A Passion For Art: My Parents’ Art Collecting

On Monday, 6 November, an exhibition of the small art collection assembled by my late parents over 40-some-odd years opened at the Stan Kamen Gallery at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.  This was the final act in a more-than-two-year process to make a continuing loan of the collection to the university.  I first contacted the university’s Reeves Collection, the division that oversees the school’s art holdings that are used in the art department and campus display, a short time after my mother, Judith (b. 1923), died in May 2015.  (My father, Eugene, b. 1918, had died in 1996.  I’ve written memoirs of both my parents for Rick On Theater: “Dad,” posted on 20 June 2010, and “Mom,” 1 November 2016.)  After negotiating several administrative and logistical hurdles, Washington and Lee agreed to accept the loan, which will be renewed every several years.  (W&L doesn’t take permanent or perpetual loans.)

I’m extremely pleased that the university agreed to this proposal.  My father was an alumnus of W&L’s class of 1940 and I’m a graduate of the class of 1969.  My father was a very active alumnus, serving on several committees in the years since World War II until his death, and Mother supported him wholeheartedly in all his efforts.  (An alumna of Elmira College in upstate New York, Mom essentially shifted her allegiance from her own alma mater and became a sort of daughter-in-law of Washington and Lee.)  Both my parents were particularly interested in the arts on the W&L campus, perhaps because I was an avid member of the Troubadours, the extracurricular university theater in my day, for my four years in Lexington.  Dad was particularly active in the development program for the Lenfest Center for the Arts, the home to the school’s fine and performing arts programs and activities (and the site of the Kamen Gallery).  He was on the development committee for the center, responsible for raising the money for its construction, and my parents were invited to attend the opening gala when the theater was inaugurated with a dedication ceremony and a production of Evita on Saturday, 25 May 1991.

Both Mother and Dad were very proud to have contributed to the Reeves Collection over the years, most significantly a pair of antique carved wood sculptures of Japanese deities.  When I came back briefly to New York City in June 2015 after my mother’s death in Maryland, I found a note of condolence from the directors of the Reeves Center and I decided to contact them to thank them for their sentiments and to broach the subject of the loan proposal.  My parents had been collecting art since the late 1950s and had gathered about 40 pieces of various forms (oil paintings, watercolors, prints, sculptures, tapestry) and periods.  Several of the pieces are large and together with the number, it was impossible for me to keep the art myself—unless I bought another apartment just for the collection.  (I actually remember reading of a man who did just that.  He lived in one apartment and kept a second one across town in which he stored his works of art.  Periodically, he’d swap out the pieces he displayed in his home with some stored in the other apartment and would thus rotate the art on his residence walls.) 

Two things I knew: I didn’t want to sell off the art—it had meant too much to my parents and, by legacy, to me as well—and I didn’t want to put it in some kind of permanent or long-term storage until I happened to move to larger quarters . . . or died.   A loan to some place that would agree to keep the collection together was my best solution, and my Dad’s and my alma mater was the optimum choice if they could be persuaded to be interested.  Luckily for me, as soon as I broached the idea to the W&L art folks, they expressed great interest in making the deal.  As it turned out, the university was looking for works to fill in gaps in its art holdings, particularly in “20th-century and non-Western art,” as Patricia Hobbs, Curator of University Collections of Art and History, put it to me.  Among the pieces in my parents’ collection are a Fernando Botero (Colombian) oil, an Antoni Tàpies (Spanish) oil, three Sam Gilliam (American contemporary) acrylic pieces of different styles, two Leonard Cave (American contemporary) marble sculptures, and a Fritz Scholder (Native American contemporary) bronze.  There are also several non-Western pieces, including pre-Columbian (Latin American terracotta figures), Chinese (19th-century scroll), Thai (18th/19th-century works on linen), and Japanese (18th-century woodblocks).  (There were a number of African pieces, but my mother gave them to me during her lifetime.  My will, however, stipulates that all my art will be bequeathed to Washington and Lee at my death, so the school will get that parcel as well as a few other interesting works in a decade or so.)

W&L doesn’t have an art gallery or museum like some colleges.  The art in its collection is primarily used in the classes of the Department of Art and Art History; selected works are displayed in academic and administrative buildings around the campus and changed periodically.  The rest are kept in storage, available for the art classes and swapped for those on display.  This struck me immediately as an ideal situation because I believe my parents would not only approve, but actually delight in the arrangement.  Hanging the art in buildings where students and faculty come and go daily, rather than corralling it in a special space designated an “art gallery” where people have to go expressly to see it, seems ideal for art that had been part of the home I grew up in and saw every day as I went about the ordinary business of life.  My family didn’t go to a museum to see their art, why would they want anyone else to have to? 

And using the works in classes is a benefit it goes without saying would please my father especially.  I always felt he’d have been an exceptional teacher.  He was a kind of one first as the director of the Amerika Haus in Koblenz, West Germany, his Foreign Service post in the early ’60s, where his job was to inculcate the idea of America and the history of the U.S. to post-war Germans; and later, as a volunteer docent at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in the ’80s, explaining some of the works of art there to museum-goers.  (Mother, too, was involved in teaching, volunteering in the D.C. public schools’ reading programs and screening applicants for high school exchange programs from Russia for Youth for Understanding.)  I know this proposition would meet with their approval all around.  (The Lenfest Center exhibit, which will remain on view until 30 June, will be the only time at W&L that the whole collection will be shown together while the university retains it.  It’s entitled A Passion for Art, which I’ve borrowed for the title to this article.  It expresses perfectly my folks’ approach to art collecting, as I hope you’ll see.)

The loan arrangements and the Lenfest exhibit are also the culmination of my parents’ nearly 50-year adventure in art collecting.  It started in 1958 when my father bought a part ownership in the Gres Gallery in Washington, a respected venue for contemporary one-artist and theme shows.  It was a total impulse buy: Dad came home one day and pretty much exclaimed, “Guess what I bought!”  Of course, we had no idea—my brother and I were all of about 10 and 12 at this point—and when my father told us he’d bought into an art gallery, Mom asked, “What  kind of art gallery?”  “Modern art,” Dad replied, and Mom came back, “But we don’t know anything about modern art!”

That was true, too.  There was certainly more on the walls of my family’s home at this point—they weren’t bare as far as I can recall—but I only specifically remember three pieces that predate the Gres Gallery days.  Two were old-fashioned Romantic oil paintings that I recall had been presents from my mother’s father as house-warming gifts for my folks’ first apartment as a married couple.  One was a picture of four men playing dice, painted according to some notes of my father’s, by German artist Claus Meyer (1856-1919).  (A quick search on the Internet reveals a work called The Dice Game by Meyer, painted in about 1900, that strongly resembles my recollection of the painting my parents owned.)  The other, essentially its mate (though the artists are almost certainly not the same), is a painting by an unknown painter of two small children playing with a cat in what looks like a farmyard.  Both paintings are dark and painted in the style of a late-19th-century oil, framed in elaborate gold-leafed wood frames.  I was never partial to them, but my cousin loved them and my parents gave them to her when she got married in the ’70s. Today they hang in her dining room in Bethesda.  (My grandfather was her great uncle.)

The third piece of art that my parents had when I was a little boy was a mid-20th-century Impressionist painting, Out My Apartment Window (ca. 1948) by Maurice Bizot, a French artist who lived in the late 19th to middle 20th centuries.  This was the first piece of art my parents bought, a good decade before they became immersed in the world of contemporary art through their experience with Gres.  It's certainly not a great piece of art, and Bizot’s almost unknown.  He has almost no Internet footprint; even his life dates are unrecorded.  I know from what my folks told me years later that they bought this painting without any knowledge of art or artists and the desire was just for a piece of décor that they liked.  I don't know where they bought the painting—probably a gallery in Washington, but it could have been New York (where both sets of grandparents lived then)—but I suspect it was the 1940s equivalent of art sold at those motel exhibits that are advertised on TV late at night.  Nonetheless, it had sentimental value to my parents and it's rather a good example, technically at least, of the techniques and criteria of an Impressionist painting, even though it was painted decades after the true Impressionist era.  I always had a fondness for it, too, mostly for its view out an apartment window.  I always liked to imagine I was looking down on a Paris street, perhaps in Montmartre.

