Zelda Fichandler (1924-2016), Part 1

 

[Zelda Fichandler was one of the principal pioneers of the American regional theater movement of the mid-20th-century post-World War II era.  Following in the footsteps of Margo Jones (1911-55), who started Theatre ’47 in Dallas in 1947, and Nina Vance (1914-80), who launched the Alley Theatre in Houston, also in 1947, Zelda Fichandler, with her husband, Thomas C. Fichandler (1915-97), and Edward Mangum (1913-2001), founded Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in 1950. 

[This was the beginning of the surge of resident, non-profit theaters across the United States.  If readers have been following my occasional series on the regional theater in this country, you know the extent to which that movement has influenced the development of theater in the U.S.

[Full disclosure: I was born and grew up in Washington.  The Arena Stage opened when I wasn’t yet four years old, so it was part of my growing up to be a theater-lover.  (As I explained in “A Broadway Baby,” [posted on Rick On Theater on 22 September 2010], my parents were born in New York City and were inveterate theater-enthusiasts.  They transferred this habit to the Nation’s Capital and passed it on to me—and Arena was a big part of that.)  ROTters may well detect a certain level of D.C. and Arena chauvinism in my viewpoint.  I own that.  It’s who I am.

[But Zelda Fichandler, who died in 2016 at 91, was, all bias aside, a significant figure in the life of the American theater.  I, therefore, take some pride—justifiable, I believe—in presenting the following reports, in tribute to the late Zelda Fichandler. There will be one more homage to Fichandler, to be posted on Sunday, 20 October.]

“THE LEGEND OF ZELDA”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

[AT editor-in-chief Rob Weinert-Kendt’s review of two books on Zelda Fichandler published this year was posted on the American Theatre website on 20 September 2024 (AMERICAN THEATRE | The Legend of Zelda).  “The Legend of Zelda” didn’t appear in the print edition of the Theatre Communications Group’s quarterly magazine.

[In addition to co-founding Arena, Fichandler served as artistic director from its start until 1991. She assumed the artistic directorship of the New York City-based Acting Company, co-founded in 1972 by John Houseman (1902-88) and Margot Harley (b. 1935) out of the first graduating class of the Juilliard School’s drama program, from 1991 to 1994. She was also chair of the graduate acting program of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1984 to 2009.]

2 new books show and tell the instructive story of Arena’s path-breaking co-founder, Zelda Fichandler—both the work she did and the work she left for us to continue.

The postpartum-like depression that follows any creative act is familiar to anyone who works on a project-by-project basis, and most certainly to everyone in the arts. The book is published, the film or album released, the painting hung—now what? Do we really have to start over and do it all again tomorrow?

This morning-after crash is even more acute for those who toil in the ephemera of the performing arts—forms which live entirely in a series of shared public moments, only to be struck with the sets or packed away with the guitars or pointe shoes, the sole remaining record of all that effort existing in the individual memories of hundreds, possibly thousands of disparate people (not counting stray video captures and/or the things we theatre journalists write). To get up the next day and go through that dance of the mayfly again—most often not only with no hope of a durable record but with a strong likelihood you won’t receive extravagant material compensations either—might almost fit the famous definition of insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. A lifetime of such ups and downs is definitely not for the faint of heart.

Imagine, though, if you built an institution that could serve as a permanent container for such moments, a fixed address for these fleeting appointments—a garden where these flowers can bloom in their season, then be pruned away for the next. Might that give an artist some sense of continuity, lasting impact, artistic home?

This is the question I kept coming back to as I read two indispensable new books by and about Zelda Fichandler [see Part 2, coming up on the 20th], the late, great co-founder of Washington, D.C.’s mighty Arena Stage, who died in 2016. Fichandler inarguably built one of the nation’s leading arts institutions around precisely this impulse—to make for theatre artists, as she often put it, “a home and not a hotel”—and in so doing inspired generations of leaders and artists (which she also did in her subsequent role as head of New York University’s graduate acting program).

