Kenneth Tynan

by Kirk Woodward

[For the serious theater student, especially those of us who came of intellectual age in the second half of the 20th century, the name Kenneth Tynan represented something important.  William Goldman’s The Season, his account of the New York theater scene of 1967-68, is chock-a-block with quoted comments from Tynan’s reviews.

[Tynan wrote perceptively—and literately—about “plays, personalities, problems and ideas” of the world of theater in England and the U.S. (and nations beyond), but he also influenced the theater of his time.  It should be noted that “his time” was the post-war years of the middle of the 20th century when the theater and, indeed, all the arts were changing into “modern.”

[In other words, the influence he wielded on the culture of the 1950s and ’60s lived long past his early and untimely death at 53. 

[According to Tynan’s second wife, Kathleen (1937-95), playwright Tom Stoppard said at the critic’s memorial service that he was “the product of our time . . . but our time was of his making.”  According to the editor of Tynan’s writings on theater, he influenced the evolution of the whole of post-war theater in Britain.  I don’t believe he was being hyperbolic. 

[I think ROTters will find Kirk Woodward, a generous contributor to Rick On Theater, has captured some of that in his profile of Tynan.  The writing of this post was inspired, I believe, by Kirk’s reading of Kenneth Tynan: Theatre Writings, selections of Tynan’s reviews.]

Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980) flashed like a meteor through the performance world. He would hate that simile, because he was a stylish, impeccable writer.

He was born in Birmingham, England. His middle name was “Peacock,” and he learned after the death of his father that the man he knew as “Peter Tynan” was also “Sir Peter Peacock,” who had a completely different life and a large family in another city.

The theatricality of this situation seems almost too remarkable, something that one would find hard to believe in fiction. However, Tynan appears to have been “theatrical” from the start. Paul Johnson (b. 1928) describes in his invaluable book Intellectuals (Harper, revised 2007) how, at Oxford,

when the new term opened, I was an awestruck freshman-witness to his arrival at the Magdalen Lodge. I stared in astonishment at this tall, beautiful, epicene youth, with pale yellow locks, Beardsley cheekbones, fashionable stammer, plum coloured suit, lavender tie and ruby signet-ring. . . . He seemed to fill the lodge with his possessions and servitors whom he ordered about with calm and imperious authority. . . . At Oxford he dressed in princely style at a time when clothes-rationing was still strictly enforced. . . . He thus restored Oxford’s reputation for aesthetic extravagance.

Peacock indeed! One might expect such a flamboyant character to be a wastrel or, at best, a dilettante. On the contrary, Tynan had a career that, considering how young he died, was remarkably full. He acted a bit, apparently competently.  He directed a great deal, but then felt he had failed. He wrote screenplays, at least two of which were produced (Nowhere to Go, 1958; Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, 1971). He became theater reviewer for the London Evening Standard, The Observer, and, in the United States, The New Yorker, for which he also later wrote a celebrated series of “Profiles.”

As a reviewer he was extraordinarily influential. He championed the plays and directorial approach of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and did a great deal to popularize them. He also promoted the “angry young man” drama Look Back in Anger (1956) by John Osborne (1929-1994), with the result that the play had an enormous impact on British theater.

He then in 1963 became the Literary Manager for the new National Theatre of Great Britain, serving in that capacity alongside its Artistic Director, Laurence Olivier (1907-1989), until both of them stepped down in 1973, and, in that capacity, he was involved in the selection of some 70 plays for the company’s repertory, most of them successful and many of them daring.

Tynan was also the initiator and producer of the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! (1969), which perhaps not everyone would count as a great achievement, but which ran for a remarkable number of performances in its original production and in revivals.

Part of Tynan’s creed, in fact, was to attack what we might call “Puritanical” attitudes, both about sex and about language. He spent a great deal of his energy on this project. An important result of his effort, and the efforts of others, was the end of government censorship of the theater in Great Britain under the Licensing Act (1737), through passage of the Theatres Act 1968.

A personal word about Oh! Calcutta! I have a copy – no idea where it came from – and I have tried to read it once or twice, but I simply cannot stand the thing. It seems to me to prove conclusively that sex in plays can be an important component – Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) would agree – but only in a context of characters, which I can’t find in Oh! Calcutta! at all. Of course it’s a revue rather than a play, but I doubt that that makes much difference.

In any case, Tynan was definitely no dilettante – he had a profound effect on the theater of his time, and by extension, on ours. It is well worth the effort, if that’s the word, to look at his theater reviews and writings. First, however, we should note that simply as a writer – just as a person who puts words down on paper (in his time) or whatever – he was superlative.

He never got over his fondness for puns – really good puns, to tell the truth:

            (Of the reviewer George Jean Nathan, 1882-1958)

Admittedly, we all make mystiques.

(On a week in which two separate productions of Richard II opened)

An embarrassment of Richards.

            (On a boring play involving a cat-killing)

Another distraction [from the ennui of the play] might be to work out an appropriate epigraph for Tabitha: the best I could summon up was: “Home is where you hang your cat.”

The selection assembled in Kenneth Tynan: Theatre Writings (Quite Specific Media Group, 2007) reveals, in its early entries, a writer determined to demonstrate how widely he has read, and his prose is self-consciously overripe. As he goes along, he modifies this tendency.

Even from his earliest reviews, however, he has the gift of letting you see what he sees. It is tempting simply to quote him at length. Here for example is the first paragraph of a review from 10 April 1953:

The present revival of The Wandering Jew [by E. Temple Thurston, 1879-1933] is one of the most reassuring theatrical experiences in years. Have we really progressed so far? In 1920 the play survived 390 performances; today not a line of it but rings flat and false.

Notice how in that quotation the little word “survived” prepares us for what’s coming. We see that he had no difficulty identifying failure; it is no wonder he was feared as a reviewer. He could also write ear-perfect parodies, as in this review of the musical Guys and Dolls (1953):

What happens next but The Sky gets bopped by religion and shoots craps with Nathan and the boys for their immortal souls. And where do the sinners wind up, with their chalk-striped suits and busted noses, but at a prayer meeting in the doll’s mission house, which hands me a very big laugh indeed.

One sees him in 1954 drawing battle lines against what he considers the mediocrity of the English theater:

The bare fact is that, apart from revivals and imports, there is nothing in the London theatre that one dares discuss with an intelligent man for more than five minutes. Since the great Ibsen challenge of the nineties, the English intellectuals have been drifting away from drama.

Unwilling to put up with this state of affairs, Tynan, like George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) before him, resolves to cause tumult:

I counsel aggression because, as a critic, I had rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist.

He selects the theatrical “causes” he will champion and fights for them fiercely.  First Brecht:

A Brechtian, let me explain, is one who believes that low drama with high principles is better than high principles with no audience; that the worst plays are those which depend wholly on suspense and the illusion of reality; and that the drama of the future will be a wedding of song and narrative in which neither partner marries beneath itself.

Then came Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, and the “realistic,” “angry young man,” “kitchen sink” drama that followed:

Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is . . . . I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.              

And he was greatly encouraged by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, which had produced Osborne’s play and others in the same vein:

To an extent unknown since the Ibsen riots, it has made drama a matter of public controversy. It has buttonholed us with new voices, some of them bawdy, many of them irreverent, and all of them calculated to bring gooseflesh to the evening of Aunt Edna’s life. It has raised hackles, Cain laughs and the standards of English dramaturgy.

