[I say in the introduction
to “Zelda Fichandler (1924-2016), Part 1” (17 October 2024) that Arena Stage
was an important factor in my growing up in D.C.—it was the only professional
alternative to the Broadway-adjunct National Theatre between 1950 (when Arena
opened) and 1971, when the Kennedy Center opened (followed by the start of the
little Off-Broadway-type companies in the ’80s)—so my family went a lot when I
was old enough to see “real” theater (i.e., not “kiddie” shows or Gilbert and
Sullivan).
[I never met Zelda Fichandler,
although she was a large presence in Washington’s cultural landscape, but Arena
had a special place in my consciousness as I was becoming a theater-lover. (I address this phenomenon in “A Broadway
Baby,” 22 September 2010.) It’s always
been my benchmark for good theater, even after I began to see shows at other
top companies around the country (including the Actors Theatre of Louisville,
which I first attended when I was at Fort Knox in the army in 1969/70;
Houston’s Alley Theatre; The Goodman Theatre and Steppenwolf Theatre Company in
Chicago, the latter of which I saw at Washington’s Kennedy Center; The Guthrie
Theatre in Minneapolis; and a passel of illustrious European troupes, courtesy
of the Kennedy Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Lincoln Center
Festival, including Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, the United Kingdom’s Royal National
Theatre, and Germany’s Berliner Ensemble).
[Among the reasons I held
Arena in such esteem—influenced, of course, by its being my “hometown theater”
and D.C. having so few other outlets for theater at the time—was the shows I
saw there that were special: The Great
White Hope, Indians, Moonchildren, a striking Arturo Ui
directed by Carl Weber, Georg Büchner's Leonce and Lena directed by
Liviu Ciulei, and Elie Wiesel’s Zalmen, or the Madness of God directed
by Alan Schneider (which I didn't see until it came to Broadway with David
Margulies, who was one of my teachers in grad school at the time, in the cast).
[I briefly describe the
state of theater in Washington around the time that Arena opened in “Washington’s
Arena Stage: Under Construction,” 26 November 2011, and "‘Stages in DC’
(Summer 1985),” 25 December 2011. “Stages
in DC” was written just at the time when the city was emerging as a real
theater town, and “Washington’s Arena Stage,” which focuses on the company’s opening
in 2010 of its new facility, the Mead Center for American Theatre, also includes
a little background on Arena.]
“ZELDA FICHANDLER,
VALIANT STRIVER IN THE ARENA”
by Various Authors
[American Theatre compiled these reminiscences by a
number of people who were colleagues of Zelda Fichandler, studied at NYU during
her tenure, or were friends of hers, and posted them as a tribute to her legacy
on the AT website on 5 August 2016, a week after her death; the memorial didn’t run in
the print edition of the magazine.
[The magazine published a
formal obituary of Fichandler by Laurence Maslon in the issue of October 2016,
as well as a personal note of tribute by AT editor Rob Weinert-Kendt, both of which are included in Part 1 of
this post. (A shortened version of Maslon’s
obituary appears below as the first of this collection of remembrances.)]
The dynamo who led Arena Stage and NYU Tisch’s acting
program was acutely interested in human beings, and what theatre could reveal
about them.
Zelda
Fichandler, cofounding artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. [1950-91],
died last week [29 July 2016] at the age of 91. Inarguably one of the pioneers
and founding mothers of the American resident theatre movement, Fichandler, in
addition to running Arena for four decades, headed [. . .] NYU’s Graduate
Acting program in the 1990s [1984-2009] and served as artistic director of the
Acting Company [1991-94] after leaving [Arena]. We asked colleagues,
collaborators, and students for their thoughts about Fichandler’s unique
contribution and legacy. –Ed.
It Was Always Personal
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 [producer; 1911-2000] as you
could be and still use the word “producer” to describe them both [some
anecdotes that illustrate Maslon’s estimation of Merrick are related in “The
Power of the Reviewer—Myth or Fact?: Part 2,” 26 January 2011]. 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 Arena Stage and at NYU’s [New York
University] 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 pad of yellow legal paper, 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.
[The “Broadway Bialystocks,”
for those who can’t place Maslon’s invocation, 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 which 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! [Odets, 1935; staged at Arena by Fichandler in 2006; see “Awake
and Sing!, et al.,” 3 April 2017]: “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] &
[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 [b. 1949?;
Wager would succeed Fichandler as artistic director of Arena (1991-98)]. 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 Yiddish for ‘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 [Dublin’s Gate] Theater’s Juno
and the Paycock [1924; Sean O’Casey (1880-1964)], directed by Joe Dowling [Irish-born;
b. 1948], 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 with the Arena company [4 May-10 June 1990].) As we
walked to a restaurant on West 44th Street afterwards, I
nattered on about my meager achievements in the 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 below.]
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
will power, couldn’t knit together the warp and woof of human history. It’s an
ongoing experiment, and to my mind Zelda has never been given 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 Thursday night [28 July 2016 (at the
Democratic National Convention)], 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 (now the Neil Simon) 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 very end of the last
act is Sonya.]
