PLUME: Moving on to UCLA, at that period of time, was there again a culture shock?

SHIMERMAN: No, because for the first year I lived at home. UCLA was not that far away from home and it was a big school, obviously much bigger than Santa Monica, where I went to high school. But it wasn’t so much a culture shock. Remember, I had just left my small town junior year and then I went to Santa Monica, so the idea of changing classmates, I had already practiced once, and it wasn’t that hard. I enrolled as a Political Science major, and I graduated as an English major, but I always matriculated over to the drama department and immediately started doing plays in the theater department.

PLUME: Was drama offered as a major at that time?

SHIMERMAN: Oh, absolutely. In fact, after I graduated – I’m not sure whether I had anything to do with it, and I played a lot of lead parts in the theater department over the course of the four years that I was there – but after I graduated, they changed the rules so that you had to be a theater major to play the big parts.

PLUME: Was it something that you didn’t even consider, as far as changing your major?

SHIMERMAN: No. I wanted to be an English major and my specialization was Shakespeare. Even in the last two years of college when it became clear to me that I was very much interested in acting – poly-sci major had disappeared after my first year – for my junior, senior and sophomore years I was an English major. As it became clear to me that I wanted to be an actor, it also became clear to me that I wanted to be a classical actor, and so I thought the best way to investigate the classical studies would be through the English department rather than the theater department, because I was continuing to act in the theater department – so I was getting a seat-of-your-pants education by doing it in the theater department, but I was getting a formal education in the English department, studying the language and the works.

PLUME: Learning the mechanics behind it.

SHIMERMAN: Right.

PLUME: At that time, starting out as an actor, what were the biggest obstacles that you had to overcome?

SHIMERMAN: Well, one of the biggest obstacles was living in Los Angeles and seeing the film industry was primarily interested in very good looking people. I was always a character actor, so that was always a detriment. I always thought, “Okay, well, this is going to be a very tough uphill climb.” And it turned out to be hard and easy at the same time. The other part was simply I was mostly interested in classical theater, and there wasn’t a lot of that in Los Angeles to follow. Most of my mentors were suggesting I should move to New York, where there was more theater to be found. At that time, when I was in college, I really wasn’t interested at all in doing television or film. I really was only interested in doing theater. That is what I had been trained for, that is what I was excited about, and that was the path I eventually followed.

PLUME: Because you simply weren’t interested in TV or film?

SHIMERMAN: That’s right. It didn’t have the language that theater did. It didn’t have the four to five weeks of rehearsal time which made a character grow, and you really felt that you owned it. Again, it seemed like a closed door to me, because I only saw good-looking people appearing on films and TV. The people who weren’t so good looking were the older people, but I was a long way from that age. So I thought it’d be best for me to stay in the theater where I thought your acting ability was more important. I’ve learned over a lifetime that that’s not true, but at that time, I thought that real actors only went into the theater.

PLUME: In which direction did your professors point you?

SHIMERMAN: A wonderful, wonderful professor named Ed Kaye-Martin, who was my mentor for many years – even after school – he always recommended working in the theater and always recommended that I go to New York. So, eventually, I took his advice and went.

PLUME: This was after the stint at the Globe Theater in San Diego?

SHIMERMAN: I left for New York after The Globe. I had spent a summer there in San Diego, working with actors who either lived in San Francisco or lived in New York City. I got an earful over the summer of the benefits of both places, and eventually – although I had a better recommendation and the ability to go to ACT in San Francisco to work – I decided to go to New York instead, for a number of reasons, including just a work opportunity. At that time I was working in a restaurant chain called Victoria Station, which was a prime rib house. A job opportunity with the chain came up outside of New York in a town called Darien, Connecticut. The combination of my desire to want to go to New York, plus this job opportunity, convinced me pretty quickly that that’s what I was going to do.

PLUME: What did you actually do when you got to New York?

SHIMERMAN: I waited tables in Darien, Connecticut. What I also did was send out a ton of letters to various regional theaters in that area, the northeast. Luckily enough, one of Ed Kaye-Martin’s teachers, one of my mentor’s mentors, got a letter and was kind enough to hire me for a very small part in my very first professional – after The Globe – professional theater experience. I went back to the restaurant, and a couple of months later I got accepted to go to a Shakespeare festival in Vermont, where I played the lead role – and that was great. Right after that, I was very fortunate. I got a general audition for Joe Papp’s theater in New York, in the New York Shakespeare Festival.

PLUME: Which at that time, I guess, was at the height of its power.

