M R A O N F C R E E P OF THE
CENTURY S OF R A YE
ASS OCIATION Y T I EQU ’ S TOR PROF ESSIONAL AMERI C C F O A E S I AN T HE R HE A T D TER N A
100
ROBERT SIMONSON
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Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
9 | Foreword
15 | Beginnings
by Nick Wyman
“The Greatest All-Star Mob Scene Ever Seen”
69 | Lighting Up a Nation
109 | Troupers for Morale
One Theater at a Time
“You Bring the Shows, We’ll Build the Ships!”
11 | Introduction
American acting is as old as America, but it took an ingenious and bloodless strike by Actors’ Equity in the summer of 1919 to secure from theater managers even the plainest rights for actors in a drama that continues to the present day.
Today, the actor’s art thrives across the nation thanks in large part to the Little Theatre Movement, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway and regional theaters large and small, which contribute immeasurably to their communities.
USO shows. The Stage Door Canteen. The “G.I. Hamlet.” Actors’ Equity was born on the eve of World War I, and its leadership and members have never shied from America’s fronts since, even during 9/11, when the front was a mile from Broadway itself.
FEATURE FOCUS ON
137 | Stage Managers
15
69
137
“Voice of God” Actors’ Equity represents not just performers but also stage managers. These linchpins of the creative process regularly make the impossible happen. Call them traffic cops or den mothers—just don’t call them late for curtain. CHAPTER FOUR
109
175
145 | Equality Confronting Race Onstage—and in the House Where civil rights were concerned, Actors’ Equity was often several steps ahead of the nation, risking its very existence to fight for integration both on the stage and in the theater audience. CHAPTER FIVE
199
145
223
175 | The Individual Actors Under Fire From the blacklist to regional efforts to censor the stage, Equity has stepped up time and again to ensure the actor’s equal standing in, and critical contribution to, society—working for the basic freedoms of all. CHAPTER SIX
199 | Life and Legacy
223 | Epilogue
Not Standing Idly By
Two Views
Equity has fought for its members and their livelihoods whenever they were challenged—taking up the fight when the AIDS crisis began to decimate its ranks and defending against business and civic interests that sought to tear down historic theaters among other efforts.
Among Actors’ Equity’s distinction among unions is the wide array of generations found among its membership. Acting imposes no mandatory retirement age, and its practitioners can begin work as early as they care to. The result is that Equity cards can be found in the wallets of nine- and ninety-year-olds.
227 | Actors’ Equity Association Leadership 229 | Art and Photography Credits 231 | Index
The program overflowed with stars and ran to several hours, proceeding right through a planned intermission. Actors’ Equity Association’s early logo
18
chapter 1: beginnings
Marie Dressler docked her buxom, belle epoque figure center stage. The veteran actress had made her Broadway debut in 1898’s The Man in the Moon, the first show ever to grace the New York Theatre (which had in the interim been converted into a—gasp—movie theater). She had just been elected the first president of Equity’s new sister union, Chorus Equity. Dressler was a star with the heart of a chorister, “the most human of all who have made a success on the stage,” in the
words of a young fellow thespian. She explained to the eager crowd that musical show producers regularly demanded that choruses rehearse for six to sixteen weeks—for bupkis. Nothing. No pay. She and choreographer Guy Kendall would now teach the assembled hoofers a new set of steps in six to sixteen minutes. The crowd cheered. Then the auditorium rang with thunderous footfalls. In a quarter of an hour, the dancers had learned the routine perfectly.
performance of the century
Striking actors march through Columbus Circle, August 18, 1919.
From that point on, W. C. Fields acted as master of ceremonies. Lionel and Ethel Barrymore performed the second act of The Lady of the Camellias, which had been a vehicle for Ethel two seasons earlier. The crowd applauded for three minutes upon the legendary actress’s entrance; she had won the unionists’ hearts by allowing her famous profile to be used as a sort of sainted symbol of the Equity movement. Eddie Cantor then took the stage and joked that for once he was making as much as Ethel Barrymore. Eddie Foy and his various children performed. (The papers joked that Equity’s ranks must have doubled with the addition of the Foys.) Silent film star Pearl White—the wealthy “Stunt Queen” of The Perils of Pauline—expressed delight at getting the opportunity to talk. Even if theater producers had been given the opportunity to present the Lexington show, they couldn’t have afforded the talent on hand. The program overflowed with stars and ran to several hours, proceeding right through a planned intermission.
