A Titanic Mystery (And Its Solution)

 

“HONORS TITANIC BANDSMEN”

[It all started 111 years ago . . . .  The RMS (for Royal Mail Ship) Titanic sank on its maiden voyage from Southampton. England, to New York City on 15 April 1912.  Between 1,490 and 1,635 people died in the disaster, among them the eight members of the two orchestras on board.  They are reported to have continued to play as the ship foundered, keeping the sprits of the passengers up and preventing a panic at the end.

[The bravery of the musicians is recorded in the many newspaper accounts of the tragedy, attested to by survivors who told their stories to journalists.  Among the reports from across the country and around the world were “Nearer, My God, To Thee,” Sun [Baltimore, MD] 19 Apr. 1912: 12; “Musicians Heroes Of Titanic Wreck,” San Francisco Chronicle 19 Apr. 1912: 7; “Spur Of Iceberg Rips Open Bottom Of The Titanic,” Chicago Daily Tribune 19 Apr. 1912: 3; “Band Music Heard After Steamer Sank,” Austin [TX] Statesman 20 Apr. 1912: 1; and “The Orchestra Which Played ‘Nearer My God To Thee,’” Irish Times [Dublin, Ireland] 20 Apr. 1912: 8.

[Seven months after the great ship sank, the musicians’ union, the forerunner of the American Federation of Musicians, mounted a plaque commemorating their eight brothers from across the Atlantic who stalwartly sacrificed their lives to offer a measure of comfort to the doomed passengers.  Below is one report of that event, the start of a local mystery which wasn’t solved until a decade ago, 101 years after the musicians of the Titanic lost their lives.  It was published in the New-York Tribune on 4 November 1912.]

A bronze tablet in memory of the seven ship’s musicians who died when the Titanic sank was unveiled yesterday morning by members of the Musical Mutual Protective Union at their clubhouse, the Yorkville Casino.

The tablet is the work of Albert Weinert. It is 30 by 24 inches, and has a feminine figure, symbolic of music, placing a wreath of oak leaves on an expanse of placid water, broken by an iceberg. Beneath is the inscription:

A tribute to the bandsmen of the Titanic. When the order was “Each man for himself,” these heroes remained on board and played until the last.

Then follow the first two bars of the music of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and the names, Wallace Hartley, bandmaster; George Krins, Roger Bricoux, W. T. Brailey, J. Wesley Woodward, P. C. Taylor, J. F. P. Clarke, John L. Hume.

[As readers can see from the list of names, there were eight men.  Why the New-York Tribune report reads only seven, I don’t know—unless for some reason the reporter didn’t count bandleader Hartley as a musician.

[The hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was chosen on the spot as the last tune the band played.  The Baltimore Sun article referenced above reported that Edward Wheelton, the chief steward of the liner, recounted:

The ship’s band played as the boats were being lowered.  These musicians were the real heroes.  They played selections from the operas and the latest popular melodies of Europe and America.  Only before the final plunge did they change the character of the program.  Then they played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

[Albert Weinert (1863-1947) was a German-born American sculptor.  Yorkville is a Manhattan neighborhood bounded on the south by East 79th Street, on the north by East 96th Street, on the west by Third Avenue, and on the east by the East River.  At the time of this history, it had largely German inhabitants.

[The Yorkville Casino at 210 East 86th Street was erected by the Musician’s Mutual Protective Union (the forerunner of Local 802 of the AFM) as a social center for meetings, dances, and such for the area’s growing population.]

                

 *  *  *  *
“THE MYSTERY OF THE TITANIC MUSICIANS’ PLAQUE”
by Tino Gagliardi

[The three following articles are all from the magazine of the American Federation of Musicians Local 802, Allegro 113.9 (October, 2013).  Local 802 is the branch of AFM that represents the pit musicians for Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals.  (There are some supplementary articles at the end of this post, from an earlier issue.)  They all have something to do with the same remarkable, and historic, tale which unfolded in the pages of Allegro in 2010 and 2013.

[I’m republishing them on Rick On Theater because, first, they are part of New York City’s arts history, which is an element of my mission for ROT, and, second . . . well, it’s a fascinating story.] 

President's Report

This month, we’re pleased to present in Allegro a story that’s stranger than fiction. It’s the story of a bronze plaque that Local 802 commissioned over 100 years ago from a well-known artist. The plaque was created to honor the heroism of the musicians of the Titanic, who literally went down with the ship. For years, we owned and proudly displayed this plaque as well as a similar plaque honoring our members who lost their lives in World War II. These plaques were hung in our old location – Roseland Ballroom – on West 52nd Street. When we left Roseland in 1982, the plaques stayed behind by mistake. In fact, they were there as recently as last year. Then, when Roseland started doing some renovations, they got rid of the plaques. (Why we weren’t contacted at that time is a mystery.) The next thing we know, the plaques are in Orlando at a Titanic exhibition! The complete story of these plaques’ journey will boggle your mind.

[Tino Gagliardi is President of Local 802.] 

*  *  *  *
“TITANIC MYSTERY”
by Charles A. Haas 

Musicians & Heroes

If you were performing on an ocean liner and suddenly the ship hit an iceberg and began to sink, would you keep playing? As many know, that’s the story of what the musicians on the Titanic did just over 101 years ago, on April 15, 1912.

The eight musicians, led by bandmaster and violinist Wallace Hartley, died playing their instruments, according to Titanic survivors who heard ragtime and other upbeat music being played until nearly the end.

A little over a year after the Titanic sank, members of the original New York City musicians’ local performed a benefit concert for the families of the musicians. The union also commissioned a bronze tablet to commemorate them.

The tablet was unveiled at a ceremony where eight union musicians played, using the same instrumentation as the Titanic band. The concert closed with the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee, which some believe to be the last piece that the Titanic musicians played before the ship went down.

But where did the Titanic musicians’ memorial plaque end up? Three years ago, Allegro received an inquiry from the Titanic International Society asking about the whereabouts of the plaque.

It was the first we’d ever heard of it. But we had it all along. —introduction by Mikael Elsila

This is the story of a bronze plaque that was twice rescued from the scrapyard. It has to do first and foremost with the Titanic and its brave musicians. But it also reminds us of the very origins of Local 802. There’s lots of luck here, too. It begins with the tragic events of April 15, 1912 . . .

When news came that the Titanic had foundered in the North Atlantic with the loss of more than 1,500, it was probably inevitable that the heroic deaths of Titanic bandmaster Wallace Hartley and his seven colleagues would touch the hearts of their musical brethren in New York. By Saturday, April 27, 1912 – a mere 12 days after the Titanic met its demise – the Musical Mutual Protective Union (MMPU), Local 310, then the New York City affiliate of the American Federation of Musicians, had appointed a committee chaired by its president, William J. Kerngood, to organize a concert to aid the bandsmen’s families. Victor Herbert and John Phillip Sousa were among the committee’s members. Additionally, the union apparently asked its 5,000 members to contribute what they could to the cause.