Laurence Maslon [b. 1959], arts professor and associate chair of NYU’s
Graduate Acting Program
A Revolution, Lived Every Moment
Zelda Fichandler was, among so many things, a world-class quoter. Her
brilliant, inspirational speeches, her capacious essays, even her letters to
government officials and funders, draw quotations from poets, philosophers,
physical and social scientists, novelists, lots of Russians, and, of course,
playwrights. She wrote and spoke as a reader, because Zelda was
forever reading the world, forever studying exactly what it means to be human.
[Fichandler’s affinity for
things Russian (e.g.: plays of Chekhov, Russian literature, attraction to
Russian theater artists such as Konstantin Stanislavsky and Yuri Lyubimov)
probably stems from the fact that her father, Harry Diamond (1900-48), was an
immigrant (in 1908) from Russia. (Her mother, the former Ida Epstein (1901?-70),
was a Lithuanian immigrant.) Fichandler was an undergraduate at Cornell
University (1941-45), where she studied Russian (and was introduced to the
works of Chekhov).]
She often quoted this Burmese saying: ”The fish dwell
in the depths of the water, and the eagles in the sides of heaven; the one,
though high, may be reached with the arrow, and the other, though deep, with
the hook; but the heart of man at a foot’s distance cannot be known.” This
unknowable “foot’s distance” between one heart and another was, I believe,
Zelda’s life’s work. She never lost track of it. In a world of mission drift
and purpose distraction, Zelda’s genius was precisely her ability to keep her
eyes trained on this infinitely small space, on what was most
important.
Yes, the nonprofit art theatre would have grown differently
(if it grew at all) had Zelda not shown us the way to realize Margo Jones’s
dream of a regional-resident-repertory movement. Yes, the path of new
plays into New York might have taken many more years to forge
had it not been for Arena’s The Great White Hope in
1968. The acting company ideal—the body and soul of our field’s founding
impulse—might have died aborning had she not zealously kept it alive for almost
four decades. Yes, we would have needed someone else to integrate theatre in
the nation’s capital; to fight for diversity at every level of a major
institutional theatre; to inspire a generation of American actors (as she did
leading NYU’s graduate acting program); to imagine the theatre field as a
field, articulate its values, and then question, question, question the very
revolution she incited. It may be too much to say that without Zelda the
nonprofit theatre community wouldn’t be here; it’s possible, though, that
without her leadership we wouldn’t know what we are here for.
[Margo Jones (1911-55) founded
Theatre ’47 (1947-55) in Dallas, Texas. It was the first professional regional
company in the United States, and launched the American regional theater
movement and introduced theater-in-the-round, also called arena staging, to the
country through her book, Theatre-in-the-Round (McGraw-Hill Book Co.,
1951).]
I have spent 35 years working in and mapping this
movement she created, and, like so many people she influenced, I can’t say for
sure whether she created me or just drafted me as an officer in her evangelical
army. Have I adopted her sentence structure? Aped her turn of mind? What would
my principles have been had I never crossed her path? The time we shared in
recent years felt especially intimate. She had enlisted me to help her with a
book of her collected speeches and essays, long in the works for Theatre
Communications Group [The Long Revolution:
Sixty Years on the Frontlines of a New American Theater, 2024; see Part 1].
Later, facing surgery with a difficult period of recovery (she ultimately opted
out of the procedure), she asked for my promise to complete the work she feared
she’d leave unfinished. It was the easiest promise of my life. For several
years then, including from across the country, from D.C. to Seattle [London
was on the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle from 2014 to 2018],
we were surrounded by her extensive writing, reading Zelda together—the
world according to Zelda. And what a vast, complex, humane world it is!
Art is our mostly doomed attempt to describe life even as we live it. (Here
I imagine Zelda, who famously brought Our Town to Russia [see
above], quoting Thornton Wilder’s Emily: ”Oh, Earth, you’re too wonderful
for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they
live it?—every, every minute?”) I believe that Zelda—as founder, director,
producer, teacher, writer, rabbi—sought to do just that: fully realize life
while she lived it.
In her final years, she struggled to make sense of the “long
revolution” she started. Not content to rest on her accomplishments, Zelda
couldn’t stop rewriting. She refused to quote herself. She had to
know what was happening now, what was most important now.
The work was never done. She could never know enough, could never suspend her
ceaseless commitment to realize the unknowable.
Todd London, [former] executive director/professor at University of
Washington School of Drama, who [. . .] complete[d] Fichandler’s memoirs[;
currently Director of The Legacy Playwrights Initiative for the Dramatists
Guild Foundation and a member of the Bridge Executive Ensemble of the Network
of Ensemble Theaters]
The Encouraging Embrace
I came to Arena Stage in 1974 as an intern fresh out of
Boston University with my MFA in directing, for a 10-week period to assist Alan
Schneider on the world premiere of Elie Wiesel’s play [Zalmen or] The
Madness of God [3 May-9 June 1974; directed by Alan Schneider]. Those
10 weeks turned into 25 consecutive years.
Our world has lost a blessed, powerful, tenacious, inspired
visionary.
