Ruthann Curry Browne — she directs; she acts; she sings; she writes.
So much talent packed into such a tiny person.
The 5-foot-2-inch Conway woman is the director of the Youth Theatre of Central Arkansas at the University of Central Arkansas and also an adjunct instructor of theater at UCA and Hendrix College.
“I’ve been doing theater since I was 10,” she said. Browne’s first role was Marta in The Sound of Music. She got the part, despite embarrassing her big brother, who also was in the play.
“I just sang ‘The Hills are Alive,’” she said.
Her brother teased her by saying, “Mom, she tried to sing like Julie Andrews.”
“Apparently, I sang it with a lot of vibrato,” she said, imitating how she might have sounded.
Browne grew up in northern Virginia, the third of six children in a tight-knit family. She said she was a tomboy who worked on cars and rode motorcycles. “Dad would take me to softball practice on the back of a motorcycle,” she said.
Her father, Thomas F. Curry, an engineer and research scientist, worked at the Pentagon under the deputy secretary of the Navy. “He and his team developed what now are used for drones; we just knew Daddy was an engineer. It was all top secret,” she said.
But her father had an artsy side, too. “He played the cornet and sang at the top of his lungs,” she said. Her parents always were playing record albums, too. Her mother was a former English teacher and ran an after-
school drama club, a fact that only came to light when Browne was an adult, she said. Her mother also ran a textbook store for colleges when Browne was in high school.
Browne earned her bachelor’s degree in music with a minor in dramatic literature at College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and got her master’s degree in performance from the University of Denver in Colorado. She always thought she would teach right away, but she got her actor’s equity card and just kept getting acting jobs. She danced and sang and acted her little heart out on stages in Colorado in summer stock, winter stock and regional theater, and then felt pangs of homesickness, so she went home to Virginia. She worked in dinner theater and got into arts management, where she scheduled runs of plays.
When a friend asked Browne to come with her to audition in New York, she went and was cast in an off-Broadway show.
“I got cast in Sh-Boom! Sh-Boom!, a ’50s Grease-kind-of show,” she said.
She lived in New York for seven years and met her husband, Kevin, who had an established acting career onstage and in commercials. She met him at an acting studio.
“Actors continue to work on their craft,” she said. “You’re doing scene study, voice and movement training and acting for the camera.”
Browne also did comedy improv with the New York group of Chicago City Limits, and she was in one Broadway show, but it closed after three nights.
Browne said her favorite role was the lead in Baby With the Bathwater. During the first scene, she recalled that she walked out, and when she said her first line, “the audience howled. I was like, ‘Wow!’ They were on the floor,” she said.
“I always hooked into things that had a heart and were at least a little bit humorous,” she said.
To make ends meet, Browne also worked as a temp for a lawyer’s office during the day while performing in plays at night or managing plays. She also became the general manager of a musical-theater development company called Musical Theatre Works, which developed new musicals for the Broadway stage. “They were like the farm team for Broadway,” she said.
Browne started directing more and more – and one actor stands out.
“I directed Edward Norton in his first New York play,” she said. That would be the Academy Award-nominated Edward Norton.
The play was called Lovers, and it was a success, she said.
“Edward was just fresh off the boat in New York from Yale University. He wanted to write op-ed; he was a writer. I said to him, ‘Honey, you’ve got to act.’”
Browne said Edward Albee, a famous playwright, saw Norton in Lovers “and knew Edward had ‘it.’”
She said Albee cast Norton in a production, and Norton’s career took off after that.
Browne said that although she hasn’t talked to him in a while, she and Norton have stayed in touch over the years, occasionally exchanging Christmas cards. He sent her a photograph taken at a benefit of him and the female lead in Lovers with a note about those being some of the best days of his life in New York.
Browne said Norton is “the most genuine, down-to-earth person; he really is.”
The Brownes moved from New York to Arizona when Kevin went to get his master’s, and she took courses toward her doctorate in theater for youth. They later moved to Boulder, Colorado, for him to earn his doctorate. They had a son and a daughter during that time.
Ruthann started a youth-theater program in the kids’ schools in Boulder, directed community theater and taught drama and English literature at a Catholic school in Boulder for 1 1/2 years.
“They’d never had a drama teacher who actually did a play with them,” she said. Browne wrote a curriculum for the program, too.
The Brownes moved to Conway in August 2003 for Kevin to take a job in the UCA theater program.
“At first, I was a little bit lost,” she said. “I was like, ‘Where am I?’”
Browne got a job teaching sixth-grade literature at St. Joseph Catholic School in Conway in 2004. “I loved it,” she said.
She also is part of the Arkansas Arts in Education teaching roster. “I spend a week at a time in residency in public schools around the state integrating the arts in the classroom. Sometimes, I’m in a civics classroom … English or social studies. … We do something that integrates what they’re studying with art. I really, really love it,” she said.
Liz Parker, then business and production manager of the UCA theater program, called Browne about 12 years ago and said she’d heard about Browne’s background in children’s theater and asked her to get involved in Youth Theatre of Central Arkansas. Part of the UCA theater program, it holds a six-week workshop each summer.
Parker was involved with the youth-theater program since its inception in 1989, according to the UCA website, and served as coordinator for many years.
“When she and Kevin moved to Conway, there was a built-in person to do it; it was obvious,” Parker said. “She’s been doing it ever since. She’s brought continuity, first of all, because she was able to come back each year.”
Browne started running the summer program and built a curriculum for it.
She also is chairwoman of the Conway Public Art Board and is a member of the executive board for Conway Alliance for the Arts.
In April, she received the Outstanding Arts Educator award from Conway Alliance for the Arts, and she was nominated by Youth Theatre of Central Arkansas students.
“That meant so much I could hardly talk about it,” she said.
Browne said having Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre at UCA each summer is a big plus — the students get to see the professional actors.
“We can hook into exciting stuff going on on campus,” she said. Browne walked down the hallway of Snow Fine Arts Center, where students in a classroom on one side of the hallway were working on costumes for Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre and, across the hall, the youth-theater students were warming up in the Black Box Theatre.
The summer intensive for youth-theater participants is just that, Browne said.
“We try to train them so they’ll learn more than ‘hang up a sheet and put on a play,’” she said. “Arts and theater arts help us learn what it means to be a human being — what it means to be on this planet and in this community.
“We’ve had lots of youth-theater kids graduate and come on to school here,” she said. “We’ve had some really great UCA students who then began to teach youth.”
The plays performed by the Youth Theatre of Central Arkansas at the conclusion of its summer workshops run the gamut of genres. “Sometimes, it’s funny; sometimes, it’s sad,” she said.
“I’m still proud of the year we did A Thousand Cranes.” It’s the true story of a girl who was 2 when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and it was performed in conjunction with a national movement.
Browne writes a lot of plays for young people, and the youth theater students have performed a few over the years.
This year, the junior group will perform The Buffet Games, her take on the movie The Hunger Games.
“Sometimes, we can do just plain entertainment to learn how to laugh at ourselves,” she said.
Her goal for youth theater is to reach underserved kids. “I think there’s a whole community here who needs this stuff — to jump around, be themselves, create.”
Her ultimate dream, she said, would be to have a new arts facility with at least a little corner devoted to Youth Theatre of Central Arkansas to have year-round classes.
Browne said what she hopes will be the end result of her life is — whether students end up being another Edward Norton, community-theater performers, teachers or in another field — that they have a life-long appreciation for the arts.
“If nothing else, it makes them better human beings … stronger community members, better at communicating with each other. If nothing else, if they will go support the arts, that’s what I want for them,” she said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.