By Mike McInally
There came a moment – he calls it an “epiphany” -- when Ed Ray knew he was going to step away from the theater stage and move into another stage of his life.
It’s a moment that says something about the success Ray has had during his career, which includes a 17-year stint as president of Oregon State University.
It’s also a moment that leads to this: The theatre space in the OSU’s Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts will be named the Edward J. Ray Black Box Theater.
Today, Ray credits his time on stage as helping to give him some of the skills that helped drive his career – from Queens College in New York City to Stanford University and onto positions at The Ohio State University and OSU.
But the moment of epiphany occurred at Queens College, where Ray – New York-born and bred and the first member of his family to attend college – launched his higher education career.
Back then at Queens, the required curriculum included classes in arts and music appreciation. Other students paid lip service to those classes – just another box to check off toward graduation.
For Ray, those classes were transforming.
“I was taking art history,” he said in a recent interview in his new office at OSU in Bexell Hall. “I mean, everybody hates art history taught in a large lecture hall with slides in front of hundreds of students. I loved it. It was like a whole new world.”
“And I took music appreciation because you had to take that. I fell in love with that.”
But it was an encounter with a speech professor, Robert Dierlam, that led to Ray’s brief career on the stage. Each term in his speech appreciation class, Dierlam started with a stunt in which he identified where each student hailed from just by listening to the student speak a sentence or two.
“So he would say to kids, ‘say something and I'll tell you where you're from.’ And, I mean, you're targeting a bunch of mostly Jewish kids from Queens, New York. Where the hell do you think they grew up?”
The students would say something, and Dierlam would say, most often, “Oh, you're from here in Queens.”
Widespread astonishment followed.
“So then it gets to me to say something. So I say something to him. And he says, ‘You didn’t grow up here. You grew up somewhere in the Midwest.’”
The mistake led to an opportunity for Ray. Dierlam also was the head of the drama department at Queens. As the semester drew to a close, he pulled Ray aside and encouraged him to audition for a production of “Detective Story,” a play by Sidney Kingsley. Ray auditioned. He was cast in the show.
Ray recalled: “What’s funny about it is, I got the part of Arthur Kindred, who was supposed to be a kid from this exotic place called Ann Arbor, Michigan.” To this day, Ray suspects his casting might have had something to do with the fact that Dierlam thought his student sounded Midwestern – just like Arthur Kindred.
The acting bug bit Ray hard after his debut. He appeared in shows like “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” did theater in the round and did technical work for other shows. He performed inside an Air France hangar with a group called the Idlewild Players at JFK, previously named Idlewild Airport.
But the epiphany came when he was cast in a production of “Two for the Seesaw,” William Gibson’s two-character romantic drama. (Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft starred in the original Broadway production.)
After a performance, Ray recalled, “one of the professors came up and she said, ‘You were just wonderful. You did a wonderful job.’ And I said, ‘Well, thank you very much. I think it's a good play.’ She said, ‘Oh, it’s a terrible play, but you were wonderful.’”
The comment stung. “I couldn't figure out why I was depressed by her saying that,” Ray said. “And then it was clear to me that what I enjoyed about acting was entertaining other people, that I was doing it for other people. And that ultimately, that's a path to failure. Because now your happiness or success is defined by other people.”
“And so I just had this instinct,” Ray remembered, that he had to do something that he cared about passionately – and that he couldn’t care about what other people thought about him. “If you’re counting on the world to say it loves you, you’re on a fool’s errand.”
And that essentially marked the end of Ray’s acting career. From Queens, he went onto graduate school at Stanford (at the time, he thought Leland Stanford Junior University was his “safety school” – but that’s another story).
Lessons learned on stage
At Stanford, studying economics, “I really got into the grind. And what I found out is that I really enjoyed teaching.”
That launched an academic career that took him to Ohio State and then to OSU, where he was named president in 2003. He stepped down from that position in 2020, and now serves as president emeritus and teaches classes.
The lessons he learned on stage have served him well during his career.
“Well, I think I'm probably more theatrical” in front of a class or a crowd, thanks to the experience,” he said. “You learn to read audiences. And I was always pretty comfortable talking to groups of people. And then I never had stage fright or any such thing because I’d had that experience.”
Years later, a prominent OSU supporter asked Ray why he got into academics. Ray answered: “I really just love learning. I’m curious, and I always want to learn things. And then what I realized is I really liked telling people what I learned and seeing them get excited that they just learned it.”
Observers of Ray’s tenure at OSU say he hasn’t gotten enough credit for the work he did to boost the profile of the arts at the university.
Elizabeth Helman, the program coordinator for OSU Theatre, said naming the black box theater after Ray is a fitting tribute. “He’s been such a supporter and advocate for the arts in general, but specifically for theater since he’s been here, so it’s nice to be able to say ‘thank you’ in some way for that.”
Helman added that there’s been talk from time to time about getting Ray back on stage – perhaps a cameo appearance in one of OSU’s Bard in the Quad Shakespearean productions. It hasn’t happened yet, but she holds out hope. “I would find a place for it, absolutely,” she said.
Larry Rodgers, the dean of OSU’s College of Liberal Arts, said naming the black box after Ray “made sense, to honor his own personal interest in theater and his own personal history” – and also as recognition that Ray was integral to helping get the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts off the ground.
And Rodgers believes that the mission of the Reser Center for the Creative Arts – to make the arts accessible for everyone, especially for students who haven’t had cultural opportunities previously -- resonates with Ray.
After all, Ray’s life changed during those art, music and theater experiences at Queens College. He wants students at OSU to be able to experience the same universe-expanding moments he had.
“Most of the young people out there need to have some epiphany about arts and literature, and the worlds that are out there beyond their own world,” he said.
Besides, he said, there’s something about the arts “that’s really magical. You know, we don’t have enough magic going on in our lives anymore. We’ve gotten too cynical and too staid. And arts are a way to shake things up and to get people to go ‘a-ha.’”
Everyone deserves their own moments of epiphany.