Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Lucy Rosenthal’s playwriting professor at Yale was critic and anthologist John Gassner. Her memories of him are not warm. “He advised me to transfer to the education school so I could be home at three o’clock to give the children milk and cookies. And then he said – if you want to know what the culture was like – ‘There aren’t any women playwrights, except Lillian Hellman, and she’s really a man.’ This was said to me in private. I think Gassner knew, even then, that this shouldn’t be put on the P.A. system.”
George C. White, who was familiar with Rosenthal from Yale, apparently had a different opinion about the possibility of a woman succeeding as a dramatist. “He took me and Oliver Hailey to lunch one spring day at the Yale Club and began to talk about this idea he had. I think Oliver was standing up his wife, who was waiting for him on some street corner, but he didn’t want to leave because George was kind of spellbinding.” White was describing the conference he planned and sounding them out about their interest in being part of it. Rosenthal was able to attend that first summer; Hailey came to Waterford later.
The first John Guare heard of the inaugural 1965 conference was a letter from White. “Would I be interested in coming to Waterford, Connecticut to discuss the beginning of a new possible theater?” The idea appealed; he had yet to find a way to establish himself in the theater scene that existed. “The abyss between Broadway and off-Broadway and then between off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway was immense.” He remembers that there was the beginning of a sense of community between the young writers in New York, particularly the significant number of them based in Greenwich Village. “We were all living. Just hanging out. And feeling that downtown was a different world. I lived in an apartment on Tenth Street and Fourth Street, a fourth floor walk-up with a 20-foot ceiling and a skylight and a wood-burning fireplace and an eat-in kitchen and a bathroom that looked down on a garden. Thirty-two dollars a month. Terrence McNally lived over here and Lanford Wilson lived over there. It was being young and fun and fucking around. You’d go to the theater every weekend. You’d go to La Mama and Theatre Genesis and Cino and Barr-Wilder. You didn’t go to see something specific, you went to see what was there.”
Guare remembers not just an abyss between the worlds of commercial uptown and experimental downtown, but something fiercer, even a few years later when some of the downtown people had in fact been produced in the Times Square neighborhood. “You can’t imagine the contempt the uptown world had for us.” Guare believes this persisted for years, even after he had had work produced uptown. “There were people at the Dramatists Guild who did not want Terrence McNally and me to be on the [Dramatists Guild] Council because we were not Broadway playwrights. We had had plays done on Broadway but we were not Broadway playwrights. We were from a different world and we shouldn’t be on the Council. It was great animosity and dismissal because we were part of a whole new path of building theater.”
As the first day of the conference approached, invitee Frank Gagliano got a call from George White. “George asked if I could drive. I had just gotten my license. George would rent a station wagon for me if I could bring up some playwrights who didn’t drive. I think Sam Shepard might’ve been in the car, but I know that Lanford Wilson was.”
Most of the others of the twenty, Guare remembers, boarded a bus that left from Times Square “to take us Fresh Air Fund kids to the country.” The “Fresh Air Fund” reference suggests a theme Guare often refers to about the attitude then about helping young writers. “That new playwrights were sort of like a disease. Charity. Polio was taken, you know.”
And so the playwrights arrived in Waterford. Among the others in that first cohort were Charles Frink, John Glennon, Israel Horovitz, Joe Julian, Tobi Louis, Leonard Melfi, Joel Oliansky, Tom Oliver, Sally Ordway, Emanuel Peluso, Sam Shepard, Doris Schwerin, Douglas Taylor, and the writer who suggested the conference in the first place, Marc Smith. Lucy Rosenthal recalls, “They housed us that first year with townspeople, and the houses were quite grand, or so I thought then. I remember a very luxurious bed and I think either floral wallpaper or sheets.” Their lodgings arranged, the writers began to look warily at what was being offered by a host many of them had never met.
Playwright Lewis John Carlino, who arrived at the conference late, wrote about his apprehensions in the September 12, 1965 New York Times. “What’s to be gained by such a meeting?” he thought as he approached Waterford on the New England Thruway. “What can possibly be exchanged between me, us, and the panelists (top people in the fields of design, directing, producing, acting, agenting and writing) that hasn’t already been discussed endlessly before and shaped into all the neat, seemingly significant and wholly inane generalities usually found in Sunday supplements entitled, ‘What’s Wrong with the American Theater?’ I don’t know about these other guys, but I’ve got misgivings.”
The playwrights entered the drive of the Hammond estate. A dozen acres sloping up a broad lawn from the Long Island Sound to the 24-room mansion George White’s father had pointed out while sailing. The mansion cut a noble figure against the sky, but it was dilapidated to the point of being dangerous. The nearby barn was in better shape; at least you could step inside it without the risk of the roof collapsing on you. Given the condition of the buildings, White thought it best to hold many of the gatherings in a sunken garden to the east of the mansion, underneath a huge old copper beech tree.
Odel Shepard offered the opening remarks of the conference. A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, scholar and former lieutenant governor of the state of Connecticut, he told of a time in colonial days when townspeople raced down to the waterfront of New London to catch a view of caged lion on display on an anchored ship. He suggested this might have been the area’s first example of an entertainment attraction. (The religious values of the day would never have allowed something so sinful as the opening of a playhouse.)
