Will is currently performing the role of the great South African actor André Huguenet in Athol Fugard's "Exits and Entrances" at the New Repertory Theatre in the Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown Massachusetts. "I love this man," Will says. "I love the wall of arrogance he uses to hide his insecurity and the way he finally comes to grips with who he is, a man he ends up thinking is a very insignificant being. As the playwright says, 'He was wrong.' " The story is told as André, a great raconteur, talks with a young playwright (Fugard himself) about his life in the theatre, but when it is over, the audience realizes it has experienced a whole lifetime of a struggling, creative man, and understands how that struggle will affect the young playwright of the next generation.
Referring to his performance as Claudius in the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's tenth anniversary
production of Hamlet, the reviewer from the Boston Globe said,"Lyman's
transformation from confident king to Nixonian cover-upper is a model piece
of acting." He was subsequently nominated for an Elliot Norton award.
Will's recent stage performance in "King of the Jews"
was also recognized with a Norton nomination.
"A luminous and wrenching production." (The Boston Phoenix.)
"Lyman's charismatic and troubling Trumpleman..." (The Boston Globe )
Will Lyman's theatre
experience in New York includes productions of The Passion of Dracula
at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Pinter's The Dwarfs, The Grinding Machine
at The American Place, Howard Fast's The Novelist on Theatre Row and
Connor Larkin in a Broadway Workshop production of Leon Uris' six-hour adaptation
of his epic Irish romance, Trinity.
A sampling of regional theatre includes Dr. Dysart in Equus at the Nora
Theatre in Boston, Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the
George Street Playhouse, John Proctor in The Crucible at Pennsylvania
Stage, both men in Pinter's Betrayal and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's
Dream at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
An ex-classical bass player, Will has had the pleasure of performing vocally
with two of the world's finest orchestras. 1989 saw him onstage with the Cleveland
Symphony Orchestra as Ivan in Every Good Boy Deserves Favor. In 1990,
Will narrated a treatment of Eisenstein's unproduced film Ivan the Terrible to Sergei Prokofiev's film score performed by the National Symphony under the
direction of Mstislav Rostropovich at the Kennedy Center in Washington. (See
the audio link above.) In 1997, he was in Boston's Symphony Hall with the Handel
& Haydn Society reading Jason to Claire Bloom's Medea.
Since 1998, he has been closely associated with the Commonwealth Shakespeare
Company where he has performed Brutus in Julius Caesar, Prospero in The Tempest and Claudius in Hamlet.
