22 minute read
I Was Just Going to Do Plays
by SDC Journal
REFLECTIONS ON ZELDA FICHANDLER
BY LUCY GRAM
In 1950, a 24-year-old graduate student in the drama department of The George Washington University joined forces with her husband and her professor and converted a former burlesque and movie house into a 247-seat theatre-in-the-round. “I didn’t know what I was doing when the theater opened,” she wrote to a colleague many years later. “I was just going to do plays, and not have them in New York—that’s all.”
The graduate student’s name was Zelda Fichandler, and she would go on to turn that theatre into a renowned cultural space: Washington, DC’s Arena Stage. Zelda (as everyone called her) would serve as Arena’s artistic leader for 40 years, and in the process would become a seminal figure in the American regional theatre movement: an artistic director, writer, director, and leader with a unique ability to recognize and articulate the promise and problems of the field.
Arena’s creation was inspired by another early figure in the American regional theatre movement: Margo Jones, whose nonprofit Theatre ’49 was the inspiration for Arena’s in-the-round configuration. Other theatrical pioneers from that period included the Alley Theatre’s Nina Vance and, after Arena’s founding, Gordon Davidson, Tyrone Guthrie, Joseph Papp, and many more. The theatres that these leaders founded, many of which still exist, now provide the foundation for sustainable artistic careers for a wide variety of American theatre artists: actors, designers, and, of course, directors and choreographers.
When we think about the founders of anything, we tend to think of them as fully formed: complete, successful, with a narrative we know. When someone is much beloved, as Zelda was, that narrative can start to feel perfunctory. You can see it in the repeated language people use to describe someone in this category; they are a “titan,” a “visionary,” a “matriarch.” It’s not that those words aren’t often accurate descriptions. It’s that when we use this kind of clichéd vocabulary to describe someone with an impact as important and varied as Zelda’s, we forget—or lose the opportunity to learn— the qualities that earned them that status, that got them there in the first place: how they were forged, what obstacles they overcame, the specific ways they succeeded and failed, and the values that guided them along the way.
“There are form-givers in every new style of art,” Zelda observed in the last public speech she ever gave, when she was a venerated leader in her eighties, a far cry from her graduate student beginnings. “There may seem to be just one in front,” she told her audience, “but, like seeds under the snow, they emerge in small clusters, and if the plants are strong, they become widely absorbed in the culture.” Zelda, along with her fellow founders, was a form-giver. Those of us who did not know her, or whose theatre careers weren’t directly shaped by her as so many were, nonetheless work in a field that owes its foundation—its nonprofit structure, service organizations, relationship to the commercial sector, artistic leaders, and very way of thinking about our art form—to Zelda Fichandler and her peers. She was the first to admit that she was not the only founder of the American regional theatre movement, but she was for a long time its torchbearer. To many theatre artists, she still is. Her ideas and her accomplishments have become widely absorbed in the culture. They are central to the American theatre as we know it. We could pull out one of those oft-used phrases and say Zelda was a visionary, and it would be true. But it would also be easy— and we learn less from easy.
So it’s a special pleasure that as we celebrate the centennial of Zelda’s birth this fall, we have the opportunity to revisit her life and ideas through two newly published books: Mary B. Robinson’s To Repair the World: Zelda Fichandler and the Transformation of American Theater (Routledge, 2024), an oral history of Zelda’s life and career, and The Long Revolution (Theatre Communications Group, 2024), a collection of Zelda’s writing and speeches edited by Todd London. The books have the same subject but different focuses, and as a result, complement each other well; in fact, it’s hard to imagine a reader who would not benefit from reading both at once.
Robinson’s book is a biography written in oral-history form. It traces Zelda’s life and career through the reflections of her friends and colleagues, interspersed with Robinson’s own writing and excerpts from Zelda’s speeches and letters that give context to others’ memories. London’s book, a collection, has a more straightforward task, although calling it straightforward belies the years of effort it took to bring it to this final form. Zelda began compiling her writing and speeches into a body of work, then bequeathed the project to London at the end of her life.
Readers get a comprehensive sense of what London calls “the range of Zelda’s thinking and the areas of her concern” from The Long Revolution. The collection gives us the opportunity to dig deep into Zelda’s intellectual life and begin to understand her capacity to inspire both through sheer intellectual heft and the clear-eyed focus she brought to the art and artists at the center of the regional theatre movement. A glance at the table of contents indicates the complexity of the project: Zelda wrote, and spoke, extensively, about topics ranging from how theatre is connected to human evolution, to actor training, racial integration, the institutionalization of the American theatre, and more.
