Barbra Streisand, 2024 Life Achievement Honoree of the Screen Actors Guild

 

[I saw the Barbra Streisand première of Broadway’s Funny Girl (26 March 1964-1 July 1967).  I don’t remember when in Streisand’s run I saw that show—she left the production in December 1965 and I saw the original cast—but I suspect it was relatively early, though after it’d been declared a hit.  (Given the dates, it’d have to have fbeen either in the spring of ’64, when I was 17, or the fall of ’65, when I was 18.)  Her performance as Fanny Brice was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 

[I know a thing or two about awesome performances, having caught the end of Broadway’s Golden Age (which I extend into the ’60s and the early ’70s).  Just among the musicals—I saw some astounding acting in straight plays, too, of course—a few of what I can compare Streisand’s Fanny Brice to include Tom Bosley in Fiorello! (1959), Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1959), Mary Martin in The Sound of Music (1959), Andrews, Richard Burton, and Roddy McDowall in Camelot (1960), Robert Morse and Charles Nelson Reilly in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), Jerry Orbach and Kaye Ballard in Carnival! (1961), Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Beatrice Lillie in High Spirits (1964), Gwen Verdon in Sweet Charity (1966) and then in Chicago (1975), Ben Vereen in Pippin (1972), Virginia Capers in Raisin (1973), and several others.

[(The gap between 1966 and 1972 is largely from my army service from December 1969 and February 1974.  I actually saw Pippin in ’74—the dates I use above are the years in which the productions premièred—when Vereen returned to the show for several months.  During my army service, I never got closer to New York than four months in 1971 in Baltimore—and half my service was in West Berlin.)

[I can say without hesitation that Streisand’s performance in only her second Broadway outing (I didn’t see I Can Get It For You Wholesale in 1962—I was in prep school in New Jersey) easily stood up next to any of the work of these stage vets.  It was, indeed, something I have carried with me in memory for almost 60 years.

[Both the profile of Barbra Streisand (b. 1942 in Brooklyn, New York City) and the transcript of the interview of the actress by Fran Drescher (b. 1957 in Queens, New York City; elected President of SAG-AFTRA in 2021) ran in the Spring 2024 issue of SAG-AFTRA (volume 13, number 2).  SAG-AFTRA is the official publication of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.  

[Known as SAG-AFTRA, this is the union that represents film and television actors, journalists, radio personalities, recording artists, singers, voice actors, and other media professionals worldwide.  The organization was formed in 2012 following the merger of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG, created in 1933) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (created in 1937 as the American Federation of Radio Artists [AFRA], becoming AFTRA in 1952 after merger with the Television Authority). 

[(Actors’ Equity Association, the union for theatrical performers and stage managers formed in 1913, is still a separate organization.)

[As you will see, the SAG Life Achievement Award retains the name under which it was established in 1962.  It’s awarded for “outstanding achievement in fostering the finest ideals of the acting profession.”]

“HER NAME IS BARBRA”

Celebrating SAG Life Achievement Award Recipient BARBRA STREISAND

There’s always been something about Barbra Streisand. For over six decades, she has defied and redefined expectations as a singer, actor, producer and director. She has received awards and accolades from numerous industry institutions, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award [1994], Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award [2000], a special Tony Award [Star of the Decade, 1970], the Presidential Medal of Freedom [2015] and many others. The SAG Life Achievement Award ceremony, held during the 30th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on Feb. 24, was preceded by many who praised Streisand for her talent, unequivocal work ethic and lifelong accomplishments.

But when it comes to Barbra Streisand, there’s always more to be said.

Streisand got her start on Broadway, performing in productions such as I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962), but with the release of her debut album, The Barbra Streisand Album (1963), she became known to the world as a singer. Still, even with music as her medium, it was clear to listeners and concertgoers that her vocal performances were rooted in acting. As Maestro actor Bradley Cooper said when presenting her award, “Acting is the lens that Barbra has always seen performance [through] . . . She never just sings a song; she tells a story. So while it may seem that Barbra began as a singer, she’s been acting all along.”

Her on-screen acting debut came in 1968 with the musical film Funny Girl, in which Streisand reprised her Broadway role as Fanny Brice, and later received the Academy Award for Best Actress. Other roles through the ’60s and ’70s included Hello, Dolly! (1969), What’s Up, Doc? (1972), The Way We Were (1973) and A Star Is Born (1976).

However, the heights Streisand reached in those early years did not come without strife. In her memoir, My Name Is Barbra (2023), she describes feeling “absolutely powerless” in steering films towards her creative vision. She was particularly against The Way We Were director Sydney Pollack’s [1934-2008] decision to cut key scenes between her and co-star Robert Redford.

The drive she felt to bring her imagination to life on the screen is what ultimately led her to transition into directing and her career-defining project Yentl (1983), the story in which its eponymous character, played by Streisand, disguises herself as a man for the opportunity to study Talmudic law. [Study of Talmud was forbidden to women by the custom of Yentl’s community, a shtetl—a small town with a predominantly Jewish population in Eastern Europe before World War II—in Poland in 1904.] The production, which took 15 years to greenlight, was not only the first time Streisand served as director, star, co-writer and co-producer, but the first time any woman had undertaken all four roles concurrently in a major studio film. In his review, the late film critic Roger Ebert [1942-2013] wrote [in the Chicago Sun-Times, 9 Dec. 1983] that the romantic musical “treats its romances with the respect due to genuine emotion, and its performances are so good that, yes, I really did care.” During the 1984 awards season, Streisand became the first woman to receive the Golden Globe for Best Director, and remained the only woman to win the award for nearly four decades.

[The Hebrew term Talmud (literally ‘study,’ ‘teaching,’ or ‘learning’) refers to a compilation of ancient teachings regarded as sacred and normative by Jews from the time it was compiled until today.  It’s still regarded in this light by traditional religious Jews. The Talmud is the primary source of Jewish religious law (halakha) and Jewish theology.

[The compilation of the Talmud started with Ezra the Scribe (Book of Ezra) in the 5th century BCE.  It was first published in 1523-24 in Venice, Italy, with later editions following. From the time of its completion, the Talmud became integral to Jewish scholarship.

[During the 15th and 16th centuries, an intense form of textual analysis in Talmud study called pilpul (Hebrew, loosely meaning ‘sharp analysis’), arose. In the 19th century, modern methods of textual and historical analysis were applied to the Talmud.]

Despite this accolade and many others for her subsequent projects, The Prince of Tides (1991) and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), Streisand never received an Oscar nomination in the directorial categories. Even in the face of what many attribute to sexism within the industry, Streisand’s spirit is one of perseverance. Today, she is seen as a pioneering figure among female directors, and, in the end, her longtime advocacy for The Way We Were’s original scenes resulted in a re-cut of the movie’s ending — just in time for its 50th anniversary release in 2023.

[As director Pollack had died in 2008, the new “Director’s Cut” of The Way We Were for its 50th anniversary was edited by Streisand, who restored two scenes cut from the original theatrical version. Streisand had kept clips in her private archive of the deleted scenes, which had explained why her character and Redford’s had divorced, and she had them restored for the 2023 re-release. The new DVD included both the 1973 and 2023 versions of the film.]

But her enduring work hasn’t just been limited to Hollywood. The Streisand Foundation, established in 1986, has provided funding for numerous organizations that support women’s rights, civil liberties and the environment, among other causes. In 2021, she endowed the Barbra Streisand Institute at UCLA, and since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022, has served as a UNITED24 ambassador, helping to raise funds for humanitarian aid for Ukraine.

[UNITED24 is a Ukrainian government-run platform launched in May 2022 to raise money for Ukraine’s war efforts. Its “ambassadors” are prominent people, both Ukrainian and international figures, who promote the cause of Ukraine around the globe and raise money for Ukraine’s defense and other wartime needs.]

With such a stellar career, an incomparable body of work and countless moments of personal triumph and professional perseverance, it was impossible to guess what Streisand would say when she took to the stage to accept her honor. In the end, her acceptance speech was so quintessentially her: self-reflective, rich with stories about lifelong friends, mentors and colleagues, and full of heartfelt gratitude towards actors and the influence acting has played throughout her life and career.

