A man of many talents

It's mid-afternoon on a Monday, in a third-floor room at Virginia Commonwealth University's Franklin Street Gymnasium. Undergraduates in black workout attire stand in a circle, not far from an array of rapiers on the wooden floor.

"The broadswords of the medieval period were basically sharp baseball bats," theater professor Aaron Anderson explains cheerily. He demonstrates how you'd wallop an opponent's nose with the blunt end of a broadsword. His audience -- undergraduate students in an advanced movement class -- watch, rapt.

It's mid-afternoon on Tuesday -- 24 hours later -- in VCU's Molecular Medicine Research Building. A workshop on empathy and end-of-life communication is unfolding in a ground-floor conference room. Medical residents sit soberly behind desks, watching a skit in which a physician talks to the family of a brain-dead patient.

"What is going on?" says Anderson, playing the patient's querulous son. He proceeds to argue loudly with everyone onstage, then storms out, swearing and slamming the door behind him. The skit concludes, and Anderson returns to join a question-and-answer session aimed at prompting the young doctors and nurses to think about matters like body language and self-awareness. (The Mindful Clinician Project, aimed at improving clinician communication and quality of life, sponsored the session.)

Two days, two starkly different assignments -- that's normal for Anderson, a 42-year-old scholar, voice and movement instructor, fight director, stuntman, gun wrangler and media-violence expert. Since arriving at VCU in 2001, he has taught subjects ranging from mask work to Asian theater to the history and theory of tragedy.

And as if that weren't enough, he and VCU theater department chairman David S. Leong recently imparted tips on communication to officials at the Richmond branch of the Federal Reserve -- an institution whose security protocol, Anderson quips, "is like the opening scene to 'Mission: Impossible.'"

"Aaron is one of those rare people who uses both the right and left half of his brain," says Leong. "He's very creative; he's spatial; he has a strong aesthetic -- and yet he's an intellect. I don't know another person who's like that."

"It's just incredible, the knowledge that he has," says Ed Herendeen, producing director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival, in Shepherdstown, W.Va., where Anderson served as fight director last summer. Herendeen says Anderson's artistry, understanding of human behavior and consciousness of safety issues make him a superb collaborator.

"Aaron has had a profound effect on student residents," says Dr. Alan Dow, assistant dean for medical education in VCU's School of Medicine. Dow, a colleague in a groundbreaking program that uses theater techniques to help doctors enhance their bedside manners, praises Anderson's ability "to relate stuff he's learned from all of his experiences to new things."

Anderson sees continuity in his unusually varied work. "In truth," he says, "I really only teach one subject: honesty and authenticity in human interaction, even in overwhelming or extreme situations."

Raised in North Carolina and South Carolina, Anderson has experienced extreme situations himself. In the 1980s, he dropped out of college to join the Army. One day, while rock climbing on a castle in Germany, he fell five stories, smashing both legs. He spent a year in a hospital at Fort Bragg.

But despite being unable to bend his ankles, he taught himself to walk again. Back at college, he majored in English, but drifted into theater. Studying literature, he says, "takes the words and dissects them. It makes them dead. Theater does the reverse: It takes words and makes them alive."

Because of his martial-arts background -- and the interest in movement he acquired while re-learning to walk -- fellow drama buffs recruited him to handle stage combat. Later, he earned a master's degree in acting from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a doctorate in culture from Northwestern University.

These days, Anderson's fight-directing work is less a moneymaking enterprise than a respite from academia and, in his words, "a way of being expressive." In his view, brutality on screens and stages is eloquent and profoundly meaningful, no matter what critics of media violence may say.

"We have a need, a desire to tell these stories," he explains. "What is it about these stories? It turns out that they are actually about power and identity, and we need a shorthand for all that."

Perfecting a shorthand can take work. For instance, in Shepherdstown last summer, he found himself spending an evening throwing food at a wall. He needed to see what edibles would be suitably noisy when an actress hurled them onstage.

"I've got a weird life," Anderson said.

Celia Wren is a former managing editor of American Theatre magazine. Contact her at .