By Susan Jonas
Created by Founder/Executive Producer Casey Childs and Project Director Sally Plass, The Primary Stages Oral History Project is one of the most significant repositories of primary source theater history in recent years. The archive features lengthy video interviews with close to 200 leading lights of the Off- and Off-Off Broadway Movement, including: Willa Kim, Woodie King Jr., Wynn Handman, Richard Foreman, Fyvush Finkel, Marsall Mason, Everett Quinton, Tina Howe and many more directors, actors, producers, founding artistic directors and other participants who helped forge for profit and non-profit alternative theatre post World War II in New York. According to Childs and Plass, this is just the beginning. What can we glean from these personal stories about the origins of non-profit and experimental theatre? What circumstances helped it flourish and can it be replicated today?
The Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project will celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2024. Already in the archive are close to two hundred interviews with actors, casting agents, directors, designers, group sales specialists, press representatives, producers, playwrights, theater founders and dramaturgs— all sharing their experiences participating in and helping to create the Off- and Off-Off-Broadway movement. The project is the fruit of a 39-year relationship between Project Director Sally Plass and Primary Stages Founder Casey Childs.
Plass had been working at Juilliard for many years, stunned by the situation of having an actual regular paycheck after decades of freelancing as a stage manager and props designer, usually juggling several gigs at once, as you do. When she knew she would be moving on from Juilliard, she approached Childs, with whom she had worked many times over nearly four decades, saying she wanted to work with him ongoing, but not in any of her previous positions. Childs took from his desk a piece of paper— his bucket list of dream projects. She spotted the item on the list— an oral history project relating to the development of the Off- and Off-Off-Broadway Movement, she leapt at it: “Let’s do this one!”
Both are serendipitously qualified to curate this immense, important and inspiring enterprise. Each found his or her way to alternative theatre on a different path and for different reasons. I turned the tables on the two and asked them the very questions they asked their interviewees. They organized their interviews around these four questions:
- Where did they grow up and who or what were their early influences?
- What was their training, if any, and when did they move to New York City? And what did they remember about New York City and Off-Broadway at that time?
- What were their career highlights? (From which one often learns of their accomplishments, their failures, their passions, and sometimes their regrets.)
- Where do they see Off-Broadway going from here?
The Curators
Casey Childs grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan with his mother, a school teacher and community theater actress, and his father, a corporate lawyer who did a lot of legal work for, as well as fundraising for, the arts. His parents helped found the Circle Theater in Grand Rapids, which started in a hotel ballroom, then moved to the pavilion of a zoo, before finally securing its own facility. So Childs grew up backstage, and started performing with his mother at around seven years of age. His first show with her was Tad Mosel’s All the Way Home, adapted from James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family. Professionally, Childs started as an actor, getting a BFA in Acting, but then an MFA in Directing, both from Carnegie Mellon. He worked primarily as an actor at a variety of festivals specializing in Shakespeare, in Ashland, Oregon and Colorado, but at some point wanted to try his hand in New York.
Once there, through a Carnegie Mellon contact, he landed a brief unpaid observership at the NBC television soap “The Doctors,” and another one at “Another World” which was recorded at a studio on 14th street and Avenue M in Brooklyn. “I was curious about learning about television direction.” With a Directors Guild strike looming, he was offered the opportunity to go on salary— $500 a week. “That felt like millions to me but I’m not going to scab.” So he returned to acting for five shows with the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, after which he came back to New York.
He landed a job as a stage manager at New Dramatists, later becoming the assistant to the Artistic Program Director, who eventually committed suicide. Childs replaced him, first temporarily and then permanently. During this time he worked with a roster of notable playwrights, including John Patrick Shanley, August Wilson, Lee Blessing and Romulus Linney. Childs participated in readings and workshops of a hundred some odd plays each year. “I felt like I met every actor and director in town.” Over time he became convinced that playwrights needed to see their plays fully produced from soup to nuts, that they had to get their plays in front of audiences, and then be able to move on to the next play; “That’s how writers grow.” While many theaters were paying lip service to new play production, too many of the good plays and very good playwrights were not getting produced. Having taken a theatre management class in graduate school and an informal class at New Dramatists in fundraising—which every single staff member was required to take— he recruited an advisory group and then a board, created a five-year plan, and voila! In 1984 Primary Stages was born. Over the years he also returned to television, directing soaps, including “Another World” and “All My Children,” earning two Emmys, and subsidizing his theatre for almost forty years. He explained that Broadway was morally obligated to investors to turn a profit, but Off-Broadway was not; it was morally obligated “to produce work that was artistically worthwhile and enriched the community.” The latter does not exist to serve the former. He cited Larry Kornfeld who said in his interview that Off-and Off-Off-Broadway must be seen not as a stepping stone to commercial theater, but as an end in itself.
Sally Plass (Makman) and her family moved to Chicago from Rhinebeck and Schenectady to start a microfilm business, where she worked after school as a kid. Her dad had been a photographer. She inherited a passion for theater arts from her mom, a History and English teacher who wrote musicals (book, music and lyrics) while in college. Plass earned a B.S. and a Master of Arts Degree in Theater from Northwestern University. There were then no classes in stage management or directing, so she trained formally as a performer but worked throughout her schooling as a designer (lights, sets, props, costumes,) as a stage manager and in other capacities. It was upon graduating high school she was told by a mentor, the Technical Director, that women weren’t allowed in the Union for set design and so she would only be allowed to work in high schools. Like so many women and others discouraged from pursuing a career in the mainstream, she plunged into the world of alternative theater. She arrived in New York City in the late Sixties having no idea what the scene there would be; her education stopped at Arthur Miller. “I had no idea who Leonard Melfi or Sam Shepard were.” She lived a few blocks from Cafe Cino, but had no idea what that was. With the help of a Northwestern professor who had moved to New York and other contacts, she found work at the Unity Church where the pastor maintained a theater because his son wanted to be an actor. It was unpaid, of course, but she “got to work.”
