[On
3 April 2002, I conducted a telephone interview with the late Eve Adamson, then
former artistic director of the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre of New York
City. I’d been asked to do the interview
for a professor of English who writes frequently on playwriting and dramatic
literature; he was working on an article on some of Tennessee Williams’s later
short plays, one of which was Kirche, Küche und
Kinder, which the Cocteau had premièred in 1979 at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre,
the company’s home base in the East Village.
[Adamson, who planted the seeds of the Cocteau Rep in 1971, retired from
active leadership of the company in 1989 and died on 8 October 2006 at 68. The company didn’t
survive her departure very long, splitting into two camps in 2004. The company didn’t renew its lease on the Bouwerie
Lane Theatre in 2006 and the Cocteau Rep’s name disappeared in 2007. The theater at 330 Bowery at Bond Street ceased
to exist in 2006 as the 1874 building, one of the city’s premier cast-iron
structures, was purchased for conversion into a private mansion.
[I have lightly
edited this transcript, which I originally typed directly from my recording of the interview. Insertions and comments
after the fact are in brackets. ~Rick]
RICK: Good morning, Ms. Adamson. This is Rick.
ADAMSON: How
are ya?
RICK:
I’m fine. How are you?
ADAMSON: Okay.
RICK: Shall we talk?
ADAMSON: Sure. First of all, I would like
to be sent a copy of whatever it is Dr. K~ is writing. Do you know more specifically what it is he’s
writing?
RICK: I do not, but he’s planning to send you a copy.
ADAMSON: Great.
RICK: He told me specifically in one of his last messages that he’d be
sending you a copy.
ADAMSON: Okay. And the other thing that I would like you to
communicate to him is that I do want to approve any quotes of me, ’cause I’ve
been misquoted so often.
RICK: All right. Well, I’m sending him not only the transcript
that I will make of this, but the tape as well.
ADAMSON: Great.
RICK: So he’ll have the closest
record there is.
ADAMSON: Okay, great. Nonetheless, things tend to . . .
RICK: Yes.
ADAMSON: . . . change in print, so just
. . . if he does quote me, I’d just like to approve that before it goes
wherever it goes.
RICK: When I said he’s going to send
you a copy, my own impression was that he’s going to send you a copy before
publication.
ADAMSON: Great, great.
RICK: He certainly will be sending
you a copy of the published . . .
ADAMSON: Right.
RICK: . . . article. But my understanding was that he’s going to
send you a copy of the . . .
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: . . . prepublication just for
that purpose.
ADAMSON: Okay, well if you’ll . . . .
RICK: I’ll confirm that, but that was
my understanding.
ADAMSON: And if you’re sending him the
tape, he’ll hear this part of our conversation, too.
RICK: Yes, he will.
ADAMSON: Okay. Now, what can I tell you? Uhh . . . you don’t know the play [Kirche, Küche und Kinder]?
RICK: No. It’s not published so I haven’t been able to,
you know, read it. [It has been
published since this interview; see my comment at the end of the interview’s
second part.] And I didn’t see the
production—although I was in New York at the time.
ADAMSON: Well, let me kind of go down
the questions. [Dr. K~ provided an advance
set of questions for the interviewees—there were others involved in the same
production—so that they’d all cover the same areas of his interest.] First of all, many of the questions are
written from sort of an academic-literary-critical point of view, and, of
course, he [Tennessee Williams] didn’t think that way at all. He was an artist and wrote directly from his
subconscious.
RICK: All right.
ADAMSON: So, a lot of the questions say,
you know, ‘Was he consciously doing this or that?’ and the answer is almost
always ‘No.’ He was just writing. So, they’re kind of difficult, uhh . . . .
RICK: Well, that would be the
answer. I’m sure . . .
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: . . . Dr. K~ would, you know, expect you to say that
if that were the case. He is . . .
. I don’t know whether I told you this:
he’s an English professor.
ADAMSON: Uh-huh. Oh sure, and I understand completely. But what he wants is my memory of Williams . .
. . At one time we were talking about In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, which is a play of his I did a couple of
times [1975 and ’79, I believe], and he was waxing wonderfully articulate and
poetic on, you know, the lyrical versus the flesh and all of that, and I said,
“Yeah, that’s what In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel was about.” He said, “Oh,
really? I thought it was about Jackson
Pollock.” [Laughs.] So . . . .
RICK: [Laughs.] Of course, he also said things like that . .
.
ADAMSON: Oh, sure.
RICK: . . . just to be provocative .
. .
ADAMSON: Sure.
RICK: . . . and amusing—especially if
there were other people about.