That was the extent of my parents’ involvement with art, modern or otherwise, until Gres Gallery.  My folks got interested in modern art when Dad made that impulse-buy and they threw themselves into the operation of the gallery—though Mother was the principal activist (Dad had a day job, of course—two, actually).  I got into the act, too, going with Mother to the 20th Street gallery near DuPont Circle to help stuff envelopes and such.  For all of us, that engagement was a total-immersion course in contemporary American and Western art and artists.  What I found most exciting was that the vernissages rotated among the six or so households, so when my folks hosted the parties, the décor had to include displaying some of the artist’s (or, sometimes, artists’) work in our home.  I helped in the set dressing, so not only did I get to see “real” art at the gallery, but I got to have this art in my house, at least temporarily.  It was like actually having taken one of those imaginary midnight shopping trips Mom and I later would joke about after seeing a good museum exhibit.  What’s more, I got to meet actual artists.  This whole venture was an art education for all of us and an adventure for me, and it lasted well beyond the demise of Gres Gallery in 1962 to the end of my parents’ lives.

Founded around 1957 by a Spaniard named Tana Gres, the gallery was purchased in ’58 by a consortium of amateurs put together by Beatrice (Mrs. Hart) Perry who trained as a sculptor.  With Beati as managing partner, Gres held first-in-America exhibits by artists from Europe, South America,  and beyond, such as painter and sculptor Wojciech Fangor of Poland (1922-2015), Colombian painter Fernando Botero (1932-2023), and Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929).  Beati Perry (1921-2011) had little interest in showing local art because she didn’t want Gres to become known as a Washington gallery, so several artists like Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) and Morris Louis (1912-62) never showed at the gallery.  Washington, however, had a lively and active art scene.  Not only have the city’s art museums such as the Corcoran Gallery (established in 1874), the Phillips Collection (1921), the National Gallery of Art (1941), and the various Smithsonian facilities (Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1829; National Portrait Gallery, 1968; Renwick Gallery, 1972; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1974; along with several specialized repositories) been important venues for displaying and viewing art of many cultures and eras, but Washington also had long had a vibrant retail gallery presence, including Gres; the Jefferson Place Gallery (1957-75), Gres’s principal competition; and the renowned Washington Gallery of Modern Art (1961-68), catering to the many collectors in the metropolitan area and beyond.  Since World War II, the Nation’s Capital has been a true art center, and it even spawned its own art movement, the Washington Color School (of which Noland and Louis were among the adherents), that flourished from the 1950s to the 1960s.  

My parents began exploring this aspect of our hometown once the Gres Gallery bug had bitten them.  Mother already had a couple of friends who were Washington artists.  Minnie Klavans (1915-99), the wife of contractor Elmer Klavans, who specialized in restorations (and did the renovation of the house in Barnaby Woods my family moved to in 1958), was an award-winning painter, sculptor, and jewelry-maker; Lila Oliver Asher (1921-2021), a friend of Mother’s from their childhoods (Lila had been Mom’s camp counselor), is an internationally esteemed printmaker, sculptor, and watercolorist.  Mom and Dad, who owned one of Lila’s prints (I also own one) and four of Minnie’s paintings and prints (plus one small painting the artist gave Mom in lieu of a greeting card—which I now have), added to these acquaintanceships by becoming friendly with other area artists they met once their interest in the work had been piqued. 

Among these new friends were Jacob Kainen (1909-2001), a painter, printmaker, collector, art historian, and curator of the Division of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian’s U. S. National Museum (later the National Museum of American History); sculptor Leonard Cave (1944-2006), whom my folks met through friends; and Sam Gilliam (b. 1933), a painter who was a later member of the Washington Color School.  Sam’s partner, Annie Gawlak, who’s also his manager, is a gallery-owner in the Nation’s Capital and Mom and Dad frequently visited her various galleries in Georgetown or Logan Circle just to see what she was showing.  They also struck up an acquaintanceship with American sculptor Chaim Gross (1904-91) and visited him several times at his studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when my folks had a Cape Cod summer house in Brewster.  Their collection includes three Gilliams, two Grosses, two Caves, and a Kainen.  (One of the Grosses and the Kainen are now in my possession.)

They also got to know David Lloyd Kreeger (1909-90), an art philanthropist (who’d been a benefactor of the Museum of African Art for which my dad had worked) and recipient of the 1990 National Medal of Arts, who built a mansion for himself and his wife on Washington’s exclusive Foxhall Road, designed in 1963 by architect Philip Johnson and built in 1968, which was intended to become a museum to display his art collection after his death.  My folks were invited to see the museum-home before it was opened to the public (I got to tag along), and the funny thing was—it felt more like the Kreegers were living in a museum than in a home that would eventually be transformed into a museum.  Kreeger, who in his other life was formerly the president, chairman, and CEO of GEICO, the insurance giant, had the reputation in the D.C. art scene of having bought the worst works of the greatest artists—and I have to say that what we saw at the Kreeger mansion that afternoon bore this rep out.  (The Kreeger Museum opened to the public on 1 June 1994.)

The group ownership of Gres Gallery lasted only three or four years, but the association impelled my parents into an exploration of contemporary art from Europe, the United States, and Latin America.  Their artistic interests soon broadened, however.  Dad’s volunteer stint from the late ’60s into the ’70s as Director of Development for the private Museum of African Art, precursor to the present National Museum of African Art on the Mall, generated an enduring interest in the art of sub-Saharan Africa and trips to China, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Japan spawned an attraction to Asian art.  Visits to the American Southwest and to Mexico and Central America resulted in an affinity for Native American and pre-Columbian art, as well. 

Vacations always included visits to the local art museums and they often went on trips that were expressly arranged as art tours organized by the Smithsonian or other art institution.  Frequently, these trips included visits to artists’ studios—and they not uncommonly brought home a new work of art with which they’d fallen in love.  A trip to Mexico City in 1981 yielded Personaje de Perfil ("Head of a Man," 1980), a mixografia/aguafuerte etching by Ruffino Tamayo (1899-1991).  A visit to Los Angeles in 1987 resulted in the purchase of Mother’s favorite piece of art, Stanley Boxer’s (1926-2000) Highfromblare (High From Blare) (ca. 1987), a large mixographia monotype on white linen, and one to Dallas the same year netted Another Mystery Woman (ca. 1987), a bronze sculpture by Native American artist Fritz Scholder (1937-2005), whose work we later encountered in 2002 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Scholder had lived and taught. 

When my folks took a trip to Yugoslavia in 1981, they went to the government-sponsored artists’ colony in Kovačica (now part of Serbia) and purchased a naïve/folk art oil on canvas entitled Bride and Groom (Bridal Couple) from the artist, Martin Paluska (1913-84).  They had arrived in the little town (population then, about 8,000), and went to the municipal showroom, where samples of all the artists’ work were on display.  They liked Paluska’s painting of the couple in their traditional wedding garb and went to the artist’s home and studio.  Negotiating through the painter’s wife, who spoke some German, my parents explained that they liked the painting they’d seen at the showroom and wanted to buy one like it—but in a different color scheme.  Was that possible?  Paluska assured them it was a perfectly common request and my parents placed the order for the painting to be created and shipped to them in the States.  Three months later, the notification came that the painting was ready as requested and had been shipped. 

Of course, the element that set my parents’ art collecting apart from many other art patrons was that they didn’t buy as an investment, and they didn’t buy work by famous artists—or artists they thought might become famous.  They bought only what they really liked.  As a result, the growing collection represented an expression not only of their taste in art, but of their enthusiasm; it was a reflection of their emotional responses to the painting or sculpture—and to the artist.  Consequently, the collection meant much more to my folks than an assemblage of attractive decorations; the art was a treasured facet of their life together.  One suggestion of this is that Mother stopped buying art after Dad died.  It was something they did together, as a couple; it wasn’t an activity either indulged in individually.  (The one exception was Botero’s Boy with Guitar, 1960.  Mother bought that as a 42nd birthday gift for my father from her, my brother, and me; it was one of the earliest art purchase after we’d become involved with Gres, from which it was purchased at the artist’s second show there, Botero in October 1960, and that situation never arose again.)

(My parents never again bought art for each other—I don’t think this was some kind of pact; it just developed that way—but they did buy art for me and my brother.  The very next purchase, also from Gres, was Intermezzo, 1958, by Norman Carton, 1908-80, in December 1960, a gift my folks made to me for my 14th birthday.  Unlike Botero, who soon became world-famous, Carton, who was on the faculty of the New School for Social Research—now known simply as The New School—in New York City, never became well known outside art circles.  Nonetheless, I cherish the little, heavily impastoed, multi-colored abstract expressionistic oil as much as any piece of art I own.  Almost 30 years after it was painted, when the oil paint finally began to dry inside the thick blobs, it began to flake and peel away from the canvas and I knew I’d lose the painting if I didn’t do something.  I asked my dad, then working as a docent at the National Portrait Gallery, to find a conservator who might be able to save the Carton and I ended up paying five times the purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it.  The expense was more than worthwhile to me.)

