50 Years of Theater at Lincoln Center - Lincoln Center Theater Review

Lincoln Center Theater Review

A publication of Lincoln Center Theater

009-010 Special Anniversary Issue Number 49-50

Alexis Gargagliano, Editor

John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors

Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design

David Leopold, Picture Editor

Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

Lincoln Center Theater

André Bishop Bernard Gersten Artistic Director Executive Producer

Board of Directors, The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc.

John B. Beinecke, Chairman

Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus

J. Tomilson Hill, President

Daryl Roth, Vice Chairman

Brooke Garber Neidich, Chairman, Executive Committee

Eric M. Mindich, Treasurer

William D. Zabel, Secretary

Andreas Beroutsos

André Bishop

Debra Black

Allison M. Blinken

Mrs. Leonard Block

Constance L. Clapp

Ida Cole

Donald G. Drapkin

Curtland E. Fields

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Bernard Gersten

Ephraim Gildor

Marlene Hess

Ellen Katz

Jane Lisman Katz

Maria Elena Lagomasino

Kewsong Lee

Memrie M. Lewis

Robert E. Linton

Ninah Lynne

Phyllis Mailman

Ellen R. Marram

John Morning

Mrs. Donald Newhouse

Augustus K. Oliver

Mrs. Alton E. Peters

Elihu Rose

John W. Rowe

Howard Sloan

David F. Solomon

Ira J. Statfeld

Leonard Tow

Tracey Travis

Robert G. Wilmers

Hon. John V. Lindsay, Founding Chairman

Anna E. Crouse, Ray Larsen, Victor H. Palmieri, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead, Honorary Trustees

The LEON LEVY FOUNDATION has made a special generous grant in support of this anniversary issue.

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review Web site—www.lctreview.org.

50 YEARS OF THEATER AT LINCOLN CENTER

Sheehy

Laughter in the House By Bernard Gersten

Then and Now: An Interview with Ada Louise Huxtable

Center Stage By Don Shewey

Bakunin’s Journal By Ethan Hawke

A Day in Utopia By Paul Kolnik

A Marvelous Compromise: An Interview with Hugh Hardy

The British in New York By Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre, Nicholas Hytner

© 009 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Front cover: Understudy rehearsal for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific on the Beaumont Stage. Back cover: Curtain call from the final marathon performance of The Coast of Utopia. Photographs © Paul Kolnik.

I have the honor of being the current artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, and I follow in the footsteps of some very distinguished American theater producers and directors. All of them, especially my immediate predecessor, Gregory Mosher, opened the door to what our theater has become, and I am deeply grateful to them. This special edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review celebrates fifty years of theater here, and is a window on the vibrant life of this particular American theater company.

Lincoln Center Theater’s motto for the past twenty-five years has been deceptively simple: “Good Plays, Popular Prices.” But behind that statement lies a larger and more nuanced vision. One of the obvious aims of every theater in the world is to make entertaining, illuminating, and satisfying work accessible to the public. Lincoln Center Theater wants to do that by running a theater that puts artists at the center of our work, offering them a home that allows them to flourish.

This theater that was once considered hopeless, shuttered for many years, with so many perceived problems that intelligent people believed the only thing to do with the Vivian Beaumont Theater was turn it into an indoor ice-skating rink, is now one of Lincoln Center’s most vital constituents.

Our theater is never closed. Engineering crews watch the building in the night, cleaners start their shifts at 4 A M., our backstage crews often arrive at 8 A M. to begin their work maintaining the lighting instruments and sets prior to rehearsal, and the wardrobe staff comes in to wash and iron the costumes from the previous night’s performances. The administrative staff arrives at 10 A.M. along with stage managers and the actors and directors working on upcoming productions in our underground rehearsal rooms. Hopeful actors arrive to audition for our casting department for future shows. By early evening, rehearsals have ended and our front-of-house staff arrives with the running crews for 7:30 half hours, and, finally our loyal audiences—fourteen hundred people every night—pour in. They come on foot, and by subway and taxi, arriving just in time for curtain. The shows begin, and afterward the actors linger to greet visitors at the stage door, and the engineers start to shut the building down until another day begins.

This issue of the magazine is filled with voices—from behind the scenes and on the stage. We hope it brings to life the rich history that has made Lincoln Center Theater what it is today. There are rare glimpses into an actor’s life; ruminations from directors; memories from audience members; lively discussions about the design and building of the highly unusual Vivian Beaumont Theater; a history of the artistic directors and executive producers who have shaped the theater; stories of the construction of the Lincoln Center complex in the mid-1960s; commentary on its recent renovations; and an essay that embodies his special view of Lincoln Center Theater, from my partner and our current executive producer, Bernard Gersten, a veteran of three artistic administrations here.

And these pages are filled with dreams. My dream is to create an enduring cultural institution that is a home for artists of all kinds. After so many years of struggle and failure, struggle and success, Bernard Gersten and I feel that we have at long last realized this dream: a sense of permanence. Lincoln Center Theater is here to stay. —André Bishop

DREAMS

by Helen Sheehy

In 1958, Vivian Beaumont Allen gave $3 million to Lincoln Center, hoping to build a national theater “comparable in distinction and achievement to the Comédie-Française.” To dream the new theater into existence, a theater that would stand on equal terms with the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Ballet, the Lincoln Center board looked a few blocks south and chose two distinguished and respected Broadway veterans, the director Elia Kazan and the producer Robert Whitehead.

Elia Kazan, then fifty-one, who compared himself to a black snake because he’d shed his skin so many times, had co-founded the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, and on Broadway had directed the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Robert Whitehead, handsome and dapper, with a mustache that made him look like a riverboat gambler, said Tennessee Williams, was admired for the artistic merit of his commercial productions, including Medea, starring Judith Anderson and John Gielgud, and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, introducing Julie Harris and the blues singer Ethel Waters.

The team of Kazan and Whitehead wanted, they said, “to make the theater necessary again as the great theaters in eras past were necessary.” They planned to bring together the best theater artists in the country and “make art, not business.” Whitehead warned, “It may take a lifetime.” The news was greeted with hyperbolic praise and anticipation. After all, the theater at Lincoln Center would be the first new theater built in New York since the Ethel Barrymore in 1928, and the first attempt to create a new repertory company since Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theater, which flourished from 1926 until it closed seven years later during the Depression. The New York Times proclaimed, “This is the first seismic tremor in what may prove to be a great earthquake in the American theater.”

The opening of the theater (in a temporary structure downtown, because the Vivian Beaumont Theater was still just a huge hole in the ground) in January 1964 was a cataclysm, quickly followed by chaos and devastation. For the inaugural production, Kazan directed Arthur Miller’s memory play, After the Fall, with characters based on the playwright, Marilyn Monroe (although Miller denied it), and an informer modeled on Kazan. The critical reception was merciless and vitriolic, although audiences, lured by voyeurism and the combined star power of everyone involved, sent ticket sales soaring.

After one season in the temporary theater, which included pro-

ductions of Miller’s Incident at Vichy and The Changeling, Kazan’s attempt at directing Jacobean tragedy, the impatient board, prodded by a hostile press, forced the men to leave. Although Whitehead continued to produce serious theater on Broadway, Kazan never staged another play. “I was not the man to solve this problem,” he said.

If Kazan couldn’t solve the problem, who could? Never mind that it had taken England more than a century to create its national theater—the board members wanted immediate results, so they searched for new dreamers. This time they traveled three thousand miles west and found perhaps the unlikeliest candidates in American theater—Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, co-founders of the Actors Workshop in San Francisco.

Blau, a former professor, had just published The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto. A theater revolutionary, Blau wrote, “There are times when, confronted with the despicable behavior of people in the American theater, I feel like the lunatic Lear on the heath, wanting to ‘kill, kill, kill.…” At the Actors Workshop, Blau and Irving had directed and produced more new American plays than any other regional theater and introduced their audiences to avant-garde drama, including Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter. In 1957, they presented Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at San Quentin State Prison. “I don’t want to be doing Mary, Mary when the bomb drops,” Irving said.

When they moved to Lincoln Center, bringing many members of their company with them, Blau and Irving promised that “ideologically we shall remain…three thousand miles from Broadway and what it represents.” Once again, there was great fanfare in the press, and enormous excitement. Regional-theater historian Joseph Zeigler observed that Blau and Irving’s move to New York was a “major turning point of the regional-theater revolution because it marked the first time that the central powers turned to the periphery for help.”

“I wasn’t long at Lincoln Center,” Blau wrote later, “before I felt rather like Captain Ahab on the third day of the hunt.” After one season of classical plays and an inability to surmount the technical and acoustical problems of the white whale of the Beaumont stage, Blau left.

Jules Irving, a charming former actor and a self-taught financial wizard, stayed on for six more years, and achieved many successes on the small jewel of the Forum Theater’s stage with productions of Pinter, Beckett, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. When the Forum’s season was canceled because of insufficient funds, Irving resigned in protest. “Our dramatic heritage is being strangled by indifference,” he said.

Opposite page: Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead at construction site of Vivian Beaumont Theater, 1962

Photo from the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Into the vacuum stepped Joseph Papp, then fifty-two, the selfmade son of a Polish immigrant and a man who dominated New York theater, moving easily between a summer season of Shakespeare in Central Park and his Public Theater downtown, which housed four theaters, as well as productions on Broadway and television. With Bernard Gersten, his brilliant producing partner, Papp was successful both in the institutional, nonprofit world and in the commercial theater. The board wooed him, and the marriage settlement included a change of name. The Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center would now be called the New York Shakespeare Festival at Lincoln Center. “If Papp did not exist,” Mel Gussow wrote, “some playwright would have to invent him.”

During his first two seasons, Papp brought new playwrights like David Rabe and Miguel Piñero to the Beaumont’s stage. Almost all of the plays he produced were controversial, filled with sex and violence; this enraged the theater subscribers, whom Papp privately referred to as “the Viennese.”

The following season, Papp changed his policy and produced a season of classics, which inspired another wave of protest that he had shed his principles. In an effort to “create a bridge between the avantgarde theater and the conventional theater,” Papp mated experimental directors with classics, producing Richard Foreman’s version of The Threepenny Opera and Andrei Serban’s production of The Cherry Orchard. Suddenly, just as audiences were beginning to respond to his experiments, Papp resigned, saying that he felt “trapped in an institutional structure both artistically and fiscally.”

During Papp’s first season, the writer Patricia Bosworth followed

him around for days. In all that time, she wrote, “I never saw anyone cross Papp publicly—except one…very fragile-looking woman.” It was at the ceremony renaming the Forum the Mitzi E. Newhouse. “Papp sprawled on stage,” Bosworth wrote, “puffing on a huge cigar. Mrs. Newhouse attempted to speak but seemed to be fighting for breath. Pausing, she waved her tiny jeweled hands in the air and cried: ‘Joe, please? No cigar smoke in my theater.’ Papp quickly stubbed out his cigar.”

To replace the colorful, outsized Papp, the board chose Richmond Crinkley, an amiable Southerner who had served as director of programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library and also as Roger Stevens’s assistant at the Kennedy Center. In 1979, just after he took the Lincoln Center position, Crinkley moved his production of The Elephant Man to Broadway, where it won a Tony for Best Play.

Crinkley’s dream for the theater at Lincoln Center emphasized “our American and English-language artistic heritage.” He named a five-member directorate made up of Woody Allen, Sarah Caldwell, Liviu Ciulei, Robin Phillips, and Ellis Rabb to help him run the theater. In 1980-81, he produced a three-play season of Rabb’s The Philadelphia Story; Allen’s The Floating Light Bulb, directed by Ulu Grosbard; and Sarah Caldwell’s Macbeth. None of the productions was successful, either critically or at the box office. The theater remained closed while Crinkley and the board pondered changing the Beaumont into a proscenium theater. The proposal made sense to Crinkley, since most American classic plays had been written for the proscenium, and to save money he wanted to share productions with

Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, 1965

the Kennedy Center, which had a proscenium stage. When the board lost a $4 million foundation grant to rebuild the Beaumont with a proscenium arch, Walter Kerr pointed out that “proscenium stages don’t establish brilliant acting companies, they don’t go out and find talented directors, and they don’t, of course, write plays. They just stand there.”

It took Peter Brook’s luminous staging of Carmen (as well as a subtle reconfiguring of the space that had been intermittently shuttered since 1977) in 1984 to prove that the Beaumont could work. Thirtyfour-year-old Gregory Mosher, the artistic director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, saw that production and realized that Brook had found the theater’s “sweet spot.” In July 1985, a reorganized board, led by former New York City mayor John Lindsay, gave Gregory Mosher and Bernard Gersten, as executive producer, the challenge of relighting a theater that had been dark for most of the last eight years.

The year before, Mosher had directed David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway and was no stranger to New York theater. Still, he came to his new job with some apprehension, packing only two suitcases, not expecting to stay long. Almost immediately, he made significant changes. Lincoln Center Theater Company became Lincoln Center Theater. He’d realized from Papp’s tenure that Papp had been boxed in by the subscription season. “Subscription is the only system where you close your hits and run your flops,” Mosher said, and he inaugurated a membership system instead. “Good Plays, Popular Prices” became the theater’s motto. And, while previous artistic directors talked endlessly to the press about their plans, Mosher refused to discuss his vision. “What are you about?” reporters

would ask, and he said, “Come to the plays and then you tell me.” Almost every day for six years, Mosher said to the staff, “We are not our press releases, our reviews, our balance sheet, our interviews, our annual report or our awards. We are what happens at 8.”

The theater’s first big hit was John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, which began at the Newhouse and moved upstairs to the Beaumont. More hits followed, including Anything Goes, Sarafina!, Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow with Madonna on Broadway, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town with Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager, Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, and a number of other new and old plays, some of which were flops.

In 1991, Mosher quit. “I was very tired,” he recalled. “I had taken two, two-week vacations between 1974 and 1991.” He’s modest about the success that had eluded, he believed, much greater directors. “Everybody had been trying to get the lid off the pickle jar for years,” he said, “and the guy who finally does it doesn’t deserve the credit.”

For the sixth time, the theater needed a dreamer. “We knew we had to find someone very special,” said board member Linda LeRoy Janklow. Bernard Gersten put together a list that included André Bishop, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, a small Off Broadway theater devoted to new American works and as different from Lincoln Center Theater as could be.

A shy, scholarly man with a self-effacing manner that masks a formidable will, Bishop at the time was the golden boy of the New York nonprofit theater, having put a distinct stamp on the work of Playwrights Horizons and, in the process, produced a number of

Joseph Papp, 1977

Richmond Crinkley, 1979

Lincoln Center Theater was everything I knew nothing about—it was big, it was uptown, it was a marble palace with two difficult thrust stages.

extraordinarily successful new shows, including three Pulitzer Prize winners: The Heidi Chronicles, Driving Miss Daisy, and Sunday in the Park with George

“Leaving Playwrights Horizons was like leaving my youth behind,” Bishop recalled. “Lincoln Center Theater was everything I knew nothing about—it was big, it was uptown, it was a marble palace with two difficult thrust stages. Yet I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life only doing new plays in a very small theater, albeit a theater I loved with all my heart. I think I had unconsciously been looking for a bigger canvas. I wanted to do Shakespeare and the classics and large-scale musical work. I also knew that if I didn’t take the opportunity another one might never come along again.”

Knowing that he was nervous about the change, the director Gerald Gutierrez, a friend of Bishop’s, counseled him, “Darling, don’t worry about a thing. Just pretend you’ve come into an inheritance and you’re moving uptown into a very large and splendid apartment.” Bishop took his advice and the advice of another friend, Wendy Wasserstein (“Do it, André—you have to do it”), and came to Lincoln Center Theater with happiness and great trepidation. He need not have worried.

For eighteen years, things have worked out for André Bishop. But despite success with a number of new plays and musicals, including The Sisters Rosensweig and Contact, to name two, Bishop feels that he has not been as effective in the new work arena as he should have been, given his background at Playwrights Horizons. “We need to produce more new plays and spend more time working with younger generations of directors. That is why we have started a new program—

LCT3—that will exclusively produce the work of new playwrights with new directors and designers and a very low ticket price. We hope to build this third theater, to be named the Claire Tow Theater after the wife of one of our Board members, on the roof of the Beaumont. Meanwhile, to get things started, we are renting outside space,” he says. Ironically, his greatest achievement has been the very thing he had no knowledge or experience of when he arrived at Lincoln Center: the constant and effective use of the Beaumont Theater. With the help of a group of first-rate directors and designers who weren’t afraid of the space—in fact, they reveled in it—and a major renovation that solved the acoustic and seating problems, LCT, under Bishop’s direction, presented many extraordinary productions in the Beaumont—including Carousel, The Coast of Utopia, Henry IV, and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific—to popular and critical acclaim.