ADAMSON: But the wonderful thing was
that, you know, during the period I knew him, which was late in his life—and
this was, of course, true all his life—he wrote every day. He couldn’t not write. And, uh, he was doing
what a mature artist does, which is exploring new areas all the time. And that’s kinda what this play was.
So, let’s see—looking at
these questions here, umm . . . . Well,
the first one: “Working closely . . .
blah-blah-blah-blah . . . did he label it a certain kind of play?” Uhh . . . ehhh . . . . Yes, it’s subtitle was An Outrage for the Stage.
RICK: Yes.
ADAMSON: So that’s how he labeled
it. And once Craig Smith was talking to
him—[the long-time Cocteau actor] who played the central character in both of
the new plays I did, this and Something Cloudy—and
he said to Tennessee, “Gee, I’ve played you twice, Tennessee.” And Tennessee said, “No, you’ve played me
once. The first time, you played my
vulgarity.” [Chuckles.] Referring to this play. [For information on
the Cocteau production of Something Cloudy, see my comment at the end of
this post.]
RICK: Mmm-hmm.
ADAMSON: So, uhh . . . . So that’s . . . I mean, that was his
subtitle.
“The late Linda Dorff . .
. .” I didn’t know that she had died. [Dorff (1951-2000) was a professor of theater
history who wrote often about Williams, particularly his later works.]
RICK: I don’t know her, so . . .
. That’s the second time that Dr. K~ has
referred to her as “late,” so I presume that that’s true. Of course, unless he was misinformed.
ADAMSON: She was a young woman. She interviewed me a couple of years back,
and . . . huh! I’m surprised to hear
that. Anyway . . . .
RICK: That may have been the
interview that he mentioned to me.
ADAMSON: Could be.
Uhhhh . . . . “Borrowed a lot of his techniques from
cartoons.” Uhh . . . . “Are there any other influences you see in
this late play?” I don’t know that he
necessarily borrowed techniques anywhere.
I, uhh . . . .
RICK: You mean, consciously.
ADAMSON: Right, consciously . . .
consciously. I don’t think . . . . As I say, he wrote directly from his
subconscious, and some of it was wonderful and some of it was not. Umm. I
remember the first time he had given me—this was on Something Cloudy—that he had given me a looong rewrite that he
had just done, and I was just thinking, ‘My God, how do I go to Tennessee
Williams and say this is . . . no good?’
[Chuckles.] And he said to
me, “It’s no good, right?” So . . .
. I mean, he just wrote. And then later, he would say, ‘Okay, this
works; this doesn’t.’
Uhh . . . . No, I don’t see any influences. Part of this play, however—and this kind of
connects to the set question—umm . . . .
When we were doing this play, I worked with a designer named Douglas
McKeown [a member of the Cocteau Rep], who was very, very sensitive to
Tennessee’s work, and, umm . . . . This
play takes place in two places, the ‘Kirche,’ which is the place where the
central character lives—which is a loft in SoHo that he sort of thinks is his
church, or like a chambered nautilus—and the ‘Küche,’ which is where his wife
lives, which is the kitchen. And
Tennessee had initially thought that it should be done on a . . . two spaces on
a wide stage. And, of course, at the
Cocteau, we don’t have a wide stage; I like to work on a stage that’s deeper
than it is wide. So, Doug and I were
trying to figure out how to do this.
And, first of all, I said to Tennessee, “Fellini film”—he was very, very
visual . . . .
RICK: Williams was the one who was
visual.
ADAMSON: Yes, very visual. He painted.
And, actually, I learned in this play—because my background had been and
still is primarily in classics, so I tend to work with playwrights who’ve been
dead 400 years; the relationship is great!—but, I learned quickly on to really
pay attention to what he wanted visually.
I mean, if he talked about a color or some weird visual image, it really
was part of what he was doing. But we
[i.e., McKeown and Adamson] couldn’t figure out how to do this, and I said to
him [i.e., TW] early on, “a Fellini film,” and he got that—he loved that.
RICK: This was an impression that you
had that you were providing him?
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: A visual thing?
ADAMSON: Yeah, yeah.
And then, we talked about
what Doug and I—the designer and I—talked about: What happens when Dorothy goes
to Oz, how black-and-white becomes color?