It was a wild eventful time of pop-up events and happenings, street art and street theater, and a breadth of entrepreneurial artists forming companies. Theater was everywhere in myriad spaces other than actual theaters. Young and energetic, Plass was able to juggle numerous gigs while also auditioning as an actress. She designed sets and props, stage managed, but also worked as a visual artist and in publishing, in particular on the books of Joseph Campbell. At one point she wandered into La Mama looking for work and came upon a woman sweeping the lobby— Ellen Stewart, who told her to come back tomorrow. “She said that to everyone. It was a test.” Plass returned the next day and was hired. At first she had a hard time reconciling her experience there with her academic training. “I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.” At one point she came to Stewart in a panic; the actors were running wild all over the fire escape. “Ah, they are struck by the muse,” explained Stewart. “So, it’s ok?” “Yes. It’s ok.”
Plass’ C.V. is too vast to synopsize, but suffice it to say that she crossed paths with many of the key figures in the Off- and Off-Off-Broadway revolution. She worked at Roundabout when it was a scrappy downtown theatre under the leadership of Gene Feist. It’s important to remember the rougher origins of such theaters. Manhattan Theatre Club was founded in 1970, according to their website, by “a small group of business and professional people concerned about the lack of serious theater in what was a rather barren New York theater scene…Inspired by the Arts Theatre Club of London and the Theatre Guild, the objectives set forth by the founding board members …(were)…: the close identification of the subscriber audience with the institution-through subscriptions and through the mixing of artists and audiences in social settings; the diversity of entertainment that is required to keep such an audience year after year; and the effort to help breed serious American Theater by providing a non-commercial home for the development of new work and new talent.” Its five-story building, of which it occupied three floors was located at the National Bohemian Hall at 321 East 73rd Street. Plass also worked with Ensemble Studio Theatre, which stayed scrappy under the leadership of Curt Dempster, with Norman Thomas Marshall’s No Smoking Playhouse, and, of course, with Primary Stages. All these theaters were invented in response to the perceived dearth of quality work, diversity and opportunity in commercial theatre. Some— MTC, Roundabout, Lincoln Center, Second Stage— benefited from generous funding over many decades, evolving into theaters that are still technically Off-Broadway, allowing them to hire talent at bargain prices, despite big budgets, well-paid leadership, costly real estate and large staffs.
Naturally, especially in the early days, Plass’ gigs were no- or low-pay, which meant long hours, taking on numerous gigs simultaneously, and subsidizing her theatre work with other paying work. She and her husband, magician Michael Makman, ran a props business for twenty-five years, serving “most” Off-Broadway theaters including AMAS Rep, The Pearl, Signature Theater, The Atlantic, and Ma-Yi, “to name a few.” There was some relief and great novelty when she began working full time as Production Stage Manager for the Juilliard School of Drama, 3rd Year Division. Plass took full advantage of her access at Juilliard to classes, and sat in on theatre history classes. There she realized while auditing a class on the alternative theater revolution, that she had been right in the middle of a major moment of theatre history: “You don’t realize it when you are in it.” That was the catalyst for partnering with Child’s on the project.
The Project
Childs had been on the Board of the Directors Guild of America when they launched their oral history of film directors, so he had an introduction to the premise. One impulse behind the project comes from the desire to find some permanency in a field that is by its nature ephemeral. Also Childs and Plass found that while there was a treasure trove of documentation of Broadway, there was very little documentation of Off- and Off-Off- Broadway. Indeed, you will still find few books on the subject, fewer in print. And while there are a variety of discrete archives related to discrete companies and artists, typically housed at universities, there are few that regard the subject and the field more generally. Of course at this moment in time it is a race against the clock to capture people on video before they pass, or become too ill or old to interview, or their memories fade too much. Finally, it is being done because it is so do-able; Childs explains, “You can do it now cheaply. You just need a camera! It’s raw footage you don’t have to edit. So the expenses are minimal.” Once he had Plass as a partner, he said, “Now we can do this.”
Childs and Plass keep it simple and low-budget. They take turns with one doing the interviewing and the other as camera person. While there is some overlap, each one can draw from his or her own vast disparate network cultivated from decades of working in the profession. The third staff person is David Goldsmith who edits and manages the rudimentary website. At various times interns have helped with the substantial research necessary to prepare for each interview. At the moment, there are no interns. So far the team has executed some twenty interviews a year, but they anticipate doing more. With two hundred “in the can,” Plass says, “This is only the beginning.”
The interviews are pointedly unedited. Childs explains, “What is important in oral history is getting interviewees to talk freely, to not self-censor too much, and to not just give succinct or rehearsed answers to the questions. By talking, they reveal themselves and the chaotic and vibrant world of early Off-Broadway. The power of every interview is in the richness of the details, in the atmosphere the subjects evoke, in their commitment to share their stories with every tiny nuance and shading. Many of our interviewees commented afterwards on how they had not thought about some of these events in years and were surprised that many of these memories still lived inside them.” (From the Off Center website.)
The interviews are informal, intimate and substantial, most averaging two hours but a few running to as much as five hours. Often they are taped in the subject’s own home, filled with memorabilia. One has the feeling of being in the room with each person, sharing personal reminiscences of their long and supremely impactful careers. And who wouldn’t want to spend a few hours in conversation with the likes of George Ferencz, Micki Grant, Christopher Durang, Ping Chong, Lee Breuer, Michael Feingold and many others. (See the complete list below.)
What’s Off- or Off-Off-
I don’t know who coined “Off-Broadway” but in 1926, in Stage Journal, Alexander Woollcott said, “It is always off Broadway— usually in the most unexpected corners of the town— that the new life in the theater can be heard stirring.” Michael Smith credits Jerry Tallmer for coining the term “Off-Off- Broadway” in 1960. It’s interesting to consider the impact of categories defined by what they are not. Broadway theaters are theaters with more than 500 seats. Off-Broadway theaters have between 99 and 499 seats. Off-Off-Broadway theaters have 99 seats or fewer. For Plass and Childs the perimeters are “Everything but Broadway.”