Along with Boy with Guitar (also called Boy with Mandolin) and Intermezzo, my parents acquired several pieces from Gres, all within the short period between 1959 and the gallery’s demise in 1962.  Among these, the foundation of their small collection, were Pegasus (1951) by Spanish painter Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012); Biblique (1959) by Aleksander Kobzdej (Polish, 1920-72); Ossidiana VI (1959), aluminum gel on canvas by Franco Assetto (Italian, 1911-91); and an untitled pen-and-ink drawing (ca. 1959) by Rafael Alvarez Ortega (Spanish, b. 1927), part of his line-drawing series “Los Niños del Mar” (“Children of the Sea”).  (The last two are in my possession now.)  One piece which is no longer in the collection, a Yayoi Kusama canvas, an untitled 51"-square, red-and-black oil from her “Infinity Net” paintings, was bought from one of the 1960 shows of her work at Gres; Mom sold it in 1996.

The Kusama canvas was the only piece of art my parents sold from their collection.  They did give the two Romantics to my cousin and over the years, they gave a number of works to me; in the last several years of Mother’s life, she decided to give me pieces of art instead of presents on my birthdays and other holidays, so some things that were originally part of my parents collection are now in my home.  They never, however, sold another work of art other than the Kusama.

The Yayoi Kusama Infinity Net painting, along with Kobzdej’s Biblique, are artifacts in a couple of historically interesting art events at Gres in which my parents participated.  One early exhibit Beati Perry organized at the gallery was Six Japanese Painters in 1960, a display of Japanese artists working in Yōga, or contemporary Western-style painting, rather than Nihonga, traditional Japanese forms—something that was unfamiliar to American collectors at that time.  Six Japanese Painters was so noteworthy (not to mention popular) that it toured the country, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  Kobzdej was part of a show that was even more striking, a group of Polish painters, which also included Fangor, who were working in contemporary forms instead of the approved Soviet style of Socialist Realism.  This work wasn’t officially sanctioned in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe and had never been allowed outside the region before, but Perry put together 15 Polish Painters at Gres and it, too, was borrowed in its entirety by MoMA in 1961. The show was still only quasi-officially recognized: the Polish ambassador didn’t come to the opening—I believe he came privately later—but the embassy did send a middle-ranking diplomat as a representative. 

My parents eventually met Kobzdej, but it was hard to do because of the Cold War.  The artists hadn’t been allowed to come to Washington or New York for the exhibits; the art was okay to leave the country, but the artists apparently weren’t.  The Cold War was a truly Kafkaesque time!  I wasn’t there when my folks met the artist (I was probably at school), but I heard the tale.  Kobzdej had been allowed to travel a little in Western Europe by then (the early ’60s), but he was closely monitored and his itineraries were carefully laid out so as to leave little opportunity to socialize with Westerners—or, worse, defect.  Somehow my folks had learned the artist was going to be somewhere in West Germany—I guess they must have been in correspondence—so they planned to go there at the same time and try to see him.   Anyway, they didn’t connect—either Kobzdej’s schedule changed or my parents couldn’t get to see him in person.  (The same thing happened to a friend and me trying to connect with his pen-pal in the Soviet Union.)  But he was going to be in another town later or on another trip, and this time they were able to get together and had a long talk about his work and travels and my folks’ lives in Germany—just chitchat (I imagine they were monitored; it would have been the practice in the Cold War that Kobzdej have a minder).  I do remember that he was delighted that my parents had one of his paintings—I think he remembered the specific one.  (When Mom met Tàpies years later, he didn’t recall the Pegasus we had!)

The subsidiary consequence of the way my parents bought their art was that it came to mean more to me than mere possessions as well.  I’ve already said that the art was more important to me than the furniture or my mother’s jewelry, or the set of crystal, or the sterling flatware.  Those were nice—my parents had wonderful taste and Mother had an eye for home decorating—but I wasn’t ever going to use them, so I gave some of it to family members and sold the rest at auction.  But I couldn’t do that with the art, as I explained.  It’s not even quite that I “grew up with it.”  I didn’t live in my parents’ home from 9th grade on; I came home for holidays when I was at school and visits after I was an adult—but I didn’t live there anymore.  But the art was somehow special—and it wasn’t only because of the way Mom and Dad acquired it.  I love it, too, separate from its association with my folks—probably because I went though that initiation back in the late ’50s along with my parents.  I suspect it made a stronger impression on me, at 12, 13, and 14, than maybe it did on Mom and Dad.  (The experience doesn’t seem to have had the same effect on my brother, two years my junior.)

The collecting, as I said, went on in earnest from 1959 until a few years before my father’s death in 1996.  I moved out of my parents’ home in September 1961 to go away to school, but until college, I returned home regularly.  So the art that was accumulated between 1960 and 1965 might as well have been mine in the sense that I lived with it almost continually as I was growing up.  As I told people at Washington and Lee when I was there for A Passion for Art, some of those works became like old friends.  My relationship with the pieces added later, after I was in the army and then had my own home in New York City, was different—even though some of my favorite pieces of art in the collection are among these.  But those pieces are just that: works of art I like and admire, not special friends I visited when I came to see my parents.  Among these are Sam Gilliam’s Chinese (1990), a formless canvas of many-colored acrylic which is shaped differently every time it’s hung and takes on a completely different character depending on who’s done the installation.  (Gilliam himself hung the piece the first time it was installed in my parents’ Washington, D.C., apartment in 1990.  He rehung it for Mother when she moved several years later to another apartment, and it was different in both apartments: in the first, it bent around the corner of an entranceway from the dining room into the living room; in the second, a lobe reached up the wall onto the ceiling.)  Another favorite is a maroon-and-white op-art tapestry by Victor Vasarely (French/Hungarian, 1906-97).  Both Gilliam and Vasarely are artists my parents liked particularly; they owned three Gilliam works (and, as I recounted, he became a friend) and two Vasarelys, plus a pair of Vasarely “wearable art” cufflinks, Jolie (silver and black enamel, 1988), Mother and I bought for Dad as a gift for his 70th birthday.  (I also own a Gilliam—and I have the Vasarely cufflinks, which Mom gave me after Dad died.  I made a particular point of wearing the jewelry to the 14 November reception at the Kamen Gallery that marked the exhibit’s opening.)

I guess the upshot is that my parents passed on to me an affection for this collection because of the way they brought it together.  I’ve affirmed that my mother and father didn’t buy art because they saw it as an investment; it wasn’t a statement of any kind, either.  It was more than just decorative, pretty things to put around the house or apartment—although it definitely served that purpose as well.  They bought what they truly loved, which is why I found the exhibit title so apt: they undeniably had a passion for art.  But they also developed a love of the process of collecting, going to galleries and museums to see the work of artists, to studios where they met the artists in whom they took an interest, getting to know some along the way.  Art and art-collecting became one of my parents’ greatest pleasures; even though my mother stopped acquiring art after my father’s death, she never stopped enjoying seeing it and being around it.  Mom and Dad went to art museums and galleries almost as far back as I can remember and later took trips, as I’ve noted, expressly to see art and artists.  We always included art museums, especially museums of local art, in our trips in the U.S. and abroad and when Dad died, Mom often saved those kinds of visits for when we visited one another.  She began giving me art as gifts not because it was easier than buying presents, but because she wanted me to have the pieces—and she knew I’d love them, too. 

The collected works had special meaning to Mom because their assembling had been an endeavor she and my father shared.  Each piece reflected something unique.  I have anecdotes about many of the works in the collection—Mom had stories about all of them.  As sentimental as it sounds to articulate it, my parents’ art collection was brought together with love.  More than anything else they left me, the art collection holds the most meaning for me.  In a way, I’m glad I can’t display it in my home.  If I did, no one would see it except me and a few friends and relatives.  On loan to Washington and Lee University, where it can be seen around the campus by students, faculty, and visitors (and W&L is a historic school with a campus designated a National Historic Landmark and renowned as the “most beautiful college campus in America,” so it gets a fair number of visitors), I get to share it with others—even if they don’t actually know why they’re seeing it.  (Pat Hobbs told me before A Passion for Art opened that there was a lot of buzz around the campus and after the reception she confirmed that the attendance was the largest ever in the Kamen Gallery and had included not only faculty and staff, but students and community members as well.  I hope that’s a harbinger of interest to come.)

[I’ve covered art and artists a fair amount on Rick On Theater, including some of the painters and sculptors named above.  Both “Washington Art Matters,” posted on 5 September 2013, and “The Washington School of Color,” 21 September 2014, touched on some of the art history mentioned here as well as several of the artists shown at Gres Gallery and included in my folks’ collection.  Sam Gilliam, who figures in both the general articles, is featured in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011; “Lila Oliver Asher,” 26 September  2014, and “Yayoi Kusama,” 18 May 2017, are profiles of the artists of the titles.  There’s also a report on Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian, a two-part exhibit at the two branches of the National Museum of the American Indian in 2008-09 which I posted on 20 March 2011.]