SHIMERMAN: Yes, it was. Just about that time, Chorus Line was about to open. Chorus Line, of course, made the New York Shakespeare Festival a Broadway entity after that. But I got a general audition and did a lot of Shakespeare for the casting people, and then I was very fortunate in that very soon after my audition they were casting for a production, a very avant-garde production of Three Penny Opera. The director primarily wanted to work with people who didn’t have New York credits and had certain types of faces. So the thing that had always been to my detriment, which was my ethnic looking quality, was actually a benefit here for Richard Foreman, who was the director. That, plus my inexperience – which was also what he wanted – plus my having been in the right place at the right time, I ended up being in Three Penny Opera, and that was a very famous production with Raul Julia that ran for a year and a half at Lincoln Center. At that time, Lincoln Center was a Broadway house.

PLUME: When directors are looking for actors with no experience, what are the reasons why?

SHIMERMAN: That’s such an anomaly. It almost never happens, because there’s an old cliché in New York theater that you can’t get a Broadway show until you’ve done a Broadway show. It’s a catch-22 situation. Richard, he’s a well-known avant-garde director with ideas of his own. After Joe had put his stamp on certain casting, like Raul and Elizabeth Wilson, and C. K. Alexander, the smaller parts were up for Richard Foreman to cast. It rarely happens. Directors want to work with the best actors they can – Richard wanted to mold people. He wanted people who didn’t necessarily have their own techniques already cemented in their psyches. So he picked a company of rather inexperienced people who had great potential and great looks, and molded us into a phenomenal cast and company.

PLUME: How would you describe your transition? How were you molded?

SHIMERMAN: As a young actor, I had always thought that I was the be all and the end all, as far as choices. As an actor, I thought, “Well, the actor makes the choices and the director sort of shapes them.” But Richard Foreman is a very powerful director and brilliant at what he does, and he gave us all the choices. We weren’t allowed to make choices. In a sense, and I don’t mean this to sound bad or critical, we were puppets and he manipulated the strings – which he’s famous for, actually. He’s famous for his strings. We were better for it. It was a brilliant production to watch and to experience. I was very honored, when I look back, to have been part of it. And it was, of course, the beginning of my career.

PLUME: What is it like to fully experience that grind once it actually kicks in?

SHIMERMAN: “We’re trapped in a hit.” That was the expression the actors used to say. Because we’d do it day after day, week after week, month after month. We could get out, of course – we could quit. But then we’d go back to unemployment – or in my case, back to waiting on tables.

PLUME: Which is not really a valid alternative.

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, but when Sunday would come, you’d say to yourself, “What did we do Wednesday? What did I do Tuesday? I can’t remember. All I remember is being onstage.” It was a grind, and it was a great education. By grind, yes, it was difficult work. But it gave me – one of the things anybody who’s worked with me will probably say about me – a tremendous work ethic about doing the work as good as you can, and never complaining about the hours. Because that’s what you signed on for. It’s not so terrible to be caught in a hit, to be trapped in a hit.

PLUME: How do you keep it fresh for yourself every night?

SHIMERMAN: Because it’s a puzzle. You keep trying to unlock the puzzle, and even when you think you’ve finished the puzzle, invariably, you’ll find that you missed something. So even during the year a half – and I’ve had no theater run as long as that – but in the ones that have followed, it’s always a matter of trying to figure out how to make it better. It’s always a matter of repainting the canvas so it’s just a little bit better on Sunday than it was on Tuesday.

PLUME: Has there ever been a time when you couldn’t unlock the puzzle?

SHIMERMAN: Yes – sometimes TV, because of the shortness of the preparation time. I look back on the performances and say, “What was I doing? My God, why didn’t they fire me on the spot? That was totally the wrong choice.” Including the first time I did the Ferengi. They were all wrong choices. And, unfortunately, me and the dozens of actors who followed me playing Ferengi all had to live with them.

PLUME: Was there very little direction from the outside, as far as interpretation?

SHIMERMAN: There was very little direction, very little good direction. The direction I got was antithetical to anything that should have been given. The sort of gerbil-like quality of the Ferengi in that very first episode was the idea of the director. The Ferengi, almost instantaneously, went from being galactic threats to being galactic comic figures. I mean, if you watch TNG in the earlier episodes, the Ferengi were spoken of as some sort of vicious, horrible, competitive creatures. Then the moment you saw them, with me in the forefront, they became these sort of laughable idiots. That was the direction of the director, and the bad choices – admittedly – the bad choices by me.

PLUME: How much of the work that you did on DS9 was either hindered or aided by those choices?

SHIMERMAN: Well, the thing you learn in life is the mistakes you make make you stronger, if you learn from them. There were many things that were set in stone because the Ferengi had been established on TNG, and many times I would have liked to have changed that. But, at the same time, I had to work twice as hard to improve, make them real, and still try to achieve some sort of three-dimensionality. Even though my work would have been a little easier if those earlier choices hadn’t been made, I think my character, in the performance I gave eventually over the course of seven years, was stronger because of the handicaps that were given to me at the beginning of the series.

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