But rest on her laurels? Nope. On the evidence of the speeches and essays collected and lovingly edited by Todd London in The Long Revolution: Sixty Years on the Frontlines of a New American Theater [Theatre Communications Group, 2024], Fichandler was hardly shy about celebrating the achievements of Arena and of U.S. regional theatres more broadly. But she could never be mistaken for a simple cheerleader. In a 1970 essay, she tidily sums up the rationale for the movement she helped pioneer over the previous two decades: “The impulse . . . was to remedy a grievous fault and reverse a direful trend—the contraction and imminent death of the theatre. The goal has been, to a large degree, accomplished.” She hastens to add a cautionary note: “Not secured, but accomplished.”

More plaintively, in a 1967 speech, she wonders aloud:

How old do you have to be to be “permanent”? How far up is “up”? Where are you when you are finally “there”? . . . When I get up in the morning I feel about twenty-eight days younger than the Comédie-Française [founded in 1680]. When will the proof be acknowledged to be actually in the pudding? How long must we scramble, pushing that damn stone up that damn mountain only to have to push it up again? How long, O Lord, how long?

[The reference to pushing a stone up a mountain is an allusion to the fate of Sisyphus in Greek mythology. In the underworld, he was condemned for eternity to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down before he reaches the top and he has to push it up again repeatedly forever. The myth is featured in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and Albert Camus’s 1942 philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus.]

A certain divine dissatisfaction also thrums throughout Mary B. Robinson’s extraordinarily vivid mix of oral history and biography, To Repair the World: Zelda Fichandler and the Transformation of American Theater [Routledge, 2024], in which Zelda is quoted as saying, philosophically, “It’s never all in place. It never needs to be in place. Motion, change, transformation—that’s where the energy comes from.” That is also where the anxiety comes from: In an impassioned letter to the Ford Foundation, whose largesse helped launch Arena but whose direct support waned over the years, Zelda wrote, “I feel that there is no more successful theatre anywhere and NONE THAT IS IN A MORE PRECARIOUS POSITION.”

Robinson’s book even winds up in meta-contemplation of The Long Revolution itself—a collection that was in the works before Zelda’s death but was only completed earlier this year. Robinson quotes London on Fichandler’s “Jewish and Talmudic” impulse to “keep questioning the thing that you’ve made.” London adds, poignantly, “Without the opening night, or without the structure of school year/graduation, she couldn’t bring herself to stop the process. It just felt so continuous—her inability to just say, ‘The End.’”

[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.]

I think I’m drawn to this strain of Fichandler’s thinking, and the note of unmistakable pathos in it, not only because it seems abundantly clear that a questing, never-settled spirit was central to her forward-driving leadership, but because the theatre field she helped create is currently going through yet another rolling existential crisis, with contracting audiences, declining funding, widespread leadership turnover, and overdue but contested programs of diversity and equity. As many crucial lessons as these books contain about company-building and decision-making from one of the best who ever did it, they are possibly even more instructive on matters of company-sustaining, rethinking, regrouping, learning from failure, grounded in a strong connection to the ancient human roots of why and how we gather to tell stories in the first place. What would Zelda do? is a question very much worth asking now. These two books, read individually—or, as I did, in tandem—provide an abundance of answers.

[The two links in the paragraph above take readers to a pair of articles on the topics laid out. I have some posts on this blog relating to the same topics, however. First is the occasional series on the regional theater I mentioned in the introduction to this post, which includes, among other articles, “A look at the regional theaters fighting to save their historic art form” by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport (PBS NewsHour) and “Theater is in freefall, and the pandemic isn’t the only thing to blame” by Peter Marks (Washington Post), both in “The Regional Theater: Change or Die,” 3 October 2023.

[As for the second issue, see “Theatrical Continuity” (21 August 2009), my take on this same situation some years ago.]

Among her other striking qualities, Fichandler was searingly prescient—or, to put it another way, she was ever alert to the afflictions that perennially plague the lively arts. Consider “Hard Times for High Arts,” a speech she gave in the early 1990s, when recessionary pressures were forcing theatres to close, federal funding was in more or less permanent retreat, audiences were declining, artists were leaving the industry, the religious right was on the march against free expression—sound familiar? But it’s not just her diagnoses but her prescriptions that seem to point the way to our current moment: Rather than retreat into either the elitist or populist postures favored by some of her contemporaries, she full-throatedly advocates diversity and equity as central to theatre’s future (not least for their aesthetic and cultural benefits), and she sees robust arts education as a prerequisite for both a healthy civilization and a responsive audience.