(“Aunt Edna” was the imaginary audience member for whom the playwright Terrence Rattigan, 1911-1977, said he wrote.)

He noted that the English stage presented almost no satire, and very soon after was delighted by the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe (1961 in London), the bellwether of the astonishing wave of British satire that brought us Monty Python’s Flying Circus (on the BBC from 1969 to 1974):

Future historians may well thank me for providing them with a full account of the moment when English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the twentieth century.

And, from first to last, Tynan campaigned for the creation of a National Theatre, which did take place, as noted above, in 1963, and for which Tynan became Literary Manager.

Tynan did not, however, champion the “Theater of the Absurd” in general, although he highly praised Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), first staged in London in 1955 and widely considered the supreme example of that approach. In his review of Godot, he wrote:

I care little for its enormous success in Europe over the past three years, but much for the way in which it pricked and stimulated my own nervous system. It summoned the music-hall and the parable to present a view of life which banished the sentimentality of the music-hall and the parable’s fulsome uplift. It forced me to re-examine the rules which have hitherto governed the drama; and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough. It is validly new, and hence I declare myself, as the Spanish would say, godotista.

With respect to the genre however, he criticized

the pessimism that has driven so many young writers in Paris and New York to declare that true verbal communication between human beings is nowadays impossible.

Of “The Chairs” (1952, first performed in London in 1955) by Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994), he wrote:

This world [of the play] is not mine, but I recognize it to be a valid personal vision, presented with great imaginative aplomb and verbal audacity. The peril arises when it is held up for general emulation as the gateway to the theatre of the future, that bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief in man will forever be banished.

He and Ionesco carried on a lively newspaper debate, which can be found in Ionesco’s Notes & Counter Notes (Grove Press, 1964), a collection of writings well worth reading. (I have written about Ionesco elsewhere in this blog [“Eugene Ionesco,” 2 July 2013].) Tynan posits Ionesco as the “messiah” of a new school of playwrighting. Ionesco denies such an intention and slyly suggests that Tynan may be the one looking for a “messiah.” A hit, a palpable hit.

[I have posted several reports on productions of Ionesco plays on Rick On Theater: “Rhinoceros,” 15 October 2012; “Three Ionesco Plays (2004),” 17 July 2013.  ~Rick]

Interestingly, he did not embrace arena staging (“theater in the round”), which one hears periodically touted as a superior way to present plays. Tynan calls it

a method which overrates the importance of ‘intimacy’ in the theatre and, by citing the circus as a vindication of its creed, overlooks the fact that of the two most exciting things that happen in a circus one takes place behind bars and the other hundreds of feet in the air.

I can’t help comparing Tynan’s writings on theater to those of Eric Bentley (1916-2020), about whom I have written elsewhere in this blog [“Eric Bentley – An Appreciation,” 4 December 2012; “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw,” 3 December 2015; ]. Tynan in general provides closer descriptions of particular productions and performances than Bentley, who is typically more focused on play than players.

Both Tynan and Bentley hoped for careers as directors. (Bentley actually directed Tynan in a production of Him by E. E. Cummings, 1894-1962.) Both lost confidence in their ability to direct, but the loss appears to have hit Tynan harder – his second wife, Kathleen Tynan (1937-1995), wrote that “One of the saddest things about Ken was that he really wanted to be a director more than a writer – much more . . . .”  

Still, his directing experience informs his writing, and makes it possible for him to suggest, not just generalities, but specific important aspects of performances that actors might even want to fix. For example, evaluating Laurence Olivier as King Lear, he writes:

He gave a moderate Lear at the New [Theatre], built up out of a few tremendous tantrums of impotence . . . and an infinite run of cadenzas on his four most overworked tricks: (1) the stabbing finger; (2) the jaw and eye movement; (3) the ceaseless fits of wrestling with his cloak, like a tortoise with claustrophobia; and (4) the nervously nodding head.

By all accounts, actors feared Tynan’s criticism. From this distance, however, and not being the performers involved, he does not strike me as brutal, like, say, John Simon (1925-2019), but candid and precise [see “‘Moron! Vermin! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!!’: John Simon (1925-2019),” 28 November and 1, 4, and 7 December 2019]. One almost always feels, “I understand what he’s talking about.”

Tynan is certainly more the literary stylist than Bentley. For me, however, comparing, for example, both writers’ description of a Paris theatrical season, Tynan is informative but not revelatory, while I find new insights in Bentley’s account (in the collection In Search of Theater, 1953) every time I read it.

The difference may be that Tynan is genuinely a reviewer, and Bentley is genuinely a critic. To put it another way, Tynan is brilliant about moments, but Bentley is even better about movements. Tynan believed that a review

is a letter addressed to the future; to people thirty years hence who may wonder exactly what it felt like to be in a certain playhouse on a certain distant night. The critic is their eyewitness; and he has done his job if he evokes, precisely and with all his prejudices clearly charted, the state of his mind after the performance has impinged on it.

I do not agree completely with this job description of the reviewer (in which he calls the reviewer a critic), but in any case Tynan lives up to it. He writes fluidly and leaves you no doubt as to what he’s describing. He is a first-rate reporter – albeit one with ideas and an attitude.

Tynan today may be as well known for his articles about performers, collected in Profiles (1990, Random House), as he is for his reviews. According to his son, Tynan proposed to write an autobiography (which he did not live to do), and

A major theme of the book, . . . will be attempts – as journalist, propagandist, and impresario – to celebrate talent and make more room in the world for it to flourish.

This intention is interesting, because, as I mentioned, Tynan had a reputation as a fearsome reviewer, but Profiles could have been titled Appreciations. Without exception the 50 pieces in the book focus on what makes the subjects of the profile – all of them in the performance field except a couple of early friends – remarkable.

Tynan was not shy and he got around, and he knew all but a handful of the people described in Profiles, among them C. S. Lewis (1898-1963, under whom Tynan studied at Oxford), Orson Welles (1915-1985), Miles Davis (1926-1991 – Tynan loved jazz and knew it well), Lenny Bruce (1925-1966), Noel Coward (1899-1973), and, surprisingly, Greta Garbo (1905-1990). He may have been an intimidating reviewer but in Profiles his genuine interest in people shines through.

In the longer profiles in the book (most of these were written for The New Yorker), Tynan spends considerable time with his subjects, and the results are notable. In particular, he accompanied the unpredictable actor Nicol Williamson (1936-2011) as he prepared and finally managed to deliver an evening of selections from plays for President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) at the White House. The account is unspeakably funny; I wish I could quote it all, as Tynan struggles, largely without success, to keep pace with Williamson’s erratic behavior and insecurities.

In fact, Tynan is frequently funny. One example out of many: describing a production in which Orson Welles uses a fake nose, Tynan writes:

Sir Laurence Olivier began his film of Hamlet with the statement that it was ‘the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind’. At one point Mr. Welles’s new appendage started to leave its moorings, and Moby Dick nearly became the tragedy of a man who could not make up his nose.

And he can be delightfully aphoristic:

A playwright is a man who can forget himself long enough to be other people; and a poet is a man who can forget other people long enough to be himself.

A melodrama is a play whose author is more interested in the impact events are having on his audience than in their impact on his characters.

Comedy, perhaps, is merely tragedy in which people don’t give in.