The Theater Problem in Education

by Robert B. Youngblood

[Bob Youngblood, an emeritus professor at my undergrad alma mater, was one of my German profs and, as he says below, was an avid supporter and participant in the university theater program. Both Bob and our university theater director were new the same semester I started my freshman year, not much older than I was, so we all became friendly even as students and faculty. After I graduated, Bob and Lee Kahn, the director, became more like social acquaintances with common interests than teachers and a former student and we kept in touch all these years. (Lee died at 46 in 1981 but I’m still in touch with his widow.) In one e-mail message Bob sent me, he broached the topic of the disappearance of theater at my alma mater and I published “Disappearing Theater” on ROT on 19 July 2010. “The Theater Problem” is Bob’s view of this same disheartening phenomenon from the inside. ~Rick]

For three decades of my teaching career at Washington and Lee University as a professor of German and Italian, I taught two large literature classes of modern foreign literature in English translation, a component course in those required for graduation. The fall semester course was on modern German literature (from Rainer Maria Rilke to Thomas Bernhard and Ingo Schulze) and the winter semester course was on modern Italian literature (from Giovanni Verga to Antonio Tabucchi and Erri De Luca). The prose portions of the course could usually proceed with surmountable problems. Poetry and drama in both courses, on the other hand, were very bumpy roads indeed. This essay addresses "the theater problem."

It was, of course, my job to teach plays by dramatists that were aesthetically complex and by authors too contemporary for the students even to know their names (plays like Offending the Public by Peter Handke and Ten Rooms by Botho Strauss in German, Emma B. Widow Jocasta by Alberto Savinio and The Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo in Italian, for example). Theater-lover that I am, I relished the task of presenting plays by these and other playwrights. Because I could automatically and rightly assume that every student was a tabula rasa about the plays, performance techniques, and the contemporary theater scenes in Germany and Italy, these modernist/postmodernist playwrights were less of an obstacle to teach . So ultra-modernism wasn't the problem.

What depressed me (and up to retirement brought me close to despondency) was that students, over the years, gradually came to have virtually no background in post-Elizabethan play-reading and had only attended either very few or no plays at all in a theater proper.

Naturally, I didn't expect students, even at our ultra-selective private liberal arts college, to be familiar with the playwrights generally considered the European forerunners of modern drama: Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Chekhov, Wedekind, Pirandello, Shaw, and Brecht. Given, however, the notorious U.S.-centered cultural isolation our students are taught in, I expected most of them to have read or seen Thornton Wilder's Our Town or Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, or failing that, to have heard of at least one play by Eugene O'Neill. In my last teaching years, the only playwright that most students could name or profess familiarity with one or the other of his major plays was (as one might expect) Tennessee Williams. In his case, students were able to name, said they knew about, or had seen (the movie version of) A Streetcar Named Desire.

In response to this distressing situation, I would ask students why they hadn't read or seen canonical plays. Surely their high school put on at least a play a year and they took part in or saw it? Oh yes, they replied, and named musicals that were performed or they took part in! To that, I would ask if they had acted in or seen any of the outstanding musicals like Cabaret, Into the Woods, or Sweeney Todd that consider serious themes and offers intellectual challenges rather than just issue-free entertainment. That question would net me a blank look, but they assured me they knew musicals by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Gershwin Brothers, some of the classics up to the 1950s.

My follow-up question would then be: Why they didn't go to plays. The answers would run along these lines: We live in the suburbs. The theaters are downtown. Plays are at night when downtown is dangerous. We don't go down there. To my follow-up question, what about matinees on the weekend, again no answer. Weekends, as we in the teaching profession know, are for sleeping late and partying. And, given the "stuff" they see on DVDs and TV, to expect them to sit through a play of two or three hours, which has few scene changes and which requires a cerebral commitment, is asking a lot of today's young people. It's all students can do to sit through a lecture of an hour between their cell phone calls and text messages.

But there's film, I would counter. There are lots of plays on film. There are, for example, at least three different film versions of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, that quintessential American play. In response to the word "film," they would tell me how many plays by Shakespeare they had seen in English class. Ah, I thought, here's where they experienced the translation of text into image and sound. It would often turn out, however, that they had only read one complete play by Shakespeare (usually Romeo and Juliet; if a second one, usually Richard III). Frequently they just read extrapolated scenes in class and later watched a film of the play (alas, I can't remember hearing Othello, Julius Caesar, King Lear mentioned).

Given their lack of at least theater attendance, I shouldn't have been disappointed at the following, but invariably was: At least one oral report was required per course; I would suggest the setting of a scene in a play read for a class. Although I would give a verbal example of a scene-setting or diagram one on the blackboard, students would either tell me, to my disappointment, that they were unable or found it very difficult to set or diagram a scene. I expected them to know, but most also didn't, what a sound stage was in movie-making.

Despite the dispiriting, near absence, of theater background that students all too often came to W&L with from high school, this idealistic and theater-passionate instructor threw himself willingly into the breach. His abiding hope was that the plays treated in his courses would at least awaken an interest in theater and prod students to attend performances at W&L. Alas, this was not the case. A colleague who conducted an exiting-senior survey for years found, in the last year he did, that only one third of the senior class had attended a single play at W&L.

I personally had some of my most significant experiences at W&L with colleague-directors in our university theater. I contributed to a contemporary version of Six Characters in Search of an Author, to characterization and Brechtian elements in Saint Joan of the Stockyards, and to a major production of Goethe's Faust (both parts!) which played to virtually full houses. The programming of plays at W&L tried to present at least one representative play from the principle periods in the canon over a student's four years at W&L. Unfortunately, this college has eliminated virtually all play production. The two stages of our impressive and still fairly new performing arts complex were virtually barren of plays. This is not only due to the economic downturn but also because of low student participation in this art form. Up to the last year of performances, W&L wound up playing to primarily non-student audiences.

It comes as no surprise to me that theater in the U.S. has been experiencing a "hard go of it" in the years I've been a witness to the drop-off of live theater experiences and play-reading in our high schools. If, to boot, our colleges aren't educating and producing a new generation of play-going audiences, the future of theater in these altogether troubled United States looks even bleaker still!

[Bob was, as he describes himself, “theater-passionate,” but he doesn’t make his living in the theater, either as an artist or as a teacher, so his lament is perhaps a more unbiased cri than was my own. I could be seen to have had a conflict of interest, an axe to grind—but Bob’s loss is purely from the perspective of someone who loves (and misses) theater and a teacher in a liberal arts college who sees the loss to the students’ fundamental education. His final statement, that “the future of theater in these altogether troubled United States looks even bleaker still” if colleges like W&L stop teaching and presenting theater because we would no longer be “educating and producing a new generation of play-going audiences,” is something that I’ve said myself numerous times. In “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009), I make the same point Bob does in “The Theater Problem,” for instance, but the issue comes up often. It’s shameful, in my view, that arts education at any academic level in this country should become a question of finances or head-count. It’s even worse when the school or the board of ed takes the tack of eliminating theater or other art program in the face of low student turn-out rather than doing everything they can to raise that student interest, promote the arts on campus, and boost the benefits and pleasures of the arts.

[In “Disappearing Theater,” I quoted from a letter George Washington, the principal benefactor of the young Washington Academy (which grew into Washington and Lee University), wrote to the school’s trustees in 1798. The former president of the United States insisted: "[T]o encourage the Arts [has] ever been amongst the warmest wishes of my heart." I’ll also quote another great American, Chester A. Riley (as portrayed on TV by William Bendix): "What a revoltin' development this is!" I say, shame on everyone involved. Discretion may be considered valorous, but cowardice and burying your head in the sand are no virtues. Shame!]

Directing 'Twelfth Night' for Children, Part II

By Kirk Woodward

[The second part of Kirk’s memoir of his work on Twelfth Night for audiences of children in central Virginia concludes the experience. The director completes the rehearsals and describes some of the performances in elementary schools and libraries around Lexington. At the end, Kirk also relates some of the lessons he learned from this work early in his theatrical career.]

May 11

Today Leonard worked with Malvolio individually, and I worked with Viola on being a boy and Feste on constantly being a fool – poses, expressions. Malvolio showed he got the idea of Leonard’s instruction (on which I gave him no advice), but only in spots, to Leonard’s discouragement. Viola, who takes any direction immediately, took to the boy business like a duck to water. She now has a nice first entrance as a boy. She marches out two steps – doesn’t like that kind of walk; marches two more steps, bigger – dejected, doesn’t like that either; then grabs her sword in a huge fighting pose, and freezes. Very funny and touching. Feste said, of his coaching, “I didn’t know if you wanted me to do that kind of thing.” He’ll work on it, I believe; he was a little better tonight.