Or look to “Whither (or Wither) Art?” [reposted on ROT in “‘Art Will Out,’ Part 4: Responses (continued),” 12 August 2024], her spirited 2003 response to a series of provocative essays in this magazine [i.e., American Theatre], including Jaan Whitehead’s critique of stultifying “institutional art” [reposted as “‘Art Will Out,’ Part 1,” 3 August 2024] and Todd London’s lament about the painful chasm between artists and institutions. Reflecting back on the lessons of Arena’s early years and the fieldwide struggles of the succeeding decades, Fichandler clearly recognizes in these voices a familiar call to create artistic sanctuaries from an extractive job-to-job economy—indeed, it was largely this impulse, in contrast to the “one-shot” Broadway model, around which Arena and like-minded theatres were founded. While she first mounts a partial defense of the regional theatre’s record as a talent incubator and culture creator, and issues her share of cautionary wisdom about windy idealism in the face of material challenges, she is ultimately not defensive. Instead, she ends up conceding the point that, yes, artists should get higher pay and an increased say on theatre boards and staffs, and that more theatres should be run by playwrights.

In fact, when she wrote that, the playwright and director Emily Mann [b. 1952] was already leading the McCarter Theatre Center (and would be followed by other playwright-leaders like Chay Yew [b. 1971] at Victory Gardens, Kwame Kwei-Armah [b. 1939] at Baltimore Center Stage, and Hana Sharif [b. 1979], Arena’s current artistic director). But acknowledgment of her successors wasn’t always Fichandler’s strongest suit, especially if they were women. Indeed, Mann appears in the pages of Robinson’s To Repair the World as one of many women leaders who honor Fichandler’s path-breaking example on the one hand, and lament her failure to lift up the next generation of women on the other. As Mann puts it bluntly, “She was not a friend [to women directors]. . . She did not want any peers,” though she adds that Fichandler’s praise for Mann’s play Execution of Justice “meant a great deal to me.”

[Emily Mann’s documentary play Execution of Justice, based on the transcripts of the 1979 trial of former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White for the 1978 murders Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, opened at Arena on 10 May 1985. The production was directed by Douglas C. Wager (who would succeed Fichandler as artistic director of the company) and designed by Ming Cho Lee. The production closed as scheduled on 16 June.

[The play was produced on Broadway at the Virginia Theatre, running from 13 to 22 March 1986 under Mann’s direction on Lee’s Arena set. The play is mentioned significantly in my article “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October 2009.]

Robinson’s bracingly frank book is full of this kind of complication and texture: praise tempered by criticism, and vice versa. In one paragraph an actor will testify to the life-changing opportunity Zelda gave them, and in the next will starkly, sometimes bitterly, recount their falling out (and sometimes, though not always, weigh an invite to work together again). From a series of alternately harrowing and hilarious backstage tales, triumphs and setbacks, a portrait emerges of a glamorous, inspiring leader with exacting standards and a seemingly innate genius for seizing the reins and setting the agenda: in the rehearsal room, the boardroom, and later the classroom. This was coupled with a closely guarded vulnerability and self-doubt that would sometimes surface in her work as a director and as an essayist, but which Fichandler would not admit as an impediment to her work.

Some of those doubts arose from her role as a woman leader with children, and the impossible bind of the sexist expectation that she would somehow juggle these responsibilities without complaint, which never dogged her male colleagues. While she later confessed to friends that she wished she had spent more time with her family, she had always felt that her work was worth some sacrifice on the home front.

The most dramatic chapters of To Repair the World concern her struggles to hold together another kind of family: the acting company that was Arena Stage’s central attraction for decades, through which passed the likes of James Earl Jones [see “In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024),” 22, 25, and 28 September 2024], George Grizzard [1928-2007], Jane Alexander [b. 1939], Robert Prosky [1930-2008], Frances Sternhagen [1930-2023], Melinda Dillon [1939-2023], Roy Scheider [1932-2008], Rene Auberjonois [1940-2019], and Ned Beatty [1937-2021], among many others. Anyone who idealizes the storied early years of the regional theatre, when institutions like Arena or the Guthrie or Trinity Rep employed resident acting companies doing repertory work, should read these passages carefully. Can a standing company achieve a uniquely lived-in ensemble synergy onstage, a la Moscow Art Theatre? Sure—but for every such triumph (1974’s transcendent Death of a Salesman, starring Prosky, shines in most memories as a particular highlight), Robinson’s book recounts dozens of tense meetings, competitive struggles for creative agency, and enduring grudges. It becomes clear that as tough and uncompromising as Zelda could be, and as much as she put actors at the center of her theatre—literally and otherwise—it took an immense toll on her to carry “so many souls that you are attached to,” as she put it to a colleague.