What emerges is a tapestry of individuals with unique visions, methods and creations, who share one simple and impossible ambition, to create theatre for the sake of art, not commerce, in high contrast to Broadway. The profit-driven theatre was/is restrictive in many ways. By its mandate it must cater to the greatest common denominator and to some extent eschew risk, experimentation, the unfamiliar, the challenging, so it rarely moves the art form forward. But also, Broadway has always been driven to a great extent by producers— usually white male gatekeepers. Women, people of color, gays, immigrants, radicals were not made to feel welcome. Unable to penetrate the mainstream, many created their own opportunities by starting their own companies. The heart of the revolution was not sour grapes, however; it was a hunger for freedom, daring, newness— relevant to both aesthetics and content. It also aspired to political radicalism and a repudiation of capitalism, swinging Left, and advocated universal access to the making of art and to its consumption.
“What is important in oral history is getting interviewees to talk freely, to not self-censor too much, and to not just give succinct or rehearsed answers to the questions. By talking, they reveal themselves and the chaotic and vibrant world of early Off-Broadway,” says Childs.
Of course there are antecedents and precedents. There was the Little Theatre Movement in the early Twentieth Century, beginning in Chicago, then Boston, Seattle and Detroit. One, The Provincetown Players, moved from Massachusetts to New York City (1916) and members of the Washington Square Players formed the Theatre Guild (1919).
Inspired by these was Eva Le Gallienne a young actress who had grown up in Paris and London but moved to New York at 16 where she quickly became a Broadway star. At a mere twenty-seven, at the height of her fame, she decided to step away from The Great White Way to realize her dream. In 1926, she founded Civic Repertory Theater. She was unable to understand why the opera, symphony and museums were endowed but, “Theatre was an outcast.” Informed by European traditions of local subsidized theaters that produced both classics and new plays without the imperative of profit, she insisted ticket prices be low enough for almost anyone to afford; the top price was $1.50 and balcony seats were 50 cents. (Broadway tickets then averaged $3.50.)
City of Boston Archives
Even so, her actors were compensated an average of $100 a week, which in today’s money amounts to around $1400 – more than most off Broadway contracts now offer. In 1929 she added a free training program for actors; earliest participants included Burgess Meredith, Robert Lewis, and May Sarton. “The effort to industrialize and mechanize theatre by placing its control in the hands of corporations and syndicates, composed largely of businessmen, totally ignorant of the art of the theatre and intent only upon luring money out of the public’s pocket, has ended in complete failure. The theatre, having failed as an ‘industry’, will now return into the hands of the workers who love it…(and)…bring about an infinitely higher standard.” Her oft-repeated line was, “Theatre should be an instrument for giving, not getting!” The theatre closed in 1933 at the height of the Depression, but during its brief time, it produced an extraordinary body of work and inspired countless Off-Broadway enterprises. Le Gallienne and The Civic Rep, The Little Theatre Movement and European theaters were pivotal in the conception of non-profit theater. Off- and Off-Off- Broadway are on that continuum.
The Interviews
The raw footage is not edited for speed, flow or entertainment value. It’s a banquet, however, for theatre nerds, despite occasional spates of tedium. Some of the speakers are more articulate than others. Some speak with animation and others monotonously. Some struggle with faded memories and others are remarkably sharp in their eighties or nineties.
It’s remarkable how interlinked all the artists and companies are in a chain of inspiration, innovation, evolution and zeitgeist.
With a plethora of interviews and some 500 hours of video, I had to make choices, though in time I will undoubtedly view most or all. (Theatre nerd that I am…) I started with six interviews: Terese Hayden, Judith Malina, Crystal Field, Joanne Akalaitis, Anne Bogart and Doris Blum Gorelick. I’ll give you a little taste of each.
Terese Hayden
Hayden was one of the founders of the Equity Library Theater in 1943. The non-profit venture sought to give exposure to unemployed actors, and opportunities to unemployed directors and technicians. All were unpaid. A twin goal was to provide quality free theatre for an audience that could not afford to attend Broadway. For years the company performed in libraries before securing a permanent home theater.
By the time it closed in the 1989-90 season, it had “employed” 12,000 actors, directors, technicians in more than 600 productions. In this instance, although the mission was to benefit an under-served, less-than-affluent audience, an eye was always on commercial theatre, as the hope was unpaid work would lead to paid work. For many it did, among them: Martin Balsam, John Casale, Danny DeVito, Lee Grant, Jean Stapleton, Jason Robards, Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones. Hayden (nee Hyman), the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in Nashville and says one of her greatest inspirations was the full-scale replica of The Parthenon built in Nashville in 1897 which she encountered on a school trip in kindergarten. Hayden died in 2019 at age 98.
Judith Malina
While Hayden saw the Equity Theatre as handmaiden to the commercial theater, feeding it talent, the founders of The Living Theatre had no ambition or desire to fraternize with the enemy. In a thrilling encounter, the indomitable Judith Malina, taped in the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood at age 88, outlines the mission of the longest-running producing company in New York and the longest-lived experimental company in the nation, which also has an almost unmatched international reputation. Created in 1947 by Malina and her husband, abstract expressionist painter Julian Beck, the company repudiated commercial theatre, not only for its product, which they thought poor in quality and relevance, but also because they rejected the very idea of art as commerce, and they renounced capitalism itself. The company performed in Malina’s living room, in the street, at protests, in parks, and in a series of theaters, some of which, over a forty-year period from 1953-1993, were shut down by the Fire Department, the IRS, or the Buildings Department. When there was no other option, the Living Theatre performed in public spaces. For eight years they toured Europe.
