"Unopened": 'Lone Star Love'"

[“Shows stumble and fall on the way to Broadway all the time,” writes Lisa Birnbach, an author of several books who also wrote for the Village Voice and writes for the New York Times and other periodicals, in the article below. As the proverb goes, “There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip.” 

[On Sunday, 1 November 2020, the New York Times inaugurated a short series in response to the many closings and non-openings of stage productions caused by the coronavirus shut-down of New York City’s theaters that started in March. A number of shows hadn’t made it to previews and stopped rehearsing when the theaters closed on 12 March 2020; others were in previews but closed before officially opening. 

[Within weeks or months, several of those productions announced that they wouldn’t resume preparations or performances, such as Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” starring Laurie Metcalf and Rupert Everett that closed at the Booth Theatre after nine previews; the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway revival of How I Learned to Drive by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel didn’t even make it to previews, which were scheduled to begin at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 27 March 2020. 

[In “Unopened,” the Times is looking at plays scheduled for Broadway runs before the pandemic struck and still didn’t make it to opening. Of the five shows profiled in the series, some closed out of town during try-outs and others closed during New York previews. In its introduction to the series, which I’ll be posting in order, the paper’s editors wrote: 

Among the casualties of the current Broadway shutdown are shows in previews that will never officially open, as well as those whose futures are still in limbo. This series is looking at the curious history of five other shows aimed for Broadway that never got to opening night. 

[The Times started “Unopened” in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the Sunday paper and ran it on five consecutive days in the print edition. The first article, below, reports the fate of 2004’s Lone Star Love, an up-dated and musicalized adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. (The online series started on Thursday, 29 October 2020, then skipped to 1 November and finished on the three succeeding days. The web version of this report is entitled “A Not-So-Merry Mix: Shakespeare, Bluegrass and Randy Quaid.”) I’ll be spreading the articles out a little more than that.] 

“SHAKESPEARE’S BLUEGRASS TRAGEDY” 

by Lisa Birnbach 

The Broadway marquee was up, but this crowd-pleasing musical never made it out of Seattle. Among the creative differences: How fat should Falstaff be? 

Among the casualties of the current Broadway shutdown are shows in previews that will never officially open, as well as those whose futures are still in limbo. This series is looking at the curious history of five other shows aimed for Broadway that never got to opening night. 

Shows stumble and fall on the way to Broadway all the time. Then there’s “Lone Star Love,” which after nearly two decades as a regional-theater staple, finally crashed thanks to the mercurial behavior of its star, which resulted in his lifetime banishment from Actors’ Equity. 

The actor: Randy Quaid [b. 1950], who with his wife/manager, Evi Quaid [b. 1963], has since been in the news largely for brushes with the law. Today, almost 13 years after its aborted Broadway opening, the creators of the show are reluctant to speak the names of the couple at the center of the cancellation. 

He is “the actor who caused an unbelievable fracas,” or simply “that actor”; she is known as “her.” 

Flash back, though, to happier times, when “Lone Star Love” was simply a bouncy Texas-set updating of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” complete with bluegrass music. 

Its origin story begins in 1973 with John Haber [b. 1948], a young graduate of the University of North Carolina who returned home to Chapel Hill with an M.F.A. in directing from New York University’s Tisch School. The local troupe Everyman Company asked him to direct “Henry IV, Part I” at the outdoor Forest Theater on the Chapel Hill campus. 

They wanted to cast the banjoist Tommy Thompson [1937-2003], a member of the local bluegrass band Red Clay Ramblers, as Falstaff, the portly friend of Prince Hal in the drama. Falstaff, as you may remember, was a vain rogue said to be Shakespeare’s own favorite character. 

Haber thought that the comic Falstaff from “The Merry Wives of Windsor” was better suited for the company’s mostly amateur cast. So he modernized and set the production in Windsor, Texas, post-Civil War. The band played incidental music from the side of the stage, and at the curtain call performed “Happy Trails.” 

[“Happy Trails” is a song released in 1952 by cowboy entertainers Roy Rogers (1911-98) and wife Dale Evans (1912-2001) that became the enduring theme song for their radio program (1944-55) and television show (1951-57).]

As a noble, Falstaff is an outlier, but “‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ is Shakespeare’s only play about common people,” Haber explained recently. “After the Civil War, Texans started making money as cattle ranchers, just [the way] wealth was being accumulated in England in the 15th century. And I could picture John Falstaff as a southern colonel.” 

When Haber moved back to New York, he joined the Dodgers, a producing entity, and worked on other shows. The Red Clay Ramblers came to have a higher profile as well, releasing several albums and touring internationally. 

The play’s journey restarted in 1987, when the renowned Alley Theater of Houston asked the Ramblers if they had any ideas for a show they might bring to the venue. The band had just performed there (and in New York) in Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind.” Thompson remembered the Texas-set “Merry Wives” he had once done, and called his old friend Haber. 

The Ramblers wrote a full score of music and lyrics, and Haber made changes in the script that combined Elizabethan language with cowpoke action. The musicians played Col. John Falstaff’s wingmen, held up props, and generally added to the merriment of the enterprise. 

The Repertory Theater of St. Louis put it on the following year. From there the show meandered — the Players Theater in Columbus, Ohio; Duke University; the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. 

It was a bona fide regional theater crowd-pleaser. Next stop? New York. 

Workshops were organized in 1996, and in 1999, with Jim Belushi [b. 1954] as Falstaff. “We loved him — he was great,” said the composer, Jack Herrick [b. 1969] of the Red Clay Ramblers. Unfortunately, Belushi had commitments to his ABC-TV series [probably According to Jim, 2001-9, of which Belushi was executive producer] and couldn’t stay with the musical, which was now called “Lone Star Love; or, the Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas.” 

It took five more years, but “Lone Star Love” finally opened at the John Houseman Theater Off Broadway, under the auspices of AMAS Musical Theater. The production was immersive before that became so trendy; audience members were ushered to the stage where the cast served up a barbecue meal. (Some thought that was too country, but when the 2019 Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!” did something similar it was considered brilliant.) 

Jay O. Sanders [b. 1953], a New York stage stalwart, portrayed Falstaff Off Broadway. Beth Leavel [b. 1955] played one of the merry wives. “Pleasant, competent, thoroughly innocuous” were some of the phrases Charles Isherwood used in his Dec. 9, 2004 New York Times review. 

Still, “Lone Star Love” had a lot going for it: words by Shakespeare, a familiar plot, charming music and, most important, investors who were willing to put money into it. 

They included the seasoned Broadway producer Bob Boyett [b. 1942], as well as Ed Burke [b. 1943?], a newly retired businessman from Chapel Hill. He had just sold his company and wanted to get into the producing game. He flew to New York to take a three-day seminar to learn how. Given his North Carolina provenance, the instructor introduced him to “Lone Star Love.” 

That the creators were fellow Tar Heels felt promising. “Living in North Carolina,” Burke told me over the phone recently, “I was country come to town. But I got hooked. 

“I went to opening night, I wrote a check, and I met Bob Boyett, the lead producer,” he added. Before long, he and his wife, Eleanor, were writing checks frequently. 

A cast album was recorded and the show was nominated for best musical by both the Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel awards. Though it didn’t win, it had momentum, and after closing Off Broadway in 2005 the producers had Broadway in mind as the next logical step. 

Boyett suggested that John Rando (“Urinetown”) come aboard to direct. (His eventual credit was creative supervisor; Randy Skinner [b. 1952] was the director/choreographer). He also called in Robert Horn (who later won the Tony for “Tootsie”) to co-write the book. 

The gang realized they needed a higher profile star for Broadway. In 2007 Rando and Horn met with Randy Quaid at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. In 2005 the actor, a native Texan, had been Emmy nominated for playing Col. Tom Parker in a mini-series about Elvis Presley. The same year he had a choice movie role in “Brokeback Mountain.” 

Despite a career filled with distinguished performances, though, he was still best known as Cousin Eddie from the “National Lampoon’s Vacation” movies. This musical Falstaff would mark his Broadway debut. 

“He was smart and understood where we were going,” Horn said of the meeting. “It was a lovefest — we thought we’d found the perfect fit.” 

Looking back, Burke said, “Boy, did we pick the wrong horse.” 

That August, after some New York rehearsals, the production moved to Seattle’s Fifth Avenue Theater for a pre-Broadway tryout, with the New York opening scheduled for December. (“Hairspray” had gone to Broadway from the same theater.) In order to procure Quaid for the gig, he was given an unusual amount of creative approval. 

Problem No. 1: the fat suit. According to Burke, Quaid, on the advice of his wife, refused to wear it for the role. 

“Not only did our script contain references to Falstaff as a fat man — I counted eight at the time,” Burke recalled, “Jack had even written a production number called ‘Fat Man Jump.’ ” 

Instead the couple suggested, over many objections, that Falstaff should wear a “gigantic codpiece,” as it was described to me. An actor from the Seattle company remembers a crack that was shared among the performers: “It looks like he’s wearing his understudy in his underpants.” 

Participants in the Seattle production were generally loath to be quoted on the tryout, but did provide glimpses of the turmoil as captured in emails from the Quaids to the creative team. 