The concert, featuring the talents of more than 500 musicians, duly took place on Sunday, June 2, 1912 at New York’s Moulin Rouge Theatre (later renamed the New York Theatre), donated for that purpose by its owner, theater impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. As they entered their box seats, the captain and some of crew of the Carpathia – the ship that rescued the Titanic’s survivors – received prolonged applause, while about 100 additional Carpathia crew members took their seats below. Seven New York City-based bands played selections ranging from the grand march from Aida to the Leonore Overture and the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana. The evening, which raised $1,500, concluded with a poignant rendering of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” the hymn famously played by the Titanic musicians as they went down with the ship.

On May 19, 1912, the musicians’ union offered a Sunday evening concert for members at their New York headquarters – the Yorkville Casino – to further aid the bandsmen’s next of kin, raising another $1,800. Meanwhile, the MMPU had begun to plan a more permanent remembrance of the heroism of Titanic’s orchestra in the form of a bronze tablet. The chosen design was that of German-born Albert Weinert, a 49-year-old sculptor at the zenith of his career. Among his earlier commissions had been the William McKinley Memorial in Toledo, Ohio, the Haymarket Martyrs’ Memorial in Chicago, and, at Washington, D.C.’s Library of Congress, the Court of Neptune Fountain and extensive Reading Room interior decorations.

Likely during the summer of 1912, the union’s board of directors authorized production of the bronze plaque by the Jno. Williams Foundry of West 27th Street in Manhattan. The highly regarded Williams firm had cast works by Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, among other notable American sculptors. Foundry workers carefully etched and sculpted the mold (possibly under Weinert’s direct supervision). Several test castings in a base metal may have been made before production of the final plaque began. Amid hellish heat inside the foundry building, workers began melting copper and tin, then mixed them to form bronze, and carefully poured the molten metal into the mold. On the plaque’s reverse side, mounting posts were imbedded or attached at each corner while the plaque’s metal was still liquid. The assemblage was allowed to cool and solidify. Then Williams’ skilled bronze smiths separated the plaque from its mold and carefully polished and perfected the tablet’s bas-relief front surface.

The completed plaque measured two feet tall by three feet wide by about a quarter-inch thick and weighed nearly 70 pounds. The first view of the finished product was a stand-alone photograph in the October 1912 issue of the Quarterly Bulletin of the American Institute of Architects, which credited the sculptor and foundry, but offered no further information.

While the bustle of America’s largest city paused on a Sunday, November 3, 1912, the musicians’ union officers, board of trustees, the Titanic Musicians Memorial committee and union members gathered at 11 a.m. at 210 East 86th Street in Manhattan, the MMPU’s Yorkville Casino headquarters. Associated Press reporters were invited to attend, and stories recording the plaque’s dedication soon appeared in newspapers throughout the United States.

In a simple ceremony in the building’s lobby, the tablet was formally dedicated. Draped in American and British flags, it was unveiled by union president William Kerngood, who said, “Language fails in attempting a tribute to the conduct of these heroes, just as it failed in the tumult and the panic when they died. The call of the Lord was as sudden for them as for the others, but they found a selection appropriate to that supreme moment and did their duty as they saw it. May we and all musicians prove as worthy of Music as they did, and may these men rest in peace.” Under union member Nic Briglio’s direction, an eight-member orchestra with instruments identical to those on board the Titanic played “Nearer, My God to Thee,” which was followed by a solitary trumpeter playing “Taps.”

Those present then pressed forward to view sculptor Albert Weinert’s artistry. His design featured a female figure representing music, casting a laurel wreath upon the ocean, its placid surface interrupted by an iceberg. Below were the words, “A Tribute to the Bandsmen of the Titanic. When the Order was ‘Each Man for Himself,’ These Heroes Remained on Board and Played Till the Last.” The words were followed by an image of the two opening bars of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” (the “Bethany” or “American” version), followed by the eight musicians’ names: “Wallace Hartley, Bandmaster; George Krins, Roger Bricoux, W. T. Brailey, J. Wesley Woodward, P. C. Taylor, J. F. P. Clarke, John L Hume.” To the right of the union’s raised seal, the text concluded, “Erected by the M.M.P.U. 1912″; the sculptor’s name “A. Weinert” modestly appeared in the plaque’s outer framing.

The dedication ceremony concluded, the crowd quietly dispersed.

The plaque remained in its place of prominence even as a sizable addition to the building was constructed from 1916 to 1919 on adjacent East 85th Street in Manhattan. The Musical Mutual Protective Union’s Local 310 lost its charter in 1921 after a dispute with the parent union and soon was dissolved, to be replaced by Local 802.

Over the next 54 years, thousands of visitors – union members and those attending functions booked at the hall – passed by this enduring tribute to Titanic’s gallant musicians. No photographs of the plaque in situ are presently known to exist.

By 1966, the Upper East Side of Manhattan was undergoing a building boom, and the East 86th Street portion of the building, now owned by the Ornstein family of real estate developers, was demolished and replaced by a high-rise, multipurpose building; the East 85th Street addition remained, its engraved “Musical Mutual Protective Union” fascia still present in 2013. It is now a movie theater. It is not known who rescued the tablet when its longtime home was torn down, but it found its way to the Roseland Ballroom at 229 West 52nd Street, then Local 802’s headquarters. The building’s then-owner Louis Brecker said, “Cheek-to-cheek dancing, that’s what this place is all about,” but according to Wikipedia, “Brecker sold the building in 1981. Under new owners the Roseland began regularly scheduled ‘disco nights,’ which gave rise to a period when it was considered a dangerous venue and neighborhood menace,” with several murders taking place there. And apparently it was here, for more than 35 years, that the Titanic musicians’ plaque remained. Local 802 left Roseland for its new quarters in 1982, apparently leaving the plaque behind.

Titanic International Society’s historian John P. Eaton, a lifelong music aficionado, has maintained a long-term respect for and interest in Titanic’s musicians. His capacious files included a rather blurry photocopied image of the plaque he’d found years ago in a musicians’ journal at the New York Public Library; the image found its way into the first (1986) edition of the book he co-authored with Charles Haas, Titanic: Triumph and Tragedy, with a caption noting the plaque’s “current whereabouts are not known,” a notation sadly repeated in the second (1994) edition. In 2010, as work on the third edition of this book began, Haas suggested that Eaton contact Local 802 to inquire whether the union knew the plaque’s location. Eaton received a response from Mikael Elsila, the editor of the union’s magazine Allegro, who interviewed Eaton by telephone about the missing memorial. In April 2010, Allegro ran a story that said, in part, “The search is on for a missing plaque that commemorates the musicians. It’s just possible that an Allegro reader has some clues of where it might be,” and it urged union members to get in touch with Elsila if they “had ever heard of this tablet or even seen it.” And there, response to Jack’s inquiry ended, without success. Until now.