Zelda gave [. . .] so many of us the chance to live and grow
within the encouraging embrace of an amazing creative community of
possibility. She worked from a deeply feminine understanding of the
importance of allowing people working at every level of the organization
to feel they could speak up and contribute, but you always knew she held the
reins; you were working for an incredibly strong, willful,
prodigiously gifted visionary leader.
As I came to know her more personally, I was surprised to
discover that she was in certain respects quite shy and somewhat fearful
of speaking in public. As a result, she never ever allowed herself to
speak extemporaneously; she always prepared her remarks. And the careful
thought she devoted to that exercise yielded some of the most amazingly
effective, powerfully insightful, and inspiring public addresses, and a
body of writing on theatre and its place in the world—theatre as an instrument
of civilization no less important to the life of a community than a
church, a major library, a museum, or a university.
Though she was inarguably a formidably gifted stage
director, directing was never her first love. She derived far more
personal satisfaction from shaping the image and the artistic culture of the
company and defining its place in society, forever trying to solve
the riddle of how best to consummate the artist-to-audience relationship, and
of how theatre becomes indispensably important to the daily life of
the community.
Arena’s ensemble of resident artists and theatre
practitioners thrived within a challenging and rigorous culture of
artistic expression fueled by passion and purpose—a collaborative collective of
“storytellers” making theatre together, all imbued with her underlying
humanistic sense of promulgating hope for the human condition. She touched
and opened so many hearts and souls though her work, transforming the
lives of artists and audiences alike, and indeed, theatre in America for all
posterity.
Zelda defied and triumphed over the crass capitalistic
assumption that the professional resident theatre movement she championed
was easily dismissed as merely a commercial enterprise that failed to
make a profit. She elevated the stature of the art form by
prioritizing the centrality of the artist over the necessities of commerce. She
pioneered a way to encourage the community to join her in
recalibrating the precarious balance between fiscal stability and the
pursuit of artistic excellence, reaping priceless profits, not in
dollars and cents, but in the hearts and minds of audiences and artists.
I was incredibly fortunate to be selected as her successor
following her decision to step down and focus the full force of her
creative energies on leading NYU’s Tisch Graduate Acting program. I was
both thrilled and incredibly intimidated by the prospect of even
attempting to fill her shoes. I remember sharing a moment of self-doubt
with her as to whether she was really in fact okay ”passing the torch”
to me. She thought for a moment—and forgive me for
paraphrasing—she said not to worry: “Maybe you can’t pass the
torch; you can only pass the fire.” So she did.
Douglas C. Wager [b. 1949?], [professor]
of Theater, Film, and Media Arts at Temple University
Wise and Questioning
Zelda was a beacon for me. When I completed my six-month
active duty in 1957, I was anxious to start my career in the theatre
in New York, of course. But something made me investigate what seemed to
be a small awakening of theatres in cities around the country. I chose to
write to Zelda at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., followed by inquiries to
Nina Vance [1914-80; launched the Alley Theatre in Houston, 1947]
in Houston, Jules Irving [1925-79]/Herb Blau [1926-2013] in San Francisco
[co-founders of the Actor’s Workshop, San Francisco (1952-65)], and K. Elmo
Lowe [1899-1971] at the Cleveland Play House [artistic director, 1958-69]]—about
five or six in all. The rest replied with a form letter stating that no jobs
were available, but Zelda’s answer was personal. Although no jobs were
available with her either, she was positive in her encouragement to
explore, reach out, and take chances.
We became good friends. She was always available, even
after she took on the challenge of chair of the graduate acting
and directing program of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York
University. She was wise and questioning; she listened, and her responses
to my questions were always enlightened and provocative. She was truthful
and insightful and challenging.
Zelda was a pioneer and an artist of deep
resources. She was special to my life and I am grateful for
her wisdom and her caring. We were good friends, but she was much more
than that to me: inspirational and brave.
Gordon Davidson [1933-2010], founding artistic director, Center
Theatre Group [1967-2005]
Truth in Contention
Copernicus [mathematician and astronomer; 1473-1543] tells
us: ”At rest, in the middle of everything, is the sun.” For me, it’s Zelda
who will always hold that place.
Above all else, I think she valued ideas, and her nurturing radiance was
her colossal intellect. When I met her, I was 30 and I believed
that my quest, my purpose, was to discover the absolute truth of human
existence—that I must uncover some coherent, unalterable kernel that would
envelop all the contradictions of human experience. That there was a perfect,
unshakable, immovable idea at the center of it all.
It was Zelda who made me understand that I was misguided in
believing that the essence of human experience was a pure, indivisible, fixed
thing. She taught me that any truthful perception of life would be contained in
the creation of ideas, not in a simple thought or a pure feeling or an
unchanging belief. An idea was something achieved, or created, by wrestling
with experience and learning and was crafted, ever so carefully, over time.
Revising, editing, deleting, inserting until it took its true shape. It must
first and foremost contain active conflict, contradiction; it must hold
opposite, contradictory forces, locked in a never-ending balancing act. She
made me see the truth of the world in its contradictions, to be in love with
paradox, to be suspicious of those who have answers, and to value those who
eternally seek the ultimate truth in questions.