“I always thought acting was my education: trying to understand the character, having to do research, and immersing [myself] into the period,” she said. “It is really a privilege to be part of this profession. For a couple of hours, people can sit in a theater and escape their own troubles — what an idea!

“To my fellow actors and directors, I’ve loved working with you, playing with you and inhabiting that magical world of the movies with you. Most of all I want to thank you for giving me so much joy [by] just watching you on the screen! Thank you for that.”

Nominated and voted on by the SAG-AFTRA National Honors and Tributes Committee, the SAG Life Achievement Award is bestowed to those who have contributed to improving the image of the acting profession and have a history of active involvement in public service endeavors. Streisand is the awards’ 59th recipient.

*  *  *  *
“ACTOR TO ACTOR: FRAN DRESCHER INTERVIEWS BARBRA STREISAND” 

With a decades-spanning career in music and film and a lifelong commitment to numerous philanthropic causes, Barbra Streisand is beloved by fans around the world. Among them is SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher, The Nanny star [CBS-TV sitcom, 1993-99] whose character, Fran Fine, never missed a moment to fangirl over her favorite performer.

In the days leading up to the 30th Annual SAG Awards, Streisand and Drescher sat down for an Actor to Actor interview, discussing Streisand’s career on the stage, behind the camera and beyond. What follows is an edited version of their conversation.  [“Actor to Actor” is a continuing feature of SAG-AFTRA magazine.]

SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher: You’re getting the SAG Life Achievement Award. Now, this is the highest honor that your union can give anyone. Congratulations on the award, because it’s a big deal, and it’s so well deserved.

Barbra Streisand: Thank you.

Fran: You’ve been a member of the Screen Actors Guild, and now SAG-AFTRA, since 1961. What is the single most valuable acting lesson that you’ve learned in your career?

Barbra: A great actor has to rely on the truth. . . . The audience can feel that. They know when you’re telling the truth. Like, I’m making a new record now — which I can’t talk about — but I have my conductor that breathes with me. He sees me in my booth singing and he’s out there with the orchestra, but he can tell, because I don’t sing the song the same twice.

Fran: Do you watch any of those singing competition shows on TV? The coaches, who are professional, very accomplished singers, are always trying to train these amateur performers to feel what they’re saying. “Tell the story, don’t just do acrobatics with your voice.”

Barbra: Exactly. Why do you go high sometimes? It’s only because the character is feeling great love at that moment. That’s why you go high. It’s like, sometimes when I sing it . . . I’m not feeling so much love for this character, I may not go for that high note. You have to be in the moment.

Fran: Have you ever, though, had to work with an actor that doesn’t listen, but is just waiting to say his next line?

Barbra: Yes, as a matter of fact, it’s somebody I did a movie with, and I put something in that wasn’t in the script, and the guy wouldn’t look because it was his wrong side; something like that. That’s not being in the moment.

Fran: No, it’s not organic.

Barbra: I was doing a movie with Bob Redford, The Way We Were; we had to be very observant. Sometimes I smiled when I said something, sometimes he laughed. We both had to react in the moment. You have a preconception always about how you’re going to play something, but then, life intrudes. And life is spectacular, right?

Fran: I want to talk a little bit about Yentl because that was an unbelievable achievement on so many different levels. First of all, you wore so many hats in the movie. You got the Golden Globe for Best Director.

Barbra: Which I was very shocked to get because I was up against great directors, I mean, really wonderful directors.

Fran: And you said it took you 15 years to get that movie made.

Barbra: Yeah. Because who wanted to do a movie about, you know, a Jewish girl who wanted to study Talmud, and she had to dress as a man in order to get into school?

Fran: You were breaking the ceiling in filmmaking for women by having the tenacity to say, “I can do more than just be in front of the camera.”

Barbra: Exactly.

Fran: So did you realize in the moment that you were doing something that was even bigger than the sum of its parts? Because you were leading women and girls into a future that looked different than the one that you came out of.

Barbra: I think it has nothing to do with male or female. If you have a vision, it’s a complete vision. That’s why I had to do all those jobs. I had a responsibility; I had that on my shoulders.

Fran: To women and girls, or just to the movie?

Barbra: No, to women and girls and the movie. It’s all one thing. In other words, I have a vision, and people are frightened that I can’t control financial things. I enjoyed that position: having to say, “Okay, if we shoot today and it’s gray out, but I want lights on the water, I want the sun to be shining, to give us a hopeful feeling when Yentl is crossing that little river to go to her school,” I have to weigh that. I’m weighing; tell me the cost. I’m capable of, you know, handling finances.

What will it cost if I put it off till tomorrow and wait for the sun? In other words, I loved balancing the reality of the budget to the aesthetic. That’s just a grown-up [thing]. I’ve noticed — because [I] watch a lot of films, and there are so many more women directing now. It’s like, it used to be such a shock, “directed by a woman,” but in the last few years, many women have been directing movies.

Fran: And I think television opened that up first. There are a lot of women directors that are in television, both in one-hour and multi-cam, which is what I did, and I directed some of those.

Barbra: You know, I made a documentary about the first women in film [Reel Models: The First Women of Film; TV Short produced by Barwood Films (formed by Streisand in 1972) and AMC Productions; 30 May 2000 on American Movie Classics; 2001 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Special]. When I was making Yentl, I did research about these women. And even [though] D. W. Griffith [1875-1948] is called the father of film, these women were making films in 1916, before he made his great film [probably a reference to 1915’s The Birth of a Nation].

Fran: That’s why they call it his-story, not her-story.

Barbra: That’s right; very good point.

Fran: So you’ve done TV, you’ve done Broadway and, of course, you’ve done film and you’ve done them all well. But is there something that you like the best? 

Barbra: Well, I love film, but when I was in Funny Girl [onstage] — oh, my god! I love the experimental part of the job, meaning —

Fran: “Putting it together,” like Sondheim said.

Barbra: Yes, putting it together. We had 41 different last scenes for Funny Girl. Opening night was the 42nd — good number too, by the way — that we’d closed the show with that. You know, the 42nd version. I loved the different versions. I loved experimenting! [Streisand was in Funny Girl at the Winter Garden Theatre from March 1964 to December 1965. She was nominated for a 1964 Best Actress in a Musical for her performance, but did not win.]

Fran: Of course, it speaks volumes for you as a director. . . . So you started in comedy and then you transitioned into drama. They say that comic actors make the best dramatic actors. What do you have to say to all that?

Barbra: Life is both. Life is funny at times and life is sad at times, and the most interesting comedies have something serious at the core. Tragedy sometimes starts with a clown, right?

Fran: Needless to say, especially in our industry, there are a lot of people that carry the burden of insecurities. How do you leverage your own insecurities as a help rather than a hindrance?

Barbra: I would be suspicious of any actor who wasn’t, somewhere, insecure. It’s part of the game, because the actor has to expose his inner self, his soul, his secrets. And that makes him very vulnerable, which is great, allowing that. Now, I mean, I can be both things: I can be very confident — well, no, I’ve never gone on stage [confidently]. When a new concert comes up, I always think, “Well, they won’t come,” or “They’ll walk out.” I have that [insecurity], but I also know that there is strength and confidence in even being insecure. And having the confidence to be insecure as well.

Fran: Right. Have the confidence to be vulnerable and own it. It’s trying to mask it or be afraid of it happening that’s the torture.

Barbra: I mean, I’m confident in my singing a song about vulnerability, but I have to be open to that part of me that is singing . . . Nobody’s just insecure or nobody’s that confident. Except assholes. . . . Confidence, such total confidence, is kind of a turnoff. Do you know what I mean?

Fran: Definitely.

Barbra: You know what I would suggest to anybody? Examine your dreams. [They are] the key to your unconscious before you are ready for it to be conscious . . .

Fran: You love working with actors. What is your process to get [your vision] out of them?