Years earlier, in their first subscription brochure, Blau and Irving dreamed of a theater at Lincoln Center that would be a “crossroads, a meeting hall, a shrine, a playground, and a battleground...a place of wonder and confrontation where the prophetic soul of the world, in an age of revolutions, may do its dreaming on things to come.” Bishop says, “Well, those were fancy words, but I’m not sure what they mean. I believe in dreaming in private and then letting people come and see the results. I don’t know what the future will bring,” he adds, but he continues to dream.

Helen Sheehy is the author of Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones, Eva Le Gallienne: A Biography, and Eleonora Duse: A Biography. Visit her Web site at www.helensheehy.org.

Bernard Gersten and André Bishop, 1993

From left to right: Bernard Gersten, Arthur Miller, Gregory Mosher, and Jerry Zaks, 1986

Photo far left by Brigitte Lacombe and near left by Ken Howard.

L A U G H T E R HOUSE

by Bernard Gersten

Bernard Gersten has been the executive producer of Lincoln Center Theater since its reopening in 1985. This spring Mr. Gersten sat in his comfortable Lincoln Center office, which sits close to the stage of the Beaumont Theater and is connected to the office of artistic director André Bishop by a doorway, and talked to our editors about his career.

Before coming to work at Lincoln Center Theater, I was doing my Wanderjahr. I got fired from my job at the Public Theater by Joseph Papp in August of 1978, and my first job after that was working as the producer of Michael Bennett’s Ballroom. When that nose-dived, I co-produced John Guare’s Bosoms and Neglect. First we did it in collaboration with Gregory Mosher at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and then we brought it to Broadway, to the Longacre Theatre, where it opened on a Thursday, played Friday and Saturday, and closed on Saturday, very sadly.

After that, I received a telephone call from Francis Ford Coppola— whom I had met years before, very, very briefly, when he came to visit at the Public, and was treated high-handedly by Joe. Francis said, “I’m forming a new kind of studio, a Hollywood studio, and I remember you from when we met at the Public Theater, and I’d like you to come out here and work with me.” And I went out there. It was a monumental decision, because my wife, Cora [Cahan], was in the middle of building The Joyce Theater, our two kids were in school, and nobody really knew what the Francis thing was. But he had just acquired Zoetrope Studios in Hollywood—this was just before the release of Apocalypse Now, which opened during my first month there. It was an astonishing event. Francis was very exciting, and I worked there for two and a half years. We made five movies for $50 million—One from the Heart, The Escape Artist, Hammett, The Outsiders, and The Black Stallion Returns—and together they grossed less than a million dollars. We were bankrupt.

So I came back to New York and went to work as the executive producer at Radio City Music Hall for two years, during which time I produced Porgy and Bess—directed by Jack O’Brien, I should add! The first and only legitimate production ever to play the Music Hall. And then the Music Hall kind of pulled back. It didn’t go bankrupt, it just contracted. And in the fall of 1984 I got a job working for Alexander Cohen. We were producing the Tony Awards, and among the plays that we produced at that time was Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist at the Belasco Theatre, with Jonathan Pryce, Bill Irwin, and Patti LuPone—just so you know how the same characters reoccur in one’s life. It was really very good. Anyway, we opened and the show didn’t do very well. We closed it. Things were really slowing down at Alex Cohen’s.

Simultaneously, I was teaching theater management at Columbia in the graduate school. One of the things I would do with my students was create a model for running the Vivian Beaumont Theater, which had been empty for many years. I would say, “I don’t know what the big problem is with the Beaumont, but here’s what needs to be done there.” So we discussed producing about three plays a

year at the Beaumont, and two or three plays a year at the Mitzi Newhouse. We discussed what they would cost, and how long they should run. It was a model.

I was doing this and one day the dean of the school, Schuyler Chapin, came to see Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and when I saw him afterward he said, “Bernie, I really would like to talk to you about the Vivian Beaumont Theater.” And I said, “It’s funny you should say that—I’ve been teaching the Beaumont in my class.” So we arranged to have a drink, and he said, “What are your opinions about the Beaumont?” And I said, “Let me write a paper.” So I did, and I must say, I did it with some innocence. I certainly had no aspiration to work at the Beaumont. I hadn’t thought of it seriously. Well, maybe a little bit. I submitted the paper to Schuyler and he liked it. I said that I thought at this time [the spring of 1985] the Beaumont was more needed in the New York theater than perhaps at any other time.

Schuyler said, “Would you come and meet with John Lindsay and me? John Lindsay’s in charge of a search group that’s looking for new management for the Beaumont. We have already identified Gregory Mosher as a possible artistic director.”

I went and had breakfast with Schuyler and John—who had given me an award when I was working at the Public Theater, and whom I, like everyone else, admired so and adored. John asked, “Would you serve as a consultant? We have money—we’ll give you money if you serve as a consultant.” And I said, “John, I have a job, I don’t need to be hired. Of course, I’ll gladly serve as a consultant.” Then he switched gears seamlessly and said, “Well, actually, will you take the job with Gregory Mosher and run the Beaumont?” And that was the offer.

I was reluctant at first—even though I knew and liked Gregory, and we got along well, and he was very admiring of me—in large part because of the things that had happened at the Public Theater; my fight with Joe was historic already. When the offer came, I said, “Let me think about it—let me talk to Gregory.”

In the end, Cora came up with all the reasons that I should take the job, and felt that the timing to make a go of the theater was ideal.

The board had not yet been defined. There were some good people there. Adele Block, Anna Crouse, Joan Cullman, Linda LeRoy Janklow, Ray Larsen, Victor Palmieri, Elizabeth Peters, and Arthur Ross were among them. Anna gave a tea at her apartment at which I was introduced to members of the board. There I was, balancing a teacup in one hand and a pastry in the other, when they asked, “Well, what would it take to run the Beaumont?” I took out an envelope and a pen, and I said, “Well, if we were to do three plays at the Beaumont and they cost an average of a million five for each, and if we did two or three plays at the Mitzi and they cost two-fifty each…” Anyway, all added up it came to $12 million, which meant we needed to raise $5 million and earn $7 million. Years later, Anna told me that nothing had ever made the budget for a theater so clear to her as that very simple back-of-the-envelope calculation. And I said, “Well, I really worked on it over a long period of time!” It assumed something like you’d sell 75 percent of the tickets at an average ticket price of

$15, or whatever it was. But it was all quite simple and unpretentious. What it didn’t discuss was the artistic aspects of the venture.

But in my paper for Schuyler I’d written about artistic goals, about the quality of the theater—what the theater must do. I said that it must achieve the trust of artists. That it should be built upon the willingness of artists or, better, the eagerness of artists, to entrust their artistic lives to this theater. And that trust—that was the thing that had to be created at Lincoln Center, because it didn’t exist. There was no history. The Beaumont was just a place that had been a failed theater over many, many regimes.

I believed you just had to win the trust of the artists by virtue of how you behaved, what artistic choices you made, and what administrative choices you made. One of the best examples was the second

Blue Leaves wasn’t the first time that an Off Broadway show had moved to a Broadway house. But it had never happened here at Lincoln Center, and it turned out to be a very simple matter. We closed down on a Sunday and we opened on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. We did it with no fanfare. All of a sudden, it was there. The most important thing was that audiences were coming in great numbers. And suddenly the ghosts of the Beaumont were banished. The laughter of The House of Blue Leaves in the house purged the Beaumont of its ghosts and its history and its malaise.

I usually make an opening-day speech to the companies each time we go into rehearsal.

It’s like lighting a fire.

play that we put on, John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves. It was a very popular play. We opened at the Mitzi Newhouse, and we had more customers than we had seats. The Beaumont was empty, and one day we scratched our collective heads. And I don’t know which head was being scratched, or who the scratcher was, but we said, “What would happen if we moved it up to the Beaumont?” And the conclusion was that we would sell out and the Beaumont would be open.

In all the history of the two theaters, nothing had ever moved from the Mitzi to the Beaumont. But saying, “Here’s a show that’s playing in this three-hundred-seat theater, it’s very popular, and could probably play very successfully in a thousand-seat theater, let’s move it!” was very innovative, especially since the show was perfect in the Mitzi, a perfect fit.

We took the company up onstage and walked them around. There were ghosts there. Finally, somebody turned to Christopher Walken and said, “Chris! You’re the only one of us who ever played in the Beaumont. Why does the Beaumont have such a bad reputation? What’s wrong with it?” And Chris said, “Well, what’s wrong with the Beaumont is when you come out onstage, and you look out there, you see all these red seats.” To which the answer was “Chris, we will sell all the seats, all the tickets, so you won’t see red seats.” And he said, “No problem.”

We did move it up. And, of course, the lesson learned was the same lesson that I had learned some years earlier, when we moved A Chorus Line, which was perfect in this three-hundred-seat configuration at the Public’s Newman Theater. We wondered how it could possibly move to the Shubert Theatre with fifteen hundred seats. The answer was: when you add a thousand people you add theatrons, which are the unit of theatrical energy. They’re like electrons or ions or protons. They are given off by various theatrical things—actors, playwrights. Words give off theatrons. Words delivered add more theatrons. Actors with virtuosity add even more theatrons. The room acts as a kind of magnifier—a reflector, like one of those orgone boxes of Wilhelm Reich. You release the theatrons, they bounce against the wall and then bounce back into the work onstage, and they energize it and give it sexual energy. The way orgasms worked for Wilhelm Reich. A theater without a roof is hopeless! All the theatrons escape through the open top!

The journey of The House of Blue Leaves was the initial journey of the theater—it moved from the Mitzi to the Beaumont in March or April, in time for the Tony Awards. It was nominated for Tonys; it won some Tonys. Meanwhile, we were planning the first Beaumont season, and we almost had enough money. With the success of The House of Blue Leaves, the strengthening of the board, and that first flash of achievement, there was a little spark of hope in the breasts of everyone involved. It was the effect of a hit.

Gregory was asked to write a mission statement, and he said, “We’re going to do good plays.” And I remembered what Norris Houghton said to Constantin Stanislavsky. Houghton went to Russia fresh out of Princeton and met Stanislavsky, who said, “So, young man, what do you intend to do? What do you intend to do in the theater?” And Houghton said, “We want to do great plays.” And Stanislavsky sneered or snorted, or whatever he did. He said, “Everybody wants to do great plays. But how will you do them? What will you do to make your plays great?” Gregory and I reduced the whole ethos of our theater to a few words: We’re going to do good plays, and we’re going to have popular prices. Actually, it wasn’t such a bad slogan. We erred on the side of understatement. All you say is here’s what it is. It’s a turkey sandwich on rye with Russian, and if you like it fine; if you don’t, order something else. Our language was to be more matter-of-fact, more plainspoken—not the language of the institutional theaters or the regional theaters, where without a proper statement of intention a production just couldn’t begin. And what do they do? Every theater does the same goddamned stuff! You do all the plays, and you do all the musicals. And everybody wants young playwrights, everybody wants emerging this and emerging that. (You know my image for the

My slogan is “Eat it, touch it, stroke it, hug it.”

emerging playwright’s program? A young woman in stirrups, delivering. With the head crowning. And there’s the emerging playwright!) The whole character of the individual theater is based upon the taste of the artistic director. That’s all there is. That’s all that differentiates one theater from another.

When I was here with Joe there were successes, but nothing had quite that electricity. And, especially because of the long, tortured years of darkness, with The House of Blue Leaves there were sparks struck. I usually make an opening-day speech to the companies each time we go into rehearsal. It’s like lighting a fire—you get one leaf to burn and you hope that the leaf will spread the fire. You fan it, you blow on it, you shelter it from the wind. You do whatever seems necessary to get the fire to glow and to burn.

I don’t remember what the speeches were like for those first productions of the first full season at the Beaumont. But there was an excitement. John Lithgow was here, and Richard Thomas and Jerry Zaks and Tony Walton. The theater was going.

A not-for-profit theater in New York is a thing unto itself. And notfor-profit theater in New York is different from not-for-profit theater in Detroit or some other city, where they are usually the only game in town. New York is not the same. There was a temptation, since there was a history of the Beaumont’s being a replica of not-for-profit theaters around the country, of having a subscription, and doing a certain

What we have here, it’s not a rabbinical society; it’s not a church. It’s a theater.

number of plays and doing experimental plays at the Mitzi. Those were the conventions. And they were applied here—certainly by Jules Irving and, to a certain extent, even by Joe when the Public Theater came here. But the results tended to be bland up here. It’s as though the marble overpowered those modest ambitions and aspirations.

We started out unconventionally—our board, having hired us, failed to say, “Now tell us exactly what you’re going to do, and then do exactly what you tell us you’re going to do.” So a style of being somewhat improvisational emerged— responding to the circumstances that you either have made for yourself or that you find yourself in, not being caught in the web of a subscription that required you to open a certain play on a certain date.

hedonist and in part because I worked for a few years with Joe, who suffered from anhedonia. I don’t understand anhedonia. My slogan is “Eat it, touch it, stroke it, hug it.”

And I think for people in the rehearsal hall that state of ecstasy is what you strive for when you are working together at the top of your peak with people who are as good as you are or better. The best example we had of that collectively was The Coast of Utopia. Their high was sky-high. It was incredible—they all knew it and they all loved it. But there’s also something else: the theater has a sense of humor. I mean, the theater has a sense of humor. I have a sense of humor. I like jokes, I like wit, I like play. These are things that are necessary to my own life, and I choose colleagues and comrades and friends who have similar needs and desires and abilities. So I am still amazed at my own ability to close circuits and put wild things together and be amused by it. What we have here, it’s not a rabbinical society; it’s not a church. It’s a theater.

For me, one of the most interesting questions about the current incarnation of Lincoln Center Theater is how you explain the fact that this theater has run along uninterruptedly for twenty-four years—not challenged by crisis or desperation, with financial successes and failures, but never once has there been a crisis board meeting. There’s been only one change of artistic directors. There’s been no change in my job—I’ve been here all the time. And when there was a change

It wasn’t that we didn’t do stupid things, make mistakes, put on bad plays. None of that was precluded. But you always strove to do good and well.

We have a few great inventions that are so simple and so obvious—a first-night dinner for the company after their first preview before an audience, flowers for all on the first preview, wonderful dressing rooms, and a farewell drink or two or three on closing performances, so you don’t just walk out of the dressing room into the night with your bags and straight to unemployment. You get a little haze of alcohol to get you through. That’s what makes the trust. But the underlying basis for trust is artistic integrity. These decisions were made from an artistic perspective—to preserve, enhance, and assure the artistry of the work that we are engaged in to the best of our ability. It wasn’t that we didn’t do stupid things, make mistakes, put on bad plays. None of that was precluded. But you always strove to do good and well. My illustration of what exemplifies trust is the trust that exists among trapeze artists. Trapeze artists literally entrust their lives to the catcher. They say, “I know that when I do my triple something, and I reach out, your hands will be there.” And that, to me, is such a vivid image. The catcher has a special role. And I said that our theater is the catcher and the artists who work here are the flyers. And you have to imbue them with the sense that the catcher will always be there at the appointed time. I like to go to curtain-down. I go a couple of times a week. I want to be sure the audience is still having a good time. That they’re responding to the show, and that the cast is having a good time. It makes me happy. And certainly I’m driven—in part because I am a

in artistic directors there was no search committee. There was no torture. There was no extended process. It wasn’t leaderless for a long period of time. When Gregory said, “Well, I’m out of here”—and that’s what he said—Victor Palmieri asked me if there was anybody out there. And I put together a list. And Cora asked, “Why didn’t you put André on the list?” And I said, “He wouldn’t do it. He’s too involved with Playwrights Horizons. He would never leave there.”

André Bishop was an old friend of some years, so I called him and said, “André, I’m calling you to let you know that on Monday or Tuesday word is coming out that Gregory is leaving Lincoln Center Theater.” And he said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” And I said, “So he’s leaving, and I’ve got a list of people, all of whom you know, so I just wanted to get your opinion about them.” And I ran down the list of candidates, and he said, “X is wonderful” and “X...couldn’t ask for anybody smarter, more pleasant to work with....“And so on for each of them. And then I said, “And what about André Bishop?” He paused for only a moment, and he said, “André might be very interesting.” And then he went on and talked about André in the third person, with exactly the same amount of regard and objectivity as he’d spoken about the others. And I remember his summary. He said, “And, all things considered, André might be the most idiosyncratic of all of them. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.” And I said, “Can we meet on Monday?” And he said, “Yes, let’s meet on Monday.” And I hung up the phone and said to Cora, “André‘s going to take the job.”

Then And Now:

An Interview with Ada Louise Huxtable

This spring our editors had a chance to speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable about the original conception of Lincoln Center, as well as the ideas for renovating the complex now that it has become a vital cultural institution.