Though her intellect was vast and wide-ranging, it landed,
ultimately and inevitably, on theatre. The essence of drama—the conflict of
opposing forces or ideas—was how her mind naturally perceived human experience.
Where else could she have gone but theatre? Her method of thinking was
theatrical. It didn’t happen in solitary mediation; it was deliberation by
dialogue. By engaging with other human souls, she found her opinions, her
poetry of ideas. She tested her hypotheses on others, she collected her evidence
by communicating with people. Of course she loved actors: They are poets who
use their bodies and minds to convey ideas and imagery. Their practice of
ritual reenactment perfectly matched her own instinctive means of grasping and
then communicating the perception of living.
I think her greatest accomplishment might well be her
articulation of the importance of the creation of spaces for artists and
audiences to meet. Her life’s work of creating, inhabiting, and sustaining
vibrant artistic institutions was in itself a distinct artistic practice, as
significant as the practice of acting, writing, directing or designing. She
made me understand that every last detail of an audience member’s experience of
a space is an artistic question. To her, from the very first impression of a
production that a potential audience member received to the parking of their
car, from the experience of picking up a ticket to the ambience of the
bathrooms—these were all vital concerns of the artistic director. And not in
the customer-service sense, but in how these experiences impact the
expectations and mood of the audience member as they sit down in their seat to
experience the work of the artists at hand.
Ultimately she believed that human relationships based on true,
deep listening to each other were not only the building blocks for creating
art, but are the essence of all human endeavor. She believed that we only find
the light and the truth in each other.
It’s hard to accept that my own personal sun, my Zelda, has
set with some ultimate finality. I will have to believe that some of her
essence radiates on still, and enlightens the dark world, in and by the many,
many of us who were shaped by her, who must live on now without her.
James Nicola [b. 1950], artistic director, New York Theater Workshop [1988-2022]
An Illuminating Force
I think continually of those
who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was what their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from the head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
—Stephen Spender [British;1909-95; “The Truly Great” (1928)]
It is very clear: I am a lucky so-and-so. I was born under a most
propitious star. The planets were all brilliantly aligned. Jupiter was ablaze
somewhere in the midheavens, rising in my tenth house of great expectations, as
a comet’s tail passed over conjunct or trined or sextiled with
mercury, making me a student for life, interminably conscious of receiving
and filtering good news and glad tidings—birthed in double Gemini, with a new
moon in Capricorn. This cosmic milky way formation would lead me on a life path
journey that would connect me, in the still formative period of my life, to she
who would shape mist into substance: Zelda Fichandler.
[In astrology, trined
denotes two celestial bodies 120° apart (1/3
of a circle). Sextiled denotes two celestial bodies separated by 60° (1/6
of a circle).]
Zelda was a dear friend, mentor and mother figure. She
brought me to Arena Stage in 1988. It changed my life. We wrote
letters/cards/notes to each other—even though sometimes in the same building,
on the same floor—for almost 30 years. We spoke by phone, endlessly or in short
spurts on a wild variety of topics, several times a month, and in the last
years, two to three times a week. She provided me with a reading list of plays
and authors I must want to know. She entertained me with memorized lyrics of standards
from the 1930s and ’40s. She read drafts of my plays, giving me incisive,
perceptive, and cogent notes. She dramaturged all my productions while near at
Arena Stage, from NYU or the Acting Company, and from as far as Cape Town
and Tokyo. Despite a horrific argument many years ago over my wanting to work
independently elsewhere and her insisting I stay within the company as an
associate, we became deep close friends. I will love and miss her forever.
Zelda: complex, tough, tender, inspiring, imaginative,
inventive, erudite, difficult, unique, caring, loving, political, brilliant,
brave, bold, tenacious, remarkable, renegade, witty, relentless, stylish,
classy, resilient, empathetic, fallible, uncompromising, vulnerable, visionary,
vain, genius, magician, phoenix, soulful, radiant, transcendent, splendid.
And now the planets have clashed and the whole world has
shifted. Out of a chaotic sky and the times teeming with lightning; leaning in
sorrow, in the saddened aftermath of your passing, artists are left dashed,
shocked and shivering, fending for ourselves, reaching for the eternal dream
and the transitory light you left us. How are we to catch our breath again?
We receive you and with free
sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not—we love you—there’s perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
—Walt Whitman [1819-92;
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (published under the title “Sun-Down Poem” in 1856,
then under its final title in 1860)]
Tazewell Thompson [b. 1948], playwright/director, former artistic director
of Westport Country Playhouse [2006-07] and Syracuse Stage [1992-95]
Words Well Chosen
I first met Zelda in 1985 when I joined the board of Arena Stage. We worked
together for many years at Arena, then at the Acting Company, and then on the
board of Theatre Communications Group. After she moved to New York to chair the
graduate acting program at NYU, our professional friendship gradually evolved
into a more personal friendship, nourished over many dinners where we talked
about art, but also about love and marriage and the many complexities of human
behavior that we experienced as women. We were both very private people, so it
was a friendship that grew slowly as we built trust and a shared compassion for
our own lives, as well as the lives of others.
