In the 1920s and ’30s, Saint Paul, the capital city of Minnesota, was known as a “crooks’ haven”—a sanctuary where bootleggers, bank robbers, and gangsters of all kinds from all over the Midwest came to hide out when the heat got too heavy in their home towns. At one time or another the likes of bank robber John Dillinger (1903-34, with his girlfriend Evelyn Frechette, 1907-69), mob leader Alphonse “Scarface” Capone (1899-1947), Alvin “Creepy” Karpis (1907-79), Kate “Ma” Barker (1873-35) and her boys, and the outlaw couple Clyde Barrow (1909-34) and Bonnie Parker (1910-34) spent down-time in Saint Paul under the protection of the chief of police, the sheriffs of Ramsey and Hennepin Counties (Saint Paul and Minneapolis respectively), the Twin Cities’ mayors, the county DA’s, other local officials, and the cities’ own gangster bosses.
When I first learned of this history, doing some research I didn’t know was connected to any of this, I had no idea that Minnesota even had a gangstedr past. I wonder how many others are aware of this little sliver of American history. New York, sure. Chicago, no question. Detroit, L.A., even Miami. But Minneapolis-Saint Paul?
But it did. And it had its gangster kings, too. New York had Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer (1901-35) and Chicago had Al Capone. Well, Minneapolis had Benny Haskell—and Saint Paul had Leon Gleckman, known, because of his control of the liquor business in the state capital, as “the Al Capone of Saint Paul” and “the Bootlegging Boss of Saint Paul.” (An odd fact about the Minnesota gangster scene is that it was largely a Jewish mob. Among many other Twin Cities hoods, both Haskell—his father was Haskell Zuckerman—and Gleckman were Jews. Another of Gleckman’s sobriquets was “the Jewish Al Capone” and he was raised in a traidtionally observant Jewish home.)
Leon Gleckman was born in either Minsk, Byelorussia (now Belarus), or Brody, Ukraine, both then part of the Russian Empire, on 1 June in either 1893 or 1894 (records vary). His family emigrated to the United States in the winter of 1903 (initially settling in Michigan, by way of London and Nova Scotia), and his father, Herman (that was his Americanized name; he was apparently born with the name Gershon), who started out as a rag-and-bone man with a horse and wagon, raised six children (a seventh child died in infancy) of which Leon was the third-born. Leon married Rose Goldstein, daughter of Austrian and Russian immigrants, in 1913; the bride and groom were both 20 years old. Herman Gleckman managed to accumulate some money, bought stocks and property, and prospered in the new land.
Leon Gleckman began working when he was very younng, selling flowers on the street. He was a natural-born salesman, and eventually, he became a traveling salesman—but what he wanted was to go to law school. He was something of an autodidact, however, writing poetry and spouting philosophy. He began supplying Saint Paul with its illegal pleasures: booze, gambling, and prositutes. He set up his clandestine operation in the Hamm Building, a 1919 limestone, terra cotta, and brick six-story commercial building at 408 Saint Peter Street at 6th Street in Saint Paul; it was built by Williiam Hamm to house offices of the Theodore Hamm’s Brewing Company. Gleckman’s St. Paul Recreation Company, comprising a billiard parlor, cigar stand, gym, boxing ring, and bowling alley, was in the basement. The space also housed one of the city’s biggest illegal gambling operations, the foundation of Gleckman’s criminal empire; the legitimate activities made it difficult for city authorities to close the establishment—if anyone actually wanted to do that.
Gleckman was doing all right purveying Saint Paul’s vices, but in 1920 Prohibition began across the country after the ratification on 16 January 1919 of the 18th Amendment. (The Volstead Act, the law that athorized National Prohibition, passed Congress on 28 October and took effect on 17 January 1920.). From that point on, Gleckman went into the boolegging business in earnest, supplying Saint Paul with another sinful pleasure, essentially cornering the market—with the chief of police running interference with both federal and state authorities and rival bootleggers. (In 1930, Gleckman had enough influence in city government to get Thomas Archibald “Big Tom” Brown, 1889-1959, appointed Chief of Police in Saint Paul. To repay the debt, Big Tom, who stood 6’5", protected Gleckman’s rackets.) He eventually had the Mill Creek Distilleries in Cuba to supply the Saint Paul speakeasies, and another distillery in the Virgin Islands. General disdain for Prohibition among Saint Paulites boosted Gleckman—and Haskell across the river in Minneapolis—from mere bootleggers to important figures in their cities.
Gleckman’s circle of “friends” didn’t just extend to gangsters, corrupt politicians, and crooked cops; he cultivated businessmen, bankers, and anybody with money or influence (preferrably both). He was in contact with Thomas D. Schall (1878-1935), the state’s Republican junior senator, and Einar Hoidale (1870-1952), a Democratic at-large Member of Congress from Minnesota. By 1930, he insulated his family and his legitimate enterprises from his illegal activities by keeping suite 301-303 at the Saint Paul Hotel, the city’s luxury hotel at 350 Market Street, a three-minute walk from the Hamm Building. This was where he conducted what he called “politics”: paying off police and city officials, as well as meeting with politicans and gangsters. The FBI—just known as the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) until 1933, when it was renamed the Division of Investigation (DOI); it was named the Federal Bureau of Inestigation in 1935—called the Saint Paul “a rendezvous for gangsters,” and T-Man Michael “Mysterious Mike” Malone (1893-1960), who had previously infiltrated Al Capone’s syndicate in Chicago, also rented room 309 at the hotel to keep Gleckman’s visitors and activities under surveillance.
The bootlegger also had legitimate businesses: in 1927, Gleckman acquired a Cord-Auburn luxury auto dealership to go with his tire store, wallpaper store, and loan company (which doubled as a cash laundry). But Leon Gleckman’s real buisiness, the source of his power in Saint Paul, was becoming more and more the running of a political machine. With so much of Saint Paul’s administration on his payroll, he had become adept at getting his friends into important (and lucrative) positions in city government and law enforcement (like Tom Brown’s appointment as police chief). He’d apparently inherited (or learned) his father’s talent for hondling—dealing—and turned it to fitting the right friendly peg into the right advantageous hole. Gleckman was a macher—a fixer, a wheeler-dealer. And he was good at it. He “could fix a grand jury, buy off a judge, sheriff, or prosecuting attorney, secure a governor’s pardon for a convict, and ensure the appointment of a lenient police chief,” reports Paul Maccabee in his history of the time and place, John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936 (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995). He could also decide who would be a candidate for public office in Saint Paul, all the way up to city hall. He was, in fact, in complete control of Saint Paul’s municipal government.
Average Saint Paulites saw Gleckman as a generous neighbor—he’s reported to have kept a jar on his desk for parking tickets people wanted fixed and they’d be picked up by a cop and never be heard about again; others with a taste for gaming, drink, and women of the evening found an accommodating pleasure provider; those who sought city jobs or needed help to negotiate the Saint Paul bureaucracy—cutting red tape, say, or smoorhing over a permit or licensing snag—knew him as a powerful advocate who knew where a lot of the bodies were buried. (He may have known where they were buried, but he never planted any of them himself. Gleckman probably caused a rub-out or two—we’ll hear about one likely instance—but he was not prone to violence, unlike his nickname’s sake.)
By the late 1920s, at the height of his influence, Leon Gleckman ran Saint Paul without ever holding a city or county office. He could get anyone he wanted a job on the municipal payroll—for his future son-in-law, when the younger man started dating Florence, the oldest of Gleckman’s three daughters, in 1929, he got the 17-year-old a job trimming trees for the city. (When the couple got engaged, Gleckman brought his daughrer’s fiancé into the Republic Finance Company.) Of course, the flip side was that he could also block anyone from getting city work if he didn’t want them to.
Then, on 5 December 1933, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was repealed, ending Prohibition—and the wind went out of Leon Gleckman’s sails, as well as those of all other bootleggers in the U.S. Booze was no longer illegal to make or sell, and Gleckman had to fall back on the other vices he purveyed. Of course, his legit business were doing all right, having weathered the Great Depression (1929-39), at least until the Auburn Automobile Company ceased production in 1936.