“With all the deceit going on and lack of paying key creative elements for the production Randy’s contract being unethicly [sic] passed around, he has no trust in the working process he does not agree to any changes,” read one note from Evi Quaid. “He no longer trusts the creative teams [sic] agenda or to Honor his contractual rights in this production. He is not willing to make changes in the script.” 

As friction grew between the Quaids and everyone else, life in Windsor, Texas, became far from merry. One day Horn said he went to the Quaids’ hotel room to talk over line changes. “Mr. Quaid was agreeing with me and showing me respect,” he recalled, “but Mrs. Quaid didn’t like the fact that he was trying to find a middle ground. 

“The nice conversation descended into chaos,” he added. “I got out of that room. It was the last time I ever spoke to them.” 

Stories of misbehavior flew out of Seattle and into the New York tabloids. 

“Jack [Herrick] and John [Haber] suffer from the fact that I was not a New York producer,” Burke recalled. “If you write enough checks you can call yourself a producer. But we had an unmanageable situation. Our contract wouldn’t allow us to hire another actor. It guaranteed that Randy Quaid would take the role on Broadway.” 

When it became clear that “Lone Star Love” with Randy Quaid could not transfer to Broadway, a closing notice was posted, per union requirements. Quaid’s understudy performed as Falstaff for the final two weeks. 

Twenty-three members of the cast and crew formally complained to Actors’ Equity about the actor’s behavior, on and offstage. After a Los Angeles hearing to review the complaint, he was banned from the union for life and fined $81,000 [about $105,000 today] — two weeks’ pay for the other members of the company. 

[Correction – Nov. 10, 2020: An earlier version of this article, relying on information from one of the show’s producers, described incorrectly the timing and purpose of an $81,000 payment. The producers Ed and Eleanor Burke made the payment as severance to members of the show’s company before it closed, not to pay a fine by Actors’ Equity against Randy Quaid. —New York Times] 

In a 2008 article in Backstage magazine, Quaid shared a letter indicating that he had chosen to resign, saying the union “tolerates racism and mounts witch-hunts and McCarthyism.” 

The marquee was already up at the Belasco Theater on Broadway, but the show never made the move. The New York Times reported the shutdown briefly: “Over the past few weeks, Mr. Quaid’s wife, Evi Quaid, said, there had been backstage bickering between the Quaids and one of the show’s producers, Ed Burke. Mr. Quaid had negotiated an unusually high degree of creative approval for the show, and there were disagreements about his interpretation of his character, who is based on Falstaff.” “How do you take a fornicator, an adulterer, an alcoholic and an identity thief and make a family show around him?” Quaid was quoted as saying. (Efforts to reach the actor and his wife for this article through their lawyers in Vermont, Virginia and Los Angeles were unsuccessful, as was outreach through their social media channels.) 

Boyett, the lead producer, remembers things a bit differently. 

“The cast wasn’t the biggest consideration for me as a producer,” he said by telephone. “I don’t really blame the Quaids. When we closed the show out of town we thought we should rest the property. The timing wasn’t good. And then we all were busy with other things.” 

Subsequently, the Quaids were charged with vandalism on their former California home and for failing to appear in court while on bail. (The office of the Santa Barbara district attorney confirmed this week that the charges were still outstanding.) In recent interviews and on social media they’ve attested to the presence of what they call “Starwhackers” — a cabal of people who are out to kill celebrities. 

Almost 30 years since he first got involved with what promised to be a lighthearted romp, Herrick of the Red Clay Ramblers remains philosophical about the experience. 

“You can’t hold your breath for Broadway,” he said, chuckling over the phone from Chapel Hill. “Work has continued on that show, and the producers have abiding faith in it.” 

[Readers of Rick On Theater may recall that on 14 April 2010, I posted an article on “Camino Real, The Musical,” an abortive 1976 attempt by a Buffalo, New York, theater company to develop a musical adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play from 1953. As with some of the plays in the New York Times series, it never made it out of the starting gate. 

[But I had a somewhat closer connection to a play putatively on its way to New York City and Broadway that never quite got here. I wasn’t in it or even associated with the show, but I was acquainted with several people who were—and I was a grad school classmate of the playwright. 

[Neil Cuthbert (b. 1951) was a Master of Fine Arts candidate in playwriting at the Rutgers University School of Fine and Performing Arts, now officially christened the Mason Gross School of the Arts. I was there for an acting MFA from 1975 to 1977; I believe Neil completed his degree in 1976. 

[Neil was one of a small group of MFA students at Rutgers who had essentially completed their degree requirements before the MFA was officially authorized by the university’s board of governors in 1975. (Another was actor Avery Brooks, about whom I’ve written recently; see “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive: Othello,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 December 2020.) 

[Dubbed “shadow MFA’s,” Neil and his contemporaries had to remain in residence in the newly-formed school of the arts one more year to fulfill the administrative requirements for the MFA.. (I was part of the first class to enter the arts school after the degree was fully accredited.) 

[One of the things Neil had to accomplish was present his thesis play and then defend the thesis itself. The play was a script called Hot Potatoes and it was part of a spring repertory of three plays performed by the MFA acting company in April and May 1976. (The other two plays in the rep were Anton Chekhov’s The Wood Demon, staged by actor David Margulies [1937-2016], and Joseph A. Walker’s The River Niger, which Avery directed.) 

[Because Neil had been around the theater program for a time before the MFA was official—I think all the shadow MFA’s had been undergrads in the theater program at Rutgers’ Douglass College, the seed of the graduate program—he’d already written plays and one, The Soft Touch, had been staged at Rutgers in 1974 and went on the win the American College Theater Festival’s Best New Play Award, for which it received a performance at Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Eisenhower Theater. 

[The play’s director was Jack Bettenbender, who died in 1988 at 67 and was the head of the program (which he also devised), and the designer was Joe Miklojcik, the theater program’s TD, with both of whom I later worked. Several cast members were still in or around the program when I was in residence. 

[The play was optioned by Gene Persson in association with Ted Chapin and Pangloss Productions for a Broadway run. It was scheduled to open at the John Golden Theatre (demolished in 1985) on 21 September 1975 under the direction of Alan Arkin; the stars were Lenny Baker, Richard Libertini, Josh Mostel, and Jo Anne Meredith. 

[Kevin Kelly in the Boston Globe declared that a description of the play “makes it sound better than it is” and dubbed it a “truly sophomoric piece of theater.” The Soft Touch closed in Boston on 13 September after a two‐week run at the Wilbur Theatre. 

[With respect to Lone Star Love, the production at UNC that started the project to musicalize Merry Wives was called The Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas and ran at the Forest Theatre at Chapel Hill in the summer of 1973. The Off-Broadway première of the play, now entitled Lone Star Love, was staged at the John Houseman Theatre on Theatre Row from 8 December 2004 to 6 February 2005 (previews started on 21 November 2004) under the direction of Michael Bogdanov. The limited-run production was nominated for two 2005 Lucille Lortel Awards (Outstanding Musical and Outstanding Choreographer) and a 2005 Outer Critics Circle Award (Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical). 

[The Seattle try-out of Lone Star Love opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre on 8 September 2007 and closed on the 30th. The abortive Broadway première had been scheduled to open at the Balasco Theatre (now the New Victory Theatre), on 42nd Street west of Broadway on 3 December 2007 after starting previews on 1 November. The producers announced the cancelation of the Broadway engagement on 24 September. 

[Next in “Unopened” (1 March): “A comedy of mistaken racial identity inspired by ‘Miss Saigon’ crashes and burns.”]

Theater for Young Audiences

by Kirk Woodward 

[Mega-contributor Kirk Woodward’s next topic, following his look at the craft of writing plays, is, as he points out below, what used to be called “children’s theater.”  Both Kirk and I have been involved in theater for young audiences since the 1960s; it’s something that we both think is an important artistic endeavor.

[I’ve published two previous articles on this blog about TYA: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children’s Theater in America” (posted on Rick On Theater on 25 November 2009), which was initiated by my attendance at a performance of one of Kirk’s own young person’s plays, and “Missoula Children’s Theatre” (25 August 2009), which I wrote when I was impressed by a report on MCT on television,

[That last post was follows many years later by another, entirely serendipitous guest article.  My friend Oona Haaranen sent me “Nobody Wants to See a Tired Bat on Stage” (9 January 2014), about her young son’s first theater experience with MCT in their Long Island hometown.  Oona’s a dancer, choreographer, dance notator, and dance teacher and I’d been trying to get her to write something about her field for ROT, but she kept putting me off.  Then she sent me this wonderful piece about her son and the visit of MCT.

[Kirk writes that theater for young audiences is sometimes still dismissed as “kiddie theater.”  Back in the late 1980s, I did a one-year leave-replacement stint at the State University of New York College at Oneonta where I found that it had a children’s theater course.  It was the only one I’d ever heard of, so I sat in on one class and it seemed quite good.  I don’t know if SUCO still offers it, but Kirk reports, “Looking at Google, there seem to be at least a few schools that offer something from a class to a program now.”

[I’ve told Kirk this, so it shouldn’t surprise him to see it again:  I think he’s a good and, what’s more, interesting playwright.  I especially enjoy his mystery plays—probably because he’s such a devotee of the genre.  (Kirk has a three-part post on ROT on Perry Mason, 19 and 22 February and 19 March 2018, and he took great delight that an office where he worked for several years was in walking distance of the Manhattan building that occupies the site of the fictional home of gourmet detective Nero Wolfe.)  

