Arliss Howard, cast member, The Night Kitchen Radio Theater

Plucked from a small theatre in Kansas City, Missouri by a pair of exotic casting directors for a small role in a miniseries, The Day After, Arliss Howard has continued the nomadic life bestowed upon him by his traveling preacher father and roamed the world and the immediate logging trails of his Catskill farm home in search of inspiration and fun.

Among his film appearances that pop up most frequently on basic cable are Stanley Kubrick’s  Full Metal Jacket, The Lost World, and Amistad, directed by Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, and Men Don’t Leave, Paul Brickman director.

He met his wife, Debra Winger, on the set of Wilder Napalm, a cautionary tale of pyrotechnic powers, love, and serial incompetence and went on to perform with her and their son Babe in the film, Big Bad Love, which he adapted with his brother, James from Larry Brown’s short story collection and directed with Ms. Winger producing and cooking the family dinner each evening.

Howard has appeared on television in The Man Who Captured Eichman, capturing Robert Duvall, Old Man, based on Faulkner’s novella with a script by Horton Foote, and in a segment for This Dang Tractor, in which he demonstrated the proper way to drain a PTO crankcase without getting oil on a dinner jacket.

His theatre work includes, The Late Henry Moss, and Killer’s Head by Sam Shephard at Signature Theatre, New York, and Caryl Churchill’s A Number at New York Theatre Workshop.  He has appeared in several seasons at American Reperatory Theatre.

Howard enjoys radio as it represents technology with which he is long familiar, having listened to Monte Moore call Kansas City baseball games from a small radio won by his younger sister in a beauty pageant, a radio that survives today on a shelf in Howard’s barn where it is permanently tuned to maritime frequencies.