German-born Malina moved to the United States at age two with her German-Polish parents, a rabbi and an aspiring actress. It makes perfect sense that she studied with Erwin Piscator, the German director who, along with his friend Brecht, pioneered epic and documentary theatre. In 1929 Piscator published The Political Theatre. He had fled to Russia from Germany as the Nazis came to power, and in 1939 came to America and was invited by the New School to establish The Dramatic Workshop, where Malina studied alongside Bea Arthur, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara, Walter Matthau, Rod Steiger, Elaine Stritch, Eli Wallach and Tennessee Williams. Piscator returned to Germany in 1951 to escape persecution by McCarthy. Malina tells an anecdote of approaching her mentor with the request to transfer from performing to directing but Piscator refused, claiming women were not suited to be directors. Malina said she was still ashamed to admit that she used tears to wear down his resistance and it worked.
The Living Theatre somehow managed to produce in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. (I remember sitting at a panel discussion about funding at the New York State Council on the Arts in the Nineties where there was reluctance to provide a grant to The Living Theatre, given their history of violating building codes and evading their debts. I remember saying, “But it’s THE LIVING THEATRE, for God’s sake.” (And here we could stop to talk about the problems inherent with the funding structure, ostensibly committed to non-profit work, but inevitably shaped by for-profit expectations and values. But I won’t.) Malina insists several times during the interview that she would pursue specific projects when she “got out” of the home in which she is living—out of financial necessity. Watching now we know she will die there in 2015 weeks before her 89th birthday, and are at once awed by her indefatigable nature and saddened by her end. (I dare you not to be moved and awed by her interview.)
Crystal Field
Field was born in New York City, in Manhattan, and grew up primarily on the Upper West Side. Her father was a journalist, a published poet and a teacher of languages— French, Italian and Spanish. Her mother was one of the first female doctors, and because she could have a more active practice there, she moved the family to Queens. Field went to a public school with no theater activity to speak of, but she spent summers with her family at an extraordinary place, Free Acres in New Jersey, which was started as a social experiment by Bolton Hall and became a kind of communal arts colony. There residents, many of them artists, lived in cabins in the woods, and had all sorts of activities including puppetry and an outdoor theater. The puppet plays made a huge impression on Fields; they were “complicated, deep, mysterious.” As a small child, she began to study dance with Klarna Pinska, a protégé of Ruth St. Denis. She pursued dance for some years, later studying at Juilliard with Martha Graham, but the consensus was that she was “built wrong” and couldn’t be a dancer. While in high school she began studying acting with Bennes Maarden, who worked “with Jewish and Russian themes.” After high school, she studied acting with Paul Mann, an acclaimed teacher of Stanislavsky’s Method. The basis of Mann’s teaching was not limited to Stanislavsky’s first book as was the pedagogy of the other famous Method teachers, but encompassed (importantly) the later works which are quite different. Mann had studied with The Group Theatre. His mentor was Morris Carnovsky, but he also studied with Erwin Piscator and Michael Chekhov. Among his students were Diana Sands, James Earl Jones, Herschel Bernardi, Talia Shire, Sal Mineo and Field. (Judith Malina had also studied with Mann for seven years, supported by a scholarship which required her to clean the toilets in the studio. Later she worked for Mann writing collection letters to students with outstanding bills; one was Sidney Poitier, she remembers.)
Field saw more opera and ballet as a child (“Firebird…wonderful!”), mostly at City Center, but she also remembers children’s theater and the experience of going up onstage with the actors after the show. Productions she found memorable as a child were Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Bluebird of Happiness and The Love for Three Oranges by Carlo Gozzi and Sergei Prokofiev. When no longer chaperoned by her parents, she was not above “second-acting.” She did Summer Stock at Mt. Kisco Summer Theatre and New London Players, and later performed at Greenwich Mews, the downstairs theater at Greenwich House. She was “discovered” by Elia Kazan, who hit on her remorselessly (She demurred because she was married; “I said no but I wanted to…”) and cast her in Splendor in the Grass.
She has ample theatre, film and television credits, but she is best known in our community as the co-founder in 1971 of Theater for the New City, with George Bartenieff, her then husband, Theo Barnes and Lawrence Kornfeld. They met while working at the Judson Poets Theatre, and started a company in the Westbeth Artists Community space producing the plays of Charles Ludlam, Richard Foreman, Miguel Pinero and Jean-Claude van Italie, among others. They also created an Annual Summer Street Theater and founded the Village Halloween Parade with puppeteer Ralph Lee. In 1977, the theater moved from the West Village to the East Village, 155 First Avenue, where it is run today under the artistic direction of Field, now 88 years old and still going strong.
It is daunting to try to synopsize the breadth of work done at TNC over a little over fifty years as the sheer volume of industry and output through its four theaters and festivals boggles the mind. It is a place that makes work possible in a city where a theatre space is generally unaffordable to those seeking a point of entry. The shows could not be more eclectic, and the quality may be hit-or-miss as the object is more to facilitate creation than vet it. Moises Kauffman worked there when he came to New York from Argentina. Charles Busch has premiered work there. It’s hard to imagine Off-Off-Broadway without TNC; it’s a linchpin.
JoAnne Akalaitis
Akalaitis saw a production of South Pacific as a child and, “The seed was planted. If a woman could wash her hair onstage, then anything in theatre was possible.” In part, she co-created a company because she was censured for bringing her child to rehearsal. As a mother and artist with little income, it was a necessity but also a preference.” ..There had to be something else: i.e. our own theatre…where we controlled everything, where we were artists, where we could do what we want, where we could have children.” She found motherhood “joyous” and wanted to integrate it into her working life so she decided to make work in a way that supported that.
Grotowski’s Polish Lab Theatre came to New York in 1969, creating a huge sensation. People clamored to get into the sold-out shows at Judson Theatre. Akalaitis and her circle hung out with them and the influence was profound.
Taking from Grotowski she says, “By action I learned courage.” Akalaitis taught Grotowski’s methods and exercises to, among others, Lee Breuer and Spalding Gray, and it became foundational to the company they would shortly form. This was the time of Robert Wilson’s twelve hour productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. John Cage and Merce Cunningham were flourishing. All of this had an impact.