Editors: You were the architecture critic at the New York Times when Lincoln Center opened. How did you write about it then?

Ada Louise Huxtable: We all reviewed it, and we all disliked it. In fact, I remember that when the Opera opened every one of the critics went—music, architecture, art— and we all wrote these scathing pieces, and the memo that came down from Punch Sulzberger at the time was: “Couldn’t any of you have liked anything?”

Well, we were right and we were wrong. There was a lot to like, but we were also creatures of our time. Certainly, I was thinking of the architecture at the time, which I admired, and I thought this was compromised. But it wasn’t, really.

ED: Compromised by what?

ALH: By the tastes of the groups that were sponsoring it. They didn’t want anything too brutal, too off-putting. And modern architecture had a very tough look then. So it was softened, and I think agreeably so, and probably properly so.

ED: What did you like about it?

ALH: Well, I loved the open space. I loved the plaza. I liked the Beaumont. To someone who was a modernist, the Beaumont was a very good, modern building. It still, I think, has lovely things about it. And we felt that it was not compromised as the others were.

ED: How was that area selected?

ALH: It was an urban-renewal area. This was during Robert Moses’s later years. And I think, frankly, we were prejudiced by that. (A) We didn’t believe in urban renewal. We saw how it was destroying cities throughout the country. (B) We were leery of a big, concentrated temple of culture being stuck into a place where people were, you know, forced out. And so we came to it negatively. And I think that partly influenced our view. But it turned out to be a very, very good thing.

ED: How long did that turnaround take?

ALH: It wasn’t so much a turnaround as a gradual acceptance. Though I still haven’t accepted the idea of slum clearance; very few people have. But, you know, what’s done is done, and since what replaced it turned out to be a benefit for the city, and to work well, and something we’re all extremely fond of now, you accept it. And then you’re very encouraged by the things that are being done today.

ED: What was the thinking behind building Lincoln Center and, for that matter, the Los Angeles Music Center, the South Bank in London?

ALH: First of all, it was a car-centric culture. The idea was that you should be able to drive to a center that combined all of these cultural forms and performances. Lincoln Center was done in a very monumental style, which was largely called brutalism, but it was not like the London buildings, which were pure, unadulterated brutalism. They [the Lincoln Center buildings] were sort of what I’d call soft modernism. They were more pleasing. They were watered down a bit.

ED: Were they compromises?

ALH: They were compromises, and we all objected, but we’ve all gotten to love them, including the architects Diller Scofidio+Renfro, who are renovating Lincoln Center. They are very aware of the history and felt, as I do now, that this was a very legitimate way to build, in terms of the philosophy and the beliefs of the time.

In fact, they’re working to save the architecture and do the things that need to be done to bring it all into the twenty-first century. What we’re critical of is the way these buildings were built, as temples on podiums that removed them from the city. You drove in by car. You came underneath. The whole idea of what’s going on there now is to reconnect it with the city, to reconnect it with the life of the city, and to make it people-receptive. And I think they’re doing a brilliant job. There are two things here: the physical and the philosophical. In fifty years, a place gets old. It’s been remodeled. Things have worked, things haven’t worked.

They’ve been changed. And everything needs repair. All the systems begin to fail. And so it all comes together in the minds of the people who are part of the complex that something needs to be done.

ED: Lincoln Center couldn’t be built today—the impulse to build something like that belongs exactly to that mid-century period, right?

ALH: Absolutely. That was the time of all the big cultural centers across the country.

ED: And do you think Diller Scofidio+Renfro’s mission now is to make it more peoplefriendly?

ALH: That’s absolutely one of their major purposes. The whole philosophy of architecture has changed. That’s the point. We no longer think of architecture as something to be isolated. Already, with Alice Tully Hall, they have opened it and brought it forward to the street edge. Suddenly you’re invited into that lobby; you want to go in, whether you’re going to a performance or not.

And Diller Scofidio+Renfro were hired to look at the public spaces and do something about that terrible concrete bridge. And they ended up saying, “Well, when you talk about public spaces you’re also talking about their connections to the buildings.” And that’s the reason for what they did to Tully Hall.

Also, the Beaumont Plaza was a fine space, but it was dead. That meant some-

I loved the open space. I loved the plaza. I liked the Beaumont. To someone who was a modernist, the Beaumont was a very good, modern building.

ED: In fifty years, when this renovation has to be remodeled, where do you think we’ll be?

thing was missing. Now there will be a new restaurant. And the most wonderful thing, I think, is what they’re doing at the main entrance. There are two roads of cars, and you have to cross that. It’s horrible. The cars will go underneath and a set of lowrise stairs will invite you directly up into the plaza from the street. It’s going to be a beautiful way to enter. We all know the main plaza is a superb space; it worked from the beginning, so of course that’s not being touched, but because we’ve made a lot of technological advances in the twenty-first century there will be improvements, like lighting, and I think it will be better than ever. Then there will be a smaller set of the same kind of stairs on Sixty-fifth Street. You’ll be able to come up from the street onto the plaza, where the Beaumont is, and the café. So this is very thoughtful planning that brings it right up to the way we think about urban spaces, culture, and city life in the twenty-first century.

ALH: Oh, they’ll do it over. They’ll do it over because by then all of this—which we hope will work beautifully and be wonderful, and be used for a long time—will go through the same cycle. And there’ll be different needs, and maybe even different kinds of cultural institutions. Who knows, in fifty years? But this is such a strong unit, and so important to the city, that I have no doubt that, even if it turned out to be overused and abused after fifty years, the same process would bring it back to life. But in terms of life and culture and architecture fifty years from now— things are always going to change. Always.

The Lincoln Center Artists Group (from left): The ballerina Alicia Markova, the choreographer Martha Graham, Juilliard president William Schuman, the violinist Dorothy Pixley, (a Juilliard music student), the soprano Lucine Amara, the Metropolitan Opera impresario Rudolf Bing, the executive director for the center Alfred Reginald Allen, Philharmonic managing director George E. Judd, Jr., the composer Leonard Bernstein, the producer Robert Whitehead, and the actress Julie Harris pose around a scale model of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on its future site on Broadway in the lower Sixties. New York, November , 1959.

CENTER STAGE

by Don Shewey

The history of a theater is usually told by the people who come in the front door, and it usually centers on the greatest hits, the star performances, and the artistic mission as defined by the founders and sustained by their successors. But actors have a different perspective on the life of a theater. They walk in a different door than the paying customers do, and just as the workers know things the bosses don’t know, actors know things about the theater that audiences, critics, even the owners can’t possibly know. They have their own personal history of the theater based on their interactions with the buildings, the staff, backstage, the audience, the rehearsal rooms, and the dayto-day run of the show.

I spoke with thirteen actors about their experiences working at Lincoln Center Theater.

Most performers vividly remember their first time at Lincoln Center. “When I got the job to do The Light in the Piazza, I’d already done five Broadway shows,” said Kelli O’Hara, who also starred as Nellie Forbush in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific. “But working at Lincoln Center was a huge deal for me. It was what I dreamed of as a singer, what I wanted my life to be. I’m from a little town in Oklahoma called Elk City. I didn’t come to New York even to visit until I was twenty-one. The earliest memory I have of this city—and it’s not that long ago—was when I walked up the steps and stood in front of the fountain looking at the Met and the ballet and Avery Fisher.”

Billy Crudup had just graduated from New York University when he made his Lincoln Center debut in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia “The first time you walk into the Vivian Beaumont, it’s a grand feeling,” he said. “When you come to work, you walk by the fountains and the opera and the symphony, and you feel like you’re at the cultural heart of New York. What better place to be as an up-andcoming creative artist!”

For Leleti Khumalo, who was sixteen when she played the title role in Sarafina!, Lincoln Center was literally a foreign country. “We were supposed to be there for three weeks and go home to South Africa,” Khumalo said. “Then the show got extended, and they wanted to move it to Broadway. I didn’t know what Broadway was. I knew nothing about New York. I was just having fun!”

When Amy Irving was a teenager, Lincoln Center was literally home. Her father, Jules Irving, and his partner Herbert Blau,

who founded the San Francisco Actors Workshop, were invited to take over the Lincoln Center Repertory Company in 1965. Since her mother, Priscilla Pointer, was a leading actress in the company, young Amy spent a lot of time backstage at Lincoln Center. “I’d watch the guillotine scenes at the end of Danton’s Death every night and memorize everybody’s part, whether it was James Earl Jones or Roscoe Lee Browne,” Irving recalled. “In their second production, The Country Wife, I had a walk-on role. That was my professional stage debut. I was in a crowd scene in a booth. I sold a guinea pig to Stacy Keach.”

For Juilliard students like Patti LuPone, Lincoln Center was an extension of the campus, so near and yet so far. “I was in the first class of the Drama Division,” LuPone said. “We used to stare out the windows of The Juilliard School and gaze across the road to Lincoln Center.” Twenty years after graduation, LuPone made her debut at the Vivian Beaumont, starring in Jerry Zaks’s 1987 revival of Anything Goes. “I always thought it was the place where I belonged.”

Kevin Kline was a classmate of LuPone’s at Juilliard. “Part of the training was seeing great classical plays at Lincoln Center,” he said. “I remember Blythe Danner as Viola in Ellis Rabb’s production of Twelfth Night, with René Auberjonois as Malvolio, and The Merchant of Venice with Rosemary Harris and Chris Walken.” Long before he played Falstaff in Henry IV (2003) and the title role in Chekhov’s Ivanov (1997), Kline got his first job at Lincoln Center standing by for Raul Julia in Richard Foreman’s 1976 production of The Threepenny Opera

“When you’re an understudy, at least you’re onstage. The standby just sits around and waits,” said Kline. “Raul never missed a performance. When he left, Phil Bosco took over, and one day he came down with the flu. I got a call at 10 A.M. on Sunday saying, ‘You’re doing the matinee.’ That was my first time onstage at the Beaumont. It was terrifying, because Macheath came out of the pit, walking in this stylized toe-heel animal-like prowl in slow motion, with his cane and derby hat. And, as he walked upstage with his back to the audience, this huge wall at the proscenium started backing up from the sheer power of this prowling predator, while Roy Brocksmith sang ‘Mack the Knife.’ It was a great entrance—except if you’re not sure if you’re going to faint or vomit or shit yourself. By the second act, I started to have fun.”

Audra McDonald, another Juilliard graduate, made a memorable first impression at Lincoln Center. “During my final callback for

Carousel, singing ‘When I Marry Mr. Snow’ on the stage of the Mitzi Newhouse Theater, I got so nervous because there was a possibility that I might actually get this that I just passed out,” she said. “For my first big audition for my first big role to basically end with me unconscious on the floor was kind of a good way to enter the building. When I came to, Mary Rodgers was saying, ‘Someone get her some orange juice!’”

“When you first go to work for Lincoln Center Theater, you walk through the door slightly intimidated,” said Cherry Jones, who won a Tony Award in 1995 for her performance in The Heiress. “The reason the productions are so extraordinary is because Bernie Gersten and André Bishop almost literally cradle each artist in their arms. I’ll never forget the first reading of The Heiress. There were a million people in the room, a large cast, the Ruth and Augustus Goetz family members were there. I remember André coming in, all of us being nervous in his presence. He turned bright red and said, ‘I’m having a terrible hair day.’ Of course, we were all completely disarmed. Most actors in New York consider Lincoln Center Theater the pinnacle of pinnacles. You’re taken such good care of. They know what is required to produce good work.”

Sam Waterston first appeared at Lincoln Center in Hamlet in 1975, when the Vivian Beaumont was under the management of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Joseph Papp and his associate producer Bernard Gersten. He has returned several times, most recently in 1993 for Abe Lincoln in Illinois. “For me, there was a continuity because of Bernie’s caring, attentive, careful oversight,” Waterston said. “He and André have a well-deserved reputation for being very hospitable and appreciative of actors. Always there, always interested, always involved, always watchful.”

Papp gave Meryl Streep, fresh out of Yale Drama School, her first professional job in New York, in Trelawney of the ‘Wells,’ alongside Mary Beth Hurt, John Lithgow, Jerome Dempsey, Mandy Patinkin, Sascha Von Scherler, and Michael Tucker. “It was a wonderful cast in an adorable old play about a theatrical troupe at the turn of the [previous] century,” Streep said. “I learned how to be in a theatrical troupe from that play, how backstage was just as much fun as being on. John Lithgow, Mandy Patinkin, and I joined some of the others in forming a madrigal group. The stairwells and dressing rooms of

the Beaumont have magical acoustics, and we made gorgeous sounds together every night. Scratch most actors and you’ll find people who want to sing their little hearts out.”

The original conception of a theater at Lincoln Center included the vision of a resident acting company doing classic plays in repertory, under the direction of Robert Whitehead and Elia Kazan. Repertory theater is a cherished alternative to the perpetual insecurity of competing for roles and repeatedly going back to square one that characterizes life in the commercial theater.

Among the actors hired to launch the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center were Jason Robards, Jr., Faye Dunaway, Salome Jens, and Hal Holbrook. Although he had already begun performing his now famous Mark Twain Tonight!, Holbrook was thrilled to be asked to join the company, which began performing at a temporary theater in Washington Square while the Vivian Beaumont was under construction. “The pressure of creating the great repertory company of the American theater was a heavy load,” Holbrook recalled. “But the second year Bill Ball came in to direct Tartuffe, and brought with him all these terrific actors who were friendly and fun: Larry Gates, Sada Thompson, Michael O’Sullivan. I had three great roles that season. I took over the lead in After the Fall from Jason Robards, I played the major in Incident at Vichy, and then I had this wonderful little fiveminute routine in Tartuffe. We had spirit, and the company started coming together. Then they axed us.”

After the second season, Whitehead and Kazan were replaced as artistic directors by Irving and Blau, who brought in their own ensemble of actors from San Francisco. It soon became clear to Holbrook that there was no place for him in the reconstituted company, and he left. “It’s a sad memory for me,” he admitted, “because it was something that I poured my heart and soul into. I wanted really bad to be a part of it, and stay a part of it. And they wouldn’t let me.” In 1997, Holbrook returned to Lincoln Center Theater to appear with Kate Nelligan in Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter

Philip Bosco was originally the only New York actor to join Irving and Blau’s new company in its first season. “It took me a while to get over the feeling of being an outsider,” he said. “But then I had seven very happy years doing four or five shows a season there.” For Bosco, as for many actors, financial stability ranked high among the advantages of belonging to a resident theater company. “I used to live on ten

thousand a year, and that meant working constantly for three hundred dollars a week,” he said. “At Lincoln Center, I was getting five hundred a week. Then they upped it to six hundred or six-fifty, which to me was a fortune. So it was a boon for my family to have a regular salary.”

In 1973, the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center dissolved, although Bosco has returned many times, appearing in Mrs. Warren’s Profession and The Threepenny Opera during the Joseph Papp regime and in The Heiress and Twelfth Night under Bishop and Gersten’s management.

The closest thing to rotating repertory that LCT has undertaken in recent years was The Coast of Utopia, the trilogy of interlocking plays by Tom Stoppard that occupied the Vivian Beaumont for the entire 2006-07 season. For Amy Irving, who appeared in two of the three plays, it was a return to her idyllic childhood. “I was so spoiled growing up in a repertory theater where the same actors were together doing show after show after show,” she said. “There was a real sense of family. The Coast of Utopia was the closest thing to that I’ve experienced in the theater since then. It was a thrilling group of people to live with for a year.”

Of course, even individual productions develop their own sense of company cohesiveness. Playing the central role of the long-distance swimmer Mabel Tidings Bigelow, in Tina Howe’s Pride’s Crossing (1997), was physically demanding for Cherry Jones. The character aged from ten to ninety years old during the course of the play. The exhilarating reward for going the distance was the final scene, in which she dove from a platform into the arms of the supporting cast. She said, “There’s no greater way of ending a night of theater than being caught in the arms of your fellow actors and then being thrust heavenward.”

Sometimes adverse circumstances beget unexpected successes, as Stockard Channing discovered in 1990 with Six Degrees of Separation. Blythe Danner had originally been cast in the leading role but bowed out during the early stages of rehearsal. “I was in San Diego at the Old Globe doing a Neil Simon play, Jake’s Women,” recalled Channing, who made her LCT debut in The House of Blue Leaves (1986). “The marquee was up, the pictures had been taken, people had rented apartments, children enrolled in school. Suddenly, it was announced that the show was closing out of town and not coming to New York. It was Easter weekend. I got a call from Bernie Gersten

saying John Guare had written this play, Six Degrees of Separation, the leading lady had decided she wasn’t going to do the play, tickets had been sold.…I said, ‘You don’t understand—I feel like I never want to do a play again.’ I was in a quandary. Paul Benedict, an actor friend of mine, was staying in my apartment. He read the play and said, ‘It’s great. You should do it.’ I agreed to get on a plane and fly back and read the play with the company. There was this room full of actors staring at me. I felt like Wendy in Peter Pan—‘Come be our mother!’ They’d been rehearsing the one scene Ouisa Kittredge was not in. I sat down and read through it with everybody. There was this silence. I thought, Oh, what the hell. It’s only going to be six weeks at the Mitzi. It turned out to be four years of my life.”