At the rehearsal tonight I summarized to the cast what Lee had said, and split the group into two: Leonard and all but Feste and Malvolio and I went into the lobby and practiced graceful movement and bows (Leonard worked with Andrew mostly, trying to get him to loosen up). The three of us did the madhouse scene for ½ hour. Then the whole cast worked through the whole play while I stopped them constantly and said things like, “You could bow there, couldn’t you?” “Now add a pretty movement to get from there to there. No, no, pretty.” Some results. Then a refreshment break and a runthrough, up to the last two scenes, which we again didn’t do. It came along decently as a whole.

May 12

Today we met at the church again, and I had an idea which may help a lot. We took separate “bits” and small scenes from the play. With the person(s) on stage doing the scene, everyone else sat at the back of the auditorium and watched and listened. After the scene, I’d say, “React,” and anyone who had a comment would give it; sometimes we’d discuss the comments; and then the whole process would be repeated as many more times as necessary. Hoped-for results were to get the cast to see how much projection and physicalization is necessary to get anything across to an audience, and to draw on everybody’s minds for ways of improving scenes. It looks to me like we really did succeed. (Maria came up to me afterward and said, “Thank you. For the first time I don’t feel like killing myself.” I felt a little the same way.) Scenes became richer in detail and opened up. Three hours of this. Toby resented missing his supper. (I had cookies there, however.) Apparently a good rehearsal. It’s the first thing we’ve done that I’ve been happy about, and the cast seemed to respond. [This is a dangerous technique, because you never want actors to stand outside their roles by judging other actors. However, in this circumstance it helped.]

May 13

Saturday morning rehearsal at 9:00. We did a runthrough, which lacked energy and thought. For example, when Olivia said “Go” to someone, he would get up slowly and saunter toward the door. I gave notes, and then we worked the Viola/Captain scene, the first part of the letter scene, and the Viola/Olivia “’Tis my picture” scene, using yesterday’s methods. A few details were sharpened – suggestions led to the Captain’s being more mercenary, for example.

Leonard knows a lot (witness his very fine work with Malvolio, who is consistent in his physical characterization now) and he’s practical and common sense. I find myself asking his advice constantly, and usually taking it.

May 14

First dress rehearsal. Costumes, which are mostly here, are pretty. So is the set, now complete; I like it a lot. We used make-up; Lee Kahn suggested “heavy and stylized” but it was pretty light tonight. I don’t know the first thing about makeup. I had told Leonard he’d be in charge of it, and somehow I hoped he’d just do it, or someone would, but no one did, so I asked him for suggestions, accepted every one, and they went on that. After the runthrough he told the cast, “Heavier lines on the face.”

The runthrough, lo and behold, was right good. It looks – all of a sudden, it struck me – like a whole show, one we can go with and count on, although nothing like what I originally imagined. There were problems tonight, more in the last scene than elsewhere, so we worked that, punctuating, trying to get openness, clarifying sections, and improving focus of attention. My favorite change was when Viola and Sebastian rush into each others’ arms. I had them run toward each other – stop and look – rush to embrace. It’s much more affecting than before. I tried to get Sebastian to shout “MADAM!” in order to draw attention to himself on his first entrance, but usually he still doesn’t. Then we blocked the curtain call and ran the whole scene without stopping – except the Duke kept breaking up with laughter, so we kept going back to the start of the scene, probably six times, until we finally got through it without anyone’s laughing. An encouraging evening, since a whole show exists and is visible.

Tonight we also changed what Olivia does in the letter scene. Now she and Malvolio stand in ¼ position back to back, she talking and he mouthing the words. It’s much clearer, I think, although Maria says she still doesn’t think it’ll mean anything to the children at all.

May 15

Second dress rehearsal: Sue LaRue had all the costumes completed except Malvolio’s yellow stockings and cross-garters. At 7:00 we began taking photographs. I hoped to take all the shots in 30 minutes; we took exactly an hour longer. A real bore. I made a list of shots to take, but hadn’t thought – have never thought – about photo composition, so they may be good or they may be junk or they may be both. The photographer expected me to know! Depth and variety seem to help make good photos. . . . Then we ran the whole show. It wasn’t as good as last night but it had its points. Most of the problems were technical – for example, Malvolio threw his veil at Olivia; Feste, referring to Viola, pointed at Olivia inadvertently; Malvolio dropped syllables (“Play with some rich Jew” for “jewel”); Olivia, trying to look astonished, looked like she had cramps.

Many words were hard to understand, too. A properly run rehearsal period would teach the cast to discover and correct this sort of problem for itself. We finished about 9:45.

Our crisis for tonight was that Andrew was 45 minutes late for call. When he arrived, he said he’d been apartment hunting and his watch had stopped (he showed me a watch which said 4:10). My first inclination was to replace him in the show with Leonard; and Leonard, although I suppose he didn’t especially want the role (I didn’t tell him he’d have it, but I’m sure he knew), apparently felt we should replace Andrew. I decided to keep him, because of the late date, the photographs, and the cataclysm his replacement would cause the cast; but I told him it was concern for the show, not for him, that saved his hide. He appeared shaken. The cast probably would have been glad to see him replaced, at first; but quickly would have seen how much more they were in for now.

May 16

Final dress rehearsal began at 7:00, with makeup call at 5:30. Maria told us how excited the children were at Glasgow as she told them the story of the play; she said they remembered all the way through who Sebastian was. (We weren’t going to do the play at Glasgow, but because of some scheduling confusion Natural Bridge cancelled out yesterday and Glasgow went in.) I’d asked Betty for some children tonight for an audience, and they were there, but they hardly reacted at all. I thought the performance was mechanical. I told the actors they weren’t listening to each others’ lines, but simply waiting to say their own. They were surprised; they thought they were good tonight. I thought they were dull. Then Feste and Toby worked on the song at the end. Feste speaks it all, because I can’t imagine their working out the singing successfully. I tried to break up his lines for variety. He doesn’t understand the words of the song, and they’re hard to explain. The general problem with rehearsal was that the actors weren’t standing open, but were facing each other and closing themselves off from the audience. The audience tonight came with expectations, but was colossally bored, with some exceptions. We broke up about 8:30, in order to allow sleep for tomorrow. (“Party!” everyone shouted.)

May 17

First performance, at Glasgow. There wasn’t much excitement during makeup, but things went smoothly. The stage at Glasgow is small and the audience only about 150. The set was driven out in an Army 2½-ton truck loaned by VMI for a week along with a Sergeant First Class named Poorboy, who says he doesn’t know much about this Shakespeare. He’s pleasant and although he wasn’t required to, he helped with moving the set. The performance wasn’t bad. The audience cheered for Maria, who’s the school librarian, at the end, but they didn’t react vocally too much during the show. I thought they were watching, though. The cast had expected wall-to-wall tumult (so had I, although Leonard had warned me about that notion – I agreed but didn’t change my tune) and were upset when it wasn’t there. Still I think the cast was pleased, and relieved. It’s sort of a quiet show. It seems to tell the story. (Story outlines had been circulated, so the children knew it anyway. When Feste said, “What do you think? Is her brother really dead?” they said “No!”)

Then we traveled to Fairfield, ‘way on the other side of Lexington, ate outdoors (Betsy Brittigan, that good soul, is providing sandwiches – very tasty), and set up. Then – surprise! – the principal started sending students in early, so the auditorium was filled 20 minutes ahead of schedule, before Sebastian, who had been setting up lights, was even in costume. I’d told the cast that they could play with raising the audience reaction level by varying what they do before the play starts, trying different approaches. They hardly had a chance this time because of the surprise early start; but they did move out into the audience while waiting. The main problem with the performance was that toward the end it became a strain to hear (the auditorium is large), and the audience showed the problem by rustling and talking. The cast was disturbed by the noise; I told them it was simply a problem of intelligibility. When Feste started the Sir Topas routine in a big voice, the noise stopped. Maria’s and Olivia’s voices especially don’t carry well.

Someone at Fairfield asked Olivia today whether Peter Pan would really fly in our production.

Last night Leonard and I decided to have Andrew wrap his head in a bandage for the last scene. Today at the first performance he wore it across his forehead, like a headband. All he needed was a feather to look like an Indian. Leonard and I were as dumb men.

May 18

The Duke slept in this morning; I drove to his house, woke him, lectured him, and drove him back. Later Leonard said he needs a talk generally; he had a separate argument with Leonard; but I haven’t talked to him yet, except for this morning’s remarks.