Upon graduation from high school in central Pennsylvania, Douglas Turner served in the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army. He relocated to Naples, Florida in 1989, and now, at age 45, is a sergeant in the Collier County (Florida) Sheriff’s Department, a 23-year veteran specializing in criminal investigations. It’s a tough job with long hours and high stress. In his off-duty hours, Doug and his wife enjoy visiting local antique dealers and scrap yards, looking for unusual items.

On Friday, Jan. 25, 2013, Turner visited one of their favorite local scrap yards, meandering through a veritable jumble of discarded items awaiting resale or disposal. On the floor, leaning against a basket filled with insulated wire about to be melted down, was a flat metallic object covered with dust, grease, some corrosion and verdigris. Turner thought the item “kind of peculiar.” After going home and giving the matter some thought, its reference to Titanic intriguing him, he returned on Wednesday, Jan. 30, and inquired of the yard’s owner about its origins and the asking price. The owner, a friend of Turner’s, said someone had brought it in with another plaque, a Local 802 war memorial. The scrap yard owner was asking “a ridiculous price” for the pair, according to Turner, just $2 per pound, the going price for bronze, mentioning he had purchased it from someone from New York for $1.61 a pound. Turner happily paid the asking price for both the Titanic and war memorial plaques, totaling, with sales tax, just over $300, which certainly did not reflect any historical value. When he pointed out one plaque’s Titanic reference, the yard’s owner remarked, “I knew I should have thrown it into the basket to melt it down!” and said that within days, that would have been the fate of the plaque and the wire in the basket. During its five-day presence at the scrapyard, hundreds of people had passed it by without giving the historic piece much notice.

As a law enforcement officer, Turner realized he had a special obligation to check further into the plaques’ origins. He found no reports that either had been stolen. Eventually, he learned how they had made their 1,100-mile journey to Florida.

Under new ownership, the Roseland Ballroom underwent renovations in 2012. Early in that year, a Roseland employee told “Percy,” a construction worker in his early 40s, that the two plaques should be removed from the premises, and, so far as she was concerned, he could “take ’em and sell ’em for scrap.” Percy took the tablets and kept them at his home for nearly a year.

A Peruvian by birth and a U.S. resident for more than 20 years, Percy’s English was imperfect, perhaps explaining why several New York City antique dealers, when contacted, offered him as little as $10 for both plaques. It would have been easy for Percy to have ridded himself of them for such a pittance, but he did not do so.

Percy and his wife moved to Florida in early January 2013, bringing the plaques with them. The trip to the Sunshine State having left them nearly penniless, he sold the plaques to the scrap yard for $100.

After making his purchase, Doug Turner wanted to know more, and online had found the Allegro article in which Jack Eaton had inquired about the Titanic musicians’ plaque’s whereabouts. Turner contacted the musicians’ union in New York City and was given historian Eaton’s contact information.

On Jan. 31, 2013, Titanic International Society’s president Charles Haas spoke by telephone with Doug Turner at his Florida home. He mentioned that at some time in the past, likely when the plaques were removed from the MMPU’s Yorkville Casino, the mounting studs on the Titanic plaque’s reverse side had been broken off, and someone had drilled holes in each corner to permit its remounting, but otherwise it was in good condition.

Within minutes, Haas knew the plaque was in very good hands. Turner had gently wiped the plaque’s surfaces with a damp cloth to remove dirt and grime, and was seeking our advice about valuation, insurance, conservation and ongoing care. Haas offered several suggestions, then put Turner in touch with Andrew Aldridge of Henry Aldridge & Son Auctions in the UK, a respected firm specializing in Titanic items. Upon receiving details and photos of the plaque, Aldridge provided a valuation that permitted Turner to obtain insurance coverage and advised conservation (rather than restoration), explaining that the plaque’s present imperfections are part-and-parcel of the piece’s history. Despite its considerable value and its uniqueness, Turner does not wish to sell this historic piece. Instead, he wants very much to exhibit it publicly. Titanic International Society has assisted Turner in finding suitable venues for its public display.

On Aug. 15, 2013, in a ceremony recalling the original dedication in 1912, Turner and Haas unveiled the plaque at “Titanic: The Experience,” Premier Exhibitions, Inc.’s Titanic artifact exhibition in Orlando, Florida, where it will remain on display for at least six months. The plaque is the highlight of an exhibition room detailing the human cost of Titanic’s loss.

More than a century ago, the heroism of Titanic’s bandsmen prompted their musical colleagues ashore to create a lasting tribute to those men and their final moments. History saw fit to abbreviate the plaque’s role in reminding us of their deeds. But now, with its providential, last-minute reprieves from the smelter and its re-emergence in the hands of a history-conscious sheriff’s officer, it can resume its rightful place as one of America’s most significant Titanic memorials.

[Charles Haas is president of the Titanic International Society. Mikael Elsila is Communications Director at Local 802; he studied French horn, piano, improvisation and ethnomusicology. Additional information about Titanic International Society may be obtained from the Society’s Web site, www.TitanicInternationalSociety.org, or by sending a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Titanic International Society, Inc., Post Office Box 416, Midland Park, NJ 07432-0416.]

*  *  *  *
“LOST AND FOUND”
by Harvey S. Mars, Esq. 

Legal Corner

I recently had the unique experience of attending the unveiling of the recently discovered 101-year-old plaque commemorating the musicians who lost their lives on the Titanic. The ceremony took place at “Titanic: the Experience,” an exhibition in Orlando.

In April 2010, Allegro published an article regarding this plaque after we were contacted by John P. Eaton, historian of the Titanic International Society. Mr. Eaton was interested in learning the whereabouts of the plaque. The article beseeched anyone knowing of the whereabouts of the plaque to contact Allegro’s editor, Mikael Elsila.

Well, the plague was found, partially as a result of our article.

Florida resident Douglas Turner, a law enforcement officer who enjoys visiting scrap yards looking for items of value, found and purchased the Titanic plaque as well as another plaque commissioned by Local 802 memorializing musicians who had lost their lives in World War II.

Upon reading the Allegro article, Mr. Turner contacted the Titanic society and inquired as to where the plaque could be publicly shown. Ultimately, a six-month license was awarded to “Titanic: the Experience,” where the beautiful plaque currently hangs. Pictures truly do not do it justice.

During the unveiling ceremony, local musicians played “Nearer, My God to Three,” the same composition that many believe the musicians on the Titanic played while the ship was sinking.