As I got to know Zelda, I never ceased to be amazed at the
integrity of her mind and spirit. In a field that feeds on words, she never
used words carelessly. Every time she wrote a new paper or speech or even
started exploring new ideas, her thinking was original. She started fresh,
building on her past thoughts but never rehashing them. Her vision was wide,
but she always spoke to the personal, particularly to the artists she
cherished. For her, the artists and the art were one.
In the past few years, as her health declined, we talked on
the phone or I visited when I was in Washington. We still talked about art. She
was putting her papers together in book form [this is undoubtedly The Long Revolution] and was reaching to
understand the rapid changes in the field today. She read everything and was
synthesizing it into her own long view of the field. She was not able to finish
this work before she became so ill. But it was always on her mind, and she never
lost her curiosity or passion for the theatre.
Zelda revolutionized the field of theatre and led it forward
for many decades as our most articulate spokesperson. But she also touched
peoples’ lives in very personal ways, inspiring students, sustaining
artists, and engaging audiences. We have all been deeply enriched by her. I
will miss her dearly as a mentor and a friend.
[Jaan Whitehead also wrote “Art
Will Out” for American Theatre. It’s posted on ROT as “‘Art Will
Out,’ Part 1,” 3 August 2024.]
Jaan Whitehead, trustee emeritus and
former board chair of SITI Company
Mayor of Our Theatre Capital
I got my book back from Zelda this week at her shiva [in Judaism, a
period of seven days’ formal mourning for the dead]. She left it waiting for me
at the top of a pile in her study. It was a book that meant a lot to us both: Arthur
Miller’s [1915-2005] autobiography, Timebends [Grove/Atlantic, 1987].
She asked me for it about four years ago, as she wanted to study it for
her own memoir—to understand its associative structure, hurtling from memory to
memory in psychoanalytic unity, threaded together by the writer’s intention to
figure himself out, almost never in chronological order. It appealed to her in
the profoundest of ways—to be psychologically true; to seek structural
innovation—because the essential business of reflecting the world, her
world, from the inside and out, required a form to fit the largeness of
the vision.
Such was Zelda’s probing intention throughout her
life: to question and to build, at one and the same time, a framework for
celebrating and interrogating the meaning of life as rendered by artists; to
build a civic center for world drama that might also be called a home,
though it was much less “homey” than it was a capital, a cradle of
theatrical primacy, where the actor, the writer, the director, all shared power
in different ways, like a government—a little federal municipality of the arts.
And Zelda was its president/mayor/presiding officer for half a century.
Around the apartment on Calvert Street yesterday were
articles and cover stories of note about Zelda. The first that caught my
eye was a major interview with her in American Theatre magazine
from March of 1991, a month after the
closing of Born Guilty [20 January-3 March 1991], which she
directed after a two-year development process—the only world premiere of an
American play she would ever direct in her lifetime. I was
the playwright. And as I’ve written before, we grew closer after the project’s
workshop and premiere than we were beforehand or during the crucible of its
launching (it’s often the other way around—relationships with directors can
fade as everyone moves on). But she proved to be a mentor later rather than
sooner, as I became a producer; her words grew wiser and more profuse as I
matured in my ambitions. She only seemed to warm to those ambitions, and to me,
more and more, and more and more personally in the writing that she shared.
And over these last years, as she continued to battle
through pain and write profoundly, and associatively, in an often unwieldy way,
we both kept wondering when I would get my book back; she would promise to
bring it to the theatre, but then not be able to make it. I didn’t have the
heart to ask for it on my last visit, with Howard Shalwitz [b. 1952?; co-founder
of Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 1980], toward the very end.
But three weeks later, we were back, and it was waiting there, at the top of
the pile, my name inside the front cover, her primacy as an architect of the
American theatre movement—and as a frequent partner to our other departed giant
mentor, Arthur Miller—very much secure. All was in its place: her place in
our lives, and hopefully, ours in hers. She knew she was loved, and she knew
what she had achieved. What would last? Whither our direction? These were the
continuing questions she would force us to think about for the rest of our
lives.
[Ari Roth was the subject of a
post on this blog concerning freedom of expression: “The First Amendment &
The Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015.]
Ari Roth [b. 1961], [founder and former] artistic director, Mosaic
Theater Company [2014-2020]
The Mother of Us All
Zelda Fichandler is the mother of us all in the American theatre. It
was her thinking as a seminal artist and architect of the not-for-profit
resident theater that imagined resident theatres creating brilliant theatre in
our own communities—a revolutionary idea. Her thinking and her writing have
forged the way we were created and the resident nature of our movement. She is
irreplaceable, but lives on in every single not-for-profit theatre in
America—now more than 1,500 strong. Her legacy stretches from coast
to coast.
Arthur Miller wrote in the preface to Arena’s 40th
anniversary keepsake book (The Arena Adventure[: The First 40 Years by Laurence Maslon (Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1990)]) that Arena had the
makings of a national theatre for the U.S. Without Zelda and Margo Jones and
Nina Vance, there would not be this robust American theatre landscape. It
was a vision like Zelda’s that could lead to a time where my vision at Arena
for American work can thrive. She had a remarkable openness to new ideas,
and most of all to always, always support the artist.”