Musicals create unique opportunities for company solidarity. “The sitzprobe has always been my favorite day—the first time they put the orchestra together with the cast,” said Kelli O’Hara. “For South Pacific, I was excited and looking forward to it. But when Loretta Ables Sayre, who plays Bloody Mary, got up in front of the orchestra she started to bawl—like, audibly weep. She couldn’t go on. Ted [Sperling, the conductor] had to stop. She sat there for a minute to compose herself. It was silent for a while. Then she said, ‘I’ve never sung with an orchestra before.’ She’s fifty, she’s Hawaiian, she did local shows and concerts with people coming through like Kenny Rogers. But she’s never worked anywhere else. You can get cynical—too cool for school—but when someone like that, who’s so incredibly genuine and grateful, gets to have this chance at that age in her life—that was a special moment.”

Audra McDonald has similarly cherished memories of the sitzprobe for Carousel. “They had the orchestra and the cast all set up in the lobby of the Beaumont during a late-winter snowstorm,” she

RICHARD EASTON•

said. “The sound was incredible. And we all sang and played Rodgers and Hammerstein facing the ceiling-high windows, looking out onto the Lincoln Center plaza and the gorgeous snow. That was 1994, and the moment is still completely burned in my brain.”

For some actors, discoveries made during rehearsals make unexpectedly long-lasting impressions. Hal Holbrook had an unforgettable experience working with Elia Kazan when he assumed the leading role in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall. “I was going through a very bad time in my life,” he recalled. “My marriage was breaking up, and in some ways this role saved me from falling apart. I had two rehearsals with the cast before I took over. Kazan showed up for the last one. At the end of the second act, Quentin comes down these long stairs giving this enormous soliloquy, which I had interpreted as a realization of his guilt. I started the speech, and suddenly I got hit with this tremendous emotion. I started to cry, but I kept stopping myself. I could hardly get through the speech. I didn’t intend to cry. I felt so ashamed. I just sat down at the end and stopped. There was a long silence. I felt like an idiot. Kazan walked down to the stage and sat down beside me on the steps, and he said, ‘Why are you afraid to cry?’ I said, ‘Christ, I don’t know what happened. It’s ridiculous!’ He said, ‘It’s okay to cry.’ He put his hand on my knee and got up and left. To be given that encouragement by such a great director was a wonderful moment for me as an actor.” Moviegoers can attest that Holbrook has continued to make good use of that lesson, most recently in the performance that earned him his first Academy Award nomination, at age eighty-three, in Sean Penn’s 2008 film Into the Wild Meryl Streep’s second appearance at the Beaumont was in Andrei Serban’s production of The Cherry Orchard. “The glorious Irene Worth was Ranevskaya, the divine Raul Julia her nemesis, Mary Beth Hurt was the ingenue, and I was the maid,” Streep said. “They were all so wonderful and moving that I decided, just for laughs, to fall down at some point in every scene, either coming in or going out. I loved setting up an expectation, and the delicious drawing out of the moment when the inadvertent inevitably occurred. Yum. And hearing the laughs roll up from the back of the house like surround sound: double yum. I found out that Bob De Niro saw me in this perfectly shameless performance and recommended I play the modest Linda in The Deer Hunter. That shows both the breadth of his imagination and his forgiveness.”

During the many months that actors spend together making a show, they intimately witness one another’s lives, both onstage and off. Sam Waterston’s strongest memory associated with Abe Lincoln in Illinois is that both he and director Gerry Gutierrez lost their mothers during the run of the show. “It was a gigantic event in both our lives,” he said. “And it gave the play a lot of personal moments. Our feelings went into the play and made it richer.” Waterston also appreciated the compassionate concern of Lincoln Center Theater’s management: “My mother died just before the opening. Gerry and André and Bernie were unanimous in saying that we didn’t need to go on, and they were unanimous in helping me through it. When I went home, my father met me at the door. He said, ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you have a performance tonight?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Hadn’t we better go?’ His attitude was that my mother never liked missing opening nights, and even though she wouldn’t be there, she would have wanted us to go.”

Kevin Kline encountered loss during the run of Henry IV. “I remember Bernie coming to my dressing room an hour before curtain one night to say Gerry Gutierrez had died. I’d just talked to him a week before. Then I had to go on. And Michael Hayden’s sister was killed in a freak car accident the day of the first preview. He’d just heard that a couple of hours before the show. No understudy was ready, so he went on. Only a few of us knew what had happened.” And although Kline wasn’t present, his wife’s sister was in the audience for The Coast of Utopia the night Richard Easton collapsed onstage. “She said it was terrifying to watch,” Kline recalled. “Ethan Hawke or Martha Plimpton said, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ Ten guys came running. One had unbuckled his pants, and they slipped down as he was running down the aisle. One of the stagehands knew CPR and saved Richard’s life.”

A very different spirit prevailed when Patti LuPone got married on the stage of the Beaumont. “My husband proposed to me during the run of Anything Goes,” she recollected. “One day I was in the stage manager’s office at intermission, and Matt said, ‘If you don’t set a date, we’re never going to get married.’ I said, ‘Okay, December 12.’ Then there was the question of where: Long Island, where I grew up; New York, where I’m performing; or Connecticut, where we live? Bernie and his wife, Cora [Cahan] came to me, and he said, ‘You have

to get married on the stage of the Vivian Beaumont. Cora and I got married on the stage of the Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater, and we’ve been together thirty years.’ We got married on our day off. I asked Bernie, ‘Who’s going to pay for the overtime?’ He said, ‘Lincoln Center will cover it.’”

Even mundane onetime events make lasting impressions on performers. “The Coast of Utopia was a very large show with a lot of technical stuff going, like a musical,” Amy Irving said. “With that many people and that much stuff going on, you have to trust a lot of the people backstage to take care of you. In Shipwreck, part two of the trilogy, I had a scene as Maria Ogarev that ended with my chaise longue dropping down on an elevator into the trap room under the stage. One night I finish the scene, and I’m laughing and smoking my cigarette. I’m supposed to sink down and exit, but nothing’s happening. I’m in the dark, I don’t know what to do. All of a sudden, a stage manager comes and leads me off. I felt like Blanche DuBois being taken away at the end of Streetcar. Turns out the stage manager could see from the booth that my chaise was not aligned on the elevator floor, and if it had descended as usual I would have been tipped out. Luckily, I was saved.”

Patti LuPone had a memorable moment during Anything Goes. “At the end of the show, a net full of silk rose petals was released and the whole stage was showered with them,” she recalled. “One night I was beginning to do ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow.’ I was wearing this diaphanous red gown Tony Walton designed. The top piece was two panels, held together from breast to breast by a string of four bugle beads. As I was singing, something caught my eye in the light and I looked up. The audience followed my eyes to see what I was looking at. A single rose petal was wafting down from the ceiling, and we followed it as it went right between my breasts. I had to turn my back and pull it out. It was a while before we had control of the audience again.”

Kevin Kline’s memories of playing the title role in Ivanov revolve around his acute sensitivity to audience responses. “I remember coming up against flu season,” he said. “Jayne Atkinson played my wife,

Photo from Six Degrees of Separation © Martha Swope. From the Billy Rose Theatre Division,

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

who was tubercular. She said, ‘I can’t hear myself coughing above the coughing.’ I once sent out a bowl of cough drops to the audience. And I remember after the climactic moment, when my wife comes in and sees me kissing Sasha—Hope Davis—there was a very melodramatic light-and-sound cue, then Hope and I had to clear off stage left in the darkness. She said, ‘Did you hear what that man in the third row said? “That guy looks like Kevin Kline.” ’ People just talk like they’re in front of a television screen! There was something in the program notes about the character of Ivanov being a narcissist. Right after I said some hateful, horrible line to my dying wife, there was a blackout, and the set slid slowly upstage. As I was going back into the recesses of darkness, I heard this woman in the front row say, ‘My God, he is a narcissist.’”

Speaking of audiences, Stockard Channing said, “I love that when you’re in a show at Lincoln Center you never know who’s going to be in the hallway afterward. You’d open the door and there’d be Julie Andrews, Paul Newman, Robert Redford. People just march right down there.” For Leleti Khumalo as a teenager, it was a thrill to encounter Stevie Wonder and Eddie Murphy backstage. Amy Irving recalls going to the opening night of Camino Real and meeting Tennessee Williams. “I was too young to have a real conversation with him,” she said. “But I was the boss’s daughter, and I got to hang out backstage with everybody.”

Curtain calls are always gratifying to performers. But after marathons of The Coast of Utopia, when all three parts of the trilogy were performed in a single day, an extraordinary ovation greeted the cast. “The back-and-forth energy was unbelievable,” Irving said. “It felt like we’d been at a rock concert.” The marathons were unusual for Irving and Billy Crudup, because they were not in the third play. “When I died in the second play,” said Crudup, “I’d go home and have a nap, put my son to sleep, and then go back for the curtain call. It’s a very perverse feeling. I used to tell people, ‘I have to run uptown for a minute to get people to clap for me. I’ll be right back.’”

For Audra McDonald, the final curtain call for the 1999 production of Michael John LaChiusa’s Marie Christine remains one of the high points of her association with Lincoln Center. “Even though Marie Christine wasn’t the commercial or critical success we wanted it to be, I remember, as I was bowing at the end of that last performance, I was so emotional and so proud of the work we had done,” she said. “And I was grateful that there was a place like Lincoln Center Theater that would allow ambitious new works like that to be done, give them a home, let them run their course, and support them.”

Don Shewey has published three books about theater, and his essays have been included in anthologies ranging from Contemporary Shakespearean Criticism to The Politics of Masculinity. An archive of his articles for the New York Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, and other publications can be found online at www.donshewey.com.

AMY IRVING•THECOASTOFUTOPIA

• 2007

BAKUNIN’S JOURNAL

by Ethan Hawke

In 2006, Jack O’Brien called and asked me to read Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. He was offering me a role in a production that would be a yearlong commitment. I told him I didn’t think the timing was going to work. I felt a lot of pressure to pursue my film career. He said, “Just read the play and meet with me. That’s all I ask.”

At lunch with him, he described the opening image of the play—a giant, stark black stage that seemed to be moving like an ocean in a night storm—in an instant the water (“the largest goddamn piece of black silk ever stitched”) would disappear and leave the stage barren, with the exception of what will appear to be thousands of impoverished souls. He continued on, walking me through the play, describing its political relevance and the depth of feeling that needed to be brought to it. He talked about how important Stoppard’s work is, how it was in direct lineage with Shakespeare and Shaw.

Then, finally, I said, “Look, I get it, Jack. It’s an important play and you are swinging for the fences. That’s not the question—”

“Before you make up your mind, let me just say this,” Jack interrupted. “Do you know when a new play, by a major writer, is going to be produced on a scale like this again?” He paused for effect. “Never.”

“Jack, I’m in,” I remember saying. “What the hell else am I gonna do?”

There was a short scene near the beginning of Voyage where I (as the young aspiring anarchist Michael Bakunin) was seated on a giant turntable in the center of the stage at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater scribbling in this old leather journal. I had about sixty seconds onstage to write while Martha Plimpton and Jennifer Ehle discussed boys on the other side of the stage. I kept a kind of onstage journal through the course of the run. At moments I would memorize Bakunin quotes that were not in the play, and write those down.

Day One. (October 10, 2007). Tech rehearsal. This old leather book is beautiful. I have hopes I will be able to keep a journal here.

Day Two. Everyone’s worried that this giant turntable I am sitting on will never work. It moves in fits and spurts, like a twelve-yearold driving a stick shift.

“There was in my character a radical defect: love for the fantastic, for the out-of-the-way, unheard-of adventures, for undertakings which open up an infinite horizon and whose end no man can foresee.”—Michael Bakunin

Day Three. God damn, I am nervous. Jack keeps telling me not to push. I don’t want to tell him that I have absolutely no control over what I do onstage.

“To follow one’s heart wherever it leads us! To love where we may, whenever we may. To let love be our guide to the greater good.” —Varenka, quoting George Sand to Liubov

Dress rehearsal. BREATHE. BREATHE. WHY CAN’T I BREATHE?

Someday I will probably be doing this scene and be so relaxed that I am not even the least bit tense…but not now.

First preview. My hands are shaking so much, it is a feat of will to use this pencil.

Second preview. My hands aren’t shaking, but I just completely TANKED my first speech. WHY? It was better when my hands shook.

Third preview. Last night Richard [Easton] collapsed onstage with a heart attack. Martha & I stumbled around trying to figure out what to do. We did not finish the performance. I love him. All I can do for Jack and Richard right now is to have the best show of my life out here. I am not nervous at all. All we are thinking about is Richard.

“Life, love, and action can only be understood through life, love, and action.”—Michael Bakunin

Relaxation is all I can work on now.

PLAY. PLAY. PLAY.

“The development of our will is the only solution. When we are able to say, ‘I want what God wants,’ then we shall be happy. Then our sufferings will cease. Until then, we deserve them.”—Michael Bakunin

Jack is a goddamn master at this profession. It is a thrill to live inside this play.

First matinee. What we need right now is to do a bunch of shows in a row and let everything sink deep.

Saw Richard this morning at the hospital. I can’t believe he’s alive. He was dead for about four minutes. “Back from the dead. For a moment” were his first words to me. “Now my tutelage is complete,” he said. “I’ve taught you to say the most famous line in theater history: ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’”

I am so tired. I am always surprised by how exhausting it is when you only work about five hours a night. Kind of like a hooker.

Sunday matinee. My kids come over tonight. I can’t wait to have my own life.

Jesus H. Christ—we are rehearsing this scene again. Jennifer and Martha get more damn rehearsal time than Edwin Booth.

“Life is love. And the whole form and essence of life consists of love and arises out of LOVE. Tell me what you truly love, what you seek and strive after with all the longing of your soul….What you love—that IS your life.”—Michael Bakunin

I got a new idea about this next scene tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes.

ALL RIGHT! I finally figured out how to make these bastards laugh.

“Art doesn’t have to be true like a theorem.”

Thursday’s opening has been pushed. We are waiting for Richard to return. I’ll cry when that happens. Bawl like a baby. My agent is out there tonight. Hello? Focus.

Be real. Really write. Be inside this moment.

This moment.

This moment.

“It’s the kind of line you say right before you slip on an oyster shell. Do you understand?”—Tom Stoppard

I’m glad opening is delayed. The show is getting stronger. If Willie Nelson can sing “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain” for thirty years, I can do this play for a few months.

I can’t buy a laugh tonight. I want to be Marlon Brando, but I lack the courage to be hated.

Nikos Kazantzakis’s epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

It’s Halloween tonight. I’m going as Michael Bakunin.

“Not romance. No, my vocation is quite other. I am a man of the times and the hand of God has traced over my heart the holy words, which embrace my whole being: HE SHALL NOT LIVE FOR HIMSELF. I intend to realize this fair future. I shall make myself worthy of it. To be able to sacrifice everything to this holy purpose—this is my only ambition. Every other happiness is closed to me.”

—Michael Bakunin

Breathing now. Living onstage. Inhale, exhale. Hmm, I’m hungry.

When does it stop happening? When do you stop looking for “Love” to save you, like an imagined life-altering religious experience? “Love,” in the romantic sense of the word, is like a life-stealing virus, like Lyme disease.

Two shows today. What do I care? I’m not even in this play. I live in outer space.

Tom Stoppard on knowing when is the right moment to cut one of an actor’s lines: “It’s like trying to see the light going out in your refrigerator. You can’t do it.”

Started rehearsal on Shipwreck. Richard surprised everybody and came to rehearsal, much like Gandalf after his battle with the Balrog: lighter and more angelic but utterly himself.

Audience is weird tonight. There are a lot of friends out there. It is hard to stay in the moment.

I still struggle with that damn opening speech. Some nights I nail it and the room pops. Some nights I feel like a water balloon just landed in my face.

Before Richard’s collapse, tonight’s performance was scheduled to be our opening night. That was the plan…but then there’s the Ginger Cat.

It’s been six days since we’ve done this play, and it’s like seeing an old friend.

Stoppard is here again. Hard not to sense his presence in the house. I imagine him thinking, If only that American actor could learn to pronounce the letter “A”!

Richard is back! One line at a time. Our first day of rehearsal, Tom spoke about life being a series of arrivals and departures. We are always doing both.

Richard was exquisite last night. Sometimes, for a moment, the world is rich with grace.