Later in the conference, the playwrights heard from Audrey Wood, a literary agent famous for spotting and encouraging playwriting talent. The story of how she discovered and sustained Tennessee Williams through hard times till he made his breakthrough was legend, and she had also had an active hand in advancing the fortunes of Robert Anderson, William Inge, Arthur Kopit, Carson McCullers, Murray Schisgal and Guare, among many other writers. A brochure published by the Center in the wake of the conference quotes some of her remarks, including her concern about the effect of the commercial marketplace on contemporary playwriting. “Plays with film potential get the best production breaks,” she is reported to have said. “Nine out of ten serious scripts are brushed aside in favor of comedies.” She talked, too, of the need for “a central clearing house” for new works to find adventurous producers.
As the conference got under way, White became aware of rumbling among the writers. They were angry, particularly the unproduced (and under-produced) ones. “I was totally horrified at all these crazies that came up,” he recalls.
Guare believes that some of the anger had its roots in the suspicion that the conference assumed that the writers wanted careers on Broadway. It was an assumption that he also encountered later when he became a member of New Dramatists. “People would come to New Dramatists like in 1968 to tell us how to write a hit Broadway comedy. You got the sense that the old status theater was trying to hold on desperately by its fingernails. It was [also] in the air at the O’Neill. So when we had a chance to speak we said, ‘We don’t want to be part of this.’ We were interested in the new theater.”
This anger bubbled up during even what White had assumed would be an uncontroversial panel. “I thought who’s going to get angry at scenery?” So he scheduled as one of the early sessions a conversation featuring set designer David Hays and costume designer Patricia Zipprodt. But the dialogue soon moved into confrontation. White says, “I remember someone saying, ‘How dare you take my play and wreck it with your scenery?’” Frank Gagliano says, “I guess it must have been David Hays who said something about never reading stage directions. Just reading the script. I remember seeing red at that. Not reading a writer’s stage directions!”
David Hays’s version of that encounter is a little more complicated. “I said, ‘Many designers – and I sometimes found myself in this position – want to just read the play, see what they come up with in their mind, and maybe then maybe read the playwright’s directions.’ So Sam [Shepard] blew up, said, ‘When I want such and such a set, and when I want such and such a costume, that’s what I want.’ Pat Zipprodt spoke up and said, ‘You know, Sam, if you say that the heroine is in a black dress and she looks like shit in a black dress I’m not going to put her in a black dress.’ And then I said, ‘I just designed All the Way Home for Arthur Penn. The playwright [Tad Mosel] suggested six settings and I said you can do it in one without a turntable, nothing. No change. Look at what you save in construction.’” (Hays was nominated for the 1961 Tony for the design.)
A meeting with some established producers – Lyn Austin, David Black, T. Edward Hambleton and Judy Rutherford Marechal – also triggered resentment. Carlino’s account confirms Guare’s theory: “Mr. Black suggests we write comedy for our first Broadway effort. Then the next plays can be serious. From the back of the barn comes a sharp retort, ‘Nuts!’” (In 1965 this qualified as a sharp retort.)
The most dramatic confrontation came during a panel on criticism, which featured Henry Hewes (of the Saturday Review), Norman Nadel (from the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain), Leonard Probst (of NBC) and Boston eminence Elliot Norton. Guare had a very particular quarrel with Norton.
“Eliott Norton came swanning in,” Guare recalls. “I’d been working for William Inge. He opened a play called Family Things, Etc. in Boston. (It later opened in New York under the title Where’s Daddy?)” Norton was featured on a local Boston television program to which he invited people associated with the plays he was covering to discuss their projects with him. Inge was booked to appear on the broadcast in the wake of his opening. Norton’s review had not yet been released. The playwright arrived at the studio unprepared for what the critic had in mind. Guare remembers, “Norton said, ‘I think it would be very interesting today on the broadcast to read the review, and then discuss the review. Do you mind this, Mr. Inge?’ Inge said, ‘No.’
“The review was devastating. Something like, ‘What was at best a mediocre talent stretched beyond all limits.’ Norton assuming that William Inge would take that and say, ‘Thank you so much.’ Embarrassing him so publicly that he never wrote again. He was so fragile. And I had to ask Norton what he felt his obligations towards playwrights were when he felt so free to destroy one on television by catching him off guard and reading a devastatingly destructive review while the camera was on his face.”
Guare wasn’t the only one who confronted the Boston critic. Says Gagliano, “I seem to remember Eliot Norton bringing up Shakespeare and Sam Shepard getting up and saying, “Fuck Shakespeare! It’s not about him anymore!’”
Shepard left Waterford midway through the conference. White shrugs at the memory. “Lanford tried to get him to stay. But we served a great purpose for Sam: he needed some place to walk out of. I mean he really did. To make a statement. He was nineteen.”
According to White, what rescued that first conference from chaos were two playwrights, one living and one dead.
The living one was Edward Albee. White arranged for Albee and one of his producing partners, Richard Barr, to meet with the young writers. Albee had a unique status. On the one hand, he was a famously uncompromising figure in the playwriting world whom the invited writers saw as a colleague and ally. (As Carlino wrote, “I mean, he’s one of us. He understands.”) On the other hand, he was commercially successful, having authored Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the most notable new play of the past decade. “Edward was a hero because had given his royalties to start Barr-Wilder,” Guare says. Of course, everybody was busy writing their own version of The Zoo Story.” Guare adds that he and the others were pleased to see Albee, but did not quite understand what he was there for or how they were expected to respond. “We loved Edward, but we didn’t know what we were supposed to do.”
Without particularly intending it, Albee found himself bridging the gap between the would-be insurgents and what they perceived as the establishment. Not exactly famous in those days for being a peace-maker, Albee nonetheless kept stressing to his fellow playwrights that the O’Neill organization was attempting to address the issues and deserved a chance. Albee explains his support of White was based on a simple fact: “He was the one who showed up with the ideas. If nobody’s giving you anything, and then somebody decides to give you something useful, you’re enthusiastic. Somebody had to be doing this. I think I was impressed by the fact that he seemed to know something about what he wanted.”