As I listened, I wondered what the musicians were thinking and feeling while the ship was sinking. Were they absorbed by the music and solely focused on it? Did they play to soothe themselves knowing of their impending doom? Did they realize that they were heroes, who – through the calming strains of their music – saved many lives and helped keep order while the life-boats were boarded? It was hard for me not to get choked up.

How did the plaque wind up in the scrap yard? Charles Haas, president of the Titanic International Society, tells this amazing tale in this issue.

Two additional points are worth mentioning. First, the plaques were Local 802’s property for many decades. They last hung on the wall at the Roseland Ballroom, which was formerly the union’s headquarters. However, when Local 802 left Roseland in 1982, both the Titanic plaque and the World War II memorial plaque were inadvertently left behind.

Having been abandoned for more than 25 years, the plaques became the legal property of Mr. Turner when he purchased them in Florida. Under common law rules, the individual who purchases or takes possession of abandoned property becomes its rightful owner. (Hence, the partially true maxim: “possession is nine-tenths of the law.”)

However, we are very fortunate that Mr. Turner salvaged these plaques, since it is clear that they would have been destroyed. The hand of fate definitely played a role in this incident.

The other point is one I learned directly from Mr. Haas after the ceremony. The Titanic’s musicians were not employees of the White Star Line (Titanic’s owner), which had recently begun contracting musicians via an outside agency. Thus, these musicians were independent contractors who had been supplied by a third party. Because of this, they were listed as second-class passengers, and not crew. This meant that they were free to evacuate the ship with the passengers. They chose not to, and remained on board. They met their death doing what they loved to do: performing music for others.

We hope that at the end of the six- month lease, Local 802 can enter into an arrangement with Mr. Turner so that we can return both plaques to where they were meant to be: at Local 802.

[Harvey Mars is counsel to Local 802.]

*  *  *  *
“LOCAL 802 HAS TITANIC HISTORY”

[The two articles below, from Allegro 110.4 (April 2010), were the notices that started the saga of relocating and restoring the AFM plaques commemorating the sinking of the RMS Titanic.]

If you were performing on an ocean liner and suddenly the ship hit an iceberg and began to sink, would you keep playing? As many know, that’s the story of what the musicians on the Titanic did 98 years ago this month, on April 15, 1912.

The eight musicians, led by violinist Wallace Hartley, died playing their instruments, according to Titanic survivors who heard ragtime and other upbeat music being played up until nearly the end.

Now the search is on for a missing plaque that commemorates the musicians.

It’s just possible that an Allegro reader has some clues of where it might be.

Here’s the story.

A little over a year after the Titanic sank, members of the original New York City musicians’ local – originally called the Musicians Mutual Protective Union and later AFM Local 310 – performed a benefit concert for the families of the deceased Titanic musicians, raising $1,800.

The union was then located at the Yorkville Casino at 210 East 86th Street.

Later that fall, the union commissioned a bronze tablet to commemorate the Titanic musicians.

The tablet was unveiled at a ceremony where eight union musicians – utilizing the same instrumentation as the Titanic band – performed a tribute concert.

The concert closed with the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which some believe to be the last piece that the Titanic musicians played before they went down.

Both the International Musician and the New York Times covered the event.

But where is the Titanic musicians’ memorial plaque now? Local 310 ceased to exist in the 1920’s after a feud with the nascent Local 802.

And the assets of Local 310 may have been absorbed by the AFM.

Recently, Allegro received an inquiry from the Titanic International Society asking about the whereabouts of the plaque.

It was the first we’d ever heard of it.

If any member has heard of this tablet or even seen it, please contact Allegro editor Mikael Elsila at Allegro@Local802afm.org.

Otherwise, the spirit of the Titanic musicians must live on in memory.

*  *  *  *
“UNLIKELY HEROES:
REMEMBERING THE BANDSMEN ON THE TITANIC - 98 YEARS LATER”
by John P. Eaton 

Heroism in music takes many forms. The political heroism of a Sibelius or a Toscanini. Marian Anderson’s heroism of the spirit. The heroism of innovation: Bach, Richard Wagner, Charles Ives, Stravinsky. The quiet heroism of vocal coaches, chorus members and grade school music teachers: nameless people, but people without whose contributions to music’s fabric there would ultimately be no giants, no legendary stars.

The quietest, least known are often the most heroic.

Many years ago, when I was first encountering details of the liner Titanic and her tragic loss, I was introduced to a veritable pantheon of nameless heroes: men and women among the passengers who unselfishly gave up their lifeboat seats to others; stokers and engineers who kept the doomed vessel’s lights burning until almost the last moment; all those who died that others might live.

Among the many acts of heroism performed on the North Atlantic that cold night so many Aprils ago, none to me surpasses the contribution of Titanic’s bandsmen: Brailey, Bricoux, Clarke, Hume, Krins, Taylor, Woodward, and their leader, Wallace Hartley.

Titanic struck the berg which doomed her at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912.

Shortly after midnight, the musicians assembled in the forward first-class entrance, where passengers began gathering before going to the lifeboats.

The band’s music established a quick, bright tempo that kept the passengers’ feet moving to its beat.

Suspicion and even panic was averted by the musicians’ presence.

(“Why, if they’re playing here, things can’t be that bad.”) Later, when most passengers were on the promenade and boat decks, the band reassembled outside the gymnasium near the first class entrance’s starboard side.

Around 12:45 a.m., as the first lifeboat was being lowered, they began playing a brave counterpoint to the sound of shuffling feet and the increasing murmur of confused passengers.

Their music helped to bring order to the proceedings.

Their repertoire of marches, quicksteps and occasional waltz tunes were performed with coldstiffened fingers through the next hour and 20 minutes.

The last lifeboat was lowered at 2:05 a.m. But a few brief moments remained.

High on the boat deck, Titanic’s bandsmen paused in their music making. The deck beneath them began a slow, almost imperceptible slant forward.

Cold hands gripped instruments tightly, chilled fingers groped for taut strings. Bandmaster Hartley tapped his bow and spoke a title.

The strains of the well-loved “Londonderry Air” (“Danny Boy” to many) drifted across the calm waters now dotted with drifting lifeboats.

The slanting deck grew steeper, more slippery. Footing became more difficult.

The music ceased, then began again, thinly, as Hartley, perhaps in reverie, pulled his bow across the strings for a final time.

He was joined as, one by one, the other players picked up the familiar tune – the hymn played at the gravesides of fellow musicians departed, and Hartley’s own favorite, “Nearer My God, to Thee.”

At this point, it became impossible to stand without falling. The music’s sounds were lost in an increasingly thunderous roar.

Titanic’s stern rose high out of the water.

