Remembering Robert (Buddy) Stoccardo (1961-2021)

The Mystic of Cahuenga Boulevard

By Steven Leigh Morris

The Persistence of Forgetting

In Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece 1968 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a dirt-eating, orphan child named Rebeca wanders into the town of Macondo and brings with her the “insomnia plague,” a contagious disease that first manifests itself by the lack of sleep. At first, the villagers find this helpful.

“If we don’t sleep again, so much the better, Jose Arcadio Buendia said in good humor, “That way we can get more out of life.”

But his initial, enthusiastic shrug masks the plague’s darker slide into the loss of memory. Slowly, inexorably, words start to fall away, so that Jose Arcadio Buendia and his son, Aureliano, need to place labels on objects and creatures.

One day Aureliano is looking for the small anvil that he uses for laminating metals and he could not remember its name. “His father told him: ‘stake.’ Aureliano wrote the name on a piece of paper that he pasted to the small anvil: stake. In that way he was sure of not forgetting it in the future. It did not occur to him that this was the first manifestation of a loss of memory, because the object had a difficult name to remember. But a few days later he discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in the laboratory. Then he marked them with their respective names so that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify them. . . Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.”

A fair amount has been written about Marquez’s brief chronicle of dementia in the novel, an analysis which leaves out the important detail that this insomnia plagues an entire village, raising the larger concern that if, as a community, we forget the names and virtues of people and things, we are collectively lost at sea, on a kind of medieval ship of fools.

In a theater community, one might presume that fame and accomplishment are hedges against community amnesia. A decade ago, I asked my undergrad students in my World Theatre class (a general education course at California State University) if they knew who Arthur Miller was. The recognition ratio then was between 30-40%. Today it’s down to 10% and below. Even being among the seminal playwrights of the 20^th century is not sufficient to be remembered. In a different time, and a different place, Arthur Miller would have train stations named after him. In this time, and this place, he’s dissipating into the ether of popular culture, as though The Crucible has no bearing on contemporary behavior.

This creeping, collective amnesia leads irrevocably to the theater community in and around Los Angeles and to the value it held in years gone by, and to the value it might hold in the aftermath of our own plague. These two values are tethered to each other, in the long chain of events that got us to where we are. These values summon four interrelated questions: Can we remember? Do we even wish to remember? Where are we, if we forget? And what are we, if we forget?

The value of our theater community has always manifested itself in the quality of the energy of our actors. There are also some very good playwrights here, and designers, directors and producers. They’ve gotten better as the years have ticked by. L.A. has proven itself adept at being a development center for new plays. Yet the ultimate, memorable value of our scene, not unrelated to new play development, comes from the raw talent of our actors, from the way they breathe life into plays. Theater may be ephemeral, but its energy lingers in memory. Plays themselves slip out of memory, sometimes in a wink, sometimes slowly, at least without reinforcement, but the quality of a great performance lives in the ether. It transcends the all-too-obvious limitations of the art form.

That quality, that talent, that generosity of spirit, that courage (Is it courage when one hurls oneself into the abyss of a new role, in a new play, sometimes stark naked, because of the conviction that there’s no worthy alternative?) can be found in the likes of actor Robert (Buddy) Stoccardo, who died on May 9, shy of his 60^th birthday.

In the Century Gone By

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“He was the fellow in the NOTE late night show playing the man resurrected from trash. He used real trash. He smelled like an old Big Mac. One thing for certain, whatever current project Buddy was involved with was, in his eyes, the greatest piece of art ever created.”

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In 1997, The Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, having left its Claremont digs, found itself in residence at Hollywood’s Theatre of NOTE on Cahuenga Boulevard, just north of Sunset Boulevard. The Padua visitors were holding the latest incarnation of their annual festival of new plays. Among them was Wesley Walker’s Freak Storm, featuring Stoccardo. This was the same year that actor-producer Cathy Carlton had rolled into LA from New York, looking for a theater home.

“There was Buddy,” Carlton recalls, “dressed in a Panda costume and, for some reason, got naked fast, and sported a bloody handkerchief around his dick. Ahh, yes, this is where I belong,” Carlton reflects wistfully. “This is home, I thought.” Carlton says she auditioned for NOTE a few weeks later, got in, and had “a long happy life there. Still do.” (Though Carlton currently lives and works in Massachusetts, home is where the heart is.)

Actor Doug Burch had been with Theatre of NOTE at its former location on Kenmore Avenue, and left in order to “make a living.” But after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake decimated the Kenmore venue, Burch returned to the company to help transform the Cahuenga Boulevard storefront into an operable theater. He re-auditioned for the company, and was re-admitted.

“This guy wandered in, I always hung at the back or in the lobby,” Burch recalls. “He came in and had this great smile, ‘Hey I’m Buddy.’ ‘Hey I’m Doug.’ No hesitation, didn’t know me from Adam. ‘You used to be here, and welcome back man.’ If something did upset him, I remember once he got very emotional about it, it came from a love and passion.”

Among the things that triggered Stoccardo’s passion was a new play that was working itself through the theater’s committee-based approval process. According to Burch, Stoccardo was an intense advocate for new plays that he believed in.