[But, I’ve said to Kirk and others, I think his plays for young viewers are truly special.  I tried to convey this feeling in “Sleepy Hollow,” referenced above, and every time I read or see one of his young people’s plays, I’m more and more convinced of this.  (I’m further convinced when I see or read many of the other authors’ children’s scripts.  There’s just no comparison.)]

“Theater for young audiences” (TYA) is the accepted term today for what used to be called, when I was first involved in it, “children’s theater.” Why the name change? In part, I’d guess, the reason is that “children’s theater” might sound like it meant “theater by children,” and although there’s plenty of that, in the theater companies I’m writing about here, adult actors perform for children.

There are a number of good books and articles about TYA (e.g.: TYA: Essays on the Theatre for Young Audiences by Moses Goldberg [Anchorage Press Plays, 2006]; TYA Today magazine [http://www.tyausa.org/publications/tya-today-magazine/, a membership organization] has regular articles on the subject), and from them one can get a good idea of the history of the field, since although its antecedents go far back in time, basically it took shape and prospered beginning in the Twentieth Century.

I don’t intend to retell the story of TYA here, but only to describe my own experiences with it, to talk about some issues involved in writing for it, and to try to convey my enthusiasm for the form, with some reasons why I feel that way.

I was introduced to TYA – then “children’s theater” – some 59 years ago by my friend Perry Baer, who was working at what was then called Louisville (Kentucky) Children’s Theater (LCT). It was founded in 1946, just after World War II.

When I joined the LTC, the theater was still, as it had been since its founding, a completely amateur operation except for a paid director. A much respected leader, Rick Schiller, had moved on to Texas at the end of the previous season; the current director was a man named Claude Astin (1939-2003).

Perry brought me to a Saturday morning “tech day,” which on that particular Saturday was devoted to straightening up the clutter in the basement below the stage of the old University of Louisville (U of L) theater, an historic wooden structure that still exists, although it’s now been moved to a different location on campus. Later Saturdays were devoted to building sets, assembling costumes, and the like.

LCT was a somewhat uneasy guest of the University theater, because they both used the same space. There was some movement between the two, especially on the part of the unofficial leader of the LTC group, David Semonin (1941-2010), about whom I have written elsewhere on this blog (see “Saints of the Theater,” posted on Rick On Theater on 30 December 2011). David was enrolled at U of L, as were some of the others of our group. I was dazzled by the talent in the group, and I wasn’t wrong; several continued with fine careers in theater.

Males are often in short supply in community theaters, so I was cast in a show called Seven At One Blow and then in another called Robinson Crusoe (I am not sure who wrote either of them, but they were published scripts). The other production I remember best from those days was an original musical called Reckon With the River, with a score by Nelson Keyes (1928-1987) and a book by Clark McMeekin, a pen name for two ladies named Dorothy Clark (1899-1983) and Isabel McMeekin (1895-1973).

I go into this detail because plays written for TYA often fall into these three categories: plays based on folk tales; plays based on stories or books; and original works. Any of these can be either musicals or “straight plays.”

TYA has changed enormously since those early days, and LTC is a good example: it is now called StageOne Family Theatre, and it is a well-known and respected professional operation with its own theater space at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville.  For some years it was led by Moses Goldberg (b. 1940), an outstanding figure in TYA both as an author and as a director.

There is now an umbrella organization, TYA/USA, with over a thousand members including “theaters, organizations, and individual artists.”  (TYA/USA, or Theatre for Young Audiences/USA, is the U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People, known by its French initials, ASSITEJ.  TYA/USA—which sometimes goes by the initials USA/ASSITEJ—is a membership organization and publishes TYA Today for its members; the biennial publication is available in some libraries.  The organization’s website is at http://www.tyausa.org/.)

For me the experience of working at LCT was formative. I’ve loved TYA ever since (although I only recently learned not to call it “children’s theater”). After college, in Rockbridge County, Virginia, I directed my first venture with a “children’s show,” an adaptation of Twelfth Night for children (see “Directing Twelfth Night for Children,” 16 and 19 December 2010).

I’ve had many wonderful experiences with TYA. Here are a few: I wrote and directed several TYA productions for the Attic Ensemble in Jersey City, New Jersey. The first came about when I was asked to direct a play based on the Aladdin story, and I realized not only that it was a terrible script, but that it had almost no roles for women. I wrote a new version, which has since been produced a number of times.

Mona Hennessy and I created a professional company for which we both wrote and performed. I remember David Semonin asking me why I thought the world needed another TYA company. I said I thought we could write some worthwhile things, and we did, including a Christmas play (Waiting for Christmas) that was produced as recently as this past holiday season.

Elsewhere I directed TYA shows wherever I could, usually writing the shows as well. I acted and played piano for a year for Pushcart Players, an outstanding New Jersey company, and led the TYA wing of 12 Miles West, a professional company in Montclair (later moved to Bloomfield), New Jersey. More recently I’ve directed TYA for the Theater League of Clifton (New Jersey).

As a matter of fact, a commentary on one of the TYA plays I wrote, a musical version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, has appeared on this blog, as has a fascinating piece about the Missoula Children’s Theatre, and links to both articles can be found in the comments at the beginning of this article.

As I pointed out, TYA is a much more vigorous field than it was when I began working in it. Nevertheless it is still something of a last resort for many actors – often seen mainly as a way of getting their Equity cards – and for theaters, who may have a sort of “second unit” TYA for apprentices, prospective company members, and students in the theater’s training wing.

Many times I have had to scratch for actors to cast in children’s plays. Lenny Bart, the artistic director of 12 Miles West, would try to nudge performers toward our productions by telling them their prospects of joining the main acting company would be much higher if they used TYA to demonstrate what they could do. No soap.

Part of the problem – assuming that the same thing has been and is a problem for others – is the notion of TYA as “kiddie theater,” a notion encouraged by an impressive number of badly written plays, often badly produced. One cringes at the memory of all the TYA plays in which two actors, walking backward toward the center of the stage, bump into each other and scream in mock alarm. One wouldn’t see that in a play by Ibsen!

And that’s the point: TYA demands the same respect for audiences that a play by Ibsen does, and that any other kind of theater does. A sloppy script, poorly directed on a minimal set and filled with acting shtick, deserves exactly the amount of approval that the same things would receive in a play by Shakespeare.

There are differences, of course. In the first place, a young audience isn’t monolithic. (Neither is an adult audience, but ordinarily the distinctions are less clearly defined.) An audience of, say, kindergarteners through third graders is not the same as an audience of, say, up to seventh graders, or tenth graders. As a result, many TYA theaters specify in their advertising the age range for which a particular play is written.

“Writing down” to an early elementary school audience is certainly not a good option. Instead, the playwright must focus on vivid action and clarity of ideas – a good thing no matter what the age of the audience.

Another issue in writing for TYA is that in many cases up to half the audience is likely to be adult – that is, parents and caregivers who, however unwillingly, have accompanied the children to the play. One of the pioneers of TYA in the United States, Charlotte Chorpenning (1873-1955), in her seminal book Twenty-One Years With Children’s Theatre (Children’s Theatre Press, 1954) noticed this situation and advised playwrights to be sure to consider the adults now and then.

Obviously the attention spans of children differ from those of adults. (Some might say they are longer!) I use a school assembly program as a standard for the length of a play for a young audience. Many plays for adults, of course, are also too long and could use the discipline one gets from writing for children.

As a friend of mine says, then, good advice for someone writing a play for a young audience is: “Cook with a wine you like.” You wouldn’t drink a wine you didn’t like; why would you write a play that you wouldn’t want to see?

A crucial issue in writing plays for TYA is the question whether or not such a play should deliberately teach a lesson, a moral, a principle, or a belief. In many cases the answer is “yes.” There is a great deal of excellent writing on the subject, much of it available through the Educational Theatre Association (“shaping lives through theatre education”), supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Theater is a valuable tool for education. I have written instructional plays for both school and church, and have also taught and used what is sometimes known as “creative dramatics” (see “Creative Dramatics,” 30 September 2013), described by The American Association of Theatre for Youth as “an improvisational, non-exhibitional, process-centered form of drama in which participants are guided by a leader to imagine, enact and reflect upon human experience,” often with an emphasis on learning something specific.

Few would disagree with the idea that education for children is important, and that theater can be an effective tool for teaching when guided by people skilled in the field. There are definitely things we want children to learn. Of course, whenever theater is used as a tool for teaching, something specific is being taught. For example, I would want children to learn about the prevalence and the danger of racism.

However, theater as a tool can be used for varied purposes; it could, for example, be used to promote racism. This is not inconceivable. (Some in fact would claim that any use of theater to educate and train is necessarily oppressive and inevitably is going to be culturally biased. I find this position overstated but important to consider.)

Starting out to teach a lesson is not necessarily the best approach for a playwright anyway, and not necessarily better for an audience either. As an audience member, do you enjoy a play more when you see its point coming at you a mile away? And as a playwright, do you feel at your most creative when writing as though you were following a recipe?