Ancient tragedy puts the question: ‘How are we to live?’ Modern tragedy asks: ‘How am I to live?’ That is the vital difference.

It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness.

You cannot persuade an audience that people are related simply by making them call each other bastards.

Those who devote themselves to making silk purses out of sows’ ears are in duty bound to go the whole hog.

Nothing is more crucially stupid than to deride the artistic achievements of a social class because one deplores its historical record.

I once defined a critic as a man who knew the way but couldn’t drive the car.

Theater doesn’t give its practitioners happy endings; it only gives good moments. For all his brilliance – or perhaps because of it – Tynan seems to have been in varying degrees dissatisfied with his life. Like the rest of us, he could only impose his will on the world so far. He was a lifelong heavy smoker, exasperating a congenital lung condition, and died absurdly young at 53.

Still, if there is a recurring theme in Profiles, it might be said to be, “Make something of yourself,” and that he did.

[Kirk disagrees with what he quotes Tynan as saying that “a review ‘is a letter addressed to the future,’” but I find it spot-on—especially from the perspective of the research I’ve often done to reconstruct productions.  I’ve used reviews a lot as a resource for production descriptions—even little details that I can compile from several notices.  In that sense, the reviewers are my “eyewitnesses.” 

[Many reviewers see themselves as theatrical consumer reporters.  When I was researching “The Power of the Reviewer—Myth or Fact?” (23 and 26 January 2011), there were several surveys in which theater journalists were asked how they saw their jobs; “consumer reporter” was a very popular answer

[When I shared this remark with Kirk, he responded: “No contradiction here, except that even Tynan wasn’t just writing for the future, he was also writing for tomorrow morning.”  I see my performance reports for Roger as a record of what I experienced.

[I’ve always considered the play reports on ROT as a kind of record of what I saw.  That’s why I do the review round-up and the backgrounds of the plays and productions and the profiles of the playwrights.  When I write about a theater or company I haven’t covered before, I do a description or profile of that, too—to get it on the record.  None of that usually appears in any review (which is why I don’t call them that!).]

"Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design," Articles 8 & 9

 

[The final two articles on the AT series on stage design and technology are largely about recognition and invisibility—and both use Broadway’s Tony Awards as the context in which to examine these issues. 

[In her article, Pamela Newton spotlights costume designers, though her points, and those of the artists she interviewed, can clearly be applied to set, lighting, and sound designers as well.  John Gromada has a somewhat different point to make with respect to sound designers, and I’ll have more to say about his article below. 

[As I have throughout this series, I suggest that ROTters make a point of going back and reading the foregoing seven articles in this collection.  None of the nine pieces depends on any of the others for comprehension; they all cover different aspects of the arts and techniques of theatrical design of production. 

[The result, though, is that the Special Section of the AT design and tech issue taken as a whole provides a panoramic view of stage design and tech, one of the least-well understood facets of play production among most theatergoers.  (I have already admitted that theater tech has always eluded my grasp.)  This is a good opportunity for readers who haven’t been following along to see what the design and tech fields are all about nowadays.

[To remind you all, Articles 1 through 7 were posted on 9, 12, 15, 18, and 21 September.  You can read the five posts in any order.]

“THE BROADWAY SEASON WAS DIVERSE OFFSTAGE TOO, NOT THAT YOU’D NOTICE”
by Pamela Newton 

[Newton’s report, which wasn’t published in AT’s print edition, was posted in the website on 7 June 2016 as part of the feature “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,”]

The invisibility of stage designers cuts both ways: They lack for recognition (see this week’s Tonys [Sunday, 12 June 2016]), but they can also build diverse careers—if they get the chance.

NEW YORK CITY: The Great White Way has never been as ill-fitting an appellation for Broadway as it was this past season. Shows all along the district have presented a wonderfully diverse range of voices and experiences, from The Color Purple [10 December 2015-8 January 2017] to Allegiance [8 November 2015-14 February 2016] to On Your Feet! [5 November 2015-20 August 2017]. And this is all happening under the giant shadow of Hamilton [Broadway: 6 August 2015-Present], with its rapping founding fathers and a cast that is almost entirely African-American, Latino, and Asian.

Amid a panoply of directors, playwrights, and performers of color, it is easy to overlook that this [2015-16] is an unusually diverse season for designers as well. Emilio Sosa, who is black and from the Dominican Republic, designed the costumes for On Your Feet! Riccardo Hernandez, who is Latino, did the costumes and sets for the Gin Game [14 October 2015-10 January 2016] revival starring James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. Toni-Leslie James, a black costume designer, channeled the 18th century for Amazing Grace [16 July-25 October 2015], the short-lived musical about slavery and the eponymous Christian hymn. And this season there were two costume designers of Asian descent at the helm of high-profile shows: Anita Yavich for the revival of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love [8 October-13 December 2015] and Suttirat Anne Larlarb for the Sara Bareilles-composed musical Waitress [24 April 2016-5 January 2020].

You may not see this backstage diversity reflected on Sunday’s Tony Awards broadcast, though, since only two designers of color employed this season were nominated for Tonys: Clint Ramos for Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed [6 March-19 June 2016] and Paul Tazewell for Hamilton, both for costume design. (Ramos also designed the set for Eclipsed.)

[Ramos won the Tony for Best Costume Design of a Play and Tazewell won for Best Costume Design of a Musical.  All the 2016 winners and nominees are listed on the Tony Award website at https://www.tonyawards.com/nominees/year/2016/category/any/show/any/; there’s search engine at the top right that allows you to go directly to the various design categories.]

Tazewell, a black costume designer for whom this represents a sixth Tony nomination, is excited not only about his nomination, but also about what shows like his say about the current state of Broadway.

“The possibility has opened up for a new way of telling a story, presenting an idea, presenting a musical,” he says. “It’s no longer as interesting to see a Broadway musical served up in the usual way.”

This is Ramos’s first Tony nomination, and even as he celebrates the diversity among this season’s design pool, he bemoans that designers aren’t more visible to the theatregoing public.

“There were quite a number of designers of color this year, but you don’t see us,” says the designer, who is of Filipino descent. “It’s hard for us to get any attention. A lot of people ask, ‘Where are the designers of color?’ And I always say, ‘We’re out there! We’re just as busy as other designers!’ But we work behind the scenes, so we can’t get as much attention as the people onstage.”

Although it is par for the course that designers of all backgrounds stay out of the spotlight—and many of them prefer it that way—Ramos thinks this invisibility exacerbates the diversity problem in design. Though there has been no demographic study about designers on Broadway specifically, a recent study from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, which surveyed 1,000 cultural nonprofits, found that out of 346 theatre designers polled, 81 percent were Caucasian (the percentage was the same for the 1,676 technical/production staffers polled).

“There is a dearth of young artists of color going into design for the theatre,” says Ramos. “And part of that is because they don’t see themselves in it. I never saw people who looked like me. I was never exposed to them. I had to seek them out.” It creates a vicious cycle, he explains. “How can we address the problem when we can’t attract young artists of color into the design field?”

The answer may be to start at the institutional level. Cecilia Friederichs, the national business agent of United Scenic Artists, a union for designers and scenic artists, says that the stage design field is having a conversation now not only about racial equity but gender disparity as well. Apart from the category of costume design, women are woefully underrepresented in all categories of USA’s membership. And according to a study released last year by the League of Professional Theatre Women, men Off-Broadway outnumber women in all backstage disciplines save for costuming and stage management. The union has formed a diversity committee this year to address both gender and racial equity in theatrical design, and plan out action steps to promote both.

