Joe Ray came to the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre in June of 1981. It was all quite by accident. We had just returned from a USO tour and the actor that I had employed to play Jubal Early in Too Free For Me had taken another position. Wayne Bowman said he knew an excellent actor and since the outdoor drama, Wilderness Road, had closed, he thought we might be able to employ him. I have to admit that I was a little dubious about the prospect of hiring someone I had never seen work, and who, for the last three years, had primarily been a director and not an actor. However, when Joe showed up and began reading the part of Jubal Early, I knew I had found the genuine thing: a good solid actor.
That summer, he not only played Jubal Early, but had several parts in Charity For All, and helped create a variety of exciting roles in Roar of the Silence. Back in those days, I had the actors do a little improvisation with the historical documents before I scripted the play. Joe told me once that he was very hesitant, as a matter of fact, to use his exact words, he said: “I was dumbfounded and never thought I could do it… I was too old for this approach.” However, Joe quickly fell into it and became an excellent improvisational artist. I have always been convinced that there was nothing on the stage Joe Ray couldn’t do.
I can’t remember all the roles Joe Ray played here, but some stand out: as the father in Life With Father, the husband in Cheaper By The Dozen, a criminal in Arsenic and Old Lace, and Edward Staunton in The Conspiracy, (where Joe sang and danced for the first time).
I have worked with hundreds of actors over the thirty-plus years of the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre, but there is none whose performances I will ever treasure more than Joe Ray.
R. Rex Stephenson
I met Joe Ray, as he would say, “Where else? In the theatre!” My first role at the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre was opposite him in The Enchanted Cottage, where we played obnoxious parents to the leading characters. The second act began with a “ballet,” wherein Joe stormed out to center stage, and with great enthusiasm, raised a rubber chicken to the audience before storming off. He recalled a moment from my first season, 2001, when we made it into the wings after some other actor had lost his place onstage and we just barely escaped with our dignity intact. We took each other’s hands in a gesture of support, and “I knew from that moment,” he said, “we were going to be friends.”
I couldn’t have had a better friend than Joe Ray. We spent countless hours doing nothing but sitting in the office after everyone had gone home for the day, just telling stories. He was dapper and charming and thoughtful, never missing an opportunity to send a card or a gift, and never neglecting to document every event with carefully detailed photographs. It was as important to him to take pictures of my first car, “the mothership,” as it was for him to send me old photos of himself before we knew one another.
I looked up to Joe Ray as an actor and a director, and he would send me scripts from shows he had worked on, with careful notes and details in the margins, every page thoroughly documented and every detail accounted for. We shared teaching stories and compared notes on plays we saw, the great ones and the awful ones. He was completely devoted to the theatre and his work, but he was always supportive of whatever I was doing. He made a life of celebrating small moments and big successes and although it is a sad day for the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre and for the friends he leaves behind, his life and work deserve celebration.
Once, after a summer season, as we were saying our goodbyes, he said to me: “As Dorothy said to the Cowardly Lion, ‘I’m going to miss you the most.’”
Emily Rose Tucker