White says, “I told him, ‘I owe you a lot.’ He really helped put order out of chaos.”
Albee’s support for the O’Neill is all the more notable because it ultimately evolved into a place with a method that he does not find personally useful. Albee famously composes his plays in his head, puts them on paper in a rush when he feels they are ready, goes into production and doesn’t revise much. He doesn’t hesitate to state that the idea of staged readings and workshops of his own work holds no appeal for him but acknowledges they may be of value to those who don’t write the way he does. With a characteristic sense of mischief, he says, “I tell playwrights: don’t write first drafts. Write the finished piece.”
As for the dead playwright who eased the tensions – that was Eugene O’Neill himself.
The drunken spaghetti dinner at the Whites’ apartment forgotten or forgiven, José Quintero arrived in Waterford with actors Barbara Colby and Terry Kaiser and gathered the conference participants for a presentation in the barn. As White wrote, “it was necessary to surround the [barn] with fire engines, as there was still dry hay beneath the floor (which sagged in the middle). The lighting was provided by a line of 75 watt bulbs strung down the center
. The audience sat in folding chairs provided by the local fire house.” Later White commented, “It was dangerous as hell. I mean, everyone was smoking.” If a lighted cigarette had miscarried, “there would have been a conflagration.”
The presentation was of a rehearsed reading of a scene from A Moon for the Misbegotten featuring the character of Jamie Tyrone, the alcoholic older brother familiar to audiences from Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It is nearly a dozen years after the action of Journey and he is now in his forties and on a downward spiral. Moon focuses on the relationship between Jamie and Josie Hogan, a young woman who lives with her father on a farm Jamie has inherited. Josie is described by O’Neill as being “so oversized for a woman that she is almost a freak – [she is] five feet eleven in her stockings and weighs around one hundred eighty.” She has encouraged a bawdy reputation in the town but is in fact a virgin and secretly has long been in love with the dissolute Jamie. In one of the most poignant encounters in dramatic literature, Josie expresses some of her feelings for him. But it is too late for him to be redeemed by what she has to offer. Eaten up with self-disgust and guilt, he now wants nothing more than to greet permanent oblivion. All that Josie can offer him this evening is the temporary relief he gets from confiding in her. Exhausted, Jamie falls asleep on her breast. When he wakes the next morning, he remembers little of the evening before and affects a jauntiness before leaving her for what she knows will be the last time.
The conference participants watched Quintero and his actors explore this extraordinary material aware that a supporting character named T. Stedman Harder (who ends up covered in mud) was a fictionalized version of Edward Crowninshield Hammond, on whose estate the conference was being held, and that O’Neill pictured the location of the Hogan farm near the Harkness Pond, a stone’s throw from where they were sitting.
Gagliano remembers, “Quintero was really a lovely man, very eloquent. The woman playing Josie wasn’t a big girl. She said, ‘How do you act big?’ And he said, ‘By acting small. A big person wants to be small, like a drunken person wants to look sober.’ And she did it and it worked.” Carlino was struck by, “the rapt faces caught by the crazy magic of the creative process.”
The balm Josie offers Jamie reportedly conferred a kind of balm on the contentious participants of the conference at Waterford. At the end, just as Jamie’s demons were temporarily at bay, White sensed that the anger that had simmered throughout the conference had dissipated. The warmth of Josie’s pure love brought the first conference to a close as if it were a final benediction. White wrote, “It was an eloquent expression of talent, theater, and O’Neill and served to bond the conference together; it changed the negative attitudes into an overall feeling of enthusiasm and optimism.”
Director J Ranelli believes that, beyond the immediate therapeutic effect, Quintero’s work that evening helped shape what would become the National Playwrights Conference’s approach to working with new scripts. “What he was demonstrating is how you work in rehearsal.” Quintero not only worked with the actors but maintained a running commentary for the audience on why and how he was making these suggestions with this cast. “It’s a technique you use when you do masters’ classes and workshops. You try to get something going, and then you say, ‘You see why he did that?’ or ‘That’s why I told him not to do this.’ What Jose did in the process was expand everybody’s knowledge of the text without preaching about it, by creating playable directions for actors to do. Not to show how good these actors could be in ten minutes, but how, with script in hand, the values in the text could emerge.”
The playwrights returned to New York. Carlino described his thoughts as he drove back, “A whole town said, ‘We feel the future of the theater rests in the hands of the playwright and we want to do something about it.’ O.K. So they open their homes to a bunch of strangers. And feed us. And convert a mansion into a meeting place for us. And spend a lot of dollars simply trying to find out what we need to work best. … And guess what? They want us back. And they are going to spend the next year trying to get the money to bring us. … Nothing like this has ever been done before with us or for us.”
Guare was more skeptical. “I thought I would never hear from them again,” he says of the conference organizers.
White was determined that there be another summer. As he undertook the challenge of raising money for the Center, he started to think about what changes he should put into place. Having sailed since he was a boy, the tactic he employed now was not unlike tacking, recognizing the direction from which the wind was coming and shifting the sail in relation to it to modify his course. The wind necessarily came from what he learned from the playwrights when he queried them after the conference. “I asked them, ‘What do you really want?’ And they basically said, ‘We want Broadway productions,’ but what they really meant was that they wanted professionals to work on their plays. In those days, ‘professional’ translated to ‘Broadway.’”