Barbra: Well, I’ll give you an example. When I was doing The Mirror Has Two Faces, [with] Lauren Bacall [1924-2014] . . . It’s a scene where she is up all night; I’m her daughter. It was the night before she had to film it, and I came in to just rehearse it with her. And she was using a toothpick, and she didn’t know her lines very well. . . . I said to her, “Forget the lines. You don’t even have to know the lines. Just tell me what you feel about this. What do you feel about how you’ve spent your life and what you didn’t do? What you didn’t get done? What are your regrets, in a sense?” She spoke from her heart. She spoke from her truth. Her memories of what she was like as a younger actress in the movies. I got the performance that I wanted, [and] we didn’t have to shoot it in the morning. Another moment I wanted where she said something, “It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful,” but her reaction when we were filming was [flatly], “It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful.” And I said, “Turn off the cameras.” . . . [And then I asked her] “When you were in those movies, like when you first met Humphrey Bogart [1899-1957] and he became your husband [1945] and stuff, and you were just wanted by everybody and every director, what was that like?” She had to think about it, and very quietly, she said . . . [emotionally] “It was wonderful.”

Fran: And that’s what we see in that movie.

Barbra: That’s in the movie, and in [another] scene as well. And she was nominated, and she got the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. I had to get to understand her, to know her, to love her . . . Do you know what I mean?

Fran: As a director, you have to be a little parental, right?

Barbra: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to be loving; you have to love them in a way.

Fran: You’ve made three movies, you’ve received 14 Academy Award nominations. Many of the actors achieved some of the best performances that you got out of them. What would you like to be remembered for?

Barbra: Well, I would say my films, my records, my book now and my philanthropy. Philanthropy is very, very important in my life. 

Fran: I’m so glad you brought that up because that was an area that we never got to. 

Barbra: Yeah, it’s important. I was able to start my foundation . . .

Fran: The Streisand Foundation.

Barbra: . . . in 1986, when I was horrified by what happened at Chernobyl. And that’s why I agreed to sing again: to raise money for five Democratic senators that took over the Senate. We became Democratic. I knew that [they] shared my values, and [were] against nuclear proliferation. It was for women’s rights. It was for protection of the environment because I was scared in 1986 about what was happening to the earth. . . . What struck me and made me very happy was George Shultz, who was Reagan’s secretary of state, came up to me and said, “Thank you.” And I said, “For what?” You know, I thought he liked my singing or my acting or my movies, whatever. He said to me, “No, for what your foundation funded to fight against nuclear proliferation.” Now that is something that I’m very proud of. Do you see what I mean, like — just trying to save the fucking world.

[The worst nuclear disaster in history, and the costliest disaster in human history, the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat in northern Ukraine occurred on 26 April 1986. The consensus is that approximately 30 people died from the immediate blast and radiation poisoning after the disaster, with 60 in total in the decades since. There are varying estimates of increased mortality since 1986, ranging from 4,000 to 16,000, with some figures as high as 60,000. The response to the accident has had an estimated cost of $700 billion.]

Fran: Yes. You’re a very special woman: very dear, very intelligent and I’m wildly impressed by you.

Barbra: [laughs] Well, I’m impressed by you, too. We’ll meet again, I’m sure.

Fran: I hope so.

[Many of Barbra Streisand’s credits for the stage, film, and publishing are named in the two SAG-AFTRA articles republished above.  Most of them are dated; for the rest, I’ve inserted dates; and for a few, I’ve added additional identifying information. 

[I think it would be informative or, at least, interesting for ROTters to have more information about these achievements, so I’ve compiled a list of the works named above, in the order they appear in the text, with exact dates, theaters for plays, studio names for films, and some important personnel, and so on.

I Can Get It for You Wholesale – stage musical; Streisand’s stage début; Shubert Theatre/Broadway Theatre; 22 March-8 December 1962 (2 previews, 300 regular performances); book by Jerome Weidman (1913-98), music and lyrics by Harold Rome (1908-93); based on the 1937 novel I Can Get It for You Wholesale by Weidman; directed by Arthur Laurents (1917-2011), musical staging by Herbert Ross, scenic and lighting designed by Will Steven Armstrong, costumes designed by Theoni V. Aldredge (1922-2011); principal cast: Elliott Gould as Harry Bogen, Streisand as Miss Marmelstein, Lillian Roth (1910-80) as Mrs. Bogen, Marillyn Cooper (1934-2009) as Ruthie Rivkin; 1 Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Barbra Streisand); cast album released by Columbia Records, April 1962.

The Barbra Streisand Album – début album; recorded on 23-25 January 1963, released by Columbia Records on 25 February 1963; nominated for 5 1963 Grammy Awards, won for Album of the Year and Best Female Vocal Performance; reached #9 on the Billboard Top LPs; certified a gold album (500,000 U.S. sales), sold 1 million copies worldwide by 1966; inducted into Grammy Hall of Fame in 2006.

Funny Girl – film adaptation of the 1964 stage musical (see below); Columbia Pictures with Rastar Productions; filmed from August to December 1967 (after rehearsals which started in July), released in the U.S. (New York City) on 18 September 1968 (première); produced by Ray Stark (1916-2004), founder of Rastar and the son-in-law of Fanny Brice (1891-1951), the character played by Barbra Streisand and on whose life the play and movie is based; screenplay by Isobel Lennart (1915-71); directed by William Wyler (1902-81), score by Jule Styne (1905-94) and Walter Scharf (1910-2003); production design by Gene Callahan, costume design by Irene Sharaff (1910-93); principal cast: Streisand as Fanny Brice, Omar Sharif (1932-2015) as Nicky Arnstein, Kay Medford (1909-1980) as Rose Brice (Fanny’s mother); nominated for 8 1969 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Score of a Musical Picture – Original or Adaptation, winning 1 for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Streisand, in a tie with Katherine Hepburn for A Lion in Winter); Streisand also won the 1969 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy; Funny Girl was the highest-grossing film of 1968 in the U.S., having earned $24.9 million; Funny Girl was declared “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress in 2016 and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. .

Hello, Dolly! – film adaptation of the 1964 stage musical; Chenault Productions and 20th Century Fox; production from September 1967 to August 1968, released in the U.S. on 6 December 1969; produced by Ernest Lehman; screenplay by Ernest Lehman and Michael Stewart; based on the play The Matchmaker (1954) by Thornton Wilder (1897-1975); directed by Gene Kelly (1912-96), score by Jerry Herman (1931-2019), and Lionel Newman (1916-89), costume design by Irene Sharaff, art direction by Harman A. Blumenthal and Jack Martin Smith; principal cast: Streisand as Dolly Levi, Walter Matthau (1920-2000) as Horace Vandergelder, and Michael Crawford as Cornelius Hackl, and featuring Louis Armstrong (1901-71) as the Orchestra Leader; nominated for 7 1970 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, winning 3 (Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Sound, Best Music, Score of a Musical Picture); also 5 Golden Globe nominations, including Best Motion Picture, Best Actress – Comedy or Musical (Streisand), no wins.

What’s Up, Doc? – screwball comedy film; Saticoy Productions and Warner Bros., filming from August to November 1971, released 9 March 1972 (New York City); produced by Peter Bogdonovich (1939-2022); screenplay by Buck Henry (1930-2020), David Newman, and Robert Benton; directed by Bogdonovich, production and costume design by Polly Platt; principal cast: Streisand as Judy Maxwell, Ryan O’Neal (1941-2023) as Howard Bannister, and Madeline Kahn (1942-99) as Eunice Burns; 1 1973 Golden Globe nomination: Most Promising Newcomer – Female (Kahn); won the Writers Guild of America 1973 Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen award for the screenwriters; was the highest-grossing film of 1972 in the U.S.