It’s in To Repair the World, however, where the unpacking of her personality and vitality happens. “What was it about Zelda,” Robinson wonders in her introduction, “…that caused so many people to feel transformed by her?” Accompanying the author on her journey to answer that question helps us begin to unyoke Zelda from her “visionary” narrative. So do excerpts from Zelda’s letters, which Robinson often quotes in the introductory setups for each chapter in To Repair the World. The letters allow the reader access to Zelda’s doubts and vulnerability, written in a more personal voice than her formal pieces. Of particular note are Zelda’s letters to subscribers, which include a defense of one of Arena’s productions that could be a description of Robinson and London’s mutual pursuit. “To write is to affirm,” Zelda wrote to the subscriber. “Any creative act is a form of affirmation of life.”
SDC and SDC Foundation have their own affirmation of Zelda’s life through the Zelda Fichandler Award, which was established on the occasion of SDC’s 50th anniversary in 2009 to recognize an outstanding director or choreographer who is making a unique and exceptional contribution through their work in regional theatre. For Zelda, the award represented an acknowledgment of a director or choreographer’s accomplishments to date and future promise, created to be given to an artist in the middle of their creative life who has made a long-term commitment to community.
The Long Revolution includes two speeches given on occasions surrounding the award. The first was delivered at SDC’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2009, when the award was announced, and the second at the 2011 award presentation. That later speech, the last Zelda ever gave publicly, is the one in which she spoke about the founders of American theatre as “form-givers.” The 2009 and 2011 speeches are cut and combined in London’s book, but both, especially the 2011 speech, are worth considering separately as capstones to Zelda’s long career. Like much of Zelda’s writing over the years, they contain both celebrations of her own achievements and the growth of the American regional theatre, and warnings about what could hasten its downfall as an art form. In a time of hardship for regional theatres across the United States, it’s helpful to get a taste of both; it’s a chance to learn who laid the foundation and find out it’s not as stable as we thought it was.
And Zelda did lay the foundation. It began, she says in her 2011 award speech, with “a revolution in our perception,” what she, in a June 1959 document published at the end of London’s book, called a “new recognition of the need to establish… permanent repertory theaters” outside of New York. Zelda and her peers wanted to give communities across the United States the chance to experience theatre as an art form, separate from the New York-centric commercialism of Broadway. That left the founders with a problem, however. They needed a different financial structure for their theatres. They landed on the 501(c) (3) tax code, which allowed theatres to join educational, religious, scientific, and charitable organizations in benefiting from “nonprofit” status. The 501(c)(3) tax code hadn’t previously been used for arts and culture organizations, but it would go on to become an essential piece of the American regional theatre.
“Some of us may take that fact for granted, but we shouldn’t,” Zelda stressed in 2011. The nonprofit structure is “the basic reality of our existence.” In fact, Arena started out as a for-profit organization and ran that way for seven years, before W. McNeil Lowry, the Ford Foundation’s director of art and humanities, told Zelda that nonprofit status was a requirement for receiving foundation funding. Arena’s stockholders then voted to turn the for-profit company Arena Enterprises Inc. into a nonprofit. It was one of the first theatres to lead the way into a new nonprofit world.
“Once we made the choice to produce our plays not to recoup an investment, but to recoup some corner of the universe for our understanding and engagement,” Zelda later wrote, “we entered into the same world as the library, the museum, the church, and became, like them, an instrument of civilization.” As Robinson notes, this is a powerful enough quote that Zelda used it repeatedly. In the years since Zelda wrote this, American theatremakers have created thousands of nonprofit theatres. More than 2,000 of them remain a vital part of this country’s cultural life.
Other basic realities of the field that even the most invested and interested theatre artists among us might take for granted— the service organizations that support those regional theatres and the collective bargaining agent that represents them— sprang to life in the 20 years after Zelda and her colleagues started Arena Stage. Theatre Communications Group was founded more than 10 years after Arena, in 1961, expressly for the purpose of connecting the leaders of America’s budding regional theatres to one another. The National Endowment for the Arts began its existence four years later, in 1965. On a parallel track, just a year after that, the League of Resident Theatres was founded as the multi-employer bargaining representative for the resident theatres by a group of leaders including Tom Fichandler, Zelda’s husband, who served as Executive Director of Arena Stage for 36 years. These organizations provided essential support to Arena as it grew and changed, and they continue to bolster nonprofit theatres today. Studying TCG, the NEA, and LORT as part of Arena’s history highlights that these are still relatively young organizations. Their existence, as both Zelda’s story and the NEA’s persistent fight for funding reminds us, is fragile.
