R.I.P. 2023 North Coast: Donald, Charlie and Bernadette

 Among those that the North Coast and North Coast theatre lost in 2023 were Donald Forrest, Charlie Myers and Bernadette Cheyne. 

Donald Forrest was an artistic director of Dell’Arte in the 1970s , together with Michael Fields and Joan Schirle. They were very active as performers, not only on the North Coast but throughout California and elsewhere in the world.

  Before that he’d been an actor in Manhattan (Broadway to Off-Off) and a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. “He brought physical theater to new heights,” said his friend Michael Fields.  Fields directed Forrest’s last performance shortly before his death: the title role in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear called The Logger Lear, performed at the Logger Bar (which Fields now owns) in Blue Lake. Donald Forrest also became known locally for starting a theatre program in Blue Lake schools, and bringing an eighth grade student production to the Carlo Theatre annually.  

Donald Forrest in Logger Lear

I’m aware of seeing him on stage only once, in a Redwood Curtain production of a new play called The Lawn, also directed by Fields. I met him when we were both participants in a staged reading at the Carlo in 2011 of the Sinclair Lewis play It Can’t Happen Here, marking the 75^th anniversary of that play’s premiere as part of the Federal Theatre Project.  I met him again around a long table at the Abruzzi Restaurant in Arcata (now gone), where I was invited to dinner with what turned out to be a lot of Dell’Arte people.  Forrest and the others (including Joan Schirle) engaged in a hilarious round of stories about the old days.  I only wish there had been a tape recorder on the table, for it was an event that can never be repeated. 

 Donald Forrest died in October of complications from Covid-19. He was 73.

 Charlie Myers may be remembered more broadly for his love of film.  He was the movie reviewer for the North Coast Journal during some of the years I was writing their theatre column, and before that he circulated a weekly roundup via email of movies showing in Arcata.  But within the North Coast theatre community he was known as a director and a teacher.  He came to Humboldt State College in 1969 and didn’t fully retire until well into the 21^st century. 

 Charlie was one of the first people I met when Margaret and I moved to Humboldt in 1996.  He was chair of what was then the Theatre Arts department of Humboldt State University, and was instrumental in hiring Margaret to teach dramatic writing.  He and his wife Claudia even found us our first dwelling place here.  From him especially (but also John Heckel) we heard tales of the theatre department in its heyday, when the faculty was much larger, and there were many more productions with longer runs.  It turned out we arrived for the last few years of the department’s glory. For someone with a fairly sardonic view of things, I was impressed by how much he was sincerely concerned for the department’s students. 

 Charlie was a very sociable guy and had a wide range of interests, including music and books (I envied his extensive climate-controlled library at his rural home—where, during a housesitting gig, I made particular friends with their goat.)  Those interests and more on his very full life are reflected in Claudia’s appreciation published in the Lost Coast Outpost.  Charlie Myers died in September 2023.  Again complications from Covid-19 were involved.  He was 85.

Bernadette Cheyne came to the North Coast from Texas by way of Alaska and her family’s farm in Wisconsin.  She taught a range of courses for HSU theatre, but was especially known for her acting classes and her work with acting students on vocal production and dialects.  From the start she acted with distinction in university and community productions, then added directing, both of which she continued to do into her final year.

 Bernadette was also adept at university politics, and served on the statewide academic Senate, then becoming the vice-chair of the California State University Board of Trustees.  It had been her advocacy and skill as chair of what had become the HSU Department of Theatre, Film and Dance that went a long way in saving the department from extinction during a budget crisis. After her retirement in 2013 she was active for some years in the Humboldt County Grand Jury. 

 As department chair, Bernadette hired me to do publicity for several HSU productions, which led to a regular gig. She was always encouraging and her support was definitive. We also shared a devotion to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and so I showed up at her retirement party in uniform.

 She and Margaret were close.  Bernadette was just about the only person we saw in the early Covid years: we visited her at her home surrounded by woods, and she was our guest here.  

Bernadette in "Mother Courage"
at HSU

In the pamphlet for her memorial event, her family selected this quote from her in 2011: “Vitality.  It’s about the force that allows us to live, to grow to develop.  It’s in the classroom, it’s in ourselves, it’s in the environment all around us that just breathes this extraordinary passion and the thirst for knowledge.  A desire to teach, a desire to learn, a desire to grow.”

 Vitality—in her work, her conversation and social life, her personal warmth, and the way she dressed and presented herself to the world—characterized Bernadette.  I remember seeing her in the spring of a year she was chair, and she was clearly at the edge of exhaustion. But by the fall she had bounced back, ready to embrace the challenges and opportunities of a new school year.