“One time we had done a [new play] reading,” Burch explains, describing Stoccardo’s uncompromising commitment to it. The play never got produced. Says Burch, “It was more accessible than the stuff we normally do at NOTE. I tried to say to him, ‘Maybe they don’t want to do something that the audience might actually understand.'”

Stoccardo was not amused. Says Burch, “He could see beyond the words of the reading. He looked at it from the [vision of] the play, not just the actor’s eye.”

Long-time Theatre of NOTE member Richard Werner, who now lives in Tennessee, first met Stoccardo in the mid 1990s, when Stoccardo was performing in Jim Cartwright’s Road. “He was a great friend to me from the day we met,” Werner writes. “[Road] was a beautiful and visceral play and his passion for the work was easy to see. The only thing greater than his ferocity as an artist was his love for his friends. Volatile, intense scary and a completely lovable fellow. I could say, yeah, he was the naked guy in Wesley Walker’s show running around with the bloody rag tied to his penis. I could also say he was the fellow in the NOTE late night show playing the man resurrected from trash. He used real trash. He smelled like an old Big Mac. One thing for certain, whatever current project Buddy was involved with was, in his eyes, the greatest piece of art ever created. . . We were like-minded actors doing punk-rock theater in a company that had resurrected itself from the debris of the Northridge Quake. What a trip. He had a generous heart and cooked for me in Hollywood after I had some surgery.”

Werner recalls that Stoccardo read his own poetry many times at the NOTE performance marathon after 3 am., and was hoping that he’d come to visit him in Tennessee. Stoccardo did call a few times to check in, Werner says. “I called him a mad genius. If Harvey Keitel and Dennis Hopper had a kid, he’d be something like Buddy.”

Robert (Buddy) Stoccardo

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“We first saw him acting in middle school, where he played Pig Pen in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Even to this day, I remember sitting in the auditorium watching that show and knowing something special was happening up there.”

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Born in Philadelphia, Stoccardo grew up in Miami Springs, Florida, playing soccer. One of seven children from an Irish/English-Italian household, “He was always the flamboyant one,” his sister Catherine Mitseas recalls. . . “the kid who wore long sleeve silk shirts, and was always ready for a good time. We first saw him acting in middle school, where he played Pig Pen in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Even to this day, I remember sitting in the auditorium watching that show and knowing something special was happening up there. We were an artistic family, enjoying live theater, music, and the remains of vaudeville as it existed in South Beach in the 1970s. Maybe Buddy took that to heart.”

He graduated from High School in Winter Park, Florida, and made it to college on an athletic scholarship. Two years later, a blown knee allowed him to pivot to acting, where he quickly received a scholarship. He attended Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and graduated with an English degree.

Before coming to Los Angeles, he lived in New York, and had enjoyed some commercial success in the theater in Orlando, Florida.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, Stoccardo won a featured performance award in Orlando for a 1987 production of Lyle Kessler’s Orphans.

For a year in Orlando, as well, he taught high school English and directed the school’s theater department.

While in New York, he was in the ensemble for Sir Peter Hall’s 1989 Production of The Tempest, at the Roundabout Theatre, co-starring Frank Langella and BD Wong. Richard Werner recalls Stoccard’s story of how he went uptown to help Langella with his lines, then realized he was short on cab fare, and how Langella refused to spot him for the cab fare home.

In L.A., besides participating in wild-and-wooly theater with companies such as Theatre of Note, Padua Playwrights and Echo Theater Company, Stoccardo was cast in movies such Problem Child 2 (1991), Unsolved Mysteries (1987), Superboy (1988), and the cult classic, Murdercycle (1999).

Stoccardo did not have an easy time in Los Angeles. People who knew him heard him tell stories of two assaults against him, though the dates, locations and other details remain murky. One of these stories referenced an onstage incident of battery in which, during a fight scene, a fellow actor allegedly took the reality of the violence between the characters literally. The other story is similarly vague on details, concerning an incident in which he was beaten up, possibly on the streets.

But there was nothing oblique about the epileptic fits that occurred so frequently, he couldn’t drive. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to conjure the difficulties for an actor navigating the streets of Los Angeles on public transportation and on foot.

Add to this a bout of homelessness, from which Stoccardo eventually recovered and lived comfortably. But in his final years, he suffered from a series of mini-strokes. He applied to Meals on Wheels for help getting food, but they told him he wouldn’t be eligible until his 60^th birthday, which he didn’t live to see. A massive stroke took his life in May.

Stoccardo’s last stage role was in Chiara Atik’s Poor Clare, presented in 2020 by Echo Theater Company. The company is preparing to re-stage the production, since it had been shuttered by Covid-19. Reprising that role in a post-Covid theater season was Stoccardo’s sole focus, say many of his friends.

Checking the Rear View Mirror

So many in this club of transcendent talent are still with us, in both the land of the living and in Southern California. In no particular order: Jacqueline Wright, Tracey A. Leigh, Jack Kehler, Jack Stehlin, Kalean Ung, Sam Anderson, French Stewart, Rose Portillo, Richard Fancy, Jessica Emmanuel, and probably the entire roster of the Antaeus Company all spring to mind in a list that’s far from comprehensive.