And, we [i.e., McKeown and Adamson] came up with this idea of, since we
couldn’t put both spaces—nor did I think it was theatrically terrific to put
both spaces side by side on the stage, because nothing was central—we came up
with the idea of venetian blinds, which were in primary colors—and the primary
colors were important to Tennessee—they were in primary colors on one side and
in gray on the other side. So we went
back and forth between what looked like a color film and what looked like a
black-and-white film. And the ‘Küche’—again
the cartoon . . . . But, you know, this
is something we [i.e., McKeown and Adamson] came up with—but he [i.e., TW] did
love that. But, then he had these other
really outrageous, symbolic things like the “Daisy of Day,” which opened up in
the morning . . . and, you know, things like that, which I learned were
wonderful images. And I’m . . . . Doing mostly classics, I’m used to taking
great liberties with what a play should be visually, but I really learned here
to listen to him, because he knew what he was talking about.
So, uhh . . . number
three: “hilariously satiric . . . against organized religion . . . what pulls
all of these targets together?” Ummm . .
. . And, again, he didn’t sit down and
think, ‘I’m gonna attack religion, the literary estab[lishment]” . . . you
know. What pulls it all together, I
think, is . . . . This play, unlike Something Cloudy, was very like a collage. And, actually, we worked on it that way. Because, he didn’t work as closely with me on
this as he did in Something Cloudy,
because at the time he was all involved in Clothes for a Summer Hotel and very anxious about that. [Williams’s Clothes for a Summer Hotel,
a play about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, opened on Broadway for a brief,
15-performance run on 26 March 1980. It
was the playwright’s last play to début on Broadway in his lifetime.] But I would take pieces . . . . I kinda took it all apart and put it back
together, and did that with him, and it really seemed to work—the contrasting
of the ‘Kirche,’ the church, and the ‘Küche’—the contrasting of the two worlds
back and forth. So, I think, that’s what
kind of pulls it all together—is that structure that we sort of created
together.
Uhhhhh . . . . “Are any of the characters modeled after
specific individuals?” Not that I know
of. Not that I know of. Uhhh . . . .
I mean, the central character is . . . well, what he is in the play is a
hustler who’s retired to this loft in SoHo, who lives in a wheelchair and
pretends to be paralyzed. And when his
wife leaves the room, he jumps out of the wheelchair and does cartwheels and
summersaults and all sorts of things—so he’s not paralyzed. And, I think you
could certainly read that as an artist who is seen to be ineffectual, who’s not
really. And, at the end of the play, the
hustler decides to go back to work. And,
it’s very interesting, ’cause the play was very bawdy. It’s a . . . it’s a . . . . You know, I’m talking about the contrast of
the two worlds—it has in it some of the most beautiful, lyrical writing he’s
ever done and it also has some really kind of grade-school bawdiness. And I think the contrast between the two of
those is very interesting. Uhh . . . . There was a fellow, a songwriter, who was in
his seventies, who came to see the play.
And I knew him, and a lot of people couldn’t figure out what the play
was about. I mean, a lot of people
reacted this way to all of Williams’ late work because it . . . just because it
wasn’t his early works. A lot of people
couldn’t see what he was doing, which I think is a great, great shame. So, I was a little concerned about this older
gentleman being offended by some of the bawdiness in the play, or not knowing
what was going on, or whatever, and when he left the play, he said, “Well, I
don’t know what all the furor is about.
It’s clearly all about an aging artist.”
Which . . . . You know, he got it.
And . . . yeah, I think a lot of . . . .
Well, certainly the two plays I did are about an aging artist, or about
Tennessee’s consciousness at the time.
So, I mean, in that
sense, I think, the main character is Tennessee. But a lot of art is autobiographical. But I don’t think any other character is
modeled after anyone specific.
Uhhh . . . “satirized the
Lutherans . . . .” I have no idea . . .
no idea what it was about the Lutherans.
Okay, now your question . . . . I’m assuming you have your e-mails in front
of you. I’m going down them here. Okay.
About that publication? [This is
in response to a question I had asked about a collection of tributes to
Williams from the Cocteau files that were un-identified.]
RICK: Oh, that one. Yes.
ADAMSON: Yeah. That was a publication called Other Stages . . .
RICK: I remember that.
ADAMSON: . . . which was published by
Leah Frank. And that’s where that appeared. [Other Stages was a small theater
magazine that focused on Off-Off-Broadway from 1978 to 1983, when it ceased
publication. Leah D. Frank has been a
long-time theater reviewer, including for the New York Times.]
RICK: You don’t remember when?
ADAMSON: Uhh . . . .
RICK: It was obviously after his
death . . .
ADAMSON: Right.
RICK: . . . shortly after his death
from the way . . .
ADAMSON: It was.
RICK: . . . the way it was
written. It sounded like a tribute
immediately upon his death.
ADAMSON: It was.
RICK: That’s what it sounds like.
ADAMSON: She also . . . Leah also wrote
a very nice thing when we were about to open Something Cloudy, whatever year that was—I’m bad at years. Very, very nice piece. Actually, she asked Tennessee to write something. Which he did.