Molly Smith, [former] artistic director, Arena Stage [1998-2023]
Persistence of Vision
A week after the opening of my production of Juno
and the Paycock at Broadway’s Golden Theatre in June 1988, the phone
rang in my Dublin office. “This is Zelda Fichandler and I have just seen your
production, and I want you to direct it for our company at Arena Stage.” While
flattered that she might consider me for such a task, I immediately refused,
arguing that I couldn’t possibly recreate such an Irish production with
American actors. Zelda never knew how to take no for an answer. For some weeks
after that, she called regularly, and finally I agreed to visit Arena Stage
with our set designer, Frank Hallinan Flood.
As soon as we entered that magical space, we knew that we
had to create the production there [4 May-10 June 1990]. The Arena company, led
by Tana Hicken [b. 1944] and Halo Wines [1939-2021], were magnificent, and I
had the pleasure of working closely with Zelda on a number of subsequent
productions at Arena. I have been forever grateful to Zelda that she was so
persistent in her pursuit. Because of her I had the chance to develop an American
career that I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams.
Persistence was one of Zelda’s most enduring qualities,
among so many others. She was also fearless, wise, and filled with a passion
for theatre, for writers, for actors, and above all for her Washington
audiences.
Zelda was one of that amazing generation of artists who,
seeing a huge vacuum in theatre outside New York, resolved to change matters
themselves. The courage Zelda and her contemporaries showed is hard to imagine
now, with the resident theatre movement spread from coast to coast. When
Zelda, Tom Fichandler [1915-97], and Ed Ma[ng]um [1913-2001] began Arena in the
early ‘50s, there was no map and very little precedent to follow. As Zelda
herself said so eloquently:
It was, as I say, miscellaneous, whimsical, as whimsical as
falling in love: a something that you can’t evade, you can’t avoid, you can’t
dodge, you can’t go around. You don’t listen to your parents. You think all
obstacles are mythological and that you’re going to have this thing, love, this
person you love, this idea, at whatever cost. Your life is made in those
moments. It’s a moment of self-donation: “I give myself to this.” So in a very
lighthearted but serious way, that’s how it happened.
However whimsical the beginning, the achievement was
extraordinary and enduring. Her tenacity and courage, combined with her
artistry, were the ideal characteristics to make her the leader of a vital
national movement. Her appetite for new work, for reinventing the classics and
for the ideal of an acting company working closely together over multiple
seasons, made Arena Stage a leader in the burgeoning resident theatre movement.
Zelda’s promotion of young artists came from a deep passion
for education and a real understanding of the need young artists have for
mentorship. Her tenure as chair of the graduate acting program at the Tisch
School at NYU was notable for the range of diverse and skilled actors she
encouraged. Her artistic directorship of the Acting Company was a
further example of her devotion to young talent. Like me, there are many people
working in the American theatre who owe a great debt to this amazing visionary.
Her legacy is to be seen in theatres throughout the country. We have all reason
to be grateful for her work and her life. She was a unique spirit and may she
rest in peace.
Joe Dowling [b. 1948], former artistic director of the Guthrie
Theater [1995-2015]
Her Leap of Faith, and Mine
Zelda would have us imagine. She would have us do it with courage, drive,
and purpose, but she would have us begin there. And above all, she would have
us take that leap with faith. She knew this was why humans need theatre: to
give ground to our imagination, and in doing so to keep growing new iterations
of ourselves in all our wild fragility. But she would go further:
She would have what we experience in the harbor of the theatre inspire us
to live better lives outside that harbor than the ones we lived before
entering.
It was her mission to us whom she guided through NYU’s
Graduate Acting Program between 1984 and 2009. In our first semester, we would
have class with her. We would lie on the floor and finish the phrase, “As if .
. .”—as if I were a carpenter, as if I were taller, as if I were to reinvent
regional theatre, as if the color of one’s skin were irrelevant to one’s ability
to play a part . . . . things like that. In her speech at the beginning of each
school year, clad in her tailored leather suits, hair perfectly colored and
coiffed, this titanic spirit in the tiny frame would quote [French Symbolist poet
and playwright Guillaume] Apollinaire [1880-1918] and invite us to “come to the
edge,” afraid of falling, so that we might be pushed off, and only then find
our wings—and in turn, our faith.
I had never had an acting class until after I’d been
accepted into NYU midway through my senior year of undergrad; I was a science
major but squeezed Acting 101 into my final semester so that I might not be
wholly unprepared going into what Zelda had helped turn into one of the nations’
top actor training programs. I was very, very green. But for some reason I
could feel her faith in me. In a way that is characteristic of great theatre,
she used her eagle eyes to show me who I was with both a potentially painful
yet ultimately uplifting honesty, saying things like, “You’re a woman now. You
weren’t one when you entered this program, but you are now. It’s wonderful to
see.”