The Way We Were – film romance; Rastar Productions and Columbia Pictures, filming from September to December 1972, released in the U.S. on 19 October 1973; produced by Ray Stark; screenplay by Arthur Laurents, Francis Ford Coppola, Paddy Chayefsky (1923-88); based on Laurents’s autobiographical novel The Way We Were (1972); directed by Sydney Pollack, score by Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012), production design by Stephen B. Grimes, costume design by Dorothy Jeakins and Moss Mabry; principal cast: Streisand as Katie Morosky, Robert Redford as Hubbell Gardiner, and Bradford Dillman (1930-2018) as J. J.; 6 1974 Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress in a Leading Role (Streisand) with 2 wins for Best Original Song (“The Way We Were,” Hamlisch) and Best Original Dramatic Score (Hamlisch); 2 1974 Golden Globe nominations, including Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama (Streisand), no wins; considered one of the best romantic films; soundtrack album was a gold record and so was the single “The Way We Were,” which sold 2 million copies and was named the #1 pop hit of 1974 by Billboard magazine; the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998.

A Star Is Born – remake of 1937 film starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March; Barwood Films (formed by Streisand in 1972), First Artists, and Warner Bros.; released on 17 December 1976 in the U.S.; produced by Jon Peters with Streisand as executive producer; screenplay by John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion (1934-2021), and Frank Pierson; directed by Pierson, production design by Polly Platt, costumes designed by Seth Banks and Shirlee Strahm; principal cast: Streisand as Esther Hoffman, Kris Kristofferson as John Norman Howard, and Gary Busey as Bobby Ritchie; 4 1977 Academy Award nominations, including 1 win for Best Original Song (“Evergreen” by Streisand and Paul Williams); 5 1977 Golden Globe Awards: Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical, Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical (Kristofferson), Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical (Streisand), Best Original Score (Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher), and Best Original Song (“Evergreen,” Streisand and Williams); second-highest grossing movie of 1976; soundtrack album was Grammy-nominated in 1977.

My Name Is Barbra (2023) – memoir/autobiography; hardcover: Viking Press, E-book: Kindle Edition (Viking Press; with additional photos). audiobook: Penguin Audio (narrated by Streisand, who relates some anecdotes not included in print edition; takes ca. 48+ hours to listen to); released on 7 November 2023 (all versions); bestseller, sold 55,000 copies in first week.

Yentl – romantic musical film adaptation of the 1962 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”; United Artists, Barwood Films, and Ladbroke Entertainment; production from April to October 1982, released in the U.S. on 6 January 1984; produced by Rusty Lemorande and Streisand; screenplay by Jack Rosenthal, Streisand, and Singer; directed by Streisand (her directorial début), score by Michel Legrand (French; 1932-2019), production design by Ray Walker, costumes designed by Judy Moorcroft; principal cast: Streisand as Yentl, Amy Irving as Hadass, Mandy Patinkin as Avigdor; 6 1984 Academy Award nominations, including 1 win for Best Original Score (Legrand, Alan Bergman, and Marilyn Bergman); 6 1984 Golden Globe nominations, including Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical (Streisand) and 2 wins: Best Director – Motion Picture (Streisand) and Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical; Streisand was the first woman to be nominated for a best-directing Golden Globe (though she did not then receive an Oscar nomination as a director).

The Prince of Tides – romantic drama film; Columbia Pictures, Barwood Films, and Longfellow Pictures; production from January to October 1990, released in the U.S. on 25 December 1991; produced by Andrew S. Karsch and Streisand; screenplay by Pat Conroy (1945-2016) and Becky Johnston; based on Conroy’s 1986 novel; directed by Streisand, score by James Newton Howard, production design by Paul Sylbert, costumes designed by Ruth Morely; principal cast: Streisand as Susan Lowenstein, Nick Nolte as Tom Wingo, Blythe Danner as Sally Wingo; 7 1992 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Nolte), Best Writing (Conroy and Johnston), Best Original Score (Howard), no wins; 3 1992 Golden Globe nominations, with 1 win for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama (Nolte) – other nominations were for Best Director – Motion Picture (Streisand) and Best Motion Picture – Drama.

The Mirror Has Two Faces – romantic comedy-drama film; TriStar Pictures, Phoenix Pictures, and Barwood Films; filming from October 1995 to May 1996, released in the U.S. on 15 November 1996; produced by Arnon Milchan and Streisand; screenplay by Richard LaGravenese; based on the 1958 French movie Le Miroir à deux faces written by André Cayatte (1909-89) and Gérard Oury (1919-2000); directed by Streisand, score Marvin Hamlisch, production design by Tom H. John, costumes designed by Theoni V. Aldredge; principal cast: Streisand as Rose Morgan, Jeff Bridges as Gregory Larkin, and Lauren Bacall (1924-2014) as Hannah Morgan; 2 1997 Academy Award nominations, including Best Original Song (“I’ve Finally Found Someone,” Streisand, Hamlisch, and Bryan Adams), no wins; 4 1997 Golden Globe nominations, including 1 win for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical (Bacall) – other nominations were for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical (Streisand), Best Original Song – Motion Picture (“I’ve Finally Found Someone,” Streisand, Hamlisch, and Adams); 1 SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role (Bacall).

Reel Models: The First Women of Film – TV documentary short produced by Barwood Films and AMC Productions; produced by Jessica Falcon; written by Christopher Koch and Susan Koch; directed by Susan Koch; aired 30 May 2000 on American Movie Classics (AMC); 1 2001 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Special.

Funny Girl – stage musical, Winter Garden Theatre/Majestic Theatre/Broadway Theatre; 26 March 1964-1 July 1967 (17 previews, 1,348 regular performances); book by Isobel Lennart, music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill (1921-98); produced by Ray Stark (see note above in film adaptation); based on incidents in the life of Fanny Brice; directed by Garson Kanin (1912-99), dance arrangements by Luther Henderson, production supervised by Jerome Robbins (1918-98), vocal arranger assisted by Marvin Hamlisch, scenic and lighting designed by Robert Randolph; costume designed by Irene Sharaff; principal cast: Sydney Chaplin (1926-2009) as Nicky Arnstein, Streisand as Fanny Brice, Kay Medford as Mrs. Brice, and featuring Jean Stapleton (1923-2013) as Mrs. Strakosh and Lainie Kazan as Vera/standby for Fanny Brice; 8 1964 Tony nominations, including Best Musical, Bes Producer (Musical) (Stark), Best Actress in a Musical (Streisand), Best Actor in a Musical (Chaplin), and Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Medford), no wins.

[Of course, Streisand has accomplished more in her career so far than is mentioned in the articles above or listed here.  This is by no means a complete catalogue, and I leave it to readers to look up any other achievements in which they may be interested.]

"Bigger Than Broadway!"

by Richard Zoglin 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[Richard Zoglin’s report on the regional theater in the United States was published in Time magazine on 27 May 2003.  (The text below is taken from the online posting which had no text enhancements, so in addition to my bracketed comments, mostly identifications, I have italicized the titles of plays and works of literature, and added some boldfacing in the last section.)

[Readers will no doubt note that this article is 21 years old.  For that reason, I have taken the liberty of identifying as many of the plays and productions author Zoglin names that I can, as some aren’t well known today (and a few didn’t make it out of obscurity).  By the same token, I have inserted the life dates of the people Zoglin mentions as a few of them have passed on since 2003.]

The world’s a stage: The outdoor Elizabethan theater is one of three venues in Ashland, Ore.

By the time the eco-terrorists show up — a band of tree sitters, with names like Lynx and Aquarius and Smokebomb, who drop from the skies, rappelling down the trunks of a redwood grove onstage — your head is already spinning. Daughters of the Revolution, one-half of David Edgar’s [British; b. 1948] two-play cycle about an American political campaign called Continental Divide [2003], has mostly been talk up to this point. But what talk! The play has nearly 50 characters, rapid-fire dialogue and an impossibly complicated plot involving leftover ‘60s radicals, skeletons in the closet, the clash between ideals and pragmatism in politics, and a hot-button ballot initiative that would mandate loyalty oaths for all voters. And that’s only half the story. Daughters of the Revolution centers on the Democratic side of a gubernatorial race in an unnamed Western state; its companion play, Mothers Against, focuses on the Republican side. In all, it’s six hours of dense, unruly, sometimes maddening, always engrossing drama.

