Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

There are times when it’s not appropriate for me to review works that I’ve seen. I am primarily a playwright. A lot of my friends are playwrights. I also teach playwriting, and a number of my former and current students get produced. Sometimes I feel I can maintain objectivity, sometimes not. I avoid conflicts of interest. I try to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest.

So, I cannot pretend objectivity about Emily Mann. She’s an old friend, she’s directed my work, and when she was artistic director of the McCarter Theater I was her guest for several of the best productions I’ve seen in my 50+ years of theatergoing, many of which she directed.

That said, I will limit myself to saying I was deeply moved by The Pianist, the adaptation of Władysław Szpilman’s memoir Emily wrote and directed (and, yes, suggest you make the trip to the George Street Playhouse in new Brunswick, NJ to see it).

One of the actors in The Pianist is Austin Pendleton, another old friend. I had the pleasure of working with him on one of my shows off-Broadway, I’ve enjoyed coffees with him for decades, and I still hope to have him direct one of my plays. (His production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Between Riverside and Crazy on Broadway last season was perfect.) I’m also delighted to learn that he and Emily will be working together again when she directs him in an off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana.

There are a lot of gifted people working in the American theater. There aren’t as many gifted people making livings out of working in the American theater, but there isn’t a direct correlation between talent and compensation. There is a subset of people working in the American theater I consider to be theater saints.

I have my own criteria as to what makes a theater saint. Not only talent, but a largeness of spirit that embraces, celebrates and champions those around them. Part of what moved me about attending The Pianist is that, yes, I think both Emily and Austin are members of that rare group.

Emily (who was elected to the Theater Hall of Fame in 2019) is not only a multi-talent in the theater, she is very much a citizen who sees the theater as a necessary part of civilization. What she produced at the McCarter usually made her audiences happy, but it was also worth doing. In the 30 years that she was the artistic director there, she transformed a theater that had done honorable work but was little regarded outside of its community to a national force. One high point was the premiere of Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which subsequently went to Broadway and won the Tony for the best play of 2013. In addition to this, she wrote plays largely rooted in documentary techniques (including the Broadway hit, Having Our Say), but refusing to settle for mere representations of fact and moving into frequently thrilling theatricality. Oh, and she directed the best Mrs. Warren’s Profession I’ve ever seen.

Austin hasn’t been elected to the Theater Hall of Fame yet, and they should get around to that, dammit. A lot of us first became aware of him on the original cast album of Fiddler on the Roof playing Motel the tailor. Off-Broadway audiences also knew him from when he, Barbara Harris and Jo Van Fleet scared the shit out of a lot of people in Arthur Kopit’s game-changing, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad. He started writing plays, including a notable hit called Orson’s Shadow (about Orson Welles’s attempt to direct Laurence Olivier). He also directed. Everywhere. Who else would go from directing Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes to directing monologues off-off-Broadway? In addition to this, he has been a beloved teacher at HB Studios for decades.

Neither Emily nor Austin made choices on the basis of status or what might make them household names or enrich them. The devotion has always been to what good can be done with idealistic colleagues in the theater.

Visiting backstage at The Pianist, there was a moment when I had the thrill of embracing them both. If only sainthood were contagious.