Lights that had stayed lit for so long – at the price of many lives – flickered, turned red as current fails, then went out forever.

Dark, now, against the starlit sky, Titanic rose almost upright, paused, then began a slow, inevitable slide . . .

Today, Titanic rests in decaying grandeur at the bottom of the North Atlantic, a memorial to all who lost their lives, a remembrance of humanity’s folly and our disregard of nature’s supremacy.

Titanic is cold and dark and silent now.

But above the agony of her loss and the grief for her dead soar the unselfish, heroic harmonies of her bandsmen – steadfast to the end, sharing their lives, their gift of music, so that others might die with dignity; sharing their deaths with Titanic’s dead so that all are surely inscribed in the Book of Life as heroes.

[John P. Eaton (1926-2021) was the Society’s historian is an authority on the Titanic: he is the co-author of five full-length books and many articles about the Titanic and has even dived on the wreck site.  Eaton was the historian of the Titanic International Society until his death.]

 

Luck & Failure

 

“BRYAN CRANSTON ON BEING READY FOR LUCK”
by Bryan Cranston 

[The following transcript of a “Brief But Spectacular” essay aired on PBS NewsHour on 1 November 2018.  The essayist, actor Bryan Cranston (b. 1956), won the 2019 Tony for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play in Network, which opened at the Belasco Theatre on 6 December 2018 for a limited run and closed on 8 June 2019.]

Oscar-nominated actor Bryan Cranston, best known for his role as Walter White in “Breaking Bad,” didn’t get his big break until age 40, when he was cast in the family TV sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle.” Now, he’ll be playing the role of Howard Beale in the upcoming Broadway production of “Network.” He shares his brief but spectacular take on an unusual career trajectory and the role of luck.

Judy Woodruff: Oscar-nominated actor Bryan Cranston is best known for his Emmy-winning role as Walter White in the TV series “Breaking Bad” [AMC; 20 January 2008-29 September 2013].

But, as he explains in tonight’s Brief But Spectacular episode, it took him some luck to get there.

Starting next Saturday [Woodruff probably meant 10 November 2018, the first preview], Cranston will be playing the role of Howard Beale in the Broadway production of “Network,” based on the famous film [MGM; 1976].

Bryan Cranston: The first thing I look for when I read a script is, does the story move me?

What I truly love about this, and when I talk to audiences about anything I have done or any other movie or stage piece, is that the audience is always right. However you felt, however you reacted to something is always right. That’s how you felt.

And it’s remarkable how you can sit next to someone and watch a movie. I could be weeping, and they’re like, eh. It’s like, really? They say, yes, it missed me.

The only failure is if you move an audience to nothing, to boredom. If they are indifferent about what they just experienced, whether it’s a painting or a recital or a singer or a dancer or a play, if they are, I feel nothing throughout, then we failed. Then we failed.

Actors come to town, to New York or Los Angeles or London, and they say, you know, I’m going to give it a shot. I’m going to give it a year and see if I can become successful.

And to those, I want to say, I can save you a year of your time. If you think that this is something that you can carve out some arbitrary amount of time to achieve certain things, this is not for you. This is a lifetime.

When you first start out as an actor, your answer to any question is yes. Do you want to? Yes, I want to do that.

I started out in 1979 doing background work as an extra. Angry mob. Drunken frat boy. Reckless driver. And then, when you first get that break where you actually have a name, Steve, wow, I actually have a name, I’m Steve, you feel like you have progressed to some degree.

There’s no career that has ever been achieved in entertainment — I truly believe this — without a healthy dose of luck. Someone said, OK, kid, I will read your script, or, all right, you want to audition? Come in. Do it right now.

And then you got to be ready. Celebrity is a byproduct of what I do and what I like to do. It’s not what I was after. I was a working actor. Things were fine. I was paying my bills, leading a very middle-class economic life. And then I got a lucky break at age 40 and was cast in “Malcolm in the Middle” [Fox; 9 January 2000-14 May 2006].

At 50, I got an even bigger break when I was cast as Walter White on “Breaking Bad.”

That was my trajectory. It came when it was supposed to come. And that’s the interesting thing about luck. It doesn’t work on your timetable. It works on its own.

My name is Bryan Cranston, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on being an actor.

[The backstory of “Brief But Spectacular,” a weekly series that premièred on NewsHour in 2015, begins with creator Steve Goldbloom, the creator and host of the original comedy news show for PBS, “Everything But the News,” and his longtime producing partner Zach Land-Miller who conduct every interview off-camera and off-screen.  (The segments are all two to four minutes long and there are no cutaways to reporters or interjections of questions.) 

[Each Thursday, “Brief But Spectacular” introduces NewsHour viewers to original profiles; these short segments feature some of the most original contemporary figures, offering passionate takes on topics they know well.  These have included household names like actors Alec Baldwin and Carl Reiner, artist Marina Abramović,  and activist Bryan Stevenson. 

[Topics have included comedian, writer, and director Jill Soloway (Amazon’s original series Transparent) on gatekeepers in Hollywood, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on police reform in America, Abramović on the art of performance, author Michael Lewis on finding disruptive characters, performers Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on the rise of their hit Comedy Central series Broad City, engineer Jason Dunn on creating the first 3-D printer in space, and many more.] 

*  *  *  *
“A HUMBLE OPINION ON DERIVING MOTIVATION FROM FAILURE”
by Elizabeth McCracken 

[Elizabeth McCracken’s essay about failure on “In My Humble Opinion,” from PBS News Hour on 11 March 2019, brought to mind Samuel Beckett’s advice: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”  I’ll present another essay on that passage from Beckett’s 1983 story “Worstward Ho” following this NewsHour transcript.]

It irks novelist and professor Elizabeth McCracken [b. 1966] when people say a success has “humbled” them. She argues it’s in fact failure that produces a humbling effect – but also a highly motivating one. McCracken offers her humble opinion on why the best work doesn’t derive from calm equilibrium, but rather from a “well-nourished, very private sense of revenge.”

Judy Woodruff: New Coke, the Fire Phone, big mistakes for Coca-Cola and Amazon, but their CEOs and those of many other companies have worked the concept of failure into their corporate culture.

Letting employees fail is seen as one way of finding the next big thing that works.

Novelist and professor Elizabeth McCracken also sees the value, but in her Humble Opinion, it’s the darker side of failure that ends up pushing you to success.

Elizabeth McCracken: Lately, I have been thinking about failure.

For instance, it’s a pet peeve of mine when people say that an honor has humbled them. It hasn’t. By what definition could that happen? You might mean that you think you should remain humble in the face of an honor. And, sure, why not? But it doesn’t actually humble you.

Failure, on the other hand, tends to humble people, which is right and also good, because only when you fail can you stand up and assess the damage and then, then get really furious, and vow revenge.

