Two Theater Personages of Note: Ralph Lee (1935-2023)

 

[When I read of the death of Ralph Lee, the mask- and puppet-maker who also created the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, I wanted to post something in his memory, but I didn’t want just to republish his obituary.  A few days later, the report of the passing of playwright James de Jongh appeared, and I decided to post an homage to the two theater artists together.

[I began assembling various articles and reports to accompany the two obituaries.  As I developed the memorial post, it began to grow longer and longer, eventually outgrowing my maximum length for a stand-alone post.  So, now the memorial to “Two Theater Personages of Note” has become two posts.  I’m starting with Ralph Lee and the homage to James de Jongh will be posted on Monday, 12 June.] 

“RALPH LEE, FATHER OF PUPPETS AND A NEW YORK PARADE, IS DEAD AT 87”
by Neil Genzlinger 

[Niel Genzlinger’s obituary of Ralph Lee, designer of costumes, puppets, masks, and stage sets, and the creator of the iconic Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, ran in the New York Times on 18 May 2023.  I’m posting it on Rick On Theater with a history of the Parade from its producing organization’s own website and a review of an exhibit of Lee’s theater artistry at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. which I visited back in 1998.]

In 1974 he decided it would be fun to parade through Greenwich Village with some of his creations on Halloween. A tradition was born.

Ralph Lee, a creator of giant crustaceans, lizards, skeletons and sorceresses as well as one enduring New York tradition, the Village Halloween Parade, died on Friday [12 May 2023] at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

His wife, Casey Compton, confirmed the death. She said his health had been declining for several months.

Mr. Lee was an actor, writer, producer and director, but above all he was one of puppetry’s most prolific and inventive designers. His evocative masks and figures were seen in productions by his own Mettawee River Theater Company and in shows by the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Shakespeare Festival [now the Public Theater], New York City Opera, Theater for the New City and various dance troupes and stage companies.

His menagerie ranged from hand puppets to fantastic figures that towered over the audience and were controlled by multiple puppeteers. One of his most famous puppets ate Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin and others — it was the “land shark” that turned up at unsuspecting women’s doors in a 1975 “Saturday Night Live” sketch and returned several times over the years. [Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws was released on 20 June 1975.]

Masks were another Lee signature; his designs could be scary, sorrowful or phantasmagorical.

“There is something mysterious about masks,” he told The New York Times in 1998, when the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts was given over to an exhibition of his work [see Mel Gussow’s review of this show below], “and the core of that mystery is that an inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if it’s manipulated properly you would swear that you can see the expression change.” [See “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011.]

Mr. Lee brought all his skills and interests to bear in creating the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, which he first staged in 1974 with production help from George Bartenieff and Crystal Field of Theater for the New City. A modest announcement in The Times promoted the event.

“Starting at 5 p.m., a pageant‐parade will spill forth from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, winding across Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square,” the announcement said. The parade was to be “a transient entertainment” with musicians, giant puppets and floats. Children were invited to wear costumes and join the procession. [TNC eventually moved to 1st Avenue in the East Village.]

It was not an instant success.

“There were not many people around besides us — maybe bums,” Mr. Lee said in 1998. “And here we were, all holding sparklers, kind of looking at each other.”

But the next year the parade grew, and so did the audience, earning Mr. Lee an Obie Award [1975]. Soon it was a flamboyant fixture of the city’s October calendar, so big that in 1985 it had to be moved off the narrow side streets of the Village and onto the Avenue of the Americas. Mr. Lee stepped aside from running the show around that time, but it has continued across the decades.

“Halloween is for the kid in all of us,” he said in 1982. “It gives people, especially adults, permission to act any way they want.”

Ralph Minor Lee was born on July 9, 1935, in Middlebury, Vt. His father, William, was a dean at Middlebury College, where his mother, Mary Louise (Minor) Lee, taught dance.

He grew up in Middlebury, getting his first few years of education in a one-room schoolhouse, where he appeared in his first play. He portrayed a cat policeman, he said in a 2016 interview for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project, and he particularly remembered delivering one line, catlike: “I have neeews.”

