Two Theater Personages of Note: James de Jongh (1942-2023)

 

[As I stated in the introduction to the memorial post for Ralph Lee on 9 June, when I read of his death, I wanted to put something on Rick On Theater in his memory, but I didn’t want just to republish his obituary.  A few days later, the report of the passing of playwright James de Jongh appeared, and I decided to post an homage to the two theater artists together.

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

“JAMES DE JONGH, 80, PLAYWRIGHT WHO TOLD STORIES OF SLAVERY, DIES”
by Neil Genzlinger

[Neil Genzlinger’s obituary of playwright and English professor James de Jongh was published in the New York Times on 23 May 2023.  I’m accompanying it on ROT with three reviews of his best-known play, Do Lord Remember Me: first, from the New York Times of the 1978 Off-Off-Broadway world première; second, of the 1982 Off-Broadway première from the New York Amsterdam News; and third, from the Associated Press, also of the Off-Broadway production.] 

His play “Do Lord Remember Me,” constructed from interviews with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, was first staged in 1978 and has been revived multiple times since.

James de Jongh, a scholar and playwright best known for fashioning oral histories left by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s into “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an unflinching picture of the human cost of slavery, died on May 5 in the Bronx. He was 80.

Robert deJongh Jr. [sic], a nephew, said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Professor de Jongh was a longtime member of the English department faculty at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he specialized in African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. But briefly in his early career he had been an actor, and he continued to maintain an interest in the theater. In 1975, together with Carles Cleveland [sometimes identified as “Charles” and by one source as “Carlos”], he wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about a Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.

“I wanted to go in a completely different direction for the second play,” he told the public-access cable channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a recent interview.

He was drawn to a book called “The Negro in Virginia” [Hastings House, 1940], a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people started by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal, and completed in 1940 by the Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, he said, his idea was to construct a fictional story using that material as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, his thinking changed.

“Many of them were quite eloquent, were quite moving, were quite touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of the people themselves,” he said. “In other words, the interviewers had actually recorded word for word, rather than simply summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”

He realized that he could create a play made primarily of the recollections of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented by the words of Nat Turner [b. 1800; hanged, 1831], the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, and by some gospel and work songs. The result was “Do Lord Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater on East Third Street in Manhattan [at the Pilgrim Theater, 30 March-9 April 1978], with a cast that included Frances Foster [1924-97], a leading actress of the day.

“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for The New York Times [5 April 1978; see below]. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”

A revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater in Midtown [24 October 1982-26 February 1983], with a cast that included Ebony Jo-Ann [b. 1945] and Glynn Turman [b. 1947]. In a fresh review [“Stage: Slavery Recalled,” 26 October 1982], Mr. Gussow called it “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”

The play, which has been restaged a number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and a theme of triumphing over adversity. But it is also blunt in its language and its depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the kind of historical realism that is being erased from educational curriculums in some schools and libraries today. In one scene, a woman shares the back story of her facial disfigurement: As a child, she was punished for taking a peppermint stick by having her head placed beneath the rocker of a rocking chair and crushed.

In the interview with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Professor de Jongh said that although he was not a particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort of calling.

“Somehow, I felt I had a task,” he said, “and the task had found me.”

James Laurence de Jongh was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His father, Percy, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a poultry farm and plant store.

Professor de Jongh attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas and then Williams College in Massachusetts, where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a master’s degree from Yale in 1967 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983.

Professor de Jongh continued to act for a time after his days at Williams College, but teaching was his vocation beginning in 1969, when he spent a year as an instructor at Rutgers University. The next year he joined the CUNY faculty; he remained there for decades and added the Graduate Center to his portfolio in 1990. He took emeritus status in 2011.

Professor de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Black theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990 he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination” [Cambridge University Press, 1990]. He also served on the board of the New Federal Theater, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Van Dyke, called him “a quiet, gracious powerhouse.”

Professor de Jongh, who lived in the Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.

The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates at Rikers Island [in the week of 7 November 1982; reported in “‘Do Lord Remember Me’ visits Riker’s” by Lionel Mitchell in the New York Amsterdam News on 20 November] — according to news accounts, it was the first complete professional production staged at the prison [Robin Herman and Laurie Johnston, “NEW YORK Day by Day: Chance for a Playwright And His Young Audience,” New York Times 12 November 1982]. Professor de Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.

“There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told The Times that year [see note above]. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.

