It was the most important line in actor Douglas Harmsen’s career … and he flubbed it.
The distinguished Denver Center Theatre Company actor was in place on the Stage Theatre when fellow actor Stephanie Cozart dropped to one knee and delivered his cue.
“Will you marry me?” she said.
Pauses can be deadly in the theater.
In Harmen’s defense, this scene was never rehearsed. Not unless you count six years before, when the roles were reversed, and Harmsen proposed to Cozart.
“I guess my response to him at that time was, ‘Well … I guess I don’t see why not,”‘ said Cozart. “I’m sure that wasn’t exactly his fantasy.”
“It was,” Harmsen concurs sheepishly, “rather underwhelming.”
Cozart just wasn’t quite ready to get married then. By last September, she was. But she knew she would have to do something spectacular in return.
So she arranged for the stage manager known only as Erock to let the couple into the Denver Center’s Stage Theatre – the same theater where they first performed together a decade before. Where they fell in love while playing lovers in Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” And where they will play lovers again in “Amadeus,” opening Thursday.
Cue Harmsen, who just didn’t see it coming. He was “flabbergasted, surprised and stunned.” Too choked up to respond.
“I don’t know what to say,” Harmsen finally said.
“Say yes!” Erock boomed across the darkened distance.
Harmsen said yes. “Actually I shouted it,” he said. “Yes!”
“Isn’t that funny?” said Cozart. “I proposed – and the stage manager had to give him his line.”
That stage manager will be Harmsen’s best man Oct. 29, the day after “Amadeus” closes.
The wedding will take place – where else? – in the Stage Theatre, with recently departed senior acting company member Jamie Horton officiating.
Harmsen and Cozart have performed in about 40 plays as members of Denver’s resident theater company, eight of them together. The photo on their wedding invitation is from “Arcadia.” It shows Harmsen, as Septimus, taking the hand of Cozart, as Thomasina. In “Amadeus,” Cozart plays Constanze to her fiancé’s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It’s all so perfectly symmetrical, the two have simply yielded to the commingling will of science and nature, which was the subject of “Arcadia.” Their invitation carries a Blaise Pascal quote: “If you do not love too much, you do not love enough” – a rumination on love by a mathematician.
“Everything goes back to ‘Arcadia,”‘ Harmsen said of a play that toyed with the notion that love and science represent separate poles of human experience. Both, Stoppard wrote, are unpredictable and equally powerful forces.
For this lesson they credit “Arcadia” director Laird Williamson. “We call him our fairy godfather because he brought us together,” Cozart said.
Williamson introduced the word “allurement” as his catchword for the play. “It means a love of life and a fascination with the universe,” said Harmsen. The same force that binds particles and holds the planets together also applies to human beings.
“The point being that you have no choice in the matter,” Cozart said.
“No doubt – love chose us,” Harmsen said. “The heart makes its own decision.”
Not just a “show-mance”
Cozart, who was raised in east Texas, was selected from hundreds of applicants for admission into the National Theatre Conservatory grad school in 1994. She had always fantasized about living in Colorado, and she picked the NTC after seeing mountains on its poster. Harmsen, a Canadian who graduated from Juilliard, first performed for the DCTC in 1992’s “Uncertainty,” but had not yet met Cozart.
The late Andrew Yelusich, who designed the set for “Arcadia,” asked Cozart if she had met Harmsen. When she said no, he predicted, ” I think you’re really gonna like him.”
Yelusich was prophetic. “The first day of rehearsal, I looked at her and thought, ‘Uh oh,”‘ Harmsen said. “Already, I knew I was in trouble.”
In the business, the term is “show-mance”: Actors get caught up in a magic that often ends the day the show does.
This one stuck.
“We’re professionals and we have to be pretending to fall in love all the time,” Cozart said. “But this really felt like it was beyond our control. When you know, you know.”
It’s been smooth sailing ever since – give or take one unenthusiastic response to a proposal. The couple have worked all over the country. Harmsen made his Broadway debut in 2004’s “King Lear” with Denzel Washington, and they often spend their summers together acting in Telluride. “But we definitely consider Denver to be our professional home away from home,” Harmsen said.
Denver, Cozart said, “is really our happy place. It has been so good to us. Is so artistically satisfying. It’s nurturing. The work here is truly collaborative.”
The two have not only survived the company’s only major creative transition in two decades, they are flourishing under second-year artistic director Kent Thompson. While many longtime company members are being de-emphasized, Harmsen and Cozart each have three featured roles in the 2006-07 season.
In fact, their honeymoon has been postponed until late February because the day after their wedding, they’re back in rehearsal: “Season’s Greetings” for Harmsen; “A Christmas Carol” for Cozart.
What science, nature – and Thompson – have in store for them beyond this season is out of their control.
“We are very grateful to Kent but we expect nothing,” Harmsen said. “If you ever have a sense of entitlement in this business, you’re in trouble.”
In the meantime, they accede to the poet W.H. Auden, who will be quoted in their wedding:
“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