And he still ran Saint Paul. Florence Gleckman called him “the man behind politics.” “One time,” she recalled, Gleckman “had an argument with the editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Then the man had a vendetta against him. They finally locked him up.” In any case, he asserted that “he made more money through politically secured contracts than he ever made in the alcohol business.” He even ruminated that “with the return of legalized liquor . . . and, having a large amount of money, [I] entered the political situation in St. Paul with the hope of some day becoming Mayor of St. Paul.”
But Gleckman’s power within Saint Paul wasn’t an impenetrable shield against legal troubles. His first arrest came in August 1922 when revenuers raided his Minnesota Blueing Company, a front for an illegal distillery which the U.S. Department of the Treasury estimated was generating as much as $1 million a year (worth $14.25 million in 2018) from its 13 stills. Gleckman was charged with liquor conspiracy, but the bootlegger remained free on bail for five years while the case was appealed.
In 1927, he was convicted of federal charges stemming from his illegal liquor business and sentenced to United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, a maximum-security prison, for 18-months on charges of liquor conspiracy. After six months or a year, the jailed bootlegger became a trusty because he was so well bahaved, assigned to work in the prison greenhouse, and then paroled. Again in 1934, he was returned to Leavenworth for 18 months for income-tax evasion.
In a footnote to history, Gleckman had the dubious distinction of being only the second man tried for federal tax evasion as a way to prosecute him for other crimes. The first had been Capone in 1931, and the Department of Justice brought the same prosecutor who had tried Capone to Saint Paul from Chicago, U. S. Attorney George E. Q. Johnson (1874-1949). Johnson had to try Gleckman twice to get a conviction, the jury having deadlocked the first time. Leon Gleckman and his brother Alexander, known as “Jap,” had bribed a juror with $695 (about $13,000 today) to hold out for acquittal. Later, there were also state and local charges for bribing the juror in the 1934 tax-evasion case, for which Gleckman served six months in the Minneapolis workhouse in 1938. (Florence, who’d have been 25 at the time, recalled that he tried to break out.)
In January 1940, Gleckman had also been convicted in New York in a bank-fraud case involving the Fort Greene National Bank in Brooklyn and sentenced to six months in federal prison. According to no less an authority on the case than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, “Strange things were going on in the” bank, whose “accounts were a maze of queer transactions. Names of mysterious individuals of unknown address”—which included “two-time ex-convict and former czar of the underworld in St. Paul,” Leon Gleckman—“were found on notes running into hundreds of thousands.” Gleckman and two confederates had been alleged to have defrauded the bank of over $250,000 (now worth about $4.4 million) by overstating the value of liquor stored in several warehouses.
Personal peril, alongside legal consequences, was also a danger of Gleckman’s gangland life. In what Maccabee dubbed the “occupational hazard common to bootleggers of the 1930s,” Leon Gleckman, the boss of Saint Paul, was kidnapped on 24 September 1931.
Florence Gleckman recalled: “The summer before he was kidnapped, we had a cottage by the lake. Mom [Rose Gleckman] kept saying the furniture’s been moved. They sent her to a neurologist. Afterwards, it turned out it had been the kidnappers. They were going to take him from the lake, but he was never alone.” If the recollection of the 18-year-old Miss Gleckman is correct, the kidnappers changed their plans. The press record says that Gleckman was taken as he left his home at 2168 Sargent Avenue, forced to the side of the road by a car. According to Florence’s account, “Leon liked to walk. His office was downtown [at the finance company in the Merchants Bank Building at 332 Minnesota Street, seven miles away], he used to walk to work every day . . ., [and] he was kidnapped on his way to work. A man in a corner house gave a signal when he walked by.”
The Gleckman house was a whirl of gangsters, politicians, and ransom notes. Florence also recounted, “One day Rose went to a fortune teller who said she saw him in a cabin, in the woods, by a lake playing cards. Finally they paid the ransom. When they got him back, it was true, he’d been in the North Woods.” Indeed, when her father was released, after eight day’s of captivity, he’d been held in a cabin 40 miles from Woodruff, Wisconsin, 220 miles east of Saint Paul. The kidnappers had demanded $200,000 (about $3 million today) but only $6,400 ($98,000) was paid—$5,000, plus whatever Gleckman had in his pockets, which turned out to be $1,450 (apparently, the kidnappers left their victim 50 bucks for cabfare). Gleckman was released on 2 October and within days, one kidnapper had been killed, putatively by his confederates; four others had been arrested; and about 40 men and women had been jailed.
(The Gleckman ransom money had been recovered, but it ended up in Big Tom Brown’s campaign chest for his run for Ramsey County sheriff. Brown lost the race and in 1932, he was demoted to detective. In 1936, he was permanently removed from the Saint Paul police force entirely.)
The identity of the person responsible for the whole plot was a matter of endless debate—and never successfully proved—but one popular candidate was Jack Peifer, a rival rum-runner of Gleckman’s. Peifer had actually served as a go-between for the ransom money from Gleckman’s racket and the kidnappers holding him, but Brown and the Ramsey County attorney both warned the kidnapping suspects not to bring up Peifer’s name during their interrogations “if they knew what was good for them.” When Gleckman was informed that some of the participants might be people he regarded as friends, he told the BOI he’d “take care of them his own way”—whatever that might portend!
For six months after the kidnapping, Gleckman had a 24-hour police guard outside his Sargent Avenue house. Then, in the summer of 1932, Florence herself was taken for a ransom of $50,000 ($850,000), which was never paid. The young woman had just started studying at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Driving home from class one evening, she pulled in to park near her home and someone cut her off. He had a blackjack in one hand and maybe a gun in the other. He came up to the side of the car, according to Florence, and told her, “Do what I say and you won’t be hurt.” The young man handcuffed her, took her glasses, and taped her eyes. They went through a sewer and the man took her to the woods along the Mississippi River; the man left her tied up in the woods at night. She was very scared, she said, and in the morning she started to cry. “I’ll take you home,” the young man said. He never hurt her. The authorities never found him.
On Thursday, 15 June 1933, Jack Peifer was engaged once again in a high-profile kidnapping for ransom. This time, he was in cahoots with the Barker-Karpis gang: Alvin Karpis, Ma Barker’s sons Arthur “Doc” Barker and Fred Barker, and a couple of hangers-on. The gang had moved on from bank robbery to kidnapping as its principal criminal activity, having engaged in at least two previous abductions before taking Willam Hamm, Jr. Hamm (1893-1970), son of William Hamm, Sr., who built the Hamm Building where Leon Gleckman had his gamblng parlor-cum-boxing gym-cum cigar stand-cum pool hall, et al., and grandson of the brewery’s founder, Theodore Hamm, was grabbed off the street in Saint Paul in the middle of the day by Karpis and Doc Berker who put him into a car driven by a third man.
Hamm was made to sign four ransom notes in the amount of $100,000 (about $1.9 million in 2018). Eventually, Hamm, who had succeeded his father as president of Hamm’s Brewing in 1931, was kept at a house in northern Minnesota by five or six men. He was held until Sunday, 18 June, when he was driven after dark to Wyoming, Minnesota, and left on a highway. Early the following morning, Hamm called his family and shortly, police arrived and took him home.
All the perpeterators were apprehended or killed eventually, but not before they engineered one last kidnapping: Edward Bremer (1897-1965), son of Adolph Bremer, the major stockholder in the Jacob Schmidt Brewing Company, another Saint Paul beermaker, on 17 January 1934. The gang asked for $200,000 ($3.7 million), but police and DOI speculated that there was also a more personal motive for the abuction. It seems that the Bremers had cooperated with bootleggers during Prohibition, making beer on the QT which the bootleggers distributed, surviving when other liquor manufacturers suffered. When the 18th Amendment was repealed, Schmidt Brewing severed its ties to the criminals, angering their former associates enough to prompt some to take revenge. Bremer was generally not a popular man, even to members of his family.
Of the main gang members, Doc Barker was arrested in 1935 and Karpis in 1936; Fred Barker was killed, along with his mother, in a 1935 shootout with the FBI; other members of the gang met similar fates. (Historical footnote: after Alvin Karpis pleaded guilty to kidnapping, he was sent to prison on Alcatraz Island, the federal prison in San Francisco Bay. He was paroled in 1969, becoming the rock’s longest-serving prisoner. Doc Barker was also sentenced to Alcatraz, but he was shot during an escape attempt in 1939.)