Still, on the production end, small changes can be made to highlight more of the creative team beyond just the directors and writers. Ramos believes that designers’ names should be included in the publicity materials for shows.

“It’s important that people see my last name there,” he says. “Because I think young artists will see a last name like that and think, ‘Oh, there could be a place for me there.’” He cites a trend about 20 or 30 years back that saw some female lighting designers using only their first initials and last names to increase their chances of getting hired in a male-dominated field. “I understand. They wanted to even the playing field. But I think it also didn’t serve a lot of women designers because it masked the reality.”

Tazewell believes that a big part of the burden for fostering diversity falls to the people at the top. “It will take forward-thinking producers and directors asking designers [of color] who are just great designers period,” he says. “Inviting them to design Shakespeare, inviting them to design Ibsen, inviting them to design a musical that’s all showgirls and sparkles.”

Tazewell’s résumé also includes a number of African-American-centered productions, which he is proud to have been involved in. But to him one of the great frustrations for designers of color is being told that they “should be working on a production that is specific to a diverse story.” It’s ironic, considering that audiences never see the designers. “There is no reason for Broadway or commercial producers to distinguish between designers of color and white designers,” Ramos says. “Unlike with casting, we have the benefit of the fact that it doesn’t really matter what we look like. If the design is good, it doesn’t matter.”

In this sense, Ramos suggests that the invisibility factor goes both ways: It may be harder to see designers of color than actors, but it’s easier to hire them based on skill—that is, if you can find them.

Over at United Scenic Artists, the diversity committee is working to address the disparity by urging established designers of all backgrounds to hire and mentor assistants from a more diverse pool. Explains Friederichs, “We’re interested in getting involved in encouraging people to choose assistants in a way that fosters a growth of diversity.”

There are also hopeful signs on the national level. Crowded Fire Theater in San Francisco, for example, provides grants and professional development to Bay Area designers and technicians under the auspices of its Ignite Fund, described in its official wording as having “an eye toward supporting the plurality of race, culture, class, gender, and age in our local design and technical community.” And Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.[,] has an internship and fellowship program for designers, technicians, and administrators, named after Allen Lee Hughes, a black lighting designer who has worked at the company since 1969.

Ramos also cites the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as two companies that, in his experience, have made it part of their core mission to attract diverse theatre artists. The Guthrie offers internships and a job fair for artists on and offstage. OSF offers a fellowship and residency program, called FAIR, for theatre practitioners, including designers.

In spite of the headway being made on Broadway and beyond, though, it remains to be seen whether this season was an inspiration or aberration. There have certainly been other years when Broadway has offered daring fare and showcased underrepresented groups: Take 1996, when the proto-hipster musical Rent [29 April 1996-7 September 2008], August Wilson’s Seven Guitars [28 March-8 September 1996], and George C. Wolfe’s black history musical Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk [25 April 1996-10 January 1999] (with costumes by Tazewell) were all up for Tonys, and many thought it heralded a new age. But the next year it was back to the safety (and predominant whiteness) of A Doll’s House [2 April-31 August 1997], Chicago [14 November 1996-Present], and Titanic [23 April 1997-21 March 1999]. (Notably, there was a Broadway revival of The Gin Game that year as well, starring white actors Charles Durning and Julie Harris [20 April-31 August 1997].)

Both Ramos and Tazewell maintain a cautious optimism toward the current moment. “I think if you asked people of color, most of us have a guarded sort of stance,” says Ramos. “We think of it as a blip, something that may not happen again.”

“I am hopeful that this is the direction we’re moving in,” says Tazewell, “but history has proven that there’s a pendulum. The pendulum I think will start to widen, start to open up more possibilities, but it is bound to shift back, because that is the nature of the beast.”

Ramos pointedly cautions that the work is not over. After all, this has been a notably diverse season for designers only in relative terms.

“We’ve certainly made strides in terms of diversity on Broadway,” he says. “but for designers and people who work backstage, it’s still not as diverse as we want it to be.” For him, the key is to take the present momentum and keep on moving forward. “If we in the American theatre are really invested in diversity and the breadth of human experience, then it is imperative that we populate our industry with more designers of color who, just by the nature of who they are, offer a different worldview, with a different body of experience.”

[Pamela Newton is a freelance writer and college writing teacher living in New York City. 

[I don’t know if the diversity issue had progressed among theater designers in the ensuing five years since Newton wrote her report, but it occurs to me, reading “The Broadway Season Was Diverse Offstage” that the same points the author and the artists to whom she spoke make above are equally valid with respect to artists with physical handicaps—and I’d bet that they meet with the same discrimination and invisibility that women and artists of color have.]

*  *  *  *
“TONY, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
by John Gromada

[Gromada’s article, published in the “Opinion” feature of the print issue and posted on 6 June 2016 on the website, is a protest, born of disappointment. The Tony Awards on Sunday, 12 June 2016, omitted the contributions of sound designers.  The absence screamed loudly for Gromada, who had campaigned to have sound design added to the award categories; it was included in the 2008 awards.

[Gromada was nominated for the award himself in 2013 for Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, but the next year, he saw the Tony committee yank the award away again.  What he couldn’t know when he wrote his article, though, was that the Tony Awards Administration Committee would relent and on 24 April 2017, would announce that the sound design awards would be reintroduced for the 2017-18 season.

[I’ve decided to run Gromada’s argument anyway, even though the reinstatement renders his main point out of date, because the article is still an important examination of the problem theater design artists have fought since stage design became part of the theatrical landscape: lack of recognition.  As you’ll read, the work of designers is either overlooked entirely or considered the realm of technicians and craftsmen, not artists.

[That’s just among other theater pros like producers and directors; among theatergoers, the work is often not even noticed.  (I read a lot of reviews when I write my performance reports and it’s clear the review-writers don’t know what to say much of the time when it comes to the designers’ contributions.  If the reviewers mention them at all, it’s a few words at the end of the notice, almost as if they felt obligated to say something.)

[I said at the start of this series that I took several design classes in grad school in order to learn more about that part of the business.  That put me in a position later as a director to appreciate what designers do for a production—which goes far beyond making pretty pictures or sounds.  They also solve problems, smooth over glitches, and enhance the drama—or comedy—of the production in ways that actors, directors, and even playwrights never could on their own.

[And I never made the mistake of feeling that what they do is anything less than an art.  So John Gromada’s other point is right on target.  As Linda Loman said in another context in Death of a Salesman: “Attention must be paid.”]

The absence of sound design categories at the Tony Awards screams louder each year.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of my professional career in the theatre, where I’ve had the good fortune to make a life designing sound and composing music for numerous productions, many of them on Broadway. I have been privileged to receive one of the highest accolades in the theatre for my work: In 2013, I was nominated for a Tony Award for designing the sound for Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful [23 April-9 October 2013].