The 10:00 performance was at Waddell, outside, in their “amphitheater.” The ground was muddy, but the school provided a parachute to walk on. It kept the costumes from being ruined. Lee Kahn warned me yesterday that the set pieces would fly like kites in the first wind if there were no extra weights and braces, but the set carpenter said no. We revised some bits that depended on a proscenium stage, and ran the yellow-stocking scene several times; it picked up some. Malvolio added a new piece of business, in which he sets his leg in Olivia’s lap. The audience was nursery-school through 4th grade. Before the show the cast played Frisbee, also tossing it up to the kids. The performance was good. The actors opened up; they improvised when necessary; and they showed great presence of mind. A dog started chasing actors; Feste chased it off stage, and Leonard calmed it down. The children loved the dog. Then, later, Olivia’s house blew over, not once but twice. The actors picked it up and went on. Audience response extremely warm. After the show, one little girl solemnly insisted on being hugged by Sebastian, who was moved almost to tears. I thought it was their best performance so far. (Leonard said no.) They did too, and attributed the improvement to the audience. I told them not to use the audience as a crutch.

The afternoon performance, after lunch, was at 1:30 at Lylburn-Downing. (The actors were lying down, resting, when the audience started coming in.) Feste keeps improving; he was better this afternoon, using the wide area in front of the stage. It was a good performance, but I thought I detected definite signs of out-and-out ham, and told the cast so, to their surprise. The audience rustled toward the end, but there was a lot of attention, and a good response. Olivia tends to mug a lot when she’s not careful; so does Sebastian. (Toby and Feste do and should.) Viola, Maria, and Malvolio are consistently in character. Andrew hasn’t the foggiest notion of what acting means; he has no ear and no timing and he indicates; he’s my biggest failure. The Duke is becoming melodramatic again.

Touring is a grind. I was exhausted tonight; the cast feels the same.

May 19

Only one performance, at Central. The Duke and Feste were late. Weather rainy. At the school, the principal turned out to be most unpleasant; he hadn’t wanted Olivia’s special education class from the high school to watch – “they’d better be quiet;” he told someone (we heard) that if he’d known seats had to be set up for the show (in the lunchroom/auditorium) he’d never have allowed the show to come to the school; and he gloomed at everyone. A real Malvolio. On the basis of a probably unfounded rumor that this man had once banned Purlie Victorious because it included the word “damn,” and over cast protests, I instructed our group to change our two “hell’s” to “Hades”. . . . I told them the children deserved every moment of pleasure we could give them, under circumstances like this. . . . The children in the audience were pretty rustic, and Betty and Betsy, who saw the performance, were upset by the noise they made, but I didn’t think they were any more unruly than the performance called for, especially since cues were sloppy and the end of the show was style-less and dragged. I told the cast this afterward; they were slightly surprised. I also told them that their moving through the audience before the play started was dull and not attractive, and I told them their cue pickup, from the yellow-stocking scene on, was awful, which it is. The audience seemed to like the play, I thought. (A later report I heard from a teacher indicated the younger children liked it more.)

May 21

For a 3:00 show, call was 1:30. The Duke was 10 minutes late; Leonard told him, and the Duke said so what? “What kind of attitude is that?” said Lee Kahn sharply. The Duke shrugged and went on. The performance was at the Troubadour Theater. We debated whether or not to do the whole in-the-audience routine (since it would be a partly-adult audience), and whether or not to leave the house lights on. To the first, Leonard said “yes,” so we did. For the second, Olivia’s and Maria’s pleas influenced me perhaps more than they should have; at any rate, we turned the lights out when the show started. I made a half-hearted little speech before everyone went downstairs, and debated aloud with myself about how to end the curtain call. (“Let’s not change anything now!” Olivia said.) The audience was mostly adult, but some kids. Toby almost began the show early, on what he thought were instructions from me. (I’m always assuming I’ve explained something when I haven’t.) I didn’t watch the performance except for peeking a little through the lobby door. I gather that Andrew fell off the stage at first; that the audience picked up sexual innuendos and plot twists that child audiences had never reacted to; and that the cast as a whole became sloppy and hammed it up a lot. I said this last to Viola afterward, when asked, and she was shocked, so perhaps she wasn’t sloppy (the word was Leonard’s), but the others seemed to think they were.

Some people in the audience liked the play a lot and a few didn’t. Applause at the end was long. I thought the cast seemed to be working consciously on cue-pickup today.

May 22

Two shows today; an early call. I got the Duke up at 6:30 myself, on request. Some groggy people. Neither Andrew nor the Duke had any sleep at all to speak of last night. We drove to Brownburg, a little school in a little town in a beautiful rolling part of the valley. After we were set up, we sat on the grass and rested; it was a high-point. The performance, when it started, had spurts of energy. At one point Maria kicked Andrew when he wouldn’t hide behind the wall fast enough to suit her. There may have been some personal motivation to the kick, too. The yellow stocking scene was limp and unfunny. The audience laughed often during the play, all the way to the end; curiously, the cast couldn’t hear the laughter, and thought the audience might have disliked them. Afterwards they signed thousands of autographs. Then I gave notes. I told them their performances were solid at the center but contracting around the edges, as though they were saving their best for some other time; as a result many routines, for example, the fight, weren’t as funny as they had been. I told Olivia she was the problem in the yellow stocking scene, since she wasn’t showing any real alarm at Malvolio’s behavior; and that cue pick-up was the other problem.

Then we ate on the lawn, and drove to Goshen, 15 miles away. Goshen’s audience was receptive too. There were some signs of boredom in the audience in the middle of the play. The last scene was extremely interesting. The first part of it, up to “I am Viola!”, was the best they’ve done it; fine listening and reacting. Then the scene immediately began to drag, and continued to do so until “. . . ‘tis Maria’s hand,” when Maria began a long laugh which sounded like it came from the Wicked Witch of the West. This baffled the cast so much that Malvolio forgot to do a whole piece of movement at the end of the show – fortunately not business that the audience would notice. Again, many autographs at the end. I gave Andrew a note – pick up his cues in the first scene – but otherwise gave none. Viola says she’s certain she’s going stale, becoming dull. “I keep trying to change it,” she says. (She appears remarkably consistent.)

May 23

Last show. 11:30 call; many people late. I talked to one actor about another one – something I should never do. We drove to Effinger School, eight miles out, ate, and set up in a rather leisurely fashion. I gave a short note beforehand about not doing any amateurish last-show stunts during performance; I don’t think this group would have in any case; at any rate, they didn’t. The audience wanted action, and tended to be restive in the talky scenes; but the long section of the play from the yellow stocking scene to the madhouse scene was excellent – the best they’ve done it. In the madhouse scene something happened which I should have foreseen, since I saw exactly the same thing occur with David Semonin’s Winnie the Pooh in Louisville this spring. When Malvolio stared ahead of him, indicating that he was in a different place from Feste, the audience followed his gaze to see what he was looking at. They expected someone else to run down the aisle. This wasn’t a problem until Malvolio began doing the scene with some conviction (only the last couple of shows). Leonard recommended a long time ago that we make a simple set of bars for Malvolio to carry out and sit behind; this would have solved the problem; but I didn’t take his advice.

After the curtain call, when the actors went into the audience, the children sat and watched instead of getting up; and they didn’t leave until the principal told them they could. Feste, however, did lead a row or two around.

Tonight was the cast party. The producers and the ladies who’d done costumes and music were very happy. The cast seemed relieved to be through, and pleased with themselves. And that was that.

OBSERVATIONS

1. The first several rehearsal days should have been spent reading the script while standing, and discussing it. (There was plenty of time in that rehearsal period for anything we wanted to do.)
2. Projection exercises should have been included from the first.
3. I failed to work hard enough. I was unprepared, and as a result the things I could have the actors do were limited.
4. On the other hand, experience is important. As I said to Lee Kahn, inexperienced directors often spend their time telling their actors to fly – because they don’t know how else to reach the results they want.
5. Although group-direction is not the only method of directing, or necessarily the best, it does seem that it can pay dividends, given a thorough knowledge on the director’s part of the play and of group-direction methods, and given the director’s ability to try other approaches when appropriate. It stands to reason that a director who aims for spontaneity and creativity, freshness, awareness, and energy in performance, will aim for those same qualities in rehearsal. In our production, growth was stymied – growth of scenes (a good routine or feeling would barely begin before it ended) and of the actors.
6. Still our production contained many good things – Toby’s clowning, Feste’s energy, Viola’s luminous and touching unsentimental character, Malvolio’s surprising dignity, Andrew’s fencing gesture, Maria’s determination, Olivia’s perfectly wonderful comic pathos (perhaps my favorite of all). The audiences were moved by the brother/sister reconciliation. We never had a bum performance, and a week or so into May we started working together. All these things are worthy, and I’m grateful for them.