“The news was that I was going to be in the theater,” he recalled, “because I was really hooked.”

Puppetry was also an early interest.

“When I was about 12 years old I started making puppets, and I developed my own little puppet theater with all hand puppets,” he said in an oral history recorded for the Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls, N.Y. “I used to perform for school assemblies and birthday parties, things like that.”

He graduated from Amherst College in 1957, then studied dance and theater in Europe on a Fulbright scholarship before trying his hand at theater in New York.

He had small parts in three Broadway shows, starting with “Caligula” in 1960, and later in the 1960s began working with the experimental Open Theater troupe [founded by Joseph Chaikin]. After that group disbanded in 1973, he made his way back to Vermont, taking a teaching job at Bennington College.

It was at Bennington in the spring of 1974 that he staged an innovative theatrical event called “Casserole,” which The Bennington Banner described as “a dramatic piece which confronts the audience with a variety of levels of reality and illusion.” Its scenes, which incorporated Mr. Lee’s puppets, were staged all around the campus, with the spectators transported from one scene to the next in hay wagons.

“I’d never done anything like that before in my life,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “And it was the first time that I had actually seen any of my puppets outdoors, and it seemed like they took on a kind of life outdoors that they just didn’t have inside.”

From there it was a short leap to the Halloween parade, and for decades Mr. Lee continued to stage theater productions outdoors as well as in. He became artistic director of the Mettawee River company shortly after it was formed by some Bennington theater graduates (including Ms. Compton) in 1975, and it staged shows in all sorts of places over the ensuing decades — Moreau Lake State Park in upstate New York, the lawn of the Putney School in Vermont, Windsor Lake Park in Massachusetts, Central Park and the garden of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, and many more.

[The Mettawee River Theatre Company, founded in 1975, is based in Salem, New York, a town in Washington County 200 miles north of New York City in eastern New York State on the border with Vermont.  Bennington College is in Bennington, Vermont, 30 miles south-southeast of Salem.]

Those works and others Mr. Lee presented often drew on traditions and mythologies from a diverse range of cultures. For years he traveled to Mexico to work with Sna Jtz’ibajom, a writers’ group that seeks to preserve Mayan culture, creating a new theater work with the group each time he visited.

[Sna Jtz’ibajom is headquartered in the city of San Cristobal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas. The name means ‘the house of the writer’ in Tzotzil, a Mayan language spoken in the region.]

“Most of our shows are based on folk material from one culture or another, and I find that very inspiring,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “You’re dealing with forces of nature and how they operate and how they clash with each other, and how things become resolved.”

In February [2023], he and Ms. Compton received a lifetime achievement Obie Award for their work with Mettawee.

Mr. Lee’s first marriage, to Stephanie Lawrence Ratner in 1959, ended in divorce in 1973. In addition to Ms. Compton, whom he married in 1982, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Heather, Jennifer and Joshua Lee; a daughter from his second marriage, Dorothy Louise Compton Lee; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

Mr. Lee’s puppets were generally carefully made works of craftsmanship that bordered on art. But the Lee creature that might have been seen by more people than any, the “S.N.L.” land shark, was, he said, thrown together from foam, cloth and rubber laminate he had lying around the house.

“People still know about that shark,” he told The Post-Star of Glens Falls in 2003. “For many people, it is my claim to fame.”

“When I was making it,” he added, “I thought it would get used once and shucked.”

In his 1998 interview with The Times, he acknowledged that some of his work could be ephemeral, but he said that when he carved wooden masks for puppets, he was hoping for something more.

“The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,” he said. “I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.”

[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries desk.  Previously he was a television, film, and theater critic.] 

*  *  *  *
“HISTORY OF THE PARADE” 

[Lee founded the now-perennial—and iconic—Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in 1974.  The “modest announcement in The Times” (“GOING OUT Guide” by Howard Thompson, 31 October 1974 on page 50) to which the obituary above refers read as follows:

AWAY THEY GO Starting at 5 P.M., a pageant‐parade will spill forth from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, winding across Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square. The parade, sponsored by the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, produced by the theater and designed by Ralph Lee, will be a transient entertainment with its own musical score, singers, giant puppet figures and floats, apples and candy for children, who are invited to wear costumes and join the procession along the way.