That may explain why, when she became head of NYU’s graduate acting program [1984-2009], she seemed to feel somewhat liberated, since the job of an educator is not [to] attach herself to souls but to equip them to soar to the next aerie. Though she had devoted the lion’s share of her career to building what she called, in the long, breathtaking essay that opens The Long Revolution, “Institution-as-Artwork” (her successor at Arena, Douglas Wager [b. 1949?], said she “dramaturged the institution”), Fichandler was finally more at home inspiring than hiring and firing. The testimonies of the actors who thrilled to her annual speeches and blossomed under her tutelage—including Rainn Wilson [b. 1966], Mahershala Ali [b. 1974], Karen Pittman [b. 1986], Danai Gurira [b. 1978], Angel Desai [b. 1972], and Corey Stoll [b. 1976]—are nearly universally awestruck and grateful.

At an evening earlier this year at NYU’s African Grove Theatre [“Celebrating Zelda Fichandler and Book Publications,” 18 September 2024 (the date is the 100th anniversary of her birth)], celebrating Fichandler’s centennial as well as the release of these two new books, many of the actors whose lives she’d helped to shape, from Jane Alexnder [b. 1969] to Randy Danson [b. 1950] to Miriam Silverman [b. 1977], read their testimonies and/or speeches by Zelda, and a few acted scenes from plays that were especially meaningful to her (Uncle Vanya [produced at Arena in 1997 under Fichandler’s direction], Awake and Sing! [staged at Arena by Fichandler in 2006; see “Awake and Sing!, et al.,” 3 April 2017]). As Maggie Siff [b. 1974] puts it:

Zelda was really important . . . in terms of defining purpose, making yourself believe you had a purpose as an actor. We get a lot of messaging as young actors that what you do isn’t a real art form. It wasn’t until I heard her speak that I could give language to this deep feeling I had inside that what I was doing, what I wanted to do, had a very important role in society.

Even in the NYU chapters, though, Robinson’s oral history pulls no punches, detailing a dust-up in 1992 when Black actors in the program vocally objected to Fichandler’s attempt to give them roles by programming a play about slavery, Carlyle Brown’s [b. 1946?] Yellow Moon Rising. Victor Williams [actor; b. 1970], on hand for the NYU celebration, recalled clashing with Fichandler on this issue and learning, as he puts it in Robinson’s book:

There is no perfect first time around . . . [Zelda] was always proactive and assertive in trying to be at the forefront . . . I think the reality is sometimes she hit the nail on the head, sometimes she didn’t . . . You’re not always going to be on the same page in terms of how to get there, but you’re still on the same path.

That seems a fair summation. Directionally, Fichandler, like Joseph Papp [1921-91; founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, now the Public Theater], was raised with left-wing politics and remained more or less firmly on the side of the angels (“to repair the world” is the common translation of the Talmud’s “tikkun olam”). When it opened in 1949, Arena Stage was the only racially integrated theatre in Washington, D.C. And while she struggled fitfully to diversify her acting company, programming, and audience, in a city she recognized was predominantly Black, one of her final legacies at Arena was to establish the Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship [the AT article to which this a link, “The Pipeline: All Set to Succeed” by Crystal Paul, is reposted in “Theater Education & Training, Part 3,” 9 October 2024], a career development program for theatre professionals of color, named for the theatre’s Black lighting designer.

[According to every source, including the theater company’s own website, Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage was founded on 16 August 1950 by Zelda Fichandler, who became the long-serving artistic director; her husband, Thomas C. Fichandler (1915-97), who was the executive director; and Edward Mangum (1913-2001), a professor at George Washington University. There are administrative records the archive of Arena’s papers on reposit at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, that are dated 1949, but I assume they are preliminary planning documents as the theater didn’t open until 1950. (There is a sketch of Arena’s history on this blog in “Washington’s Arena Stage: Under Construction,” 26 November 2011.)

