T HEATER I was little, we used to play duets together, but then he stopped when I got better than him, he says. One of my conditions for this show was that if I was going to take the risk of playing such a difficult and dramatic acting role [as the young terrorist], he was going to play the violin in the show! Every night when we got to that moment in the show [where we played together], I couldn’t help but be filled with gratitude, thinking to myself, ’Here I am playing with my father onstage in Edinburgh in my mother’s work!’ I will always keep that moment alive with me.” —Rebecca Raber Erik Johnke ’87 was 30 years old when he wrote his first play, but Colin Pip Dixon ’94 (center) onstage with his father (right) in a production of His Majesty, the Devil . s the son of two actors, Colin Pip Dixon ’94 was perhaps predestined for a life on the stage. In his almost 20-year career as a violinist and composer, the Haverford music major has performed in Poland as part of the European Mozart Academy and spent 14 years in Paris, where he performed in such diverse venues as the prestigious Salon Louis XIV at Les Invalides, the Iranian Cultural Center, and the almost 200-year-old historical monument Théâtre de l’Atelier. Now based in New York, Dixon had previously collaborated with his parents—most notably by composing the music for The Tolstoy Diaries , a play written by his mother, Alexandra Devon—but never before had a project been as much a family affair as the recent production of His Majesty, the Devil. The “play with music,” which showed at the 59E59 Theater in New York in July and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in August, was written by his mother, who died in 2010, and co-starred Dixon and his father, MacIntyre. In fact, Dixon wasn’t just a performer in the play, he was also its composer and co-producer. “It [was] a great privilege to be onstage with my father and see and experience the magic of his performance up close,” says Dixon, who undertook the work of the new production in tribute to his mother. “He carried the show with such unbelievable youth and energy, it was really a lesson for all of us. And when I see my mother’s script communicating and touching people or making them laugh, it is a way of continuing the relationship and of overcoming death.” His Majesty, the Devil , which was inspired by The Brothers Karamazov , is the story of a mysterious man visiting a young terrorist the night before a planned attack. After his mother’s death, Dixon revisited her old script with the ambition of adding music that would be more than an incidental score. Not only did he make the music part of the story, but he also insisted that the actors play the instruments onstage themselves. “My father was an amateur violinist years ago,” says Dixon. “When A in the 17 years since, he has crafted a dozen more. One of them, God’s Country , a collaboration with composer Elaine Chelton that chronicles a wealthy Englishman’s search to find his Irish birth mother in 1871, debuted this past summer at the New York Musical Theatre Festival to much acclaim. (The website Times Square Chronicles picked it as one of the festival’s five shows that should move on to bigger productions.) “A musical is a very powerful but difficult medium,” says Johnke, who is now in talks with producers for possible venues for another production of God’s Country . “Music has the potential to bypass the defense of the intellect and go straight to the heart. On the other hand, it is really tricky to transition between music and the book and to know which action should be expressed in song and what should be expressed in scene work.” Johnke, who was for a decade a high school theater director, now teaches at CITYterm at the Masters School, a residential, interdisci-plinary program for high school juniors and seniors who live at the Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., school for a semester and study New York City. That work, he says, even influences his playwriting; he credits the local history he learned in the course of his teaching job for a scene in God’s Country ’s second act that takes place at the caisson of the Brooklyn Bridge. And he hopes that he is influencing his students the way Haverford influenced him. “There is no doubt in my mind that Haverford was an incredibly important part of my educa-tion, a place in which I felt I had complete freedom to explore ideas and clarify my values,” he says. “At the time, people often said that every-thing we deliberated over so meticulously didn’t matter, because Haverford wasn’t the ’real world.’ But it was precisely that protected container that allowed us to do that explo-ration, because there was safety and trust. That is the kind of safety and trust that I try to cre-ate in my classroom every day, so that other students have that same opportunity.” —R.R. Erik Johnke ’87 24 HaverfordMagazine DIXON PHOTO: RODNEY DAMON II; JOHNKE PHOTO: AARON ALMENDRAL