Among the participants will be Tammy Grimes, John Guare, Joel Oppenheimer and Barbara Carson, the Active Trading Company, the Margot Colbert Dancers, the Open Eye Musicians and the Renaissance Street Singers. Procession stops en route to the Washington Square dance are at Abingdon and Sheridan Squares, the Washington Square Methodist Church and the Judson Church.

[A few pages earlier, among a collection of Halloween-themed articles, nary a word was written about the soon-to-be beloved annual event.

[The following history of the parade is from the Village Halloween Parade website (http://halloween-nyc.com/about.php), posted on 27 July 2014; I updated some of the details to 2023.]

Started by Greenwich Village mask maker and puppeteer Ralph Lee in 1974, the Parade began as a walk from house to house in his neighborhood for his children and their friends. After the second year of this local promenade, Theater for the New City [then located in the West Village] stepped in and produced the event on a larger scale as part of their City in the Streets program. That year the Parade went through many more streets in Greenwich Village and attracted larger participation because of the involvement of the Theater. After the third year, the Parade formed itself into a not-for-profit organization, discontinued its association with Theater for the New City and produced the Parade on its own.

Today the Parade is the largest celebration of its kind in the world and has been picked by Festivals International as “The Best Event in the World” for October 31.

After the 8th year [1981], when the crowd had reached the size of 100,000 Celebration Artist and Producer Jeanne Fleming, a long-time participant in the Parade took over the event. She began working closely with the local Community Board, residents, merchants, schools, community centers and the Police to ensure a grass-roots, small “Village” aspect of the event, while at the same time preparing for its future growth. Now, 30 years later [2013], the Parade draws more than 60,000 costumed participants and spectators estimated at 2 million. [Another 1 million watch the Parade on local television in New York City.]

[In 1985, Lee withdrew as producer of the Parade.  “In its early years,” he told the New York Times (“Neighborhood Report: greenwich village: The Parade: Too, too? Or Too Much?” by Andrew Jacobs, 29 October 1995 in “The City” section), “the parade had a wonderful spontaneity between onlookers and marchers, and there was no firm line between the two. But the number of onlookers began to overwhelm the participants, and that's what killed it for me.”

[Jeanne Fleming, Lee’s assistant, took over and the Parade continued.  In 2016, however, the puppeteer asserted in the New York Post (“He's TRICKEd OFF Father of Village Halloween Parade disowns creation” by Raquel Laneri, 30 October 2016): “What had started out as a community event had become a city event. The spectators were standing six or seven deep — it just seemed like they had become total onlookers.”]

Originally drawing only a postage stamp sized article in the New York Times [see above], now the Parade is covered by all media—local, national and worldwide. [WPIX television (channel 11) in New York City has broadcast the Parade live.]

The Parade has won an Obie Award [1975] and been recognized by the Municipal Arts Society [1985] and [inducted into the] City Lore [People’s Hall of Fame in 1993] for making a major contribution to the life and culture of New York City. In 1993 the Parade was awarded a major NEA Grant for Lifetime Achievement and in 1993 and 1997—it’s 20th and 25th Anniversary Years— it was awarded Tourism Grants from both the Office of the Mayor of the City of New York and the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in recognition of its economic and cultural contribution to New York City. Additionally, the Parade has been the subject of many books, scholarly dissertations, independent films and documentaries due to its position as an authentic “cultural event.”

In 1994 The Mayor of the City of New York [Rudolf Giuliani] issued a Proclamation honoring the Village Halloween Parade for 20 years of bringing everyone in the City together in a joyful and creative way and being a boon to the economic life of the City. The Proclamation concludes: “New York is the world’s capital of creativity and entertainment. The Village Halloween Parade presents the single greatest opportunity for all New Yorkers to exhibit their creativity in an event that is one-of-a-kind, unique and memorable every year. New Yorkers of all ages love Halloween, and this delightful event enables them to enjoy it every year and join in with their own special contributions. The Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village is a true cultural treasure.” In that same statement, the Mayor declared the week of October 24-31 to “HALLOWEEK in NYC in perpetuity.”