Ed Wynn, the phenomenally popular Ziegfeld Follies comedian, was seated in the third row, well away from Fields, who had once knocked him unconscious onstage with a pool cue for upstaging him. But that’s not why he wasn’t onstage. Sometime into the entertainment, a spotlight hit Wynn. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with grandiose formality, “Justice Lydon has forbidden me to appear on the stage tonight. I am very sorry this has
Actress Marie Dressler and Choreographer Guy Kendall teach dancers a new routine at the Lexington Avenue Opera House benefit for the AEA strike, August 18, 1919. Producers typically demanded that choruses rehearse for six to sixteen weeks; Dressler proved a point by teaching the new steps in fifteen minutes.
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3 TROUPERS FOR MORALE USO shows. Patriotic songs and plays. The Stage Door Canteen. The “G.I. Hamlet.” Morale visits to hospitals and munitions factories. And, of course, actual enlistment in the armed services. Actors’ Equity was born on the eve of World War I, and its leadership and members have never shied from America’s fronts since, even during 9/11, when the front was a mile from Broadway itself.
“YOU BRING THE SHOWS, WE’LL BUILD THE SHIPS!”
“Give me a thousand soldiers occasionally entertained to ten thousand soldiers without entertainment,” General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing is reported to have said. The quote may be apocryphal, but its spirit is unimpeachable. Pershing definitely did send a letter to the young Actors’ Equity Association on March 18, 1918. “A great service can be rendered by the American theater in providing necessary diversion for our troops in France,” he wrote. “Such a service rendered through the YMCA would have my hearty approval.”
Still struggling for recognition by the nation’s theater producers, the union jumped into the fray, as it would in every American conflict to follow. “Actors must excite the minds of the soldiers and stir their souls!” a June 1917 editorial in Equity Magazine exhorted. “Is this not the loftiest of functions?” An answer came the next year, when the magazine published a letter from Colonel Frank Parker to actor E. H. Sothern. “When the men in the first line realize that the whole country is watching them and thinking of them constantly,” wrote Parker, “they have a feeling of confidence
DANNY KAYE WENT TO JAPAN
BING CROSBY WENT TO FRANCE
BOB HOPE
WENT EVERYWHERE
BY V-E DAY THE USO WAS PRODUCING AS MANY AS
700
SHOWS A DAY ALL OVER THE GLOBE.
“WHEN I GOT THE CALL, I BURST INTO TEARS” betty buckley
Stage Manager David O’Brien in the booth
STAGE MANAGERS AND ACTORS— A NATURAL ALLIANCE Many people forget that Actors’ Equity represents not just performers, but also stage managers. Actors never do. When an actor can’t make a show, an understudy or swing steps in. Without a stage manager, the show simply doesn’t go on, just as a marionette show doesn’t go on without the puppet master. Call them the traffic cops of the theater, the den mothers. Just don’t call them late for curtain.
“VOICE OF GOD”
In the original Off-Broadway staging of The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, Paul Rudnick’s cheeky retelling of the Eden story, actress Amy Sedaris played a stage manager. She sat on a stool on the far edge of the stage, flipping through a call book and cueing lightning and thunder as needed. At one point, the actor playing Adam asked her, “Are you God?” Said Sedaris, “I think I am.” Since most theater starts with the word, the playwright’s importance is beyond dispute. As the ultimate authority on the staging of the work, the director’s role is certainly crucial. The actor, meanwhile, has the most direct relationship with the
theatergoer. But to anyone who has stood backstage during a show, watching as every cue is uttered with steady calm by an understated presence in dark clothing and a headset, it’s hard to escape the notion that the stage manager is the mind, heart, and motor of any production. Removing him or her from the equation would be akin to yanking out a traffic light at a busy, six-lane intersection. God? No. God-like? Perhaps. “They do call the announcements we make the ‘Voice of God,’ particularly when we speak to the house,” pointed out Arturo Porazzi, a stage manager with more than thirty years of experience.