I realize that, as George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) says, every play that’s not the merest tissue of effects must have some kind of idea behind it. But often that idea emerges, both for the audience and for the writer, from the interaction of the characters in the play. (Shaw himself, although a fervent Socialist, makes almost no mention of Socialism in his many plays.)

My conclusion is that there is a place for TYA plays deliberately designed to educate, but that there has got to be an important place as well for TYA plays written out of an unforced artistic impulse. Children can gain as much from such plays as adults can from similar plays written for them. The many works of the outstanding TYA playwright Aurand Harris (1915-1996) substantiate this claim.

Earlier I said that the major categories of TYA plays are plays based on folk tales; plays based on stories or books; and original works. Most but not all of the fifteen produced plays for TYA that I’ve written belong to the first two categories, usually to the second, plays based on folktales or books, including, among others, The Bremen Town Musicians, Alice in Wonderland, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Aesop’s fables.

I love the discipline of adapting books and stories for young audiences – the requirements of time, and the demand for a clear storyline and characters. The storyline doesn’t have to be linear either – Alice in Wonderland certainly is not. Working with an established author on material in the public domain is like working with a brilliant collaborator who trusts you.

Mentioning the public domain reminds me that the expansion of TYA goes hand in hand with the expansion of literature for children. The two face many of the same issues, and many stories written for children can make terrific theater – only, of course, if the author grants rights to the playwright, or writes  the plays herself or himself.

One final thought: in an era in which electronic entertainment is rampant, young children still enjoy seeing a play, and that enthusiasm may continue into later life, if it’s encouraged by exciting and interesting theater experiences. If only for the sake of providing an alternative to mass produced experience, TYA is an important and valuable asset for our society.

[Aside from performing in school plays in elementary and middle school (and seeing at least one memorable children’s play, recounted below, in the mid-1950s), my involvement with theater for young audiences didn’t start as early as Kirk’s.  My first real experience with theater for children was in the spring of my senior year at college (1969). 

[I’d been active in the university theater program from my freshman year (which is when I met Kirk, incidentally), but during that final spring, the wife of the university theater director and another faculty wife put together a performance for children that was to tour elementary schools and local libraries in Rockbridge County, Virginia.  

[The production was a version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, though I don’t recall the writer of the published script.  I played the villain.  As much fun as it is to play a bad guy—Iago was my dream role and I played Don John in Much Ado About Nothing—playing a children’s villain is even more fun!

[After I graduated from college, I had several months to wait before reporting for active military duty. The university theater director offered me a gap job in the theater shop, so I was back in Lexington, Virginia, for the fall. When the two women who’d produced ENC proposed a children’s acting workshop, I took a third-grade class.  This was my first experience teaching any kind of theater or acting.

[In the army, after I arrived in West Berlin in the summer of 1971, I became involved in the Berlin Brigade theater activities at the Berlin Entertainment Center.  Then a small group of us formed a theater group independent of the BEC.  One of our members was an air force tech sergeant and he got the Tempelhof NCO club to sponsor us.  (Tempelhof was West Berlin’s main airport at that time, and a U.S. Air Force base.)

[We called ourselves the Tempelhof American Theatre, or TAT, and our first show (December 1972) was a children’s play, The Wonderful Tang by Beaumont Bruestle (1905-89).  It was a fairy tale set in China and I played a character, The Chorus, who’s like a children’s version of Our Town’s Stage Manager. 

[The show was a huge success.  TAT was invited to do a cut-down version of the play on a Saturday morning children’s show on Air Force Television that was taped in Berlin.  The AFTV show also included some interviews—children’s style—about who TAT was and what we did and what the play was about and so on.

[After the army, I came to New York and went to Rutgers University for a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting from what became the Mason Gross School of the Arts.  During my second year at New Jersey’s state university (1976-77), I signed on as touring stage manager for The Brave Little Tailor, a children’s musical by Aurand Harris that traveled around Middlesex County throughout the school year.

[During the summer following my second and final year at Rutgers, some of the MFA students put together a traveling children’s theater, which we called the Loose Caboose.  We had a rep of two shows which schools, summer programs, libraries, and community centers could book.  One was The Dancing Donkey, a children’s musical by Erik Vos (b. 1929).

[The other show was a story-theater piece all about animals we assembled from a number of sources.  It included an African folk story about Ananse, the trickster spider; a couple of Thurber fables; and the Bremen Town Musicians.  (I don’t remember for sure anymore, but I think I was the hound dog.) 

[This wasn’t Kirk’s script of The Bremen Town Musicians, which is a musical, since I’m pretty sure he hadn’t created his yet.  I believe, however, BMT is my favorite of Kirk’s young-audiences plays—but that may be solely because it contains a song called “You Can’t Stay Mad at a Dog.”  You see, both Kirk and I are dog-lovers.  If you’re a dog-lover, it’s just plain true: you can’t stay mad at a dog!

[I directed a December 1978 production of Kirk’s Aladdin for the American Theatre Arts Project, which was working out of the Provincetown Playhouse near Washington Square in Greenwich Village.  That’s  the historic theater where Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) had gotten his New York start (there was still a permanent cyclorama on the stage which he’d helped build and which bore his initials!). 

[I talked to some of the ATAP leaders about starting a children’s theater program and they were receptive.  I chose Aladdin for our first full-length children’s play.  As Kirk mentions in his article, men are scarce in TYA, and I ran into this issue when I was casting Aladdin.  I had to break one of my own rules and take a part in a play I was directing because I couldn’t get enough male ATAP actors to audition.

[I also cast the Genie as a woman because I didn’t have enough men.  I think that was fine, but I had to drop the Groucho Marx imitation Kirk had written into the part because I didn’t feel it worked with a woman doing it—it didn’t make sense.  (Groucho, 1890-1977, had just died the year before, but I was still pretty certain that the little kids in our audience wouldn’t see the joke anyway—even if the adults with them might.)

[Kirk talks about “exciting and interesting theater experiences” in childhood spurring interest in theater later and I’m reminded of an anecdote I’ve told before (in “A Broadway Baby,” 22 September 2010).  When I was very young, under 10, I’d say, when my family spent part of the summer on Cape Cod, we used to go at least once a season to the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis.  One show I remember, with one scene in particular, was The Wizard of Oz.  It was more than 65 years ago, but I still have an image of that scene, which I described thus:

I still remember being astonished at a production of  The Wizard of Oz there when, after a tornado generated by the techies, the lights came back up—and there was Dorothy’s house on stage, on top of the Wicked Witch, her legs sticking out from under one side!   It was impossible!  How did that house get there?  It was magic!

[Obviously it made an impression on me that lasted over six-and-a-half decades.  I’ve always seen it as my earliest experience of live theater that stamped me for life.  (I think I may have been on stage at a younger age at school.  One time was the dramatization of a folktale or traditional story—I don’t remember which one (maybe the Pied Piper)—and I had a speech down front . . . and I went up! 

[I absolutely froze, so much that when people off stage tried to prompt me, I couldn’t pick up what they were saying and I just stood there.  I remember it as minutes, but I imagine it was actually only seconds—and you’d think that would have cured me of being stage-struck.  Nope!  (But that never happened again—at least not that way.)]

Some Off-Off-Broadway Performances from the Archive

[Back in 1985, when I was a grad student at New York University, I did an internship with one of my teachers, Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, who was planning to start a writers’ theater.  The internship ran from 4 February to 17 May, and my main jobs, in addition to reading scripts (which everyone working on the theater project did), was to attend and report on workshops and reading series around the city and play readings and showcases at other theaters.  Jenner, who was a dramaturg (American Place Theatre, Women’s InterArt Center), was scouting out playwrights for her prospective production house, which she named Theatre Junction.

[I’ve posted a few of the longer reports I made for Cynthia on Rick On Theater, mostly of Off-Broadway productions I saw on her behalf (Salonika by Louise Page and Faulkner’s Bicycle by Heather McDonald, both in “Women Playwrights of the ’80s,” posted on Rick On Theater on 21 December 2018).  Here are some shorter reports I sent her for performances Off-Off-Broadway.]

ZOE ANGLESEY & VICTOR MONTEJO
Word/Play
Medicine Show Theatre
6 March 1985

Poetry and translations of Zoe Anglesey and fables, myths, poetry, and fiction of Victor Montejo, part of Word/Play at the Medicine Show Theatre (6 W. 18th Street [since moved to Clinton]), the theater’s writers’ reading series, is a month-long series of readings and “performances” of material that would otherwise not be produced.  The evening of Tuesday, 5 March, was devoted to readings by two poet-writers concerned with Central America in general and Guatemala in particular.  There was no “performance” in any sense, so the space had no effect on the presentation.

Anglesey’s material, both her own poetry and translations (both hers and others’) of works by Central American poets, was all of one note.  She seems (on the basis of this one hearing) to be obsessed with the subject of the violence and war in Central America.  Her attitude is decidedly anti-right, pro-peasant, and a little anti-U.S.  All the material was adamantly political, and I saw no real artistic value in it.  I may sympathize with her political anger, but her poetry leaves me less than cold.  She’s a bore.

Montejo, on the other hand, is very interesting, both as an individual and as a writer.  He is a Guatemalan Mayan from a small village, Jacaltenango in Huehuetenango Department (pop. ca. 15,000 in 1985), and, despite his very heavy accent, he’s very articulate and sophisticated.  His interests are threefold: preserving the oral traditions of his people, recording their contemporary history and writing “personal” poetry. 