I teach creative writing, and I always tell my students that revenge is great motivation. People who are afraid of failure tend to say, I’m harder on myself than anyone else is.

This is never true.

Or else, my problem is that I’m a perfectionist, to which I always say, oh, you don’t like failing in public, unlike the rest of us?

In order to succeed, you have to risk failing. We all know that, but sometimes we forget that failure is actually good for you. Your immune system needs a bit of failure in order to be inoculated against further failure. The antibodies that failure produces are not pretty, but they are motivating, vengeance, hubris.

My most successful students have already failed. Maybe they didn’t get into graduate school the first time. Maybe they were rejected by a bunch of agents. Maybe they started a completely different career because their parents didn’t want them to be writers.

And failure instilled in them a particular feeling, not a commitment to their art or sense of peace about their fate.

“I thought,” one student of mine said just before she sold her novel, “I will show them.”

We often think that the best work comes from a place of equilibrium and support, but the thing is, equilibrium is pretty static, whereas a well-nourished, very private sense of revenge has enough heat and light to power a city, never mind a novel.

It’s almost heartwarming. Sometimes, when you think, I will show them, the them you end up showing is yourself.

Judy Woodruff: Elizabeth McCracken.

[“in My Humble Opinion,” the successor to “Essay” on NewsHour, was a series dedicated to video essays by writers, artists, and thinkers on diverse topics of interest to them.  I didn’t find confirmation, but it appears no longer to be a feature of NewsHour; perhaps it’s been subsumed into the segment called “Brief But Spectacular,” to which the first transcript in this post belonged.

[Elizabeth McCracken is an author and is a recipient of the 2002 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Niagara Falls All Over Again.  McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree in English from Boston University, a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, and a Master of Science in Library Science from Drexel University.

[In 2008 and 2009, she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Formerly on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, McCracken holds the James Michener Chair of Fiction of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a 1996 National Book Awards finalist for The Giant’s House, was on the 2014 National Book Awards long list for Thunderstruck & Other Stories, won the 2015 Story Prize for Thunderstruck & Other Stories, and made the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award shortlist for “Hungry.”]

*  *  *  *
“’TRY AGAIN. FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER’: HOW SAMUEL BECKETT 
CREATED THE UNLIKELY MANTRA THAT INSPIRES ENTREPRENEURS TODAY”
by Colin Marshall 

[Because McCracken’s essay “A humble opinion on deriving motivation from failure” reminded me immediately of the quotation from playwright and poet Samuel Beckett (1906-89), "Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better,” I decided to add a short piece from Open Culture, a website that “scours the web for the best educational media.  We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.”  Published on 17 December 2017, the following essay discusses the full meaning of Beckett’s line.]

To what writer, besides Ayn Rand, do the business-minded techies and tech-minded businessmen of 21st-century Silicon Valley look for their inspiration? The name of Samuel Beckett may not, at first, strike you as an obvious answer — unless, of course, you know the origin of the phrase “Fail better.” It appears five times in Beckett’s 1983 story “Worstward Ho,” the first of which goes like this: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The sentiment seems to resonate naturally with the mentality demanded by the world of tech startups, where nearly every venture ends in failure, but failure which may well contain the seeds of future success.

Or rather, the apparent sentiment resonates. “By itself, you can probably understand why this phrase has become a mantra of sorts, especially in the glamorized world of overworked start-up founders hoping against pretty high odds to make it,” writes Books on the Wall‘s Andrea Schlottman.

“We think so, too. That is, until you read the rest of it.” The paragraph immediately following those much-quoted lines runs as follows:

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.

“Throw up for good” — a rich image, certainly, but perhaps not as likely to get you out there disrupting complacent industries as “Fail better,” which The New Inquiry’s Ned Beauman describes as “experimental literature’s equivalent of that famous Che Guevara photo, flayed completely of meaning and turned into a successful brand with no particular owner. ‘Worstward Ho’ may be a difficult work that resists any stable interpretation, but we can at least be pretty sure that Beckett’s message was a bit darker than ‘Just do your best and everything is sure to work out ok in the end.’

But if Beckett’s words don’t provide quite the cause for optimism we thought they did, the story of his life actually might. “Beckett had already experienced plenty of artistic failure by the time he developed it into a poetics,” writes Chris Power in The Guardian. “No one was willing to publish his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and the book of short stories he salvaged from it, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), sold disastrously.” And yet today, even those who’ve never read a page of his work — indeed, those who’ve never even read the “Fail better” quote in full — acknowledge him as one of the 20th century’s greatest literary masters. Still, we have good cause to believe that Beckett himself probably regarded his own work as, to one degree or another, a failure. Those of us who revere it would do well to remember that, and maybe even to draw some inspiration from it.

[Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture.  His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles (in press) and the video series The City in Cinema.

[I’ve blogged several times on Samuel Beckett, all on his theater.  (Many of the posts have been about Waiting for Godot, which readers of Rick On Theater will probably know I think is a masterpiece.)  ROT’s Beckett posts are: “History of Waiting For Godot,” 30 March 2009; “Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 1 April 2009; “More Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 3 April 2009; “Is Waiting For Godot Trash?” 17 April 2009; “Waiting for Godot (Gare St. Lazare),”31 October 2015; “Beckett Trilogy: Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby.” 1 May 2016; "‘Beckett by the Madeleine’" by Tom F. Driver, 25 January 2018; and “Waiting For Godot (Druid Theatre Company),” 21 November 2018.]

The Theatre for Peace (1966-1972)

[For a long time, I’ve been trying to gather enough material to write an article on the Theatre for Peace, an anti-war organization that existed during the Vietnam era.  So far—and I’ve been searching on and off for information on the TFP since the mid- and late 1990s—I haven’t had a lot of success.  

[Part of the problem has been that the TFP was in operation long before there was an Internet—and so far, no one has posted a memoir or history of the organization.  It only seems to have existed for about six years and its press coverage included mostly reviews of the productions it supported and occasional announcements of its programs and workshops.

[Another difficulty with this research is that during the Vietnam-protest period, there were hundreds of groups with the same or analogous aims and agendas, many of which had higher profiles than the Theatre for Peace.

[There are, unfortunately, also dozens of modern-day organizations with names similar to the Theatre for Peace, most of them abroad.  When there’s a pertinent site that might provide facts about the TFP which I’m researching, it gets buried in the pile of like-named programs than can number in the hundreds.

[Nonetheless, I’m going to put down what I’ve learned.  Maybe some reader will have some pertinent facts or a lead I can follow.]

