"Presidents at the Theater"

by Rebecca Ritzel

[Now seems an auspicious moment to republish the article below, “Presidents at the Theater.”  Last Tuesday, 14 April, was the 150th anniversary of the night that Pres. Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot at Ford’s Theatre by actor John Wilkes Booth.  (Lincoln died in the house across Northwest 10th Street early the next morning.)  Fortunately for us, not to mention theatergoing presidents, sudden death has not commonly been the final act of attendance at a play (though some few may have felt like it was).  The impetus for this Washington Post feature on presidents who went to the theater was the visit of former Pres. Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, to Washington’s Arena Stage for a performance of the new play by Lawrence Wright, Camp David, about his hosting the historic peace conference with Israeli Prime Minster Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Pres. Anwar Sadat in 1978.  (I’ve also appended another brief report on the Carters’ visit to the theater and the review of the play, just to complete the record.)

[This article was published in the Washington Post’s “Style” section on Wednesday, 2 April 2014.]

Backstage: Jimmy Carter, a longtime theater fan, to attend world premiere of ‘Camp David’

Thursday night in Southwest Washington, former president Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, will file through security checks and take their seats at Arena Stage for the red-carpet world premiere of a new play, “Camp David.” For Washingtonians who have become accustomed to presidential theatergoing amounting to the Kennedy Center Honors and an occasional date night in New York, seeing a president at a local theater may come as something of a shock.

But those who remember the Carter administration will smile knowingly and nod. Of course President Carter is going to Arena Stage. President Carter was a theater guy. He wouldn’t miss this premiere for the world, although maybe for world peace.

Although he was in office for just four years, Carter holds the record for the most trips to the Kennedy Center by a sitting president, with 28. He remains the only president to ever attend a play by Eugene O’Neill, and his idea of entertaining foreign dignitaries was inviting everyone from opera star Beverly Sills to a children’s theater troupe to come sing show tunes at the White House.

“Carter is easily in the top six or seven of the theatergoing presidents,” said Thomas A. Bogar, a retired history professor based in Silver Spring who wrote the 2006 book “American Presidents Attend the Theatre.”

Not since Woodrow Wilson had an American president gone to the theater so regularly — once a month his first year in office.

“Carter, compared to many other presidents, went to the theater more for genuine appreciation and intellectual stimulation,” Bogar said. “He had eclectic taste, and such a wide appreciation for all the different genres of theater.”

Less than a month after the Carters moved to Washington, the peanut-farmer-in-chief made a spur-of-the-moment decision to catch “Madame Butterfly” at the Kennedy Center one day after church. He caused a commotion when he and Rosalynn showed up in the presidential box with their pastor, daughter Amy and several other friends in tow. They stayed for all three hours and headed backstage afterward.

By contrast, Gerald Ford’s last operatic outing ended with the president and his entourage leaving the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “La Boheme” at intermission. Carter’s enthusiasm caught the press corps off guard, but soon photographers realized they were tailing a president who relished a weekend matinee or a night on the town.

As he did research, Bogar exchanged letters with Carter several times. “I am usually overwhelmed by a great performance,” Carter wrote in one note to Bogar, “and I consider it an honor to meet the artists.”

Carter made a point of seeing nearly every pre-Broadway tryout that came through Washington, and the District’s theaters hosted several during his term. Of the musical “Annie,” Carter said, “There’s no doubt in my mind that it will be completely successful.” But his taste ran the gamut, and when he went backstage to meet John Lithgow after a performance of O’Neill’s drama “Anna Christie,” the president informed the actor he had read the script in advance and accused Lithgow of ad-libbing a peanut joke.

Liv Ullmann, Lithgow’s co-star, was one of many actors who was invited to the White House after receiving a backstage handshake. Another was the British actor Ian McKellen, who came to Washington as the star of a pre-Broadway tuneup for Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus.” The dark comedy about Mozart and his rival Antonio Salieri was the first show the Carters saw after he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, an actor who wouldn’t venture out to the theater nearly as often.

McKellen said Carter’s loss cast a pall over the production, which began previews at the National Theatre on election night. “Washington was rather distraught,” the actor said. (McKellen shared this story with The Washington Post in January, after he recorded voice-overs for the Olney Theatre’s production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”)

Carter “came backstage afterwards, and he asked me if I thought ‘Amadeus’ would be suitable for his young daughter, and I said, ‘I don’t know, you should judge that, but I think people should go to the theater at as early an age as possible,’ ” McKellen recalled. Amy Carter, 13 at the time, came a few nights later and enjoyed the show. McKellen was then invited to the White House, along with his friend Angela Lansbury, who was in town starring as Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd.”

“So the two of us had the tour. It didn’t end in the Oval Office — it began in the Oval Office, and then it went to even more special places,” McKellen said. The president did “his work in a little office down the corridor. It had a real log fire burning, and a view of the Washington Monument. . . . He had three books on his desk: one was the Bible, one was a biography of the current pope, and one was collected poetry of Dylan Thomas.”

Carter’s visit to Arena Stage to see “Camp David” will be a first by any president. Other local theaters, including Ford’s and Shakespeare, have hosted presidents in the past, and one possible — yet unconfirmed — explanation is that before the renovation, Arena Stage had too many entrances to be properly secured. The new play by Lawrence Wright stars Richard Thomas as Carter, Hallie Foote as Rosalynn and Ron Rifkin as Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

“It is going to be interesting what Carter’s perception of Richard Thomas is. The resemblance is so striking, the youth and the energy is there,” Bogar said.

One critical matter that’s far easier to speculate on: that Carter will probably want to meet the actors, because of all recent presidents, Bogar says, it is Carter who best understands the very fine line between acting as a president and playing the role of commander in chief on the world’s stage.

[Ritzel is a freelance writer.

[Camp David by Lawrence Wright. Directed by Molly Smith. Through May 4 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW. Tickets, $75-$120.]

*  *  *  *
JIMMY CARTER’S EMOTIONAL NIGHT AT ‘CAMP DAVID’
by Liz Seymour

[This article was posted on the Washington Post's website on 4 April 2014; http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/wp/2014/04/04/jimmy-carters-emotional-night-at-camp-david.]

Richard Thomas as Jimmy Carter and Ron Rifkin as Menachem Begin in Camp David at Arena Stage. (Photo by Teresa Wood)

It doesn’t happen every day — not even when you’re a former president. But from Row F at the Arena Stage Thursday evening and in the midst of a star-studded Washington crowd, former President Jimmy Carter was given a rare glimpse of himself and his presidency during the premier of “Camp David.”