New Yorker critic John Lahr observes that, for all the legend that surrounds the early days of off-off-Broadway, something has been generally overlooked: “The level of technical expertise in Caffé Cino and La MaMa was never, ever very good. It was pretty amateur night. It still is. I mean, I went just half a year ago to see a Tennessee Williams thing [at La MaMa] and I thought it was heartbreaking. I thought I had never left. It was still terrible. They were just sort of busking. And having fun. And some of it turned out to be very influential and had some verve and some personality, but a lot of the work that was done off-off-Broadway and off-Broadway at the beginning was shocking. And so what the O’Neill had was a higher level. They had real directors and really confident actors.”
For the second Conference, in the summer of 1966, George White decided to assign a couple of those real directors and a company of really confident actors to full productions of two new plays. In addition to the writers of the two plays he chose, White invited back the veterans of the first conference.
Guare was surprised to receive an invitation to return and pleased that the comments he and the other writers had made had been heeded. “The shock was, when we went back next year, what we asked for was there,” says Guare. “We came back and found that it was no longer the ghost of Broadway. The next year it was people from the Group Theatre. Bobby Lewis was there, Harold Clurman was there. Phenomenal. And Franchot Tone – very glamorous. It anchored it in a way that it had not been anchored in the first year.”
Tone’s arrival at the O’Neill had a special resonance – he had played Jamie Tyrone opposite Wendy Hiller in the short-lived Broadway premiere of A Moon For the Misbegotten in 1957. He was in Waterford to act the lead (under the direction of Fred Rolfe) in one of the two plays White had selected for full production, The Bird, the Bear and the Actress by John Glennon, a dramatization of the later life of Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary British figure who pioneered much modern theatrical theory, developed new techniques in scenic design still influential today, and exalted the director as the most important force in production. (If Craig had been on the first conference’s design panel with Hays and Zipprodt and expressed such an opinion, one can only imagine the reception he would have received from the playwrights!)
Tone was a great admirer of Craig and was delighted to be cast as him. He was also excited to be part of the O’Neill. As he told reporter Janet Roach in an August 5, 1966 interview for The Day, “If this place can retain its purity of intent, escape the commercialism, it can be one of the landmarks of culture in the country, perhaps in the world.”
Tone had some basis in experience for his comments. As Guare noted, he was a veteran of the Group Theatre, the company that Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg founded in 1931 that was active for about ten years. In 1961, Clurman wrote a vivid memoir called The Fervent Years, describing the Group’s mission and history. Though it produced plays on Broadway, the Group was created to challenge the prevailing star-focused ethos of Broadway by generating productions out of an ensemble consciousness. It was notable for premiering works by Clifford Odets and Sidney Kingsley and introducing to America an approach to acting informed by the theories of Constantin Stanislavski (an introduction that would later be reinforced by the founding of the Actors Studio, which Strasberg led for decades). The Conference playwrights with a sense of history saw members of the Group as early fighters in the same struggle in which they were engaged – to create vital theater uncorrupted by the conventional practices of the commercial managements.
The other script White chose to give full production was Joel Oliansky’s Bedford Forrest. The play is a somewhat overstuffed epic in which the likes of Abraham Lincoln, James Buchanan and Robert E. Lee make cameo appearances, but there is a strong central story about the enigmatic title character – a slave master turned Confederate general – and a black man he used to own named Brewster who, after escaping, is determined to kill Forrest. It was Oliansky’s idea to hire Lloyd Richards to stage it. “I didn’t even know Joel Oliansky,” Richards told N. Graham Nesmith in an interview for the fall, 2005 African American Review. “They asked him who he wanted to direct his play, and he said me. He had been a Yale graduate student and had seen some of my plays that had come through there. I got a call from a man I never heard of, named George White, asking me to come to a place I had never heard of, to direct a play I had never heard of … in a theatre that was yet to be built.”
As part of a speech he gave introducing a play at the Conference in 1994, Richards described his first visit to Waterford in greater detail. “I was met at the train ….. They didn’t bring me out here. They brought me to the Mohican Hotel in town and told me all about that’s where O’Neill used to sit with the cracker barrel and then get drunk and go home. I said, ‘Great, but where’s the theater?’ They said, ‘Oh, you want to see the theater.’ They put me in a car and ….. brought me out here and ….. drove me up to the Mansion. The ‘Mansion’ we call it now because that’s what it is now and that’s what it may have been some hundreds of years ago, but we went in and the water was coming through the roof. It was being caught in cans. And I said, ‘Fine, but where’s the theater?’ And [George White] said, ‘Oh,’ and we took our umbrellas and we walked down the path, and he pointed to a hole in the ground with about four feet of water and he said, ‘That’s the theater.’ ‘And I start rehearsal when?’ ‘Two weeks.’ And I said, ‘Fuck.’”
The pit White showed Richards was dug in part by playwrights. Guare remembers, “We had shovels. When we got up there, we started digging out what became the amphitheater.” White also recruited young muscle from the area. “I gave these pizza and beer parties with Coast Guard cadets and Connecticut College girls and I taught them how to lay cement block.” Opening night for Oliansky’s play was August 5, 1966. Designed by David Hays and Fred Grimsey, who also supervised the building, the 130-seat amphitheater wasn’t quite ready as scheduled, though. Says White, “We had to hold the curtain. The asphalt was still cooling. We had to hose it down.” Even with that step taken, Hays remembers, “The chairs were sinking into the flat top.”