She taught me to find the inner strength to ask for what I
wanted, though I was accustomed to the opposite—to accepting whatever I got
without complaint. So I took the lesson: At the end of my second year, I sat in
her office and said, “I’d like to play a leading lady. I think I’m ready to do
that now.” She smiled and said, “Okay,” or something to that effect. When I saw
our casting for the third year, she’d given me exactly what I’d asked for:
the lead in Romantic Roulette, Laurence Maslon’s adaptation of [Pierre
Carlet de Chamblain de] Marivaux’s [1688-1763] The Game of Love and
Chance [1730]. (If only it were still that easy . . .)
Her faith in me continued after I graduated in 1997. By the
time we’d finished three years of school, my self-confidence had been
painstakingly rebuilt—only to be broken again at the very end when I did not
get an agent out of the showcase. I had very few meetings with casting
directors, and hardly any auditions for months. I was despairing and terrified
much of the time, full of questions with no answers, thinking I had no future
in the American theatre. (I learned soon afterwards that if you don’t know what
your future is as an actor for only a few months, you’re in great shape.)
And then, in late October of that year, Zelda was holding
auditions for her production of Uncle Vanya at her seminal
co-creation, the Arena Stage [12 December 1997-18 January 1998]. I auditioned
for Sonya, the part I had played in grad school, and she chose me. I could
breathe again. Not only that, but during the run, Doug Wager, then Arena’s
artistic director, pulled me into his office and said, “Zelda’s giving you an
award.” I was deeply puzzled. I remember saying something to the effect of, “What?
Why?” As green as I still was, she had given me the Rose Robinson Cowan Acting
Fellowship, in recognition of my promise and potential as a future actor
of the American theatre.
I was stunned. I did not thank her properly. To this day I
have yet to thank her properly, though I’m grateful to this publication for
offering me the chance to try. With Vanya, she didn’t just give me
a job, or a part that remains one of my most beloved of all time. She didn’t
simply give me my entrance into Actor’s Equity, the start to my career, or an
award I’d barely had the chance to earn. She gave me something far greater: her
faith. [Actors’ Equity Association, known as Equity or Actors’ Equity, is the
union that represents stage actors and theatrical stage managers in the United
States.] And by doing so she restored mine. Bestowed with the belief she had in
me, I began to once again believe I might belong in the world I’d dreamt of
inhabiting since I was a child. She imagined I might become someone worthy of
this award, and she did it with the same matter-of-fact knowingness with which
she seemed to do everything—as if she could see the preordained and knew how to
will it into being.
A person like that is rare; a woman with the power to use
these gifts for the greater good more so (though less and less rare these
days). She seemed to both know this and disregard it at the same time. Because
her driving force was the knowledge she sought to instill in all of
us that in the end, no individual performance, no single accomplishment,
is greater than that which it serves: the story which encompasses us all.
Whatever work I continue to have in the theatre, it is in no small part due to
Zelda. More importantly, I have been infused with the idea that my work is not
mine to keep—that it is my responsibility and privilege to be an “actor
citizen,” one whose artistic and civic efforts mesh in order to advance a
deeper common understanding, and therefore a greater civilization. I take this
privilege seriously, and it gives me great joy. (Aw, man—yet more ideas for
which I wish I could thank this great lady.)
Though I imagine she can hear me.
Angel Desai [b. 1972], actor
A Lingering Joy
“Are you hearing me?”
Zelda used to say this, looking up from her notes behind
fabulous glasses, as she delivered all-school speeches to us, her MFA students
in the late 1990s. She wasn’t being stern. She was giving us a chance to
configure ourselves in the present moment, something we were learning to do as
actors too. Her speeches somehow managed to be inspiring orations and intimate
ruminations at the same time.
Her positive impression lingers in so many places and for so
many people. For me one of the enduring joys of my attempts in the theatre has
been to discover Zelda’s presence in my present moments, reminding me that
acting is being private in public; that theatre, like politics, is local; and
that a maroon leather suit is something to strive to wear when one is 70.
I heard Zelda again when I picked up the phone and called
her about two months ago. I was working on Nora
in A Doll’s House [Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience, 30
April-12 June 2016; see “TFANA’S Scandinavian Rep: A Doll’s House and The
Father,” 13 June 2016, on ROT]. Zelda’s former colleague, our mutual
friend, and NYU’s resident smarty-pants, Larry Maslon, had generously given me
some research material of Zelda’s from her production of A Doll’s House
[2 March-8 April 1990; the Arena translation, by Irene Berman and Gerry
Bamman, used the title A Doll House]. I told her I missed her and that I
think about her often. She told me that was nice to hear.
Maggie Lacey, actor
Falling and Flying
My first professional audition, in 1983, was a general call
for Washington, D.C., area theatres, held at the Arena Stage. I had just
graduated from college, and a hot summer of sweltering lawn care employment and
living in my old bedroom in my parents’ house had made me start wondering if
the world was going to be impressed that I had played Prospero [central
character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest] and Falstaff [this
character appears in three Shakespearean plays: Henry IV, Part 1 and Part
2, and The Merry Wives of Windsor] at 20. Something told me they
already had people for those roles out here in the real world.