Big Tom Brown also paid consequences, obliquely related to the kidnappings. During the investigatons of the several Saint Paul abductions, the feds suspected that Brown had leaked information to the kidnappers. He was removed from the investigation team and after further probing, the DOI determined that Brown had been involved in the kidnappings themselves. He was dismissed from the Saint Paul police force on 9 October 1936, though he was never successfully prosecuted for his corruption. The former police chief moved away from Saint Paul and, ironically (given his long association with bootleggers) opened a liquor store. He stayed in that trade for some years, but was later arrested for non-payment of his taxes (a little like Gleckman and Capone) and for selling liquor without a license (also a sort of pale imitation of Gleckman and other bootleggers). Brown was sentenced to a year in jail for these offenses but the punishment was suspended. He died of a heart attack in 1959 at 69.
Leon Gleckman, the bootlegging kingpin and political boss of Saint Paul, also didn’t end well. He died on 14 July 1941 in a one-car accident. He was 48 years old. The St. Paul Dispatch of that date reported:
Gleckman was killed when his west-bound automobile crashed at 1:50 a.m. into a pillar supporting the Union Depot concourse across Kellogg [B]lvd. He died in a police ambulance en route to Ancker [H]ospital.
According to the Dispatch, Gleckman had played golf the afternoon before and then spent the evening with friends at the golf club. He was apparently driving home and, the police believed, may have fallen asleep at the wheel. Gleckman’s blood-alcohol level was .23, the equivalent of having had nine drinks of 90-proof liquor. Geckman’s Chevrolet hit the abutment of the Saint Paul railroad station concourse so hard that the hood and steering wheel were crushed. A night watchman at the Union Depot Company, who heard the crash, reported that he hadn’t heard any sounds of brakes or skidding tires. The police didn’t find any skid marks, either.
Gleckman died of a fractured skull. The death was declared “probably accidental,” but privately, many people, incuding Gleckman’s family, beleved he’d committed suicide. One cop stated: “You can’t prove it, but in my heart as a policeman, I think [he] wanted to do himself in. We all think Leon killed himself. . . . He was due to go to federal prison. He was the king of the bootleggers and he didn’t fancy sitting in the Can.”
Gleckman, a notorious—and, apparently, beloved—figure in the Saint Paul underworld of the 1920s and ’30s, never made it to law school and never ran for mayor. He was, nevertheless, the chief executive of Saint Paul, at least de facto, for the years of Prohibition, 1929 to 1933—and for several years thereafter. Something of a dandy and a man-about-town, he was judged to have been highly intelligent and insightful, with an extraordinary problem-solving acumen. In the early 1990s, when Florence wrote down some of her memories for her son, she noted that the name Gleckman was still in the phonebook, and she wrote: “People still call to say thanks for sending me to college, all kinds of stories, everybody loved him.” According to Florence, her father had started the Republic Finance Company because he was always lending money, helping people out. Even his prison file characterized him as “self-confident, glib, and respectful.”
A musical play, Last Hooch at the Hollyhocks by Lance Belville, was presented by the Great North American History Theatre and performed at the Minnesota Arts and Science Center in Saint Paul in 1990. It featured Leon Gleckman as a character (the Hollyhocks was Saint Paul’s spiffiest speakeasy, owned by Jack Peifer), and one of Florence’s younger sisters attended a performance. There’s also the Eagle Street Grille, a local restauant that features “a mob-themed menu” with interesting names for the menu items. (There used to be sandwiches and platters named for the gangsters who lived or visited the city, including Gleckman, but that no longer seems to be true.) Even the Saint Paul Hotel invokes its gangster history on its website and tells about Gleckman’s residency there.
[I wrote above that I learned about this history when I was researching another topic. That subject was Leonardo Shapiro, the avant-garde theater director about whom I’ve blogged many times now, and I was researching his childhood and early family life. You see, Leon Gleckman was Shapiro’s grandfather and Florence, née Gleckman, was his mother. Born Leo Richard Shapiro (he adopted the name Leonardo when he was in high school in homage to Leonardo da Vinci, whom he admired), the director-to-be was named after his grandfather, whom he never knew as Gleckman died 4½ years before Shapiro was born. He nevertheless felt a special connection with Gleckman because both men were largely self-educated, an achievement Shaprio esteemed, and they both loved and wrote poetry. (Shapiro had started out to be a poet before turning to theater.) Shapiro once confided to me that Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman held special meaning for him; it may have been significant to Shapiro that Willy Loman’s death, also a suicide, was nearly identical to Gleckman’s.]
by Sopan Deb
[“Focusing on ‘Mean Girls’” describes the process actress Jennifer Simard went through when she took over the parts played in the new Broadway musical, based on the 2004 movie that opened on 8 April, by Kerry Butler, who opened in the original cast. Originally published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 13 September 2018, Sopan Deb’s report falls into the category of articles I like to post occasionally that spotlight lesser-known aspects of stage production—the parts of show business that audiences seldom know about or even think of when they're sitting in the house enjoying a performance. A number of years ago (on 28 November 2015), I posted an article from the Washington Post, “Broadway’s Anonymous Stars” by Peter Marks, that focused on actors who replaced stars of Broadway shows. Deb’s report is an apt follow-up, depicting the work of a “utility” player (Simard, who joined the cast on stage on 11 September, covers three roles) rather than a star.]
It was Jennifer Simard’s first day of work. Propping her elbows on a railing behind the audience in the back of the August Wilson Theater, she peered through binoculars, purchased just hours before so she could get a really close-up look at what was happening on stage during this Tuesday night performance of “Mean Girls.”
She squinted. What equation was the calculus teacher writing? Where did she put her marker? How did she then weave through the students during a dance number?
That teacher, Ms. Norbury, was one of three drastically different roles Ms. Simard would soon inhabit. She had quite a bit of catching up to do as she embarked on one of the unheralded journeys in theater — joining the established ensemble of a Broadway musical well after it opens.
“It’s my job to enter into this well-oiled machine as seamlessly as possible, almost like a ghost,” she explained.
Where her fellow cast members had months to master their parts, Ms. Simard had exactly two weeks to learn the staging for characters previously played by Kerry Butler. (The others: the mothers of queen bee Regina George and nice girl Cady Heron.) That included only one full rehearsal with the whole cast — called a “put-in” — that comes at the end of the process.
A perpetually sunny 48, Ms. Simard didn’t seem especially fazed; after all, her Broadway debut in 2007 was as a replacement in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”
She allowed a reporter to follow her during key moments — including an expert comedic consultation — as she got ready to face the Plastics, culminating in her first performance on Tuesday night.
Watch Carefully
Ms. Simard had finished her run as Ernestina in “Hello, Dolly” in March and was in rehearsal for a summer production of “Annie” in St. Louis when she read for “Mean Girls.” A hit show, it promised to be steady work.
She auditioned on July 2. A little more than two weeks later, she got the part.
She knew the basics of the script, having been part of a reading of the musical in 2016 during its development, and immediately got to work by memorizing her lines even before her contract began.
“It’s not a lot of time,” she said. “You can’t really play and find the beats you need as an actor with your script in your hand for very long.”
On Aug. 28, her first official day, she was fitted for 10 costumes, and started vocal rehearsals.
For an actor, joining a show, rather than originating a character, means your creative choices are narrowed. There’s less to discover when you’re plugged in to an existing machine.
To John MacInnis, the associate choreographer of “Mean Girls,” who would be working with Ms. Simard, that limitation can be a blessing.
“I personally think getting thrown into a show is a lot easier than going through the whole process from the beginning because everyone is concentrating on you,” he said. “You’re the main focus.”
For Ms. Simard, the most essential task was simple: watching the show as often as possible.
Rehearsal time is limited, so it’s key for performers to learn as much about blocking, choreography, how cast members navigate the stage space and other minutiae through visual osmosis.
Thus the binoculars. And, on Ms. Simard’s second night at the theater, a stopwatch, which allowed her to notate her script with timings for costume changes and transitions.
Finding Your Place(s)
During days, Ms. Simard worked on scenes and choreography mostly in a rehearsal room away from the theater. There was also a day built in for photography.
On Sept. 6, Ms. Simard was at the August Wilson with other actors and members of the creative team, including Mr. MacInnis. This is typical, especially for a musical with its many moving parts; new cast members are trained by key deputies, not the creative leaders.