Bedford Forrest was a huge undertaking. Richards remembered, “We had about 60 people in the cast. We had armies, battles, and the Ku Klux Klan.” For those with an eye for the intersection of history and politics, the casting of James Edwards as the defiant Brewster had particular overtones. Edwards had made a splash with a leading role in the film Home of the Brave, a movie about prejudice in the Army written by Arthur Laurents (based on his play). A paucity of opportunities for African-American actors in film in those days and the suspicion that he held leftist sympathies combined to keep him from the career his peers believe he should have enjoyed. (Some ascribe his early death at 51 to his treatment.) Black writers weren’t significantly represented at first at the O’Neill, but the participation of two major black artists – Richards and Edwards – announced the intention of the Conference to be part of a movement to enlarge the scope of the American theatre.
Bedford Forrest was also notable for providing an early stage credit to a young man connected to one of the Center’s earliest supporters. One of the Founders of the Center, William Darrid, was a New York producer who also had credits as an agent, writer and an actor. In 1956, he had married Diana Dill, the ex-wife of film actor-producer Kirk Douglas, and in so doing he gained a stepson named Michael. Michael was still trying to figure out where his place in the world was when Darrid suggested to White that Michael – now 21 – might be of use to the new enterprise in Waterford.
Douglas remembers, “I was in my sophomore year in college [at University of California, Santa Barbara], and I’d just started getting interested in acting. My stepfather, who I adored, suggested that I work on the construction crew at the O’Neill, focus on building the amphitheater, with the hope that I might get a couple of small parts in some of the plays that they were trying out at the playwrights conference.” He speaks of the exhilaration of those days, particularly “being hoisted up this 60-foot ship pole to adjust the follow-spots.”
This early experience working with developing writers on new scripts turned out to be of importance to Douglas’s later career as actor and producer. “I wasn’t aware of it that moment, but it was an incredible time for playwrights. Israel Horovitz, Lanford Wilson and John Guare – a lot of great writers. Since this was a playwrights conference, the actor’s responsibility was to serve the playwright. You started learning [about what distinguishes] good writing from bad writing, and you learned a lot about structure. Analyzing text. I’ve always been an old-fashioned structuralist, you know, in terms of three acts. I’ve carried that over to screenplays. That experience has carried me through my entire career in terms of realizing that the material is the only thing that matters. My acting career – everything has pretty much been based on what the material was.
“It was my first experience in summer theater. It was like an adult summer camp – a balance between working on original material and the promiscuity of young actresses and actors hanging out together. I had some wonderful romances over those summers.”
Many of the writers from the first conference – including Guare and Rosenthal – were there for the second summer. Says White, “I sensed that the last thing those playwrights wanted was to sit around and watch another play that wasn’t theirs being worked on. They said, ‘Can we bring up plays and read them?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’”
So began the so-called backyard readings. In addition to Guare and Rosenthal, the playwrights whose works were performed in this series were Rolf Fjelde, Paul Foster, Israel Horovitz, Joe Julian, Tobi Louis, Sally Ordway, Edward Peluso, Doris Schwerin, and Douglas Taylor. The most prolific director was Melvin Bernhardt, who put up five of them, including the first act of a play that would come to be viewed as one of the key works of the new wave of playwriting, a dark comedy about a desperate would-be songwriter named Artie Shaughnessy plotting to escape the borough of Queens on the day in 1965 when the Pope visited New York.
As Guare recalls it, “Bedford Forrest was the play that was supposed to make the place. The House of Blue Leaves was put also being put up. The first act of it. (I knew what the second act was going to be, but I had only had time to finish the first act.) I had trouble casting Blue Leaves. I couldn’t find a man to play the lead, Artie, so finally I said, ‘I will play it.’”
According to Guare, one evening Blue Leaves and Bedford Forrest were performed at the same time. While Bedford was playing in the new amphitheater, Blue Leaves was playing near the kitchen of the main house, its audience sitting on bleachers White had borrowed from the Little League. “The response to Blue Leaves intruded on the performance of Bedford Forrest,” says Guare. “People came out of Bedford and wanted to know what was happening. They’d heard the response to Blue Leaves.”
Bernhardt is less sure of this. Bedford Forrest, playing at night, was lit by equipment Michael Douglas helped set. Not so, Guare’s play. “As I recall it, the sun hadn’t gone down when we did Blue Leaves. We did it on the back porch and there was no lighting over there.”
Like Blue Leaves, another play presented that summer called The Sudden and Accidental Re-Education of Horse Johnson by Douglas Taylor dealt with a man discontent with the ordinary existence fate had dealt him. Jack Klugman played Horse. (Horse Johnson would become the first play from the O’Neill to open on Broadway, on December 18, 1968 at the Belasco Theatre. It ran for five performances.)
Another reading that caused a stir was a one-act by Israel Horovitz called The Indian Wants the Bronx. Indian had been rehearsing in New York, and Horovitz brought it to Waterford with a cast that included John Cazale, Matthew Cowles and a young actor new to most named Al Pacino. The story of an East Indian man (Cazale) lost in New York City who is viciously harassed on the street by a couple of young hoods (Cowles and Pacino), it galvanized the audience with its air of menace.
Michael Douglas also remembers a group from the American Academy of Dramatics Arts presented Royall Tyler’s 1787 play The Contrast (reputedly the first comedy written by an American). One of the members of that cast was Danny DeVito. “We became best friends. After I graduated from school, we were roommates in New York.” (When Douglas accepted the O’Neill’s Monte Cristo Award in 2012, in his speech he suggested that the initial bonding wasn’t so much over art as a shared enthusiasm for combustible vegetation.) They would later collaborate on several films, including a film DeVito directed and in which Douglas starred, a hit black comedy called The War of the Roses.