Unfortunately, I am one of the few sound designers who have been recognized, or might ever be recognized, by the Tonys for their work; the following season was the last the awards were given. That’s because the American Theatre Wing announced that they were eliminating the Tony cate­gories for sound design, relegating any recognition in that area to the occasional special Tony.  [The Tony Awards Administration Committee made the announcement on 11 June 2014.] The reasons were enumerated in The New York Times: “Many Tony voters do not know what sound design is or how to assess it; a large number of Tony voters choose not to cast ballots in sound design categories because of this lack of expertise; and some administration committee members believe that sound design is more of a technical craft, rather than a theatrical art form that the Tonys are intended to honor.”

Suffice to say, the decision was an incredible blow to me. And I was far from the only one: The afternoon of the announcement, I started an online petition asking the Tony administration committee to reconsider, thinking that if I could get 1,000 signatures, it might persuade the committee to change their minds. In an hour, I had 1,000 signatures; in a few hours, the numbers grew to 5,000, then 10,000. In a week, more than 30,000 people from around the world signed the petition—including luminaries like Hugh Jackman, Stephen Sondheim, [director] Diane Paulus, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

People from all disciplines expressed shock and dismay. What the Tony committee saw as a simple administrative adjustment demoralized thousands of people around the country who felt as if their role in the theatre had suddenly been invalidated. For so long we had fought for respect and recognition for our art. After many years of lobbying, we were able to get Tony categories for best sound design—one for plays and another for musicals—established in 2007 and implemented for the 2008 ceremony. It seemed that the battle was over. The Tony Award was the last of many hurdles our profession had faced in gaining respect, visibility, and the potential to make an adult living. Or so it seemed.

Getting sound design recognized as a legitimate career and art form has been a long and arduous process. In the late ’90s, we were able to convince United Scenic Artists [the union for artists and designers in the entertainment industry] to represent us, marking a major step for our profession. For the first time, working sound designers were able to have employer-based health insurance and could look forward to a pension upon retirement. And we began to close the pay gap between the fees we received and what other designers made, meaning that to make a living we no longer had to do twice as many shows as our colleagues just to get by. We could spend more time, energy, and thought on any given production, and maybe, just maybe, even think about supporting a family while engaged in this business we love.

Sound design is now such a necessity that most major theatre graduate programs in the country offer sound design MFAs, turning out scores of young bright designers looking to make a living in this field.

Meanwhile, most of the other major awards, in New York and elsewhere, have added sound design categories. When the Tony Awards joined in the trend, it was a monumental validation. As a nationally recognized and televised event, the Tonys finally gave us access to the highest level of visibility available to a theatre artist, and the potential to turn that visibility into a sustainable career. A designer with a Tony, or even a nomination, can command higher fees and respect, and use the honor to leverage all sorts of opportunities.

Now that opportunity for recognition is no longer available to us. The manner in which the categories were eliminated, and the way it was explained in the press, gave the impression that some kind of mistake had been made in adding sound design categories in the first place, as if previous sound design winners didn’t truly deserve their awards because, after all, Tony voters never knew how to judge what we do. I was told that many people on the Tony administration committee believed that sound design was nothing more than a matter of “Can I hear them?” and that to justify the continuation of the categories we would need to change that perception.

Of course, we had already jumped through all of those hoops back in 2006 and 2007 during the process to establish the categories—a process that included months of lobbying, education, and gentle persuasion. In 2006 after a preview of Lisa Kron’s Well, which I had designed sound for, producer Liz McCann [1931-2021; she died this past 9 September] came up to me and said, “John, I love so much what you’re bringing to this production. I think you should win a Tony Award!”

I responded that many in the theatre community shared her opinion that there should be a sound design category. She then offered to begin a process to make it happen. The conversation expanded to include several of my sound design colleagues, representatives of our union, and members of the American Theatre Wing who valued sound design and understood our place as partners in the process. Our allies on the committee shepherded the idea through the byzantine and opaque political process that shapes Tony Awards policy. They arranged for an education session in which David Budries, head of the sound design program at the Yale School of Drama, spoke to committee members and Tony nominators about what we do, and what to look for in judging sound design.

What Budries told them is that sound design is a discipline that defies concrete definition, and that it’s often best when it’s not noticed. Still, any perceptive theatregoer is equipped to vote on excellence in sound design. All it takes is simply to think a bit about what you’re listening to. It doesn’t take any more special knowledge than it takes to judge lighting design or orchestration or even costume design. Listen to the design and think: Does it serve the play and production? Is it distinctive in some way that is unique while helping tell a story? How does what you’re hearing make you feel?

Admittedly, we generally aren’t used to thinking about the sounds we hear, because sound is processed in a very different part of the brain than visual stimuli. Sound works on the unconscious, animal parts of our brain; we’re often not aware that it’s happening or what kind of effect it’s having on us. That’s why it’s both so potentially powerful as a design element and yet so easy to overlook.

Some heard and understood what Budries said, but others reportedly found it hard to break out of the traditional notion of what constitutes theatrical design. To them, design is what they can see, not hear, and sound design, as far as they could tell, was simply about making things louder. Still, after more than a year of work lobbying and gathering endorsements from theatre industry leaders around the country, we had enough support that when a vote was finally taken to establish the sound design categories, it passed in 2007.

I clearly remember that day; a producer on the committee called me excitedly with news that the motion had passed. There was no better evidence that sound design had finally come of age than the American Theatre Wing recognizing our art with a Tony Award.

For us sound designers, being considered for a Tony Award was a long-awaited vindication of an essential concept: that we were an integral part of the theatre world, and have been making invaluable contributions as artists to productions on Broadway and across the country for a very long time.

I first learned this myself 30 years ago in 1986, when I made my professional and Broadway debut designing the transition sound and music for Jonathan Miller’s production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey. I was 22 years old and a senior at Duke University, where producer Manny Azenberg had brought the production to try out. I had spent nearly four years at Duke doing this thing called sound design, inspired by Jeff Storer, a charismatic teacher/director who had thankfully steered me away from acting and into this relatively new discipline, where I could perfectly combine my musical ability and my love of theatre.

That semester I was doing an independent study in music composition that included work with one of the very first samplers—an expensive and rare instrument that few had access to. While in rehearsal with the show, Miller discovered that he needed some kind of music or sound to tie together the different scenes in his production and indicate the passage of time, and there was no time to bring someone in from New York to execute it. Friends who were interning on the production steered him to me, and I soon found myself in a room with Miller, who hummed for me examples of the tone-like music that was in his head. Overnight I composed a little sound score of pieces that pleased the director; they made it into the production and onto Broadway. Though a modest contribution, it was part of the glue that held the entire piece together. And I actually received a paycheck for it.

After Miller trusted me to compose transitions for his productions, I arrived in New York at a time when directors were just beginning to clue into the possibilities of sound, and there seemed to be a shortage of sound designers approaching productions as artists. I found myself working with forward-thinking directors—JoAnne Akalaitis, Michael Greif, Anne Bogart—and veteran designers, including [scenic designer] Ben Edwards [1916-99], [lighting designer] Tom Skelton [1927-94], [costume designer] Jane Greenwood [b. 1934], and [lighting designer] Jennifer Tipton [b. 1937]. They treated me as an equal member of the design team and understood how my work complemented theirs and how aural elements could be used to tell a story. And my skills were enough in demand that I was able to cobble together a living among Off-Broadway nonprofits, resident theatres, and a Broadway production or two most seasons.

