The lives and roles of Hugh Hill: Doctor, lawyer, actor takes the stage in ‘Our Town’

As a young man, Hugh Hill decided to follow his dream, and it swept him into three parallel careers: emergency medicine, the law, and the theater.

Far from being overwhelmed by this vocational trinity, Hill, a native Virginian and for eight years a part-time resident of Huntly, seems to thrive in it, finding that each line of work informs the other two. At 74, he doesn’t regret roads not taken because he followed all three pursuits that summoned him.

After stepping back from clinical responsibilities at Johns Hopkins Department of Emergency Medicine, where he has worked in multiple capacities since 1996, Hill has more time for the stage: he played Jacob Marley in the RAAC Theatre’s production of “A Christmas Carol” last December, and will step into the role of the on-stage Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s indispensable drama, “Our Town,” which opens at the RAAC Theatre April 28.

In accepting the unconventional role, which is half-narrator, half- Greek chorus, Hill joins a pantheon of beloved actors, including Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Orson Welles, Ginger Rogers and Thornton Wilder himself. Hill must hold together the play’s characters and the forces that drive their lives. With sage-like omniscience, he names the buildings of the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, presents the aspirations and foibles of the residents, and carries the burden of knowing what’s been and what’s coming.

Having brought coherence to his own three careers, Hill is equipped to knit together Wilder’s motley characters into a dramatic whole, interacting with them with a benign humor, and offering wisdom sparingly and without grandiosity. Andy Platt, who is directing the play, trusts Hill’s varied experiences— in emergency rooms and courtrooms— to take on the more challenging aspects of the play, and to maintain equilibrium if something goes wrong on the stage.

When the Pulitzer Prize-winning play transitions from small town drama to cosmic inquiry, the Stage Manager makes space for the living and the dead, opening an exploration of how people locate and celebrate what is most real in life. And when the character of Emily, who has died, revisits her own life, it is the Stage Manager who must answer her question: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

Going Plural

As a high school student in Roanoke, Hill traveled to Staunton where a career counselor suggested being a doctor, or if not, a lawyer, or if neither materializes, a forest ranger. But at Washington and Lee University, Hill began acting, as well as taking part in summer productions, plus a course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. At graduation, he had completed the requirements for a Bachelor of Science in pre-med and a Bachelor of Arts in drama.

It happened that the head of the college’s theater program had made a start in medical training but abandoned it to concentrate on the dramatic arts. Hill didn’t take this route. “I knew acting was something I really wanted to do,” he said. “and I had thoughts about doing it professionally. But you had to be able to sing, and dance and act, and I could only do the last.”

Still, he never gave up the stage. The summer of his first year in medical school, he worked at the Medical College of Virginia each day, then traveled to Williamsburg from Richmond each evening to act in Paul Green’s symphonic play, “The Common Glory.” A photograph from this production, performed in an outdoor theater, shows a dashing young actor playing opposite a radiant young woman. The actor was Hugh Hill; the actress was Glenn Close, another double major, studying theater and anthropology at The College of William and Mary.

Close went on to become a globally renowned film star, earning eight Oscar nominations for her roles on the screen. Hill’s acting roles played out in small theaters near the mid-Atlantic locations where he practiced emergency medicine.

But Hill’s acting has been anything but a casual hobby. He acted in “Macbeth,” playing Macbeth. He acted in “Julius Caesar,” playing Caesar. He was the ghost in “Hamlet,” Benedict in “Much Ado About Nothing,” Potzo in “Waiting for Godot.” All told, he’s had 32 stage roles, plus 13 stage readings, radio plays, voiceovers, and a handful of independent films. He can summon up entire passages of Shakespeare. He knows how to address an audience with his back turned, and how to stage a pause without pretension. According to his acting curriculum vitae, he stands ready to play characters ranging in age from 59 to 85.

After his medical training in Richmond, Hill began to establish himself in the evolving specialty of emergency medicine. At the time, he said, emergency room physicians sported “beards, Birkenstocks and backpacks,” developing tools to think and respond to the fraught situations they faced each day. For Hill, the emergency room carried a clear benefit: relatively predictable hours, leaving time to get back to the stage. Meanwhile, he began working on the third leg of his professional stool, enrolling in the University of Virginia Law School.

