Special to STAR TREK.COM by Deborah Fisher

Among the nominations for this year's Tony Awards -- Broadway's equivalent of the Oscars -- is a dramatic play by Arthur Miller called "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan." The show's lead is played by an actor more than familiar to Star Trek fans, Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard). Many fans know that Stewart began his acting career on the stage. "I started life as a repertory actor where you play a different part every week," says Stewart of his early days with Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company. "You could be a clown in the afternoon and King Lear in the evening. I've always enjoyed that range."

Stage work is an essential part of any actor's training and many return to it regularly to recharge the batteries. Besides Stewart's turn on Broadway, Tony Todd (Kurn) recently finished a successful run in August Wilson's "King Hedley II" in Seattle and earlier this spring, Andrew J. Robinson (Garak) directed Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" in Los Angeles.

But it's hard to make a living exclusively treading the boards which is why so many actors gravitate toward the promise of steady -- and more lucrative -- work in television and film. Ironically, TV and film do not always make good use of an actor's theatrical training -- except in Star Trek. As a former Executive Producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, Jeri Taylor describes that certain theatrical "something" that producers always search for when casting Star Trek.

"Star Trek puts demands on an actor that are unlike those of any other series on the air. In Hollywood, a look and an attitude can make you a series lead but not on Trek. Only classically-trained actors are used because you don't want to hear accents or street sounds. All that says 20th century. Trek tries to abstract casting considerations to the point where actors sound timeless." "I did a lot of early work in regional theatres and the Folger Shakespeare Theatre," recalls J.G. Hertzler (General Martok) of his initial training. "Shakespeare helped with Star Trek more than anything. It helps you do the speech in a heightened form that's believable for the reality of science fiction."

Actor John Schuck is another example of an actor who used Shakespeare to his advantage to land the part of the Klingon Ambassador he portrayed in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home." "I knew [Director] Leonard [Nimoy] and he agreed to see me. I read the scene for him and he said very good, but I really can't use you, you're too young. I just happened to see the costume designer's rendering sitting on the desk with all the get-up, the beard, the hair. I said 'Leonard, a ten-year old boy could do this.' We laughed and I persuaded him to let me try it again. In my actor's mind, I grasped the image of King Lear. I didn't think of the ambassador as a bad person. I thought of him as someone with a point of view. I made him quite theatrical."

The other advantage of formal stage training and experience for Star Trek actors is learning how to handle serious makeup. "The theatrical background is very important because we need actors who aren't afraid of makeup," says Casting Director Ron Surma. "Trek is one of the few shows where they have to work underneath a lot of makeup and many actors can't do that."

"You're looking for people who are willing to wear a prosthetic that takes four hours to get into and two hours to get out of," says Jeri Taylor. "You can't hear because you're ears are covered and you can't see because you have lenses in. Then they have to be able to toss off the language and the technobabble to make it sound natural."

Many experienced stage actors have not only been able to overcome Star Trek's legendary makeup, but find inspiration in it. Jeffrey Combs has had the chance to create three memorable Star Trek characters -- Weyoun, Brunt, and Penk -- and he says the finishing touches on his roles all emerged during those hours in front of the makeup mirror.

"You're really flying by the seat of your pants when you get a Trek script because you sometimes get them only days before filming. You show up at the studio at 4:30 in the morning with no idea what process you'll go through. When I first showed up to do Weyoun, I had no idea. Thank God [Makeup Director] Michael Westmore is a genius. What he did was very simple, very striking, Kabuki-esque. With Brunt, once you put the Ferengi teeth it was almost like doing Jerry Lewis. With Penk, they did this forehead with these protruding nodules on either side. He had a widow's peak with red hair and Fu Manchu mustaches that hooked around my ears. Penk seemed sleek and slithery. You look in mirror and think 'oh that's what he looks like.'"

Early stage experience often seasons an actor in ways that pay off in character development later. Walter Koenig (Chekov) recalls learning an important lesson on stage doing scenes from "The Golden Boy" in a New York drama school that helped lead to his successful career in Star Trek. "I was playing a boxer who's a violin player with weak eyes. I honed in on his inadequacy, his weak eyes, and started to play it as a guy who feels very bad about himself. My instructor got me to see that there was more to this character than being so insecure. I'm sure I was able to ultimately do Chekov as a spunky, brash character because of that experience of learning that there is more than one way to approach a part."

Actors love stage and screen work for different reasons (and not just financial). Both offer different ways to build and sustain characters. "Theatre is a challenge," says Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine), "because it's live and in front of an audience. You have to keep things fresh night after night. But I love having one character in a television series that I can watch develop and develop with her over the course of several seasons. It's very exciting."

When Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham (Ru'afo) guest starred in "Star Trek: Insurrection," he said he found an exuberance about Star Trek that combined what he loves best about film and stage. "The magic of a stage performance is that something about it lives even if the show closes. It remains in the atmosphere. It has a kind of projection that is sacrificed as soon as it's done. There's something spiritually essential about a room full of people working together to help a performer achieve that experience.

"Film has a celluloid permanence but one of the magical things about it is that no matter what the critics say about a performance in a film, there can come a time when that performance can be proved to be great. The critics can be proven to be full of beans. You can combine that spiritual aspect of the stage work with the size and energy involved in doing a Star Trek film and it takes on a 'life' that I really respond to. Doing Star Trek is very liberating."