R.I.P. 2022 Arthur Giron

 

To my knowledge, an Arthur Giron play has never been staged on the North Coast.  Yet his approach to the stage has influenced productions here. And he has North Coast connections in the former chair of the former Theatre, Film & Dance department at the former Humboldt State University, Margaret Kelso.  And me.

Arthur Giron was a distinguished American playwright and educator who died in February 2022.  He was 85.  A founding member of New York’s venerable Ensemble Studio Theatre, he was known most recently as the author of the book for the musical Amazing Grace, which had a brief run on Broadway in 2015 and has since found more success in other venues. Several of his subsequent works for stage and film are in process and may yet be realized.

 Probably his first bold call on theatrical and media attention was Edith Stein, a play about a real person and actual events, a Jewish woman who converted to Catholicism and was murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.  Many of his later plays were also on historical subjects, including biographical explorations of such figures as physicist Richard Feynman, the Wright brothers (a script that has become the basis for several musicals), and the passionate relationship of Voltaire with the scientist Emilie du Chatelet, in a play that won the Galileo Prize for illuminating scientific innovation. Even given their subjects and historical sweep, Giron explored the emotions at the heart of these achievements.

  Giron was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Guild to write a bilingual (Spanish/English) opera, The Golden Guitar.  At that point, Edith Stein had itself already become an opera. 

 His plays often dealt with moral and political questions, none more so that A Dream of Wealth, which dealt with the defining influence of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, the country of his family’s origins.  “I think the theatre in general is the last haven of the truth,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter during a rehearsal of this play.  “We in the theatre have the responsibility to get under the surface of things…”

 Arthur Giron grew up in Los Angeles, where his father was a “dentist to the stars” at MGM.  During World War II, Hollywood was a haven for the displaced artists and intelligentsia of Europe whose relationship with the movies was uneasy, but some of whom were passionately committed to theatre, not yet prominent in southern California. As a precocious young stage actor in his teenage years, Arthur absorbed this passion and commitment.  (He describes this period in an essay, “The Golden Silence,” posted onhis website.)

I first met Arthur Giron in the early 1990s, when he was head of the graduate program in playwriting in the Drama Department at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the most prestigious theatre programs in the country. He was mentor to my partner, playwright Margaret Thomas Kelso.  Though at that time she was no longer a student, having earned her MFA and gone on to also teach, we saw a lot of Arthur in the years before we left Pittsburgh for California, and he returned to New York.

 He was tall and handsome, his height and appearance enhanced by an erect posture that was unaffected and constant.  He could be funny and acerbic but he earned his air of authority.  When he was a guest artist at a southern California university, the predominantly Latin theatre students addressed him as Maestro.  That was Arthur.

 At the same time, he deployed the kindness, courtesies and soft voice of an old world gentleman. I once saw his gallantry on display at a surprise birthday party for Margaret at a Pittsburgh restaurant I arranged with her friends.  After dinner there was dancing, and an elderly woman guest was watching alone until Arthur asked her to dance.

 With his principled idealism he was also practical about playwriting and the business of artistic survival. His work observed the power of passions. He endured tragedies in his life, but his bulwark was his devotion to his wife Mariluz.

  Although I was not one of his students, he encouraged my writing.  Margaret directed a short theatre piece I wrote, and the next day Arthur left an effusive phone message of praise, which he repeated the next time I saw him.  This is just one instance of his interest.

 I saw an early version of his Wright brothers play at CMU, and one of his one-acts at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Manhattan.  Probably his most produced play—mostly by university theatres unafraid of large casts and challenging staging—is Becoming Memories, and so far I’ve seen three productions of it, each memorable in its own way.

 Becoming Memories follows five small town families through three generations from the frontier to modern days, beginning in 1911.  It is based on the memories and family stories contributed by members of the Illusion Theatre in Minneapolis.  The first scene depicts the rescue of a teenage girl on horseback—when I first read it, I couldn’t see how this would work on stage.  But this imaginative dimension in a realistic story often characterizes Giron’s plays.

 The first production I saw was created by my partner Margaret when she was the entire theatre department of a small college in central Pennsylvania.  However small, the college had a fine old theatre with a large stage, and Margaret used that space and a large student cast to create a colorful epic.  Most memorable to me was how she staged the final scenes of each act to produce an emotional, ecstatic effect. Other audience members felt it, too.  (Arthur had visited the cast during rehearsals and talked with them about the play.)

 The second time was a university production in Vancouver, B.C., where I happened to be while researching a Smithsonian story on the Haida artist Robert Davidson.  This time the stage was much smaller, an improvised space in which the audience was close to and on pretty much the same level as most of the action (though there was creative use of ladders and platforms as well.)  This produced some revelatory and magic moments, particularly the personal moments we witnessed close up.  Afterwards I met its actors backstage, and when I told them I knew the playwright and would be seeing him when I returned to Pittsburgh, they all signed a production poster for him. I was pleased to deliver it to Arthur in his office at CMU.

 The third time was at the University of Pittsburgh.  One of my nieces living in a town east of Pittsburgh was about to enter high school, and I gave her a day in the city as a gift marking the transition.  We were to end the day with Becoming Memories.  But earlier in the afternoon, I took her on a tour of the CMU campus, where we happened to run into Arthur just as he was leaving.  So I was able to introduce her to the author of the play she would see that evening.  The production itself was on a scale between the previous two, and once again it illuminated different aspects of the story.

 These are some of the virtues of theatre that sets it apart, and so Arthur Giron’s plays will continue to generate new and even surprising permutations. May he rest in peace.  His work certainly lives on.