The new play revisits the 13 days of negotiations in 1978 that led to an accord between Egypt and Israel. But it was the first time a president and his wife came to the Arena, said Molly Smith, the theater’s artistic director and the play’s director. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, watched themselves portrayed on stage as two of the four main characters. Journalists and politicians, including Andrea Mitchell, Bob Schieffer, Chris Matthews, Judy Woodruff, Nancy Pelosi and former Congressman Dan Glickman flooded the audience.

When the 90-minute performance ended and the cast received a standing ovation, the Carters did too. Then they were escorted to the stage to embrace the actors (Richard Thomas of the Waltons and Hallie Foote) who played them. All four became emotional on stage. Earlier the former president and his wife were feted at a dinner of rack of lamb and lemon meringue tart in Arena’s smaller Kogod Cradle stage.

[While not a presidential playgoer, another contemporary figure of prominence is the subject of a production at Arena this season.  Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia is the main character in John Strand’s The Originalist, which opened in the Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle at Arena on 6 March and is scheduled to close on 31 May.  Washington’s splendid actor Edward Gero (see my reports on Amadeus, 6 July 2011, and Red, 4 March 2012) portrays Scalia, who never committed to going to see the performance.  I know of no report that he has to date.]

*  *  *  *
LAWRENCE WRIGHT'S PROMISING BUT STILTED PLAY 'CAMP DAVID' TRACKS 1978 MIDEAST PEACE TALKS
by Peter Marks

[The following review was posted on the Washington Post's website on 6 April 2014; http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/lawrence-wrights-promising-but-stilted-play-camp-david-tracks-1978-mideast-peace-talks/2014/04/06/e0d71ad6-bd4f-11e3-9ee7-02c1e10a03f0_story.html.]

In one of the best scenes of “Camp David,” the alternately talky and affecting new play at Arena Stage about the 13 grueling days of negotiations that led to the Middle East’s most durable peace treaty, President Jimmy Carter takes Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin on a class trip of sorts to Gettysburg, Pa.

At the site of one of America’s bloodiest battles — and Abraham Lincoln’s greatest speeches — the three leaders at last can focus on something other than their rote, self-serving agendas. It’s on this field of grief and carnage that these men who’ve known war become reflective about suffering and what they’ve learned from it. And as Begin starts to speak the words of the Gettysburg Address, and Carter joins in, and then Sadat, you can be excused for choking up at the kumbaya affirmativeness of the interlude — the emotion released at watching these figures grope their way to common ground.

Lawrence Wright’s play, receiving its world premiere at Arena’s Kreeger Theater under Molly Smith’s direction, is engrossing at these moments, because it’s not just reciting history or framing the debate; it’s also showing us how to understand why intractable adversaries might have lowered their guards, gazed at their bitterest enemy and begun to conceive of a way forward.

It’s also the sort of illuminating scene the play needs more of. Because when “Camp David” is chronicling the agonizing, two-steps-forward-one-step-back pace of geopolitical dealmaking, the drama tends to mirror actual events too authentically. It becomes a slog. And in its meticulous effort to reveal the singular achievement of those 13 days, it aspires to be more than that.

The characters with all the speaking roles in “Camp David” are the major players in the events of September 1978, when an American president went to the extraordinary length of sequestering himself with two intransigent leaders in the mountains of Maryland, with the intention of working out the details of peace, man to man to man. The actors form an impressive roll call: Richard Thomas is Carter, Ron Rifkin plays Begin, Egyptian film star Khaled Nabawy portrays Sadat and Hallie Foote is Carter’s first lady, Rosalynn.

Wright, a widely traveled, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has created for them identities that are limited in the personality department. You sense the actors’ struggle — especially in the cases of Thomas and Foote — to project something more complex about these world-class newsmakers than the one admirable attribute propelling the evening, namely their desire to bring tranquil security to the Holy Land. Perhaps some of the apparent tightness onstage had to do with the fact that on this night, the audience included the Carters, along with a slew of other well-known Washington faces, onetime Carter aides and current members of Congress and TV journalists. It can’t be relaxing, practicing that Jimmy Carter high-beam smile for Jimmy Carter. In any event, this worthwhile play cries out for some shift in its priorities. It needs to become a bit more about the people and less about the process.

You crave more, too, for Rifkin and Nabawy to chew on, for Wright to loosen his strong journalistic grip on the material, to give us more of the dramatist’s poetic view and less evidence of the astute researcher. Both actors are very good at embodying the wiliness and steel of politicians callused by suspicion and the anxiety that blinking first might hold dire consequences, but also the worry that failing to seize the moment might be just as dangerous. Smith seems content here to rely on the actors’ considerable charisma to carry the story, and that works, up to a point. Rifkin expertly calls up Begin’s stoic resolve, while Nabawy impressively summons Sadat’s canny bonhomie. Even in these private talks, however, we see little of anything but the public men. (Giving them no confidantes other than the Carters — both had entourages at Camp David — proves theatrically constricting.)

The images of these leaders, engaged in a civil battle of wills amid the trees and cabins of Walt Spangler’s rustic set, reinforce one of the more hopeful takeaways from the play: that government can be a mechanism for good. In its references to Palestinian autonomy, Jewish settlements in lands Israel conquered in the 1967 war and Israel’s quest to dwell within safe borders, the play reminds us that the world still lives with issues left unresolved at Camp David. But unlike, say, the relentlessly negative view of Washington spread by the hit Netflix series “House of Cards,” this play suggests that it’s possible in American politics to want to do something other than help oneself.

The play’s biggest problem is turning that impulse into a consistently lively 100 minutes or so of exposition. The progress of these delicate negotiations would, of course, have to be frustratingly stop and start. Still, the scenes in which Begin and Sadat are seated in patio chairs, asserting and reasserting their countries’ grievan­ces and demands, while the referee president coaxes and cajoles, become a little monotonous. It’s not only the combatants who are relieved when Foote’s Rosalynn materializes amusingly from her cabin at just the right moment with a tea service and encouraging words.

Rosalynn makes so clear she doesn’t want to intrude that we become aware of a slyly opposite intent: Her genteel attentions are part of the diplomatic ballet. If anything, more of Rosalynn is needed in the play, and not just as sympathetic ear for her idealistic, spiritual husband, who addresses God directly, asking for guidance, much in the way Tevye pleads with his maker in “Fiddler on the Roof.” It’s a device that reinforces an antique dimension to the storytelling. And it isn’t balanced nearly enough with a sense of what resources (beside religion) Carter called on to compel Begin and Sadat to remain open to a breakthrough.

As detailed here, the president’s final desperate assault on Begin’s conscience to win an agreement — if a consciously manipulative act is what it was — comes across as so ambiguous that it registers more as a sentimental gesture than a stroke of genius. Historically accurate the depiction may be, but like too many other instances in “Camp David,” it misses an opportunity to exploit dramatic potential to the fullest.