Perhaps our greatest honor came only 7 weeks after the tragic events of 9/11, when Mayor Rudolf Giuliani insisted that the Parade take place stating that it would be a healing event for New York. With the eyes of the world looking at us, we created a giant Phoenix puppet rising out of the ashes.

Hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide watched as the Parade provided tangible evidence that NYC was enduring, safe, surviving, and spirited in the face of great tragedy and hardship.

In 2005 we paid tribute to New Orleans and invited all Katrina evacuees to join us in a Funeral Procession Tribute to the stricken city. Over 8,000 evacuees showed up for the Parade and Benefit. [On 29 August 2005, Katrina’s storm surge breached various flood protection structures in and around the greater New Orleans area, inundating 80% of the city.]

In 2010 the Parade commissioned Haitian Karnaval Artist Didier Civil to make traditional Haitian Carnival figures in a themed element entitled “Memento Mori!” [Latin for ‘remember you must die’] in support of his efforts to rebuild the Art School in Jacmel, Haiti’s center for Carnival. Again, thousands of Haitians participated in the Parade to mourn and remember all those lost in the [12 January 2010] earthquake.

In 2012 Super Storm Sandy [which hit New York City on 29 October] forced an unprecedented cancellation of the Parade, prompting us to call for public support to save the Parade after it suffered serious financial losses.

[Less than four hours after eight people were killed six blocks west of the parade route in the 2017 New York City truck attack, the parade proceeded as scheduled. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo marched in the parade.

[(On 31 October at 3:05 p.m., Sayfullo Saipov swerved a rented pick-up truck into the Hudson River Greenway, a protected bike lane, at Houston Street. He killed eight and injured seven others. Saipov was sentenced on 17 May 2023 to eight consecutive life terms without parole and two concurrent life terms plus 260 years and is currently incarcerated)

[In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the parade was canceled for the second time. The parade organizers cited concerns that social distancing would be impossible with the high crowds that the parade typically saw.]

[Unlike most parades in New York City, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade is unique.  It’s semi-organized, unlike, say, the famous Easter Parade, which is really just an open promenade along the stretch of 5th Avenue that runs in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  Participants flaunt their spring finery, especially the vaunted Easter bonnets, which are often elaborate and fanciful.

[Second, unlike, say, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, anyone may join the march up 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village—as long as she or he wears a costume.  There are a few other rules (no alcohol, for instance, and marchers must follow the Parade’s designated route), but it’s free (both to march and to watch) and there are no other qualifications.

[Third, it’s a nighttime procession—the nation’s only night parade.  After all, it is Halloween!  What self-respecting goblin comes out in the daytime?

[The costumes can be simple and are often homemade, but they can also get quite elaborate—remember, Lee was also a costume and mask designer, so his confreres are drawn to the Parade.  So are the LGBTQ+ community, whose garb can be quite outrageous—and entertaining.  There’s also often a little (or even a lot) of politics on view—mostly of the lampooning variety.

[The usual Parade path goes up 6th Avenue—the place of congregation before the march used to be Washington Square, but the Parade has grown too big to be accommodated in the short distance from the park to the mid-teens, so it’s been extended down to Canal Street—and then turns east onto my street as the procession breaks up, and participants walk back down to the Village via 5th Avenue.  They pass right under my apartment windows as they make the turn from eastward bound to southward.  Of course, the raucous noise accompanies the marchers in their get-ups.] 

*  *  *  *
“FLEETING BEASTS COLLECTED IN A FANTASY HEAVEN”
by Mel Gussow 

[From 4 February to 2 May 1998, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center was the site of Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures and Theater Designs, an exhibit of Lee’s multifarious design work.  Mel Gussow’s review of the show ran in the New York Times of 13 March 1998.]

“Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures and Theater Designs,” an exhibition that includes whimsical and scary images from theatrical productions created by Mr. Lee.