Tom Stoppard holds on to a compliment like George Bush holds on to Iraqi detainees at Guantánamo: he’ll be damned if he’ll let one slip out.

The New York Times is here. I am trying not to think about it (obviously!). Maybe I will read in “Arts & Leisure” about how unbelievably I wrote in my journal.

This afternoon they changed the way we are supposed to say the name Varenka. Are you kidding?

Bakunin divided his debts into two categories: those that threatened imprisonment, and those that threatened dishonor. I divide my performances the same way.

Opening night. House is fantastic. I blew my first speech. I cannot say Varenka right.

Why do I feel like it’s my fault when the moon is no longer full?

Opening went great. Stoppard told me after the show, “The show owes a great debt to your talent, passion, intensity, and humor, but you may find in the future you don’t have to be quite so good.” What the hell does that mean?

I guess I’m still pushing.

“It’s not how far you throw your voice. It’s how far you throw your soul.”—Jack O’Brien

It’s now been two weeks since opening, when we last did Voyage. I cannot explain the joy of returning to this play. The feeling is so foreign to me. I’ve never done repertory theater.

Shipwreck (part two) is coming together. Just in time, it seems.

Martha’s dad came yesterday. He could not hide the extent to which he enjoyed Billy Crudup’s performance over mine.

Shipwreck is a hit! Go figure. Imagine if we’d had time to rehearse it.

Merry Christmas! My gut is enormous, hanging over my belt. I wish I was wearing a corset.

I worry about my kids even onstage. Do other people? Salvage rehearsals start tomorrow.

Back at Voyage again. This is my favorite play, but probably

because I have more lines in this one. And let’s face it: I like having LOTS of lines.

Happy New Year. Rehearsals for Salvage are going well. I love playing this part. I imagine that watching Jack & Tom work together is like watching Mick & Keith cut a record.

We are all nice and relaxed. We’ve had two weeks off from performing while we got serious about Salvage. Tomorrow is my son’s birthday.

Damn, I’m not nervous at all anymore—I feel my son’s Star Wars Legos in my nineteenth-century pocket. I don’t think Stanislavsky would approve of my level of preparation.

With all the Shipwreck & Salvage performances, I really have missed this play. I even miss Billy.

Ahhh, the tough part has arrived. Salvage has people fighting and bickering. A theater critic wrote a giant piece for the Times about how overrated we are. He calls us “BORING.” Richard’s response was vintage: “If a theater critic is BORED by a new Tom Stoppard play about some of the world’s most brilliant minds living through one of the greatest movements of history, perhaps he should revisit his choice of profession.”

Josh Hamilton (one of my closest of friends for twenty damn years and a lifelong collaborator) left the theater last night and went straight to Lenox Hill Hospital to assist the delivery of his son Horatio. Everyone is happy and healthy. Josh’s wife, Lily, called our dressing room and told me she was going into labor and that she was headed to the hospital. I told her he was onstage, that there was only about forty minutes left in the show, and asked if she wanted me to tell him now or at curtain call. (I knew if I told him now he would LEAVE, and I really didn’t want that!) Lily said to wait, it would probably be at least a few more hours. When I came out onstage and made eye contact with him, I yelled my line, which, coincidentally, was “CONGRATULATIONS!” and gave him a big hug. I did all my actions with a peculiar wink and verve. He looked at me like, Why are you always such a crazy person?

Guess what? Salvage is getting good.

Salvage opened. It’s a hit. We’ve dodged another bullet. The trilogy is complete. I’ve got to give it up for Jack. He’s staged nine hours of theater, and it’s just GLORIOUS.

Our first marathon. This is the greatest house I have ever performed in front of. People have flown in from all over the world. They are ready. If I look up right now, I’ll get a laugh. Watch:

See.

Back at a regular show, and for the first time in the run I am having zero fun. After the intensity of the marathon performance, regular life is just too regular.

“Beware of abnormal pleasures—they kill your taste for the normal ones.”–Anaïs Nin

Another marathon. This is like a rock show. My brother is in today. He is on leave from Baghdad. History.

I’m going inside Michael. Goodbye.

Strange how much the audience informs each show. I wish it wasn’t true. It’s like a collective dance: if they are into it, we shift and respond.

Okay, this audience HATES me.

Someday I’ll be old, too—watching a play with a hearing aid, yelling at my wife, “What did he say?”—but for now it gets on my nerves.

Final ten performances. Why am I nervous again? My voice is barely hanging on.

Another marathon. Hot damn. We’re back. This is the last time Jack & Tom will see the show. I have grown to admire them both so deeply. Electricity is flying through my arms.

Funny. I went “up” for the first time in my life that last marathon. I was doing my giant speech to Brían O’Byrne in our first-act scene in Salvage, and I started thinking about how Jack & Tom were watching the show for the last time and how I really wanted to really be inside this speech, and then I forgot where I was. Did I just repeat myself? I couldn’t tell. Then I couldn’t remember one word and stood dumbly staring at Brían. Then my eyes searched the house. Frozen like a child standing on the tracks staring at an oncoming train. Suddenly, I just screamed. Startled all of us, and the words came flowing back.

“True freedom is spontaneity!” (Bakunin, Salvage, Act Two)

Last few shows—my voice box is about to fall out of my body. Do not try. Do.

My voice is fine. I think I am worrying about it to give myself anxiety about something other than this experience ending.

Last show. Dry it out.

Look and see. Listen and hear. Everything passes. Everything changes. Arriving. Departing. Arri…

That’s where the journal ends. I remember sharing a cab with my mother after the final marathon performance. She said, “Well, you are going to do a lot of things in your life. And hopefully some of them will be tremendous, but you will never be involved in anything better than what I just saw. You may as well start getting used to that now.”

“Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain.”—Michael Bakunin

Ethan Hawke appeared in Lincoln Center Theater’s Tony Awardwinning productions of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and Shakespeare’s Henry IV. His film work includes Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Hamlet, Gattaca, Training Day, and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. He has been nominated for an Academy Award as an actor and as a writer. He has also directed two films and written two novels, The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday

A DAY IN UTOPIA

by Paul Kolnik

Photographing The Coast of Utopia marathon was a oncein-a-lifetime experience. As the audience watched the play, I was backstage listening to it through the speakers as the actors, hairdressers, costumers and crew were in various stages of work, relaxation, and most interestingly, a state of readiness. The actors—shifting in and out of roles, ages, and historical moments—were in a state of flux, creating and inhabiting the present moment that exists in a play.

A M A R V E L O US COM P R O M I S E :

An Interview with Hugh Hardy

The celebrated architect Hugh Hardy sat down to talk with our editors about his time working as the assistant to Jo Mielziner during the design and construction of the two theaters at Lincoln Center.

Editors: When did you start work on the Vivian Beaumont Theater?

Hugh Hardy: The early sixties.

ED: What was the working name for the theater?

HH: It was the Repertory Theater. The idea was that it would do repertory of clas-

sic American plays, always American. That it was going to be something better than Broadway, different from Broadway—that it would be worthy of the great idea of Lincoln Center. And it was something without precedent in the U.S. of A.

ED: Who came to you first with this idea? Was it Robert Whitehead and Elia Kazan?

HH: Well, they were involved. But the board specifically selected them because they were the best of the era. They happened, ironically, to be the best of Broadway, though they were hired to do something different than that. That’s always been the great contradiction of the place.

ED: What were you doing in the early sixties?

HH: I was working for Jo Mielziner as a scene designer, although I had received an MFA in architecture. Because I had passed the Scene Design Union exam, I therefore could work as a scene designer.

ED: Were you an architect then?

HH: No. I was stagestruck by Jo Mielziner’s work, which transformed American theater.

ED: And where did you study?

HH: At Princeton, for architecture. I didn’t study theater—I didn’t know anything about theater, but I got through Princeton painting scenery, building scenery, doing lighting

and all the stuff you explore as an amateur. And so I knew the theater cold in that respect—I knew how they physically make it.

ED: And when you finished Princeton what was your first job?

HH: Well, I’d always kept track of Jo. I wrote him a letter, and he wrote back! I was just done in with delight—he was my hero, you know? So we kept up correspondence, and when I was in the Army I would go to Washington and sit there in technical rehearsals while he lit a show. That was pretty exciting. I wasn’t on salary; I was just there having a good time. So I pestered him (Laughs), kept after him, and because I was credentialed as a scene designer I could go work in his studio. I worked there with Ming Cho Lee, and Will Steven Armstrong. We were all drafting up a storm together. For instance, I drew the hotel for Gypsy. I was slightly embarrassed when people said, “What do you do?” And I’d say, “Oh, I work for a scene designer.” It probably would have sounded better to say, “I’m an architect,” but I wasn’t registered.

So when Jo got the job to design the theaters at Lincoln Center he came to me and said, “I’ve got a job, I need you.” Because I was a credentialed architect, not a licensed architect, I understood architecture. He was a scene designer collaborating with the architect Eero Saarinen, but Jo didn’t know the language of architecture. So I was the translator between these two titans. Two people often don’t mean the same thing even when using the same words. They would have these conversations, and I would have to say, “Now, Jo, what Eero means is...”(Laughter) And you know, I’m just this kid, so it was gutsy.

ED: So what were they talking about?

HH: About the nature of the theater. Saarinen believed in progress. He was tyrannically obsessed with how things work. And he believed in evolution; he believed that things were getting better. He believed that people used to ride around on horses, and then things got better because they could ride around in cars, and then transportation

got better because they could ride around in airplanes—the world was improving. No question about it.

ED: And the theater?

HH: And the theater was evolving, too, and Eero believed that what Tyrone Guthrie did in Canada was the future of the theater. Anybody who thought otherwise was wrong. Now, of course in New York (Laughs) there was no interest in any of that, and so there was this titanic struggle with Jo holding on to what he knew. But the business about the theater’s shape—proscenium or thrust—was never resolved, you see. In a sense, it was Eero who won. By shaping the Beaumont the way he did, he prejudiced it in favor of the thrust stage.

ED: And was Mielziner angry about that?

HH: Oh yes, all the time, all the time. (Laughter) Jo, however, did finally accept that this was a possibility. And that’s what led to the big turntable and all that machinery that Bernard Gersten has thrown away because it was so rigid. The physical result of all that apparatus had been tyrannical, requiring people to behave in a certain way.

ED: And did they determine where the curtain line was going to be? Was it going to be a drop curtain?

HH: There’s a big proscenium-style curtain line, and the rigging is there for a house curtain. If they want to hang one up, they can.

ED: Wasn’t there a discussion about a singleform stage or a multiform stage. So that, if there was a rep situation, they could use it on a proscenium one night and as a thrust the next?

HH: Yes, the rationale for that was this giant turntable—the idea was that the front seating section would slide underneath the stage. There were two bunches of machinery. One was Jo’s turntable, with a platform on the outside. He was the first one who created this business of platforms moving individually across the stage. By building separate platform stages on winches, you could move scenery laterally. The idea was influenced by film and work with Kazan. They loved this idea of scene dissolves and scrims—that’s the movies. In addition, which is even more amazing, if you had a platform that was the presentation for a proscenium production you needed to store it, and it could move in any direction, so that you could have three productions simultaneously ready to perform in repertory, and that’s why the stage is so huge. Nobody was

ever going to perform all over there. It was made for live storage in repertory.

ED: What were your responsibilities?

HH: I was responsible for the initial program—how big are the dressing rooms, how many toilets should you have, where does the greenroom go, and so forth. But, I said, the first question should be, What is the repertory? What do you mean by ‘repertory’? But that was never answered. Nobody ever defined what they meant by ‘repertory theater.’ It meant everything to everybody. And so Lincoln Center ended up with this very expensive solution and this really quite weird theater, one which wasn’t a direct expression of any one person. It was a direct expression of the contest between two people.

ED: And was anybody happy with it?

HH: Not the people who used it first. They didn’t know what to do with it. Eero scaled the room to a two-story set, and it looked wonderful. Now, what happens if you don’t have a two-story set? That was never investigated. And when Joe Papp did some production—I can’t remember now what it was, but it had a big two-story set in the middle—things looked just fine. But, really, nobody knew how to use the place because it had been designed as a compromise.

Interestingly, about ten years ago Bernard Gersten did a major alteration on the Beaumont and we lowered and reshaped the volume of that room. It is, I think, much better, because now it doesn’t overwhelm the actors. And they have now learned, which was very brave, that you can have a single person on that stage standing in all that space, with a glorious result. But initially everyone was afraid to try that.

ED: The Beaumont is known for being a tricky house to work in. Why is that?

HH: It really was designed unlike any other theater, and therefore you need to use it unlike any other theater. It isn’t really a proscenium stage, and it isn’t really a thrust stage. It is somewhere in the middle.

ED: Well, Tony Walton, when he designed the set for The House of Blue Leaves, found that the back wall of the set would be the curtain line.

HH: Yes, because that’s where the focus of the room comes from.

ED: Do you think the challenge of the theater itself was responsible for Kazan’s failure?

HH: Yes.

ED: And Whitehead?

Group portrait of the Lincoln Center Architects Group, (left to right): Architect Edward J. Matthews, architect Philip Johnson, theater designer Jo Mielziner, John D. Rockefeller III, architect Eero Saarinen, architect Gordon Bunshaft, architect Max Abramovitz, architect Pietro Belluschi, and architect Wallace K. Harrison as they pose around an architectural scale model of the proposed Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. New York, November , 1959.

I understood architecture. He was a scene designer collaborating with the architect Eero Saarinen, but Jo didn’t know the language of architecture. So I was the translator between these two titans.

HH: In part, yes. But they were also responsible for this strange business of inventing something that didn’t exist in America. Something for which there was no precedent, something that isn’t Broadway. What measure of theater was there in New York except Broadway? This is before regional theater became so institutionalized and before Off Broadway was taken seriously. So the idea was that we were going to have a new form of American theater, and we were going to hire the two best Broadway people to do it was odd.

ED: Peter Brook once said, “If you find the true center of that stage at the Beaumont, you’ll make it work. That’s the problem with the theater—nobody knows where the true center of it is.” He changed the space when he did Carmen in the Beaumont. Did the center of the stage ever come up when you were working with Jo?

HH: No.

ED: But the center of a stage is a way of deciding where the inevitable heartbeat of the stage is, where the audience’s attention goes. HH: That isn’t the language of architecture. It is the language of performance. And the form of the theater was really designed by architects, not by theater people.

ED: But would Whitehead and Kazan come in and sit in on meetings?

HH: Oh, they came to everything. They were wonderful. But they were more observers than participants.

ED: Over the years, as you saw productions at the Beaumont, did you have an opinion about which designers solved certain things?

HH: Michael Yeargan’s big painted backdrops in South Pacific are essential to the presentation of the place, and that’s very Mielzineresque.

ED: You’re quoted as saying, “These stages, for instance, don’t enhance scenery, they require it….Those suggested fragments of realism, which in another theater would be scenically compelling and evocative, can easily appear paltry and even shabby on the Beaumont’s stage.”

HH: It’s a question of scale. You have to come to terms with the scale of that place, and now designers have. Coming to terms with scale implies that you have to only use great big things. But it’s not how big things are, it’s the scale of the presentation, the whole mise-en-scène.

ED: Did you give up the idea of working in the theater and move over to architecture as a result of working on the Beaumont?

HH: The experience of working with Saarinen caused me to have a religious conversion. Saarinen did me in. I just thought, Wow, I could be an architect! That’s what I want to

do. It was the opportunity to think about something. Jo was completely instinctive. He was amazing. Eero was intellectual. Everything had to have a rationale, had to be quantified. Eero asked Jo, “What is the ideal maximum distance from the audience to the actor in the theater?” Because he wanted to make sure that the Beaumont didn’t get any deeper, higher, lower, wider than this magic dimension. Jo didn’t know, had never thought about it, because he worked in existing buildings. And then he decided that it was the last row of the Belasco because Julie Harris was there in The Lark, and her face was so small that he knew that if you could see her face in the last row you were fine. So sixty-five feet was the answer. In England, someone figured out the same thing—the same magic dimension—but they did it scientifically, by measuring sightlines, and they still came up with sixty-five feet.

ED: Was Mielziner disappointed that you left the theater?

HH: Yes, I think he was. Well, he asked me to be his assistant, and run his studio.

ED: Have you seen any particular scenic solutions in the Beaumont over the years that you found interesting?

HH: Well, certainly Bob Crowley’s mirrored floor in The Coast of Utopia for Jack O’Brien was one of the most fascinating recent ideas. That was pretty dazzling.

ED: What advice would you, Hardy the architect, give to Hugh Hardy the designer about working in the Beaumont?

HH: That simpler is better. And that you’ve got to think about the scale of the place in relation to people.

ED: Is that kind of scale a gut instinct, or is it scientific?