[Montejo is a Jakaltek Maya and an internationally recognized author, scholar, and intellectual.  In 1982, he was forced to flee his home to escape being murdered by the Guatemalan Army during that country’s civil war.  He managed to make his way to the United States, where he received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Connecticut in 1993.  He later taught at the University of California-Davis in the Department of Native American Studies, eventually becoming its chair.  He was a Fullbright Scholar in 2003.  In 2004 he returned to Guatemala to serve first as Ministro de Paz (Minister of Peace) in the cabinet of Guatemalan president Roberto Berger, and then as a member of Guatemala’s National Congress from 2004 to 2008.  He formally retired from UC-Davis in 2011, and currently lives in his hometown of Jacaltenango, where he continues to write.]

Montejo has a published book (bilingual in Spanish and English) relating in verse the myth of “El Kanil, The Man of Lightning,” the great hero/god of his people.  He also has material recording some of the fables (much like Aesop’s) used by his parents and grandparents to teach the village children proper values in the days before there were schools for the Indians. 

[The book cited in the paragraph above is El Kanil, Man of Lightning: A Legend of Jacaltenango (Carrboro, N.C.: Signal Books, 1984).  It was an earlier edition of the current Q’anil, el hombre rayo: una leyenda de Jacaltenango (Rancho Palos Verdes, CA: Fundación Yax Te', 1999).  (The English edition is El Q’anil: Man of Lightning, translated by Wallace Kaufman and Susan G. Rascón (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001). 

[A book of Mayan legends by Montejo is The Bird Who Cleans the World and Other Mayan Fables (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press; East Haven, CT: Distributed by InBook, 1991).]

The chronicling of the contemporary lives of his people is not much different from what you might expect, but it is related with an innate charm and a combination of irony, humor, and concern that is quite illuminating.  What Montejo read were several anecdotes and vignettes that were very telling about the relationship between the Indians and the government.

Montejo’s “personal” poetry (my term, not his) apparently deals with his own experiences.  He read two quite amusing and astute pieces concerning his current visit to New York City, as seen by a very observant and sensitive visitor from a small Guatemalan village.  The sophisticated language juxtaposed with the naïveté of the wonderment was very touching and revealing.

Despite the interest I had in Montejo’s writing, I’m not sure what could be done with it as potential performance material.  To me, the oral tradition material is the most intriguing, but these myths, legends, and fables, as enjoyable as they are, aren’t terribly different from the equivalent material in many other cultures from the Greeks to the Norsemen, African tribes to North American Indians.  I doubt their charm would transfer to the stage as direct adaptations of the stories.  (It would probably end up as the Mayan version of that TV adaptation of Hanta Yo, called The Mystic Warrior [ABC, 1984].)

However, if some device could be found to use the material in a new way, perhaps, but not necessarily, in conjunction with some of Montejo’s other stuff (say his contemporary vignettes), it might prove interesting, different, and provocative.  I confess that I can’t think of such a device that would be different from other such attempts. 

The big question that I see is, even if it can be adapted, would it be really anything new except for the fact that it’s Guatemalan and Mayan?  I mean, is it only it’s exotic locale that makes it a curiosity?  I can’t shake the feeling that that’s the case. 

*  *  *  *
THE PRIVATE RICH
by Peter Rand
and
THE GERMAN FRIEND
by Serge Gavronsky
Word/Play
Medicine Show Theatre
8 March 1985

I think I can take care of The Private Rich by Peter Rand and The German Friend by Serge Gavronsky (WORD/PLAY at the Medicine Show; Friday, 8 March) very briefly.  Neither have anything I consider worth going after.  I begin to see that the taste of TMS people is pretty awful, and I’m not much inclined to go to any more of their stuff. 

Rand’s Private Rich is a clichéd, sniggering satire about the wealthy.  It has nothing to say that’s either new or clever, and the performances were uniformly amateurish and mugging.  The audience’s laughter was incomprehensible to me—I saw nothing funny, or even amusing.  This guy is billed as a teacher of creative writing at Columbia.  If I were Columbia, I’d be ashamed.

Thinking the second reading couldn’t be worse, I made the mistake of staying instead of coming back home to watch television.  The Rand pieces at least weren’t painful; Gavronsky’s pretentious, obtuse, self-indulgent mush was excruciating.  I’m sure everyone around me saw me looking at my watch every fifteen minutes. 

I couldn’t wait for the thing to be over, and when it finally was, I bolted as fast as I could.  If I ever see this man’s name on a program again, you couldn’t drag me to the theater.  I couldn’t even begin to tell you what this thing was about.  The flyer calls it “his poetic, funny, and disturbing novel about terrorism and the fractured world of the bourgeoisie.”  I found it neither poetic nor funny, and the only thing that was disturbed was my tush—from sitting through it.  For the rest—who cares!  Yecch! 

*  *  *  *
SOME RAIN
by James Luczak
Staret . . . The Director’s Company
13 March 1985

I went to the staged reading of James Luczak’s Some Rain at Staret . . . The Director’s Company (311 W. 43d Street) on my own on 10 March because I read the script last summer when I was reading for StageArts Theater Company, an Off-Off-Broadway showcase house where I did some rudimentary literary advising, and liked it very much.  I won’t recap the whole report at length—just give you my new impressions from the reading.

Very briefly, the plot is about Sarah, a middle-aged waitress, who encounters Wally, a young drifter.  He reawakens her to love and life, which she had abandoned, and when he leaves, she finds herself able to accept the proposal of her long-time friend and boss, Eddy.

There’s a subdued and engaging charm to this play.  Wally is extremely likeable—more Eros than Cupid—and the relationship he establishes with Sarah is entirely acceptable and understandable.  Even though he leaves her, I don’t feel he’s abandoned her.  We’ve been subtlety prepared for her feelings for Eddie, and his arrival is aptly conceived.   The play’s simplicity is deceptive, and the roles of Sarah and Wally have depths and corners that challenge the creative imaginations and talents of the actors.

I still like the play as an idea.  The slightly otherworldliness of Wally, though not brought out in this reading, and the engaging relationship of Wally and Sarah, make this a touching and interesting statement.  Though it’s presented as realism, I think there’s something more under its surface this reading didn’t tap.  Even here, I still saw what I saw when I read the play.

What I found out at the reading that I didn’t see when I read the script is that the play’s almost all dialogue.  There’s very little physical action, and not much possibility for adding any as the play stands.  The setting is the almost barren yard of Sarah’s trailer home.  Though there’s junk littered about, it provides little opportunity for activity, since it must be cleaned up by Wally—but this happens between scenes.  The bleakness of the surroundings is emblematic of Sarah’s life, so it can’t really be changed.  There are some directorial possibilities, I think, but they’re vague in my mind right now.  If this very serious problem can’t be overcome dramaturgically, the play will not stage well at all.

There was one review from a Theatre Row production about four years ago—in the New York Post, I think—which wasn’t very good.  I suspected at the time I was looking into the play that the production was done, as this reading was, strictly realistically and straight­forwardly and therefore wasn’t as theatrically interesting in production as I envisioned it.  I now suppose the talkiness of the script was also part of the problem.  The former can be solved easily by directing; the latter will need rewriting and dramaturgical efforts.

In the reading at Staret there was a scene I hadn’t read before the main action of the play.  After the reading, there was a brief discussion with the director, and he said that this was part of a scene added after the script was published.  It had been a longer scene than the reading used, and had been performed in some subsequent production of the play after the New York première.  The scene introduced Eddy, walking Sarah home from the diner, before she meets Wally. 

In the published version, Eddy is talked about throughout the first three scenes, but we never meet him until the very last scene, after Wally’s left.  I liked the old version, without this scene.  Though this makes Eddy a much smaller part quantitatively, I didn’t feel he was in any way insignificant.  I like the fact that Sarah talked about him, even defended him to Wally, without our ever seeing him until she was ready to accept his love.  It seemed important that he wasn’t “really” there while Wally was breaking down her resistance to life. 

The addition of the new opening scene, though it provided a structural frame for the play (Eddy at the beginning and the end), made the play too “real” for me.  The old way, besides not meeting Eddy in the flesh until the end, started off with Wally just appearing on Sarah’s doorstep.  This parallels his disappearance between scenes—we never see him leave; he’s just gone, no questions asked. 

This contributed to the “otherworldli­ness” I felt in his character—as if he were sent to awaken Sarah’s hibernating soul, and, having done his job, passed on to another assignment somewhere else.  Opening in medias res as the original version does helps this.  Having a logical beginning dissipates this feeling.

The reading also used a young, attractive actress for Sarah.  Not only does this change all the relationships, it also changes the play’s central message concerning life, love, and age.  An aging, no-longer-attractive woman awakened to love and affection is different than a young, pretty one.  The former seems less self-pitying than resigned; the latter prematurely jaded and need­lessly enervated. 

I could understand why an older woman couldn’t pick up and move on, but a younger one made me wonder why she doesn’t just quit complaining and go someplace else.  I don’t have the same sympathy for the younger Sarah that I do for the older.  The rest of the audience seemed to concur with this reaction.