been under the management of eight of the most prominent New York managers,” she wrote, “and with two exceptions—that of the late Charles Frohman and Henry B. Harris—the contracts which I received from them were never worth the paper on which they were written.” She described her experience on a spring tryout for The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring in Atlantic City as follows. She did three weeks of payless rehearsal and one week of performances, bought costumes with her own money, got good notices, and was compliment-
sembled companies around their own talents and toured the nation. The managers’ fortunes rose and fell with those of their fellow thespians. But in the years following the Civil War, show business grew into its name. Routes and circuits were formalized. Booking offices were founded. The keen-eyed businessman-manager’s star rose, and the dreamy-eyed actor-manager’s fell. From this fertile era of change emerged a cutthroat organization called the Theatrical Syndicate. It was run by six men: Marc Klaw and A. L.
After the Civil War, the keen-eyed businessman-manager’s star rose, and the dreamy-eyed actor-manager’s fell. ed by management. When she wasn’t cast for the subsequent New York run, she stormed the producer’s office and demanded an explanation. “I thought you understood that your contract was only for the tryout,” said the producer. “The author decided that you were not the type for the part. You looked too young and pretty. And he had engaged someone else.” “But he must have know that at Atlantic City,” complained Foster. “Why did he let me sit about all summer and thus lose a whole season’s work?” “Search me,” said the producer, retreating to his office. “I afterward learned the true facts in the case,” wrote Foster. “The author had written that part for a well-known character actress who refused to do the four weeks’ work for the one week’s salary during the hot weather.” To add insult to injury, the prominent actress had actually attended the Atlantic City shows, studying the part she would inherit. Theater Becomes “Show Business” It wasn’t always that way. Until the late 1800s, the theater was dominated by actor-managers, performers who as24
chapter 1: beginnings
Erlanger, a booking partnership based in New York that handled most of the theaters in the South; Samuel F. NixonNirdlinger and Frederick Zimmerman, the leading managers in Philadelphia, who also owned theaters in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington; Charles Frohman, a leading New York producer who represented a chain of theaters in the West; and Frohman’s partner, Al Hayman, who owned Broadway’s Empire Theatre and others out west. One winter day in 1896, they met for lunch in the Louis Quinze–style dining room at the brand new Holland House hotel near Herald Square, then the theatrical center of New York. (The six men always insisted that, improbably, this meeting occurred “by chance.”) During that fateful lunch, an alliance was formed, a kind of “super-booking office.” By early 1896, the group owned thirty-seven first-class theaters, and soon the syndicate controlled nearly all of the top houses in America. This arrangement yielded general benefits. Booking messes were untangled, wasteful competition among similar shows was avoided, local managers were made to honor their agreements, and tours could be
performance of the century
American acting can be divided—has been divided— into two eras: before Marlon Brando and after Marlon Brando. That benchmark was notched in 1947, when the virtually unknown actor donned a grimy white undershirt and stepped into the light as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Whether it was the greatest performance of the twentieth century is debatable, but it was certainly the most influential. Quite simply, it changed American stage acting forever. Brando brought the Method approach to acting, pioneered by Stanislavski and championed by Lee Strasberg, to the world of Streetcar and overnight turned the internalized, “felt” performance into a touchstone for American dramatic performance. He mumbled, he smoldered, he charmed and menaced with a glance or a grunt. He prowled the set, at once underplaying and gobbling up the stage, exuding an almost otherworldly magnetism. (If you’ve seen him in the film, you’ve had a mere taste of the power he commanded in the theater.) Brando’s Stanley made people uncomfortable, and they loved it. Detractors of the performance called him a slob, a primitive, a brute lacking in diction and poise. Ironically, his fans agreed—enthusiastically! The zoo had a new animal. His characterization, his character was from a new dramatic world—the real world. In contrast to Brando, other performances seemed almost quaint. The differences in class and perspective between Stanley and his sister-in-law, the faux-genteel Blanche DuBois, were accentuated by the differences in the two actors’ performance styles. As fine an actress as she was, Jessica Tandy was more obviously performing, just as Blanche always was. Brando, by contrast, didn’t seem to be performing at all. He just was, a model of proudly unself-conscious exis-
tence. Director Elia Kazan called it a “performance miracle.” “Marlon simply could not do anything phony on stage,” said costar Karl Malden. “He took the concept of reality to a totally new level. He was Stanley Kowalski. To this day, I cannot think of a marriage of character and actor to rival that of Marlon and Stanley.” No one ever quite matched Brando’s particular intensity— Jack Nicholson once called him ‘’a genius who was the beginning and end of his own revolution”— but that
LANDMARK PERFORMANCE
MARLON BRANDO IN A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
didn’t stop people from trying. Nicholson was among the countless actors who openly and proudly declared Brando an influence. “He changed my life” was a frequent refrain. “He changed acting” was another. He also changed Streetcar itself—from a great play to a great play made indelible by a great performance.