To rehearse blocking without the whole cast present — that would be a costly commitment, given union rules — performers have to memorize a virtual grid, with zero at the center of the stage.
Ms. Simard’s transitions included moving a desk on and off the stage at the end of one dance-heavy musical number. If she was in the wrong spot a colleague could get hurt.
She looked tentative as she ran through her dance moves on stage. But with each run-through she seemed to be soaking it in.
Becca Petersen, the assistant dance captain, is responsible for knowing every dance move for every cast member. She and Mr. MacInnis guided Ms. Simard through “Do This Thing” and “I See Stars,” the final two big production numbers.
“Do This Thing” ends with Kyle Selig, who plays Cady’s love interest, essentially belly-flopping directly in front of Ms. Simard. After one pass, she asked Mr. MacInnis if her spacing was correct: “I just want to make sure he has room to get around me.”
“There’s a lot of traffic,’’ she explained afterward. “You have to make sure you’re not hurting anybody. Safety first, you know?”
Getting Notes From the Source
Ms. Simard was the only performer in costume at the put-in on Sept. 7. It was four days before show time and, along with everything else, she needed to rehearse her 10 costume changes in real time.
As a gesture of good will, she ordered a box of soft pretzels for the entire cast. She was a bundle of jittery energy, her nervousness not helped by the fact that Tina Fey, who wrote the book for the show and played Ms. Norbury in the 2004 film, was there to watch.
Cast members not in Ms. Simard’s scenes frequently burst into applause when she came on stage or executed a successful number. Casey Hushion, the associate director, occasionally strolled up to the stage to adjust Ms. Simard’s spacing.
It wasn’t completely smooth — Ms. Simard stumbled on a few lines — but afterward she said she felt exactly where she needed to be. In a chat with the music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Ms. Simard compared the one-and-done rehearsal to her wedding day: “Pay attention because it’s going to be a blur.”
Ms. Fey had some notes. One of Ms. Simard’s characters, Mrs. George, absolutely wants to be part of the Plastics, the shallow, popular and occasionally cruel trio of high school girls at the center of the show. But Ms. Fey reminded the actress that she wants to be a good mother, too.
In 2016, Ms. Simard was nominated for a Tony Award playing a gambling-addicted nun in the spoofy musical “Disaster!” Her big number had her virtually making out with a slot machine.
She’s not afraid of physical comedy. And Ms. Fey’s notes included a bit of encouragement. She particularly liked how Ms. Simard was clutching Mrs. George’s puppet dog in one of her scenes.
“Maybe,’’ Ms. Simard reported, thinking out loud, “it’s going to lick my neck in the end?”
It’s Show Time
On Tuesday, Sept. 11, hours before she was to make her “Mean Girls” debut, Ms. Simard got pointers for the first time from Casey Nicholaw, the show’s director and choreographer.
Referring to her first scene as Mrs. Heron, Mr. Nicholaw suggested that she “warm her up a little bit.” But mostly he was full of praise. “You have the best musical theater face ever,” he said. He ended the rehearsal by punctuating his encouragement: “You’re going to be so [clap] good [clap] tonight [clap].”
Minutes before going on stage, Ms. Simard was in the wings as fellow cast members hugged her and wished her good luck. “I feel ready,” she said, staring intently at the stage.
Bernadette Peters — her former “Hello, Dolly” colleague — was in the audience to see her. And backstage, the crew had laid out boxes of Tic Tacs that were specially labeled “I’m a Pusher,” a reference to one of Ms. Simard’s lines.
There was one early hiccup. As Ms. Norbury, that equation-writing calculus teacher, Ms. Simard skipped a few lines, throwing off the timing of an entrance for Erika Henningsen, as Cady.
In her dressing room right just afterward Ms. Simard took the blame. “It makes for a funny story — later,” she said.
Speaking of which, she also had a triumph: Her approach to Mrs. George’s first scene with the puppet dog earned her exit applause as she walked offstage.
She would remember to keep it in. It was time to leave the theater and go to bed. After all, she had two shows the next day.
by Laura Collins-Hughes
[The article below, from the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 12 September 2018, reports the preparation of Craig Lucas’s I Was Most Alive With You, a play inspired by the Book of Job that tells the story of a deaf man whose entire existence is threatened by a series of unexpected tests. The Playwrights Horizons production of the New York première, which opens on 24 September (it's currently in previews) and is scheduled to close on 14 October, is performed simultaneously in English and American Sign Language by two separate casts on a split stage. Three years ago, I posted a collection of articles from the Washington Post about signed performances featuring deaf performers; I entitled the post “‘Visible Language’: Signing (and Singing) a Musical,” 4 January 2015. I see “Gained in Translation” as an excellent follow-up to those articles.]
The actor Russell Harvard sat in an armchair, draped in a blue robe and looking surly. It was late August in a rehearsal room at Playwrights Horizons on 42nd Street, and he was in the middle of an emotionally charged hospital scene.
In Craig Lucas’s “I Was Most Alive With You,” Mr. Harvard (“Tribes,” “Fargo”) plays a gay, deaf recovering alcoholic named Knox — and so does the actor Harold Foxx, who stood on a raised platform behind him. As Mr. Harvard delivered Knox’s lines in English downstage, Mr. Foxx performed them in American Sign Language upstage.
They are just two of the 14 actors in the enormously complex Off Broadway premiere of this ambitious bilingual play, a multigenerational drama that aims to be equally accessible to deaf and hearing audience members at every moment of every performance. There is one featured cast member and one shadow cast member for each of the seven characters. The shadow cast performs entirely in A.S.L.; the featured cast, in a mix of English and sign.
And the artists themselves? The director, Tyne Rafaeli, said the ratio is about 50-50, deaf and hearing — and that’s how the rehearsal felt, f with its layers of conversations occurring in English and A.S.L.
When Ms. Rafaeli had something to say to the group, she hopped up on a chair so that everyone — including three A.S.L. interpreters deployed through the room — would have a clear view as she spoke, mainly in English. When Lisa Emery, who plays Knox’s mother, grew frustrated about her A.S.L. ability, the director of artistic sign language, Sabrina Dennison, offered encouragement through an interpreter, Candace Broecker Penn.
And when Mr. Lucas used a colorful English vulgarity to describe a chaotic moment in the play, Ms. Penn rendered it instantly, vividly.
A few days after that rehearsal, Ms. Rafaeli, Mr. Lucas and Ms. Emery spoke separately by phone about the production, now in previews for a Sept. 24 opening. Ms. Dennison, who recently joined the shadow cast, Mr. Foxx and Mr. Harvard, who has some hearing but whose first language is A.S.L., spoke by email. These are edited excepts.
Rules of Engagement
TYNE RAFAELI We had to set some ground rules very quickly, because obviously any rehearsal room dealing with bilingual communication is going to be complicated, but when one of those languages is a visual language and not a sonic language, it becomes even more imperative. A very fundamental rule, which seems crazily simplistic but has proved to be enormously helpful, is that there aren’t any phones allowed in the room. Because we have already two worlds. We can’t have a third one.
RUSSELL HARVARD I come from a deaf family, and so when bits of information are being exchanged within the family, I get it immediately. I’ve become so accustomed to that, it becomes harder for me to adapt when side conversations are spoken or exchanged among other actors who don’t sign. But patience is a virtue, so I try to put my frustration aside, because I love my job. I have worked with an all-deaf cast and crew previously for a film and that was a golden token.
LISA EMERY When you’re rehearsing and you get an idea and you start talking about it, you realize half the people in the room are completely shut out of what you’re saying. So now we have to raise our hands, deaf and hearing, and be recognized, and then there’s a big flurry of hands so that everybody knows that one person is talking. It’s horrible if somebody’s signing and trying to express themselves and then I start talking. Just sort of rude and oblivious.
Pleasure, and Frustration
CRAIG LUCAS We did several workshops of the play at Playwrights so that the actors could start learning their American Sign Language. It’s labor-intensive.
RAFAELI It was very new to me. Just the fact that it’s a gestural, embodied language that takes connection between hands and facial gestures, it is inherently theatrical and inherently poetic.
HAROLD FOXX When there are two languages in a play, and it’s the first time for some actors, the work in the rehearsal room can be complex. For us deaf actors, some of us have worked together before, so we know what it takes to come together with hearing actors and make it work. We don’t expect hearing actors to be fluent in A.S.L.