The Theatre for Peace was an anti-Vietnam war activist group that operated in New York City from about 1966 to the end of U.S. combat in Southeast Asia in 1972.  Comprised mostly of theater and performing artists, TFP produced plays and other theatrical events and participated in or organized other activities whose aim was to protest—by theatrical means—United States policy in Southeast Asia.

A project of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam, which was founded in 1965 by New York psychiatrist Oscar Sachs, who served as chairman, as a political and social action organization (it actively supported the 1968 candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy [1925-68] for president as early as 1966—before the New York senator even declared), the TFP produced plays in and around the city and the Tri-State area, often in union halls and on university campuses.

The Committee of the Professions, as it was commonly known, ran many advertisements, usually signed statements, opposing President Lyndon B. Johnson’s (and then President Richard M. Nixon’s) policies in Vietnam, most vociferously, the military involvement in the war that started under the French in 1940 (First Indochina War); the United States took over in 1955.

On 5 June 1966, for example, the Committee of the Professions co-sponsored a three-page ad in the New York Times at a cost of $20,880 (equivalent to just under $195,000 today).  There were 6,400 signatories to the ad from the faculties of such colleges and universities as Columbia, Harvard, City College of New York, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

The organization also held rallies, “speak-outs,” and demonstrations.  By 1966, the Committee of the Professions had about 750 “affiliates,” according to the New York Times.

The founder of the Theatre for Peace was Gary Pogrow (1941-2010), a graduate of New York’s City College, a teacher of theater, a writer and publisher, and a Freedom Rider in the Civil Rights Movement.  He served as artistic director of the TFP. 

Other founding members included such luminaries in the arts and letters as Swedish-American stage, film, and television actor Viveca Lindfors (1920-95); theater director, actor, playwright, and theater theoretician Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003); theater critic, playwright, editor, and translator Eric Bentley (1916-2020); and actor and director Alvin Epstein (1925-2018), among others. 

The TFP declared that its aim was to develop and stage theater pieces whose purpose was to end the Vietnam war.  (One of these productions was 1967’s Brother, You’re Next, the street musical co-created by Leonardo Shapiro, the avant-garde director about whom I’ve blogged often on Rick On Theater; see my post on 26 January 2010.)

The Theatre for Peace espoused a commitment “to a theater of propaganda in the best sense of the word.”  In a casting notice in Back Stage, the theatrical trade paper in New York, the TPF explained that their productions were “a dramatic way that committed professional theatre people may express opposition to [the] Vietnam war.”

In addition to providing opportunities for artists dissenting from the war in Vietnam “through their own medium,” the TFP’s self-declared mission included reaching “new audiences by performing in churches, community centers, homes, parks, and on the streets,” seeking out, especially, “bookings in universities and in areas of cities which rarely see live theatre.”

Like Brother, You’re Next, which was composed by Shapiro, Stephen Wangh, Chris Rohmann, and Robert Reiser based on Bertolt Brecht’s anti-military play Man Is Man, some of TRP’s offerings were presented in theaters or spaces like auditoriums and meeting halls and had a published schedule. 

Other shows were street theater, as Brother was outside its one indoor mounting, and were guerilla performances, popping up on sidewalks and in parks unannounced, playing for whoever stopped to watch or were attracted to the spectacle.

The scheduled theater performances catered to a paying audience who bought tickets, though the cost was minimal, and the street shows were free, though the performers probably passed a hat before departing for the next venue. 

A third form for TFP shows, as suggested above, was bookings by organizations, such as the schools mentioned or anti-war groups, for their members and those to whom they reached out.  For those performances, TFP charged a fee to cover the cost of transportation and room and board.

The Theatre for Peace (some publications spelled the troupe’s name “Theater for Peace” or called it “Theatre of Peace,” making it hard to locate all the coverage of TFP in databases) also participated in festivals relating to their philosophy.  In 1967, for instance, the theater was part of Angry Arts Week in New York City, 26 January to 5 February. 

The full, official title of the event was Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam (though some publications and archives referred to this event as the Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam), and The Militant, an international socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party, labeled it “a unique antiwar project.”  The New York City-based paper described the event thus:

There will be protests against the war by members of all the arts—music, painting, theater, poetry, dance, film and combined forms.

The participating artists have slated a multitude of activity to express their revulsion for this war.  Among the programs scheduled are four evenings of theater, two dance concerts, a folk music concert and five film showings.

In addition, caravans of poets and musicians will present 20-minute performances on street corners throughout the city.  Other street protests will take the form of “play-ins” in lobbies of public buildings and dramatic presentations in supermarkets and laundromats.

The New York Times quoted Robert Reitz, a greeting-card designer who was chairman of the Angry Arts organization—which mounted similar events all around the Tri-State region and the Theatre for Peace appeared at many of them as well—that “many artists have wanted to voice their dissent nonviolently and nonpolitically against the war in Vietnam.”

Among the artists and literati who appeared at Angry Arts’ first event were actor Alan Alda, actor Ruby Dee, storyteller and radio show host John Henry Faulk, cartoonist and author/playwright Jules Feiffer, actor Diana Sands, and Hungarian-born writer and theatre director George Tabori (husband of Viveca Lindfors).

At the time of Angry Arts Week, the Theatre for Peace was presenting Happy Hunting, a satirical musical by Academy Award-winning songwriter Lewis Allen about the effects of the Vietnam war and draft on family life.  It was the play TFP performed at the protest event (and several other incarnations of Angry Arts, such as one in Philadelphia in January 1968. 

“It is becoming more difficult to speak and more painful to be silent,” lamented actress Anne Allen (wife of Lewis Allen) at the opening of the play at a subsequent protest event at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, a performance on 19 August 1967.  As characterized by Robert A. Horwitz in the Hartford Courant, these lines

were said without any of the difficulty to which Mrs. Allen referred.  They were said with compassion, with conviction, with love, by experienced, highly professional New York actors who had volunteered an evening without pay to present the Hartford audience a message which they believe deeply: that war is wrong, that the present war is especially senseless, that the official statements which try to justify that war are empty, meaningless words, that man must strive with all his being to achieve peace.”

Horwitz described the performance:

The production which the Theatre for Peace actors staged is called “Happy Hunting.”  It consists of three parts: a dramatic reading of anti-war poetry compiled by the poet Walter Lowenfels [1897-1976; poet, journalist, and member of the Communist Party USA]; a selection of witty nursery rhymes by Lewis All[e]n . . . called “Light Verse, Not to Be Taken Lightly”; and a short playlet with satirical songs, also by Lewis Allen, called “Happy Hunting: A Primer for Primates.”

The message the actors present is not a new one.  War has been decried by writers and artists for centuries; love has been celebrated since the beginning of time.  But the script and the acting is unusually touching in this production.  And the old message takes on a new vitality.

The anti-war poems which began the production are touching because they concern the people, the individual, suffering people involved in war, not merely the politics of it all.