*  *  *  *
“SUNSHINE”
by Dallas Murphy
Word/Play
Medicine Show Theatre
2 April 1985 

I really don’t have much to say about the staged reading of prose works by Thulani Davis, Dallas Murphy, and Frederick Feirstein, part of Word/Play at the Medicine Show (31 March 1985).  I really only went to meet and introduce myself to Murphy; I didn’t stay for the second half of the reading, the works by Feirstein, particularly after Murphy, who had seen it, told me it didn’t work. 

The Thulani Davis material was of little interest—a number of very brief monologues acted out with a silent ensemble while one actress delivered the piece.  The material was obtuse, and the performances were strange and self-indulgent. 

Murphy’s piece, “Sunshine,” was more whole: a brief story of two migrants to New York City from Miami (the evening was centered on views of New York from various perspectives), one wanting to return to Florida, the other resisting the boredom and lifelessness she left there.  The characters were alive, despite the amateurish performances, and quite telling. 

Of all the material I’ve seen at TMS, this was the first that had some real life and universality (see report of 8 March 1985, above).  Everything else sounded like literary masturbation in public.  It might well be worth looking at the whole piece from which this was drawn, something called Uptown Tales. 

I took the opportunity before the show to introduce myself to Murphy and we talked briefly.  He is, indeed, a very nice man.  We both agree that TMS is a mediocre place at best.  He was not pleased with their direction of “Sunshine” and said he had nothing to do with their production of the work.  He was relieved they didn’t do worse by it than they had.  (It wasn’t as mugged and camped as their other performances.) 

I think that puts the period to my visits there.  Except for Murphy, their choices of material show a vast lack of taste, and their performances do not do anything for the material they select. (I wonder how Murphy’s worked slipped in here.  Murphy’s Law—pardon the pun—in reverse.

"For Paul Newman's 96th birthday, his lost cinematic masterpiece," Part 3

by Allan M. Jalon

[This is the concluding section of Allan M. Jalon’s article on Paul Newman’s never-released film version of Anton Chekhov’s one-act play On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.  If you’ve been reading Parts 1 and 2, you know what a remarkable tale this is.  (If you haven’t read the beginning installments—posted respectively on 5 and 8 February—I strongly suggest going back and picking up the start of this endeavor.]

The play’s full title is “The Dybbuk, Between Two Worlds” [in which Michael Strong appeared in 1975 at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum; see Part 2]. It presents the troubled divide between the religion-steeped past and secular assimilation, the same transition that members of the Natapoff family (and many families) had experienced in Russia, and then in America. The play’s history runs like a thread through Jewish progress from the Old World to the new. It was written in Russia — originally for Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre, though it never had a production there — and got staged in Yiddish in New York in the 1920s. Now it was playing at the main theater complex in L.A.

Still, when Strong was onstage in “The Dybbuk,” in costume as a Polish Jew, did he feel connected to his Jewish identity? Strong’s childhood home felt “more Russian than Jewish,” his son told me, adding that the Natapoff family had no custom of Jewish practice or even celebrating holidays. Garfein said he’d had Strong and Shalet to his apartment for a few Seders [the ceremonial meal for Passover].

I’ll let Ellen Strong have the next-to last word: “Acting was his religion.”

My final words on this question offer a reminder that these were decades of a specific evolution — the merging of Jewish and American identities. Mike Strong was an American Jewish actor, while other people of his generation, with widely varying interest in the specificities of Jewishness, were American Jewish poets, American Jewish teachers and American Jewish politicians. It seems so obvious a statement, until one considers the decades of change it had taken until immigrants and their children could feel less like strangers here.

Garfein had moved to L.A. in 1964, joining Newman to establish the Actors Studio-West, an outpost of the New York group. He also got together with Strong and Shalet, growing closer to Strong than they’d been in New York. Ellen Strong recalls his “very social” presence at parties of about 10 people, mostly actors, in the backyard of their house. “Everyone would be telling stories and laughing about scenes going wrong, actors getting injured while doing stunts,” she recalled.

Garfein and Strong went to star-studded Hollywood parties. “We didn’t go to stupid parties,” he said. “It was always Kazan or Strasberg’s parties.”

They spent frequent Sunday mornings together at Garfein’s apartment, in a high-rise along Sunset Boulevard, “talking mostly about what we were doing — theater, movies.”

Strong and Garfein were two Actors Studio friends whose relationship was rooted in Chekhov-like indirection, the fissures between what was and wasn’t stated, remembered and left behind. Garfein said he and Strong got as close “as brothers — I was the younger brother,” but the two never spoke about the deep shadows surrounding them.

Garfein told me he never spoke to Strong about his youth in the Slovakian town of Bardejov [then part of Czechoslovakia]. In 1942, the family moved from Slovakia — a brutal Nazi ally that had begun deportations by then — to the relative safety of the Hungarian town where the Garfeins lived for two years. The family was swept up and placed on trains to Auschwitz in the massive Hungarian deportations of 1944.

In Auschwitz, Garfein told me, he lost 19 members of his family, including his mother and sister, on a single day, May 23, 1944; he was 13. His name was then Jacob Garfein, and his hair was red, not today’s airy white. (Iraj Abde, our mutual friend at Barzini’s Market, told me he buys 19 yahrzeit candles for Holocaust Remembrance Day each year.) [Yahrzeit is Yiddish for ‘anniversary’; the candles are memorials that Jews light in memory of loved ones on the anniversaries of their deaths.  They are also lit at Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah).]

It’s hard to reconcile his carefully modulated voice, his hints of infinite grief, with the man I’ve watched stroll buoyantly down Broadway. He details labor camps and death marches across Europe largely to lay German rail lines. He names nine camps across Poland and Central Europe where he stopped before English forces set him free at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. He was sent to a Swedish recovery center and from there, in 1946, to New York.

On his iPhone, he carries photographs from a Swedish newspaper, showing him as a flesh-and-bones teenager in Sweden.

Michael Strong, meanwhile, never spoke of being Cecil Natapoff, the son of an immigrant mail carrier in the Bronx who read Shakespeare in Yiddish. By hiding in a cemetery, Strong’s father had survived a pogrom in 1903 that killed hundreds of Jews in a Belorussian town called Gomel; I learned this from Susan Strong, the family historian. Strong never spoke of his brother. Gus Natapoff was seven years older than he, a prodigy who gained admission to Harvard for graduate work in advancing areas of science and engineering at a time when admission quotas limited the number of Jews.

He drowned in a swimming accident at a Harvard pool in 1938, just as Cecil Natapoff was starting his acting career, three years before he changed his name to Strong.

Alan Natapoff, a Strong cousin, is a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the impact of space travel on the human body. He grew up taking pleasure in Michael Strong’s work, and believes that Strong’s relationship with his elder brother —“the family never recovered from his death” — at least partly drove his acting ambitions.

“I didn’t know he had a brother. I never heard the name Natapoff,” Garfein said. “To me, he was Michael Strong. I knew he was Jewish, but we didn’t talk about the past.”

Grant, who wrote about her Jewish family (and how she endured the Hollywood blacklist) in a memoir called “I Said Yes to Everything” [2014], saw Strong and Shalet in L.A. She echoed Garfein, saying: “We didn’t talk about who we were like that. We were part of the tribe of actors. I never knew he was Cecil Natapoff. He never knew I was Lyova Rosenthal. Mike Strong. Lee Grant. How American can you get?”

[This is from Wikipedia: “The Hollywood blacklist (1946-1960s) was the colloquial term for what was in actuality a broader entertainment industry blacklist put in effect in the mid-20th century in the United States during the early years of the Cold War. The blacklist involved the practice of denying employment to entertainment industry professionals believed to be or to have been Communists or sympathizers. Not just actors, but screenwriters, directors, musicians, and other American entertainment professionals were barred from work by the studios. This was usually done on the basis of their membership in, alleged membership in, or even just sympathy with the Communist Party USA, or on the basis of their refusal to assist Congressional investigations into the party's activities. Even during the period of its strictest enforcement, from the late 1940s through to the late 1950s, the blacklist was rarely made explicit or easily verifiable, as it was the result of numerous individual decisions by the studios and was not the result of official legal action. Nevertheless, it quickly and directly damaged or ended the careers and income of scores of individuals working in the film industry.”]

But Garfein and Strong shared a delight in Yiddish theater stories. The Yiddish theater was in Strong’s blood. He sat in the 55-cent balcony seats of such theaters when he was a boy. Maybe when he stood on the stage of the Orpheum for Newman’s film, he was looking into a theater where he sat with his parents as a boy and felt the first stirrings of actor inspiration.

We know Strong worked on Broadway with Joseph Buloff [1899-1985], the Yiddish acting star who’d been brought from Europe by Maurice Schwartz [1890-1960], impresario-star of New York’s Yiddish Art Theater. It’s a good guess that Buloff gave him the following Schwartz story.

It seems Schwartz had a bad-great night playing Hamlet — in Yiddish, of course. He gave the gravedigger scene’s famous line — “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him. . .” — and blanked out. He looked to the prompter’s box, but it was empty, nature having called. Recovering his composure, Schwartz improvised: “Poor New Yorick, I know it. . . .”

His New York immigrant audience went crazy, it seems, as he went on: “Oh, poor New Yorick, I know it. It is our city, New Yorick, the city of our struggles, but it also holds promise for better times. . . .”

