The saying that always summed up Aubrey Hampton to me was "The dogs bark, the caravan passes by." Hampton was that caravan: unruffled, undeterred, committed to going his own way whether or not anyone else was on board.
When Hampton founded the Gorilla Theatre as a platform for his and his partner (and later wife) Susan Hussey's work, he had to face scorn from area critics, and when the theater's vision expanded, there were still detractors who dismissed it as a rich man's trinket. But Hampton was unruffled: he offered gems like Wallace Shawn's The Fever and Warren Leight's Side Man, alongside plays by Hussey and himself, and ignored the barking dogs. And over the years he began to earn some grudging respect.
You had to be grateful that someone was bringing Falsettos and Six Degrees of Separation to the Bay area, and you had to admit that there was real accomplishment in Hussey's Christmas Trio and his very funny The Manhattan Play Doctor. Many of the best local actors got their starts on Gorilla's narrow stage, and many plays that would have remained rumors from the New York Times' arts pages made it to Tampa only because of theater-lover Hampton.
Furthermore, Hampton's financial contributions to his stage (sometimes as much as $400,000 for a single year) often meant that area audiences were exposed to levels of performance and design that other houses just couldn't afford. Could he be forgiven for being a millionaire? In the scrappy world of Bay area theater, that sometimes seemed to be the essential question. But however you answered that question, you couldn't deny that Hampton's theater was one of a kind, and sometimes the best in the city.
I knew he’d had cancer (as had the late Hussey) but I thought he’d overcome it (Gorilla Theatre is keeping mum on the cause of his death on May 9). Still, it wasn't like Hampton to complain about his health, and with the superb Bridget Bean managing the theater from day to day, I didn't think to inquire about his recent absence from the spotlight. Now I think I understand it, and I'm saddened by the realization.
I’ll remember Hampton best as he presented himself a few years ago in his office at Aubrey Organics, where I interviewed him for a profile: quiet, playful, dignified, centered. With his long white hair and white beard, he could have been a figure out of the Wild West; with his refusal to speak ill of anyone, he could have been a model for all captious arts partisans.
Strangely, there was something childlike about him, in the best sense, meaning vulnerable, available, innocent. If he was a showman, he was nonetheless the opposite of flamboyant. He was gentle, a gentleman with a child’s love of magic.
Gorilla Theatre, I’m told, will continue. That's a good thing. But a lot of us are going to miss the reassuring presence of this tenderly tenacious spirit.