[Camp David by Lawrence Wright, directed by Molly Smith. Set, Walt Spangler; costumes, Paul Tazewell; lighting, Pat Collins; original music and sound, David Van Tieghem; projections, Jeff Sugg; wigs, Chuck LaPointe. With Will Beckstrom and Will Hayes. About 1 hour 45 minutes.]

We Get Letters

A kind of odd thing happened on a recent evening in mid-March.  I was in the Washington, D.C., area and, unlike the New York Times, the Washington Post comes with Parade, that dinky, mostly junky magazine some newspapers circulate on Sundays.  I leafed through Parade as I was watching some TV before dinner that night.  The main subject that week was letter-writing and the main article was “Letters That Changed Our World” by Liz Welch.  It made me think of a conversation I’ve had with some friends and relatives recently.

In her article, which Welch sub-heads “The missives that move us, shake us and, sometimes, alter the course of history,” the author refers to a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt which prompted the president to launch the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb.  She also writes about another letter to President Roosevelt, one written by Fidel Castro when he was 14 years old, “requesting $10 and Groucho Marx’s advice to Woody Allen.”  An illustration accompanying the article shows a note 23-year-old writer Eudora Welty, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, sent to the New Yorker proclaiming, “How I would like to work for you!”  Welch also refers to a book, Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving a Wider Audience (Chronicle Books, 2014), which is an anthology of letters that reveal surprising aspects of historical events and figures.  All this is what made me recall my discussions.

I used to do research for scholars from universities outside New York, finding references and documents for them.  I used to do a lot of digging up of old letters sent from one historically important figure to another—Tennessee Williams’s and Elia Kazan’s letters were among the largest collections of correspondence through which I had to pore.  It’s made me think: What’s going to happen to collected letters for the generations of famous (not to mention the not-so-famous) people to come?  (I touched on this question in my ROT post “Books in Print,” 14 July 2010.)  First of all, most of their correspondence will be electronic—e-mails and tweets and texts—which may or may not even be saved, much less printed out on paper for filing in traditional archives.  (While letter-writing has declined, the average e-mail account sends or receives about 100 e-mails daily, according to one study.  Eighteen- to 29-year-old Americans send as much as 100 texts a day.)  E-mail is basically ephemeral; I know it can be saved, and offices and agencies are required to keep significant messages, but electronic communications are just evanescent.  What’s more, they can’t easily be passed along later to repositories like libraries.  As writer John Coleman expressed it, “Email is ‘permanent’ in its own way; our electronic messages are easy to keep and search in huge volumes.  But they aren’t tangible and enduring in the same way those old notes are.”

Second, even those old electronic letters and notes that are kept—on disks or hard drives somewhere—will eventually be impossible to access and read as the technology changes (which, in the computer world, can happen in a matter of a few years).  I already have old disks that I can’t read now, like old Betamax videotapes no one can play anymore unless you dig up an old machine.  (That’s not even counting the e-mails and other files I’ve plain lost from technical mishaps, like when I fried my hard drive years ago or when my last machine got a virus and I had to wipe the drive before transferring everything left to a new one.  I also changed e-mail providers a few years ago and lost all the old stash before I realized I could have transferred it.)

Since nearly no one writes letters much anymore—the postal service estimates that in 1987 the average household received a personal letter every two weeks, whereas by 2010 the average had dropped to once every seven weeks—there’s nothing to keep.  Author Jessica Kleiman admitted in Forbes magazine, after finding a cache of old letters and notes, “Had those been sent to me via email or text, I definitely would not still have them.”  I’m not casting aspersions on the quality of on-line correspondence in contrast to paper letters.  (I’m not really a Luddite: I use e-mail all the time and I compose on a word processor; I even maintain a blog.  This isn’t about disparaging the existence of electronic media, which has many benefits.)  I’m also not lamenting the loss of the art of writing letters which declined long before computers arrived on the scene.  I’m just contemplating the durability of electronic writing versus the paper kind, how it’ll last and be accessible in the future. 

Libraries keep old books and periodicals we can get to when we want them.  There are archival collections that contain the letters and papers of the Tennessee Williamses, Max Lerners, Jo Mielziners, Cheryl Crawfords, Brooks Atkinsons, S. N. Behrmans, and Elia Kazans (to name just a few with whose papers I’ve worked) and scholars, writers, and historians consult their holdings all the time.  Who keeps electronic publications?  Where would I go in the future to work with the e-mails or e-publications of a current figure I want to write about?  Nancy Reagan kept her husband’s letters (and my mom and dad kept each others’); who’s keeping Barack Obama’s private e-mails?  One of the projects on which I worked was The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams (New Directions, 2000 and 2004).  The two published volumes cover correspondence from 1920 to 1957.  Would an editor or a biographer 80 years from now be able to find e-mails, tweets, blog comments, and so on from today?  Someone saved Williams’s early letters (he was nine in 1920; his grandfather apparently kept some of his letters) and they’re amazingly revealing to look back at!  My parents (and, apparently, my own grandfather, too) kept some of my old letters from high school, college, and the army, but if I ever become famous, would any of my friends and colleagues have retained old e-mails for a researcher to look at? 

Even if they’re not erased, old e-mails or word-processor files will be stored on some obsolete hard drive somewhere, maybe irretrievable even if someone could find it.  Technology obsolesces while paper and ink always remains accessible.  Even if letters are stashed somewhere, someone can find them and read them.  We frequently hear reports of centuries-old documents that have been discovered hidden away.  Back in 2003, members of the First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan who were cleaning out some rooms in the basement of the church stumbled on two sermons exhorting the congregation to support the American Revolution.  The historic sermons were written in 1776 and survived tucked away in the pages of a ledger, easily legible again after 227 years.  If the Rev. John Rodgers, the church's pastor during the late colonial period, had written his sermons on a computer, it’s doubtful they’d have survived 25 years, much less 225!  Will 200-year-old e-mails be available for anyone to reread in 2215?  I wonder.

Some of Williams’s correspondence (and all of Kazan’s)—including postcards, telegrams, and random notes—are in the various archival collections of his correspondents’ papers in libraries and document repositories scattered around the country from New York City to Los Angeles and Cambridge to Key West.  Would e-mails ever end up in those kinds of places where they could be retrieved by writers of the future?  Many e-mail systems don’t even save messages older than a week or so.  They’re just erased, gone, sent out into the ether.  What will happen to the next Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, or Ronald Reagan (whose letters are published in I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan; Random House, 2000)?  Those letters are often fascinating and revealing.  If newspapers are the first drafts of history, then letters may be the notes for that draft.  That kind of thing may not be available for future writers and scholars.  They’ll either be lost altogether or deposited somewhere in a pile of old storage media that no one can read even if someone found them.  I mean, you find an old letter, telegram, or postcard, it doesn’t take any special technology to access it.  (In addition to the old letters of mine to my parents and my grandfather I’ve found, I also recently came across a collection of letters from my father to my mother while they were apart for a month when my dad was abroad before my mother joined him.  My dad also collected and bound the letters he and my mom exchanged during World War II.  And I can just read them!  Who’s keeping the electronic love messages of today’s courting couples, the latter-day Reagans and my folks?)