In 1969 or 70, she, her husband, composer Phillip Glass, Ruth Malaczech and Lee Breuer, found a loft that was $75 a month. There they lived with a roster of children— after “scraping dead mice off the tiles.” Malaczech and Akalaitis did all the shopping and cooking for the entire household, on a budget of $30 a week. They all also worked in a restaurant that was essentially an artist-run co-op. She and Ruth cooked from 5 AM to noon, then went to rehearsal. With their kids. The men swept floors and washed dishes. Breuer was a busboy, and, according to Akalaitis, very bad at it. Akalaitis acknowledged that there was gender bias in the distribution of work. “The men showed up after; they always showed up after Ruth and I did all the business.” Eventually she confronted them, pounding on the table and shouting, “Where the fuck were you guys?”
The group lived and worked together, cobbling together enough money to get by so they could make art together. At one point Glass came into some money and had a piece of land, some fifty acres on the sea, with eleven cabins in the woods; it had cost $20,000. They spent a few months there developing the company and their first work, “Red Horse Animation.” They didn’t want a name that sounded like a theater, but one that conjured more of a rock band feeling; they settled on “Mabou Mines.” Their first performance was in an art gallery. In fact they brought their production to the Guggenheim Museum, Walker Arts Center, and San Francisco Arts Institute, finding venues dedicated to the visual arts as an alternative to conventional theaters. It was just them; “There was no nothing; we did it all.”
Much later Akalaitis brought a group of her Bard students to an exhibition on the arts in the Seventies. One student asked if she could do that kind of work. Akalaitis replied, “Well yeah, but you can’t pay the rent. I don’t think there’s anything stopping anyone, or stuff from happening, except paying the rent.” That equation— the number of hours necessary to work for money in order to pay the rent and make the art— is vastly different fifty years on. Nonetheless Akalaitis is optimistic, believing there are groups of artists making vibrant work “somewhere in Brooklyn, or Queens, or in the Bronx, or in Chicago.”
Anne Bogart
Bogart grew up peripatetic. Hers was a navy family, going back generations, and the women were meant to marry naval officers. She attended school at a time when the Artistic Director of Trinity Rep, Adrian Hall, walked into the newly-established National Endowment for the Arts and demanded they fund a program to allow every Rhode Island high school student to see a play. They did. Bogart was one of the students. The play was Adrian Hall’s Macbeth. And that was it. She saw her future home.
Unfortunately, and ironically, she was turned down by every conservatory program to which she applied. She attended four different colleges, subsidized by a trust left by her grandfather for the education of all his grandchildren. One year was spent in Greece at a study abroad program where legendary professors and historians like H. D. F. Kitto and Peter Green taught, having moved there in retirement. Eventually she ended up at Bard for two and a half years. There her mentor, Roberta Sklar, advised her to move to New York and start a company. She did. Eventually.
First she found a rental apartment on Grand Street between Crosby and Broadway with three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and a dance studio for— this will hurt—$325 a month. Soho then was “not a retail therapy place.” She shared the apartment with others so her own rent was $100 a month, and she worked at an artist collective restaurant. At various times she also worked in collections at a water company, as an expense analyst for a Wall Street brokerage firm, and in an after-school theater program at the United Nations School. Eventually she put an ad in Backstage to solicit actors to audition for an investigation of violence in Macbeth and was shocked by how many wanted to participate, even after she explained there was no pay. One actor twice her age and with substantial credits— Broadway, Off-Broadway, television and commercials—burst into tears at his audition, exclaiming, “I just want to do something that means something.” That made quite an impression on Bogart. She produced the show in a loft on 18th street.
Bogart wanted to train formally in directing, but having been turned down by every undergraduate conservatory, she figured she wouldn’t be accepted to a conservatory graduate program for directing. So she applied to the New York University Performance Studies Program, then called Theatre History and Criticism, run by Richard Schechner and Michael Kirby. “It was based on Anthropology and Structuralism, not teaching how to direct a play.” It asked, ‘What is a play in social systems?’”
While at NYU, around 1977-79, she was living in a three story brownstone in Fort Greene, which rented for— this will hurt more—$325 for the entire building. She had made a name for herself doing what was then not called site-specific theater— in other words making work where she could. But her piece Inhabitat was to be produced at an actual theater—Theatre for the New City—in the prop room. When that plan fell through, her roommate urged her to stage the play in their home. “In Brooklyn? Nobody went to Brooklyn.” And the building was in what was then a rough neighborhood. So a friend volunteered to drive the audience every night from Manhattan to Brooklyn. They put an ad in the Village Voice saying audiences would be picked up on the corner of Lafayette and Bleecker at a specific time and a maximum of thirty five people were packed into a windowless van and conveyed to Fort Greene where Deirdre O’Connell was waiting on the steps of the brownstone and greeted them with a monologue before inviting them inside to see the show in room after room. The show became “a little cult hit.” John Cage came and loved it. The Drama Review wrote about it.
Knowing she wouldn’t be able to support herself with her theatre work, she accepted a gig teaching at New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing where artists from Mabou Mines and Wooster Group, her predecessors by around a decade, had been on faculty for some time. “I didn’t know how to teach so I made things. I made A LOT of shows with a lot of students…. I took the money I made and put it towards the shows.” Now she was living on First Avenue between 3rd and 4th streets in a five story walk-up for— this will hurt even more— $165 a month. By the time she left a decade later, the rent was $235.
Around this time Bogart explains, “I saw a film that changed my life. It was as big an influence as Adrian Hall’s Macbeth.” It was a film of a German production. She spoke no German then, but decided, “Whatever that is, that’s what I want to do.” The production was from the Schaubüne, Gorky’s Summerfolk directed by Peter Stein. “When it was over, I thought, ‘Everything is different.’” She was amazed that intellectual rigor, great visual beauty, emotional purgation, aggressive politics, and extraordinary acting could all happen simultaneously. “All of that happened at the same time. Everything together…. I had never seen acting like that. I didn’t know you could do that….Everything’s changed.” She thought, “I have to do something about this.”
