[Part 2 of my 2002 interview with the late Eve Adamson, former founding
artistic director of the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre, picks up right where
Part 1 left off. (If you haven’t read
the first installment of the transcript, I recommend that you go back and do
that first.) The thrust of the interview
was Adamson’s work with Tennessee Williams on the workshop début of his one-act
play Kirche, Küche und Kinder in 1979. (Dr. K~ is the
professor for whom I conducted this interview and a couple of others for his
research on Williams’s late one-acts.) ]
RICK: Did you do The Red Devil Battery Sign?
ADAMSON: No. No.
RICK: I didn’t think so. When Dr. K~ mentioned it in his e-mail, I
wrote back that I didn’t remember . . . . Somebody recently did it, I
think back in the ‘80s—WPA did it. [It was the WPA Theatre, 26 Oct.-1
Dec. 1996—I was off a decade—with Elizabeth Ashley; the theater, which was in
Chelsea, was
an independent Off-Broadway company in New York City and should not be confused
with the New Deal government program (which included the Federal Theatre
Project).]
ADAMSON: Oh, that could be.
RICK: The late ‘80s.
ADAMSON: That could be.
RICK: And it was in the early part of
the revival of interest in his late plays.
ADAMSON: Hmm.
RICK: I remember there being an article in American Theatre that made a point—that other people had been
making, but it was the first time I’d seen it sort of written out—that the
directors who had grown up with the Williams of Kazan and Mielziner and had
that impression burned into their minds, that this was what Williams was, had
not so much passed from the scene but their influence had been dissipated, and
that these young directors—many of them not American—British or other
non-Americans—were approaching the late Williams plays with a completely fresh
mind—were not tainted by the idea that they all had to be Summer and Smoke and Streetcar. [The article in question is
Frank
Rizzo, “Raising Tennessee: For a new generation of admirers, Williams is the
playwright of the hour,” American Theatre 15.8 (Oct. 1998): 20-25.]
ADAMSON: I think that’s a really good
point.
RICK: These directors were
reimagining them and that the critical reception that had tainted them when
they were first produced in the ’60s and ’70s and dismissed, was very often
infected by the fact that everybody—that the critics also, as well as the
directors—thought of them as being bad versions of Streetcar, Summer and
Smoke, and Glass Menagerie, but they were completely different and
needed a different approach.
ADAMSON: I think that’s absolutely true.
RICK: I’m sure it is.
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: As I said, it was not a new
idea, it was just the first time I’d seen it written out in that fashion. There was a brief interest in all of these
plays, all at the same time as The Red Devil Battery Sign—I think it was at the WPA.
ADAMSON: I’ve always been a great
defender of his late work, and I feel really passionate about this. And, you know, what I usually say is, when
Picasso was the age that Tennessee was when he was writing these plays, he was
making paper sculpture, and nobody said, ‘Why aren’t you still in the Blue
Period.’
RICK: Of course, he had changed so
many times that people sort of got used to the fact that Picasso stayed with a
style, you know, five minutes.
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: But there was an interesting
column in the ’50s, by Max Lerner, that discussed that very fact, to which
Williams then responded—that a young artist, particularly playwrights, he
said—other artists tend to be accepted when they change—but a young
playwright—or newly-emerged playwright, regardless of age—who establishes
himself as substantially as Williams did with his early plays, are very often
not allowed to change. They’re not
allowed to experiment. They become what
he called the “Number One Boy”—that was the title of the column. And they’re expected to continue to do the
same thing. [This is all in reference to Max Lerner, “Number One Boy,” New York
Post 6 Mar. 1951: 28 and Max
Lerner, “Letter From A Playwright,” New York Post 16 May 1951: 44. I wrote about searching for these
publications on ROT in “A Tennessee
Williams Treasure Hunt,” 11 April 2009.]
ADAMSON: That’s absolutely true.
RICK: And if they don’t, they get
rejected.
ADAMSON: Mmm-hmm.
RICK: And somebody sent Williams—he
was on Key West at the time—somebody [it
was Wolfe Kaufman, producer Cheryl Crawford’s press agent] sent Williams the column and he wrote
back—the column ran in the New York Post—and then Lerner
published the letter, the response. But
Williams responded very positively: ‘You are the first person who has said
that, and I appreciate it—because that’s true.