The same would be true of Tennessee Williams’s journals, selections of which (as well as those of artist David Wojnarowicz) have been published and, like the letters, reveal a great deal about his development as a playwright and how he formed many of this principles and concepts.  (I drew on one entry in Williams’s journals, later released as Notebooks; Yale University Press, 2006, for my essay “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” republished on ROT on 9 May 2012.  Wojnarowicz’s journals were published as The Waterfront Journals; Grove Press, 1996.)  I have paper journals that go back to my high school days, including travel diaries from trips to places like the Soviet Union (1965) and China (1980) that I can still read and reminisce over (or use for a blog post, as I did with my travelogue of Istanbul on 24 June 2010).  My friend Kirk Woodward has kept journals for most of his sentient life and has generously let me publish parts of them—or he’s written articles based on selected entries, in some cases along with old letters—on ROT (see, for example, “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” 4 June 2010, or “A Year in Korea,” 18 January 2011, among others).  Today those would also be kept on computer.  Whether they’re word-processor files or an on-line blog like this one, they’re subject to disappearing into the ozone one way or another.  All those accounts of early experiences, travels, and ideas would be lost to us—and I can’t be the only one who finds those looks back tremendously fascinating and telling—when all there is is electronic media, as ephemeral and technically precarious as they are, like those old floppies I have that I can’t read anymore! 

Of course, it’s not just e-mails and computer journals that are perishable.  Websites in general are also, despite the myth that nothing ever disappears from the ’Net.  I can’t say that anything I post on ROT is worthy of saving, but let’s imagine that it is.  In 50 years, will anyone be able to find copies of my old posts?  I’ve published a few articles in on-line periodicals which don’t have paper editions.  Will my articles and anyone else’s in those cyber journals still be available for someone doing research in 10 or 20 years?  (Believe it or not, a few of my essays have been cited by later writers—and one on-line essay was even republished, albeit in a bowdlerized version and without my knowledge, as I described in “The Case of the Purloined Paper,” 5 February 2010.)  At least one of my contributions has already disappeared from an on-line journal’s site because the publication changed format.  Even the more prominent Internet writing, in e-journals like Huffington Post, Slate, or Politico: will anyone be able to research old articles on those sites in half a century like I can with old newspapers, Time magazines, or books?  It doesn’t seem as though any of those outlets, whose content includes significant writing and opinions that should bear on future accounts of our time, will be available for study and research.  (I’ve done many research projects, like “The Lost Première of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” 20 March  2010, or “The Washington Square Players: Art for Art’s Sake,” 21 and 24 June 2012, which required digging out old reviews.  I quote reviews in my current ROT play reports, and I include the Internet press in my survey.  Will a future researcher be able to find the old on-line reviews for a reconstruction of, say, Charles Mee’s Big Love, which I saw a few weeks ago, or Beth Henley’s Laugh, a world première on which I reported earlier this month?  It’s problematical at best.)

Kirk wrote me, when I broached the inclination to write this rumination, “When I put together my ‘autobiography’ [Kirk’s written an extensive memoir], based on letters and journals, I found that the amount of material for the most recent couple of decades was miniscule compared to that for the previous years.”  (Kirk estimates that less than a quarter of the memoir covers almost 45% of his life—since the mid-’80s, when home computers became common—“illustrating the point about fewer written sources.”)  My interpretation of this remark is that the recent record is lacking because it had all been inscribed electronically and has evaporated.  He also once sent me a copy of a wonderful memoir his grandfather wrote covering his life as a frontier lawyer for the first 60 years of the 20th century.  (Kirk wrote “A Lawyer and a Life” for ROT on 11 November 2010 based on that memoir.)  Today that chronicle would be written on a computer and, unless the author printed a copy on paper, it would exist only as electronic blips on some disk somewhere.  The same is true of the diary of Kirk’s late wife, Pat, which recounted her obsession with the Beatles in 1964—and which Kirk shared with us on ROT on 8 January 2013.  He could do that because it was on paper and he could access it.  I donated my copy of the reminiscence of Kirk’s grandfather to the local history division of the New York Public Library (“Obiter Dicta: Some Experiences During Sixty Years Practice in Kentucky Courts” by Ernest Woodward, call no.: ITY 01-10556) so that someone interested in that bit of Americana can find it.  What would happen to a latter-day counterpart?  (In 2005, I wrote an impromptu memoir of my 2½ years as an army intel officer in Berlin, but I wrote it on my computer.  Will it still be around in a readable form in 20 or 30 years?) 

This is a particularly topical subject at the moment because of the issue of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.  Though most of the coverage of the Clinton brouhaha focuses on the “gotcha” aspect, the desire to use the e-mails to find blame someone can pin on her for, say, Benghazi or some other things her adversaries can tar her with, in fact, one of the stated reasons for archiving official e-mails and electronic communications, just like the paper kind, is for the historical record.  Now and then, you hear someone mention that point in passing in a report of this story.  That, of course, is exactly the same thing as digging through Tennessee Williams’s or Elia Kazan’s letters and notes—historical (in that case, literary/artistic) research.

The issue with Clinton’s potentially missing correspondence, of course, is that it was either deliberately or carelessly discarded/not saved.  That can happen with paper mail as well.  What I’m considering is less conscious—the loss of the whole record of someone’s thoughts, ideas, ruminations, expressions simply because the format, that is, electronic blips on a storage medium, is innately ephemeral and obsolescent.   (As I said, writing on paper never goes out of date—it can be deciphered as long as it exists—barring, of course, everyone forgetting how to read the language, which can happen but takes centuries, not decades.)

There is, of course, another technical vulnerability that effects e-mails and other electronically-generated documents, whether on line or on a word processor: hacking.  Any computer system can be hacked sooner or later.  We mostly know hacking from the leaked documents that have made the news, such as the recent Sony incident and the thefts by U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea), posted on WikiLeaks, and NSA consultant Edward Snowden, but hacking can result in the alteration of electronic records as well, of course.  There are frequent stories of some student who’s hacked a school’s computer system and changed grades, and the same thing can happen to electronic memos and letters.  Paper documents can, of course, be forged or altered, too—the embarrassment at CBS in 2004 when Dan Rather took at face value some memos purporting to show that George W. Bush had gotten special treatment during his Air National Guard service is a prime example.  The memos turned out to have been latter-day forgeries and the exposure discredited not only the 60 Minutes Wednesday report but Rather’s entire career.  But that’s not easy to accomplish or get away with.  Electronic forgery or alteration is much harder to detect and can screw up someone’s research with false information or the deletion of important facts.  E-mails are far more susceptible to this kind of manipulation than paper letters, but I’m focusing here more on the loss of access to a letter-writer’s entire correspondence—or a large chunk of it—due not so much to nefarious acts but the innate realities of electronic writing.