In 1990, I found a home at the Public Theater during Joe Papp’s last year, where I composed the sound score for Grief’s landmark production of Machinal [25 September-25 November 1990] and won an Obie for it. I’ll never forget the thrill of being at my very first awards ceremony, feeling surrounded and embraced by a community of theatre artists. At that ceremony, and the others that followed over the years, I felt like I was part of a family of people all trying to make a go of it in this crazy collaborative business. What these awards have said to me is: We value you. You are part of the family. We understand and appreciate the hard work you are putting into our art.

That’s why in 2013, after having designed sound or composed music for 35 Broadway productions, it was so satisfying to finally gain validation for all those years of work from the Broadway community in the form of a Tony nomination for my work on Michael Wilson’s fine revival of The Trip to Bountiful. I understood the Tonys as a high-visibility marketing tool, but still thought that at their core the awards were about recognizing excellence within the Broadway family, a family that I have long felt a member of. As I partook in all the Tony events leading up to the ceremony, I sat at luncheons and cocktail parties with actors and producers and other designers with whom I’ve worked for years, and listened to members of the American Theatre Wing and Mayor Michael Bloomberg [in office: 2002-13] talk about how important theatre artists are to the life and economy of the city.

Most importantly, I felt I was part of a community. Had I won that year (my colleague Leon Rothenberg won for his sound design on The Nance [15 April-11 August 2013]), this is part of what I would have said in my acceptance speech: “Thank you to all of you out there for embracing me and my work as part of this Broadway family for so many years. I feel most privileged to have been able to make a life of this, creating art with you all. Thank you for listening. And thank you for your continued support of sound designers as part of the Broadway community.”

A year later, after learning the categories were taken away, I was speaking with a colleague on the Tony administration committee, asking him how this could have happened. He told me, “I’m so sorry. You guys were just beginning to come into your own.”

Just beginning? I thought. Haven’t you been paying attention to what we’ve been doing all these years? We’ve been here for decades. A sound designer’s job isn’t just to set the volume on the microphones. It’s to convey the world of a play or musical to the audience’s ears; it’s creating and structuring sounds that underscore text, choosing or composing music to facilitate a scene transition, or making the orchestra and singers sound as good as they can, even to the rear mezzanine.

And when sound designers are not recognized at the Tony Awards for our efforts, it sends a very clear message: that what we do isn’t creative, that we’re not true theatre artists, that we are a disposable member of a production’s team. All because a group of people won’t take the time to understand the creative and necessary work that we do. Somehow the voters for other notable awards—the Drama Desks, the [Lucille] Lortels [New York Off-Broadway], the [Laurence] Oliviers [professional theatre in London], the Jeffs [Joseph Jefferson Awards, for theater produced in the Chicago area], to name a few—have figured out how to determine excellence in sound design. Tony voters, of which there are more than 800, sell themselves short when they think they’re not equally equipped.

As Lin-Manuel Miranda said in a recent Rolling Stone article, “Set designers sculpt with physical materials, lighting designers sculpt with light, and sound designers sculpt with sound. They are responsible for your aural experience at a Broadway show,” adding that we create “literally the sound of Broadway.” It’s about time Tony voters learned how to listen.

[John Gromada (b. 1964) is a Tony-nominated sound designer and composer. He has designed 37 shows on Broadway and numerous works Off-Broadway and regionally.  He’s won many awards both in New York City and around the country.  Gromada also works in film, television, and radio.]

"Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design," Article 7

 

[This is the penultimate installment of the American Theatre Special Section on theater tech and design.  In Article 7, Tara Anderson writes about the technical problems of flying actors in the cast of For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday, Sarah Ruhl’s homage to her mother, who, as a teenager, played Peter in a school production of the original play.  In her article, the author reports on how the Actors Theatre of Louisville brought ordinary reality to new heights in their production. 

[Anderson’s report is from the “Production Notebook” of American Theatre’s July/August 2016 issue; it was also posted as “Taking Flight: How Sarah Ruhl’s ‘For Peter Pan’ Got Off the Ground” on the website on 20 June 2016.

[Though the nine articles in “The Magic of Design” all stand on their own, I recommend reading the whole series because each report examines a different aspect of the design and tech aspects of theater.  This is the fifth installment in the Rick On Theater republication of the series; the previous four posts were published on 9, 12, 15, and 18 September.]

“THE BEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING”
by Tara Anderson 

In Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday, everyday reality takes flight

“And if it means I must prepare
To shoulder burdens with a worried air,
I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up . . .”
      —Carolyn Leigh [lyricist, 1926-83], from the 1954 musical Peter Pan

WHEN IS A PERSON TRULY A GROWN-UP? 

Is it when they get a real job, when they have a child of their own, when their parents die? Is “never” really an option?

These questions are at the heart of Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday, which takes the tale of the boy who never grew up for a new spin while telling a story about something we all have in common: death.

For Peter Pan, which ran March 8-April 10 [2016] as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, was inspired by Ruhl’s mother, Kathleen, who played the character onstage as a teenager, and who is seen on the poster for the play looking perky in her green costume.

“When I was growing up, whenever I visited her family house in Iowa, there were these pictures of her as Peter Pan, in green tights, flying,” Ruhl recalled. “So it was part of my association with my mother, and also part of my association with what theatre was.”

The play opens with a 70-year-old Ann (Kathleen Chalfant), a sort of stand-in for Ruhl’s real-life mother, directly addressing the audience about the joy of performing the role as a child. Ann is the oldest of five, with three brothers and a younger sister, all of whom are dealing in different ways with the impending loss of their father.

Ruhl tells the story in three “movements” without an intermission [the play runs 90 minutes]: First is the vigil at the hospital; then the informal, whiskey-fueled wake around the kitchen table; and finally a fantasy sequence in which the siblings jump into the world of Peter Pan—or rather, a children’s play version of Peter Pan, but with their creaky knees and bad eyesight.

To make the final part work, some technology would be necessary—you can’t do Peter Pan with everybody’s feet on the ground. Louisville happens to be the home of ZFX Flying Effects, a company that handles everything from building equipment and harnesses to aerial choreography for productions around the world. (Cirque du Soleil, for one, gets all their black steel cables from ZFX, whose technicians developed a coloring process that makes wires invisible onstage.)

“I had always thought the flying would be a metaphor and we wouldn’t actually be able to afford flying one character, much less five, around the stage,” Ruhl admitted. But director and longtime collaborator Les Waters—whose first order of business when he took over as ATL’s artistic director in 2012 was to commission a new play from her—had other ideas. He told Ruhl, “Oh, we’re flying them.” [Waters left ATL at the end of the 2017-18 season.]

Because the script in the fantasy section calls for the characters to fly rather suddenly, the actors couldn’t be taken offstage to clip into their flying lines. So the decision was made to allow the mechanics of flying to be seen, along with other elements of the stagecraft.

“Seeing those moments then allowed us to make the general decision that the crew can be seen manipulating and setting scenery and props whenever necessary during the metatheatre parts of the play,” said scenic designer Annie Smart.

Brian Owens, senior flying director and lead trainer at ZFX, worked with the creative team to determine where and how the flying effects would work. While Owens has worked on massive productions, including the Arabic version of “American Idol,” For Peter Pan allowed him to work on a much smaller scale.

“The biggest challenge was coming up with a way to tell the story so that the flying effects supported the rest of the script and didn’t just become this thing we did,” explained Owens. “It was really just this artistic process, this collaborative art form that I so dearly love, of saying, ‘Well, what about this idea?’ or ‘What if we change this moment a little bit?’ It doesn’t matter where those ideas come from, whether it was me or Les or Sarah.”