[The Hebrew phrase tikkun olam (pronounced tee-KOON oh-LUHM) means ‘repairing the world,’ as Weinert-Kendt says: tikkun means ‘repairing,’ ‘amending,’ ‘fixing,’ ‘improvement,’ ‘establishment,’ and ‘preparing,’ and olam has diverse meanings, including, ‘world,’ ‘existence,’ ‘lifetime,’ and ‘eternity.’ In modern Judaism, tikkun olam has come to mean social action and the pursuit of social justice.]

By the time she had a stint running the peripatetic troupe the Acting Company, in the early 1990s [1991-94], multicultural casting was enough the norm that the ensemble was only about half white. As she put it: “The subliminal message of this company was, we can make a world this way. We didn’t preach it. We didn’t say it. But there was a vision of it in front of them.”

[Coincidentally, one of Fichandler’s predecessors as artistic director at the Acting Company was Michael Kahn (b. 1937), who held the post from 1978-88. In 1986, he also assumed the position of artistic director of another prominent Washington theater, the Shakespeare Theatre Company (then known as the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger until 1992), from which he retired in 2019.]

Show, don’t tell, is as good a theatre motto as any. As these books demonstrate, though, Zelda Fichandler could tell with the best of them. Her arguments have a persuasive shape and rhythm, but she also had a near-Wildean [that’s Oscar, of course: the Irish playwright (1954-1900) known for his snappy aphorisms] gift for paradox (“Progress is a snail that jumps,” “We must hang on to our despair. Without despair, everything is hopeless,” “I know too much about it really to know anything”) and a pithy, aphoristic streak. Some favorites:

Success is always an accident, only failure can be counted on.

A mind, once stretched, never returns to its original dimensions.

Imagination is the nose of the public: By this, at any time, it may be quietly led.

A theatre gets the audience it signals to and deserves, and repertory is destiny.

Be a genius. If you aren’t a genius, try harder.

Risk-taking is not a line item in the budget but a style, an attitude toward living.

The basic law of [acting] technique is that something inside of us is always in motion.

Movingly, after ranging across the decades, The Long Revolution closes with her 1959 manifesto for the Arena, written at a time when the theatre she had founded 10 years earlier, somewhat capriciously, with her husband, Thomas Fichandler, had established a track record and a loyal audience, and was poised to move into a new home and become a Ford Foundation-funded nonprofit. It was a pivot point into a heady new era, and Zelda Fichandler boldly staked her claim to “A Permanent Classical Repertory Theater in the Nation’s Capital,” writing:

The art of theatre, whose true function for over two thousand years of human history has been the interpretation of man to man, has dwindled in contemporary America into nothing more significant than a “night on the town,” or a method of achieving prestige by having seen approval-stamped bits . . . The answer to the dilemma of the art of theatre in this country is simple and readily turned into a practical, living reality: We must create more theatre that, as Brooks Atkinson [1894-1984; esteemed New York Times theater reviewer, 1922-60] says, “is not so much show business as a form of culture.”

She also writes, in this prehistoric dawn of the regional theatre scene we now take for granted at our peril, of the intrinsic value of the resident model: “The permanent acting company is the actor’s best friend. It is also the audience’s best friend.” There’s that word again: “permanent.” Zelda lived long enough to witness the brittleness of that notion—not only the inherent fragility and insecurity of nonprofit performing arts but, perhaps more terrible, its zombie durability in a diminished, corporatized, quasi-commercial form. Writing in 1978, with a bit more hard-won wisdom under her belt, she gave a typically clear-eyed assessment of what the field she’d help found had accomplished, but could not, should not rest on:

We set out to create a form for theatre that would enable us to insert meaning and beauty into our culture so that people could reach out and touch it simply and directly. Despite hazards and harassments, we have in our various ways done just that. Our greatest achievement has been to decentralize or make “popular”—that is, part of the lives of people all over the country—the art of the theatre. It is a miracle of sorts. For not only did we have to construct the method to carry our idea, but we had to train an audience to know that they wanted to have what we wanted to give them. And that was not an easy struggle. It still goes on.

