There’s more than one acting coach in Iowa City, and he has advice for Iowa’s Seth Wallace

Saturday marks the first time in our lifetimes in which Iowa has had an acting head coach for one of its football games. Kirk Ferentz’s understudy is Seth Wallace.

Who better to give some tips to Wallace than someone with experience as an acting coach? So I turned to Iowa City’s Patrick Du Laney, a full-time acting teacher at Cornell College. He’s also a professional actor who appeared for a year-and-a-half on Broadway in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” and has worked in many national touring shows and local productions.

Du Laney’s coach-to-coach advice to Wallace:

“There are no small parts, only small players. … Discourage romantic entanglements between cast members. It only leads to drama. … No matter what, the show must go on.”

He was having fun there, but then got serious.

“Work from positive energy until you can't anymore, and begin with empathy. … People crave leadership. … Remember why you’re doing this.”

Were he in Wallace’s shoes, “I would remind myself that I may not be that renowned director, but that doesn't mean I don't have things to offer.”

Iowa’s game Saturday against Illinois State is its 2024 season curtain-raiser. Jitters at the premiere are to be expected no matter who you are, especially when you’re in front of a Kinnick Stadium audience of almost 70,000.

“I always tell actors the safest place is inside the play,” Du Laney said. “Maybe that applies here. That means when you’ve got people staring at you, when you feel a little beside it, you’re not really in the zone. You’re just sort of going through the motions.

“You’ve got to give your brain a place to go, and the safest and surest place is inside the role you’re playing, inside the play itself.”

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Du Laney is performing himself in Iowa City this weekend. He’s acting Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoon in Crooked Path Theatre Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” at Iowa City’s James Theater.

As the Bard wrote, all the world’s a stage. Kinnick Stadium is a mighty big one, and Du Laney envies its players without resenting them. He grew up in Phoenix and has performed in 40 states, but made Iowa City his home in 2008. He quickly found out Iowa is a football school.

“I had never experienced anything like it until I moved to Iowa City, where the town is empty on a Saturday afternoon,” he said. “I think it’s marvelous.

“The town is empty because everyone is at the game. I think that’s unbelievable. I think it’s incredible that people who don’t know each other, and maybe in other parts of their life would dislike each other or fight each other or fundamentally disagree with each other, will still go to the game on Saturday and wear the same colors and cheer for the same people. I think that's remarkable.”

Du Laney isn’t among those fans. He wishes he were.

“I’m incredibly jealous on a Saturday afternoon,” he said, “because all those people are off doing this thing and I’m like ‘I just don’t get it.’ I wish I got it. I’d love to be a part of it.”

They aren’t all that different, football and the theater. OK, the football audience is allowed to make noise and rise from their seats. And, it wouldn’t be considered encouragement to tell football players “Break a leg” right before showtime.

Both, however, require a lot of rehearsals with a lot of repetition. The performers wear special clothes for the performance. The audiences focus on the players, not the director/coach.

Like football, Du Laney said, “theater is one of the very few fine arts that is truly collaborative. It’s never solo work. So the idea of having a sense of ensemble and a sense of teamwork is incredibly useful.”

“Theater types oftentimes like to look down on the athletic types. And I just think that's a mistake. Gosh, I want that for us. I would love it if people felt that way about us and to have that kind of rabid fandom and that interest in ‘I gotta see the show.’

“I mean, who wouldn’t want that?”

And now, you patrons of the 2024 college football season, it’s showtime.

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Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com