LUCAS This is not a representation of the English language. This is another language with different diction and different sentence structures and syntax. It’s a very complex language actually, and very hard to learn. I’m the slowest learner in the room when it comes to A.S.L.
EMERY There are certain things that just elude me completely. The sign for Knox, my son’s name, is a K and an X, and I have to practice it every day, like on the bus. I have to just keep doing it, because I stumble on it. I only have really the one speech, but it’s taken me weeks and weeks to get it down. It’s really fun to talk with your hands. And as frustrating as the day is long — the two things, mixed.
HARVARD It’s always a pleasure to see actors learning A.S.L. for the role. It’s harder when actors have to simultaneously speak and sign the lines. I applaud them because it’s a talent. In real life, you don’t speak Spanish and English at the same time.
Working on Two Levels
SABRINA DENNISON The shadow actors will all be signing fully in American Sign Language, while the characters in the play will sign as their characters would (some fluently, some haltingly, some signing and speaking). The set will be bi-level so that both are happening simultaneously.
EMERY To be an actor and know that there is somebody who is signing behind you who is playing the same character as you — there has to be an awareness of “can she see me so that she can sign what I’m saying?”
HARVARD They’re above us on the upper stage, which makes it quite challenging because some shadow actors who are completely deaf have to stay in sync with the actors on the lower level.
FOXX My job is to shadow Knox. Since Russell Harvard is already fluent in A.S.L., I don’t need to sign at all until he speaks in English. That’s when I start signing for the character. We have to rely on body language, timing or lip-read. It takes a lot of practice.
RAFAELI For a hearing audience, the distraction can be more of a danger because we’re not exposed to A.S.L., whereas A.S.L. speakers and the deaf community, their muscle is more trained to absorb those two realities because they’ve had to fit into a hearing culture.
DENNISON Our challenge is to blend them seamlessly so that both deaf and hearing audiences will be able to follow the action, taking advantage of the access being provided without being overwhelmed by it all.
RAFAELI It’s an extraordinary thing to witness the deaf artists in communication with the hearing artists, making decisions together, finding rhythm together.
[Welcome back to Rick On Theater for the second and final part of “Caffe Cino,” my brief history of the Ur-theater of Off-Off-Broadway and its founder. If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend going back to the post on 11 September to read about the beginnings of Joe Cino’s Greenwich Village coffeehouse before picking up here with the café’s growth and final curtain. (To read about the milieu out of which the Caffe Cino was born, see my two-part article “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” posted on 12 and 15 December 2011.)]
When Joe Cino arrived in New York City in the midst of a blizzard on 7 February 1948, he “didn’t have a dime,” he told Michael Smith of the Village Voice in 1965, “and I still don’t.” In November 1958, he used the $400 in savings he’d accumulated after arriving in New York as the opening capital for the coffeehouse. Until 1960, he continued to work at his day job at a laundry to support the café. Cino needed little on which to subsist, and when he really needed cash, he’d move out of his apartment and sleep on a mattress in the back of the café.
Cino and the café’s staff took no salaries and he kept the costs low. John Torrey, the Cino’s electrical genius, tapped into the city’s power system to supply the café with electricity—the lights in the café went on when the street lights did—and that helped keep overhead down immensely. (When he opened the coffeehouse, Cino had neglected to hire a waiter. When customers on that first night, mostly fiends of Joe’s, simply began to serve one another, it began a practice at the Cino of friends waiting on friends; there really never was a wait staff at the Cino--it was all volunteer.) Unlike its competition, however, the Cino was a commercial enterprise, not a non-profit experimental theater, so it wasn’t eligible for the government grants and subsidies which sustained other OOB theaters.
Customers at the Cino were required to spend a dollar for coffee or pastries from the menu as the café’s minimum, but admission for the performances was virtually nil as the performers passed the hat (a basket, actually) after each show. The artists could make maybe $15 each by the end of a week of performing (that’s about $125 today). The productions had zero budgets (usually covered by the playwright or director; the most opulent show cost a little over $300 to mount)—Cino didn’t charge for the use of the room, but he also didn’t supply anything but the lights and electricity; there were, of course, no royalty payments to the writers. Directors and designers relied on ingenuity and donated labor and goods—but no one complained. It was, if you will, DIY theater, and playwright Robert Heide recalled, “For Joe, the doors were always open: do your own thing, do what you have to do, do what you want to do.”
The reigning spirit of the café was Joe Cino. The coffeehouse reflected his personality, both for good and for ill. Soon after the place opened, Ed Franzen, who’d really been looking for a studio for his own work, split—though one rumor is that Cino dumped him and assumed the storefront’s lease. (Off-Off-Broadway’s first impresario soon took mad, volatile John Torrey as his on-and-off lover.) Caffe Cino has been glorified as a place where theater artists could work without pressure, pretensions, or career-damaging consequences, “an island where our souls can play,” as Cino playwright Claris Nelson declared. Adventurous theatergoers saw the Cino as a place to go to see the exciting edge of new theater, the kind of plays, both from writers and directors, that the commercially-minded producers of Broadway and Off-Broadway wouldn’t dare touch, the work of playwrights, directors, designers, and actors they didn’t know now, but who might be the Tennessee Williamses, Lillian Hellmans, George Abbotts, Harold Clurmans, Jo Mielziners, Donald Oenslagers, Laurence Oliviers, or Helen Hayeses of the new generation.
Despite the assertions by some, as Crespy reports, “that the Cino was a place of great innocence and fervor, where passionate, idiosyncratic artists—gay or straight—were nurtured in an aesthetic environment that gave them total freedom to create,” he warned that that wasn’t the whole picture. “For others, it was a dangerous place, a bacchanalia where drugs, sex, and death flowed freely, engendering a thrilling, yet terrifying, visceral theater.” This, too, was a manifestation of Joe Cino’s character, though many Cino habitués contend that Andy Warhol’s circle was responsible for bringing drugs to the Cino. (The artist himself began frequenting the coffeehouse in 1965.)
Cino playwright Robert Heide recalled, “The Cino also sometimes operated as a kind of way-station for wild-eyed painters, actors who doubled as hustlers, and drug addicts who slept on the floor when they had no place else to go.” He quipped, “Antonin Artaud [conceiver of the Theatre of Cruelty] would have felt right at home in this strange room, as would Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, [English occultist] Alistair Crowley, and certainly, Oscar Wilde.”
Cino himself had something of a mercurial personality. (I have no credentials for making such a diagnosis, but descriptions of Cino’s behavior sound as if he might have been bipolar: sometimes giddy, even delirious, and then alternatively depressed and morose.) It largely depended on which side of him you were on, whether you had his approval or his dismissal. Joe Cino didn’t suffer those he thought were phonies or posers—and he let them know it. Crespy describes the OOB impresario variously as “generous to a fault and sometimes petty and difficult” or “wild, dangerous, passionate.” Cino’s supporters saw him as a kind of saint or a “nurturing angel” on a “holy artistic mission.” On a tear, however, such as when he and his cohorts allegedly went out in drag to attract homophobic punks and then turned and beat them up, he looked “dark, wild-eyed, volatile.” Declared Crespy, “There was always an aura of craziness and danger about Joe.”
Already addicted to amphetamines and taking LSD, over time Cino became obsessed with his increasing weight, which he blamed for his failure to achieve a career as a dancer, and his advancing age (he turned 30 in 1961); despondent over his up-and-down love life; discouraged by the feeling he was forfeiting control of the Cino because of its growing popularity and fame; fearful of losing the coffeehouse due to increased costs, intensified scrutiny by city authorities, competition from other OOB outlets such as Café La MaMa, and changes in the theater environment, some of which were generated by the presence of Caffe Cino and its like. Heide lamented that the “dark elements won out in the end.”
Though it started with classic European scripts, the Cino’s reputation and significance to American theater was as a place for new works to be tried out, along with new staging and performing notions (although a lot of those were born more out of necessity than artistic innovation). Despite the participation of so many neophyte actors, directors, and designers, the Cino developed into a playwrights’ theater, and OOB followed in that direction as it formed. By 1963, almost every performance was a new American play.