HH: No, it’s not scientific. I think if you work there more than once you would learn something about its dimensions.

ED: This theater really is a living organism.

HH: How true. I think because the Beaumont was spawned by a compromise, these two marvelous people didn’t completely recognize that they had made something without precedent. They both got less than what they wanted, and so they didn’t recognize that in the process they had actually made something quite extraordinary.

ED: Do you think it was extraordinary?

HH: Oh, I do. I do. I do. I do. There is no other such place.

Photo by Bob Serating.

BRITISH NEW YORK

We asked the four British directors—Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre, Nicholas Hytner—who have directed at Lincoln Center Theater, and who have served as directors of London’s National Theatre, to write about their experiences.

It’s been seventeen years since I worked at Lincoln Center Theater, but I still remember my time there with enormous pleasure. I had been invited to direct the world premiere of John Guare’s Four Baboons Adoring the Sun—an extraordinary and eloquent piece of theatre that succeeded in completely dividing its audiences and the critics, creating controversy and buzz.

John Guare and I enjoyed a rare creative partnership, together with a wonderful company led by Stockard Channing and James Naughton. John let me loose on Four Baboons with boundless encouragement, and was with us every step of the way through rehearsals, continually honing the text as the production developed. On the first night, he handed me a page from the script. “This,” he announced, “is the new beginning of Act One. I’m proud to say that not one word of it corresponds to the page you began work on all those weeks ago. Every line has been rewritten.” It was a wonderful collaboration.

As well as having the happiest of times working on the actual production, I remember, too, the amazing support and help given by André and Bernie and all their staff. It was an honour for me to be part of the family even for such a short period of time, and I send my warmest greetings to all friends and colleagues at Lincoln Center as you celebrate fifty glorious years.

Peter

Hall

I have directed a show at Lincoln Center only once, but I wish I had done more projects there; partly this is because, as with any unusual and demanding theatre space (in England, I would think of the Olivier at the National Theatre, the Barbican, once home to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Chichester Festival Theatre, the Guthrie-inspired birthplace of the National company), the Vivian Beaumont takes a bit of getting used to.

The creation of an amphitheatre clearly imagined the use of a thrust stage, which would make all the seats in the semicircular auditorium equally good. I directed Tom Stoppard’s magnificent Arcadia there, and although our set design, a beautiful classical rotunda, was complemented by the semicircular forestage, Stoppard had written essentially a proscenium play and it was very difficult in staging terms (and comedic terms) to keep everybody in the audience equally well served. I also made another discovery: that our thrilling rehearsal period had insufficiently prepared us for the Beaumont’s acoustics. The effortless communication of the Stoppard wit and verbal dexterity in the rehearsal room had to become slower and heavily projected in the theatre itself, otherwise the performance would not have been fully audible. Thus front-row customers had to suffer some bellowing in order that back-row customers could join the party.

Since that time—and I have very happy memories of a cast, including such well-known names as Victor Garber, Robert Sean Leonard, and Blair Brown, and such (then) unknown names as Billy Crudup and Paul Giamatti—I know that many things have changed at the Beaumont and, most important, that a subtle sound support system was installed soon after the Arcadia experience, an equivalent of which I later used with great success at the National in London.

The members of Lincoln Center Theater enable adventurous programing and the familial atmosphere within the theatre–because it is a permanent organisation—is unique in my experience in America. If the U.S.A. were ever to decide that it would provide the subsidy and support for the creation of an American National Theatre, the only site for such an endeavour would be Lincoln Center Theater.

Trevor Nunn

All successful theatres resemble each other; they are successful because everyone works together with talent, honesty, and generosity of heart. And a little luck helps. The Lincoln Center Theater is a successful theatre.

My first encounter with the New York theatre was in 1974. I was running a regional theatre in Nottingham, and I commissioned and directed a play by Trevor Griffiths called Comedians. It was a striking success, transferring to the National Theatre in London, then to the West End. When the possibility of a Broadway production was mooted, the producer told me that I was not sufficiently well known to direct on Broadway but that he had a director who was and he might need my help. The director’s name was Mike Nichols, who was disarmingly generous about my work and, to my surprise, did indeed ask me to help him. What I found then, and continue to find, is that for all the often brutal commercialism of the New York theatre, it is a small village populated by gifted and passionate people—albeit a village constantly under siege.

In the subsequent years, I continued to work in London for not-for-profit theatre and for public-service TV and, while I saw much New York theatre, it wasn’t until I became director of the National Theatre that I renewed my direct contact with it. It seemed important that a relationship should exist between the two most conspicuous not-for-profit English-speaking theatres in the world. Consequently, I established a bridgehead between the director of the Lincoln Center Theater, at the time, Gregory Mosher, and, subsequently, with his successor, my friend André Bishop.

I have been directly connected with four shows under the banner of the Lincoln Center Theater, directing two and coproducing two—Racing Demon, Arcadia, Carousel, Vincent in Brixton. In each case, I’ve found a producing team—André and Bernie, Daniel Swee and Anne Cattaneo—who have flair, intelligence, and, most important, deliver constructive support. In short, they’re good producers.

When I directed a production of Racing Demon, I had a superb group of actors, and having tussled with the sometimes unforgiving space of the Olivier Theatre, the Vivian Beaumont held no fears for me. That much might have been predictable. What wasn’t predictable was the warm hospitality, the sense of company, and an ethos that coincided with mine—a belief that the Lincoln Center Theater should do work that, either by content or by execution or both, couldn’t be performed or wouldn’t be initiated by the commercial sector, and a conviction that institutions matter because people achieve more together than they do alone.

Like the National Theatre, the Lincoln Center Theater takes artistic risks, sustains the best of tradition, develops new writing, acting, and composing talent, and feeds the commercial theatre. To achieve this, unlike the National Theatre, it depends on the support of its corporate sponsors and private donors without the support of government subsidy. That it manages is a matter of wonder to me—and of congratulation. Long may it continue.

Richard Eyre

I could wax eloquent about Lincoln Center Theater’s preeminence, about the dedication and talent of its staff, about the creative ambition of its leaders, about the excellence of the work on its stages—and all of it would be true. I could write about the ideals it shares with the National Theatre, about the new energy it brought to Carousel (which came from the National), and about its uncompromising support for my 1998 Twelfth Night (which didn’t).

I could regret the apparent inability of New York audiences ever to embrace the principle of repertory—which remains the National’s most effective planning tool, allowing us (for instance) to support experimental work, protecting it in the programme by running it in rep with shows that have proven appeal. But I could at the same time salute Lincoln Center Theater’s embrace of the new, its loyalty to its playwrights, and, above all, its ability to commission and develop exciting new musical theatre, which is something that we can’t do at the National.

I could lament the parsimony of successive U.S. administrations towards the arts but report my awestruck admiration of the team of committed supporters who do for Lincoln Center Theater what the government does for the National. None of this would be less than true. But, in all honesty, what is most important to me about Lincoln Center Theater is that from my association with it come some of the best times of my life and some of the most important people in my life. When I write about the National Theatre, I’m obliged to affect a lofty distance, as befits the leader of an important institution. So allow me, this once, simply to say on behalf of none but myself: Thank you.

Nicholas Hytner

AN EVENING AT THE THEATER: AUDIENCE MEMORIES

I will never forget Carousel. I tried long and hard to explain to my date why this was one of the greatest openings of a show ever. I prayed it would be as good as my own high school production, which was, of course, the best ever in my mind. When the overture started and the whole stage was transformed into a carousel, tears were running down my face: it was a vision I had never considered, greater than anything I could have thought of. The sets and the casting were so mind-blowing that it changed my whole idea of how theater could be done. I’ve seen so much at LCT, but this is the most memorable. Okay, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific is the greatest show I’ve ever seen, but you never forget the first time your mind is blown away. — Janet Villas

At one time or another, I dragged every friend I had to the Newhouse to see Streamers. The intimacy of that production was staggering. Years later, at a conference, I was introduced to Paul Rudd and told him, “We’ve met. You once threw up on my shoe.” —Earl Squyres

Nothing I’ve seen at LCT over the years—not Waiting for Godot, Carousel, Racing Demon, Anything Goes, or the almost unbearably rhapsodic Arcadia—has topped the thrill of watching from front row center as Ron Silver went mano a mano with Joe Mantegna one early preview of Speed-thePlow. Mamet’s absurdly complex, fractured language spat from their mouths with a venomous fury so pure as to seem freshly invented before my very eyes, and I left the theater that night in a daze. —Tucker McCrady

I remember how striking I found the opening of Peter Brook’s The Tragedy of Carmen: the sharply raked seating, the stark lighting, the huddle of rags in the center of the stage, which turned out to be Carmen herself. It was a dancer’s Carmen, one that featured the beauty of the female form in motion. As a young woman just entering adulthood, I found Brook’s vision a challenge to me, one that made me reassess certain facets of womanhood that I might otherwise have dismissed.

— Jennifer Low

It was 1973. We were young marrieds going to see Shakespeare at the new Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. We had never been in a theater without a stage or proscenium. What a thrill to be so close to the performers; to feel a part of the action. It was Troilus and Cressida. We were riveted by a young actor named Christopher Walken. “Now, that guy has a future!” Thirty-six years and counting, we still love the Newhouse. —Eric and Mary Evansburg

I was fortunate to see Cherry Jones in Pride’s Crossing at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater in 1998. During the performance, an audience member’s cane slid onto the stage during a scene in which Ms. Jones was playing a young girl talking to others in the kitchen. Without missing a beat, Ms. Jones

picked up the cane and incorporated it into her performance, using it to create an image of the Loch Ness monster, which her character was talking about at that moment. Her spontaneity and ingenuity were breathtaking! Years later, I was lucky enough to meet Ms. Jones, and I started to recall that performance by saying, “Something odd happened …” And before I got any further, she just looked at me and said, “The cane. It was the one time something odd happened with that show.” Another magic moment linking actor and audience member! —Arlen Appelbaum

It was over forty years ago, during my first year of living in New York City trying to be an actress. Lincoln Center did not have a theater yet and was doing Man of La Mancha at a temporary theater in a tent in Washington Square. My friends and I wanted to see the show in the worst way, but it was sold out. Then one winter day we had a huge snowstorm, maybe ten inches, and one of my pals said, “Let’s go downtown and see if we can get canceled tickets!” So off we went, and we got tickets way down front. I was thrilled by the play and loved Richard Kiley. It was an experience I will never forget, and a musical I have seen many times since, but none as good as that one on a snowy evening in the Village. Also, Kirk Douglas was sitting behind me. — Gina Stahlnecker

I remember sitting with my teenage son listening to one of Spalding Gray’s monologues about skiing. He described his day on the mountain with reference to the children’s stories of Thornton W. Burgess. This resonated for us because those stories are a family tradition. My father read them as a child; he passed them on to my sister and me and we read them to our children. My son and I saw Spalding’s performance during a very difficult time for us—we had just come from visiting my husband in the hospital, where he was dying. The performance that evening provided a chance for us to connect with each other, escape from our problems, and enjoy a magical time together. —Carol Rice

One of the most transcendent performances I ever saw was Rosemary Harris in Streetcar Named Desire in 1973 at the Vivian Beaumont. I was sixteen and had gone with my best friend and her father—a man with exceptional taste who did not give out praise lightly. After it was over, we sat in stunned silence as the rest of the audience slowly came to their senses and left. Finally, my friend’s father turned to us and said that we had just witnessed one of the finest performances he had ever seen in his life. Amazing. —Lisa Cushman

It was 1976 and I was a struggling college student, yet the prospect of seeing Raul Julia in The Threepenny Opera was worth skipping lunches. (Fortunately, in those days it wasn’t many.) My brother and I often went to the theater together, but on this occasion his late-for-her-own-funeral wife decided

to join us. We planned to meet her at a subway station along the Broadway line. Several trains came and went as the minutes ticked away, and all I could think was that we were going to miss “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.” Finally, I left my dear brother standing forlorn on the platform. When he and his virago finally arrived, well into the first act, I whispered, “Next time, ditch her.” And so he did. Wife number two has never been late for an LCT curtain! —Anonymous

Several years ago my friends and I got student tickets to see Dessa Rose at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. It was a night we will never forget. From the moment the chorus first joined voices to sing “We Are Descended” until the final lights came up, we were captivated by the story unfolding before our eyes. Dessa Rose at the Newhouse wasn’t just a musical; it was an experience, big enough to leave us in awe, close enough to reach out and touch. What an incredible night at the theater!

—Cole Farrell

Two performances come right to mind. Patti LuPone headed up the stairs in Anything Goes, turning and flashing that smile that’s as bright as all Broadway as she started to sing “In Olden Days a Glimpse of Stocking.” What followed was pure musical-comedy delirium. The other is Stockard Channing advancing on us in her bathrobe at the beginning of Six Degrees of Separation, commanding “Tell them,” and boy did they! Both of those performances are indelible. —Jack DePalma

On my way to the library one day, I was stopped by the sound of music coming out of the Beaumont’s lobby. There was a rehearsal going on, and I went inside to watch. A total stranger stopped me and said, “Excuse me, is that the composer Adam Guettel?” At first glance, I had no idea. But as it turns out, it was an orchestral rehearsal of The Light in the Piazza—I was just in the right place at the right time. I fell in love with the music and saw the show twice! —Anonymous

The most wonderful evening I ever had in the theater was spent enchanted by The Sisters Rosensweig. Since I went to a preview, I had no idea that I would be invited into to the most singularly touching and funny family I have ever seen in my life as a theater lover. Seeing Madeline Kahn as Doctor Gorgeous, Jane Alexander and Frances McDormand gave me my most vivid memory of the magic that was Wendy Wasserstein. My only regret was that I couldn’t stay longer with this incredible family! —Natalie Lukas

It was 1973, and we had gone to Lincoln Center to see a new play in our series called Short Eyes, written by an unknown young playwright, Miguel Piñero, and produced by the young Joseph Papp. It was the first (and only) time we saw people in the audience at Lincoln Center stand up to yell at the actors, curse the playwright, and throw things at the stage while loudly booing the producer. The play, which concerned a white man imprisoned for child molestation at Rikers Island, incarcerated among mainly black and Puerto Rican prisoners, was also the first we’d seen deal sensitively with race

relations, violence, and child abuse. Obviously, the New York audience that night wasn’t happy about any of these firsts. Still, the play went on to win the New York Drama Critics Award for best new play of 1973-74. We’ve been members nonstop since then! — Janet and Aaron Gilman

I believe my wife and I got our LCT membership the first year it was available. One of the early thrills for us was having the good fortune to win front row-seats in the lottery for a performance of Waiting for Godot. Not only was seeing Robin Williams’s consummate comic mind at work an incredible moment of theater for us; we also experienced his ability to get in and out of character seamlessly. There was a rainstorm the night of that performance and we came to the theater neatly dressed, but I was wearing duck shoes. Not realizing front row meant feet at the edge of the stage and level with the seating floor, I felt a little self-conscious wearing those odd-looking shoes. Not least of all when Mr. Williams paused in his characterization of Beckett to stage-whisper to me, “Nice shoes!” —Aaron Shelden

As the hat began to fly in The Light in the Piazza, my person soared. I am a firstborn Italian-American, with family in many sections of Italy, including Firenze. Putting myself into the performance was like walking onto home turf—a real homecoming experience, a most special theater evening. In fact, I returned a second time, bringing seven family members. What an evening for la famiglia. — Fr. Michael A. Boccaccio

When I was in high school in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, my drama teacher suggested we go to New York to see Twelfth Night at the Beaumont Theater. It was an amazing experience, a brilliant production, directed by Ellis Rabb. I’ll never forget René Auberjonois’s Malvolio. He had me in stitches! It was my first visit to the Beaumont, and the use of the space was brilliant—the long white expanse that felt like it went on forever. I have since had so many fantastic experiences in the theater and am grateful for all the theater does. Magical it remains. —R. Bobby Ducharme

My first experience at Lincoln Center Theater was very exciting and memorable. I took a train from New Jersey to the city and stayed the night. I saw the musical Contact. I’ll never forget the star of the performance in her sexy yellow dress and high heels. I was fortunate enough to have a frontrow seat and actually rested my elbow on the edge of the stage. What an unbelievable and exceptional evening. I want to do it again TODAY! —Denis Dzurinko

I have come to associate Lincoln Center with Wendy Wasserstein, more so than any other playwright. It is there I saw The Sisters Rosensweig, An American Daughter, Old Money and Third performed just before we lost Wendy. I shed more than a few tears when I think of her, but I know that her words have been immortalized by the greatness which is Lincoln Center Theater. —Val Sherman

TALES OF THE BEAUMONT

Directors & Designers Onstage ]

Jack O’Brien’s directing credits at Lincoln Center Theater include The Coast of Utopia, Henry IV, The Invention of Love, The Little Foxes, Pride’s Crossing and Hapgood.