Directing 'Twelfth Night' for Children, Part I

By Kirk Woodward

[In 1972, after he’d returned to the states from military duty in Korea, Kirk went back to Lexington, Virginia, home of our alma mater (which provided the Troubadour Theatre for rehearsals), to direct a children’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Kirk assembled a memoir of the experience from letters, notes, and recollections. ~Rick]

[The material that follows is selected from a larger document. My thanks to the many people who contributed to this production, and who helped save my bacon as a fledgling director, all those years ago. Lee Kahn, referred to several times, was the director of the theater program at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. —KW]

April 20

Tonight the new cast of Twelfth Night met at 7:00 PM. I passed around the copies of the adaptation I had written, intended to make the play accessible for children, although I hadn’t included any modern dialogue except for transitional speeches for Feste.

I welcomed everyone, and told them the project was exciting because it was a new script and because it would tour elementary schools in Lexington and the surrounding area. I said the cast will have to create its own movement because it will have to know what is involved in doing the show in different playing areas. We discussed schedule conflicts, and I made notes on them. Then we read the play aloud. I asked them not to put emotion into the reading, but to read as they would a newspaper, since characterization will have to come from interaction on stage. The reading made my original dialogue sound awful – I suppose it is. Along the way we discussed obscure transitions, obscure lines, and the possibility of modernizing archaic speech. I told them I was delighted to have them all in the cast, but wanted to know immediately if anyone felt he or she wasn’t really willing to put out the necessary work on the show. We discussed – rather, I talked about – the difficulties the play presented, and the necessity of making it clear enough for a deaf man to understand. It seemed like a pretty good session, although I didn’t try too hard to cover the fact that I have next to no idea how anything will be done. A good cast, and I tried to provide some excitement in attitude. Will try more on that line. Exercises tomorrow night.

April 21

Tonight’s rehearsal was intended for exercises; but there was a concert at school at 8:00, 3 actors were missing, and I didn’t feel like working anyway, so we only did 45 minutes of work. We did the storytelling exercise: a person casts the story and then tells it, and the actors have to do only what he tells them. It’s supposed to teach physicalization, but I suppose it was too abrupt a choice to succeed; the actors said they would rather have had an exercise where they all had to work at once. I see their point. I found myself constantly trying to assert my superiority and leadership, especially against Toby (I’ll refer to the performers by their character names), who’s a natural actor, a ham, and a leader. Insecurity on my part. I was glad when the session was finished. . . . Also, I talk too much about my aims, and of course have little idea what to do about reaching them. . . . Exercises can’t be used tactlessly.

April 24

First working rehearsal. This afternoon I spent time writing out the play’s major problems (I thought of fourteen) and looking over the script. Fixed dinner and ate. Looked at the clock, discovered it was 7:00 – rehearsal time. And I told the actors always to come early! Horrors. Mad dash. I was late.

I had no blocking worked out. We did selected scenes, so not everyone would have to be present. Putting that all together may be confusing. The procedure was to read once through; then to read again, while I stopped them and gave blocking; then to do the scene again, completely. Big, big problem: I tried to say too much on the first night, when they don’t even have characters in mind, much less characterizations. That’s something I’ve always hated in other directors. I was actually letting the actors do characterizations – much too early. Tonight I’ll stop doing that, and I’ll also mention to them that I realize now what I was doing. . . . I was excited; that’s why I said too much.

April 25

Had a session with Malvolio at 3:00. He read the garden/letter scene. I had him read it several times, each time visualizing in as much detail as possible, and each time increasing the physicalization of the visualization. That last part didn’t work; he barely moved. Maybe he’s not a mover. Then we did the “cakes and ale” scene, and I asked him questions leading to his adoration of Olivia, and his social position. The difficulty here was, I’m afraid I led him too much toward intellectualizing. Results, as a whole: not significant.

The Duke tried, not too hard, to contact me this afternoon; I suppose he was going to tell me he couldn’t come tonight; at any rate, he didn’t come. And this evening I got a call from Olivia, who said a friend of hers was having a nervous breakdown (she herself was crying) and that she’d come in if he fell asleep. I told her not to come. So we were minus two. I told the cast about the opening scene of the play: all the actors on stage, each one talking to everyone else and feeling affection for each other. The affection is the point. They faked it. (. . . Several days later, Maria said, “How do you expect us to feel affection for each other when we don’t even know each other?”) We blocked the first scene. I found myself not being clear about where a movement came in the script, or where a certain place was. Also, I didn’t tell the people who were blocking for the first night where houses, etc, were. Then, after another scene, we did the fight scene, which when I first blocked it was disastrously confusing. I changed it several ways; nothing worked at all. Finally I suggested a break which lasted ten minutes. We talked about the scene during the break. Somebody had an idea, somebody else had another. We tried them onstage; I changed a few things, and it finally looked all right. Finis.

April 26

This afternoon I had an afternoon session with Sir Andrew. He hasn’t done much acting, is scared, and constantly makes smart-ass wise cracks. I tried to point out an “internal” side of acting. I had him choose an age – he chose 40, about two decades above his own age – and show me his age, while waiting for a bus at the bus stop. Then I had him simply sit and concentrate on the age, and nothing else. It worked well; he had moments of really looking 40 through his body in the second part of the exercise. Then I had him relax completely and imagine how it would be barely to be able to move at all. Some success with this too. He’s to practice the age concentration using Andrew’s age, every night before rehearsal. The session may not improve his acting but it slowed him down a little.

Tonight’s rehearsal was a real embarrassment for me. We were going to do the last scene, where everyone comes onstage and discovers everyone else. I hadn’t thought much about it and my improvised blocking was an obvious failure before we were halfway through. I stopped the scene there and sent everybody home except Malvolio, Feste, Olivia, Viola, and the Duke. We did the other scenes in which they hadn’t been blocked yet; they were easy. Out by 8:30, to my great chagrin. It’s a SIN that I didn’t know what I was doing.

Tomorrow will be rough. We’ll have to put the whole show together; also, I have a production meeting, for which I’m not yet prepared.

The Duke is interesting; he plays with great melancholy and pathos. “I want to cry,” Viola said after a Duke scene. Will have to change his course, though; his pathos is dreary and boring, and will be especially so to a child audience.

April 27

First a private session with Feste. I had him do his opening speech, first normally, then in gibberish, several times. He did loosen up and expand some, but he still doesn’t talk directly to his listeners; he sounds stagy. With both him and Malvolio, the need is to overcome inhibitions about big movements, to expand and spread out.

For rehearsal we went straight through the show, leaving out bits that hadn’t been blocked yet. Before that we played the entrance/exit game, equivalent to a relay, where you run, touch a point, hurry back, and pass the baton or whatever to the next person. (The first time we used pigment jars, which got all over everyone’s hands and clothes.) Then we did it walking. They weren’t very good at it, although it’s simple. The object of the game is to build awareness of the moment when you come on stage, the moment when you go off, and the relation of others on stage to those moments; but here it’s a flop. . . . Then we blocked the last scene, better, but now there’s not much movement: Viola and the Duke on one side, Olivia and, eventually, Sebastian on the other side; everyone else in the middle.

After going through the show, we took a break; Maria’s dog was hit by a car in that time, hurting his leg, so she went off to the vet; and Feste left to drive to Washington and take a dental exam. The rest of us did several other scenes, singing them. This is supposed to loosen up the actors and give them new perspectives on the show. Occasionally I thought it seemed to help a little. It was fun, anyway. . . . Toby especially has an inventive mind.

April 28

Rehearsal today was interesting. I had the cast (minus Feste) stretch; stretch the mouth and tongue; and sing “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee” twice for projection. Then I had them surround Malvolio and do the kind of sounds and the movements Malvolio might experience after a long confinement. I hope to work this into a routine in the madhouse scene. Then Toby, Maria, Andrew, Sebastian went outside and worked out their own version of the fight scene, while I worked with the rest on Visualizing the Set (a description of the surroundings as they would appear to the characters). I don’t know if this achieved anything at all. Why do it at just this moment? Pretty arbitrary. Then I worked with the Duke/Viola first scene, but didn’t get the energy or drive I wanted at all. The Duke is deep in his melancholy. Then the fight group did their scene on stage; it is pretty good, involving a lot of nose-tweaking. Then we ran the play through from page 8 to the end, skipping the madhouse scene. A lot of the dialogue is terrible, and a lot of the blocking is awful. They will have to fix it themselves - which they should have been led to do from the first, if I wasn’t going to be any better prepared to give them blocking. I plan to figure out just what to do, during this weekend. Session with Malvolio Monday at 1:00; with Viola and the Duke at 4:30 Monday. The costume lady and I have been trying to meet with the cast ever since the production meeting. Today she was late.