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

*  *  *  *
“STAGE: FORMER SLAVES REMEMBER ‘DO LORD’”
by Mel Gussow

 [James de Jongh’s Do Lord Remember Me (the title comes from a 19th-century spiritual) began when the writer was doing research for a play to be set during the Civil War period.  He came across the collected interviews of former Virginia slaves [Virginia Writers’ Project, The Negro in Virginia (Hastings House, 1940)] that had been an oral-history undertaking of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, published as the Slave Narrative Collection in 1936-38.

[Woodie King (b. 1937), the founder and artistic director if the New Federal Theatre (which produced the world première of Do Lord, told Leo Seligsohn, theater reviewer for Long Island’s Newsday (“on theater: The PAF play-picker,” 31 March 1978), at the show’s opening that de Jongh had been inspired by some photographs of slaves that had been found in Boston in 1975 and published. 

[“They aroused DeJongh’s [sic] interest and mine, too,” declared King.  Searching further, de Jongh found the WPA interviews in a Harvard University archive, some in long-out-print books and others unpublished.  As Earl Caldwell quoted the writer and teacher in the New York Daily News (“Some good words from a bad time,” 27 December 1982), he “decided to become in a sense a medium for the voices of these former slaves.  They had in effect done their own playwriting.” 

[De Jongh wrote no dialogue for Do Lord; he used the words of the interviewees verbatim, adding nothing,  He used only people who’d been enslaved in Virginia, in their 80’s and 90’s when they were interviewed (making them young children when the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished nationwide).  They were all residents of  an “old folks home for the colored.”

[De Jongh relied heavily on Weevils in the Wheat (University Press of Virginia, 1976), a book of the unedited transcripts of 15 of the former Virginia slaves edited by Charles L. Perdue, Jr.; Thomas E. Barden; and Robert K. Phillips.  The only words that weren’t from the WPA interviews were those of Nat Turner, the rebellious slave, added for balance from the confessions of Nat Turner.  

[The playwright used slave spirituals and work songs to transition between scenes, but they were songs the elderly men and women spoke of in the recollections.  The Civil War-era title spiritual, “Do, Lord, Remember Me,” is sung from off stage.

[Satisfied with the results of his work, de Jongh decided not to return to the original Civil War drama he’d planned when he began his research.  After its world première, Do Lord was revived by theaters all across the U.S. and beyond.  Perhaps counterintuitively, the play had tremendous appeal to children—perhaps because, though the characters are old folks, what they are remembering is their own childhoods.

[I’m presenting three critical notices of two productions of Do Lord from different publications.  

[The only review I could find of the world première of Do Lord, Off-Off-Broadway at the New Federal Theater was in the New York Times.  Mel Gussow, who would rereview the play when it reopened Off-Broadway at the American Place Theater in 1982, published his notice on 5 April 1978 in “The Living Section” (sec. C).

[The two-hour, intermissionless play’s début ran at the Pilgrim Theater, home to NFT productions at this time, on Thursdays through Sundays, 30 March-9 April; admission was free.

[Directed by Regge Life (sometimes identified as Reggie), with a cast of seven actors (reduced to five when it débuted Off-Broadway), each playing multiple roles, the setting was by C. Richard Mills, the lighting by Sandra Ross, the costumes by Benny Parks.

[NFT revived the show several times, often in different venues, before, during, and after the American Place mounting.  Well into the 2000s, Do Lord was presented by regional theaters, community groups, and schools—high schools and colleges (one of which even increased the cast to 13).  It easily became de Jongh’s best-known and most-produced play.  It’s also been the subject of scores, if not hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, including reviews, and even a few dissertations and theses.]

There is a transcendent moment at the end of “Do Lord Remember Me” when Frances Foster, as a woman of 86; casts her mind back to the days when she was 8 and was treated as human chattel. The recollection is clear-eyed, unmarred by myopia or the withering of time. For almost 80 years the woman’s past has been her daily reminder of a nation’s inhumanity.

The significance of the scene can be partly attributed to the authenticity of the story. As dramatist, James de Jongh has compiled and structured this anthology from interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930’s under the Federal Writers Project. It is also a tribute to the authenticity of Miss Foster’s performance.

In previous roles, this admirable actress has played everything from foxy grandmothers (“The River Niger” [Negro Ensemble Company (Off-Broadway, 1972-73); Broadway (1973)] and “First Breeze of Summer” [NEC; Broadway (1975)]) to the stoical young Lena in Athol Fugard’s “Boesman and Lena” [NEC (1975)] In a single scene in “Do Lord Remember Me,” she straddles a century. Through octogenarian eyes, she communicates the stain of childhood memory and the horror of slavery.