What, should we say, is the most essential element as one contemplates the alchemy that might or might not provide what, for lack of a better word, we must call “success” in the theater?

Different people, I’m sure, have different answers to this question, but mine, as I ripen on the bough, becomes clearer and clearer: RISK! Without risk, without the element of danger, without the chaotic climate of something one cannot possibly control, let alone wrap one’s mind around, the product is safe, static, polite. Boring.

A few years ago, based on our great and good fortune to meet and work with Tom Stoppard at Lincoln Center Theater on two previous productions of his—Hapgood for the Mitzi, and The Invention of Love ultimately at the beautiful Lyceum Theatre—my great and good collaborator Bob Crowley and I sat through a marathon performance of Tom’s epic The Coast of Utopia at the National Theatre in London. We staggered out of the theater some eight-plus hours later, overwhelmed, humbled, and, beyond anything else, convinced that whatever might befall the world at large, we would, we could, we should NEVER attempt to stage this work for Lincoln Center.

Fade out. Fade in. Years have passed, now, and The Coast of Utopia stands at the impossible, unfathomable top of all my experiences in the theater, as, indeed, it does for everyone who participated in it—dressers, actors, designers, assistants, musicians, administrators, and, yes, “dummy serfs!”

If I look back and say what was the element that called us together, that galvanized us, that focused us all in a way that could bring a disparate group of artists, vagabonds, gypsies, and such into

the thrall of dead Russian intellectuals, I would have to say, quite honestly, THE BEAUMONT.

I honed, in all probability, whatever of my craft is now evident during the twenty-five-plus years I steered the fortunes of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. Three stages: an outdoor platform for Shakespeare, a tiny theater-in-the-round I first detested and grew to adore, and a “partial thrust” theater, the Globe, itself. When I finally confronted that ultimate lioness of theater spaces, the Vivian Beaumont Theater, with its ill-earned legends of having eaten artists, designers, and directors whole, I came with my whip and my chair—the knowledge that that space required huge gestures, and that it also needed and lived on intimacy. My three theaters in San Diego gave me plenty of ammunition for both of those requirements, and the Lioness of Lincoln Center herself seemed to study me with dispassionate interest, purring, as I met with Bob Crowley and Scott Pask in a small office off the lobby.

She is alive, that theater; she is unforgiving, and she is mighty. She wants big hearts, and bigger ideas. She demands bravery. She calls, like a siren, to one’s innermost dreams and aspirations—a cavalcade of Elizabethan soldiers, charging downstage amid plumes of fire in Henry IV, or an ocean of black silk beneath which lie all the serfs of Russia—but still she asks that you respect the actor, his or her consummate ability to control minds with a single gesture, an expression, a sigh....

We who have benefited from our creative relationship with Lincoln Center Theater have lived to love her, each in our own way—and the testimonies and words that follow are far more eloquent than anything can be, other than sitting in the dark before her and watching her reveal dreaming truths.

How fortunate we all are to be Cavaliers of the Lioness of Lincoln Center, the Vivian Beaumont! Salute!!

JACK O’BRIEN

BARTLETT SHER & MICHAEL YEARGAN

Bartlett Sher and Michael Yeargan created the great successes of recent years on the Beaumont stage with their productions of The Light in the Piazza and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

Bartlett Sher: My favorite thing about the Vivian Beaumont as an architectural and theatrical space is that it has a maximum amount of epic scale, in direct relationship to a maximum amount of intimacy. Thrust stages generally do that, but none like the Beaumont.

The Beaumont’s deeply intimate qualities—nobody in the audience is more than fifty feet from the stage—balanced against the giant, epic sweep of the stage extending backward, is where all our designs started from: how to build the relationship between the upstage so it feeds the downstage. That way, you can make all of Florence spin around, or make an island in the South Pacific surround this beautiful little postage-stamp downstage where you can feel so close to the action. This is my favorite quality of the space.

Michael Yeargan: I cut my teeth, when I got out of Yale, designing at Hartford Stage and at the Long Wharf Theatre. It was rare that I ever had the chance to work on a proscenium stage. And I love the fact that when you work in thrust it has this kind of cinematic quality, like you are looking over somebody’s back, as you watch somebody else talk. You always feel like you’re connecting much more with the actors. I’d seen Santo Loquasto’s design for The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov back in 19, which was absolutely amazing to me. It was sort of an extension of the kind of theater that I was making then, but on a vastly larger scale. I was astonished at how intimate you could feel in such a huge, stripped-down barn of a space.

So when the opportunity came along for me to work at the Beaumont I found that the key to the design of The Light in the Piazza was working diagonals. Being able to bring those arcades down into the space to connect the smaller space downstage with the vast space upstage. And Bart had no qualms about using the upstage space, I think, because of the sound enhancement that’s being used now, playing scenes all the way back. Editor: So why is the Beaumont considered such a difficult theater to work in?

BS: Proscenium theaters are easier, because in a proscenium house you basically have one single point of view that everybody shares. And in thrust theaters they’re on three sides. Certain properties of movement have to be observed so everyone in the audience can see. Actors are almost constantly in motion. To control focus on a thrust is much more of a three-dimensional chess game. You have to keep the actors moving and swirling, and you have to be aware of how the scenery supports that in the space.

MY: I was never daunted by the size of it, because I’d done so much work in opera. But I’m also not one to have a huge philosophical statement about a space when I see it. I just react to whatever the play is that’s going to have to happen within that space. My first shot at it was The Light in the Piazza. The design for that show just came naturally. In fact, that design was a revelation. When we did the show in Chicago, it was four-square on a proscenium stage. It felt too enormous. It didn’t click. Whereas when we drew it under the diagonals that the Beaumont demanded, it suddenly worked.

And we discovered a kind of a geometry that I don’t think would ever have come out of being within a proscenium space.

Also, the height of the Beaumont stage is kind of amazing. We’re in the process of taking the South Pacific design and modifying it to a proscenium for the tour. It’s incredible how different it has to be. You have to lower it down to get the kind of cinemascope quality we created for South Pacific into the background.

There’s something about the way the Beaumont supports both scale and intimacy that is better suited to how people perceive now. Also, this sense of intimacy is directly related to sound, which has been improved since the theater was originally built, when, no matter how close you were, the sound was so far away that the space felt too big. That’s what I think affected how people experienced the space for the first fifteen to twenty years of its life.

ED: One of the early criticisms of the Beaumont was that audiences were intimidated by the architecture, and by the luxurious interior of the theater.

MY: Most people in New York were going to theaters like the Belasco, which were small

SOUTH PACIFIC MODEL ]Michael Yeargan

SOUTH PACIFIC SKETCH ]Michael Yeargan

Sketches © Michael Yeargan

proscenium theaters—and they were probably just as shabby then as they are now. Then suddenly they walked into this incredibly modern space. I’m sure it was a jolt. Going to the theater at the Beaumont is a whole different experience from going to those midtown theaters.

ED: What about the size of the space? It is the third-largest stage in the city. Radio City and the Met are the two largest.

MY: The scale of the stage was so large because it was originally meant to be a repertory house—all that backstage space was for storage. But I think it’s great that we are able to use that space in a different way today. It’s brought about amazing work from people.

BS: It’s also the only place you can make a movie and a play at the same time. (Laughter) If you really want to play in that scale, there isn’t a better space in America. And it may be one of the best in the world, because nobody would ever build something that big again, in that way. You really can’t have this kind of experience anywhere else. If you’re brave enough to let the floor be that big, it is like no other kind of experience.

JOHN LEE BEATTY

John Lee Beatty designed the sets for many shows at Lincoln Center Theater when André Bishop became the artistic director in the early 1990s, including Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Dinner at Eight, and Ivanov, which were directed by Gerald Gutierrez; The Little Foxes, directed by Jack O’Brien; and, more recently, The Rivals, directed by Mark Lamos.

Editor: Each of the shows you’ve worked on here has provided you with a completely different set of challenges.

John Lee Beatty: I started working with Gerry Gutierrez, who always loved the Beaumont, which was interesting from the getgo, because most people approached the space as a problem. Gerry didn’t. I think partly because he admired Ellis Rabb, who used the theater memorably back in the early 190s, in Streetcar Named Desire and Gorky’s Enemies. There was some really sensational use of the space in both those productions. So Gerry wasn’t especially anxious. It was a great gift to go in there and not think of it as a problem. Gerry and I worked on Abe Lincoln in Illinois. The show should have been problematic, because there were so many differ-

ent scenes in it, and it ran all over Illinois— there were rivers and trains and all sorts of things. It actually lent itself extremely well to the Beaumont. The constant movement from place to place was quite thrilling, and sight lines were never a problem, because if you didn’t like one scene there was another one in a second that was going to have totally different staging issues.

And of course Gerry, being Gerry, often started productions by staging the curtain call, and he had the most thrilling curtain calls. (Laughter) Fifty people, arm in arm, tromping from way upstage all the way down to the front. The final moment at the end of Abe Lincoln in Illinois was an almost lifesize 160s railroad car traveling sixty feet upstage and disappearing into the darkness; it was just an amazing visual event. Gerry thought of it. He had the idea that we would literally re-create the historic image and follow Lincoln as he went off to Washington.

We worked very quickly. I would do a ton of sketches. The trick was to just use the stage in different ways. We had elevators, we

DINNER AT EIGHT SKETCHES ]John Lee Beatty

SOUTH PACIFIC PRELIMINARY SKETCHES ]Michael Yeargan

had traveling wagons, we had a train. We used every single thing that was at our disposal. Smoke and mirrors (Laughs), literally smoke and literally mirrors. And then, all of a sudden, a huge box set rolled down and we were in the interior of the house in Springfield, which you just never would have dreamed to see in the context of this production.

But some of the quirks of the stage appeared, too. Scenery traveling very fast on that very large stage doesn’t look like it’s going fast—it’s like swans gliding across black water. It is a lovely quality of the stage, but it’s technically challenging because the set pieces have to go so fast to achieve the effect. Once, later, when we did Ivanov, we created a red room way downstage, and the actors played a very intimate and dramatic scene. Then the wall went away and the pieces of the floor and props jackknifed out into the wings and disappeared, which was really thrilling. I had someone tell me they actually wept at one of Gerry’s transitions. Gerry was good at the big gesture on that stage.

Just doing all the scenery in Dinner at Eight was kind of astonishing. And the interesting thing in Dinner at Eight is, by then we understood that if you had something come up on the elevator you had to have something come over at the same time. You should never have to wait for a scene change. The elevator would go down with one set and another set would come diagonally and sweep right over the hole and fill it in right on top of it so that there was always movement between the scenes. Movement is very important on that stage. It was harder when I did Little Foxes with Jack O’Brien, since the actors actually needed to sit down.

ED: There was some back-and-forth between Jo Mielziner and Eero Saarinen about whether this stage requires a lot of scenery

or whether it’s better with no scenery?

JLB: You’re right both times, I would say. (Laughter) I really do think it works very well with no scenery, and it works with a lot of scenery. But the stage is what I call a scenery swallower. The scenery has to be almost operatic-size to sit right in that room. Scenery needs to be about a third taller than you would make it for a Broadway stage, just to make it register in that room.

ED: Do you have any thoughts about the center of the stage, which has proved to be somewhat elusive?

JLB: Well, we certainly knew where the sweet spot was in there, and it usually is where, concentrically, the seats point to. Clever actors find it instinctively. I remember the first day of rehearsals for Ivanov, Kevin Kline just gravitated there. And we all smiled, like, Oh, an actor who knows where that sweet spot is instinctively. It’s not being egotistical. It’s actually being smart. They find it.

ED: What was working with Gerry at the Beaumont like?

JLB: I think approaching the Beaumont with love truly was his great gift. He never said anything negative about it. Interesting artistic approach, don’t you think?

ED: It’s a good one.

JLB: Yes. If there’s no problem, there’s no problem, right? And Gerry thought the stage made the actors look good; he didn’t think it was working against them at all. He loved actors.

One afternoon during Dinner at Eight, I was sitting at the desk onstage in the office scene working on the props, and I thought, Wow, this is very pleasant. I feel very comfortable sitting here and looking out at the house. They’re all around you. They’re right there with you.

Jerry Zaks and Tony Walton’s work brought the Beaumont back to life with the revivals of The House of Blue Leaves, The Front Page, Anything Goes, and Six Degrees of Separation in the late 1980s.

Editor: Were you excited about working at the Beaumont, or wary of the fabled problems?

Jerry Zaks: I was not aware of any problems in the space because I happened to fall in love with a production of Cyrano de Bergerac that I saw at the Beaumont in 196, and I left the theater thinking, Well, this is great. Then, as I started to direct, I became vaguely aware of the problematic space that I’d read about. The first thing Tony and I did together was The House of Blue Leaves, and that was in the Mitzi Newhouse first. And I recall reading something that John Guare wrote in a preface to the play where he talked about Queens being one place and Manhattan was always the unattainable distant dream. We had Queens downstage center in the place that we came to discover was the sweet spot—where the action was most available to most of the audience.

TW: You could really just see the distant dream through the grating on the window. ED: There have been so many apocryphal stories about the move from downstairs to upstairs.

TW: Bernie invited us all up to stand there and think about it. For me, the most distinctive difference between the Mitzi and the Beaumont is the rake of the audience seating. In the Mitzi, it is incredibly actor-friendly. It doesn’t matter where you’re sitting, really. Or, if you’re an actor standing onstage, you feel connected to every seat. That’s because it has a steeper audience rake than the Beaumont, where the audience seating just drifts away and away slowly. You’re conscious of about the first third of the audience, but then the rest of the people are in the outfield and you’re not really connected to them, and not to the people upstairs in the loge at all. So Jerry and I decided to make the rake in the Beaumont the same as the rake in the Mitzi. (Laughter)

ED: How did you do that?

TW: Well, we tipped the stage until the relationship of the stage to the seating was exactly the same angle as it was in the Mitzi. It’s as if you leaned back the Mitzi, just leaned it back, and the stage tipped up and the seating tipped back. And so the relationship of the two ended up being identical.

JERRY ZAKS & TONY WALTON

ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS ]John Lee Beatty

Photo from Abe Lincoln in Illinois by Ken Howard

ANYTHING GOES SKETCHES & PRODUCTION PHOTOS ]Tony Walton

I remember John’s reaction. We hadn’t started rehearsals there yet, but the rake was in. And he strode up to the mezzanine and said, “Holy shit!” (Laughter)

ED: Moving to another John Guare play, scenically the whole campfire idea of Six Degrees of Separation was such a revelation, with the actors sitting in the first row of the house.

TW: We were trying to have it be a little bit of a circus, or a circus ring.

ED: It seemed like a form of urban storytelling.

TW: Everything that’s ever happened to theater spaces is a natural development from the ancient Greek and Roman theater, which developed from what happens around the campfire or when you’re standing in a square juggling. The theater is a direct result of how people assemble to watch something. If they can’t see, they climb on shoulders or look out windows. Everything stems from that. But it gets more and more sophisticated through the years after we develop electricity and things that allow stuff to fly in and out. And all of this is progress.

JZ: The look of that production never would have happened if Tony hadn’t been very vocal about encouraging me to think outside the box because of what the play demanded. Our conversations went basically like this: “Do we have real walls? Do we make it a real house or not?” And for the first twenty-five pages, you know, it would work perfectly in a so-called real house with walls. And I remember Tony saying, “Yes, Jerry, but go beyond page twenty-five. What happens? Look, then we go to fifteen other places.”

TW: There was a moment when there was a strong feeling that it should go to the Lyceum because of the number of scenic requirements in the text. And the text was almost a movie script. It just moved like lightning from place to place, and some of the more extreme places were Central Park, and the railroad flat, and the Waverly movie theater. And we just kept thinking, We’re going to be waiting more than we’re going to be acting. And then one day I just said, “Why don’t we start with nothing, Jerry, and then just see what you can’t do without.” And that’s the way we went for quite a while. He said, “Well, I know I don’t actually need the phones.” Then he came up with a brilliant solution that was steps beyond what anybody else was doing with miming phones. You could actually see the two speakers connected—they just looked at the same light source. It wasn’t just hooking the fingers into a phone position. It

was the sound effects—you heard the phone ring or hang up. We went on that principle as far as we could through the whole play. It became tricky when the young man played by James McDaniel had to impress the household with his culinary skills. And then some small things were needed, so we did end up with a little wheeled chrome trolley. That was about it. But we were terrified. (Laughs) What do you do for Central Park? And then Jerry phoned me at some unearthly hour in the night and said, “I got it! I got it! I suddenly see it. We could have the cop stand up in his seat in the audience and say, ‘Do you want to press charges?’ And when they say, ‘No,’ he can just sit—he doesn’t even have to go onstage. (Laughter) And he took that and ran with it.