Indeed it does. When her successor, Doug Wager [tenure: 1991-98], visited Zelda in her final weeks, he said he told her, “We’re so lucky that we had the opportunity to transform the lives of so many thousands of people.” Zelda’s response haunts me, as it rightly should all of us: “No, no! More!”

[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.]

*  *  *  *
“EDITOR’S NOTE”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

[Editor Weinert-Kendt’s note in American Theatre’s October 2016 issue (33.8) was a sort of personal obituary.  AT’s official, formal farewell by Laurence Maslon, a fellow member of the NYU faculty, follows.]

I’ve been struggling since Zelda Fichandler died at the end of July [29 July 2016] to come up with a suitable analogue for her outsized foundational stature in the American nonprofit theatre. Was she our George Washington, the level-headed general turned clear-eyed executive? Surely her four decades at the helm of Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage [1950-91], which she left only to head New York University’s graduate acting program, had a founding-mother patina about them. Or was she our Steve Jobs-like innovator, making something seem inevitable and indispensable that we didn’t even know we needed before it appeared? The regional/resident theatre movement we now think of, for better or worse, as an entrenched fixture of the U.S. and world theatre was not solely her handiwork; like Jobs she had partners, and she built on the ideas of earlier mavericks, in her case especially Margo Jones. But Fichandler can claim a large part of the credit for making theatre outside the commercial capital of New York City not only a force to be reckoned with but almost a force of nature—a part of the given cultural landscape that simply wasn’t there a half century ago but which now even (perhaps especially) the commercial theatre couldn’t do without.

Or, to make the analogy more direct, was she our [Konstantin] Stanislavsky [1963-1938], our [Bertolt] Brecht [1898-1956]—a leader both in theorizing and enacting the way to an ideal theatre of her own conviction and imagination? I’ve been eagerly diving into some of Fichandler’s writings (which will be collected in an upcoming volume by the estimable Todd London), and I mean no aspersion on the great theatre leaders of today when I say that I can think of few writers of any era—and I include critics—as tough-minded, searching, and circumspect about the many-faceted art and practice of the theatre. In a remarkable essay she wrote on the occasion of Arena’s 35th anniversary, and published by TCG [the Theatre Communications Group, publisher of American Theatre] in 1986, “Institution-as-Artwork,” Fichandler took sobering stock of the state of the movement she’d helped create, more or less ex nihilo, over the previous three-plus decades, alongside a far-flung breed of dreamers and doers, and wondered aloud, with breathtaking transparency: Is this really the world we wanted to build? She looked around at a field that had impressively professionalized itself but was at risk of what she called “the dry rot of institutionalization”; which was forsaking its commitment to well-trained, well-compensated actors and company artists; and which was too often at the mercy of bottom-line-oriented boards. If that litany sounds familiar, it’s because these dangers are still with us, unvanquished. [Some of these same concerns are addressed in Jaan Whitehead’s 2002 “Art Will Out,” posted on this blog on 3 August 2024.]

So, though, is the ever-renewing potential of this human-scaled art. I like to think that Zelda would be heartened by this issue, not only for Laurence Maslon’s [b. 1959] lovely memorial tribute to her (p. 20), but because our season preview (starting on p. 29) shines a light on the fertile new-play landscape in the U.S., and because there are two richly satisfying stories about an oft-neglected practice that was central to Arena’s origins: rotating repertory (p. 46, 122).

It finally occurs to me that I don’t need any analogue to measure her against: She was our Zelda Fichandler, and we were fortunate to have her.

*  *  *  *
“ZELDA FICHANDLER: 1924-2016”
by Laurence Maslon 

[Laurence Maslon’s obituary for Zelda Fichandler was published in American Theatre’s October 2016 issue (33.8).]

As seen through the frame of American theatre at the midpoint of the 20th century, the idea of Zelda Fichandler as a producer was unlikely casting—or, perhaps, to use a phrase to which we’ll return, nontraditional casting.

Most producers back then were men, inflamed by the hip-hooray and ballyhoo of the commercial theatre. Zelda was as far away from the self-promotional solipsism of a David Merrick [1911-2000; some anecdotes the illustrate Maslon’s estimation of Merrick are related in “The Power of the Reviewer—Myth or Fact?: Part 2,” 26 January 2011] as you could be and still use the word “producer” to describe them both. She disdained interviews and couldn’t bear to have her photo plastered in the papers; she’d much rather devote her acute intelligence to a position paper than a press release any day. When a purely commercial opportunity beckoned from a northerly distance, she went screaming in the opposite direction. If, in the 30 years I knew her, both at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage and in New York University’s graduate acting program, she ever hung around for an opening-night party, toasting herself with champagne, I never saw it; I’m sure she spent the evening back up in her office, drafting a memo about not-for-profit funding or creating a burgeoning “to-do” list on a yellow legal pad, late into the night.