We are not allowed to experiment and try new things.’ [I paraphrased Williams on the phone; the
actual quotation is in the blog article.]
ADAMSON: It is true, and then, I mean .
. . to this day and in this society, we don’t consider theater an art
form. Other countries do. And that’s one of the problems. And I know talking with him to audiences was
amazing because audiences would feel betrayed. When we did Something Cloudy, we’d get questions like, “Well, why haven’t you written one of your
wonderful female characters?” And I’d
say, “Well, look at the male character he wrote.” [Laughs.] You know . . . . There was a sense of ‘How could you do this .
. .’
RICK: Betrayal.
ADAMSON: ‘. . . to me?’ Yeah.
And it was very, very strong.
Those early plays really, I think, burnt themselves into our collective
subconscious.
RICK: And with good reason.
ADAMSON: Yeah,
and with good reason.
RICK: This is not to put down the
early plays.
ADAMSON: No, not at all!
RICK: I’ve seen, you know, recent
productions of those early successes and they’re still of immense power.
ADAMSON: Oh, they’re wonderful
plays.
RICK: I did an extensive study of Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities—which was, of course, not well received . . . . [I meant, of course, that Eccentricities
of a Nightingale wasn’t well received on Broadway in 1976, not my study,
published as “Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a
Nightingale” in Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance
(Greenwood Press, 1998).]
ADAMSON: Right.
RICK: This was an off-Broadway
revival.
ADAMSON: But that doesn’t negate his
later works.
RICK: No, no. That’s the point.
ADAMSON: And people responded so passionately and so negatively to him doing
exactly what a mature artist does, which is explore uncharted territory.
RICK: Which is odd, because now you’re
talking . . . oh, I don’t know, 30 years later, 20 years later, after Max
Lerner wrote that column, and that’s exactly what he said.
ADAMSON: Yeah, that’s wonderful.
RICK: That people essentially get
angry at them . . .
ADAMSON: Uh-huh.
RICK: . . . for doing this.
ADAMSON: Yep.
RICK: They’re not allowed to.
ADAMSON: Mmm-hmm. And that’s terrible. And it was deeply, deeply painful to
Tennessee. Because he was tremendously
courageous, exploring this new territory.
And he was just shot down everywhere he turned.
RICK: What most people . . . many
people don’t realize today is that he was tremendously courageous with his
plays in the ’40s and the ’50s.
ADAMSON: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.
RICK: Of course, today we look back
at them as standards, but, of course, they were groundbreaking in their own
way.
ADAMSON: He was always tremendously
courageous. I mean, he was an artist of
the theater. It’s
just that when he was young, there was just Broadway. You know, I think . . . .
RICK: Of course, in those days also
Broadway did new stuff.
ADAMSON: Yeah. Yeah.
RICK: But, of course, a lot his stuff
didn’t start on Broadway. He broke ground in places like Dallas.
ADAMSON: Right. Right.
RICK: And Chicago.
ADAMSON: Soooo . . . . That’s about all I can say to these specific
questions.
RICK: Well, let’s go back to the sort
of, you know, general questions—although you’ve been doing that all along, but
just sort of to end it with the, you know, the general impressions of the play
and working with Williams. Dr. K~ asked,
“Did Williams have any commentary on the parts of the play, the action,
symbols, or what he called the ‘theatre of the outrageous.’” But, just more generally, things he said
about the work—either the production or the play, the script. As you recall.
ADAMSON: Uhh . . . . Very little.
Very little. Again, because he,
you know, he didn’t talk about that. The
play was an entity in itself, that was coming to life on the stage. And, as I say, we worked much [more] closely
together on Something Cloudy
than we did on this. I mean, he came to
rehearsals for this . . . uhh . . . but he wasn’t . . . .
RICK: He was described in something
that I read about Something Cloudy as
essentially becoming a playwright-in-residence at the Cocteau during the work
on that.
ADAMSON: Yeah, that was . . . .
RICK: Which gave me the impression
that he was there all the time and working while you all were rehearsing.