Many new and gifted playwrights, experimenting with radical forms of dramaturgy that clashed with contemporary commercial tastes, were discovered by way of Caffe Cino, not to forget Joe Cino’s imitators in the Village café-theater dodge. (Many artists worked at both the Cino and La MaMa, as well as the other OOB theaters of the time.) As it happens, the very time that Off-Off-Broadway was being born at Caffe Cino, Café La MaMa (opened in 1961), the Judson Poets’ Theatre (1961), and the Theatre Genesis (1964)—the four founding theaters of OOB—Off-Broadway was changing from an inexpensive and innovative arena of informal atmosphere and small audiences into a commercial sphere with high costs, restrictive union rules, and demanding economics—a smaller version of Broadway. The average cost of an Off-Broadway drama in the early 1960s had reached $20,000 (about $165,000 today).
One theater-besotted 19-year-old college student, in a dialogue he wrote in 1965 for a student magazine, asked “the spirit of . . . Joe Cino”: “Where do I go to see the NEW theatre—the people writing NOW?” The young man was “looking for something fresh, something alive. A theatre where writers can try things out, where there’s a possibility of affirmation.” He’s transported magically to “off-off-Broadway” and “the Cino Café” where “[s]omething’s always new” and the as-yet-unknown playwrights are “trying to say something.” As a consequence, Off-Off-Broadway simply took off because it was needed, both by theatergoers and by artists. Caffe Cino was the vanguard. New York Herald Tribune cultural critic (and Village resident) John Gruen described the theater scene at the Cino in an obituary for the OOB impresario:
Twice each night, and sometimes three times, the Caffe Cino presented the outrageous, the blasphemous, the zany, the wildly poetic, the embarrassingly trite, the childish, and frequently, the moving and the beautiful.
The first original play performed at Caffe Cino and, perhaps, the first true Off-Off-Broadway première, was James Howard’s anti-war satire about the arms race, Flyspray, presented in the summer of 1960. This was followed by plays from Lanford Wilson (often credited with bringing “professional theater” to the Cino, till then a den of amateurism), Doric Wilson, Tom Eyen, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and Robert Patrick, and the work of directors like Marshall Mason and Tom O’Horgan and actors such as Al Pacino (who made his début for a paying audience in William Saroyan’s Hello Out There in 1962 or ’63), Harvey Keitel, and Bernadette Peters was first seen at Joe Cino’s coffeehouse.
The Cino made another important contribution to New York life, American theater, and the nation’s culture. In a way, it happened almost by accident—or, more precisely, circumstances. Before the Stonewall uprising in 1969, it was illegal in New York State to depict homosexuality on stage. (The law, the Wales Padlock Act, was passed in 1927 and remained on the books until 1967.) But many of the artists, especially the playwrights, who patronized and worked in Caffe Cino were gay so the coffeehouse became a congenial and safe hangout for gay men, especially, to meet. Almost surreptitiously, the Cino became a pioneer in gay theater as many of the new plays featured gay themes, subjects, and characters. (Along with Stonewall, Caffe Cino is considered a landmark of U.S. LGBTQ history. The Stonewall’s still here; the Cino’s not.)
Of course, the Cino was already breaking another law the moment it started presenting performances of any kind: New York City’s cabaret law. Businesses that wanted to put on a show had to have a liquor license (even though Caffe Cino didn’t serve booze) and a cabaret license. (The same was true of places that wanted to allow patrons to dance.) Joe Cino had neither for his coffeehouse. (This is why Ellen Stewart eventually called her house the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Patrons didn’t pay an admission fee, but bought memberships in the private club—which didn’t need a license to present a performance.) To help deter the police—who might fail to enforce Wales but would close a joint for putting on an unlicensed play—from interfering, Cino plastered the front widows with posters to obscure the view from the sidewalk.
The posters themselves, designed by Cino artist Kenneth Burgess, were lettered in what Crespy labeled “a purposely indecipherable art nouveau style—later known as psychedelic,” which the New York City authorities like cops and site inspectors couldn’t read but Cino regulars could, all to disguise the goings-on inside the coffeehouse. To the uninitiated, the posters looked like abstract art. (It was like a visual version of the sound frequency only people under 25 can hear. If you were hip, you got the message; if you were square, you didn’t.)
The Cino was a magnet, drawing wanderers, seekers, hippies, theater enthusiasts, gays, and all kinds of counterculture Americans (and foreign visitors). Early on the morning of 3 March 1965, however, disaster nearly struck as a fire, believed to have started from a gas leak (though Joe Cino was convinced that it was started by his estranged and volatile lover John Torrey) gutted the first-floor storefront. Ironically, the fire occurred on Ash Wednesday. For 2½ months, Joe Cino’s café operated out of Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa in the East Village (located at 122 2nd Avenue, between 7th and 8th Streets, at the time) on Sunday and Monday nights; other downtown theater people hosted or participated in fundraisers and benefits for Cino and his coffeehouse. (Edward Albee, already an established playwright so he never wrote for the Cino, was nevertheless an enthusiastic booster of the café theater and donated the space for the largest event in benefit for Caffe Cino.)
A newly-installed fireproof ceiling at the Cino, put in when a lighting grid was added, prevented the fire from spreading beyond the commercial space, saving the building from damage and confining the destruction to the interior of the Cino. On Tuesday, 18 May 1965, the coffeehouse reopened with a production of With Creatures Make My Way by H. M. (Haralimbus Medea, known as Harry) Koutoukas, whose plays, wrote Crespy, “personify the Cino and are emblematic of the curious mix of highbrow avant-garde and lowdown pop culture that became its signature style.” A new drop ceiling was installed, along with expanded space for dressing rooms; even a compact lighting booth was built during the reconstruction. The famous memorabilia-covered walls had to be re-decorated from scratch, but they quickly regained their familiar look. That same year, Caffe Cino and Café La MaMa were jointly awarded a Village Voice OBIE Award “for creating opportunities for new playwrights to confront audiences and gain experience of the real theatre” during the 1964-65 season.
The next year, on 19 May 1966, the Cino’s most successful production opened, helping to change OOB forever after. Dames at Sea or Golddiggers Afloat—known afterward simply as Dames at Sea—with book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller and music by Jim Wise and directed by Cino regular Robert Dahdah ran at the café theater for 148 performances. Then it moved to Off-Broadway’s Bouwerie Lane Theatre in the East Village on 20 December 1968 and transferred to the larger Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) in the West Village on 22 April 1969 and closed on 10 May 1970 after a total of 575 performances. (There was a television version which aired on NBC on 15 November 1971 and a later Broadway production at the Helen Hayes Theatre from 22 October 2015 to 3 January 2016, running 85 regular performances and 32 previews. There was also a London run in 1969 and a cast recording of the Off-Broadway staging released that same year.)
The central role of Ruby in Dames was played, both at Caffe Cino and in the OB première, by future Broadway star Bernadette Peters; her 1968 OB performance brought her her first Drama Desk Award. (Peters also reprised her role in regional productions at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, in 1973 and at the Academy Playhouse, Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1973. Many other regional productions have been staged since the play’s début; Dames at Sea’s been very popular in schools and community theaters.)
As momentous an achievement as Dames at Sea was for Caffe Cino, it also marked the beginning of the end. While working on a stock production in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, John (sometimes written “Jon” in the press) Torrey (sometimes spelled “Torre”), Joe Cino’s on-again-off-again lover, was electrocuted on 5 January 1967 and died. Some suspected it was a suicide, but many others believe the sometime Cino lighting expert had been performing his signature gag of “eating” electricity and it went horribly wrong. To demonstrate that electricity isn’t to be feared, he’d lick his fingers and grab the end of an electric line, causing the cable to throw sparks. When the electricity arced off his fingers, he made as if he was eating it. Cino was devastated by Torrey’s death and descended into despondency.
Torrey’s death sent Cino into an emotional spiral. Late on 30 March 1967, he returned alone to the coffeehouse, took a kitchen knife, and hacked at his body, stabbing himself in the stomach, enacting a bizarre sort of harakiri dance. He managed to call Johnny Dodd and Michael Smith’s apartment at 5 Cornela Street (likely before he inflicted the mortal wound) and got Smith, the Voice journalist, on the phone. Cino sounded so desperate that Smith rushed to the café and found Cino, still alive in a pool of blood. Smith ran for help and Cino was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic hospital in the Village, where Al Carmines of Judson Poets and Ellen Stewart of La MaMa kept vigil. He died on 2 April—Torrey’s birthday. Bernadette Peters, the sensation of Dames at Sea, sang a song from the play at his memorial service on 10 April at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, the home of Al Carmines’s Judson Poets’ Theatre, along with other downtown performers and artists performing scenes, readings, and more songs from Cino plays. (Joe Cino had been buried in Buffalo, his birthplace and home of his mother, on 7 April.)