Not for her the bright marquees or gilded proscenium arches that enthralled the Broadway Bialystocks. Perhaps that’s why she embraced the idea of an arena theatre so passionately: nowhere to hide; the focus on dialogue and discourse; the rethinking of human interaction in cubic space, not the artificial choreography mandated by a box set. For Zelda, the Arena was, first and forever, an arena: a forum where conflicting ideas could be battled out until the last righteous man or woman remained standing.

[Maslon’s invocation of “the Broadway Bialystocks,” for those who can’t place it, is a reference to Max Bialystock of Bialystock and Bloom. He’s the gonif producer, played in the 2001 Broadway première of the musical The Producers by Nathan Lane (and in the source movie by Zero Mostel), who came up with the idea for Springtime for Hitler and the scam that went with it.]

At the center of those ideas was always the essential instrument for broadcasting passionate thought, the human being—or, in its quotidian representation, the actor. I say this not to denigrate the actor, by any means; I simply mean that Zelda loved people and their problems—their motivations, their contradictions, the “Shadow” that T. S. Eliot [1888-1965; the reference is to lines in “The Hollow Man,” 1925] wrote about that falls between the motion and the act. She was obsessed with the human psyche, and actors were the best way to explore that vast, furrowed landscape. Had she to live her life over again (and it was three normal lifetimes’ worth), she’d have been a psychoanalyst. I think she was always more interested in actors than characters; characters were limited by even the best playwright’s imagination. Human beings, however, were infinite and circumvented neat or easy conclusions.

That may be why Zelda was always drawn to [Anton] Chekhov [1860-1904], [Arthur] Miller [1915-2005], and [Clifford] Odets [1906-63]; they came closest, in her mind, to capturing the elusive conundrums that human beings bring to real life. She always loved Bessie Berger’s line in Awake and Sing!: “We saw a very good movie, with Wallace Beery. He acts like life, very good.” Her taste in playwrights notwithstanding, she was hardly grim or humorless to anyone who knew her; she used to say, “I love a good joke—but it has to be a good joke.” But Zel rarely tried her hand at Molière [1622-73] or George S. Kaufman [1889-1961] and [Moss] Hart [1904-61] or musicals; those she left to the extremely capable hands of associates such as Garland Wright [1946-98; artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1986-95)] or Douglas C. Wager. I suspect that comedies or musicals simply didn’t intrigue her mind as much; by their very definition, they must always conclude—usually in a happy fashion—and Zelda believed that “real life” always held a next chapter.:

Few things made her happier than gossip: She loved it when I, or one of my colleagues, walked into her office and spilled the beans on some post-opening-night tryst or an ongoing affair between classmates that had escaped her attention. These were secret chapters in the lives of people close to her—and the more incongruous the assignation, the better. She always embraced the unexpected as the best possible turn of events.

Her great pleasure was in the unexpected revelation of people. Zelda would kvell her deepest kvells when an acting student made an unforeseen breakthrough in a production [for the goyim: to kvell is ‘to beam with great pride and delight’]. “Wasn’t she amazing?” she’d ask rhetorically (she was big on rhetorical questions), like a career botanist observing the bloom of an exotic flower.

When I first interviewed with her in 1988 for a job at Arena, we attended a visiting production of the Gate Theatre of Dublin’s Juno and the Paycock [1924; Sean O’Casey (1880-1964)], directed by Joe Dowling, on Broadway [John Golden Theatre, 21 June-2 July 1988]. (True to form, Zelda loved it and immediately hired Joe—whom she hadn’t met before—to direct the production at Arena [4 May-10 June 1990].) As we walked to a restaurant on West 44th Street afterward, I nattered on about my meager achievements in theatre, and I could see Zelda’s eyes glaze over; a recitation of my résumé had clearly not provided enough to spark her prodigious curiosity. A polite but semi-opaque film had been drawn between her and my ambition to work at a great theatre. But, as we were seated at the restaurant, I asked her if we could switch seats, as I was (and am) completely deaf in my left ear. “Really?” Her ebony eyes swelled behind her immense designer frames. “Since when?” [This anecdote is told from Dowling’s point of view in “Zelda Fichandler, Valiant Striver in the Arena,” coming up in Part 2 on the 20th.]