What did she do? She translated or had translated a Theatre heute edition on Stein, became a “super fan,” memorized his C.V., and learned German. “I started stealing ideas from the Schaubühne, applying them to my low budget performances on the street and in shop windows. So here’s the irony. It’s probably two years after I had seen that film that an article came out in Theatre heute about my work.” Suddenly she was invited to guest direct at numerous theaters in Germany, Austria, Switzerland. She thought, “I’m going to accept them all. I think we are superficial. I don’t like being American. I’m going to go there and become German.”
Her first show in Germany was catastrophic. And she knew it. “Stillborn. No sense of buoyancy.” People were throwing things at the stage and shouting “Sheisse!” She fled to Italy and went through a “rebirth” at a pensione. “I realized I’m not German. I’m American.… I have an American sense of humor. An American sense of space. An American sense of oral culture.” She thought about Richard Foreman, Richard Schechner, Phillip Glass, Meredith Monk— the artists ten years ahead of her. “These are people who have given me so much…They’re my teachers. I love them.” She headed for Switzerland. “I felt free for the first time. I didn’t have to be ashamed of being American and since then (1981) all my work has been about exploring American culture.” She has made work about American iconoclasts— Gertrude Stein, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Wilson, and about American cultural phenomena, looking at silent film acting, vaudeville, marathon dancing. “We have invented the most extraordinary, innovative art forms.” Moreover, she came to understand that, “in order to see culture, you have to go away.” Too close and you can’t see it.
Editors Note — The League of Professional Theatre Women has partnered with the NYPL of the Perf Arts for over two decades for the League Oral History Project. Interviews of theatre women luminaries conducted on the stage of the Bruno Walter Auditorium offer attendees an opportunity to witness and participate in these live history making interviews for free. One can also screen prior interviews at the Library for Performing Arts’ Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (TOFT)
At one point Bogart bought a thirty-day rail pass, slept on the train and went from city to city where there were venues for alternative performance. Pittsburgh, Seattle, Montreal… She arrived at each station, walked directly to a theatre, and asked if her company could perform there when they toured. Most said, “Yes.” So she went back to New York and made work to tour— three independent one-person shows based on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.
Coming full circle, she returned to Rhode Island to take up the reins of Trinity Rep in 1989, which had been led by none other than Adrian Hall. After a single notorious year as Artistic Director, and a glorious season that included work by Oskar Eustis, Irene Fornés, Molly Smith, Robert Woodruff, and Bogart’s own productions of Summerfolk and On the Town, she was fired. Or more accurately, she refused to do what the board asked of her and so willed her own dismissal. “If I were a man I would probably not have been fired.” But she also realized: “You can’t inherit someone else’s company. That was Adrian Hall’s company.”
Still she struggled with the idea of starting her own company. Then she had a conversation with Ariane Mnouchkine (and it’s a great anecdote so see the video). “I am a huge huge huge fan of Ariane Mnoushkine and her company Theatre du Soleil…. All those ten hour productions were a model for me.” They met at a post-show party in Paris, and Bogart asked her, “What about this company thing?” “What are you going to do without a company?” her hero asked in answer. Bogart had an epiphany: “Every great production I had ever seen was done by a company…. From that moment I knew I had to have a company.” In 1992 she co-founded Saratoga International Theatre Institute.
Doris Blum Gorelick
What made working on this article even more surprising and personal was encountering my “Cousin Doris.” She was actually the cousin of my stepfather who was essentially my father from the time I was three; in fact, they grew up together. She had been Robert Whitehead’s assistant and associate producer most of her working life and a close friend of his wife, Zoe Caldwell. Though I had known her almost all my life, I was surprised on viewing her interview by how much she had not told me. A few anecdotes stuck in my mind.
- At the Guy Lombardo Theatre in Jones Beach, where extravaganzas like Arabian Nights were produced, the audience was separated from the stage by a moat in which dancers/swimmers performed.
- Her pal Kate Hepburn (I can’t believe she never mentioned that friendship.) going onstage in a wheelchair having missed only one performance after breaking her foot.
- Robert Whitehead sitting with Arthur Miller in the writer’s country home, going over his play line by line. Doris says Whitehead shaped his plays significantly, as well as Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men. In those days, producers like Whitehead had fierce dramaturgical skills.
- Whitehead walking down the street with Pinter asking the playwright what Old Times meant and being asked himself, “Haven’t you seen it?”
- John Garfield (born Jacob Julius Garfinkle) coming straight from the McCarthy hearings where he was forced to testify, to rehearsal for Golden Boy, looking “weary and depleted;” he died shortly thereafter, not even forty years old.
- Doris being excoriated for eliminating the huge blank spaces between speeches to save paper when scripts were sent out to be copied; “That’s not my play. You have to do it just the way I typed it.” She was surprised and glad she wasn’t fired then and there, and went on to enjoy a career of over seventy years.
Doris passed almost exactly a year ago. I was moved to reconnect with her.
The Future of the Past
What’s next for the Oral History Project? Plass and Childs plan to continue the interviews, with no end in sight, and in fact will pick up speed. As both enter semi-retirement, they will be able to dedicate more time to recording the videos and increasing the output. Needless to say, there is an almost inexhaustible list of fascinating potential subjects, if also to some extent a race against time. Thankfully they were able to interview Robert Lupone, Deborah Lawlor, Jeff Weiss, Everett Quinton and Sheldon Harnick before their recent passing. But they mourn the missed opportunity with Ed Bullins, Steve Carter, Olympia Dukakis and many others. They’ll be looking to include the younger elders—the generation of alternative theatre-makers who followed the post World War II innovators. High on the personal wish lists are: Carole Rothman, Doug Aibel, Jean Passanante, James Nicola, Linda Chapman, folks from Jean Cocteau Rep and Squat Theater, Elizabeth LeComte, Kate Valk….
Other important next steps beyond building more content are to update the website and to find a permanent home or host for the archive at a library or university. Childs has been careful to avoid fundraising that might impinge on that of the theatre itself, but now the hope is that some grant support will facilitate this invaluable repository.