In addition, the deaf students from Gaulladet College put up two performances of Euripedes’ Iphegenia in Aulis, a precursor to the creation of the National Theatre of the Deaf at the O’Neill.
Guare believes that the response to the backyard readings was key to the shift that would come the next summer. His theory is that the comparison between the presentations of Blues Leaves and Bedford Forrest was the catalyst. “I think perhaps that was when the balance shifted, when the focus went from trying to put up full productions to doing staged readings.”
Indeed, in the third summer, in 1967, the idea of producing full productions was abandoned. White decided that the National Playwrights Conference would be devoted to presenting staged readings.
Ron Cowen was 21 and getting his masters degree at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a little extra by working in the college library. “It was a small library and nobody ever went there, so I was there by myself every night until 11:00 or whenever we locked up. I wrote it when I was a student at Penn in the library because I had nothing else to do.” The work was inspired by the shadow the war in Vietnam was throwing over society at the time. It was a shadow that had touched Cowen. “I had been called in for my [draft] physical. I was trying to fail everything, and I couldn’t. I cheated on the hearing test and I had a psychiatrist letter.” Neither the test nor the letter persuaded. “I remember the sergeant said, ‘We don’t care if you’re gay, we don’t care if you have no arms, you’re all going.’ And I thought, ‘I passed everything, there’s nothing I can do.’ And at the very end, the last thing was the eye test. And they said, ‘You can’t see anything!’ And I got out of it.” Thousands of others were not so lucky, were drafted and sent to the war in Southeast Asia. Their stories were the inspiration of Cowen’s script.
Before coming to U. of Penn, Cowen had attended UCLA where he had studied writing with Jerome Lawrence, the co-author of Inherit the Wind. “He told all the students the usual bullshit. ‘If any of you ever write a play, you should send it to me.’” Cowen did, and it tuned out Lawrence wasn’t bullshitting. “Jerry sent my play to the O’Neill. And they accepted me. I was at school. I freaked out.”
Some weeks before the scheduled conference, he found himself in New York in the Riverside Plaza Hotel. “The second floor was a ballroom. It probably hadn’t been used in a thousand years.” He met his director, Lloyd Richards, and he met the young actor who would play the lead in his play, Michael Douglas. “Michael and I just laughed and bonded immediately because we looked like cousins. And then I met Phil Sterling who played my father, and he looked just like my father.”
In an article for the September 3, 1972 New York Times, Cowen described the first reading. “We sat around a table with the actors and read Summer Tree. It was about 130 pages long, and I loved every precious luscious, golden word. Wow. Real actors, the first ones I’d ever seen off a stage, sitting right across from me like human beings and My Director and My Play. [W]e read the play through. Lloyd took notes. I took down his notes. He told me to take my own notes. I didn’t know what to take. It all seems perfect to me. The next day we cut 40 pages. I learned to take notes. To cut. To scream. To cry. To beg. Oh, please don’t cut it, I’ll do anything, don’t amputate! Lloyd was merciless, of course, and so were the actors. How about taking out this line? And that one there and that one… And somehow it made it all better. … I couldn’t figure it out. How come I didn’t see when I was writing it that a ten-page monologue delivered from under a bed wouldn’t hold the audience’s attention? Then Lloyd suggested we make Summer Tree, Summertree. One word. Boy, he’s really a smart man.” Looking back from the perspective of several decades, Cowen acknowledges, “I really didn’t have a clue at that point what to do. The whole thing was a birth. I was an infant. And Lloyd was my father. But he was just everything to me. He was everything. I loved him so much. He didn’t ‘tell’ you, he shared his thoughts with you and you came to a decision together.”
When the conference began in Connecticut, rehearsals began. It was another day of discovery for Cowen, as he reported in the article. “I learned what blocking is. It’s when the actors move around. They don’t do that on their own, you know. They are directed to, by Lloyd.”
Douglas (who roomed with Cowen at the O’Neill) remembers the play having personal resonances for him. “In those years – especially at the University of California, where I had been – we were actively involved in protests, in kicking ROTC off the campuses. A strong anti-Vietnam vibe.” The play begins with the image of a young American soldier dying under a tree in Vietnam and then shifts to images and incidents from his life under the tree in his back yard at home in the States. “It was a lovely piece,” Douglas recalls. “The play was focused on this young man, a principal character with a lot to carry. I had just recently decided to pursue acting. I was very undeveloped. I had not done a lot. I remember a lot of personal direction from Lloyd Richards, who was a great teacher. He was very articulate. And when something was funny, he had one of the greatest laughs – just from the bottom of his soul. Nothing made you happier than pleasing him.” Douglas was also directed by Richards the following summer in a play by a paralyzed playwright named Neil Yarema called Rainless Sky. “We were in wheelchairs in the play, and the actor I was playing with couldn’t do it – he was sick or whatever – so Lloyd came in and played this role at the last second. It was just great realizing how good he was as an actor.”
The first performance of Summertree in Waterford was in the Barn. Cowen remembers, “Everybody was crying. Everybody was very, very moved. The same thing would happen [later, during the run] at Lincoln Center. The lights would go out at the end of the play, and everyone would just sit in the dark. Not applauding, not doing anything. Just sitting, just sitting in the dark. And then the lights would come up and everyone would applaud, people wiping their eyes. And I said, wow, you know, you make people cry, you have this great sense of power. (But then you realize it’s not so hard to make people cry.) But people were very moved in the Barn that night.”