(There’s a sidelight to the issue of e-mail hacking.  To protect against it and maintain security and privacy, some e-mail users employ passwords.  That may safeguard the e-mail but it’d be a bane for a subsequent researcher if the password remains secret after the writer’s death.  You can’t really lock someone out of a paper letter unless you secure the file in a vault.)

Unfortunately, I don’t know the solution to this impending problem.  We can hope that e-mails and other electronic documents will be preserved—and safeguarded—somehow, that some kind of archival system will be devised so that researchers, scholars, and students can retrieve them in the future, and that there will always be some way to read those old e-documents.  But I don’t see any movement to assure that any of that wishful thinking will see realization.  The government may have a system of preserving and archiving official documents created by computers, and perhaps some corporations do, too, for their own uses.  (Among my research projects, not a few have required work on the collected files and papers of such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation; the New York Shakespeare Festival; New Directions Publishing Corporation; the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center; the Gotham Book Mart; and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.)  Right now, however, it’s just haphazard whether someone saves and stores ordinary old electronic writing, the kind that you and I create—or the next generation’s Tennessee Williams or Elia Kazan—or not.  It’s just dumb luck that they can be located and then accessed again decades hence.  Like Kirk when he was trying to find resources for his autobiography, the next generation of researchers and writers may find the record from the last few decades into the coming ones lacking.  Will we ever see the collected letters of the great 21st-century writers, artists, business leaders, military commanders, politicians?  I fear we won’t—or that the output will be so meager it will amount to a few slim volumes of spotty correspondence.    On the New York Times blog Opinionator, for example, author Mason Currey wrote:

In recent years, a number of journalists and critics have lamented the death of the literary letter.  The publication of Saul Bellow’s letters in 2010 [Saul Bellow: Letters; Viking] and William Styron’s last year [Selected Letters of William Styron; Random House, 2012] were accompanied by waves of speculation about how many more such collections we can expect.  There was also no small amount of hand-wringing about how “The Collected Emails of Dave Eggers” (or whomever) will never cast quite the same spell.

I’ll say one thing for sure: I’m glad I won’t have to be doing the digging for those elusive letters.  It’ll be someone else’s job.  He or she has my condolences—though it’s doubtful anyone will know I felt this way: this message, too, exists only on computers!

The Lost Première of 'The Eccentricities of a Nightingale'

[This column is adapted from an earlier essay published in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (11.2 [Spring 1999]: 42-59). It grew out of my research on Eccentricities and its predecessor, Summer and Smoke, which resulted in the chapter on the two plays in Philip C. Kolin’s Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).]

From 10 to 28 October 1967, Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale was presented at the two-year-old Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, Surrey, about 30 miles from London. The production, directed by Philip Wiseman, an American who worked in England, and starring Sian Phillips as Alma Winemiller opposite Kevin Colson’s John Buchanan, Jr., was declared the “world premiere” of this new version of the story of the Winemillers and the Buchanans of Glorious Hill, Mississippi. Seven months later, the Theatre Society of Long Island announced the presentation from 14 to 26 May 1968 of the “American premiere” of Eccentricities at the Mineola Theatre. The second of four plays in the inaugural eight-week season of “Long Island’s first all-professional repertory company,” this Eccentricities, also dubbed the play’s “New York premiere,” starred the original Stella Kowalski, Kim Hunter, as Alma, with Ed Flanders as John and James Broderick as Rev. Winemiller. The director was Edwin Sherin, who later directed the 1976 production at Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theatre that went on to Broadway.

The problem with these proud pronouncements is that they were plain wrong. This wasn’t an incidence of reinterpretation or spin; both the British and Long Island producers were simply flat-out overlooking three previous U.S. productions of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, all professionally mounted and duly recorded in local newspapers. Furthermore, because of the publicity from the theaters and the press coverage of the two productions, the errors have become a permanent part of the historical record. In a 1965 announcement in London’s Daily Telegraph, Ronald Hastings emphasized that the British production of Williams’s Eccentricities would be “the first play by this author to have its opening performance in Britain.” The British and international press went on to designate the Guildford Eccentricities, which International Herald Tribune reviewer Thomas Quinn Curtiss further erroneously identified as “the first draft of . . . ‘Summer and Smoke’” and incorrectly predicted would go on to London’s West End “before long,” as its “world premiere.” The local paper, the Surrey Advertiser and County Times, even described Eccentricities as “a hitherto unstaged play by one of the greater American playwrights of the century”; the announcement of the theater’s season one week earlier in the Advertiser had referred to the play as a “World Premiere.”

Then, while acknowledging the earlier British presentation, the Theatre Society of Long Island also asserted in a press release that Eccentricities “has never been professionally produced in the U.S.” These assertions, too, became the record, as Long Island’s own Newsday reported that the show was Eccentricities’ U.S. debut, and Jerry Tallmer of the New York Post wrote that Williams attended opening night “when, at long last, at the Mineola Theater, L.I., ‘Nightingale’ received its American premiere.”

Once on the record for future writers or producers to look up, such statements simply become “The Facts.” In Contemporary Authors, for instance, Williams’s 1990 profile states that the first production of Eccentricities--noted only under Summer and Smoke, as a revision of that play--was in Washington, D.C., in 1966. An earlier profile reports an unspecified “summer-stock tour” in 1964, and records a production at the “Guildford Theatre, London” in the fall of 1967. Aside from its publication with Summer and Smoke, the play isn’t otherwise mentioned in these lengthy profiles; not even the television or Broadway productions in 1976 are noted. Even when the 1976 Buffalo production that moved on to Broadway was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Edwin Wilson asserted that Betsy Palmer had “performed in the first stage version” of Eccentricities when she played Alma in the summer-stock tour that became the Studio Arena’s one hundredth production. Someone who knows that the play had been published in 1964 and suspects that a production had been mounted that year would still have a difficult time locating even the spare New York Times coverage of the event. The Times calls itself “the paper of record,” but looking up Tennessee Williams or The Eccentricities of a Nightingale in the 1964 volume of the New York Times Index, under either “books” or “theater,” reveals nothing. All three pieces that year are buried under the entry for the producing theater, making the record easy to miss unless the researcher already knows a great deal of the actual history. No other U.S. newspaper has indexes that far back, and such usual sources as the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature don’t reveal any articles on either the production or the publication of the text. It’s little wonder, then, that many have missed this significant little event.

