Aware of his recognition factor, Runyeon on a given night is liable to turn to his audience in the midst of his dark biblical tale and ask, "Sounds like a soap opera, doesn't it?"
Actually it does. Unlike his predecessor, Alec McCowan, the English actor who toured the U.S. in 1978 with his one-man performance, St. Mark's Gospel, Runyeon delivers his version in the simplest English. "You have to be careful about not treating God's word like a deadly text," he says. "The story's original language is so plain it's called 'barroom Greek.' "
Runyeon didn't come to the New Testament from a lifetime of devotion or a shimmering religious conversion. Still, he says, the suicide of his former Princeton University roommate 10 years ago got him thinking hard about faith and priorities. "That's when you sort of wake up from that adolescent haze and go, 'Gee, maybe I need to sit down and decide what I believe and what kind of person I'm supposed to be.' "
He was supposed to be a normal, upper-middle-class American boy. Runyeon grew up in Reading, Pa., the second of four children of Dr. William Runyeon, a surgeon and a Lutheran, and the former Jane Williams, a home-maker and an Episcopalian. (Frank was confirmed as an Episcopalian.) At Princeton he majored in American religion and played piano and wrote for Princeton Triangle Club revues.
Graduating in 1975, Runyeon migrated to Los Angeles, threw a few of his Triangle scripts through various transoms and supported himself by typing for temp agencies. In 1977 he returned to New York City to try his hand at TV commercials. He never got one. "I look too dangerous, too ethnic and untrustworthy," he says.
Dangerous and untrustworthy landed him the part of the conniving Steve Andropolous on As the World Turns in 1980. He spent six years on the show, two of them with an emerging actress named Meg Ryan. Also in 1980, Runyeon married Annie O'Hayer, now 41 and mother of their three kids: Anna, 13, Frankie, 10, and Robert, 6. "Every one of them was born under very difficult circumstances," he says. "Anna [pneumonia] and Robert [difficult Cesarean] weren't expected to live—but they did. So you begin to reflect on your own mortality."
He had also seen McCowan perform his Gospel on Broadway. "I thought—me being an actor, being interested in writing—maybe the way for me to enter into the world of questions about our mortality was to study the gospel of Mark, maybe even memorize it."
Over the next two years, while back in L.A. and working as Father Donnelly on the NBC soap Santa Barbara, Runyeon began studying ancient Greek and going to graduate school in Pasadena. There he developed his one-man play and started performing it in area theaters. In 1992, after a stint playing Simon Romero on General Hospital, he moved to Westport, Conn., and delved more deeply into religious studies, first at Yale, then at the General Theological Seminary, where he received his master's degree last month. Meanwhile he polished his performance of the tormented saint and took the show on the road to churches and little theaters.
His passion—not to mention his schedule—can drive Annie to good-natured distraction. "Living with someone like this makes you crazy," she says with a laugh. "My job is to keep the family grounded." Runyeon is grounding himself for the summer in Westport: no soaps, no Afraid. But the actor—who earns little from Afraid and continues to audition for TV roles—has already completed a new piece, Sermon on the Mount, in which he plays the apostle Matthew. "I love soap operas," he muses, "but what I'm saying is, 'It's not enough.' I need to explore deeper questions and live out stories of faith." As if embarrassed by the weightiness of the notion, Runyeon adds nonchalantly, "I've also memorized The Raven." He pauses. "The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe there's something in that."
ALLISON LYNN in Westport
- Contributors:
- Allison Lynn.
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