I practiced my monologue over and over in the Arena parking lot (I can’t
remember if I went with Prospero or Falstaff). In a frenzy of nervous energy, I
climbed up onto an open dumpster sitting in the parking lot. Seemed like a
thing to do. I sat up there, looking out upon the world, madly Shakespearing. I
was feeling pretty good, until I saw the most forbidding human form I’d ever
seen striding toward me. Zelda Fichandler, the queen of D.C. theatre, the
leader of the pack, the Grand Duchess, the One. I couldn’t move. She walked
past me—it turns out she wasn’t looking at me at all, but at the theatre.
I was relieved. The last thing I wanted was to get in trouble with the Great
Zelda on my first day of incipient professionalism. I thought I’d escaped her
notice until I heard a clear, ironic voice: “Don’t fall in!”
During my high school years in the Virginia suburbs of D.C.,
I saw many, many plays at the Arena. I didn’t realize then that I was the
beneficiary of Zelda’s groundbreaking work (along with Margo Jones in Dallas
and Nina Vance in Houston), more or less inventing the regional theatre in
America. I didn’t know that these three women had basically founded a real national
theatre in America (I propose replacing “regional” in this case with “national”—less
condescending, and more accurate), one that lives and breathes with the genuine
voices and talents of the whole country, most of it far away from midtown
Manhattan. I took it for granted that I could drag my mother or father to
Southwest D.C. to see Shakespeare or Miller or Wilder, to have my life changed
by great actors like Robert Prosky [1930-2008], Stanley Anderson [1939-2018],
Halo Wines, Tana Hicken, and the great, anarchic genius Richard Bauer [1939-99].
That’s where I started forming the idea that my lifelong hobby might become my
actual life. I was watching these people do it, gloriously, in front of me.
And I got to see Randy Danson [b. 1950] fly. The first
Chekhov play I ever saw was Zelda’s luminous production of The Three
Sisters, in the early 1980s [20 January-26 February 1984]. The production
was hilarious and heartbreaking, comforting and shocking. Alexander Okin’s
environmental set was like a crazy, intricate country of its own. I happened to
be sitting near the corner where Mark Hammer’s [1937-2007] Chebutykin lazed and
laughed and drank and cried in his little “room.” Unforgettable. I vividly remember
Marilyn Caskey’s hilariously self-absorbed Natasha, Henry Strozier’s dutiful
and sad Kulygin, Henry Stram’s [b. 1954] tortured Andre[i], Halo Wines’s
rock-of-Gibraltar Olga. But what I really remember is that Randy Danson flew.
In the final act, when the soldiers are saying goodbye to the Prozorov family,
Randy (as Masha) was quietly weeping in one corner of the vast Arena
space, comforted by her sisters. Her life—or that part of it that held
passionate possibility—seemed over. Now on the other side of the huge stage the
solders came in for one last goodbye before moving to another camp. The stage
got quiet as Stanley Anderson (Vershinin) stood looking across at the women. No
one spoke. I didn’t breathe.
Suddenly Randy Danson was running—and I mean running—across
the stage toward Anderson’s Vershinin. He was standing frozen. And while still
far away from him—in my memory it’s half the stage, but how could that be
true?—she leapt. She flew. And on the other end of that
flight, Vershinin caught her in his arms. The world, my heart, time itself—all
seemed to stop. When they embraced, I remember an audible, involuntary
collective shout coming from the audience, a communal expression of joy and
sadness and recognition. I’ve never seen anything like it in the theater,
before or since. Maybe it was different from how I remember it, but hey, as [Tennessee]
Williams [1911-83] said: “The play is memory” [The Glass Menagerie (1944),
Act 1, scene 1].
Some years later, long after I didn’t fall into the
dumpster, I got to work on The Three Sisters with Zelda and
the brilliant Paul Walker [1952-93] with the Acting Company. I told Zelda about
seeing that Arena production and its impact on me. She seemed moved that I’d
been so taken with her Three Sisters. ”Well, that’s what these
great plays do for us. That’s what they’re here for.”
But someone has to understand those great plays, and take
the care and effort and sweat and love to bring them forward. Somebody has to
understand that they are essential, and that when we put them out there, and do
it well, somehow the world is changed. Zelda knew. She famously said that she
had started the Arena with an envelope full of index cards listing the people
she knew in Washington, D.C., who might want to put on plays: actors, writers,
designers, stage managers, possible patrons. She opened the envelope and
got to work.
She spent her life making people fly through the air, making
sure there was someone to catch them, and making sure there were people to
witness it all, so we could all live through it together. Thanks to Zelda and a
few other pioneers, the American theatre—the American national theatre—is busy
doing its work, and making itself known all over the country in big venues and
small, pushing and prodding and striving every day to reveal and celebrate the
essential, aggravating, joyous, sad, exalted truth of our collective humanity.
Zelda strove her whole life to illuminate that humanity. To paraphrase the
great woman herself, that’s what she did for us. That’s what she was here for.
And I’m so grateful to her for opening that envelope.
Andrew Weems [1961-2019], actor and
teacher