While those entities were establishing themselves, Arena found its feet as a successful nonprofit theatre, and the accomplishments Zelda would celebrate in later years began to accrue. The Great White Hope, which Arena produced in 1967 to much acclaim, became the first regional theatre production to transfer to Broadway. The move had far-reaching consequences. Zelda had spent two years developing the play with playwright Howard Sackler, but she received no credit for her work. Arena also suffered. Despite pouring money into the mammoth production, the theatre did not benefit financially from the Broadway transfer. To add insult to injury, it lost its beloved resident acting company and associate producing director Ed Sherin to Broadway.
Motivated by those inequities, Tom Fichlander took action to make sure a situation like this couldn’t happen again. As Molly Smith notes in To Repair the World, the financial implications of the transfer “pushed Tom Fichandler into creating a way for non-profit theatres to enjoy something financial after shows had gone to New York.” This would irrevocably shape the nonprofit theatre sector’s relationship with the commercial sector, sowing the seeds for their current cozy relationship in ways that continue to reverberate today.
Despite its long-term implications, The Great White Hope’s success and transfer were a testament to Arena’s ability to create art with impact. The production played on Broadway for 564 performances, and the play went on to win the 1969 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Arena also made an impression on the international stage after it was chosen by the State Department to travel two productions to the Soviet Union as part of a cultural exchange program meant to support the détente from the Cold War. Arena’s productions of Our Town, directed by Alan Schneider, and Inherit the Wind, directed by Zelda, were met with standing ovations in Moscow, to her enduring satisfaction and pride.
As foundations shifted their funding focuses in the late 1960s, the nonprofit theatre sector’s struggle to find alternate funding began, as Zelda saw it, to guide their artistic choices. She diagnosed the problem in a set of 1967 remarks published in The Long Revolution: “What we did—to survive!—what we had to do was to acknowledge that the audience was our Master. What we did was plan a season that would please our Masters—no trick, actually, after so many years of experience.”
Zelda began, in those same remarks, to caution about what is lost when regional theatres focus on the financial potential of their programming choices rather than their artistic merit. “We need money, but as much as we need money we need—individually— to find, heighten, and explore the informing idea of our theatres,” she warned. “Real power resides within the art we make and not in the techniques of manipulation, marketing, and promotion.” Her cautions about this topic would continue to the end of her life.
In her last speech, Zelda returned to her preoccupation with the relationship between nonprofit theatres and the commercial sector. She encouraged artistic leaders to “take our gaze and any preoccupation away, away from Broadway, from which we took our leave many years ago....Broadway must not invade our house and take over our home. Always: he who pays the piper calls the tune.”
Zelda’s impulse to keep nonprofit theatres focused on their artistic impact wasn’t just about mission drift. It was also about theatre artists. Zelda is often spoken about as a great supporter and champion of actors. She believed strongly in a residential company model for regional theatres and worked hard to build and preserve Arena’s. In the second half of her life, she ran the Graduate Acting Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and so profoundly influenced a generation of American actors— many of whom remain theatre artists—that someone new to Zelda’s story might be forgiven for thinking that her interest in theatre artists was in actors alone. Robinson’s book, however, beautifully emphasizes two potentially less obvious aspects of Zelda’s career: her role as a champion and employer of a generation of directors from around the world, and the way in which her mentorship and her leadership style influenced a generation of American directors.
“As much as we need money we need— individually—to find, heighten, and explore the informing idea of our theatres. Real power resides within the art we make.”
Robinson cites several theatre artists who marvel at the roster of directors Zelda hired at Arena. “They were absolutely world class,” actor Casey Biggs recalls, “Liviu Ciulei, Lucian Pintilie, Doug Wagner, Garland Wright— these incredible directors.” For James C. Nicola, who first came on board at Arena as a directing fellow in a now-defunct NEA program, that was a major attraction of working for Zelda. “The remarkable thing that really drew me to Arena in the first place was the wisdom she had about bringing in directors from other cultural traditions.”
Zelda knew how to let a director have their own space. “When she believed in you as a director, there was another layer of comfort that you knew she would offer. There was always a sense of ‘It’s going to be your production,’” Joe Dowling remembers in Robinson’s book. “The notes she gave were not based on what she would have done with the play, but always based on what she knew I wanted to do with the play.” Dowling, who is Irish, credits Zelda for his success in the United States. “I’ve spent the last 30 years now more in America than in Ireland. That came because of Zel.”
Zelda’s leadership style, in the rehearsal room and in the halls, made an impact as well. “I completely wanted to model my directing style after her,” John Rando says. “The generosity of spirit, the intelligence, the magnanimous way of creating a very safe and playful environment in the rehearsal hall—all those things really added up for me.” Playwright Cheryl L. West thought of Zelda as tough, demanding, and sartorially sharp. “When you see a woman like that, you think perhaps I could do that too. Or I could have my own sense of strength.”
