LAUGHTER IN THE 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 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!

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.

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 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 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.

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