Dramatically, the moment reminds us of Gloria Foster’s [no relation to Frances Foster] Soliloquy at the end of “In White America” [Sheridan Square Playhouse (Off-Broadway, 1963-65)]—a mature actress transformed into a 15-year-old black girl trying to go to school against impossible opposition.

“Do Lord Remember Me,” a Henry Street Settlement production, is not the searing experience of “In White America.” Despite the conviction of these first‐hand impressions, there is a repetitiveness about some of Mr. de Jongh’s selections and there is a slowness in Regge Life’s staging that makes the evening less than completely enthralling. The anthology is interspersed with occasional songs, in which we see the antidote to injustice—the determination and the will for survival. More music would help.

Nevertheless, the play, strongly felt and single‐minded, has an impact—far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents. The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past—when people were a commodity for speculation—linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness. Whether in the kitchen or in the fields, pampered or brutalized, “it was slavery no matter where you are.”

The actors are all inseparable from their material, but special mention should be made of Louise Stubbs, Brel Barbara Clarke, Miss Foster and Joe Attles. Tall, slim and angular, the ageless Mr. Attles, a 50‐year veteran of the American Theater, is himself an icon of indomitability.

“Do Lord Remember Me” will play tomorrow [Thursday, 6 April 1978] through Sunday [9 April] at the Pilgrim Theater, 240 East Third Street [far East Village, between Avenues B and C in Alphabet City].

[There were no other reviews of the first production of de Jongh’s play that I could locate using the Internet.  (I didn’t make a trip up to the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to look through the review scrapbooks and the clipping folder; I may do so at some point, and I’ll make corrections if I find this isn’t accurate.)  The Amsterdam News ran an announcement of the upcoming production on 1 April 1978 (“Ex-slaves speak in new play”), but didn’t review the play until the American Place production opened in 1982 (see below).]

*  *  *  *
“JAMES DEJONGH’S ‘DO LORD REMEMBER ME’”
by Lionel Mitchell
 

[The review by Lionel Mitchell, the New York Amsterdam News’ longtime theater reviewer, of the Off-Broadway première of Do Lord was published on 30 October 1982.  (The Amsterdam News is one of the oldest newspapers in the United States aimed at an African-American readership.)  The show ran at the American Place Theater, 111 W. 46th Street in the Theatre District, from 24 October 1982 to 26 February 1983.]

James DeJongh [sic] was looking through some slave narratives and came across the materials that form his newest work at American Place Theatre, “Do Lord Remember Me.” It’s all authentic stuff with nothing added or taken away. I found it difficult to keep a dry eye — that’s how moving it was.

Perhaps W.E.B. Du Bois [1868-1963], in his own words, conveys the mood of this period in his “Black Reconstruction in America” [1935; latest edition: Black Reconstruction (Library of America, 2021)]. He has a chapter called “The Coming Of The Lord,” the eve of Emancipation, the great Union advance into the South (1864-65): “There was a joy in the South. It rose like perfume — like a prayer. Men stood quivering. Slim dark girls, wild and beautiful with wrinkled hair, wept silently; young women, Black, tawney, white and golden, lifte[d] shivering hands, and old and broken mothers, black and gray, raised great voices and shouted to God across fields, and up to the rocks and the mountains.”

That is the mood which the play conjures once again. Something about that material is absolutely irresistible. It makes one feel pure, justified, confirmed, affirmed, as in the old spiritual: ‘Done Got Ova AT [sic] Last!”

Blending past and present

The long millennium of the African Diaspora opens up. The past and present re-link. One dances on the streets of the Rebel capital as Grant and Sheridan ride up through the Shenandoah and with Black troops at their head, break into Richmond [3 April 1865].

One is there as Lincoln, a few days later, steams down to the broken Confederate capital to walk through the streets unguarded by anyone except the joyous ex-slaves [4 April 1865].

But more than that, more than seeing history through the eyes of the slaves, that cast, consisting of dynamos Frances Foster, Ebony Jo-Ann Pinckney, Glynn Turman, Lou Myers, and the indomitable Charles H. Patterson, paints the agony with wonder and exuberance. One experiences the personal tragedies, triumphs, the human victories over slavery. I kept recalling my German-Jewish professor of history, himself a survivor of the Lotz Ghetto [sic; Łódź (or Lodz) Ghetto in Poland, second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe] where he had weathered the Final Solution, exclaiming before a predominantly red-neck history class: “In one century, the Negroes have outstripped your slave system and they are sitting beside you in this classroom. Who knows what will happen, what relation they will bear to you in another century?”