JZ: Tony, I will never forget our back-andforth, which is impossible to describe. We were constantly asking: What if this? And what if that? Feeding each other. And I’ll never forget when we finally got to the idea of two sofas, and the revolving painting. I can remember walking through Central Park during the day—it was a beautiful day—just playing through the whole show in my head. And, by God, it all made sense. All of the scenes could be supported by what we had come up with. Working with Tony was some of the most fun and creative and stimulating time I’ve spent, ever.

TW: And I remember saying to you, “Don’t leave Lincoln Center, Jerry. It’ll never be this much fun again.” (Laughter)

JZ: And let me tell you something. I play that over in my head every few years, if not more frequently. And what I recall you saying, Tony, was “Don’t get the wrong idea. It isn’t always like this. It isn’t.” (Laughter) And I went, “What?” Well, do you know what? I can say safely that I understand what you mean now.

Andrei Serban’s productions of The Cherry Orchard and Agamemnon were highlights of Joseph Papp’s years at Lincoln Center.

Editor: Were you apprehensive about working at the Beaumont?

Andrei Serban: Well, before I went to the Beaumont I did hear the rumor that the place was impossible. That acoustically and visually it had its problems; that the relationship between audience and actors is awkward. Before I did The Cherry Orchard I had only seen one production there, Richard Foreman’s The Threepenny Opera

ED: So the only production you saw before you went to work there was a really great one?

AS: Yes. So I thought, What are they talking about? It is working very well. For The Cherry Orchard we used the proscenium, except that Santo Loquasto, the designer, and I tried to create a feeling of inside out. Usually the play takes place inside the house and the orchard is seen through a little window. But the radical departure from that was that we opened up the wall so we were seeing inside and outside, as if the orchard itself were invading the inside. The trees in bloom, which were all over the stage, gave a sense of nature invading even the auditorium.

Although there were no trees in the house, the feeling of nature pervaded the audience. It was, I must say, very powerful and shocking to see the whole Beaumont become a garden in the south of Russia.

On the very back wall, there was a silhouette of factories in the distance that suggested the Industrial Revolution; this contrasted with the beauty of the white cherry trees in blossom. That was very far back, and it gave the entire Beaumont space a unity which had not been seen before.

ANDREI SERBAN

THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES ]Tony Walton

Top left sketch courtesy of Tony Walton

ED: How did you conceive of the color? Everyone remembers the color and Irene Worth walking around the back of the stage, touching it. It was so expansive— the boldest use of the actual stage.

AS: We tried to break away from the tradition of Chekhov, which is usually staged to feel claustrophobic. We made the play be what Chekhov wrote, which is a comedy, in places almost a farce. We exploded it into something that was limitless, evoking the horizon of the Russian fields, the immensity of the steppe, of the Beckett-like noman’s-land where the characters wander in an abyss, lost in this field, where the sun is setting and where somehow their hopes and desires for understanding why they’re alive are melting into the coming night.

ED: Did you feel that the Beaumont had any architectural problems?

AS: I had absolutely no problems at all. I went in feeling completely at home. Very naturally. One never knows about spaces. Sometimes they completely melt and obey and accept you. And other times they fight you back. I had that feeling of the space fighting back when we did Agamemnon; that was a struggle. We had audiences in the theater and on the stage on these risers, like we were in a football stadium. The risers moved around, so the two hundred audience members on those risers changed perspective. The back stage of the theater—the whole wall—was completely open and naked. So the audience saw the entire machinery of the Beaumont space. It was very interesting to see the enormous theater engine. And we used that thinking for our own purpose, to look at the machine that in ancient theater

made the gods come to earth. Our deus ex machina was the theater itself.

We had the orchestra under a huge industrial metal grating. And beneath the floor was the chorus of about sixty people. An enormous ritualistic chorus sang and chanted in ancient Greek mixed with a little bit of English. And that was a continuation of the work I was doing at La MaMa with my Greek plays, The Fragments of a Trilogy.

It was a massive undertaking. Maybe too big. Maybe too ambitious. Maybe too radical visually to follow the narrative of the play, which in itself is a very difficult drama. Very stiff. While some people hated The Cherry Orchard, the majority of the critics and the audience loved it. But Agamemnon was received with much more distance and raised eyebrows, and question marks. It engendered negative reviews because it was, I think, way, way, way before its time. It was almost as if we had tried to take the Beaumont by storm after doing this very beautiful, gracious, and harmonious production of The Cherry Orchard. With Agamemnon we were trying to make very bold theater, what Peter Brook called “rough theater.”

ED: Didn’t you take Agamemnon to the park?

AS: You know, Joseph Papp was a man with his own mind, and he wanted very much to continue this production. So we took it to the Delacorte in the summer. We couldn’t have the audience onstage. It worked much better there; it was much simpler.

Daniel Sullivan and Douglas W. Schmidt came to Lincoln Center just as the theater opened in 1965. Schmidt was the principal designer for the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, and Sullivan was a member of the acting company and began his directing career with The Plough and the Stars on the Beaumont stage. Selected work in later years for Lincoln Center Theater included The Substance of Fire, The Sisters Rosensweig, Ah, Wilderness!, An American Daughter and Third.

Douglas W. Schmidt: Well, I saw the very first production in the Beaumont. It was Danton’s Death, of which I only remember a few elements, like the tribunal desk that came rolling in and some poor actor having to be murdered mid-stage and carried off on the turntable.

Daniel Sullivan: You know who that was, don’t you?

DWS: Yes, I do. (Laughs) Dan Sullivan!

DS: I was the first person on, and Herbert Blau had put together this little show at the beginning, where I ran onto Mielziner’s set, and there were statuary in perspective going upstage. And Blau asked me if I could perhaps get smaller as I went (Laughter), as I was destroying the perspective. I was supposed to crouch down a little bit as I exited. And then I was murdered by four female sansculottes. They disemboweled me, and then I fell onto the annular ring. Mielziner’s famous annular ring. (Laughter) It was an annular ring that revolved off to titters. (Laughter)

DWS: It was the longest exit in the history of the Beaumont.

ED: This was the first production in the Beaumont?

DS: That’s right. I was also the first person

DANIEL SULLIVAN & DOUGLAS W. SCHMIDT

ANTIGONE ]Douglas W. Schmidt

THE CHERRY ORCHARD ]Santo Loquasto

onstage at the Forum Theater, which is now the Newhouse. (Laughter)

I remember standing in the back of the Forum with Jo Mielziner when we were rehearsing Wilford Leach’s In Three Zones, and he looked around at the theater and said, “Well, this one will work.” He said it very sweetly, slightly puzzled, because at that point the Beaumont was being heavily criticized and he had designed the theater downstairs as a smaller-scale version of the theater upstairs, and he was curious why one was working and one wasn’t.

ED: Doug, were you intimidated by the Beaumont’s space?

DWS: I found it quite problematic. It was very difficult to maintain any sense of intimacy in those days. But, in the intervening years, different designers and producers have really helped the situation quite a lot. I remember seeing the first Joe Papp show in the Beaumont. They had dropped a circular catwalk from the ceiling, down below the existing grid in the house, and that reduced the height of the space quite dramatically. That was a huge improvement. And I know they did it as much for lighting reasons as any other. The original lighting arrangement in the Beaumont, frankly, was terrible. They made a decision somewhere along the line that the lights should be hidden and we shouldn’t be aware of them, and they forced them up into the ceiling, between the ribs, so that they wouldn’t be visible. But the problem with that was you couldn’t focus them; they could only go one place and they were miles from the stage, so it was really difficult to control.

ED: Was there a secret to doing more intimate shows?

DWS: When I think of the most successful, intimate productions, like Mike Nichols’s Little Foxes and Dan’s The Plough and the Stars, even Richard Foreman’s The Threepenny Opera, you wanted to push the performance

right down into the audience’s lap, as far out into a thrust space as you possibly could. And sometimes that meant that there was a sofa in front of twenty-five people.

DS: Right. And that’s exactly what happened with Little Foxes. Though it was a piano that was sitting there stage right. (Laughter) And we put it out to Mike Nichols, and he would say, “That’s too bad.”

DWS: Same with Richard Foreman. I would say, “You know, Richard, the people on the side there, they can’t see anything.” And he’d say, “Oh, I can’t worry about them; I gotta worry about Mr. Brecht.” The most successful designs probably had that in common back then.

DS: The theater requires a particular kind of vision. Certainly the kind of thing they did with The Coast of Utopia or South Pacific, where they really just got out there and said, “This is an unusually large space and, dammit, I’m going to fill it. And I’m not going to pretend it’s not there.” One of the other things about the Beaumont is the rake of the auditorium, which is nothing you could ever do anything about. Whether you’re in the balcony or in the house, you’re always looking down at the action. Which is one of the brilliant things about the opening of South Pacific—that you’re looking down into that orchestra pit. But with all the work they’ve done on the Beaumont the footprint of the building is the footprint. I don’t know if you agree with me, Doug, but working there is always a matter of problem-solving.

DWS: Absolutely. It was like you were starting from scratch every time you started a new show there.

ED: There were a number of experiments in the Beaumont. Joe Papp did Agamemnon and had the audience sitting onstage. DWS: I did that one. That was a landmark voyage for using the architecture in several ways. We dropped the elevator with the

front rows of seats into the basement and built a thrust stage out over the resulting pit. The thrust was constructed of transparent metal mesh and the audience could watch simultaneous action on the primary area, at stage level, and in the pit below. But it did open up the visual vocabulary for the house. As did The Cherry Orchard

ED: Did you ever meet Mielziner?

DWS: I had several encounters with him. He was always very fixed in his ideas about what theater is, and what the physical surround should be, so much so that I was really surprised that the space came out as compromised as it did.

ED: The 1960s was a key period in the architecture of theater. So many theaters were being built, and there was a lot of discussion about what a theater should be.

DS: In some ways, it was argued out in the construction of the Beaumont. That’s why you ended up with a proscenium theater and a thrust theater in one. Nobody wanted to be wrong.

ED: Which won?

DS: Well, the thrust theater has to win in that situation. It was, in fact, going to be a thrust theater, no matter what anybody said.

ED: Many people have no idea that the theater was ever dark.

DWS: Oh, for so long. It suffered a great deal because it was compared to the original, temporary downtown space, which was kind of ad hoc, built while Lincoln Center was under construction. But it was smaller and more intimate.

ED: When Lincoln Center itself opened, there was a lot of discussion about whether it was too formal and too large. The same was said of the Beaumont; it was at odds with the content of the plays in some way.

DWS: It was meant to be the people’s repertory company.

DS: It was a product of its time—there was this idea that the stage would accommodate Brechtian and Shakespearean works. That’s where people believed theater was headed. A lot of theaters built at that time were made for that kind of play. But the writing changed direction. The plays that have been most successful at the Beaumont are plays like The Coast of Utopia—plays that move in a kind of cinematic way, that have a large idea.

DWS: The epic.

ED: How perfect. After all, what play is more epic than Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death?— the very first play performed on this stage.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE ]Douglas W. Schmidt

Sketch courtesy of Douglas W. Scmidt.

50 YEARS 215 PRODUCTIONS

REPERTORY THEATER OF LINCOLN CENTER, ELIA KAZAN, ROBERT WHITEHEAD, DIRECTORS (1960-1964)

After The Fall

Marco Millions

But for Whom Charlie

The Changeling Incident at Vichy Tartuffe

REPERTORY THEATER OF LINCOLN CENTER

HERBERT BLAU, JULES IRVING, DIRECTORS (1965-1966)

Danton’s Death

The Country Wife

The Condemned of Altona

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

The Alchemist

Yerma

In Three Zones

The East Wind

Galileo

REPERTORY THEATER OF LINCOLN CENTER

JULES IRVING, DIRECTOR (1966-1972)

The Little Foxes

Walking to Waldheim/ Happiness

Saint Joan Tiger at the Gates Summertree

Cyrano de Bergerac

King Lear

A Cry of Players

Bananas

An Evening for Merlin Finch/ A Great Career

In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Inner Journey

The Miser

Year Boston Won the Pennant

The Time of Your Life

The Increased Difficulty of Concentration

Camino Real

The Disintegration of James Cherry

Operation Sidewinder Landscape/Silence

Beggar on Horseback

Amphitryon

The Good Woman of Setzuan

The Playboy of the Western World

The Birthday Party

An Enemy of the People

Scenes from American Life

Pictures in the Hallway Antigone

Mary Stuart

People are Living There

Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Ride Across Lake Constance

Twelfth Night

The Duplex

The Crucible Suggs

Man of La Mancha

Enemies

Samuel Beckett Festival

The Plough and the Stars

The Merchant of Venice

A Streetcar Named Desire

NEW YORK SHAKESPEARE

FESTIVAL AT LINCOLN CENTER

JOSEPH PAPP, PRESIDENT AND PRODUCER (1973-1977)

In the Boom Boom Room

Troilus and Cressida

The Au Pair Man

The Tempest

What the Wine-Sellers Buy

The Dance of Death

Macbeth

Short Eyes

Richard III

Mert and Phil

Black Picture Show

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Doll’s House

Little Black Sheep

The Taking of Miss Janie

Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ Hamlet

The Shortchanged Review Mrs. Warren’s Profession Streamers

The Threepenny Opera

The Cherry Orchard Agamemnon

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER COMPANY

RICHMOND CRINKLEY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR (1979-1981)

The Philadelphia Story

Macbeth

Vivien/ Stops Along the Way/ In Fireworks Lie Secret Codes

The Floating Light Bulb

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER

GREGORY MOSHER, DIRECTOR

BERNARD GERSTEN, EXECUTIVE

PRODUCER (1985–1991)

Prairie du Chien/The Shawl

The House of Blue Leaves

Juggling & Cheap Theatrics

Terrors of Pleasure

Sex & Death to the Age of 14

Swimming to Cambodia

Asinamali!

Bopha!

Children of Asazi/Gangsters

Born in the R.S.A.

The Transposed Heads

The Front Page

Bodies, Rest & Motion

Danger: Memory!

Death and the King’s Horseman

The Regard of Flight

The Comedy of Errors

Anything Goes

Sarafina!

Boys’ Life

Speed-the-Plow

I’ll Go On

Road

Waiting for Godot

Our Town

Measure for Measure

Ubu

Oh, Hell

The Tenth Man

Some Americans Abroad

Six Degrees of Separation

Monster in a Box

Township Fever

Mule Bone

Mr. Gogol & Mr. Preen

Two Shakespearean Actors

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER

ANDRÉ BISHOP,

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

BERNARD GERSTEN, EXECUTIVE

PRODUCER (1991–PRESENT)

The Most Happy Fella

The Substance of Fire

Four Baboons Adoring the Sun

The Sisters Rosensweig

My Favorite Year

Playboy of the West Indies

In the Summer House

The Lights

Abe Lincoln in Illinois

Gray’s Anatomy

Hello Again

Carousel

subUrbia

Hapgood

The Heiress

Arcadia

Twelve Dreams

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Northeast Local

Racing Demon

A Fair Country

A Delicate Balance

Sex and Longing

It’s a Slippery Slope

Juan Darién

God’s Heart

An American Daughter

The Little Foxes

Ivanov

Pride’s Crossing

Ah, Wilderness!

A New Brain

Twelfth Night

Parade

Far East

Via Dolorosa

Ancestral Voices

Ring Round the Moon

It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues

Contact

Marie Christine

Morning, Noon & Night

The Time of the Cuckoo

Rose

Spinning Into Butter

Patti LuPone: Matters of the Heart

Old Money

Ten Unknowns

The Invention of Love Chaucer in Rome

Thou Shalt Not

Everett Beekin

“QED”

Barbara Cook: Mostly Sondheim

The Carpetbagger’s Children

Morning’s at Seven

A Man of No Importance

Dinner at Eight

Observe the Sons of Ulster… Vincent in Brixton

Elegies: A Song Cycle

A Bad Friend

Henry IV

Nothing but the Truth

Big Bill

King Lear

Barbara Cook’s Broadway

The Frogs

Belle Epoque

The Rivals

Dessa Rose

The Light in the Piazza

Brian Stokes Mitchell: Love/Life

Third

Edward Albee’s Seascape

Bernarda Alba

Awake and Sing!

The House in Town

The Clean House

The Coast of Utopia

Dying City

The Glorious Ones

Cymbeline

Rock ‘N’ Roll

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s

South Pacific

The New Century

John Lithgow: Stories by Heart

Clay

Saturn Returns

Dividing the Estate

Happiness

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Haircut and Uncle Fred Flits By

Stunning

Lincoln Center Theater Review

Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc.

Lincoln Center Theater

150 West 65 Street

New York, New York 1003