The one area that, in my opinion, stymied her was the terrain of multiculturalism. Zelda believed in the flowering of human potential as much as any human being I have ever met. Her efforts in giving opportunities to actors, students, writers, directors, designers, producers of color were second to none during the time in which she had opportunities to wield at her disposal. As early as 1968, she tried to create the first “nontraditional” ensemble in the American theatre. In the 1980s, she took on the challenge with renewed vigor, diversifying the Arena company once again, hiring associate artists such as Tazewell Thompson [director and playwright; b. 1948], commissioning plays by diverse writers with diverse stories, and digging deeply into the ranks of aspiring actors for the graduate program to produce an ensemble that looked like America. Working in tandem with lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes [b. 1946?], she created a fellowship in his name at Arena Stage, an incredible program that has encouraged and developed the next generation of theatre artists of color.

And yet, somehow, I believe Zelda never felt she had done enough in this regard. Ironically, for someone who enjoyed the irresolution of an ambiguous dramatic message, Zelda couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that the diversification of an American art form was—and always will be—a process. Zelda’s can-do resolve wanted to make sure this mission was definitively concluded, but, in this one arena, even Zelda, with her immense willpower, couldn’t knit together the warp and woof of human history. It’s an ongoing experiment, and to my mind Zelda has never gotten enough credit for what she did manage to achieve in diversifying the American theatre.

I heard that Zelda was not well and that she was declining quickly during the last week of July. On the night of July 28, the Thursday before I wrote this piece, I watched Hillary Clinton accept her party’s nomination as president and give a pretty darn good speech (Zel would have had a few notes for her, though). I went to bed and when I awoke early the next morning, I learned that Zel had passed away during the night—about half an hour after Hillary’s exit from the stage in Philadelphia. What timing! Did Zelda, in her serenity, muse to herself: “You know what? I created a major American theatre, the first resident company to send a play to Broadway [The Great White Hope by Howard Sackler (1929-82)], the first to tour the Soviet Union [Our Town and Inherit the Wind to Moscow and Leningrad, 1973], the first to win a Tony Award [special Tony for theatrical excellence¸1976], and the first to provide a platform for hundreds of major artists. I transformed an MFA acting program into one of the country’s finest. Let someone else crack a few ceilings for a change: Here you go, the torch is yours.”

[GWH débuted at Arena on 7 December 1967 and ran through 14 January 1968 under the direction of Edwin Sherin (1930-2017).  The production starred James Earl Jones as Jefferson and Jane Alexander as Eleanor Bachman. 

[The production moved to Broadway’s Alvin Theatre with the original cast largely intact; it ran from 3 October 1968 to 31 January 1970 for 23 previews and 546 regular performances.  Produced by Herman Levin (1907-90), it won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (Sackler); three 1969 Tony Awards: Best Play (Sackler and Levin), Best Actor in a Play (Jones), Best Featured Actress in a Play (Alexander); and two 1969 Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Performance (Alexander and Jones), Outstanding Director (Sherin).

[There’s discussion of this play (and the film adaptation) throughout my tribute to Jones, “In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024),” 22, 25, and 28 September.

[The trip to Russia was between 27 September and 17 October 1973.  Arena traveled with 67 members, including 49 actors; the rest of the company were crew and techies. Thornton Wilder’s (1897-1975) Our Town [1938] and Jerome Lawrence (1915-2004) and Robert E. Lee’s (1918-94) Inherit the Wind (1955) were presented in Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).]

And then, to paraphrase the end of one of Zelda’s beloved Chekhov’s plays: She would rest, she would rest, she would rest. [The play is Uncle Vanya (1897) and the character who’s speaking at the vert end of the last act is Sonya.]

[Laurence Maslon is arts professor and associate chair of New York University’s graduate acting program.

[The second and last part of this tribute to Zelda Fichandler will be posted on Sunday, 20 October.]