I never failed to score in the upper 90’s in that class! This play is like that — every Black man and woman ought to make it a holy obligation to see it. In addition, all people in this country ought to see it.  “Do Lord Remember Me”, [sic] as I pointed out in the discussion last Sunday at the American Place Theatre [opening night, 24 October 1982], rediscovers perhaps the best lost literature of the Civil War period. It is material that even the great Edmund Wilson [writer, literary critic, journalist, and dramatist; 1895-1972] overlooked in his study of Civil War literature, “Patriotic Gore” [1962].

Reggie Life gets authenticity

Reggie [sic] Life has the cast doing some very authentic foot-stomping slave spirituals and Ebony Jo-Ann takes the lead in these. Madame Frances Foster is far the most powerful dramatic Black actress on the scene in years.

Glynn Turman both acts and dances to a fare-thee-well and I suspect he choreographed some of the movements he does as well.

That is a chromo [a color lithograph] for directing, for visual statement. Charles Patterson deserves applause for his narration — through a street man’s eyes. Absolutely superb!

[The cast, still under the direction of Regge Life, was largely the same (minus two actors) at the American Place as at the Pilgrim Theater 4½ years before.  The Off-Broadway set was designed by Julie Taymor (soon to be well known in her own right as a director), the lighting by Sandra L. Ross (who lit the Off-Off-Broadway début), and the costumes by Judy Dearing.

[Lionel H. (for Hampton—his father was a jazz musician in New Orleans) Mitchell was a journalist, poet, novelist, memoirist, and playwright, who wrote for the East Village Other in the 1960s, where some of his poetry was also published occasionally, and reviewed theater for the New York Amsterdam News.  He was born in 1942 in a small town in Louisiana before coming to New York City and settling in the East Village, where he was a fixture until his death in 1984 from an AIDS-related illness.  His one known published book was an autobiographical novel, Traveling Light (Seaview Books, 1980).] 

*  *  *  *
“NEW PLAY OFFERS AN EVENING OF ORAL HISTORY OF THE SLAVERY ERA”
By Mary Campbell, Associated Press

[Neither Mel Gussow’s notice for the Off-Off-Broadway world première, nor Lionel Mitchell’s of the Off-Broadway début (both above) were particularly detailed about the production, but I wanted to get them on record.  I’ve selected one more review, the Associated Press notice of the American Place mounting published in the Bridgewater, New Jersey, Courier-News of 30 October 1982, for its description of the play and performance.]

new york – James de Jongh, who wrote “Do Lord Remember Me,” playing off-Broadway at the American Place Theater, has taken oral American history – of slavery – and made an engrossing evening of theater out of it.

The oral history was recorded in the 1930s. Among the New Deal jobs created to give people something to get paid for doing was the job of asking former slaves what slavery had been like. Most still alive in the 1930s were infants or children during slavery.

But they had memories and memories of stories told to them. De Jongh, who teaches at the City College of New York, has given this theatrical form. A fine cast of five – four of them acting like old people – string the anecdotes together and act them out.

The tone of it all is interest in America’s past, not an incitement to racial hatred or guilt.

Many of the anecdotes are brief. Few detail atrocities. Those that do are vivid enough to be memorable.

One striking thing is how often one hears of a lively individual spirit that slavery did not quench or sour. Sukey, whose master tries to undress her while she’s boiling lye soap, pushes his backside into a pot of the stuff. When he sells her and hands pry open her mouth to look at her teeth, she still has something saucy to say. Uncle Jackson, left on guard in slave quarters while the men hold a meeting in the woods, leads the suspicious master a chase, outsmarting him.

“Do Lord Remember Me” tells of things from slavery that one may know, like children being sold and the parents never seeing them again and marriage by jumping over a broomstick. And it tells of things that one may not know, like slave church services only allowed when a white preacher is present and slaves who escape from the fields into the woods, not forever, and are allowed back.

De Jongh found the interviews stored in Smithsonian Institution archives. He used them verbatim and he used only those with slaves who’d lived in Virginia.