Because many chronologies of Williams’s life and work don’t even include Eccentricities, this factual confusion’s seldom addressed. Indeed, Eccentricities, which Williams considered a new play rather than a revision of Summer and Smoke, has generally flown under the radar of most Williams chroniclers and biographers. Even when the actual première is correctly identified, the writer doesn’t mention, let alone refute, the other claims, so the error’s not even acknowledged, much less laid to rest. There are, however, records that document the actual chronology of the birth of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.

Summer and Smoke, whose première was successfully presented by Margo Jones’s Theatre ’47 in Dallas on 8 July 1947, had received devastatingly bad reviews in New York and closed on 1 January 1949. Having sailed for Gibraltar in December 1948 with his long-time lover, Frank Merlo, and his friend, writer-composer Paul Bowles, Williams was in Fez, Morocco, when he received the telegram announcing the closing. He was devastated and bitter, but the character of Alma Winemiller was indelibly printed on his soul. She “seemed to exist somewhere in my being,” he wrote, and later, during rehearsals for the Broadway première of Eccentricities, Williams candidly acknowledged, “Look, I’m Alma.” Alma had actually first appeared earlier in 1947 as the main character of Williams’s short story, “The Yellow Bird,” originally published that June in Town and Country magazine. She was named Alma Tutwiler then; Williams had first used the name Winemiller in another story, “One Arm,” written between 1942 and 1945. Unable to shake her, even after the rejection of her latest incarnation, the playwright, one of whose friends came to call him “Tenacity” Williams, determined to create a new play for the Nightingale of the Delta to inhabit.

After closing on Broadway, Summer and Smoke had a meager production record until its reputation was resuscitated by the historic Off-Broadway revival in 1952. There was a summer-stock run (22-27 August 1949) at the Mountain Playhouse in Jennertown, Pennsylvania, whose only historical significance seems to be that it’s believed to be the first summer-stock performance to include blind actors. In 1950, the Portuguese-language première, O Anjo de pedra (The angel of stone), opened at the Teatro Brasiliero de Comedia, São Paulo, Brazil, and in October of that year a tour of the Western states went out with film stars Dorothy McGuire and John Ireland as the would-be lovers and Una Merkel as Mrs. Winemiller.

Williams, who seldom let a script alone even after it was published, continued to rewrite Summer and Smoke and in the summer of 1951, while on one of his many retreats to Rome, completed a new version. Letters Williams wrote between January and September 1951 to producer Cheryl Crawford and agent Audrey Wood attest to this. At the beginning of 1951, Williams wrote Crawford, who was producing The Rose Tattoo on Broadway at the time, “I am still working on the new ‘Summer’. It has turned into a totally new play, even the conception of the characters is different,” and in June, he wrote:

I am doing a completely new version, even changing the title as it now takes place in winter, and I think I have a straight, clean dramatic line for the first time, without the cloudy metaphysics and the melodrama that spoiled the original production.

Williams was even contemplating returning the new version to the United States with “a big star like Peggy Ashcroft” or Margaret Sullavan, whom, apparently, Crawford had suggested. By August, he was writing to Wood that he’d completed a draft of the new script, which he was still calling Summer and Smoke, and by September, he must have finished the revision because he wrote Crawford that he didn’t know which version the London company would present, “the new or old one.” He added, “I prefer the new one.”

He rushed off to London where a production of Summer and Smoke was in preparation by producer H. M. Tennant. Met at the airport by his friend Maria Britneva (later Lady St. Just), who was playing Rosemary in the production, he arrived too late to substitute the new script for the one “already deep into rehearsals” under the direction of Peter Glenville who, ten years later, would direct the film version.

Williams insisted that that script, which Britneva “put safely away,” was The Eccentricities of a Nightingale--though that title didn’t appear until later correspondence--and that it didn’t resurface for “some 10 or 15 years.” A typescript of Eccentricities in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Billy Rose Theatre Collection bears the date 20 June 1961, and letters to Robert MacGregor and Jay Laughlin at New Directions, Williams’s publisher, indicate that he was working again on the new play, now under its present title, in 1963 and 1964. Except for a subtitle (deleted before publication)--The Sun That Warms the Dark (A very odd little play)--the typescript’s nearly identical to the 1964 published text. It would certainly be in keeping with Williams’s practice to have reworked his new play over a decade. It’s on record, to be sure, that Williams had begun Summer and Smoke, originally entitled A Chart of Anatomy, in St. Louis as early as February or March 1944. He continued to work on it in Mexico in 1945 (where he went to recuperate from one of a series of cataract operations); in New Orleans; in Taos, New Mexico; on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in 1946 (where he shared a cottage with Carson McCullers while she dramatized The Member of the Wedding); and on until after its successful Dallas première. A typescript of Summer and Smoke in the Billy Rose Collection is labeled “Rome Version (March 1948)” and hand-annotated “Produced by Margo Jones at the Music Box Theatre, 6 October, 1948.” If he reworked a “successful” script for four years, why not a “failed” one for a decade? It’s not inconsistent, surely, and he did, indeed, furnish typed additions to the script of Eccentricities for a 1979 New Jersey production, three years after the Broadway outing. Even if Williams didn’t see the revision of Summer and Smoke for a decade after 1951, he clearly worked over the new play between at least 1961 and the performance in 1964.

In any event, New Directions scheduled publication of Eccentricities in a single volume with Summer and Smoke for October 1964. The New York Times’ June 1964 announcement of the forthcoming publication noted that the new play would receive its première later in June in Nyack, New York, but in a February 1965 review of the book, eight months after the première had closed, theater writer George Freedley, the first Curator of the New York Public Library’s Theatre Collection since 1938, noted that his “own researching shows” that Eccentricities “has not been seen on any stage.”

On 2 June 1964, the New York Times announced the imminent première, something over three weeks before it opened, and the New York Herald Tribune covered the opening on the day of the performance. Edie Adams, the widow of Ernie Kovacs and already an accomplished star of television (The Ernie Kovacs Show, 1952-53, 1956; Here’s Edie/The Edie Adams Show, 1963-64) and musicals (Wonderful Town, 1953; Li’l Abner, 1956), was to play Alma Winemiller in the summer-stock production directed by George Keathley at Bruce Becker’s Tappan Zee Playhouse. Eight years earlier, Keathley, a friend of Williams and fellow Key West resident, had directed The Enemy: Time, the one-act version of Sweet Bird of Youth, at Studio M, Keathley’s theater in Coral Gables, Florida. That production starred Alan Mixon, who played John in the première of Eccentricities. (Mixon had so impressed Williams that the playwright sent the young Floridian to his own agent, Audrey Wood, who convinced the actor to move to New York. He’d go on to play many Williams roles both before and after John Buchanan, Jr.)