In January, most of the cast gathered at ZFX’s cavernous rehearsal space for some flying practice. Chalfant and Lisa Emery, who played younger sister Wendy, were the only two actors who would wear harnesses and fly in the production; both said that the opportunity to fly was a huge draw for them to do the play. Chalfant had never flown onstage before, though she spent years in the role of Hannah Pitt being jealous of the Angel in Angels in America. [Chalfant played the role from October 1993 to December 1994.]

“It’s sort of everything you imagine it will be, and it feels absolutely safe,” said Chalfant, after coming down from pirouetting 15 feet in the air. “It’s one of those things that’s only fun.”

“Except when you’re trying to turn,” added Emery, laughing. She described the experience of flying as “ecstatically beautiful.”

Meanwhile, though the brothers—played by Scott Jaeck, Keith Reddin, and David Chandler—didn’t fly individually, they did clamber onto a bed that became a pirate ship and was hoisted aloft.

The play’s initial read-through also marked the first official day of work on the 2016 Humana Festival, as the entire Actors Theatre staff, along with a few donors and volunteers, gathered in the rehearsal room for a kickoff and family photo. There was a festive feeling as everyone introduced themselves. When it was Ruhl’s turn, she said simply, “I’m Sarah and I wrote the play,” and the room burst into applause.

Surveying the energetic whirl as the space was being set up for the reading, Ruhl said, “There’s something surreal about writing a play in your solitary room, and then there’s all these people and dogs.” (A canine in the play’s second section is triple-cast.)

Another production of For Peter Pan would go up May 20-July 3 [2016] at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre, with the same cast save Emery and Jaeck, who had other commitments. “The wonder of doing a new play in a theatre like Actors Theatre, and knowing that it will go on to Berkeley, is that there’s a long period of development,” said Chalfant. “A play like this, which on the page looks quite simple, is in production going to be pretty complex. And it’s wonderful to know that you have the time to realize it.”

At first glance it does look pretty straightforward on the page: lots of silence amid ongoing conversations, mostly good-natured family meandering, all the characters in one room together. But then you may notice some of the details Ruhl tosses in: 

◾ A suggestion that the siblings might “form a ragtag five-piece band with trumpet and accordion and sing and play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’” or a marching band might enter, at the end of the first section. In Louisville, actual marching bands—six different local high school bands taking turns over 20 performances—were hired to perform the song as the set changed behind a classic red velvet curtain.

◾ The aforementioned dog—the ghost of the family pet, to be precise. In the production the role was assayed by a rotating cast made up of a golden retriever, an Irish wolfhound, and an English sheepdog. The sheepdog was fired after a few shows for sleeping on the job, but the golden did so well she landed another role, as Crab in The Two Gentleman of Verona, at Kentucky Shakespeare through August [2016].

◾ A splashy sword fight between Peter Pan and Captain Hook in which Peter is slain, then revived by audience applause, in a neat twist on the Tinkerbell tradition.

◾ As we said: flying.

In short, For Peter Pan isn’t as simple as it may seem. For one, as Smart noted, the entire design had to factor in the flying from the beginning. What’s more, the differences between the three sections presented a design challenge.

“In many ways, Sarah has written something she imagines very pared back—a studio show, a black-box event, something intense and intimate—for parts one and two of the play,” Smart said. “And then within that, she imagines the sudden and delightful appearances of traditional stage curtains and flying drops—the trappings of an old-fashioned touring house.”

Smart built a two-walled hospital room using rolling units that could then become the family home, creating the enclosed space of the first two movements. In part three, the walls cleared to make way for a giant nursery window, creating a more expansive-feeling fantasy sequence while paying homage to the traditional Peter Pan aesthetic.

Lighting designer Matt Frey also chose to approach the first two sections differently. “We were trying to start in a very real place as much as possible, and then show signs of de-evolution as the play proceeds and shows its cracks of magic, humor, and nostalgia,” Frey explained. “By the end we are in a very different place than where we began.”

Actors Theatre’s Pamela Brown Auditorium has some built-in limitations that restricted what could be done: The grid ceiling is less than six feet above the lights, so a flying actor could not be lifted out of sight, nor could scenery be flown in. Adding to the complexity, at Humana For Peter Pan played in daily repertory with Wellesley Girl by Brendan Pelsue, the stage floor for which was installed beneath the floor for For Peter Pan—i.e., trap doors were also off-limits.

[A note on theater jargon: You can say that a character in a play “flies” and it’s perfectly understandable to even the least experienced member of the audience.  You can even say, as director Waters does, “we’re flying them,” making ‘fly’ a transitive verb with an object, and everyone will know what you mean. 

[But in theater, ‘fly’ is the word used to mean ‘hoist aloft’ or ‘lift out of sight,’ usually into the ‘fly space’ or ‘fly loft,’ the space above the lighting grid, out of the view of the spectators.  Hence, “flying in scenery” and “flying drops” mean to raise or lower objects—including humans—from or to the stage by mechanical means.]

Flying complicated Frey’s job as the lighting designer as well. “You have performers moving on a whole new axis,” he said. “In addition to stage left/stage right and upstage/downstage, we now add up/down. So we try and account for that by addressing all the possibilities of where they might be.”

As director, Waters had some adjusting to do as well.

“How do you rehearse that in a rehearsal room, where you pretend somebody is 10 feet above somebody else?” Waters wondered. The answer: You just have to pretend until you can get into the theatre.

At a run-through about 10 days before opening, the rehearsal space was packed with observers, including Actors Theatre’s troupe of acting apprentices. Even without costumes, sets, or a flying apparatus, the show had several observers openly weeping by the end. A burly twentysomething guy turned to me, a stranger, with tears in his eyes and asked for a hug.

When I shared this moment with Ruhl after the rehearsal, she said, “I think that anyone who’s lost someone in a family can relate, but I also think that for people who’ve been in theatre, it sort of ends up being a love note to what it means to work in the theatre. I think that’s partly what the tears are about.”

During rehearsals, before Chalfant even put on the famous Pan costume, she transformed into the classic character with her posture: back straight, chin up, one foot slightly in front of the other, arms akimbo. She is elegant and slim, with short hair, and she waggled her hips as a taunt to the lumbering Captain Hook.

In performance, Chalfant as Ann wore drapey pants and a loose sweater in the first two sections; the attentive observer might have seen a sliver of green above her short boots when she crossed her legs. But when she at last doffed her pants, revealing patchwork shorts and green tights, donned that iconic green cap with the red feather, and released a raucous crow call, the applause was spontaneous.

Most of the cast enjoyed hamming it up in the third movement, as the entire production took on a heightened feel, with underscoring (selected and arranged by sound designer Bray Poor) and sharper lighting. Frey described his lighting concept as “a place that is fantasy, memory, and a community theatre from over a half century ago—sometimes one of these things, and sometimes all.”

Ruhl said she wanted that section to feel as if the characters were putting on a children’s play, but also as if we’re going “into their dream life or their unconscious. They’re both children and adults at the same time.” Accordingly the characters shift between acting their parts as the Darling children and commenting on their “real” adult lives. In performance the contrast was both jarring and funny.