Zelda was a similar influence on, and was a mentor to, many young directors over the course of her career. She often gave them small opportunities and took a chance on them if they did well. Joan Vail Thorne worked as Zelda’s assistant until Zelda hired Thorne to direct in the 1954-1955 season. “It was an act of faith,” Joan remembers in To Repair the World. When Douglas C. Wager was Zelda’s assistant stage manager for An Enemy of the People, she gave him the job of staging the transitions. “That was my first official paid directing job,” he recalls. Wager would go on to a successful directing career and eventually become Zelda’s successor as Arena’s Artistic Director.
Zelda kept an eye on the people she hired and recognized their talents. Sometimes this was life changing. When Ted Pappas was hired to choreograph at Arena, she took him aside. “It’s very interesting watching you work,” she told him, “because you speak to [the performers] as a director, not as a choreographer…you don’t talk to them about steps; you talk to them about why they’re doing it. You’re a director.” Pappas agreed, and went on to a career as a director-choreographer and artistic director.
She also passed on other lessons. What stayed with Nicola “most deeply and profoundly from Zelda was the significance of continuing relationships—artistic collaborative relationships.” Benny Sato Ambush, another mentee, was impressed by Zelda’s artistic identity as “a globalist. I picked that up from her—it started my interest in a universal perspective, in addition to the Black experience.”
As Robinson points out, while Zelda was not always a proactive supporter of female directors (only six women, besides Zelda, directed at Arena in the 35 years she was its artistic leader), she nonetheless had a profound effect on women in the field. Director and writer Emily Mann’s two big influences at the time “were Hallie Flanagan and Zelda Fichandler—[they were] why I felt I could be in the field, I could run a theater, I could write, I could direct.” Irene Lewis felt similarly, she tells Robinson: “Back when I was growing up, you were expected to become a housewife. A theater director was unimaginable.” Zelda, and Nina Vance, changed that for Lewis. “They were the only two women I knew who were directing, and they were only directing because they had their own theaters,” Lewis says.
A director herself, Zelda knew how important it was for her fellow directors to stay in tune with their impulses, particularly if they also took on leadership roles. This is clear in the writing collected in The Long Revolution. “The artist must hear his own voice, at best a highly intricate process. Next to impossible within the cacophony of these institutions of ours,” she wrote in 1970. In the same essay, she cautioned against artistic leaders spending their energy on fundraising and dampening their creative spirit. “The directors, the conductors of the collective creativity, supposedly the fount for the energy and spirit of the Thing, by getting and spending lay waste to their powers,” she warned.
In her 2011 SDC Foundation speech, Zelda reminded her audience that the purpose of regional theatres was, in part, to establish places for artists to work and grow. “We must deepen our commitment to create artistic homes for artists,” so that they “feel that the institution was created for them, to cradle their work, to put them in the center.” Regional theatres, after all, were built both for audiences and for artists. “Where would our writers, directors, and designers be,” Zelda asked, “without these congeries of work places, these sites for experimentation and development?”
We could ask the same question. Where would our community be without Zelda and her many legacies? “American theater has begun to have a tradition,” she wrote in that 1970 essay, “a past, a present, a future, a somewhat coherent way to look at itself and to proceed.” It is to Zelda’s credit that we do have that tradition, for she was a form-giver and an eloquent chronicler along the way.
“Where would our writers, directors, and designers be without these congeries of work places, these sites for experimentation and development?”
It’s helpful to remember that Zelda Fichandler, giant of the American regional theatre, was once a graduate student, a young citizen-artist unsure if she was up to the task in front of her or if what she was making would survive. Perhaps Zelda was thinking of those beginnings when she wrote in her final speech, “The artist may be lonely or feel unsure of, or inadequate to, what she is making, but she must cling to her integrity—her wholeness—and see it through.”
Zelda saw it through. Her enduring belief in the power of theatre to change the world propelled her through a career of constantly shifting cultural headwinds. As she told the NYU acting students in 2001, she believed unequivocally in the “terrible and wonderful power” of theatre’s ability to “reach people’s minds through their hearts and—maybe— change them.” It was so total a belief, so consistently referenced in her writing and speaking, that one wonders where it came from. Recall that line: “I was just going to do plays, and not have them all in New York—that’s all.” Zelda continued, “And then, I found out what a theater could do, in the process of doing it. I found out.” But of course. The artists taught her. The audience taught her. The work taught her. And she continues to teach us.
If Margo Jones struck the match, and Nina Vance lit the torch, then Zelda Fichandler held the flame high for everyone to see. With the way illuminated, others walked behind, their own torches kindled with the flames Zelda passed on. Even as some fires flicker, splutter, or burn out, sparks remain. Some flames burn brightly still, and every day, a young theatre artist lights a new fire. We’ve lost some who led the way, but the message is clear. We must be our own torchbearers now.