There is the mother who pines for her son in the army: “When will my son return?  He was always a man of peace, and he played baseball in the sun.”

There is the little girl, seven years old, who speaks from her grave in Hiroshima: “I’m a little girl that’s dead.  I’m knocking at your door.  Please hear me and give me just one gift, that you won’t kill any more babies.”

The light verses, short and clever, offered some pithy comments on the current American scene: “The Grand Canyon on a political map/Would be renamed the credibility gap,” and a little ditty about poor old Humphrey Dumphrey [an allusion to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey] who fell all to pieces and couldn’t be put back together again, even by “all Johnson’s horses, all Johnson’s men.”

But it is the playlet “Happy Hunting” which really touches the soul, for here, in a few dramatic minutes, are presented all the ingredients of America suffering in war: the young boy who is drafted, the mother who doesn’t understand why he has to go and cries “Why, why, why” when his casket is later brought in, the “voice of authority” which rationalizes all the horror with rhetoric about the nation’s “commitment to a commitment to a commitment.”

Reporter and reviewer Horwitz remarked, “There are many anti-war plays which, for lack of subtlety, sophistication, or directness, simply fail to convey their intended message.  But ‘Happy Hunting’ . . . is a superior anti-war production.  Its message comes across with poignancy.”

Along with Happy Hunting, the earliest TFP production for which I found a record, the protest troupe produced Near the Wall of Lion Shadows, a “choreodrama” composed of slides, poems, and dances choreographed by Ann Wilson based on poems by Ruth Lisa Schechter; Brother, You’re Next; The Ballad of Joe Smith by Thomas Donlon and directed by Robert Kya-Hill, depicting several levels of army life; Brecht on War, directed by Lindfors; Lysistrata directed by Lenard Rosen, an ancient Greek anti-war comedy by Aristophanes (c. 446-c. 386 BCE), originally performed in Athens in 411 BCE; and Childermas, a choreodrama based on the biblical Slaughter of the Innocents, with a book by Robert Summers and music by Harold Boatright, choreographed by Joan Kerr.

The TFP’s basic plan included “to create, prepare, and present theatrical works aimed at ending the war in Vietnam.”  It also held workshops (one weekly session was conducted by Joe Chaikin) and developed improvisational playlets on Vietnam, welfare, and racism.

One planned workshop, headed by Lindfors with Canadian-born actor Dino Narrizzano, Chaikin, stage director Gladys Vaughan, songwriter and theater director Jacques Levy, Eric Bentley, historian and teacher Stan Steiner, conceptual artist David Rothenberg, and Alvin Epstein, was intended to develop scripts for distribution to student and peace groups around the U.S. and to make films or tapes of well-known artists performing or otherwise demonstrating their feelings about the war in Southeast Asia.

The program was also intended to develop mobile troupes of performers to travel the country to play wherever there was a demand.  There were also plans for a writers’ workshop.    

The troupe’s overall aim, in addition to providing “an artistic forum for opposition to the war in Vietnam,” was to perform for people who ordinarily might not “come to grips with the issues” of the conflict by presenting their work in neighborhood spaces and open venues. 

Jane Speiser, the review-writer for West Side News, who attended the 1968 indoor production of Brother, You’re Next, asserted that TFP had carved out “a difficult job, [but] has attacked it with an uncompromising sense of what makes for dramatic excitement as well as what makes for political commitment.”

[When I first wrote about Brother. You’re Next, years before I created the ROT post of 2010, I saw it only as Leonardo Shapiro’s first public New York effort and the earliest step in the evolution of what would be his life’s principal endeavor, The Shaliko Company (1972-93).

[Later, when I researched Shapiro’s next out-of-school project, the New York Free Theater (1968-71; see my post on 4 April 2010), I saw it as an outgrowth of Brother and Shapiro’s next step toward Shaliko.

[Compiling this profile of the Theatre for Peace, I now see something that I may not have spotted because I hadn’t looked into the work of the TFP beyond the fact that it produced Brother—a one-off, discrete association with Shapiro and his Brother/NYFT colleagues and collaborators.

[Here’s the hypothesis: I think there’s a good chance that the TFP influenced the founders of NYFT when they came up with their agenda for the new street-theater troupe.  Here’s why I suspect this:

[First, look at what the TFP proclaimed as their mission and philosophy.  In addition to their central emphasis, opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Theatre for Peace also focused their efforts on fighting racism, specifically, and, more generally, other societal ills, such as poverty.

[Next, the leaders of the organization made a point of performing their shows in accessible places, including the streets and parks of the cities where the TFP appeared, and bringing their performances to people who didn’t often (or ever) get to see live theater.

[The troupe offered workshops to teach others with similar agendas how to promote their ideas all across the country.  It also gave its performances and provided their developmental classes at minimal or no cost because the message and the information was more important than raising money.

[Now, Brother, You’re Next was already developed when Shapiro and his collaborators, who, except for Chris Rohmann, were all NYU undergrad theater students, came together with the Theatre for Peace and the Committee of the Professions.  But the fit was nearly perfect. 

[I think what happened was that once on board with the TFP, working with Lindfors, Tabori, Chaikin (with whom Shapiro was already acquainted from his pre-NYU teen experience with the Living Theatre—see “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 2,” 19 April 2023)—et al., their nascent leanings and proclivities coalesced and gelled into mandates.

[Brother was adamantly anti-war, and the collaborators/creators of the street musical were committed to dissent and opposition.  That wasn’t especially unusual for college students in the mid- and late ’60s; I had the same tendencies down south in central Virginia.  But when those same young actors and directors morphed into the founders of the New York Free Theater, after the encounter with the TFP, ad hoc ideas that they’d applied to Brother, You’re Next evolved into a framework for an activist street troupe.

[Racism was at the top of NYFT’s list of targets, having formed the group because of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on 4 April 1968, but they soon spread out to treat other societal ills such as poverty and consumerism.

[Performance was the main medium for the troupe’s messaging, but they soon added community workshops “intended to aid participants in directing neighborhood programs relating to racism, narcotics and violence” as additional ways to reach out to New Yorkers. 

[NYFT was conceived as a street theater, setting up on sidewalks and in parks, but a spokesperson for the troupe emphasized: “The Free Theater brings radical arts festivals into forgotten, oppressed communities,” just as the TFP did.”

[The pattern of operation for the two organizations is nearly identical.  Now, I suppose that this kind of organizational model was fairly common in the ’60s, with the proliferation of street theaters in New York City and elsewhere, but the close contact between the team that created Brother, You’re Next and then went on to found the New York Free Theater and the artists who formed the Theatre for Peace, even for a short time—especially so close to the emergence of NYFT—leads me to suspect very strongly that there was cross-pollination.]