April 30

Our little show is so far nothing but vague. It doesn’t look like anything; it doesn’t sound like anything; and it has no heart. We have 2½ weeks to correct the situation; and at the end of 1½ weeks it has to be set. Also, it’s probably too short – half an hour when it should be 50 minutes.

The basic problem, I think, is that I lost my nerve at first and didn’t let the cast shape the show by itself. Of course it looks like shit! I’ve known for a long time that actors’ contributions can add up to more than direction imposed on them. So the show has no style. (Not that group development is the only way! But it might have had a chance here.)

May 1

At 1:00 I worked with Malvolio on the VMI parade ground (to open him up some). I told him to rewrite words he didn’t like; to make transitions clearer; and to make gestures larger and more precise. We spent the whole hour on his “letter” speech; tonight, at rehearsal, when we did that scene, it became clear that he’d spent several more hours working on it. Good for him. A nice job. I wanted astonishment from him, though, as he reads the forged letter; it’s still not really there. At 4:30, Viola, the Duke, and I went on the campus lawn and did their two scenes in modern language. I had notions of using the new dialogue in the show, but didn’t like it so well tonight. At any rate, it helped them discard their sadness and pathos and reach some new energy, which was all to the good. Of course the actors were playing Bright Young People, not the Duke and Viola.)

At rehearsal, three people were late, and I was severe; later I yelled at people several times, mostly for fooling around and/or breaking character. We managed to get through page 9 – halfway. Some scenes improved. The actors still don’t feel very involved, and often don’t have much to do. I let Maria, Toby, and Andrew work out a party scene and piece of movement on their own and then added it. Viola and the Duke were both much better. I worked a little at the end with Andrew; I told him his character should be played as deaf and stiff. But by that time I was too tired to hope, even, to accomplish much. One good thing I did was to bring refreshments for the break. They loved that.

May 2

Tonight we rehearsed at the Presbyterian Church auditorium in the middle of town. It’s a small stage, like many of the ones we’ll be working on. I read the play aloud and thought about it some in the afternoon, but, as it turns out, I still have no conception of what it really means to work on a play, and to transfer that work effectively to something the cast does. It was a rugged rehearsal, grim in mood, and nothing seemed to work. For example, my idea to have a sort of surreal dance number as a way of getting Malvolio on stage for the madhouse scene didn’t go anywhere – it would take someone who knew how to get movement from his actors, and was getting it all along, to make it work. My conception and execution were vague and therefore failed. At the end, I sat everyone down and asked them what they thought. There were suggestions: keep everyone on the stage all the time (we’ll try it); more transitions for Feste. Everyone left feeling sorry for me and for the show; I know I did.

May 3

This was an afternoon rehearsal (later Lee Kahn told me he never schedules afternoon rehearsals except on weekends). It seemed to go better than yesterday’s. We tried the sitting at the side of the stage; it looked clumsy because people sat until the moment they had to go on (except Malvolio, who tried to make it work; he was big on the idea in the first place); it wasn’t controlled, and looked funny. . . . Used the set tonight for the first time. It’s simple; I like it.

May 4

2:00, session with Andrew, trying to build his military bearing, an idea which occurred to me two nights ago. Some small success – but is it hard to get him to think in terms of the stage! I intended for the cast to play the music within the play themselves, so at 3:45 Feste and, eventually, Maria had recorder lessons, and afterwards Feste and I talked through some more transitions and wrote them down. At 6:00 we rehearsed the scene where Malvolio comes cross-gartered to Olivia; it had been a real bore, but the group changed some things and livened it up a lot. They were so encouraged, in fact, that they wanted to spend more time on each scene in that way. I told them the reason the scene came around was that they found sources for energy within the scene – which I think is right. But we haven’t worked on specific scenes enough, it’s true.

Then at 7:00 we began to work through the whole play. I stopped them sometimes, and occasionally gave notes, but mostly there was too much wrong to stop. After a break, we did the whole play without breaks. It ran 32 minutes. 32 minutes!!! 15 minutes too short. How embarrassing! Now what do we do? Cast wasn’t thrilled with what they saw, either. I gave some notes, and then let everybody go except the people in the first Andrew/Toby/Maria/Feste scene, who were all about to drop from exhaustion by this time – but we worked their first routine once.

May 7

Today I added about a page and a half of additional dialogue. We put the lines in at the theater – some mutters and groans – worked through about 2/3 of the show, and then moved outdoors to Waddell School for a run-through, which was OK. It’s awfully late to be adding dialogue, which illustrates the fact that I didn’t struggle with the adaptation nearly enough before rehearsals started. I should at least have known how long it took to read it aloud. Then, the additions were easy to find; the scenes begged for them. I’d cut too close.

May 8

This afternoon provided one of those curious, accidentally, fortuitous events. As I walked into the theater, I overheard Sebastian and Toby discussing the play. They sounded unhappy and concerned, although practical rather than dejected. I shut the door loudly and walked in as if I’d just arrived, and got them to tell me what they’d been talking about. They suggested that the beginning of the show was confusing. (While Feste speaks, the people in both houses go to the doors, and look out, as if at a storm. Viola and the captain do their first scene in the aisle.) As a result of our talk I made a new beginning to the show, which we introduced tonight (at the church auditorium). The new introduction adds the “If music be the food of love” speech, puts all the speaking on the stage, and cuts out the rain-and-storm business I had in at first. Also, we added a start to each scene where the actors take a pose and freeze, Feste plays a short cue on the recorder, and the scene begins. Toby, who gave most of the advice, was good about it; so was Sebastian; they were trying to help. I had enough sense to be grateful, and to take nearly all their advice. The whole show has been moving away from my vague original notions and in the direction of greater simplicity of staging. Sebastian also suggested that, in the last scene, Viola wouldn’t leave her brother to go to the Duke as soon as she does now; but I’m wary of that, since that last scene is hard to block. . . . We worked through all the changes and transitions, and then did a runthrough, which was ho‑hum okay.

May 9

Afternoon rehearsal at the theater. We worked the long 3rd-from-last scene, then did a runthrough which lots of people watched, including, crucially, Lee Kahn. “They’re not open,” he said; “they can’t be heard. Your show’s not spoken. My second point is related to that: they’re doing it representationally, not presentationally. The word is style. This play is romantic as hell. I don’t know if it’s too late for you to work on that. Try telling them to imagine doing it with a flourish – if you want. Get those girls into costumes as soon as you can. They all walk like droopy boys. . . . I enjoyed the rehearsal very much.” Leonard Darby, our new stage manager, who was seeing the show for the first time, said, “It was dull.” The cast seemed fairly pleased with themselves, however, I think because they’re starting to see a whole show. Lee Kahn’s comments shook me to my shoes. They crystallized what I said earlier about the show’s not looking or sounding like anything – and he put it in theatrical terms.

May 10

Evening rehearsal. I talked about projecting and about Romantic style. Then we worked slowly through the play up to the madhouse scene, and then ran it through that far. Working it, I tried to get bigger speech (without much success, apparently; people in the audience said they still couldn’t understand much of the dialogue) and bows, sweeps, and flowing crosses. Olivia has little “feminine” grace. We kept saying a dress would help her, but when she finally wore one for the runthrough, she moved exactly the same, making tiny swishes while holding the skirt with one hand. Her voice, also, has a whining quality. Maria didn’t change much at all; her voice is pitched high, and on one level, and she can hardly be heard. Viola also is often indistinct, and I have to work with her tomorrow on moving like a boy, which she doesn’t do at all yet (as Lee pointed out), not because she can’t but because I never told her to. (“I was worried about that,” she said anxiously tonight. A sweet girl.) Malvolio lacks any distinctive movement style, and often stands or walks in a slovenly way. Toby is OK. Feste hardly ever varies his body position; he doesn’t look like a fool, ever; must work with him on that tomorrow too. The Duke was nervous and upset last night for external reasons; he left the stage in the middle of the runthrough, to our great astonishment, to get a cigarette and ask how the show was going. Leonard and I yelled at him, “Get back there!” and he went. Sebastian/Captain is so-so. Andrew started picking up the romantic movement idea, and at the end of his “challenge” speech gave me my first moment of delight of the rehearsal period by adding to his “Andrew – Aguecheek!” a beautiful fencing gesture – left arm and sword out, right arm curled above his head. During the runthrough the cast was dead tired, and it showed. During notes I used Andrew’s gesture as an example of what the whole play needs. (But he’s still the weakest link.)

[Kirk’s experience directing a children’s version of Twelfth Night continues in Part II of his memoir. Come back to ROT in a few days to read about the final days of the project and what Kirk took away from it.]