PROJECT STATS
CURRENTLY there are 195 interviews, with close to 50% women (119 men/113 women –some subjects are interviewed together) and 16% people of color, reflecting the predominantly white early history of the Off and Off Off Broadway movement. By 2024, the project organizers expect to have 25 more interviews completed and a significant jump in artists / practitioners of color as the next generation historically begins to diversify.
The Take-Away
It’s perhaps inappropriate to discern a take-away having viewed only 2.5 percent of the whole shebang, but patterns emerge even from so small a sampling. The influence of parents who loved or were involved with theatre, professionally or as amateurs. The influence of communities, schools, teachers, mentors and early exposure. The influence of immigrants and expats. The necessity and use of alternative or found (free or cheap) spaces. The inter-connectedness of, well, everyone; it’s remarkable how interlinked all the artists and companies are in a chain of inspiration, innovation, evolution and zeitgeist. The availability of low-cost housing which was crucial to the development of artists; they could earn their “nut” quickly enough to allow for the time necessary to make their work. The fact that no matter how many centuries the theater has been dying, there has been, is, and always will be theater, and it will always be made even in the absence of resources.
Throughout my time working on this article, there has been a question humming in the back of my mind: Must the art of theatre rely on poverty? It’s an assumed factor in the equation of the non-commercial. Listening to these leading lights, it seems inarguable that defiance of conventionality, scorn for authority, very hard work, sacrifice, determination against the odds, and freedom fed them as artists. But without those miraculously low rents, is it still possible to make alternative theatre— if you are not subsidized by family or spouse or the like? How many hours of unrelated paid work are necessary now to make that “nut,” and how much time then is there remaining to make art?
Also, I worry about the culture exploitation and poverty that seems inherent in theatre-making, even at the higher end of non-profit institutions, where artists continue to be underpaid while the institutional leadership takes home salaries that exceed a million bucks. Do we devalue ourselves long term and lower our expectations self-detrimentally by working for nothing? Are we conditioning the gatekeepers to undervalue and underpay? Many of the artists say something to the effect that it is a privilege to make your work your way. Okay. But is it possible that creativity could be cultivated without extreme privation?
The fact that no matter how many centuries the theater has been dying, there has been, is, and always will be theater, and it will always be made even in the absence of resources.
There has been a lot of virtual hand-wringing in recent months, as theaters around the country close or go on hiatus or reconfigure or lay off a high percentage of staff. Could it be that it’s time for some grand pruning of the theater landscape? In the clearing, would there be fertile ground for more alternative theater that grows without prioritizing profit?
Many online comments on the situation dismiss the possibility that art, moreover theater, can disregard the primacy of money. But there are ways to restructure our infrastructure that we have yet to explore. Low-cost housing for artists. Universal affordable healthcare. Subsidized child care. Less space-driven institutions. Younger more diverse gate-keepers. Higher minimum wage. We romanticize poverty and struggle in a way that is almost Darwinian; but survival of the fittest does not necessarily correspond to greatness. How many potentially great artists have burned out, lost hope, needed medical care, chosen parenthood at the expense of making art?
I think again of the Civic Repertory Theatre which lasted only seven years,, but it had operated at 95% capacity. Clearly there was interest. Can we make theater that audiences across the spectrum want and deserve? In her memoir At 33, Eva Le Gallienne said, “It may be that others will achieve my dream. That doesn’t matter as long as the dream materializes.”
The bottom line though is that theater will continue to be made away from the bottom line. It is irrepressible and its makers unstoppable. As Plass said, learning from the creators of the noncommercial theater revolution will provide further generations with “guideposts” for their journeys.
In Michael Smith’s 1966 article “The Good Scene: Off Off Broadway” in The Tulane Drama Review, he concludes:
The conditions that called Off Off-Broadway into being persist. Young playwrights, have enormous difficulty getting their plays done professionally; if they are that ‘lucky,’ they still faced the ordeal of ‘fixing’ the play to suit producers, directors, perhaps, investors. Free, joyful, easy, encouraging work conditions are the priceless asset of Off Off-Broadway. To work freely toward your own vision, to set your own standards, to define your own goals – the by-words of Off Off-Broadway are inconceivable on Broadway. Few people will stay forever in Off Off-Broadway, but the experience of its permissiveness will stick, a vision of what’s possible. Off Off-Broadway simply repeats its basic offer and demand: Do the work.
Susan Jonas has served as a production dramaturg, festival curator, adapter, producer, director and activist. She was: Director of Humanities and Education at The Acting Company; Resident Dramaturg at Classic Stage Company; Founder/Director of The Knickerbocker Studio; Executive Producer at Classical Theatre of Harlem; and Managing Director at Ensemble Studio Theatre. For a decade she was Theatre Arts Analyst at the New York State Council on the Arts, where she led a three-year research initiative which culminated in the seminal “Report on the Status of Women in Theatre.”
She founded The Legacy Project, dedicated to restoring the contribution of women to history, the canon and the living repertory; co-founded “50/50 in 2020,” a grassroots advocacy enterprise dedicated to achieving parity for women in theatre, awarded New York Theater Experience’s 2010 Person of the Year.; co-founded and curated “On Her Shoulders,” in partnership with The New School, featuring neglected plays by women. Jonas co-edited Dramaturgy in American Theatre and The LMDA Sourcebook, and has written for Theatre, Theatre Journal and American Theatre magazines. Jonas has been a guest lecturer/scholar at numerous theatres and universities, including The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and taught at New York University, Princeton, University of New Hampshire, SUNY-Purchase, Hunter College, and Ithaca College, where she created the first dramaturgy program. She co-founded and served as Co-President of LMDA University Caucus ; Co-Founder/Co-Chair of American Theatre in Higher Education Dramaturgy Forum; and board member emeritus of The League of Professional Theatre Women and The Women’s Project.