And you have to go to Oregon to see it.

Continental Divide, currently being given its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (in a coproduction with California’s Berkeley Repertory Theater, which will mount it later this year), is just the latest sign that challenging American theater is alive and well and nowhere near Broadway.

[Continental Divide was co-commissioned by OSF and Berkeley Rep in 2003. It premièred at OSF from 1 March to 13 July and then opened in Berkeley on 6 November, running through 28 December.]

It’s hardly news, of course, that theaters beyond the Hudson River are doing good work. Or that many of the plays that wind up on Broadway and off Broadway get their start at regional theaters. Nor should it be a surprise (though it was) that this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama went to a play most of New York City’s tastemakers had never even heard of: Cuban-born playwright Nilo Cruz’s [b. 1960] Anna in the Tropics [2002; 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama], which had been produced only at the 104-seat New Theater in Coral Gables, Fla.

What isn’t so apparent — until you spend some time, as I did over the past few months, surveying regional theaters across the country — is that these companies are pursuing whole chunks of the repertory that New York, with its commercial pressures and unforgiving critics, largely ignores. And local audiences are getting a better taste of the possibilities of theater than most New Yorkers get in an entire season. The plays that succeed on and off Broadway these days are, as a rule, small things: two-and three-character relationship dramas (those big casts cost money!); minimalist exercises in craftsmanship; tidy little plays that convert big subjects into manageable private dramas (Proof, Copenhagen, How I Learned to Drive, to name just a few recent award winners). Plays of epic size and scope, works that examine American history and the American experience, plays that attempt to engage the audience in social and political issues — for those, mostly, you’ve got to look in the hinterlands.

[David Auburn’s (b. 1969) Proof was developed at George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1999; it won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play. The play, with a cast of four, originally opened at New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club on 23 May 2000 and transferred to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 24 October 2000.

[The Off-Broadway première also won the 2001 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play, and Drama League Award for Outstanding Production of a Play.

[Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (British; b. 1933) premièred in London in 1998, at the National Theatre. It opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on 11 April 2000, winning three Tonys that year, including Best Play; the production also took the 2000 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play. It has a cast of three.

[How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel (b. 1951), written and developed during a summer 1996 residency at the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, premièred on 16 March 1997 at Off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1998. The play, which has a cast of five and a simple set, had many subsequent productions in regional theaters in the U.S., Off-Broadway in New York City, abroad (the London première was in 2015), and U.S. colleges and universities.  It had its Broadway première at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 19 April 2022 and received three 2022 Tony nominations and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play. 

[The 1997 Off-Broadway production of How I Learned also won a batch of awards, including the 1997 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, and Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play. The Vineyard Theatre mounting also won the 1997 Obie Awards for both Playwriting and Direction.]

A couple of years ago, for example, a San Francisco playwright named Joan Holden [1939-2024] had the somewhat unpromising notion of turning Nickel and Dimed [2001], Barbara Ehrenreich’s [1941-2022] best-selling book about her experiences as a minimum-wage worker, into a stage play. The result is an episodic but incisive series of vignettes about the impossibility of making ends meet while waiting tables in Florida, scrubbing toilets in Maine and stocking discount-store shelves in Minnesota. Nickel & Dimed [2002] has its deficiencies as drama, but it’s a rare example of theater that tries to open people’s eyes to the way life is lived in the real world — and maybe even rouse them to action. Midway through the second act, the actors step out of character, stop the play and conduct a 10-minute discussion with the audience on how much a cleaning woman deserves to be paid. Producers in New York haven’t given it much attention, but Nickel & Dimed is making a successful march through the regionals, from Seattle to the Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I.

[Nickel & Dimed had its New York City première by the Off-Off-Broadway 4Graces Theater Company at the Bank Street Theater from 5 to 28 October 2006. It was reviewed in the New York Times by Andrea Stevens on 11 October 2006 (“Evoking Lives Struggling to Exist on Bare Minimums").]

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater last fall presented writer-director Eric Simonson’s [b. 1960] big, imaginatively staged adaptation [6 September-6 October 2002] of Moby Dick; there was no whale, but a surprising amount of Herman Melville’s [1819-91] imposing novel [1851] made it onstage. (Adaptations of epic novels, like John Irving’s [b. 1942] Cider House Rules [1985], have a habit of flopping in New York.) Houston’s enterprising Alley Theater last fall staged a fine production of The General from America [1996], Richard Nelson’s [b. 1650] brooding, against-the-grain, surprisingly convincing historical drama about Benedict Arnold [1741-1801]. (The play later opened off-Broadway [Theatre for a New Audience at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. 2002], where the critics, predictably, dissed it.)

[Cider House Rules, the stage adaptation of Irving’s novel, had a somewhat tortuous history. It was conceived by Jane Jones (b. 1954?), the co-founding artistic director of Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre, and Tom Hulce (b. 1953), actor and producer, in 1995, and they got Peter Parnell (b. 1953), playwright and children’s-book author, to write the script.

[The result was a two-part play that ran over seven hours together.  It premièred at Book-It in June-July and October-September 1995 under Jones’s direction. It was picked up by Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum, where it ran from June to September 1996. 

[The adaptation was scheduled for staging at the Atlantic Theatre Company in New York City for the 1999-2000 season, and Part I, Here in St. Cloud’s, was staged, with Hulce as co-director, in May-June 1999.  It ran 3¼ hours and cost Atlantic about $300,000.  With largely mixed reviews, ATL couldn’t raise the money to mount the second part and the play cycle was never completed in New York.]

“Our responsibility is to do big stuff — not the next one-set, three-character play,” says Gregory Boyd [b. 1951], artistic director of the Alley [1989-2018], which has commissioned, among other new works, a play from Keith Reddin [b. 1956] about the Luddite rebellion in 19th century England. Regional theaters are one place where educational is not a dirty word. Performances are often followed by discussion sessions; the programs (so pathetically inadequate in New York) are filled with background articles on the play’s issues or real-life subject matter. People leave the theater with something more than stagecraft to talk about.

[Reddin’s Luddite play is The Prophets of Nature.  The only production for which I could find a record was by the Off-Off-Broadway Sonnet Repertory Theatre at the Belt Theatre in New York City from 16 to 20 June 2004, which appears to have been the play’s première. I couldn’t find any reviews of the production, however. Six years later, the Salt Lake Acting Company in Utah presented a single, free reading of The Prophets of Nature on 15 February 2010 as part of its New Play Sounding Series. There were several announcements of the reading (including Playbill on 6 February 2010), but no after-event commentary. The text of The Prophets of Nature doesn’t seem to have been published.]

Even with more commercial works that play the regionals with one eye on the ultimate prize — Broadway — the audience participates in a more direct way. Last winter Ellen Burstyn [b. 1932] played the title role in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a one-woman stage adaptation [by Martin Tahse, 1930-2014; not to be confused with the 1994 TV mini-series adaptation] of Allan Gurganus’ [b. 1947] best-selling novel [1989], which had its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater [2003]. She was still stumbling a bit (engagingly, catching herself with a casual “I mean . . .”) as she tried to master the demanding part, but audiences had the frisson of being present at the development of what may (when the show comes to Broadway this fall) turn out to be one of the great stage roles.

By most measures, the regional theaters are booming. There were just 23 in 1961, when the first national organization of nonprofit theaters was formed [Theatre Communications Group (TCG), established in 1961]; today there are 1,800. Many have gleaming new theaters, with two or even three stages, and state-of-the-art production facilities that put to shame the cramped old boxes on Broadway. “Frankly, it’s something of a step down for me when I go to New York,” says Jack O’Brien [b. 1939], artistic director of San Diego’s Globe Theaters [1965-present] — who has lately been going to New York often to direct hit shows like Hairspray [Broadway: 15 August 2002-4 January 2009 (8 Tonys, including Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical); première: Seattle, May-June 2002].