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Stoccardo is among an elite pantheon of Los Angeles actors, living and dead, whose every moment on the stage appears sculpted from some combination of craft and charisma. These would include the late Chris Pennock, a maven of The Actors’ Studio; and the late Pamela Gordon, who showed up on the Theatre of NOTE Stage, as well on stages such as the currently shuttered Evidence Room.

Gordon was a diminutive waif, her voice sounded filtered through gravel, from years of smoking. She never wanted to discuss her terminal cancer, she quipped, because it would be a “bad career move.” The sound of her baritone voice and her balletic movement provided a striking juxtaposition. In NOTE’s 2013 production of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, she entered a 1930s Berlin apartment backwards through a window, before settling onto a table top, on which she appeared to dance. (I don’t actually recall if she danced or not.) But when she descended to the floor, her arms lifted like wings, as though she were floating, as though she had been dancing on the head of a pin.

So many in this club of transcendent talent are still with us, in both the land of the living and in Southern California. In no particular order: Jacqueline Wright, Tracey A. Leigh, Jack Kehler, Jack Stehlin, Kalean Ung, Sam Anderson, French Stewart, Rose Portillo, Richard Fancy, Jessica Emmanuel, and probably the entire roster of the Antaeus Company all spring to mind in a list that’s far from comprehensive.

What they share with Stoccardo is their laser-like focus on whatever project they’re appearing in.

Playwright Leon Martell met Stoccardo when he was cast as a surreal crime boss in his play Hard Hat Area, produced by Theater of NOTE in 1996. Martell describes Stoccardo’s talent as being of “a holy scale.”

“Buddy was able to play both threatening and vulnerable, smart and ridiculous, always surprising, he was one of those great actors who has a subtext behind every line, every image and kept the work vibrant and alive. He cared so deeply about every moment, on stage an off. . . He lived large, in the best way.”

Recalls former NOTE member Tamar Fortgang, “Buddy was all heart which is why I think he touched so many. I can’t think of any one group of people that he conformed to, not one company that he used in any way other than to act. He just wanted to act. It sounds simple, and it is. It is genuine. Buddy may not have been simple, but his art was genuine, and so was he.”

Stoccardo acted in six plays by Sharon Yablon. 

“He loved and was passionate about theater,” says Yablon. “When I worked with him, it reassured me that it was okay for me to be pursuing theater too, even though it may befuddle some or be looked down upon in society. Especially in a town where many playwrights (except for our underground scene) abandon theater (sorry, I hate to say it) and write for TV. When I worked with Buddy it reminded me that the work is important, not my writing per se, but the pursuit of theater, telling stories with actors to an audience, which we all know is one of the most ancient and purest art forms. And that is a valid pursuit of the soul. Buddy knew that.”

In an essay to company members at NOTE, Stoccardo’s long-time friend Phil Ward wrote about Stoccardo’s talent and his character:

“Good lord, the man could act. Ask the people he worked alongside at Theatre of NOTE, the Echo Theater Company, Padua Playwrights and others. He could be frightening, funny, moving, anything you wanted. I myself hired him to act in a couple of children’s theater shows, it was like finding out that Pacino was willing to entertain third graders, and good at it. . . When he was healthy enough to do so, he would take the Metro Red Line to NOTE and run the concession stand or whatever was needed. . .

“If you talked with him during any of the times he seemed to be fighting for survival, he would tell you what a lucky guy he was; he would point out all of the blessings in his life. During those times when he was excited to be alive, which was most of the time, he had a glow about him, a sense of both peace and enthusiasm, that always struck me as angelic.”

As local theater drives forward, lurching through a fog bank, perhaps some legislation, State Senate Bill 805 or something like it, will actually put minimum wage directly into the hands of our actors. That wouldn’t have saved Stoccardo, but it certainly would have made his life easier. Perhaps we can actually, finally reckon with the racial disparities on our stages and in our audiences. These are things to look forward to.

But as we clutch the steering wheel with intense focus on the road ahead, it’s important to check the rear view mirror, where you might see Pamela Gordon dancing on the head of a pin, or Robert Buddy Stoccardo making a pizza for friends. This is not an argument that our efforts be propelled by the fumes of nostalgia, but that the future we forge should be informed by the often noble efforts of the talented, flawed people who came before. Progress is not a series of explosions and expulsions, it is the chain of sometimes fractious events that pulls us from the past into the future. It is an evolution. 

The Ghost of Hamlet’s father tells his son, “Adieu, Adieu, Adieu! Remember me.”

He is motivated by revenge. And we all know how Hamlet ends. It’s not pretty. A blood bath: Shakespeare’s point. 

It’s easy to imagine the ghost of Stoccardo hovering over Echo Theatre when Poor Clare re-opens, saying “Adieu, Adieu, Adieu! Remember me.” Being Stoccardo, his words would have nothing to do with vengeance, but with serving as a spirit-guide.

Video courtesy of Sharon Yablon