Smart’s set for this section was dominated by the huge nursery window, which she made even bigger than usual so that the adult performers looked a little smaller and more childlike. At the same time, the window piece was constructed to be extra-strong so that the flying actors could hold onto it and use it as a midstage anchor.

“The window represents light and dark, the home and family, escape from such, and later becomes a closed and locked gate—the adult ‘children’ return to look longingly through it at the old house, now sold and owned by another family,” Smart explained.

ZFX’s Owens said the moment when Wendy flies up behind the window and looks in was a happy discovery during tech rehearsals. They didn’t plan it, nor did Waters or Ruhl.

“When we realized that we could pull that window farther downstage toward the audience and put her behind it, and have this really nice quiet moment after all these big flying effects, we all went, ‘Yes. Yes, that’s the thing,’” Owens said. “In my 10-plus years of choreographing and creating flying effects, that was quite literally one of my favorite pictures that I’ve ever seen on a stage.”

During one performance I attended, the pirate ship had a little trouble getting off the ground, and Ann-as-Peter had to urge the boys to “think lovelier thoughts” before it finally lifted up. A few minutes later, the action came to a halt as the stage manager announced that there were some “flying problems,” leaving Emery and Chalfant dangling in the air stage right, with Chandler, Jaeck, and Reddin perched on the flying bed.

A few crew members with headsets came out and stood underneath Emery and Chalfant as they were slowly brought back to the ground and unhooked from the cables, but the bed stayed aloft. It was one of those stage moments that was impossible to hide or finesse: At the most fantastical part of a fantasy, reality—and gravity—intruded.

“Anybody know a song?” Chalfant gamely offered. Someone in the audience started “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and soon the entire room—cast and crew and audience—was singing together. This unplanned reprise was the perfect choice for the moment.

In total, the action was paused for about 10 minutes; then Emery and Chalfant were rewired and the play was off again. At least one audience member I spoke to later was convinced that the entire “malfunction” was part of the play—that after going from a Midwestern dining room to full-fledged Neverland, maybe anything was possible.

After all the magic of the third section, I was surprised to hear from several audience members that their strongest reaction was to the “authenticity” of the first two movements, especially the handling of the family’s faith.

“I’m a Catholic, so I could relate to so many things,” said Suzanne Higdon, a frequent attendee of the theatre. “It was so similar to how they handle very serious moments in their lives and turn to prayer.”

“The death scene—like a lot of people, I’ve seen that room a lot of times, and it was really right on,” said Tom Hay, another Humana regular, who added that he thought the second section, set around the dinner table, was too slow.

Waters said that that second part is intentionally uneventful—that it’s meant to overturn a familiar trope of the American family drama, in which characters “get drunk and tear each other apart,” and “something will be revealed and someone will say, ‘Actually, I was abused by my father’s uncle’ or ‘I’m your mother,’ or whatever.” In Ruhl’s play, “It doesn’t—it deliberately doesn’t. It’s a reminiscence. So that is actually very tricky to play.”

Critical response was mixed though generally positive. In The New York Times Charles Isherwood called the cast and direction “superb,” particularly noting Chalfant’s delight in her role. Elizabeth Kramer at Louisville’s Courier-Journal also praised the performances and the direction, while writing that the marching band transition “disrupt(ed) the story and the mood.” Ashlie Stevens at WFPL, Louisville’s NPR station, also found that moment “cumbersome,” but thought that director Waters’s “knack for the darkly fanciful elevates Ruhl’s script.”

The delicate balance of family relationships that the actors developed would have to be adjusted for the Berkeley production, with two cast members being replaced. Speaking near the end of the Humana run, Waters said he wasn’t sure if there would be any rewrites, but he did think there would be some changes to the scene transitions.

Smart also said there would be more experiments in Berkeley with revealing the stage machinery rather than having changeovers happen behind the curtain. Owens said the theatre in Berkeley allows for slightly more room to fly, so he was hoping there would be more room for dynamic action than in Louisville’s more limited space.

For Peter Pan may have presented its production challenges, but for Ruhl it was all about audiences finding resonance with the characters and the universality of the story.

“I hope the audience brings their own personal experience to it, their own personal narrative about what it means to grow up, what it is to exist in a big family, what it means to lose the head of a big family,” Ruhl said. “The play is not a message play. I don’t think it reduces neatly that way, but I hope people connect with it emotionally.”

Chalfant certainly did. She joked in rehearsal that she would be “too old” to play the 70-year-old Ann by the time the show opened in Louisville: She just turned 71. “People who are 71 years old don’t usually get to fence and fly,” she said.

This wasn’t just Chalfant’s first time flying; it was also her first stab at swashbuckling. She has a vision problem that makes stage combat a challenge, and credits her fight partner, Chandler, with being extremely brave. “I’m almost blind in one eye, so I don’t have any depth perception,” she said with a laugh. “I can see where he is, but, you know—sort of.”

But the play’s main dimension is one Chalfant had no trouble perceiving.

“The depth of it, the fierceness of it, has been kind of a surprise that we’ve found,” she said. That sounds like a pretty grown-up discovery.

[Tara Anderson has an MFA in writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and contributing editor of WFPL, Louisville’s NPR station.  She’s the host and producer of Five Things, a podcast on WFPL and holds degrees in music performance and journalism from the University of Kentucky.  

[Anderson earned a master’s degree in communications from New York City’s Fordham University, where she was the assistant program director at WFUV, Fordham's public radio station.  In addition to American Theatre, she’s been a contributor to All Things Considered, the BBC World Service, and Louisville magazine; she’s also been heard on-air on WFPK and WUOL, both also in Louisville.

[“Bearable Lightness” is a report on a technical achievement on stage that was significant to the production of Ruhl’s play; so was “How to Build a Moving House Without a Turntable in ‘Rain,’” Article 4 (posted on 15 September).  Just to illustrate how important the effect of such an accomplishment can be, let me retell an anecdote I’ve related several times before on ROT.  Some readers may recognize it:

[When my family spent part of the summer on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, back in the mid-1950s, we always went to the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis at least once during the season.  To this day, I remember being amazed at a production of The Wizard of Oz when I was probably around 6 or 7. 

[After the tornado generated by the tech crew with lighting and sound effects, the lights came back up—and there sat Dorothy’s house, with the legs of the Wicked Witch sticking out from under one side!  ‘How did that house get there?’ I wondered.  The Melody Tent being an arena stage, with no curtain to hide behind, this all happened right before our eyes (albeit, in a semi-black-out).  It was impossible!  It had to be magic!

[Clearly, I’ve never forgotten that technical bit of stage sorcery.  (And, by the way, I still don’t know how they did it!)

[One last personal note: I’m not quite old enough to have seen the Mary Martin Peter Pan on Broadway (20 October 1954-26  February 1955); I was 7 and 8 during its run, too young still to come to New York City to see a Broadway show.  But I did see the TV version broadcast by NBC on 7 March 1955—though it was in black and white. 

[Curiously, I didn’t want to be Peter—I wanted to be Captain Hook, and I dressed as Hook for Halloween for several years after seeing the show.  To this day, it’s Cyril Ritchard’s voice I hear for Captain Hook, singing “Who's the dirtiest dog in this wonderful world?” (“Captain Hook’s Waltz”).

[Oh, and if you check “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010), you’ll see that I did make it to Broadway about four years later.]