Which she published. [I.e., Tennessee Williams,
“Something Tennessee,” Other Stages 30 July 1981: 7.]
Okay, now . . . . “Did he have any specific targets in mind in
his satire?” I don’t think so.
“What were the specific
scene or set requirements to do the play?”
Well, I’ve kinda talked about that. Umm . . . .
Both times I worked with Tennessee on original material—again, I think,
the visual connection at the beginning was very strong.
RICK: His or yours?
ADAMSON: Ours.
RICK: Oh, together.
ADAMSON: Ours.
RICK: Right.
ADAMSON: Uhh . . . . I mean that . . . . You didn’t talk to him about ideas, you
talked to him about images.
RICK: It’s been written, umm, you
know, in lots of the analysis of his work over the years that he was influenced
by movies as a child.
ADAMSON: Uh-huh.
RICK: And that a lot of his writing
has cinematic qualities because that was one of his early retreats—to go to the
movies.
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: And then, of course, he worked
at MGM.
ADAMSON: Uh-huh.
RICK: Beside the painting.
ADAMSON: Mmm-hmm.
RICK: Before he actually started
painting, he had an interest in painting.
There were lots of criticism that I have read over the years that talked
about the “painterly” quality of his . . . the settings. Not the sets, but scenes the way he describes.
ADAMSON: Right. And his sense of color . . . . Yeah, his sense of color was right on it—much
stronger than mine. I mean, I tend not
to think in color; I tend to think in form before I think in color. I know, when we did Something Cloudy, I said to him, “late Turner” [English
landscapist, Joseph M. W. Turner (1775–1851)] [chuckles], and he . . . that really seemed to ring a bell.
Ummm . . . sooo . . .
. I don’t know what more I can say about
the set, except I thought we came up with a really ingenious solution and he
loved it.
RICK: The blinds.
ADAMSON: The blinds and, umm, there was
kind of a cartoonish quality to the kitchen, the ‘Küche,’ and the ‘Kirche’ was
quite beautiful. The ‘Kirche’ had an
organ in it. And this character, Miss
Rose, would come and play the organ. And
that was some of the more lyrical stuff.
Uhh, let me see . . .
. “Has it been staged anywhere besides
the Cocteau?” Not to my knowledge.
RICK: I, of course, did the Billy
Rose Collection . . .
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: . . .search a couple of weeks
ago and there was no mention of any. [I.e., the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of
the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.] Usually if there’s something . . . .
ADAMSON: Yup. No, I don’t think it’s ever been done
anywhere else.
RICK: The Internet catches a lot of
college stuff . . .
ADAMSON: Yeah.
RICK: . . . and I never found
anything there. All the hits, they were
either something having to do with your production or they were
about the text.
ADAMSON: Mmm-hmm.
RICK: Or they were listed as a
reference to a production of another play.
ADAMSON: Ahhh.
Okay . . . the Lutheran
question again. I don’t know.
“How does it compare with
other late plays that I’ve directed or rehearsed?” Umm . . . .
[In a few days,
I’ll post Part 2 of my interview with Eve Adamson. It picks up right where this part leaves off,
so come back to ROT to read the rest of Adamson’s experience working with Tennessee
Williams on one of his lesser-known scripts.
[The Cocteau, one of the few successful non-union Off-Broadway companies,
devoted its repertory to classic plays and adaptations of classic prose
literature. In 1981, the Cocteau presented Tennessee Williams’s Something Cloudy,
Something Clear under Adamson’s direction; opening on 24 August, it was the last Tennessee Williams play to have its premiere in New York while
he was alive.
[Tennessee Williams
worked as a screenwriter for MGM for six months in 1943. He wrote the script that would become The Glass Menagerie
while he was there, a property he intended for Ethel Barrymore and Judy
Garland (though Louis B. Mayer wanted Greer Garson for Laura). Ultimately, the studio rejected The
Gentleman Caller, as it was then called, but when Menagerie became a
successful stage play in 1945, the studio tried to lay claim to the rights on
the argument that Williams had started it while under contract to MGM. Williams’s stalwart agent and defender,
Audrey Wood, thwarted the studio’s efforts and the playwright maintained
control of his first hit.
Williams loved movies, which had been a refuge when he was little and
went off to the local movie theater with his big sister. One of his first bread-and-butter jobs in New
York City was usher at a large movie house (an experience that found its way
into one of his other one-act plays, These are the Stairs
You to Got Watch). But Williams was
an avid amateur painter, too, and the influences of both cinema and painting
are visible in many of this plays.]
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