In 1968, Garfein directed Shalet and Strong in a short play about a honeymooning couple’s post-coital fight about the height of a great conductor. It was called “How Tall Is Toscanini?” [written by Calder Willingham, 1922-95; performed at UCLA’s Actors Studio West Workshop.] Strong and Garfein met, and Garfein showed him his “big directing book” filled with analytical notes for his actors.

Strong didn’t want to see it, saying he’d find his part on his own.

Garfein asked him, “Well, what do you do?’

“He said: ‘I put the character on the ceiling. Then, I lay on my bed and talk to the ceiling. That’s where the character lives. I ask questions: What job do you have? Introduce me to your mother and father. What are you doing right now? And the character talks back from the ceiling, and I listen to what he says. So, use your big book after you see what I get from the ceiling.’”

From 1969 to 1970, Strong enjoyed an unusually visible career moment. Working in “Patton,” he wove through the film as the title character’s ever-helpful chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Hobart Carver, and flinched in pain when his boss declared his willingness to work with ex-Nazis.

With the film on screens nationwide, Strong toured the country in a key role in Miller’s play “The Price” [1967], directed by Miller. He played the troubled middle-aged policeman Victor Franz, one of two brothers at war over an inheritance. Critics loved him. “Strong hovers between goodness and weakness” [“Arthur Miller Directs 'Price' at Hartford,” 4 Mar. 1970], wrote Dan Sullivan of the Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post’s Richard Coe [1914-95] judged Strong to be “strangely more perceptive than Pat Hingle’s original” [“‘The Price,’” 28 Oct. 1969; Hingle, 1924-2009, played Victor Franz in the Broadway première, 7 Feb. 1968-15 Feb. 1969].

On February 17, 1970, Kazan wrote him a letter that shows how acutely Strong’s admirers felt his unachieved potential. After seeing Strong’s glowing reviews from the road, the director wrote, “See, if you keep working, and you can stand the waiting, you finally get what you deserve.”

In Chicago, where “The Price” was onstage at the gorgeous old Studebaker Theater while “Patton” played on local screens, a Chicago Daily News reporter saw a good story in Strong as a veteran actor in the limelight. He interviewed him for a rare feature focusing on just him. Midway through it, Strong pulled out his wallet, removing a “fading, well-creased” clipping of The New York Times’s tiny rave of “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.” He told the reporter that he wished this “teething ring” of Newman’s directorial skills “might be shown as part of a Paul Newman retrospective.”

It seems the star of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” [1969] never forgot his directing debut, either. Amram visited the actor in his dressing room one night a few years before his 2008 death. “All Paul wanted to talk about was that film with Michael Strong,” the composer told me. “He asked, ‘Do you have or do you know anybody who has a copy of our film, ‘On the Harmfulness of Tobacco’? I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ He said, ‘I want to see it again.’ And he looked melancholy.”

THE GRAVE

In Diane Shalet’s book, “Grief in a Sunny Climate,” Michael is already dying of stomach cancer. He’s still well enough to join the narrator-wife at a cemetery somewhere near L.A. to pick out his grave site. They find one and lie down on it, under a tree with a “cluster of dark green needles.” He tells her a Chekhov short story about a young actor who visits the grave of a dead stage star who has been forgotten.

Shalet’s fictional alter ego recalls how, referring to a once popular police series, her husband had once told her, “I wasn’t put on earth to do ‘Baretta’” [ABC, 1975-78]

And the narrator created by Shalet (who would die in 2006) explains: “Passionate about the theater, uncanny in his sense of truth; and chameleon, he could create the psychological and physical reality of another human being.” She recalls exercises that they’d used to enter a role: “Wrap yourself in the circumstances. . . .Talk and listen with the illusion of the first time. . . . Acting is life chosen.”

Then there were the trials of the barely famous: “When we walked down the street he had the finger-snapping recognition of the public: “Aren’t you. . .? Click, click. . . . ”Aren’t you. . . Glenn Ford [1916-2006]?’ Michael would mumble and ask me, ‘Are you disappointed I’m not as famous as Burt Lancaster [1913-94]?’”

Finishing that passage, I asked myself: Why, without the Newman film’s second life, would Michael Strong remain so buried by time? With all his talent and commitment, why didn’t he get another truly visible break in films? True, he was more of a character actor, but why didn’t he find the notice earned by others of that broad type, like Karl Malden, his closest actor friend, or Eli Wallach, with whom Strong’s daughter says he socialized?

Was he too versatile? Not sufficiently distinctive? Too much the good soldier, not assertive enough in some back-lot sense? And is it fair to raise a question about whether a fine actor might have won more success than the substantial degree he found? Isn’t the risk of going under-recognized in the big world’s eyes so rooted in the acting life that it’s misguided to second guess such a career?

The more often I watched “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco,” the more resonant the scene in which Chekhov’s character peers into that empty theater with baffled eyes became for me. I sensed the meaning it might have for many artists working in different fields who hold somewhere in their minds the question: “Will this work of mine be seen? Will it be heard?” The sight of Ivan Nyukhin — staring as his belief in his connection to others drains away — became a kind of symbolic moment that guided how I understood the film and the filmmakers. It’s only a reporter’s guess about the past, but I’ve become sure that both Strong and Newman constructed that scene of the unwatched actor on the Orpheum’s stage in 1959 to dramatize the possibility they lived with of making art and being answered with silence.

Still, while Paul Strong is convinced his father did what he did for mostly the sake of doing it, that he “cared more about art than stardom,” he wonders if he may have hidden frustration about his career. He asked me, “If Kazan admired him so much, why didn’t he give him a small part in ‘On the Waterfront’ [1954], or another of his classic films?”

He wanted to know if I’d found any answers to the mystery.

I told him my reporting had only deepened it.

In fact, if there’s one person I’d like to trouble from the grave for this story — besides Newman and Strong — it’s Kazan. I’ve realized how closely the lives its major figures wove through his career. He directed Newman in the [Sweet Bird of Youth (T. Williams), 1959-60]. Garfein considered him a mentor. Amram composed for him repeatedly [Splendor in the Grass (1961), The Arrangement (1969)]. He directed Strong [After The Fall (1964-65), Marco Millions (1964), The Changeling (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964-65); all stage] and worked with him at the Actors Studio.

None of those four men was blacklisted, but I can’t conjure Kazan’s memory without thinking of his having named names in the Hollywood blacklist era. His autobiography, “Elia Kazan: A Life” [1997], is one of the most complex books of self-narration I have read: a thick, confounding knot of history-making talent and betrayal. Still, his affection for actors ran deep, as the Strong papers show.

Michael Strong died of stomach cancer on September 17, 1980. He was 62. On October 3, without addressing it to Shalet or anyone, Kazan wrote what looked like a condolence note. He wasn’t at Strong’s funeral — Malden, who called Strong “my dear friend” in his memoir, was there — so it wasn’t a eulogy. He signed its typed sentences, an elegy for one actor and for a world of New York actors who called the theater home: “At one time in my life, for perhaps 15 years, I had a family in the theater, a small family of actors, because I trusted them to understand me and give me everything of which they were capable.

“Mike was one of this family. And he was capable of a great deal. But beyond and above his work there was a unique quality of sweetness, of goodness, so rare today. Of course he was competitive — that’s a necessity as the world spins today; one pays for excessive naiveté — but this career orientation never dimmed the sterling light of his realest self. There was never a day that I went to rehearsal and found Mike waiting that I didn’t feel better for the sight of him.”

THE HARMFULNESS OF AVOIDANCE

Garfein was in Paris when Strong died. Shalet called him from L.A. with the news. She also called him — possibly just before or right after he died — to tell him that Strong had asked her on his deathbed to bring Garfein the Newman film. He’d asked that she fly to France and hand it to him in person.

Ellen Strong, who cared for her father with Shalet till the end, recalls no deathbed request. But she says her father was “very proud” of the film, and that Shalet visited Europe after he died, so “it is very plausible that it happened just as Jack Garfein says.”

In fact, the film box bears a peeling strip of tape on which printed black letters say “For Jack Garfein.”

“Diane told me, ‘Mike wants you to have this movie,’” Garfein told me. “That’s what she said.”

And he fell silent, the Garfein energy giving way to a hard, inward look.

I asked, “What happened next?”

His hand gave the air a lost-looking swipe. Silent, he stared at the space of pale sofa beside him and repeated: “She came to Paris. She said that on his deathbed, Mike said: ‘Give it to Jack. He’ll know what to do with it.’ I’m the one he called after Newman gave it to him. He trusted me. He knew I respected his work immensely. He knew I understood it was the best he could do, his pinnacle as an actor. I put it away somewhere in some closet, and I never looked at it again.”

I asked him what could have stopped him from watching a film that a dying actor-friend had told his wife to carry across the Atlantic to give to him, with a clear sense that his friend dreamed it could finally be seen when he was gone?

“I knew Paul had taken his name off of it,” Garfein answered. “I was afraid that, if Paul found it a disappointment, I’d find it disappointing, too. I respected Paul’s opinion. I wanted to remember the way Mike did it at the Actors Studio. I was there the first time he did it in a class, in front of Strasberg. Strasberg thought it was astonishing. Everyone did. I didn’t want that memory to be wiped out by something mediocre.”