INTERVIEW SUBJECTS
- JOANNE AKALAITIS
- PENNY ARCADE
- B.H. BARRY
- GEORGE BARTENIEFF
- JOE JOHN BATTISTA
- JOHN LEE BEATTY
- CRAIG (ALLEN R.) BELKNAP
- TANYA BEREZIN
- PATRICIA BIRCH
- ANDRE BISHOP
- DORIS BLUM (GORELICK)
- ANNE BOGART
- GIGI GIBSON BOLT
- RENE BUCH
- MARYLOUISE BURKE
- ROBYN BURLAND
- VINIE BURROWS
- CHARLES BUSCH
- SHAMI CHAIKIN
- KATHLEEN CHALFANT
- TISA CHANG
- MARI-CLAIRE CHARBA
- CASEY CHILDS
- LORI TAN CHINN
- PING CHONG
- MARILYN CHRIS
- LYNN COHEN
- GRETCHEN CRYER
- BILL CWIKOWSKI
- BARBARA DANA
- GRACIELA DANIELE
- MERLE DEBUSKEY
- MARIANNE DE PURY
- MARIA DI DIA
- MAGIE DOMINIC
- CHRISTOPHER DURANG
- RON FABER
- DONALD and ANNE FARBER
- GEORGE FERENCZ
- CRYSTAL FIELD
- FYVUSH FINKEL
- MICHAEL FEINGOLD
- NANCY FORD
- RICHARD FOREMAN
- PAUL FOSTER
- RICHARD FRANKEL
- ARTHUR FRENCH
- JUNE GABLE
- RITA GARDINER
- JACK GARFEIN
- BARBARA GARSON
- JOHN GLOVER
- ANNIE GOLDEN
- CARYL GOLDSMITH
- ROBYN GOODMAN
- PEGGY GORDON
- MICKI GRANT
- DAVID GREENSPAN
- JANE GREENWOOD
- BARRY GROVE
- JOHN GUARE
- GWENDOLYN GUNN
- A. R. GURNEY
- WALTER and GEORGIA HADLER
- ANNE HAMBURGER
- WYNN HANDMAN
- JOSEPH HARDY
- MARGOT HARLEY
- SHELDON HARNICK
- ROSEMARY HARRIS (EHLE)
- TERESE HAYDEN
- ROBERT HEIDE and JOHN GILMAN
- BRUCE HOOVER
- TINA HOWE
- DANA IVEY
- JACQUELINE (JACKIE) JEFFRIES
- MORGAN JENNESS
- GEOFFREY JOHNSON
- TOM JONES
- JOHN JESURUN
- BARBARA KAHN
- ROBERT KALFIN
- DARLENE KAPLAN/STEVE ZUCKERMAN
- STEVE KAPLAN
- WILLA KIM
- WOODIE KING, JR.
- ARTHUR KOPIT
- LAWRENCE KORNFELD
- ERIC KREBS
- JAMES LATUS
- DAVID and LINDA LAUNDRA
- BAAYORK LEE
- MING CHO LEE
- RALPH LEE
- DEBORAH (LEE) LAWLOR
- PAUL LIBIN
- JO SULLIVAN LOESSER
- WILLIAM IVEY LONG
- LARRY LOONIN
- VIRGINIA LOULOUDES
- LAURENCE LUCKINBILL
- ROBERT Lu PONE
- AGOSTO MACHADO
- EDUARDO MACHADO
- JOAN MACINTOSH
- ELLEN MADDOW
- CHRISTINA (CHRYSE) MAILE
- JUDITH MALINA
- PETER MALONEY
- RICHARD MALTBY, JR.
- NORMAN THOMAS MARSHALL
- CHRISTOPHER MARTIN
- ROBERTA MAXWELL
- ELIZABETH IRELAND MCCANN
- SAUNDRA MCCLAIN
- MICHAEL MCGRINDER
- TERRENCE MC NALLY
- LYNNE MEADOW
- CHUCK MEE
- GLORIA MIGUEL
- MAUDE MITCHELL
- BARBARA MONTGOMERY
- GEORGE MORFOGEN
- CHARLOTTE MOORE
- JAMES MORGAN
- ROBERT MOSS
- BRIAN MURRAY
- JULIUS NOVICK
- DOROTHY OLIM
- EDGAR OLIVER
- STEVE OLSEN
- ROSCOE ORMAN
- LORCAN OTWAY
- GAIL MERRIFIELD PAPP
- NICKY PARAISO
- GILBERT PARKER
- ESTELLE PARSONS
- LOLA PASHALINSKI
- ROBERT PATRICK
- RALPH B. PENA
- AUSTIN PENDLETON
- LARRY PINE
- ALBERT POLAND
- RAMONA PONCE
- EVERETT QUINTON
- JANET REED
- ELEANOR REISSA
- ELINOR RENFIELD
- RUBY LYNN REYNER
- MARILYN JOAN ROBERTS
- JAMES ROCCO
- ROSALBA ROLON
- STUART ROSS
- DARYL ROTH
- DAVID ROTHENBERG
- DONN RUSSELL
- MARK RUSSELL
- AMY SALTZ
- DON SCARDINO
- RICHARD SCHECHNER
- OZ SCOTT
- JULIAN SCHLOSSBERG
- TERRY SCHREIBER
- LOIS SMITH
- TED SNOWDON
- BEN SPRECHER
- TED STORY
- BLACK-EYED SUSAN
- ROSEMARIE TICHLER
- JENNIFER TIPTON
- ILION TROYA
- JEAN-CLAUDE VAN ITALLIE
- DR. GLORY VAN SCOTT
- DAVID VAN TIEGHEM
- NED VAN ZANDT
- JENNIFER VON MAYRHAUSER
- DOLORES DEANE WALKER
- ROBERT WALTER
- TONY WALTON
- DOUGLAS TURNER WARD
- SHARON WASHINGTON
- JEFF WEISS
- CHARLES WELDON
- ELIZABETH WILSON
- MARY LOUISE WILSON
- HATTIE [MAE] WINSTON
- MONI YAKIM and MINA YAKIN
- SUSAN YANKOWITZ
- JERRY ZAKS
- STEVE ZEHENTNER
- DICK D. ZIGUN
- PAUL ZIMET
- STEVE ZUCKERMAN/DARLENE KAPLAN
WIT journal 