For playwrights, the chance to see their new work given a sumptuous first staging is matched only by the ability to keep tinkering with it while shielded from the harsh lights of Broadway. “One of the things you find is that there’s a low level of audience pretension,” says Richard Greenberg [b. 1958], who has developed plays like Three Days of Rain [1997; Broadway, 2006 (Julia Roberts’s stage début)] and The Violet Hour [2002; Broadway, 2003] at South Coast Repertory in California’s Orange County. “There’s a receptiveness about the audience. Their responses are pure. And that’s especially good early on, when you’re not so sure how or if your play is communicating.”

Today’s tough economic times have brought their share of pain, of course. Subscriptions and ticket sales have held their own at most of the major theaters (though advance bookings have dropped, as they have on Broadway since Sept. 11), but it has been a struggle to keep corporate and private donations coming. Seattle’s ACT company, one of the city’s three major theater groups, announced last winter that financial woes would force it to close down at the end of the season — before $1.5 million was raised at the last minute to keep it going for at least another season. The Seattle Rep, across town, is in less dire straits, but will still have to reduce staff and cut its roster of plays from nine to six next season. These pressures could increase the danger that regionals will shy away from risky fare, in favor of tried-and-true revivals, or new works that might have the prospect of a commercial run in New York. That is a criticism that some have long made of the regionals; off-Broadway is still a more receptive place for certain kinds of stylistically experimental plays. “I find that sometimes theaters are a little tame when it comes to choosing their seasons. They want to cater to their audiences,” says playwright Cruz. “A lot of regional theaters won’t take chances with work that deals more with experimentation.”

A successful regional theater, of course, has to strike the right balance, to know its audience and serve its tastes while pushing it, at least on occasion, into new territory. What’s gratifying is how well many of them are doing it — and proving in the process that all the country’s a stage.

The Top Five Regional Theaters

Some focus on new work; others have a commitment to the classics. Bringing new plays and artists to the national stage is important, but so is serving your local audience. TIME traveled the country to find the five theaters that do both best — and know how to put on a great show.

1 Goodman Theater, Chicago

With the groundbreaking Steppenwolf troupe and such ambitious smaller companies as the Victory Gardens Theater, Chicago’s theater scene is lively. But the Goodman continues to make the biggest national mark. Artistic director Robert Falls [b. 1954; Artistic Director of the Goodman, 1986-2022] has supplied Broadway with acclaimed adaptations of American classics (including this season’s Long Day’s Journey into Night [Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953); 22 February-6 April 2002]) and has nurtured such important new voices as Rebecca Gilman [b. 1964 or 1965] (Boy Gets Girl [13 March-8 April 2000]) and — along with Chicago’s Lookingglass Theater — Mary Zimmerman [b. 1960] (Metamorphoses [premiered in 1996 as Six Myths; Off-Broadway: 2001; Broadway: 2002, Tony for Best Direction of a Play, 2 additional nominations]). The Goodman is currently introducing Gem of the Ocean [28 April-24 May 2003] . . ., the latest in August Wilson’s [1945-2005] 20th century chronicle of the African-American experience, in a vibrant production with a strong cast of Wilson regulars. And Stephen Sondheim’s [1930-2021] long-awaited new musical, Bounce, will open here in June [30 June-10 August 2003]. “New York is a place to celebrate new work rather than to originate or nurture it,” says Falls. “That’s our responsibility.”

2  Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Ore.

The name is misleading. Although the company began as an all-Shakespeare troupe back in 1935, the Bard’s works now constitute less than half of its increasingly eclectic season. OSF is one of the few U.S. companies left that hew to the classic repertory format. Its 70 to 75 actors take various roles in 11 works that play in rotation from February to November. And since visitors generally travel to this Oregon resort town to see several shows at a time, the Romeo and Juliets and Hedda Gablers can be supplemented with more unconventional fare such as the two parts of David Edgar’s Continental Divide (one of them, Mothers Against . . .) and, in July, Nilo Cruz’s Lorca in a Green Dress [12 July-2 November 2003]. “We’re willing to take a chance on plays that other theaters aren’t interested in,” says artistic director Libby Appel [b. 1937], “because we have the audience for it.”

3  American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Mass.

Robert Brustein [1927-2023], the longtime artistic director of this adventurous company [1979-2002], turned over the reins this season to Robert Woodruff [b. 1947], a veteran avant-garde director from New York City. Woodruff responded by bringing in a Who’s Who of theater innovators, including Peter Sellars [b. 1957] and Andrei Serban [Romanian-born American, b. 1943], whose quirky take on Shakespeare’s Pericles [10 May-27 Jun 2003] . . ., is currently onstage. Another highlight of the season: Woodruff’s staging of Highway Ulysses [1-22 March 2002], an update of the Ulysses myth, with text and music by Rinde Eckert [b. 1951], about a man on a freaky cross-country trek in search of his son. Even when the journey wandered, Woodruff’s teeming, haunted stage kept you enthralled.

4  Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis

One of the legendary American regional companies has been quietly tending its garden for years, with 32,000 subscribers (among the highest in the nation) who brave the frigid Minnesota winters to see high-quality productions of the classics. But the Guthrie has also launched a program for developing new work, and last summer staged the world premiere of Arthur Miller’s [1915-2005] latest play, Resurrection Blues [world première at the Guthrie, 9 August-8 September 2002] . . ., Artistic director Joe Dowling [b. 1948; artistic director of the Guthrie, 1995-2015], who once ran Dublin’s Abbey Theater [1979-85] and directed a Broadway revival of Tartuffe this season [9 January-23 February 2003, for the Roundabout Theatre Company], says that the audience in Minneapolis is “one of the most sophisticated I’ve ever worked with.”

5  South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, Calif.

In Southern California, enterprising regional theaters are nearly as plentiful as orange groves — among them, San Diego’s Globe and the La Jolla Playhouse — but the little engine that could in Orange County gets the nod. Run by two former San Francisco college buddies — Martin Benson and David Emmes [both now over 90; left the leadership of SCR in 2011], who founded the company as a traveling troupe in 1964 — the South Coast Rep has helped nurture such playwrights as Richard Greenberg and David Henry Hwang [b. 1957] (Golden Child [10 January-9 February 1997; commissioned by SCR and co-produced with the New York Shakespeare Festival/The Public Theater]). This spring the theater, along with Baltimore’s Center Stage, staged the premiere of Lynn Nottage’s [b. 1964] Intimate Apparel [SCR: 11 April-18 May 2003] . . ., about a black seamstress in turn-of-the-century New York City who makes corsets for rich ladies — and a mail-order match for herself with a laborer on the Panama Canal. It’s a lovingly rendered slice of the American story that seems to glow especially bright in the heart of Reagan country.

[Richard Zoglin (b. 1948) wrote about entertainment for Time for over 30 years starting in 1983 as a staff writer and in 1996 as the theater reviewer.  He’s the author of three books: Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (Simon & Schuster, 2019); Hope: Entertainer of the Century—that’s Bob Hope, of course—(Simon & Schuster, 2014); and Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (Bloomsbury, 2008).  He’s now an op-ed contributor to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.]

"Art That Flows From a Will to Live": Marina Abramović, Performance Artist

by Jessica Testa 

[Marina Abramović (b. 1946 in Yugoslavia) is a pioneering performance artist, best known for her works that explore the physical limitations of the body, as well as the body’s potential as a vehicle to spiritual metamorphosis.  Born in Belgrade (now the capital of Serbia), Abramovic studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970 and in Zagreb, Croatia, at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1972.

[("When people ask me where I am from, I never say Serbia,” Abramović declares.  “I always say I come from a country that no longer exists" [Sean O'Hagan, “Interview: Marina Abramović,” Guardian [New York] 2 Oct. 2010, Interview: Marina Abramović | Marina Abramović | The Guardian].  What became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was formed in 1918 after World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, gaining recognition in 1922.  It became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after World War II in 1945, and dissolved into six independent republics in 1992.)

[She was among the first generation of performance artists of the 1970s, a group that often resorted to using their own bodies as an artistic medium.  Her works often explore extremes of sensation, and, frequently, the audience is invited to participate in the intense, and often exhausting, painful performances.  Aramović's presentations include sound, video, photography, language, and sculpture, in addition to using her body as the central medium for her work.