Local coverage began three days before the opening with an announcement in the Rockland County Journal-News of Adams’s impending appearance on the Nyack stage, though the paper made its own mistake by stating that Eccentricities would be Adams’s “east coast stage debut.” That certainly had occurred at least on 25 February 1953 at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre when she opened in Wonderful Town. The première of Eccentricities was seen as such a major event in Nyack that “Miss Adams and the cast, subscribers, New York and local celebrities” were bidden to a “Special Buffet” at the St. George Hotel after the début. Proclaiming, “Many top celebrities have been invited to the opening,” the Journal-News noted that after other opening nights, the “meet-the-cast party” would be at the YMCA.

The Journal-News made much of Adams’s “returning to her home area”--she had grown up in nearby Tenafly, New Jersey, and attended New York City’s Juilliard School of Music--and her original intention to become, like Alma Winemiller, a music teacher. Adams saw the production as an opportunity to stretch her dramatic muscles, acknowledging, “I had to fight to get away from the dumb blond parts. And I did. I was the ingenue and dumb blond so long that nobody thought I could do anything else.” Declaring, “This one’s for me. . . . It’s a rewrite, all on the girl. You’re on stage expounding for two and half hours,” Adams suspended her busy schedule of “singing, dancing and frothy musicals” to do the production, which New York’s Morning Telegraph still called Summer and Smoke, as “part of her education as an actress.” Explaining that working in material like Eccentricities, was necessary to establish a reputation and talent for serious acting, Adams observed that “if I wanted to do summer stock shows and make money I could do that. . . . But I wouldn’t be proving anything. I’d just be away from home.”

Announcements and festive plans, of course, aren’t proof that a performance took place. Neither are press releases or program booklets, which can be published before a performance which doesn’t occur. This, we’ll see, was the basis for the claim made by both the British and Long Island productions.

For the opening of a new play by one of America’s most renowned and respected playwrights, Eccentricities received scant attention outside Nyack. The New York Herald Tribune, while reporting that Adams had no plans to perform the show anywhere else--it wasn’t a tour as Contemporary Authors recorded-- suggested that “she has not ruled out carrying the play further at a future date.” The Herald Tribune later stated that the summer production had been a “pre-Broadway test.” Nonetheless, though the New York Times and the Herald Tribune both announced the performances, neither reviewed the opening on 25 June 1964. (Ironically, both papers covered the closing.) In fact, the only New York City paper which did review the Tappan Zee production was the New York World-Telegram and Sun. After quoting Williams’s statement--composed at the time of the play’s publication and restated in nearly every program and most production reviews--that Eccentricities was a new play and better than Summer and Smoke, reviewer Norman Nadel complained in the World-Telegram that “‘Summer and Smoke’ never looked better than it does in comparison with this revision” and that Williams “has made Alma and the play more, rather than less melodramatic.” He blamed “backstage blundering” for “a production that ranged from indifferent to catastrophic,” specifically citing miscues in Clifford Ammon’s lighting that caused inappropriate laughter when lights went on or off at the wrong times, destroying “what might have been moving moments.” Nadel went on to conclude that casting Adams was a “conspicuous error.” Though he praised “some excellent supporting performances,” particularly Alan Mixon’s, he wrote:

All Miss Adams has done is to superimpose patterned eccentricities on a kooky and rather pitiful young woman who, toward the end of the play, abruptly becomes as overtly sexy as a TV actress doing cigar commercials. Alma in this new version is neither as complex nor as sensitive a character as Williams wrote for “Summer and Smoke,” but her complexity and sensitivity go far beyond Miss Adams’ ability to communicate them more than momentarily.

Nadel’s cigar-commercial reference was to Adams’s appearances as television’s skimpily-costumed “Muriel Cigar girl” from 1962 until 1976. He summed up both the play and the performance by proclaiming, “Subtlety and tenderness have been sacrificed all along the line.”

Nyack’s Rockland County Journal-News touted the “excitement” of seeing “variations on a familiar theme” in Williams’s new version of Summer and Smoke with the “added fillip” of “a new play, still in try-out.” To this was added the appearance of Edie Adams, fresh off her Thursday-night ABC variety show that had finished a six-month run the previous March. Reviewer Mariruth Campbell confirmed that Eccentricities was, indeed, “a very odd little play”; the Nyack production was the only one that ever carried Williams’s subtitle as it appears on the typescript.

Campbell did object that the play was “over-long” and noted, “Unfortunately the on-stage figures moving scenery amused the audience, breaking the continuity of mood for which Williams aimed.” She praised Patricia Nielsen’s set in general, however, and attributed the lighting and staging style--”no curtain, changes in lighting to designate scene changes”--to “ancient oriental stage techniques.” Campbell, in contrast to Nadel, pronounced Adams’s performance “splendid,” and applauded the rest of the cast who “[a]ll worked valiantly to breathe life” into the play, though she did observe that “[m]any of the most important line[s] never were clearly heard.” Blaming some of the “dreariness” on Keathley and the company, she complained, “In real life, words spoken under great stress may be without force, may be whispers; in the theater, those same wor[d]s must be in ‘stage whispers’, reaching the last row.”

The ten-day run of Eccentricities, which launched the 1964 summer season at the Tappan Zee Playhouse, was scheduled to close on Saturday, 4 July. Sadly, early in the morning of Saturday, 27 June, just two days after the opening, a fire broke out in the theater. Discovered just before 3 a.m. by house manager Bob Olson, the fire damaged the dressing rooms. Though the New York Times reported that the blaze destroyed props and costumes, the Journal-News stated that neither the props nor the lighting instruments were damaged. Separated from the backstage area--a nineteenth-century livery stable to which the theater was added in 1903--by a thick brick wall, the auditorium suffered mostly water and smoke damage. The fire, contained by 125 local firefighters, singed the edge of a drape and the firemen had had to cut into the roof. In its report on the fire, whose origin wasn’t determined, the Times quoted some prescient lines from the script’s last scene:

ALMA: Where did the fire come from?
JOHN: No one has ever been able to answer that question.

Ironically, since the text of Eccentricities hadn’t yet been published, someone at the Times seems to have been present at a performance in order to have noted these lines. Apparently, the Times didn’t deem the production worthy of a published review, despite Williams’s prominence and the intimations that the production had been a Broadway try-out.

