Jamie Lyons

my father
Charles R. Lyons
in Shakespeare’s Love Labour’s Lost
for Farm Players at Stanford University
mid 1960s

LOOK AT THIS MAGNIFICENT BASTARD. Stanford University, mid-1960s, some production of Love’s Labour’s Lost that probably nobody remembers except it’s Shakespeare and Shakespeare MATTERS because Shakespeare understood that language is the only weapon we’ve got against the void, the only thing standing between us and the screaming abyss of meaninglessness, and here’s Chuck Lyons, Charlie, CHARLES R. LYONS, standing there in period costume looking like he believes every single impossible word.

Because that’s what it takes, right? BELIEF. Absolute conviction that these four-hundred-year-old words about love being labor being lost being found again MEAN SOMETHING. That standing on a stage and speaking in iambic pentameter isn’t just some academic exercise but a way of reaching into the audience’s chest and squeezing their hearts until they remember what it feels like to be alive.

And here’s the beautiful part, the part that makes this REAL: Margery Bailey, the Shakespeare goddess whose name would eventually be on his endowed chair, kicked him out of her class for falling asleep. KICKED HIM OUT.  The irony is so perfect it hurts. The guy who would dedicate his life to understanding what she taught him about Shakespeare couldn’t even stay awake in her class. Maybe he was up all night rehearsing, maybe he was working some job to pay tuition, maybe he was just young and stupid and exhausted from partying and trying to do everything at once. Doesn’t matter. She threw him out, and that rejection, that FAILURE, probably taught him more than any A+ ever could have.

Because that’s how it works, right? The people who matter most are the ones who refuse to let you coast. Who demand everything. Who kick you out when you’re not giving it. And then you spend the rest of your life trying to prove you were worth their time.

And this is before everything, before the PhD, before he becomes this heavyweight theater theorist writing about Brecht and Beckett, before he’s chairing departments and installing new programs and basically teaching half of America how to think about performance. Before he’s directing Endgame and wrestling with Ibsen’s divided consciousness and all that heavy intellectual machinery that would come later.

This is just pure, undiluted DOING. Acting because he had to.  BUT WAIT, because here’s where it gets REALLY good, before all this, before Stanford, before standing on this stage in this costume speaking these words, he was IN IT. The real thing. The Hollywood thing. Hanging out with Natalie Wood, the one from Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story and a million other films that defined what it meant to be young and beautiful and doomed in 1950s America. Friends with Dennis Hopper before he was the Dennis Hopper we know, back when he was just another crazy talented kid trying to make it. Parties at Nicholas Ray’s bungalow at the CHATEAU MARMONT, Nicholas Ray, the director who made Rebel Without a Cause, who understood teenage rage and loneliness better than anyone, who basically invented the modern American outsider film.

Chuck was THERE. In the rooms. At the parties. Part of that whole gorgeous, doomed, brilliant Hollywood scene that was about to explode into the Method and the New Hollywood and everything that would come after.

And he WALKED AWAY FROM IT.

Or maybe, maybe IT WALKED AWAY FROM HIM TOO. Maybe he wasn’t quite pretty enough or connected enough or willing to play the game hard enough. Maybe Natalie Wood moved on. Maybe Dennis Hopper had other friends. Maybe the invitations to Nicholas Ray’s bungalow dried up. Maybe Hollywood chewed him up a little and spit him out like it does to thousands of talented kids every year.
Maybe the choice to go to Stanford wasn’t entirely A CHOICE. Maybe it was partly a RETREAT. A pivot. A reassessment after realizing that the dream factory didn’t want him.

And you know what? THAT MAKES IT BETTER. That makes it REAL. Because then going to Stanford isn’t about some noble rejection of shallow Hollywood values, it’s about a Glendale kid who got knocked down and said FINE, I’LL FIND ANOTHER WAY. I’ll go deeper. I’ll understand this thing from the inside.

And then Margery Bailey KICKED HIM OUT of her class for falling asleep.

The narrative arc is too perfect. Kid dates a movie star, hangs out with the future legends of American cinema, has access to everything young beautiful ambitious people in the 1950s could want, it doesn’t quite work out, so he goes to Stanford to study Shakespeare and gets thrown out of class.

THAT’S the story. Not some romanticized tale of artistic purity choosing academia over commerce. But a messier, truer story about someone who kept finding ways forward even when the doors kept slamming in his face.

And yes, he’d already been a professional actor at the Pasadena Playhouse, already knew the score, but this wasn’t just about acting, this was about CHOOSING the life of the mind over the life of the scene. Choosing to understand the THEORY behind the practice, the WHY beneath the HOW, the philosophical bedrock under all that beautiful desperate playacting we call theater.

That’s the thing about the real ones, they’re never satisfied with just doing it. They need to know what it MEANS. They need to crack it open and look at the guts and figure out how the magic trick works, and then, AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART, they need to teach other people how to do the same thing.
Because theater isn’t about immortality or legacy or any of that horseshit. It’s about the moment when the lights go down and someone speaks words into the darkness and for a few hours everyone in that room agrees to believe in something together. It’s about the fundamental human need to tell stories to each other, to see ourselves reflected in someone else’s performance of what it means to be human.

Look at him there, young and committed and completely unaware that he’d spend the next few decades of his life thinking about exactly this moment, this convergence of text and body and voice and meaning. That he’d become the guy explaining to generations of students why this matters, why we keep doing this absurd thing of pretending to be other people in order to understand ourselves.

AND HERE’S THE THING, the person writing this, the person looking at this photograph and trying to make sense of it? That’s HIS SON. Jamie Lyons. Who ALSO went to Stanford. Who ALSO has a career in theater and performance. Who’s spent his own life wrestling with spectacle and live art and what it means to stand in front of people and create meaning out of nothing.

So this isn’t some objective historical analysis. This is a son trying to understand his father by looking at a photograph from before he was born. Trying to connect the dots between this kid in Shakespeare costume and the man who would raise him, who would pass down some DNA-level understanding that theater MATTERS, that performance isn’t frivolous but fundamental.

You can’t escape it, can you? The things our fathers teach us, intentionally or not. The trajectories they set us on just by being who they are. Charles Lyons dated Natalie Wood and hung out with Dennis Hopper and then chose Shakespeare and theory and teaching, and decades later his son is making art and performance and thinking about the same essential questions: What does it mean to perform? What does it mean to witness? What’s the relationship between the real and the represented?

IT’S ALL THERE IN THIS ONE PHOTOGRAPH. The whole lineage. The whole story of choosing art over everything else, even when art doesn’t choose you back. Of getting knocked down and finding another way. Of believing that standing on a stage and speaking words matters enough to build a life around it.
The Navy would come next—four years as a lieutenant, Far East duty, working with Jacques Cousteau which is its own kind of beautiful absurdity. Then teaching at Principia College, then Berkeley, then back to Stanford in 1973 to build something that would outlast him.
But here, right here in this photograph, he’s just a kid who loved Shakespeare enough to put on a costume and speak the words. That’s where it all starts. That’s where it always starts. With someone young and stupid and brave enough to believe that beauty matters, that language matters, that standing in front of other people and baring your soul through someone else’s words is a worthwhile way to spend your one wild and precious life.
He died in 1999. Sixty-six years old. Before that he’d established the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Written books that changed how people think about Brecht and Beckett and Ibsen. Directed productions that people still talk about. Mentored students who went on to shape theater across America and Europe.
But man, look at this photograph. This is where the fever started. This is patient zero for a lifetime of trying to figure out what theater means, what Shakespeare means, what it means to stand in front of people and speak truth through fiction.
That’s the real love’s labor: not lost, just transformed into everything that came after.