Copious Notes

Jack Parrish (right) discusses a scene with actor Walter May during rehearsals for Actors Guild of Lexington's 2004 production of Yasmina Reza's "Art." Herald-Leader file photo by David Stephenson.

Click here to sign an online guest book for Mr. Parrish.

Jack Parrish, a mostly Richmond, Va.-based actor and director who spent the last few years of his life enriching the Central Kentucky theater scene, died Thursday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 56.

Mr. Parrish was born in Richmond and got into theater while he was in high school. His theater and film career included the roles of Brad Garrick on Another World and Brian Collier on All My Children, as well as stage work in New York and regional stages around the country, reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

In 2004, Actors Guild of Lexington’s then-new artistic director Richard St. Peter hired Mr. Parrish to direct the first production under his watch: Yasmina Reza’s play Art.

Mr. Parrish eventually moved to Central Kentucky, where he directed the drama department at Kentucky State University in Frankfort and continued to be active in area theater.

“Watching him act was like watching a master class in the craft,” said Tim X. Davis, Mr. Parrish’s predecessor at KSU and one of the actors in that 2004 production of Art. “I was proud to have Jack take my place at Kentucky State and continue to improve upon the program we had built there. His colleagues and students from KSU, many of whom I’m still in contact with, have nothing but the most positive things to say about him and his work. His work onstage here in Lexington, brief though it was, was simply stunning.”

Mr. Parrish’s roles in Lexington included Polonius and the Gravedigger in Actors Guild’s 2007 production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He was set to take center stage as Falstaff in Actors Guild’s summer 2008 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor for Shakespeare at Equus Run but had to bow out because of his cancer treatments.

“It breaks my heart that the community never got to see his Falstaff … as it would have blown people out of their seats,” said Davis, who now directs the theater and film program at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

Mr. Parrish eventually returned to Richmond with his wife, Kathy Ann Parrish. He was in hospice care when he died.

“I feel like I have lost a family member and one of my best friends all rolled into one,” said St. Peter, who resigned his post at Actors Guild in August. “He was an extraordinary actor, a brilliant interpreter of Shakespeare, a terrific director and a true ‘man of the theater.’”

Zach Moseley as Tom Joad and Jeremy Gillett as Jim Casey in the University of Kentucky and Bluegrass Community and Technical College theater programs' production of Frank Galati's "The Grapes of Wrath." Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Click the play button to hear part of our interview with Zach Moseley and Jeremy Gillett.

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

After starting their acting careers in the theater program at Bluegrass Community and Technical College, Zach Moseley and Jeremy Gillett moved up to the University of Kentucky.

But don’t expect them to call being in a BCTC production a comedown.

“I love working with Tim,” Gillett says of BCTC theater director Tim X. Davis, who is directing UK and BCTC’s co-production of The Grapes of Wrath. “He introduced me to theater, and it’s good to be working with him again.”

Zach Moseley as Tom Joad.

Moseley, who plays Tom Joad in the production based on John Steinbeck’s novel, says he was “interested to see how my old friends from BCTC and new friends from UK would blend together. I was surprised how quickly they came together.”

That sentiment extends to the top of both theater programs.

Davis and UK theater department chairwoman Nancy Jones describe the decision to partner as a simple exchange of e-mail saying, “Hey, let’s work together.”

“I had always thought it would be great to bring Tim in as a guest artist,” Jones says. “We talked first about partnering in general and then Grapes of Wrath specifically.”

Grapes was a show that UK Theatre had wanted to produce for a while. Lighting-design professor John Holloway was a big proponent of it because of the design possibilities it presented. It just happens that the play — adapted by Frank Galati from the novel about a Depression-era family traveling across the country to find work in the fields of California — turned out to be really timely.

“It is certainly not a happy accident,” Davis says. “We wish we were not going through these tough economic times. But it has been interesting to look at the parallels between now and back then.”

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