Size mattered when New York actor Michael A. Shepperd and his partner decided to become homemakers. "I'm 6-foot-5 and weigh 250, and I couldn't find a house in New York I could fit into," Shepperd said. "But the first house we looked at in Los Angeles was perfect. I had never entertained the thought of a life and career in LA, but I was wrong."
In the 10 years since Shepperd and actor-writer Hutchins Foster made their westward move, they have adopted two children and gotten legally hitched during the window of opportunity for gay marriage. While Hutchins chronicles these and other adventures on his blog Mommy with a Penis, Sheppard has landed numerous stage and screen roles, and in 2008, he became artistic director of the Celebration Theatre, Los Angeles' longest-running LGBT theater.
While the Celebration is staging a revival of Tom Eyen's Women Behind Bars starring local drag icon Momma, Shepperd is in Palo Alto as one of the principal performers in Paula Vogel's A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration. The historical play, with traditional songs woven in, is running through Dec. 27 as part of the TheatreWorks season.
Shepperd plays Decatur Bronson, a composite character based on two African-Americans who received the Medal of Honor during the Civil War. Bronson, a former slave who bought his own freedom, is bereft after his wife is stolen away by Confederate soldiers. She had been a teacher, and taught her husband to read and write.
"He is a bit delusional, because his wife is actually dead," Shepperd said. "But he is continuing to learn to read, because he wants to write to her." There are several other black characters, including the seamstress to Mary Todd Lincoln and a black entrepreneur who sends his children to college. "People don't usually get to hear these kinds of stories," Shepperd said. "I barely knew about them."
In addition to Mrs. Lincoln, who is shopping for the new attraction known as a Christmas Tree, the list of historical characters includes Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Walt Whitman, Clara Barton, William Tecumseh Sherman, and John Wilkes Booth. The play had its world premiere last year at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, and playwright Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) has been revising and tightening the script for the several regional productions that are springing up this year.
Shepperd, who has in-laws in the Bay Area, had auditioned for several TheatreWorks productions in the past. But he actually expected to make his Bay Area stage debut in the post-Broadway production of Caroline, or Change that began at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles before arriving at the Curran in 2005. "I was fired," he said without hesitation, explaining how he was replaced by an actor friendly with a member of the creative team (not Tony Kushner). "But they had to buy out my contract, and it paid for a trip to Spain with my partner and son."
While his passion is acting on the stage, and now running a theater, he counts on TV and film work to help pay the mortgage. He's been seen on such series as Monk, Criminal Minds, Ally McBeal, and Frasier, and his deep tones brought him to Broadway in 2004 as the voice of the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
Despite his imposing size and sound, Shepperd said, "When they need a black person who doesn't scare white people, they say, 'Get Michael Sheppard.' I really am a touchy-feely kind of person, but when I do get angry, it can be ugly."
He also said he's "not good at censoring" himself, and he caught flak from some in the gay community when he told an interviewer that he wanted to expand the 27-year-old Celebration Theatre's base to include straight people, and there was hate mail when he sought to racially diversify its programming. "It's been an upper-middle-class white man's theater, and that's not the whole gay experience."
Coming up after Women Behind Bars, which he likened to comfort food, the theater will present Jay Paul Deratany's Haram Iran, based on the execution of two Iranian teenagers in 2005 for suspected homosexuality, and a musical adaptation of The Women of Brewster Place, about a group of African-American women, including a lesbian couple, living in a Los Angeles housing project.
Shepperd himself grew up in Alton, Ill., home to both Miles Davis and Phyllis Schlafly, and was expected to be a doctor. "I was supposed to replace old Dr. Horton, the black doctor in town, and then groom someone to take over for me. There was some disappointment in the family when I didn't go that route, but then I played an EMT on ER, and finally they had something to show their friends."
Richard Dodds can be reached at [email protected].