Fiery dragons and horny-toed demons, a mountainous boulder that turns into a giant, lords of death and destruction and a gigantic spider that for many Halloweens danced merrily on the facade of the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village as the arachnidan version of King Kong – these and other fantastical creatures fill the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. This phantasmagoric cavalcade, which runs through May 2, is the invention of Ralph Lee, for more than 35 years a master mask maker in the American theater.

Tomorrow at 12:30 P.M., Mr. Lee will lead a tour of the exhibition, one of a series of tours free and open to the public.

In his creations for theater and dance companies, pageants and parades, Mr. Lee also acts as puppeteer, designer and director, dramatizing folk tales and legends from diverse native cultures. In the past, his work has often been seen fleetingly in shows that offer a limited number of performances at places that range from La Mama (masks in the 1986 revival of “The Emperor and the Architect” by Fernando Arrabal) to the New York City Opera (a dancing rooster for the 1977 production of “Ashmedai”).

Collected under one roof, the mystical and metaphorical beasts seem to raise that roof, ready to fly into some outer space of Mr. Lee’s vivid imagination. Those who visit the Lincoln Center show may feel as if they have entered a world of dreams and nightmares. Standing in the middle of the exhibition, with his sculptured white hair and beard, the 62-year-old mask maker could himself have posed for a portrait of a mythological figure, somewhere between Pan and Neptune.

Although he has created towering totemic creatures like those that march for social progress for the Bread and Puppet Theater, his work is not overtly political. With its emphasis on the folkloric, it is closer to the puppetry of Julie Taymor. In common with Ms. Taymor, Mr. Lee draws inspiration from Indonesian, Japanese and Latin American sources. Most of his work begins with his Mettawee River Company, a traveling troupe whose home base is in Salem in upstate New York. His latest play, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” based on an Iroquois story, will be performed in May at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and in September in the garden at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Because his work is often supplementary to dance or drama, it can easily be undervalued. In Mr. Lee’s hands, masks become embodiments of character, emotion and motion. “There is something mysterious about masks,” he said, “and the core of that mystery is that an inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if it’s manipulated properly you would swear that you can see the expression change.” [See “The Magic of Masks,” referenced above.]

In demonstration, he stopped at an exhibit of his production of “The Tempest,” which Mettawee presented on tour in 1996, and put Caliban’s mask over his head, swimming his arms and transforming himself into a scaly amphibian emerging from the sea. Then he switched to the face of Stefano and, lolling his head, became a drunken sailor. His production used a cast of seven actors, doubling and tripling in roles, rushing on and off stage to change masks and characters.

Across the room are characters from “The North Wind,” a Yupik Eskimo story in which a Lee puppet played the title role, manipulated in performance by three puppeteers, two of whom billowed the wind’s sky-sweeping train. High over the exhibition is a 30-foot snake, inspired by an 18th-century cartoon depicting the American Colonies as a snake divided into 13 pieces with the slogan “Join or Die.”

As he moved among the displays, Mr. Lee talked about the mystique of mask-making: “When you’re wearing a mask, you have to find the way that mask would move -- the rhythm, the shape and the dynamic behind the movement.” Just as myths inspire him to expand the world of living creatures, “masks allow the performer to explore realms that he couldn’t reach by using his own face.” At the same time, he acknowledges that especially expressive actors like the late Zero Mostel can, in effect, turn their own faces into the equivalent of masks.

Necessarily, some performers are more adept than others at performing behind masks. When Mr. Lee was doing “Popol Vuh,” a Maya creation story, for his Mettawee company, he held auditions in which actors were asked to improvise with a toadlike mask, a “totally gruesome and despicable character.” One man put the mask on and the effect was “incredible – marriage at first mask.” Actors can feel possessed by masks or they can feel robbed of their own personality.

The boundary between masks and puppets is narrow. Generally masks “are inhabited by the performers and puppets are not,” but many of Mr. Lee’s most fanciful puppets are manipulated by shadowy puppeteers in the style of Bunraku or become costumes to be worn by actors. Similarly, masks are related to makeup, especially so with Chinese opera. For Mr. Lee, makeup means “painting a mask on your face.”