[She later regularly collaborated with German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, 1943-2020; German performance artist known for his ambitious conceptual works) on other performative works, exploring the capacities of the body, as well as constructions of gender and social systems in their pieces.  

[In 1976, following her marriage to Serbian performance and conceptual artist Neša Paripović (b. 1942), Abramović went to Amsterdam to give a performance and decided to move there permanently.  She divorced Paripović in 1976 (m. 1970) and began living with Ulay, with whom she worked for about twelve years.

[From 1990 to 1995, she was a visiting professor at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the Berlin University of the Arts.  From 1992 to 1996. she also served as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and from 1997 to 2004, she was a professor for performance art at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig.

[Abramović also began traveling around the world to perform, exploring the body and nature with Ulay as a means of achieving spiritual transformation, in locations ranging from the Gobi Desert to the Tibetan mountains, and the Great Wall of China (1988).  At the end of this project, her relationship with Ulay dissolved.  

[She has exhibited her work at the Venice Biennale, where she won a Golden Lion award in 1997 (and met Italian contemporary artist Paolo Canevari, b. 1963, whom she would later marry), and at Documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Art Basel in Switzerland, and the Kumamoto Museum of Contemporary Art in Kumamoto, Japan, among many other venues.

[Abramović and Canevari moved to New York in 2002 and married in 2006.  She bought an estate in upstate Hudson, a small city in the center of New York’s eastern border of with Massachusetts, that became her private residence and a meeting place for performance art.  Abramović divorced Canevari and currently lives and works in Amsterdam and New York City.

[Eleven years ago, I posted a two-part article entitled “Performance Art” (7 and 10 November 2013).  It was a short history and exegesis of the artform as I understood it (and it would be pertinent to this post), so I will republish my definition of performance art (slightly edited and reformatted) for readers who haven’t encountered this hybrid of theater and art (my characterization):

Also known as “live art,” “living art,” or “body art,” performance art exists at the conjunction of the worlds of art and theater.  Performance, as it’s often called, is the demonstration or execution of the ideas of Conceptual Art, defined as “art of which the material is the concept.”  (Other, earlier art influences include Dadaism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art.)  

Conceptual Art, which flourished between the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s, elevated ideas and the process of creation over product and technique, and insisted that art can’t be bought or sold.  Like performance art, it can’t be commodified and brought home for display.  

Accepted as a separate medium of artistic expression in 1970s, performance, however, defies precise definition, asserts RoseLee Goldberg (b. 1947), an art historian, critic, and curator who’s lectured at many institutions and schools and who wrote the most comprehensive texts on it.  (Goldberg’s Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, originally published in 1979, was reissued in 2011 in an edition that brings the history of performance up to the first decade of the 21st century.)  

As performance artist Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), a composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings a variety of experimental music and art rock styles, puts it: “This is literally living art that continues to evolve and expand.” 

Except that it’s live art by artists, in fact, few practitioners will agree on what comprises performance art and the artists and writers about performance keep expanding the scope of the definition with each succeeding wave of experimentation and exploration.  By nature, performance art constantly changes and evolves, as the artists adopt and adapt new technologies and media, engulfing new ideas and concepts as they pursue their aims.  

The event might be performed only once (most common in the early years) or repeated several times, with or without a prepared script, improvised spontaneously or rehearsed over many months.  The works might be presented in solo performances or in groups, with lighting, music, or visuals made by the artists themselves or in collaboration with other artists.  Performances could take place in galleries, theaters, museums, streets, parking lots, public squares, parks, open fields, vacant lots, bars, night clubs, lofts, or any space the artist selects that’s suited to the piece.  

In general, however, in addition to being live, it’s also predominantly presentational and typically involves improvisation.  The artist-creator-performer, using her or his body as the primary artistic medium (either as canvas or as sculpture, or both), combines dance, music, drama, and often technology like film, video, projections, or computer imagery, as well as any other media that the artist can adapt and apply.  

Performance also encompasses behaviors outside the performing and visual arts like ritual, work activities, sports, and daily tasks.

[Because performance art is ephemeral, photos or videos are frequently the art objects displayed after the live performance and sold to subsidize the work and provide the artists with income.  They are also the only record of the art event that can be preserved or archived—with the caveat that the “liveness,” one of the fundamental criteria of performance art, is missing.

[(Note, incidentally, that despite my labeling performance art as a fusion of theater and art, Abramović has insisted: “To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre.  Theatre is fake . . . .  The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real.  Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real” [O’Hagan].)

[Jessica Testa’s interview with Marina Abramović ran in the “Sunday Styles” section of the New York Times on 4 August 2024.  In addition to “Performance Art,” other posts on the subject on Rick On Theater are: “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist” by Kirk Woodward (8 January 2011); “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011); “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013); “Lady Gaga and Once” by Kirk Woodward (5 May 2014); "‘The Second Life of Performance’" by Katie Kitamura from T: The New York Times Style Magazine (10 January 2016)]

Marina Abramovic, still a performance artist at 77, talks about her desires to keep going.

Marina Abramovic stood and faced the ocean on Fire Island.

[Fire Island is the center islet of the barrier islands parallel to the South Shore (the Atlantic shore) of Long Island (though the name sometimes refers to all four of the small islands). It’s 32 miles long and ½ mile across at its widest point (9½ square miles in area) and lies off New York’s Suffolk County, the easternmost county on Long Island (and location of The Hamptons, the collection of villages—67 miles and 2 hours east of Fire Island—that are weekend and vacation homes to the arty and wealthy of New York City).

[Fire Island is a 2½-hour drive from New York City (though no cars are allowed on the island itself; one must park and take a ferry) and is a popular summer resort for New Yorkers, with an active LGBTQ community for which Fire Island is well known. There are fewer than 300 year-round residents and the population swells to 14,840 at the peak season. Many celebrities, from the entertainment world and other fields, have homes on Fire Island.]

For a long minute, her arms rose symmetrically from her sides until her body formed a T shape. Her long red dress was stark against the waves. Her palms faced forward.

Ms. Abramovic’s face was not visible, but it was conceivable that she was screaming. The performance artist once screamed for three hours, until she couldn’t anymore (“Freeing the Voice,” 1976 [Budapest]); once yelled into her lover’s reciprocating mouth for 15 minutes (“AAA-AAA,” 1978 [Amsterdam]); once persuaded hundreds of people in an Oslo park to shriek in homage to Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” ([Ekeberg Park, Oslo; 15-25 August] 2013).

[The iconic composition The Scream (Skrik in Norwegian) by Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944) exists in several versions.  The first painted rendering was made in 1893 and is in the National Museum of Norway in Oslo. A pastel version, also from 1893, is in Oslo’s Munch Museum. The second pastel version, from 1895, was sold in 2012 to a private collector. The second painted version dates from 1910 and is also in the Munch Museum. Munch also created a lithograph stone of The Scream in 1895 and made about four dozen prints, several of which survive.]

Perhaps now she was expressing rage at humanity’s spoiling of the planet — the rising seas turned into garbage patches. Years ago, she said, after a deadly tsunami in Southeast Asia [the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, known as the Boxing Day Tsunami, that killed an estimated 225-230,000 people], she whipped the ocean 360 times, wanting to punish it [God Punishing (2005) in Phuket, Thailand, whipping the sea with hundreds of performers and reading poems at the first anniversary for those lost in the tsunami].

But no, Ms. Abramovic was not screaming at the ocean. At 77, she was trying to give it positive energy and “unconditional love as a way to heal,” she said in her artist’s statement for “Performance for the Oceans.” The new piece [May 2024] — an edition of three photographs to be auctioned in October by Christie’s in London [Frieze Art Fair, 9-13 October 2024)] — was made for the conservation charity Blue Marine Foundation.