ADAMSON: Well, he was there, but he was
also—at that same time, he spent some time during our rehearsal period in
Canada. Where did they do the Trigorin, the Chekhov thing, the Writer’s Notebook? Umm . . . somewhere in Canada. He went there for a while. [The reference is to The Notebook of Trigorin:
A Free Adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull;
the
première was at the Vancouver Playhouse, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, in September
1981.]
But, oh, gosh—it was just
a wonderful, wonderful experience working with him.
RICK: Can I ask you just a personal
thing?
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: I’m sure that Dr. K~ has no
interest [in this]. Was it . . . was it
. . . . Did you know it was wonderful at the time?
ADAMSON: Oh, yeah.
RICK: Or was it wonderful looking
back, that you had this experience with, now, the late Tennessee Williams? You knew at the time that this was really a
special . . . ?
ADAMSON: Oh, of course. How could one not?
RICK: I don’t know. ’Cause you’re involved in something and you
figure, well, he’ll be around. You know,
you don’t know that he’s not gonna be there anymore.
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: You figure, oh, you know, we’re
just doing this play. It happens to be
Tennessee Williams, but we’re just . . . umm . . . .
ADAMSON: No, how could one not? It was, uhhh . . . well, it was sort of like
being with this incredible combination of artistic mentor and helpless child. [Chuckles.] Sooo . . . .
RICK: Yeah, that sort of describes
the way he was all his life.
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: People gravitated to
him—especially women—because he was this helpless child. There’s a whole description about how Audrey
Wood became involved with him, almost from the point where she first met him,
because he was this lost child. [Wood
(1905-85) was Williams’s long-time literary agent—and personal
caretaker-cum-surrogate mother.]
ADAMSON: But the helpless child could be
very maddening.
RICK: Yes. And they went on to say that, too.
ADAMSON: But, I mean, it was just . . .
. No, he was wonderful and working on
the plays was wonderful and . . . you know, sitting with him and having the
same thought at the same time was wonderful.
And the collaboration was wonderful.
And, of course I knew it at the time.
It was a great privilege and a great responsibility. Because, you know, as I said, I do primarily
classics—and, I’m known to take great liberties. I don’t superimpose concepts, but, you know,
I’m . . . . Something that’s been
written 400 years ago, you know, you can certainly edit and play with. And I’ve done very little original work,
actually. Umm . . . . So in working with Tennessee, I knew that my
responsibility was to try to make the play happen as he had conceived it, as
opposed to, ‘Gee, here’s a script. What
can I do with this?’ [Chuckles.] You know?
In the new plays . . . .
RICK: That notion of his conception .
. . did that come simply from your reading the script or did you and he talk
about it, or did he tell you something that clued you in to what that
conception was—as he conceived it?
ADAMSON: Well, it didn’t really get
articulated. It came out in things like
“Fellini film,” “late Turner,” uhh, “What do you think of this?”—you know—“Have
you read this poem?” Uhh [chuckles],
you know. It sort of came out . . . I
mean, I don’t mean to sound mystical or non-verbal about it, but it sort of
came out by getting on the same wave-length.
Because we were creating something . . . .
RICK: But that, of course, is what a
director and a living playwright working together do do. Actors and directors do it,
too.
ADAMSON: And we were bringing life of a
stage to something that had only lived on a page before.
RICK: How did you come to get Kirche, Küche und Kinder? How
did it come to you and how did you . . . and since you did do mostly classics—do do mostly classics . . . ?
ADAMSON: One Thanksgiving, and again I’m
bad at years—nineteen-seventy-something—some German television company rented
the theater on Thanksgiving Day to tape Tennessee reading some of his prose
pieces. And he said to me, “What do you
do here?” And I said, “We do classical
repertory, and we’ve done a couple of plays of yours, by the way.” And he said, “What plays,” and I mentioned
that among them was In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.
RICK: So you’d already done that?
ADAMSON: Yeah, yeah. And I love that play. And he said, “I love that play”; I said, “I
do, too.” He said, “Please do it
again.” So, of course, I did. [Chuckles.] And he came with his agent at the time, who
was Mitch Douglas.
RICK: Late . . . . No.
ADAMSON: The late Mitch Douglas, did you
say?