Once the foundations were in place, Hill began living the plural life— as a doctor, lawyer, and actor. It only worked, he said, with “an incredibly supportive wife,” Dr. Sandra Read, a dermatologist he met, and married, while in medical school. She understood the demands of a medical career, as well as Hill’s passion for acting. “She knows how important this is for me,” he said. Once the two doctors had two children, fifteen months apart, the daily challenges were intense, but the pressures never extinguished Hill’s determination to honor his three callings. 

All offer a high degree of novelty. “Emergency medicine is never repetitious, and theater performances are never so either,” he said. “Every show within a run is different, with what’s going on on stage and of course different audiences. Which leads me to remember that law is not so either. Every client and sequence are different, even if you are dealing with the same subject matter.”

His legal career hasn’t been a standard law practice. Certified by the American Board of Law and Medicine, he has offered largely consultative services, focused on malpractice, medical ethics, insurance and risk analysis, appearing in courtrooms to provide a medical context for events under court scrutiny.

Over the decades the boundaries have begun to blur: Shakespeare creates emergency rooms in his plays, while hospitals become places where life and death dramas unfold. Meanwhile, the theater becomes a continuous trial where the actors must convince each audience that what is happening on the stage is real. 

A team player

Hill has a reputation for relating well to directors. “He’s usually the first person to learn his lines,” said Mike Mahoney, who directed “Waiting for Godot” at The RAAC Theatre. “He knows the theater. He has very strong opinions about roles, but at the same time, he says he’ll do what the director wants him to.”

Sallie Morgan, a longtime actress and theater supporter, recalled the casting for “A Christmas Carol.” “I bet he would have enjoyed a crack at playing Scrooge, but he came in saying, ‘I’ll play the part you want me to play.’ He’s very much a team player.” Platt, who did play Scrooge, said that Hill “is a very good actor, and he’s also a hell of a nice guy.”

Hill’s collaborative instinct was also in evidence three years ago when he was poised to lighten his emergency room responsibilities at Hopkins.  However, Covid-19 hit, and he changed his mind. “It felt like desertion in the face of the enemy,” he explained.

In the pre-vaccine Covid era, emergency rooms fashioned one improvisation after another. “Because hospitals were short on protective masks, we learned to sterilize masks after use,” Hills said. Patients poured in with dangerously low levels of blood oxygen. The emergency staff, still learning about the nature of Covid infection, were intubating many of them, but “an alarming percentage were getting worse, or dying,” Hill recalled. “So instead of intubating we did a blast of oxygen into both nostrils.” The new tactic proved uncomfortable but much more effective. 

A Method Actor

Hill, who can seem both expansive and hyper-focused, has studied Bertolt Brecht, the German dramatist who urged actors to immerse themselves in their parts, but maintain a “third eye” to take in the full surroundings. Hill has applied the technique in both the theater and the emergency room.

Hill is also a student of “method acting” which began in the 1890s with Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and worked its way into American theater and film in the following century. The approach discourages acting that parrots other actors, or imitates people in the grip of strong emotions. Rather, actors are to behave as real people, summoning their own emotions and personalities to fit the demands of a play. Part way through rehearsals of “Our Town,” Hill took his 10-year-old grandson on a trip to Costa Rica. Immersed in the grandfather role for a week, Hill made the Stage Manager somewhat more of a grandfather– benign, empathetic, and leisurely. 

Though stepping back from clinical work, Hill remains passionate about emergency medicine. Through the Rapp Center for Education, he is teaching a four-session course on “What To Do Until Help Arrives.” He figures that, given the distance to emergency services and hospitals, residents need life-saving skills to get them through a crisis.

He also is advising Flint Hill’s Company 4 Fire & Rescue on its rehabilitation under new management.  As his life in Rappahannock takes shape on stage and off, he finds that situations “pull you in.”

He adds: “You don’t have to force yourself. It’s the most natural thing in the world.”

Tim Carrington is a board member of RAAC, which is sponsoring the “Our Town” production.

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