Along with his assertion that no production of Eccentricities had been staged by the play’s publication, George Freedley’s Morning Telegraph book review in February 1965 also quoted Williams as stating that there’d been no production of the play, but that statement had been part of his “Author’s Note” for the published edition, prepared in May 1964, before the première. In it, Williams wrote, “This radically different version of the play has never been produced.” This statement, part of the description in New Directions’ advance catalogue, was circulated with review copies of the book. It was amended in August 1964, however, prior to publication and after the stage debut had occurred, to include the words “on Broadway,” and that’s how it appears in the 1964 published text and all subsequent editions. Apparently Freedley, despite his critical and curatorial credentials, accepted Williams’s advance statement as still valid in February 1965, overlooking that a production had occurred in the meantime.

Both the British and Long Island producers gave the same justification for their claim that they were staging premières of Eccentricities. Ronald Hastings, for example, reported in London’s Daily Telegraph that “on what should have been the opening night of ‘Eccentricities,’ the [Tappan Zee Playhouse] building burned down, so the play has never been performed.” Then, in May 1968, the Theatre Society of Long Island declared that the “production scheduled for the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack was cancelled [sic] when the theatre burned down two summers ago.” The Theatre Society of Long Island’s assertion even had the time-frame wrong: the fire had been nearly four years earlier, of course, not two.

None of the published reports of the fire and the closing of the theater indicated that the theater had “burned down,” or that Eccentricities had failed to get on the stage. Becker, who had gone to New York City with his wife and co-producer, Honey Waldman, after the second performance of Eccentricities, believed he could reopen the Playhouse in two weeks or less. On Monday, 6 July, ten days after the fire closed it down, the Tappan Zee Playhouse did, in fact, reopen, using trailers as temporary dressing rooms. Becker had broken a hole in the 14-inch wall to give the actors access to them, but the production that reopened the theater was Preston Sturges’s Strictly Dishonorable. Eleven years later, after several fires severely damaged it in the early 1970s, the historic Tappan Zee did close for good.

In her opening-night review, Campbell, too, quoted ironic lines from the play: “The fire has gone out, nothing will revive it.” The Eccentricities of a Nightingale’s première production stood at two performances. Still, it was a fully union-accredited, professional production of the first performance of a new play. Duly recorded in press reviews, both locally in the Journal-News and in New York City in the World-Telegram and Sun, and in after-the-fact reports of its closing in the Journal-News, the New York Times, and the Herald Tribune, the Nyack Eccentricities fulfilled all the requirements for an official world, American, and New York première, denying the 1967 Guildford and 1968 Mineola productions the right to claim those titles. The Guildford show, of course, remains the British première, but the Theatre Society of Long Island mounted merely one of several revivals in the 1960s.

Furthermore, even if we discount the Tappan Zee production somehow--and there seems no reason to do so--there were at least two productions between the ones at Nyack and Guildford which would have earned the designation of première. First, on 20 April 1966--a year and a half before the production in Guildford and a little less than two years before the one in Mineola--Eccentricities opened at the Washington Theater Club in the District of Columbia as “the major city premiere,” which it was. This production, which ran until 15 May, can arguably be written off as a semi-professional staging. The director was the Theater Club’s artistic director, Davey Marlin-Jones, later the theater and film reviewer for WUSA-TV in the District, and the only name in the cast that might be recognized today was John Hillerman. It was a light-weight production, perhaps, but the one that followed isn’t so easily dismissed.

Between 13 January and 5 February 1967, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago presented its revival of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, nine months before the British première and 15 months before the Long Island revival. The Goodman, one of this country’s most highly regarded companies, surely can’t be ignored in a play’s production history. In addition, the Goodman’s production of Eccentricities included a curious historical footnote--possibly even a unique occurrence. Directed by Bella Itkin, the cast included Lee Richardson as John. Richardson, who in 1952 went by the name Lee Richard, played the same character in the landmark Circle in the Square production of Summer and Smoke.

The next significant productions of Eccentricities after 1968 didn’t occur until the end of the 1970s, starting with its “Theatre in America” telecast on the Public Broadcasting Service’s “Great Performances” on 16 June 1976 with Blythe Danner and Frank Langella and the belated Broadway première which opened at the Morosco Theatre with Betsy Palmer and David Selby on 23 November. On 15 February 1979, the German première (and the only foreign-language production on record as of 2000) opened under the title Die exzentrische Nachtigall (The eccentric nightingale) at the Kammerspiele in Düsseldorf. Two productions in October that year, one by BergenStage in Teaneck, New Jersey, and the other by the Westchester Regional Theater in Harrison, New York, were the latest documented professional stagings at the time I did my research.

The Broadway première had something of a curious history itself. Betsy Palmer and David Selby headed the cast of a summer-stock production of Eccentricities. Originally directed by Jeffrey Chambers, this production had problems with its design, direction, and some of the supporting cast. Neal Du Brock, Executive Director of the Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, took over for the last month of the tour. “The play was being buried under props and scenery,” Du Brock complained. He repackaged the production with the same stars but replaced half the supporting cast and remounted the production at the Studio Arena from 8 October to 6 November 1976. Du Brock brought in Edwin Sherin to replace Chambers and a Broadway-quality design team to redo the sets and costumes. When he turned the direction over to Sherin, Du Brock ordered, “[T]hrow it all out and do it on an empty stage.” The producer wanted “to let the actors speak and not have all that other stuff cluttering things up,” and the result was a spare, almost minimalist production. Sherin, harking back to his 1968 attempt on Long Island, averred, “I think some vibrations are set off, and the play’s effects are felt years and years later.” He came to Buffalo, he said, to take up the challenge of a play he had “failed to ignite the first time around.” Sherin admitted, “It’s bothered me ever since. But now it’s exactly the way I wanted to do it.” Williams, who attended rehearsals and opening night in Buffalo, is reported to have “loved this concept.” Reviewers in Buffalo apparently agreed, though the New York press found the production “skimpy.” The Broadway production closed on 12 December after only eight previews and 12 regular performances.

The record, then, is unambiguous: The Eccentricities of a Nightingale premièred on 25 June 1964 at the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, New York. This was incontrovertibly the New York, American, and world première. The production mounted at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in October 1967 was the British première. Intervening and subsequent U.S. productions, regardless of quality or other distinctions, were merely revivals or narrowly-defined premières.

[There were a few singularities among some of the subsequent revivals. On 15 April 1977, a production of Eccentricities opened in Williams’s hometown at the Greene Street Theatre in Key West; Williams attended the opening performance and gave it his own favorable review. For a production on 26-29 October 1978 at the nineteenth-century Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York, the Collingwood Repertory Company commissioned the original Suite from The Eccentricities of a Nightingale from composer Joseph Bertolozzi; the score, in manuscript, is in the collection of the American Music Center in New York City. The above-mentioned 1979 revival by BergenStage (in which I played Roger Doremus) incorporated not only material cut from the official acting edition of the text, but typed additions supplied by Williams, himself.]