In addition to Summertree, 1967 saw the first stagings of Frank Gagliano’s Father Uxbridge Wants to Marry, John Guare’s Muzeeka, Oliver Hailey’s Who’s Happy Now? and Israel Horovitz’ It’s Called the Sugarplum, all four directed by Melvin Bernhardt. Besides, Summertree, Richards directed Man Around the House by Joe Julian and Just Before Morning by Tom Oliver Crehore.
New York City finally got a sense of what was cooking in Connecticut when a number of the works from 1966 and 1967 were given full productions in the 1967-1968 season.
Father Uxbridge Wants to Marry was the first. Produced by the non-profit American Place Theatre at Theater at St. Clement’s Church, it opened on October 28, 1967 for a limited run of eleven performances with a cast led by Gene Roche as Morden, an elevator operator who comes to crisis when informed that his job is about to be made redundant by the switch to an automatic system. The various women in his life were played by Olympia Dukakis. Mel Bernhardt returned as director for this production. New York Times critic Clive Barnes gave it a mixed notice, saying “its depiction of inescapable human misery proved effective,” but expressing his opinion that it did not live up to its apparent inspiration, Georg Buchner’s Wozzeck. He had words of praise for Bernhardt and the cast. Edith Oliver, the off-Broadway critic of The New Yorker, was dismissive. “The style is religious delirium. And the script is clogged with theological and personal symbols, the former as opaque to me as the latter. I must say I was not even tempted to try to crack the mysteries.” (A couple of years later, Oliver would be summoned to the Conference to serve as a dramaturg, becoming such a central part of the O’Neill that a stage was named after her. But more on her later.)
The second evening of work developed at the O’Neill to open in New York did so on January 17 when a double bill of one-acts by Israel Horovitz, The Indian Wants the Bronx and It’s Called the Sugarplum, began a run at the Astor Place Theatre, across the street from the recently-opened Public Theatre of Joseph Papp. The bill was directed by James Hammerstein, who had directed Sugarplum at the O’Neill. Cazale, Cowles and Pacino were still in the cast. A promising young actress named Marsha Mason was featured in the companion piece. This time Edith Oliver was more appreciative. “Mr. Horovitz is a natural dramatist with a keen ear for regional talk,” she wrote. She found the depiction of “aimless cruelty” in both plays “frightening.”
Summertree opened March 3, 1968 in the downstairs space at the Lincoln Center Theater Company that would later be renamed the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre. “Perhaps the most important point to be made about Summertree is that it is written by a writer, as you can tell three minutes into the show,” said Edith Oliver. In the Times, Barnes complimented it as “soft-centered but sensitive,” and a reply to the “oft-heard question: ‘What have those guys at Lincoln Center done for us lately?’”
The production, however, did not feature two of the elements that had made Summertree go over so well in Waterford. According to Ron Cowen, Lloyd Richards had a scheduling conflict due to a project for the State Department and was not available to direct it at Lincoln Center. The reason Michael Douglas didn’t play the part with which he had connected so strongly was more complicated.
Says Douglas, “Ron asked me to come back and audition for it. I auditioned a number of times, and finally Ron came back one day saying, ‘You got it.’ And then the stage manager called and said congratulations, and said, ‘Tomorrow would you come in and read auditions?’ And the next day I went in, and amongst the actresses was Blythe Danner, not really realizing that I was still auditioning. The next thing they told me was, ‘You don’t have the part.’ I think they just wanted to get someone more established and more experienced. I think the decision came more from Jules Irving, rather than the director.” (The director was David Pressman, the man who introduced George White to David Hays. In an interview shortly before his death in 2011, Pressman would call directing Summertree one of his proudest achievements.
Cowen’s vivid memory is of Lincoln Center artistic director Jules Irving approaching him, saying, “We’re going to fire Michael. He’s not strong enough to act against Blythe Danner.” Cowen says, “I had a shit fit. I said, ‘You can’t do this.’ Jules said that he wanted David Birney. I was furious, and Jules said, ‘You have two choices. You can either have your play produced at Lincoln Center with David Birney, or we’ll put it on the shelf and we own it for the next five years, and it won’t be done.’”
David Birney now was a fact and Douglas couldn’t do anything about it. Douglas wasn’t finished with Summertree, though. “My father – I guess out of spite or revenge or whatever else – acquired the screenplay rights.”
Cowen began work on the script for producer Kirk Douglas. And then it was Cowen’s turn to be pushed out. “I got fired. I’m not surprised I got fired. I didn’t know how to write a screenplay.” The experience damaged his friendship with Michael Douglas. They lost touch until decades later when schedules brought them both to Toronto and gave them the opportunity to have a long lunch and patch things up.
As for the movie? Cowen says, “You don’t want to see the film of Summertree. It does not have a word of the play in it.” Michael Douglas has fond memories of the project. The actress who played opposite him was Brenda Vacarro, and it was the beginning of an extended romance.
Of the 1967-1968 New York productions that had originated at the O’Neill, Times critic Clive Barnes was most enthusiastic about a double bill of plays, Muzeeka/Red Cross, that opened April 28, 1968 under the direction of Mel Bernhardt at the Provincetown Playhouse (a small theater in Greenwich Village that was once home to early works by Eugene O’Neill). Red Cross was a short piece by the young Sam Shepard who had fled the O’Neill in its first year. According to Barnes, Guare’s Muzeeka, which featured Sandy Baron, Kevin Conway and Marcia Jean Kurtz, was “a mind-opener, a play of realistic fantasy. … Mr. Guare wants us to laugh, but he does not want us to forget. He has a wit like a poisoned arrow (such as when he suggests that soldiers fighting in Vietnam are under contract to individual television companies) but he does seem to have a big understanding of what we are and what we are doing.”