A Streetcar Named Desire poster, 1947
Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy in A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947
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PERFORMANCE OF THE CENTURY 100 Years of Actors’ Equity Association and the Rise of Professional American Theater
by Robert Simonson
Foreword by Nick Wyman
The fascinating story of Equity’s role in creating professional theater in America
HIGHLIGHTS: 100s
A
ctors’ Equity Association, the union representing stage actors and stage managers, turns 100 years old in 2013. Shaped by the inequities visited on performers in the 19th century, the union has shaped the landscape of the professional American theater. Founded in 1913, it became a force to be reckoned with in an historic 1919 strike—the most entertaining and dramatic one (naturally) the nation had ever seen. Since then, Equity has gone beyond securing the safety, health, and rights of stage actors, to become a progressive force in theater. It stared down not only obdurate producers, but segregation—on and off the stage, the political turmoil of the blacklist years, and the challenge of the AIDS epidemic, its members forming what would become Equity Fights AIDS. It entertained the troops of several successive American wars and fostered the spread of stage culture across the land, from the productions of the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project to the Equity Library Theatre, which offered the classics to the public at bargain prices. It witnessed the Little Theater Movement’s growth into the regional theater movement, and was there when Broadway begat Off-Broadway, and then Off-Off-Broadway. To read this resplendent new book, lavishly illustrated with historical images and stunning photographs, is to learn not only the union’s glorious past, but that of American theater itself.
of rare B&W and color photos throughout
Featured
Landmark Performances of the last century
Insights
On Craft from working actors and stage managers
Original
cover illustration by celebrated theater artist Justin “Squigs” Robertson
MARKETING: National
promotion in conjunction with the yearlong Actors’ Equity 100th anniversary celebration
Print, online, and
broadcast coverage by theater writers and broadcasters nationwide
National
print advertising in national magazines, including Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, More, and Playbill
AEA
Centennial Mobile Exhibit will visit 20 cities across the country during the year
ROBERT SIMONSON (Brooklyn, NY) has chronicled American theater for a quarter century. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Variety, and Playbill.com, where he was editor from 1999 to 2006. He is the author of the biography The Gentleman Press Agent and two collections of theater profiles, Role of a Lifetime and On Broadway, Men Still Wear Hats. In his other life, he drinks cocktails and then writes about them for the New York Times.
September Theater/History 978-1-55783-837-7 240 pages 9" × 12" Hardcover Over 200 color and B&W photos throughout
BISAC: PER011000, PER011020 HL00314933 US $40.00 World Rights
To keep up with everything surrounding the Actors’ Equity Association Centennial Celebration, visit aea100.org.
For more information about Performance of the Century, visit www.applausebooks.com
CONTACT INFORMATION: Sales: Please contact Mike Hansen at 1-800-524-4425 or mhansen@halleonard.com Publicity: Please contact Wes Seeley at 973-337-5034 ext. 208, or wseeley@halleonard.com
Advance Uncorrected Proofs