Ms. Abramovic has long explored endurance and extremes, whether by sitting in the Museum of Modern Art for upward of 700 hours [The Artist Is Present, 14 March-31 May 2010] or walking across the Great Wall of China [The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk, 30 March-3 June 1988]. (Or, more recently, leading seven minutes of silence at a rowdy music festival [Seven Minutes of Collective Silence, Glastonbury Festival, near Pilton, Somerset, England, 24 June 2024].)

This year, she took the idea of endurance a step further. With an Austrian herbalist, Nonna Brenner, she introduced a line of products called the Marina Abramovic Longevity Method. They are tinctures made with vitamins and natural ingredients, like garlic and cranberry juice, to boost energy or support the immune system. (The instructions: “Take 50-60 drops two times a day — with food and water.” [This parenthetical insert from the online version is not part of the print edition.])

Immediately, some questioned whether the line, which promises “inside-out beauty,” was performance art. It was not. Ms. Abramovic, who survived a health emergency last year [see below, re: “pulmonary embolism”] — and who said she had worked with Dr. Brenner to treat her Lyme disease, including with leeches — wants to stay on this planet as long as possible, trash-filled oceans and all. “I’m not going anywhere until I’m 103,” she said.

“In American culture, when you’re old, it’s like you’re dirty, like something’s wrong with you,” said the artist, who was born in what was then Yugoslavia. “In Balkan culture, being old is actually great.”

This was the first thing Ms. Abramovic told me on a video call in June, while in Greece. We were supposed to talk about the ocean. We spoke more about the will to live. (They’re connected.) This conversation has been edited.

On Longevity

You say Americans are obsessed with staying young and living forever, but you’re also interested in living past 100. What’s the difference?

Every wrinkle is a threat in American culture. My idea with aging is to embrace the limits of the body. That you wake up in the morning, that you have pain, that you have arthritis, that you’re not flexible like you were before. Enjoying the limits and seeing how you can accept your body as it is. That’s the difference. Americans don’t accept their bodies as they are.

Personally, I’m a little afraid of living to 100. I don’t know what the planet is going to look like. You’re running toward it.

I really want to see aliens, finally, in my lifetime. Some years ago, I asked Richard Branson [English business magnate, founder of spaceflight corporation Virgin Galactic; b. 1950] if he could give me a one-way ticket to go up and not come back. I want to see what is behind all this. I want to see black holes. Who made the cosmos? I have the curiosity of a kid of 5 years old.

By the way, I think here’s how I’m going to look at 120: My nose is very big and my chin is glued together, and I will have one big hair growing out.

Humor about yourself is so important. We have to have a few jokes about this hell we’re living in.

Well, when your Longevity Method was announced, some people weren’t sure if it was serious.

I am completely smashed by the press. This is not new for me. If I read and took seriously people’s writing, I would not leave home.

I’ve worked with the body all my life. But first of all, I’m not the doctor. I’m just giving my name to Dr. Brenner in order to promote the product. Nobody knows about her. Everybody knows about me.

The products are drops for energy, allergies and the immune system. We are allergic to everything these days because of the way we’re eating food and how pollution is in the air. If you stabilize your immune system, and you don’t have allergies, and you have drops of energy, you’re doing fine. Nothing crazier than that.

You do seem healthy.

Every day I’m eating branzino, a grilled fish, with steamed vegetables. Nothing else. I don’t have dinner. I have a light breakfast, and then I eat around 2 o’clock. When you get older, you don’t need to eat so much because you’re not running around like crazy.

What keeps you up at night?

The news is always bad — every morning, one horror after another. Why are humans historically constantly at war? Why do we have violence? How is it possible that we never learned lessons? How is it possible we never learned simple things to forgive each other?

I think we need good news. In the Second World War, when everybody was painting the atrocity of the war, [Henri] Matisse [French Post-Impressionist artist; 1869-1954], for four years of the war, was only painting flowers. That’s what we need.

So you’re an optimist?

I always see the positive side. And mostly I’m right. Like, every breakup will look terrible in the moment. Actually, years later, you’re so lucky this person is not in your life.

Every day is a miracle. I wake up quite happy every morning. Not always — my life was really difficult. I’m only getting happy lately.

What makes you so happy lately?

That I’m alive. I am a little bit worried that I will not have enough time to do whatever I am interested in doing. I’m doing a big thing in Manchester [England] next year [Manchester International Festival, 1-31 July 2025]. It’s such a crazy project, I’ll just tell you the title: “Balkan Erotic Epic.” In Balkan culture, genitals were used in rituals to connect to the spirits and the gods.

It’s going to be such a scandal. Britain is so puritan. I can’t wait.

Are you going to appear naked?

I don’t know yet. When you have the naked body and you present it to the public, it’s not me anymore. If I’m fat, or with cellulite, or with sagging tits, who cares? I’m presenting a concept in that body.

Ask me something that you never asked anybody else before.

Since we’ve been talking about longevity, have you ever not wanted to be alive?

No. I always want to be alive. I had a very bad heartbreak [the break-up with Ulay in 1988]. It was the saddest thing in my life. But I was just crying. That’s it. And one day I woke up and I didn’t cry anymore.

On ‘A Good Death’

A few weeks later, Ms. Abramovic agreed to continue the conversation at her apartment in Manhattan. She showed me footage from the “7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” an opera she conceived that includes several video clips of Ms. Abramovic, with Willem Dafoe [stage and film actor; b. 1955] as her co-star, dying various painful deaths. [7 Deaths débuted on 27 July 2021 at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera (Bayerische Staatsoper).]

She showed me photos taken last year in a hospital, where she was treated for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism [May 2023]: images of the blood clots removed from her body during surgery and of her first time walking again after being in a coma. (For when she needs it, there is still a cane in her entryway, next to a framed photograph of the German dancer Pina Bausch. [See note with above parenthetical comment.])

After her discharge, she couldn’t travel by airplane for some time. So she took a boat to Europe, developing a new appreciation for the scale of the ocean. “What’s your Plan B, by the way?” she asked, referring to the day disaster strikes New York and its citizens need to flee. (Her plan is Australia; she has a permanent visa.)

When I arrived at the apartment, a 27-year-old performance artist mentored by Ms. Abramovic was just leaving. The artist, Miles Greenberg [Canadian performance artist and sculptor; b. 1997], asked if he could bring her back any gifts from his summer travels. She requested a “supernatural story.” She is interested in the mysticism — like crystals and numerology — and in 2016 won several bets with friends after her horoscope reader predicted that Donald J. Trump would win the election. (The horoscope reader said he would lose in 2024.)

After Mr. Greenberg left, she explained that she met him when he was 17.

“I don’t have any contact with anyone in my generation,” Ms. Abramovic said. “They’re so boring and depressed.”

So you don’t have any friends your age?

No. The oldest ones are 55 or 60. But not 77. They’re half-dead, they’re always complaining, they’re always sick.

What do you do for fun?

I always try to see life through a child’s eyes. I don’t take drugs, and I don’t drink. I love chocolate. But I don’t need to drink to be funny. I think I’m hilarious. I think I should do stand-up comedy.

Did your perspective on life change with your health scare last year?

Yes, oh my God. I have no reason to be depressed. I spent too much time on my broken heart. What a waste.

One of the reasons that I think survived was everything that I learned through performance about pain, about endurance. Last year was the most physical pain I had in my entire life. I could not move, for six weeks, my little finger. The other physical pain I could control. This was something uncontrollable. You can’t control death.

I read that you planned your own funeral many years ago [Keynote Address, 30 June 2015; Marina Abramović: In Residence, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney, Australia, 24 June-5 July 2015].

After Susan Sontag’s funeral, I was so discouraged. I want a big celebration. Nobody wears black, only bright colors. I had a crazy life, and I want to have a good death.

[Writer, critic, and public intellectual Sontag (b. 1933) died in New York on 28 December 2004, but according to her wishes, she was buried in Paris.  Her funeral was in Montmartre on 17 January 2005.]

Do you think you’re fixated on death?

No! I just wanted to stop being afraid of it.

[Jessica Testa is a New York Times reporter covering the worlds of style and fashion.]