Steven Culp, Michelle Bonebright-Carter, Jocelyn Towne and Peter Van Norden in “Red Ink” at Playwrights’ Arena, 2020 (Photo by Kelly Stuart)
Peter Van Norden (1950 -2026)
From The Tempest to Naked Gun, An Actor for All Seasons
It was a jolt to read in a Facebook post by his son, Robert, that Peter Van Norden is gone.
Described by critic Charles McNulty as “one of L.A.’s most assured Shakespearean actors,” I got to know him slightly in 2019 and 2020, when he played an ingratiating, crusty newspaper owner who was selling his staff down the river in my comedy, Red Ink (Playwrights’ Arena) about the personal and journalistic consequences of a newspaper buyout. In casting the play, director Nike Doukas never wavered in contemplating him for the role. There’s no one out there better for this, she said. She had known him for years at The Antaeus Company, where she now serves as artistic director. She knew.
His portrayal of sadistic glee, the glint in his eye when he comforted his increasingly despondent editor-in-chief, played by Leo Marks, simultaneously believing and not believing whatever he was saying, his comic mastery of bullshit, of giving bullshit gravity, his flares of anger, his command of words, his respect for words and the contradictions that lay beneath them, his respect for the play – it all flowed from some deep well of intelligence, and craft, and wit, and joy. It was a mix of his training in Shakespeare and his clowning in the “Police Academy” and “Naked Gun” franchises.
Left to right: Peter Van Norden, Steven Leigh Morris, and Michelle Bonebright-Carter in Idyllwild, 2020
Peter was as kind as he was generous. He, his wife Wendy, and actress Michelle Bonebright-Carter drove up to Idyllwild to read scenes from Red Ink at the local library. We went out to dinner after at Gastrognome, where Peter and Wendy regaled us with stories.
In the end, stories are all that’s left, all that makes any damn sense. They’re the life blood of actors, and writers, trying to get at, to hold, something real in a world of lies and vapors.
I last saw him playing Prospero at Antaeus in 2023, again trafficking on stage in the artifice of cruelty, that twinkle in his eye, and the delight in knowing that behind his stage-wrath, such a tender heart was beating. He was playing. He was an actor, as fine an actor as he was a person.