RICK: No, I’m sorry. It was his previous agent.
ADAMSON: Who’s that?
RICK: Spanish name, and I can’t think
of it . . . .
ADAMSON: Luis Sanjurjo. [Literary agent Sanjurjo of International
Creative Management Associates died
in 1987 at age 45. Douglas, no longer
with ICM, is apparently not only still living, but still working.]
RICK: That’s the one.
ADAMSON: Ahh. No, he was after Mitch. But Mitch was Tennessee’s agent at this time
and . . . .
RICK: I’ve spoken with Mr. Douglas.
ADAMSON: Oh, have you?
RICK: Well, about a year or so
ago—yeah.
ADAMSON: Well, if you speak again, give
him my best.
RICK: Well, I spoke to him because I
was trying to get some information.
ADAMSON: Ahh.
RICK: It’s not like I speak to him
with any frequency. I was trying to get
some information, either for me or for Dr. K~.
ADAMSON: Well, I have nothing but good
to say about Mitch Douglas.
RICK: Yeah, he just didn’t know the
answer to my question.
ADAMSON: Because he really cared about
Tennessee. And Tennessee, of course, was
very paranoid about agents. He fired
them right and left. It’s really too bad
that he didn’t stay with Mitch. Luis
Sanjurjo was his last agent.
But, anyway, Mitch came
to that production. Tennessee loved the
production.
RICK: This is In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel?
ADAMSON: Yeah, yeah. And, uhh . . . .
RICK: I think I did read, now, that’s
why he gave you . . . .
ADAMSON: So, then, he gave me this. And, then, in the middle of . . . . You and I had discussed this briefly on the
phone the other day. In the middle of
the process, he panicked because he had Clothes for a Summer Hotel opening on Broadway, and he panicked about
what the critics were going to do about this.
And I said, “Well, the hell with it.
You know, we don’t need the critics.
We’ve got subscribers, we’ve got an audience. We won’t let ’em in.” And he just couldn’t believe that anybody
would take that point of view [chucking]. But I said, “It’s about doing the play. It’s not about what some individual writes in
the paper.” So, that’s why we called it
a “work-in-progress” and didn’t let anyone in to write about it. And, I guess through that . . . well,
artistically, first of all, but then through that he came to really, really,
really trust me. And that’s why later
on, he gave me Something Cloudy. So, that’s how it happened.
RICK: You called it a
work-in-progress and you treated it as such, at least in terms of the
public. Did he work on the play—he was
involved with Clothes, as you said—did he work
on the play, not only during rehearsals, but during the performances?
ADAMSON: No, not really.
RICK: Was there revision?
ADAMSON: No. Not with this one. That all happened with Something Cloudy, but with this one . . . .
RICK: Which [i.e., Something Cloudy] was not considered a work-in-progress; it opened—it actually had reviews.
ADAMSON: Right, right. And that was the piece he wrote—and, God, I’m
bad with dates, but it was just before Something Cloudy opened—that was the piece he wrote in Other Stages about why we had called the first one a work-in-progress and now we were
doing another one and anybody could come.
You know, we were gonna brave them all.
So, that’s how it happened.
That’s how it happened, and I just—as I say, I considered it a great
privilege and a great responsibility to have been given this play and to have
an opportunity to bring it to life.
RICK: I can’t imagine that it would
have been anything but an amazing experience, especially the two of them [i.e.,
the two plays] together.
ADAMSON: Yeah, it really was.
RICK: My only contact with him—I never
met him—but [in] 1979, I did a production of Eccentricities out in New Jersey, at the now-defunct BergenStage—maybe you remember
them. I got my Equity card from doing
that. And there were rumors . . . . He sent us changes—
ADAMSON: Uh-huh.
RICK: I still have mine—typewritten
changes to the script. This was three
years after the Broadway flop of that . . .
ADAMSON: Oh, yeah.
RICK: . . . and, uh, there . . .
. And he said . . . . There were rumors among the cast that he was
gonna come to see the show. And, of
course, he did go, very often, to see productions of his plays. And, of course, we weren’t that far from New
York. [BergenStage was performing in
Teaneck, N.J., a New York City suburb just over the G.W. Bridge in Bergen
County.]