Several years ago when Mr. Lee had a smaller exhibition in a gallery at the City University of New York, he was stopped by an admiring student who said, “You have voodoo in you.” He took that statement as an affirmation of the magic in his art.

Ever since his childhood in Middlebury, Vt., Mr. Lee has been involved in theater. On exhibit at Lincoln Center is his first puppet stage, built when he was 14. After majoring in theater at Amherst College, he briefly studied dance and mime while continuing his interest in puppetry. In 1960, he shifted to masks, designing them for productions at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., and the New York Shakespeare Festival. He also worked as an actor and designer with the Open Theater and other experimental companies.

In 1974, in collaboration with Theater for [the] New City, he created the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, a friendly neighborhood pageant that filled narrow downtown streets and brownstone balconies with a vast theatrical panoply. A dozen years later, he stopped working on the parade as it became more of a citywide tourist attraction than a community celebration. Still, he is known more for the Halloween parade than for any individual production. Many of his colorful figures have been recycled into other roles and have become members of Mr. Lee’s extended family. They return to life at the Lincoln Center exhibition.

His most intensely creative artistic relationship was with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. With his “wonderfully bare-bones approach” to choreography and design, Hawkins was, he said, a primary influence on his work and a constant spur to Mr. Lee to challenge himself. At the Hawkins display, he put on a raccoon mask from the dance “Plains Daybreak,” a facial fringe with a halo of feathers. With a quick shift of his body, he mimed the movement of a dancing raccoon. During the exhibition, Hawkins dances (with masks by Mr. Lee) are shown on video monitors.

Under the supervision of Barbara Stratyner as curator, this is a comprehensive retrospective. But it can offer only a sampling of the mask maker's work, much of which still inhabits his Westbeth studio and home as well as his farmhouse in Salem. In their home, he and his wife (Casey Compton, who is also his collaborator) are surrounded by a menagerie of realized figments of Mr. Lee's imagination. ''They start to take over,'' he said.

[Westbeth is a subsidized development of living and studio space for artists at the intersection of West and Bethune Streets in Greenwich Village.  It was also TNC’s first home, so the theater and Lee were neighbors.  (TNC moved to another nearby venue in the West Village by the time the Halloween Parade started.  Later it moved to the East Village, working in several different spaces before settling into the 1st Avenue location it currently occupies.)]

Hanging on a wall is a lobster the size of an octopus, jettisoned from a production of Sam Shepard's ''Cowboy Mouth,'' and perched atop a bookcase is a squat, bulbous puppet of Hadrian VII. Hidden in crannies and corners are other small and large lurking creatures. Mr. Lee's studio has enough bamboo to feed a giant panda. Bamboo, papier-mâché, clay and wood are his raw materials, along with objects he finds on the street, in hardware stores and in fields and forests.

Most of all, he likes to work with wood. Carving masks and puppets, he acts as a sculptor. Although he knows that by nature his work is ephemeral, he aims for solidity and durability. ''The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,'' he said. ''I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.'' As the Lincoln Center exhibition proves, Mr. Lee's chimerical visions can have a longer life than the theater and dance pieces in which they first appeared.

[Mel Gussow (1933-2005) was a theater and movie reviewer, and author who wrote for the New York Times for 35 years.  He joined the Times in 1969 and over his 3½-decade career wrote more than 4,000 reviews and articles.  In 2008, Gussow was inducted posthumously into the American Theater Hall of Fame (see my post on Rick On Theater on 10 February 2020).

[Long associated with Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, the traditional home of experimental writers, Gussow championed the writing of many of the major playwrights of the theater of the post-World War II period, and was among the first to take the young, emerging playwrights seriously. 

[A native of New York City, Gussow grew up on Long Island. He graduated from Middlebury College (where Ralph Lee’s father was dean and the future mask- and puppet-maker grew up), and in 1955, he earned a bachelor’s degree in American literature and a master's degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1956.]