After Shalet handed Garfein the box with the film in it, he stashed it in a closet in his Paris apartment, where it stayed, untouched, for another 34 years.

LOST IS NOT ALWAYS LOST

In 2012, while still living in Paris, the 82-year-old Garfein visited New York and met an articulate 37-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant (“75% percent Jewish,” he said, with a teasing smile) named Natalia Repolovsky [b. 1976; m. Garfein, 2019]. Born in Sochi, the site of Russia’s recent Olympics [winter 2014], she grew up there and trained as a classical pianist in Moscow. She’s tall, with a willowy bearing, and states clear views in her Russian accent.

She met Garfein, far more diminutive, 45 years her senior, at a dinner party that also figures into a tangled tale they gleefully tell me, about a production they were supposed to see together earlier of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”— a story that ends with them seeing it separately and hating it.

[The only New York staging of Uncle Vanya (first produced, 1899) around the time Jalon reports that Garfein and Repolovsky met was an Off-Broadway production of the Pearl Theatre. It was mounted at the company’s home on West 42nd Street (Theatre Row), east of 11th Avenue, known as the Peter Norton Space, in September and October 2014. 

[Of the production, the New York Times’ Laura Collins-Hughes (“On a Russian Farm, Where Frustration Grows,” 24 Sept. 2014) said that “there’s a lopsidedness to the telling” because “performances by” some cast members “are funnier and more fully realized than those by” others. Collins-Hughes added that “with the strong imbalance in the principal roles, . . . poignancy goes missing”; “in place of the sadness that should be there, we feel only emptiness.” 

[The translation, by Paul Schmidt, was apparently contemporary, as the Times reviewer, who liked it, characterized it as “vibrant” and “loose-limbed” and asserted, “There’s no groping through layers of musty language to find our connection to Chekhov’s” characters.  Other notices (Time Out New York, Village Voice) were equally non-committal-to-negative.]

In 2014, Garfein returned to New York to move in with Repolovsky, and brought with him a certain tired-looking brown box with an old film in it.

“We were unpacking,” she recalled. “And I saw it. Just laying there amid his things. I asked, “What’s that?” And he said, ‘Oh, it’s an old film of a play by Chekhov.’ And I asked, ‘What play?’ And he told me, and I had never read this play. I had never seen it performed. I said, ‘We have to see it.’”

Garfein hesitated, but Repolovsky insisted.

“I said, ‘We have to see it. Anything Chekhov, I will go and look,’” she recounted. “Even if it is bad, it is bad Chekhov!”

They faced a problem of time and technology. The film was locked onto the roll that Newman had handed to Strong and Shalet to Garfein, an artifact of the long era when Americans went to a movie theater to see a movie. So, Garfein called Lori Styler [b. 1954], a friend and a connection to his past.

Her father, Herman Styler, was a freelance journalist who wrote about Garfein’s brief talk at a United Jewish Appeal dinner shortly after he arrived in New York in 1946, at the age of 16. One of the first and youngest Holocaust survivors to emigrate here, he’s now one of the last who lives.

He placed the old film box with the print in it into her hands; she took it to be digitized, and brought it back with the film on a DVD disc. That evening, he nervously watched Repolovsky slide the DVD into place, and they watched as some visual static crossed the print. Credits rolled past the spot where Newman’s name might have been.

And Michael Strong came wandering down the street, dressed as Nyukhin. He stopped at the theater door, corrected his name, and starred in his slow storm of words and silences.

When the film ended, Garfein and Repolovsky told me, they sat “in silence,” contemplating the decades that it had been left to the dark. “I knew that I was wrong,” Garfein said. “Paul was wrong to be disappointed, if that’s what happened.”

“It was a revelation to me that an American actor could perform Chekhov in a way so Russian,” Repolovsky told me after I’d returned to watch the film again, this time with both of them. “This combination of misery and humor that is so big a part of Chekhov was so natural for him. It was not an American performance of a Russian play. I’ve seen those, and I have been disappointed a number of times.

“There is such a big difference between the two cultures. American culture is a success culture, always about winning, while Russia has a culture of elegant failures, and that is what this film is about. I watched Michael Strong, thinking that he gets it. He understands, and it comes from a very deep place.”

Repolovsky didn’t know, when we watched the Newman film that evening, that Michael Strong was a Russian Jew, that he’d grown up hearing the language in which Chekhov wrote his play. When I’d done that piece of reporting, I told her. Her eyes wide, she looked at me like I’d handed her a key and she’d unlocked — well, a closet. “See,” she said. “It makes total sense.”

Without Repolovsky’s émigré antennae, Garfein says, the film might have stayed lost. He had no plan to look at it. “I brought it back to New York, thinking I’d donate it to some institution, maybe Lincoln Center, and then I could take a tax write-off,” he said candidly. At one point, I told Garfein I’d found a Chekhov quote to be in order: “One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake” [from The Personal Papers of Anton Chekhov, ed. 1948]. He smiled broadly, and asked me to email it to him.

Repolovsky is clear that this ungodly mistake should be corrected, saying the film “must be seen.” Garfein said he’s taken steps to make a film about the Newman film, one that will be “more than a documentary,” though he’s declined to elaborate.

But last April [2016], the director of “Something Wild” visited a studio at TCM and helped the popular Robert Osborne [1932-2017] host a screening of his best-known film. That visit resulted in early exchanges about a possible showing of the Newman film.

Osborne may end up introducing it in just the kind of Newman retrospective that Strong envisioned as a showcase for his Chekhov tour-de-force. “At this point, a Newman evening is what I have in mind,” TCM’s [senior v.p. of programming and production Charles] Tabesh said.

Still, I wonder: Who actually owns this orphanlike film? Such a film isn’t likely to bring a windfall, but who can profit from it? I asked this to Eric Schwartz, a leading attorney on film copyright issues. “Copyright law is often murky for unfinished or abandoned projects,” he told me.

Amram registered for copyright protection for his music; Newman didn’t take that step. Garfein — possession being nine-tenths of the law — owns the physical print, but copyright law governs intangibles, and that could thwart his right to profit from screenings of the imagery.

Amram said that he will “be a mensch, not a gangster kind of guy,” and isn’t looking for money because he wants only to “get this film seen.” Still, if the Newman family claims to own the copyright, it could create a problem, Schwartz said, especially if it has documents that place control in family hands. Tabesh said TCM lawyers have looked into the rights question deeply enough to feel “comfortable” with it, but he added, “We will check with the family.”

For members of the Strong family, watching TCM together is a tradition. They spoke in interviews about stars of the decades between 1930 and 1980 with whom Michael Strong performed, including Frederic March [1897-1975; An Enemy of the People (play), 1950-51], Lee J. Cobb [1911-76; The Emperor's Clothes (play), 1953; The Young Lawyers: The Victims (TV), 1971] and Ethel Merman [1908-84; Gypsy (play; understudy Herbie), 1959-61]. When they watch Cobb, they’re aware he was one of Strong’s two favorite actors. The other was Paul Muni [1895-1967], with whom Strong probably never acted but whose disciplined intensity he emulated, and for whom Paul Strong is named.

Three generations of the Strong family spent the past summer [2016] on the Maine coast, in a house on an inlet that reaches out to the Atlantic and has been in the family for decades. There, Paul and Susan Strong have shared old movies with their two grown children — who call Michael Strong “Grampa Mike” — and two grandchildren. Michael, 9, is named for the actor. He and his sister, Sophia, 11, spent part of the summer at a theater day camp. When I mentioned his name to them, they said they hadn’t heard of Paul Newman. But they knew a lot about Michael Strong, and they’d heard about “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.”

I made a last call to the family to tell Paul Strong about TCM’s plan to show the film. In his deep, quiet voice, he said: “Robert Osborne once mentioned my father’s name. He was about to screen a film with him in it. Then he suddenly said his name, and I’ve remembered that ever since.

“They’ve shown him in ‘Detective Story,” and we’ve watched that,” he added. “But if you ask me what it means that they will show this film after all this time? There really are no words for it.”

[TCM had scheduled On the Harmfulness of Tobacco along with 1968’s Rachel, Rachel and 1972’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for “Newman Directs” on Sunday, 26 March 2017.  In February, however, Garfein pulled out of the arrangement with the network on the argument that airing the movie for a nationwide audience would impede the success of an independent documentary about the Newman film the director planned to make.

[As a result, TCM aired only Rachel, Rachel and Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds that Sunday night at 8 and 10 p.m.; On the Harmfulness of Tobacco wasn’t shown as originally announced.  Garfein died on 30 December 2019 and, as far as I could determine, never made the Newman documentary.

[The Film Society of Lincoln Center, however, scheduled the Chekhov movie along with Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for Monday, 20 February 2017, the first time since 1962 that the film would be seen in public; that screening was still planned.]

Allan M. Jalon won two 2015 Simon Rockower Awards [given for “Excellence in Jewish Journalism” sponsored by the American Jewish Press Association] for his Forward feature stories, “My Opa’s Story of World War One’s Other Fight” [7 Sept. 2014; Opa is German for ‘Grandpa’] and “A New Jersey Tale of Two Alfred Doblins” [27 July 2014].