Caffe Cino reopened in May under the management of Michael Smith and others, and it lasted another year. But Joe Cino had been the living spirit of Caffe Cino and without him at the helm, or the espresso machine, “Magic Time” was never the same. The coffeehouse closed for good on 17 March 1968; the last play at the Cino was Monuments by Diane Di Prima. In 1985, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (then known as the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts) mounted Caffe Cino and its Legacy: An American Cultural Landmark, an exhibition of memorabilia and ephemera, and playwright Robert Patrick had a plaque mounted on the front of the commercial space at 31 Cornelia Street on 28 April 2008, just under 50 years after Joe Cino opened his coffeehouse: “On this site, in the Caffe Cino (1958-68), artists brought theatre into the modern era, creating Off-Off Broadway and forever altering the performing arts worldwide.” (Sometime in May 2017, the plaque was anonymously removed.)
Joe Cino’s café theater, the first OOB theater, had lasted for just under 10 years, but its impact on New York and American theater has been everlasting. During its decade of operation, the Cino presented somewhere around 250 plays. Cino had a dark side and came to a tragic end, and all wasn’t all beer and skittles at the coffeehouse, but the café-owner isn’t remembered for that. He’s enshrined in New York and theater history for his contributions as a wizard for working with artists, providing an atmosphere of complete artistic freedom to experiment, innovate, challenge established standards—even fail—and generating a new theater forum for work that would otherwise never see a stage or an audience. In 1985, Ellen Stewart insisted, “It was Joseph Cino who started Off-Off-Broadway. I would like to ask everybody to remember that.”
Joe Cino was the first of the founders of OOB to depart: Ralph Cook (b. 1928), founder of Theatre Genesis, died in 1985; Al Camines (b. 1936) passed on in 2005; and La MaMa herself, Ellen Stewart (b. 1919), was the last survivor, dying in 2011. Off-Off-Broadway thrives in New York City—including La MaMa E.T.C., the only one of the four founding OOB theaters still in operation. Similar small spaces live in cities across the country, and American playwriting still feels the ripples of what Joe Cino and his followers started 60 years ago in a little corner of New York. On 11 November 2017, 31 Cornelia Street, the Cino’s home, was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
[Almost seven years ago, I posted a two-part article on Rick On Theater called “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s” (12 and 15 December 2011). It was principally about the genesis of Off-Off-Broadway, the non-commercial, non-union theater that began as an alternative to the commercially-oriented, union-regulated productions of Broadway and Off-Broadway. I reported in “Greenwich Village Theater” that the sipapu, the place of emergence, of Off-Off-Broadway was Greenwich Village and what, after 1964, was dubbed the East Village, and specifically, 31 Cornelia Street—the home after 1958 of the Caffe Cino. Joe Cino, the coffeehouse’s proprietor, opened his café theater 60 years ago this December. Until recently, there’d never been an extensive history of the Cino—there are few records or documents on the café’s history; it’s all in the memories of those who were there, and that's a fading population—so I thought this would be an opportune time to post a little compilation on the historic venue. I’m posting it in two parts, so come back to ROT on 14 September for the continuation of “Caffe Cino.”]
Off-Off-Broadway, the theater arena in which new artists like actors, directors, and playwrights, often get their starts in the business of show, is a New York City phenomenon. (Some cities have a vague equivalent, especially after the Off-Off-Broadway theater here made itself known in the 1960s and ’70s.) There’s no real money on the Off-Off-Broadway stage, and the working conditions are as minimal as you can imagine, but there’s a lot of experience, some exposure (agents, managers, and producers have been known to check out what are often called “showcases”—because that’s often what they are—to see if there’s some new talent or new property to interest them. It could happen . . . .).
Since the 1980s or so, Off-Off-Broadway has spread out across the city, not only to all quarters of Manhattan, but all across the city. But when the movement got started in the late 1950s and early-to-mid-1960s, it was centered in Greenwich Village and what was becoming known as the East Village. The exact spot where Off-Off-Broadway began was a coffeehouse on a tree lined-block of a typical West Village lane, Cornelia Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets—number 31, the home of Caffe Cino.
The building that housed Caffe Cino, a four-story red brick walk-up with apartments above the ground floor was built in 1877 as a tenement. (There have been numerous renovations and up-grades since then to conform to changing requirements and codes for New York City buildings. Though the interior of 31 Cornelia Street, as well as the building’s utilities and safety features, have been modernized, its exterior is basically unchanged—somewhat cleaner, perhaps—from its appearance in the days of Caffe Cino.) The entrance to the ground-floor commercial space, where the coffeehouse was located, is flanked by two cast-iron pilasters. Like the street on which it stands, it’s pretty typical of the neighborhood. Nothing about it stands out—except that what went on there changed the face of New York theater forever and had a profound impact on American theater as a whole.
Joe Cino started the Caffe Cino Art Gallery, as it was first called, in December 1958 and issued a call for artist friends to hang their art on the walls of the new coffeehouse. In 1965, he told the Village Voice (in his one and only interview), “My idea was always to start with a beautiful, intimate, warm, non-commercial, friendly atmosphere where people could come and not feel pressured or harassed.” The art displays soon led to poetry readings (how Greenwich Village coffeehouse!), and that led directly to reading plays. From there it was just a short step to putting the plays on. And remember, Greenwich Village was the very center of all things avant-garde: the bohemians congregated there in the ’teens, ’20s, and ’30s; the Beats, who really started the “coffeehouse scene,” in the ’50s; and the hippies and Yippies in the ’60s.
(By the way, the Caffe Cino is often misnamed in the press and other sources. First of all, Joe Cino, a proud Sicilian-American, chose the Italian designation for his establishment to be different from all the other Village coffeehouses—though some reports say it was an accident from a misprint in an ad that just stuck—so it’s not “Café Cino”—and he also never used the accent mark in the coffeehouse’s name [caffè]. Unfortunately, if you want to look the place up, especially on line, you have to misspell the name to be sure to catch all the potential hits since even the New York Times called the place “Cafe Cino.” Go know, right?)
Joseph Cino (1931-67) was born in Buffalo into a traditional Italian-American family. He was attracted to dance and opera from a young age, which didn’t sit well with his three brothers and his schoolmates because they felt that an Italian boy shouldn’t be interested in dancing. It was also becoming increasingly obvious that young Joe was gay, something else that wasn’t in line with his community. As a result, though Joe and his mother were close, the frictions with his family increased and in 1948, when he was 16, Joe ran away to New York City to become a dancer.
He began a string of meaningless jobs such as waiter, clerk, receptionist, and soda-jerk—the kind of thing many performing artists do when they’re starting out—and studied dance at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side; he also studied acting, speech, and make-up. Despite a scholarship to Jacob’s Pillow, the dance center and school in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and a few gigs with dance troupes, the dance career didn’t happen, probably because Cino didn’t look much like a dancer: just five-foot-nine, he was “sometimes described as ‘roundish.’” In his 2003 history of the Off-Off-Broadway theater, David Crespy drew this picture of Joe Cino:
He had a head of thick, curly hair and dark brown eyes. His standard uniform was a sweatshirt worn inside out, jeans, and yellow boots. His cherubic face, rimmed by a scruffy, half-grown beard, was filled with a delightful warmth—his smile dazzled and according to those who knew him, he exuded love, nurturing, and an irrepressible charm. He was pudgy and at the same time graceful . . . .
After 10 years of trying and closing in on 27, he was ready to move on to something else.
One of those bread-and-butter jobs Cino had was as a waiter at the Playhouse Café at 131 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, a four-minute walk east from 31 Cornelia. Cino learned about working in a coffeehouse and, especially, how to run an espresso machine at the Playhouse Café, so named because it was just a couple of doors down from the historic Provincetown Playhouse (115 MacDougal). It was while working at the Playhouse, where occasional plays were read, that Cino saved the money from his pay, stashed in a drawer in his apartment, that he would eventually use to open his own coffeehouse, something he considered during his stint at the Playhouse. When the café closed, Cino made his move.
