work at the famed Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven, Conn., and to complete an assignment as assistant director for a production of “Steel Magnolias” at the Alliance Theater in Georgia. There, he will be assisting a director with whose work he is very familiar: his sister, Judith Ivey, an artist well known for performances in film, television, and both on and off-Broadway. She was most recently reviewed in these pages for her Tony-nominated performance on Broadway, as Aunt Livinia, in “The Heiress.”

James Ivey’s next directing assignment in Chautauqua County will be “Balm in Gilead,” by Lanford Wilson, which will be performed in February 2015 on the Fredonia State campus.

STEVE RUSSELL

Another name which you’ve read frequently in these pages is young Steve Russell. He is a senior, majoring in Musical Theater at the Fredonia campus. Within the past year, we’ve seen him play the leading role in Anthony Newley’s musical “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off,” plus the role of the oily Joseph Surface in “The School for Scandal,” and as a leading dancer in the recent evening of choreography performed by the Fredonia Dance Ensemble.

Asked what he will play in the Justice Douglas production, he rattles off a long list of characters which encompasses Richard Nixon, the judge’s son, other justices on the Supreme Court, F.D.R., an Iranian emir, and many more, offering apologies for not remembering more.

“Classes in the Department of Theater and Dance usually meet either on Mondays and Wednesdays, or on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that Fridays can be used for rehearsals,” Russell said. “We’ve spent a couple of Fridays rehearsing this play, and we’re going down to Jamestown on Saturday morning and work on it all day, before the Saturday performance.”

A life in the performing arts, for nearly everyone who gets to have one, involves job change after job change, and a constant need to compete and to put one’s self on the line. Russell presently has a contract, when the college year ends, to go to Rocky Mountain Repertory, in Colorado, where he will play the role of Marius in their production of “Les Miserables,” as well as minor roles in two other productions. He currently has a call back for the casts of professional companies set to perform “Camelot” and “Mamma Mia.”

Together with several of his classmates, last winter, Russell attended a program in Memphis which invites companies all over the nation to come and hold auditions for the casts of productions for the coming year. There he got his Colorado role and made the first inroads into the other companies, and he never knows when one of the other companies for which he auditioned might decide that he’s the man for their production.

Chances are good, if you’re interested in theater and the performing arts, you’re going to see this young man performing major roles, in the future. But, be sure to make note of his face, if they’ve used the photo which we were provided. It is a rule in the performing arts unions and professional organizations, that only one performer with the same name can be enrolled, which forces performers either to change their names completely or to add middle names or initials, and other such changes.

The performing company at the Stratford Festival already boasts a Stephen Russell, so you may have to recognize him by another moniker. I promise, you won’t have any trouble recognizing him at the Jackson Center on Saturday evening.

WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS

William Orville Douglas was born in Minnesota in 1898. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and in his early childhood, his family moved to California, and then to Washington State.

His father died when the future judge was only 6 years old, and he and his brother and sister needed to work odd jobs, all the while they were growing up, to help their mother to feed and house the family.

Douglas was valedictorian of his graduating class at Yakima High School, but not until he had received a scholarship could he attend Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Wash. Even with the scholarship, he needed to work as a janitor and as a waiter in the dining hall in order to stay in college. During the summers, he got jobs picking cherries, and he would later write that the cruelty and inhumanity with which farmers treated nomadic farm workers was a major inspiration for his career of supporting the rights of workers.

When he graduated from college, Douglas accepted a teaching job, planning to save up the money to attend law school, but after two years in the classroom, he found it impossible to live – even when he cut his expenses to a bare minimum – on a teacher’s salary. That’s when he accepted the sheep herding job to pay his train fare almost to New York City.

In New York, he took advantage of his fraternity from college to live in a fraternity house in the city. A fraternity brother loaned him the money to pay his tuition at Columbia Law School. Money remained a problem for him, and he signed up for an opportunity to create a curriculum for a correspondence course in law, which earned him the money to graduate, which he did, ranking fifth in his class.

Shortly after achieving his law degree, Douglas applied and was hired to teach law at Yale. There he made connections which made it possible to be hired by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission, in Washington, D.C. There, he became associated with President Franklin Roosevelt, who would nominate him to the Supreme Court, in 1938, at the age of 40.

He served in the Supreme Court for a few days less than 37 years, which is the longest term ever served by an individual on the court, to date. During his service, Time would pronounce him, “The most dedicated Civil Libertarian ever to sit on the court.”

Douglas’s service on the court was full of dramatics, most notably when the famous Rosenberg Trial resulted in the sentencing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death in the electric chair, for giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Douglas granted a stay of execution, because the couple were condemned on a technicality, in which the judge didn’t ask the jury for the death penalty, but assigned it on his on recourse. An attempt was made to impeach Douglas, as a result, and the Chief Justice at the time called the court back into session from a recess, to overturn the stay.

Douglas enjoyed mountain climbing, white water canoeing, horseback riding and other outdoor activities throughout his life. He divorced his first three wives, and was married for 14 years to his fourth wife when he died. He left a son and a daughter, both born to his first wife.