On May 29, D. Nicholas Rudall, actor, director, translator, founding director of the Court Theatre and professor emeritus of classics at the University of Chicago, sent a message to 100 people on Facebook. “Dear friends,” he wrote, “The colon and liver cancer has become noticeably stronger in the last few weeks and as a consequence I have become noticeably weaker. I have decided, therefore, after many consultations with my daughter and professional palliative care experts, that it is time for me to enter hospice care.”
After that piece of information, Rudall looked back on his own life, which has now ended. Rudall died Tuesday at 78, his death announced Wednesday by Charles Newell, the current artistic director of Court Theatre.
“I have led an extraordinarily happy life doing the two professions I have loved most, teaching and translating classics and working in the professional theater,” he wrote. “I thank you all for helping me enjoy this wonderful life. There are tears, of course, but I entered this last stage of my life at peace and with a kind of subdued joy. So thank you all.”
Rudall’s decision to go public with the arrival of his final days led to an extraordinary outpouring of messages of love and support. To most of them, he crafted individual replies of thanks.
“It was a joy to be in a rehearsal room with you,” wrote the Chicago actress Carmen Roman.
“Your legacy and place in our firmament is assured,” wrote the Northlight artistic director BJ Jones, “and your impact is undeniable.”
“Love has always spilled out from you,” wrote the writer Sara Paretsky, “for your parents, your beautiful daughter, your friends, your students. I’m grateful that some of it shone on me, too.”
Born in 1940 in the small town of Lanelli, Wales, Rudall received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and began teaching at the University of Chicago while still in his 20s. Court Theatre had begun as a campus summer theater in the mid-1950s, but Rudall professionalized the company and shepherded its birth as a professional Chicago theater, separate from the university in the public’s mind but nonetheless housed on its campus and inextricably linked.
By the mid-1970s, Rudall was taking advantage of the theater’s intellectual audience base in Hyde Park to stage classic dramas of the kind that would likely have been box-office disasters at any other theater in America. But the Court audience lapped up such Rudall productions as Euripides’ “Medea” (1971) and Moliere’s “The Doctor In Spite of Himself” (1975).
Since his academic specialty was Greek drama, Rudall eventually began translating the classics himself; many of his versions of Greek tragedy subsequently were published by the Chicago publisher, Ivan R. Dee.
And even after Rudall was replaced by Newell as artistic director of Court in 1994, his lucid and performance-friendly translations remained a staple of the theater’s offerings, including “Iphigenia in Aulis” in 2014 (the year of Court’s 60th anniversary) and “Agamemnon” in 2015. That was exactly how he planned the later phase of his creative and scholarly pathway.
“It has been a long and extremely rewarding period of my life,” he said of his time running Court in a Tribune interview in 1994. “But it’s time for me to step away from day-to-day administration and to have the luxury of focusing only on artistic development.”
His career flourished thereafter. Rudall was a man who knew how to plan his life.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