Though the record was not of unanimous huzzahs, most of these writers were remembered when honors season came around. Ron Cowen won the Vernon Rice and Drama Desk Awards for playwriting, and both John Guare and Israel Horovitz won Obie Awards for their plays.
The season in New York had established the O’Neill as a major source of new work and new writers. This success carried with it new danger. The writers who had made a splash in the city returned to the country in the summer of 1968 with the strut of conquering heroes. Cowen says, “It all of the sudden became the star system. The second season was about getting producers up there, getting the most finished production you could get on, trying to get star names in your play, trying to get your play done on Saturday night, because that’s when the producers could drive up and see. You did not want your play done on Tuesday or Wednesday midweek, because nobody would be there to see it. And all of the sudden it’s pre-Broadway tryout. And all of the sudden it was not the O’Neill anymore.”
With so much energy put into presentation, the exploration of text was given less attention. Cast in multiple roles, the actors ran from rehearsal to rehearsal, desperately trying to master lines, and a lot of time was devoured by dozens of sound and lighting cues. As White wrote, “The losers were the playwright and the texts. They were virtually run over in a scrabble to get the work on its feet. All these elements began to breed a sense of competition among actors, playwrights, designers, and directors.”
Cowen was working again with Lloyd Richards. In his Times article, Cowen described how his piece, Redemption Center, which was supposed to be a modest two-hour musical, got so swamped by presentational concerns that the first performance ran three and a half hours. The length seemed all the longer because of the heat in the barn space where it played. “Lloyd and I sat on the steps at the back of the house, our heads between our hands, eyes blank, dried tongues hanging out, stunned. I think that’s the best word I can think of other than hot. Stunned.” They cut and rewrote furiously for the second performance, but Cowen deemed the result, “an unsalvageable mess.”
Nor were they the only team that had difficulties. “Disaster after disaster,” Cowen remembered. “People were going crazy, screaming, leaving, coming back, leaving. Everybody was mean. I went away a lot.”
The high visibility of the O’Neill had also attracted the attention of producers, scouts and agents, who flocked to check out the properties and talents. Deals and schemes were being talked all over the grounds. This only increased the competition between the writers. White commented, “What had begun as an attempt at building a temple of creativity had now allowed the money changers to enter.”
Despite the chaos, the 1968 session introduced works that would be heard from again – John Guare’s Cop-Out and one of Lanford Wilson’s key early plays, the autobiographic Lemon Sky.
A month after the Conference, White invited some of its veterans to Waterford to identify the problems and discuss how they should be addressed. He remembered, “This representative group was unanimous in its call for an artistic director with a firm hand who would put the house in order.”
As White saw it, he had two strong candidates. “I knew it was between Mel Bernhardt and Lloyd Richards. Mel was brilliant and a wonderful director – flamboyant and inventive and very, very cutting-edge. I knew he would be good in his own way, but Lloyd – Lloyd and I just got along. And I thought, Lloyd has a wisdom. So it was a tough decision but I finally opted for Lloyd.”
Bernhardt’s memory is that White inquired about his interest but that his career as a director in the city was taking off and he didn’t care to be considered. He didn’t want to commit to spending the necessary time in Connecticut. “I had things happening back in NYC. I didn’t want to tie up that much time when I could be doing plays in other places.”
Bernhardt also says that he and Richards “didn’t see eye to eye. Lloyd was much more academic than I. I was more interested in communicating what a play could be to the audience that was there. I wanted to use anything we could find around the place to help the audience picture a production. Lloyd was much more interested in working with the playwrights in terms of crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s.”
With Richards named to the post, he and White set about the task of reordering priorities. The focus would now be on the text. Since the writer was supposed to feel free to change text till the last moment before a performance, the actors would have to remain on book. This meant, too, that chasing after production values was a thing of the past. Whereas Bernhardt would have used whatever tables or chairs or props were at hand, Richards wanted to emphasize a stylistic sparseness to direct all the attention to the writing. There would be no more elaborate catalogues of lighting cues and there would be a unified style of presentation. A style based on frugality.
White turned to designer Peter Larkin. “I said, “Okay, you only get fifty bucks. I want something that will be scenery that can be used for everything.’ That was about as specific as I could get. And then Peter came in one day to my office in New York and dumped these wire things on my desk, he said ‘I think I got it.’ ‘What are these?’ ‘Well here, you take this and combine it with this, and you’ve got a platform, you put it this way and you’ve got …’” These aluminum rectangular shapes, designed to be assembled in different configurations, became the building blocks of such physical production as the O’Neill employed. A rendering of a set for each play by Fred Voelpel or Neil Jampolis was posted near the entrance of the theater so that the audience could bring in with them a mental picture of what a fuller physical production might look like.
But Richards wanted to offer the writers something in addition to the work on their scripts. “I gave them an opportunity to live with playwrights who were going through the same thing. This access is a rare opportunity for working playwrights. Here it is two o’clock in the morning, in the dorm that they stay in, and everybody is working. You have a community. The person whose play was coming up next, you and other playwrights brought him coffee, took care of him. You didn’t come to the O’Neill just to get your play done. You came to the O’Neill and you made yourself available to other playwrights – as did directors, designers, actors – everybody was available to the people involved with their work. And that created this productive, wonderful community. You were the focus for a while, and later you focused on someone else.”
One more thing Richards insisted on: though he couldn’t keep producers and scouts and agents from seeing the shows, there was to be no more deal-making on the grounds of the Center itself.
The O’Neill was re-consecrated as a temple of creativity.