Cino’d been thinking about opening a café on and off since as early as 1954, he said. Among his friends were many artists, and he thought he’d hang their paintings in his fantasy joint. One of his friends (and current lover) was painter Ed Franzen, who worked at New York University in the Village. Franzen was looking for a studio where he could work and show his paintings and he knew that Cino wanted a place, too. One day in November 1958, Franzen called his friend and told him he’d stumbled on a storefront in the West Village and when Cino met the painter at 31 Cornelia Street, the incipient OOB impresario found Franzen in conversation with the landlady, who was leaning out an upstairs window. The painter introduced his future partner: “This is Mrs. Lemma.” “Oh, you’re Italian,” said Cino. “Yes,” said Josie Lemma, “what are you?” Cino answered, “Sicilian.” And a connection was made. The rest, as the cliché goes, is (theater) history.
Mrs. Lemma threw the keys to the storefront down to them and the painter and the ex-dancer went in to look the place over. Here’s how Cino recounts the rest of the historic moment:
The first thing you saw when you looked down the room was the toilet at the back. I thought, “There’s a toilet, and there’s a sink, and there’s a fireplace. This will be a counter, a coffee machine here, a little private area.” I turned around and looked and said, “This is the room, I have no idea what to do with it.”
The room was small, narrow, open, and plain. It had wood floors, exposed-brick walls, and a pressed-metal ceiling. The metal ceiling would be covered by a plaster drop ceiling when Cino installed a lighting system and Cino soon decorated his “room” with
twinkling fairy lights, strung liberally across the ceiling, and then the sprinkling of glitter dust on the floor for show nights. Festoons of hanging decorations followed—cutouts, mobiles, baubles, glitter angels, miniature Chinese lanterns, and ever more fairy lights.
In his New York Times review of Tom Eyen’s The White Whore and the Bit Player in 1967, Dan Sullivan observed that Cino had hung “enough twinkling lights to decorate a forest of psychedelic Christmas trees.”
When “the Cino,” as it became known, started presenting plays, the generally nondescript character of the room would change depending on the plays being produced as the participants brought in new scenery each week. The most emblematic element of the space, however, were the walls. They were soon bedecked with “glossy photos of stars and unknowns, opera posters, Christmas decorations, and crunched foil, often interspersed with paintings by Kenneth Burgess, Cino’s resident artist,” and other ephemera the patrons brought in. These became the most memorable element in the café and Joe Cino’s special domain. Memorabilia Cino felt was special, such as the résumé a young Bette Midler (who never got to work at the Cino) gave him, was stapled to the wall behind the coffee bar. If the wall décor had to be rearranged for a play or for cleaning and repainting, afterwards its original appearance would have to be reconstructed. Only Cino himself could add or subtract from the display.
Franzen and Cino opened Caffe Cino on a Friday night in early December with about 30 customers, all friends. The music Cino chose for his café, in contrast with the prevailing taste of the Greenwich Village coffeehouses for folk music—for which Cino had little regard—was opera and classical. Veteran Cino dramatist Robert Patrick (who’d eventually earn the rep as the most prolific Off-Off-Broadway playwright) recalled, “There was a jukebox, which was full of opera records.” As for the rest of the activities in the café, Joe Cino reminisced:
I was thinking of a cafe with poetry readings, with lectures, maybe with dance concerts. The one thing I never thought of was fully staged productions of plays. I thought of doing readings, but I never thought any of the technical things would be important.
The café started presenting poetry readings immediately, just as Cino had planned. Then after about five months of operation, Caffe Cino began offering play readings around “a long pine table.” The first reading was “a condensed version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest” on 7 February 1959 and the coffeehouse was packed. It was supposed to be a one-off event: “I didn’t even think of doing it again,” affirmed Cino. He didn’t want “to disturb the rhythm of the room.” But Caffe Cino immediately scheduled a Monday night reading, then soon, Tuesday, and so on, one performance a night.
They read works by Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Oscar Wilde, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thornton Wilder, J. D. Salinger, Noel Coward, André Gide, Anton Chekhov, Jean Cocteau, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Pinter, and other established American and European writers. Cino resisted giving readings on the weekends and he recalled that it was almost two years before the coffeehouse was having readings all week long. He said the performers “went to staging right away.” Not precisely: Robert Dahdah, the Cino’s most frequent director, staged Sartre’s No Exit in February 1960, the first play to be fully mounted there.
There was no actual stage at the Cino—an 8-by-8-foot piece of wood was put down to mark the acting area and it was portable so it could be set down anywhere in the café. Props, set, lighting, and costumes were minimal, no more than was absolutely necessary to perform the play (and, of course, pretty much everything was scrounged, borrowed, or, occasionally, swiped. Lighting, even with the café’s limited technical resources, was the chief artistic means of creating an atmosphere for the plays. Crespy described it as “dazzling and inventive” and recounts, “Many remember the lighting as one of the most magical aspects of the Cino.” Cino introduced each performance, always—and famously—announcing as he left the performance area: “It’s magic time!”
The “room,” as Cino apparently called his coffeehouse, was reconfigured to suit each play, with the performance space being set up in a different spot on the floor and the tables rearranged accordingly. From short scenes to one-act plays to full-lengths, the performances expanded in response to both the demand of the audiences and the avidity of the artists. (One thing about actors and playwrights: they love to work—an actor friend of mine used to like to quip: “Actors are the only people who’ll work for nothing . . . if you let them!”) Pretty soon, says Crespy, the Cino “began to look more like a stage with a café on it.”
The café accommodated about 40 customers in its 18-by-30-foot space—the legal maximum capacity was 90, according to Robert Patrick, who often manned the door, but when there was a performance, many more than that squeezed in anywhere they could, even sitting atop the cigarette machine. The coffeehouse’s patrons, with their food and drinks at the 20 tiny café tables inches from the stage, were constantly in danger of spilling their coffee on the actors if one or the other wasn’t careful, but the closeness of the spectators and the performers turned the performance into an event they all shared. There was no separation, no distance. As Joe Cino himself put it, “When I now go to see something on a proscenium stage it’s like something else—with no comparisons to what is done here. But this is a theatre, a mirror of all the madness of everything else that is happening.”
Soon, one performance a night grew into two by January 1961, with an 11 o’clock show. There wasn’t always an audience, but the casts performed anyway. Cino would insist that the actors “do it for the room.” That first two-fer was a 32-minute adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which Cino called “one of the most beautiful things we had at the Cino.” The lighting, another first at the Cino, as designed by resident lighting wizard, Johnny Dodd, “was very tight, just for the actors in the performing areas. The rest of the room was dark.”
The development of the Cino as a theatrical venue was never really planned out but grew rather like Topsy. The performers, writers, directors, and production artists who put on the plays were at first friends of Cino’s, but theater folk are always on the look-out for places to ply their art, so the pool of artists widened quickly. Cino himself never performed in the plays, but after the last show, Jerome Robbins, already a star in the dance world, occasionally came by so he and Cino could dance on the small stage. The OOB impresario didn’t see himself as a producer, either; he was a café-owner who provided a place for others to work. He seldom read scripts—a habit he shared with his friend and colleague Ellen Stewart of La MaMa—and determined the performance schedule according to the playwrights’ zodiac signs!
Joe Cino insisted, in fact, that his coffeehouse wasn’t a theater, but a café. “We’re not off-off-Broadway,” he proclaimed, “we’re in-cafe.” According to Crespy’s OOB history, the Village Voice “never listed” productions at Caffe Cino in its theater section, but, until the coffeehouse’s demise, always with the cafés. Once the Cino started doing play readings, momentum took over, and the Ur-theater of Off-Off-Broadway, as dramaturg and reviewer Cynthia Jenner dubbed it in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, pretty much created itself.
[As I noted in my introduction above, “Caffe Cino” is a two-part post, so I encourage all ROTters to return on Friday to read the final installment of the article. So far, you’ve read about the start of the coffeehouse and the inauguration of Off-Off-Broadway; in the conclusion, you’ll learn about the café’s rise and its demise. I hope you’ll also get an impression of the Caffe Cino’s importance at the time and its influence down to the present.]