There is one section in which Glynn Turman speaks as Nat Turner. This gives variety – he thought he was a prophet. But the play probably would be better without it. It’s a very jarring note to have a man hanged in the 1800s among those reminiscing in the 1930s.

[A number of other review-writers expressed this same sense of displacement.

[Nat Turner (1800-31) was an enslaved African-American preacher who organized and led a rebellion of enslaved and free black people in Southampton County, Virginia (21-23 August 1831).  The rebellion was quickly suppressed, but Turner went into hiding and wasn’t captured until 31 October and imprisoned.

[He was tried for rebellion and insurrection on 5 November, found guilty, and hanged at 31 on 11 November.  The rebellious African Americans killed 55-65 white Virginians, and after the revolt was suppressed, the local militia and frightened mobs killed up to 120 blacks, most uninvolved with the rebellion. 

[In 1967, William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, a popular novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968.]

Lou Meyers, bald, Charles H. Patterson, gray, Ebony Jo-Ann and Frances Foster are the four old folks, going stiffly up and down porch steps and telling almost all the stories. They break the two hours without intermission into sections with occasional hymns. Reggie [sic] Life directed. The show opened last Sunday.

[Turman, the fifth cast member, plays various manifestations of The Slave, who, de Jongh said, “gets called into being” by the recollections of the four older characters. In Turman’s words in an interview with Marie Moore in the Amsterdam News (“Glynn Turman returns in ‘Do Lord Remember,’” 23 October 1982), the role is “sort of like the thread that is used to weave through the piece.” He’s “the spirit that either starts these people to talk or [is] conjured up as a result of their conversation.”]

In case one feels “Do Lord Remember Me” is too soft or has too much humor, it ends with Foster, 86 years later, telling of being a girl house slave, almost starved.  She stole a piece of candy and the mistress held her face down under her rockingchair’s [sic] rocker so she could beat her.  Facial bones were crushed on one side, her eye was permanently reddened and she was never again able to chew.

[Back in 1985, when I was a grad student at NYU, I took a production dramaturgy class that focused on stage adaptation of non-dramatic material, a dramaturg’s frequent assignment.  The instructor was Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, who’d been literary manager at the American Place Theater before taking the Performance Studies teaching gig.  She had served as a dramaturg on APT’s 1982 presentation of Do Lord Remember Me.

[Needless to say, Do Lord was one of Cynthia’s prime examples of a successful adaptation.  In February, James de Jongh was Cynthia’s guest in the class.  The discussion was principally focused on de Jongh’s work on the script (which was where a dramaturg’s efforts would have been directed).  Here’s a transcription of my notes (lightly edited for readability) from that sessions:

De Jongh:  A playwright’s work is invisible.  S/he doesn’t write just dialogue – writes behavior, creates scenes.  Plays that read well don’t necessarily play well.

With Do Lord, de Jongh wrote no dialogue – all language was from the interviews.  He created the structure of the play.  The arrangement of the scenes shapes the pay.  He found his ending early – knew where he was going.  Had to decide how to get there.  Assembled material into “categories” – but was it a scene?  Did it have an action?

Had to create a through-line – created an outside character (“The Slave”).  Looked for pieces that “felt like present action.”  Occasionally had to “distort” pieces to make it feel like present action.  (Idea derived from a distorted memory of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.)

De Jongh had 3 structures operating in Do Lord – string of beads (categories of slave memories), through-line (from The Slave), and action peaks (builds and climaxes of action).

[That last comment, about the unifying and cohesive structures evident in Do Lord, was a later remark by Cynthia, made after the guest session with de Jongh.  (I said Do Lord was a frequent touchstone in the class for a successful adaptation.)  I don’t know if the playwright created those structures intentionally, with forethought, or if they came organically from his intuition.

[I suspect that, whether these structure were intuitive or purposeful, they were something that Cynthia picked up on independently—that is, de Jongh didn’t point them out to her—either while helping the writer develop the script or from a post-mortem analysis to determine why Do Lord worked on stage. 

[If I apply the analytical method I learned from Michael Kirby in his Theatrical Structure class (see my two-part post on 15 and 18 February 2011), I can identify several more structural devices at work.  Two come to mind immediately: the unit setting, the same all through the performances (Continuity Structure), functions as a unifying device; the small cast with the same five (usually) actors throughout the show is a variation on Character Structure as a small ensemble of actors forms a constant, unifying presence.]

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was not an instant success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Puppetry was also an early interest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*  *  *  *
“HISTORY OF THE PARADE” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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