He didn’t come—he never did come, but, of course, that was
constantly on our minds—the belief that he might actually show up . . .
ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
RICK: . . . to see our
production. Of course, you know, this
was, as I said, shortly after the failure of the play on Broadway, so he might
very well have had an interest in checking it out. [The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
ran for only 24 performances on Broadway from 23 November to 12 December 1976. It’s world première was on 25 June 1964 at
the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, N.Y.
As I wrote in “The Lost Première of The Eccentricities of a
Nightingale,” posted on ROT on 20 March 2010, Williams was planning
to attend a performance of that production, too, but circumstances prevented
it.]
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: And he did send us . . . . That’s one of the times I talked to Mitch
Douglas, although that was many years ago now—when I was writing the Summer and Smoke/Eccentricities chapter
for The
Guide to Tennessee Williams—to see if anybody could identify those changes—if
they were around anywhere, because all I had—I was Roger Doremus, the suitor who
was the bank teller—and all I had were my sides for the changes. Of course, everybody else had their own, and
God knows whether anybody else kept them.
The director had died, the theater had broken up, so there was nobody
around who might have had all of them.
ADAMSON: Oh, dear.
RICK: And I was just wondering if any
of these things existed anywhere. I kept
trying to find the agent who handled that.
Because it was my understanding from the director, I remember, that the
agent had sent them. But, you know, I
could never find out who the agent was who had handled that at the time—because
everybody said, “No, we weren’t representing him at that time,” “No, we didn’t
handle him in those days.”
ADAMSON: Well, that’s the problem.
RICK: I never found the agent who
handled it; nobody had any recollection of where those changes came from or
whether they still existed.
ADAMSON: I was in Mitch’s office one
time, and he pointed to a shelf on his bookcase—a whole shelf. He said, “That’s Red Devil Battery Sign. He
keeps rewriting it.”
RICK: Yeah.
ADAMSON: So . . . .
RICK: There was a comment . . . . A&E ran a biography of him some years
ago, just while I was doing that early research, so, of course, I taped it and
watched it. And there was a comment by
the now-late Lyle Leverich [TW’s biographer for Tom: The Unknown Tennessee
Williams (Crown Publishers, 1995) who died in 1999 at 79] that one of his
friends—he never identified who it was—called him “Tenacity” Williams . . .
ADAMSON: [Laughs.] That’s great.
RICK: . . . because he never let
anything go. I wish I knew who had said
that, but the only credit I could give it was that Lyle Leverich said it. [This was in
Paul
Budline, writer and dir., “Tennessee Williams: Wounded Genius,” Biography,
prod. Paul Budline Productions, narr. Edward Herrmann (A&E Television
Networks, 1998).]
ADAMSON: He wrote every day of his
life. And, you know, I think that’s
really kind of wonderful.
RICK: Well, unless you can think of
something else that Dr. K~ might possibly be interested in about the play . . .
.
ADAMSON: I can’t. I mean, if he comes up with any more specific
questions out of this, I’ll do my best to attempt to answer.
RICK: Well, I will be sending him
this, and . . . . You’ve been very
generous with your time.
ADAMSON: Oh, you’re quite welcome.
RICK: . . . but I do know he wants to
hear from them. There is so little
published on the play . . .
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: . . . either your production or
any . . . or the play, itself.
ADAMSON: And, of course, Harris
Berlinsky [another long-time member of the Cocteau Rep] played a 99-year-old
pregnant woman—Fraulein Haussmitzenschlogger.
RICK: All right. So, I thank you for your time and I know that
Dr. K~ is very appreciative of your generosity.
ADAMSON: Okay. Well, good luck with the rest of your
endeavors.
RICK: Thank you very much.
[Tennessee Williams’s one-act play Kirche, Küche und Kinder was written in 1979 and first performed by The Jean Cocteau Repertory
Company as a work-in-progress on 15 September that year; it ran in repertory
until April 1980. (The title, a German
folk idiom expressing a woman’s traditional concerns, means “church, kitchen,
and children.”) The play was published
in 2008 by New Directions in The Traveling Companion & Other Plays. Williams died in 1983 at the age of 71.]