 Bernadette’s brain cancer wasn’t apparent until it was advanced.  She died in October.  She was 74.

 May they rest in peace.  The legacy of their lives and work lives on in the lives and work of others.  

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.

R.I.P. Joan Schirle and Clint Rebik

 

Update 2/16: Though North Coast media has so far failed to recognize Joan's achievements, the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook has a long article here, following the American Theatre magazine tribute here.

Joan Schirle died on February 1. I miss her already. Though I hadn't been in touch in recent years, knowing she was in the world made it a better place.

There are others who can better chronicle her considerable achievements, here on the North Coast and elsewhere in the world, and I hope they will do so. 

 But I can venture this much: As a creator of theatre, a teacher and communicator, there is no one I know of who has been more important for a longer time to the arts and their character in this community. I hope that this is recognized.

 I can only speak of what I know and feel. Joan was associated with Dell’Arte for nearly half a century. She was its Founding Artistic Director. As a creator and performer, she could excel at the robust, exaggerated commedia style, though even in the shows of that style that I saw, she added a more nuanced dimension. A prime example in more recent years was her performance as Mary Jane in Dell Arte’s bravura show, Mary Jane: The Musical. She commanded that stage as a star.

 But she was also adept at more subtle and delicate work, based on movement and music, gesture and image and poetry. Her work explored untold or little told stories of quiet heroism and love in dire or difficult circumstances, often instances of injustice.  For example, Elisabeth's Book.

 In my experience, Joan was just as authentic as a person. In a context where relationships are so often mostly transactional, she was genuine. I am grateful to her personally for two specific acts. She included me as performer and presenter in Dell Arte’s staged reading of the Sinclair Lewis play, It Can’t Happen Here, marking the 75th anniversary of that play’s opening in 18 theatres across America, produced by the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project. Joan was a principal organizer of simultaneous readings in 20 other cities. Apart from allowing me to participate in this meaningful event, she honored me with my only opportunity to be on the other side of the stage in my years on the North Coast. 

 Then when I was unceremoniously fired without cause as theatre columnist, she was the first member of the theatre community to support me in public, by posting on the local theatre Facebook page, eliciting other such statements.

 

I imagine there are many who have similar and better stories to tell about Joan’s kindness and courage, her openness and responsiveness, her humanity. 

 It seems to me that Joan had a very full life. She performed and taught and traveled all over the world. She was honored with awards in California and in Europe. She had a family, a daughter, a granddaughter. I hope that she felt that way about her life.

 Joan was born a couple of years before me, in 1944. She said to me once, we’ve got ten good years left, don’t we? Of course, being this age, I don’t remember how long ago she said this. But I’d like to think that however many they were, that on balance, they were good years.

 Last year the North Coast lost another of its theatre founders and important figures for decades. Clint Rebik was co-creator and artistic director of the Redwood Curtain theatre.

 I knew Clint since that theatre began more than 20 years ago. Besides being a talented actor and director, and in recent years a valued administrator at HSU, Clint was a model of integrity and kindness, generosity, good humor and judicious good sense. I wrote about his theatre and their productions for a decade, though I was also there for their first night. When my column was axed, Clint reached out and assured me I would have a free seat there anyway. 

We did not know each other well, but for awhile we occasionally had coffee when I stopped by his HSU Admissions office. He was widely admired in this community. Clint was only 55. He left behind two sons he loved, a partner and many friends.

Jonathan Miller

Of all the people I didn't know who died in 2019, I was most saddened by the death of Jonathan Miller.  He was an important presence at various times in my life.  When I was in college in the 1960s, one of my teachers (Douglas Wilson) mentioned this comedic satire by four young Englishmen called Beyond the Fringe. I soon acquired the album from their Broadway show, and pretty much memorized many of the bits.  In many ways it was life-changing, and certainly influenced my creative life for a long time.

The four members of Beyond the Fringe--Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Arnold Bennett and Jonathan Miller--were the Beatles of comedy.  Without Beyond the Fringe there would have been no Monty Python or Firesign Theatre, and possibly no Douglas Adams or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 

 But they were an artificial supergroup of funny guys from Oxford and Cambridge assembled by the official Edinburgh Festival to compete with its unofficial fringe festival comedies. They were such a hit they moved on to a commercial gig in London, and then to New York. After their Broadway success they disbanded, but while Bennett cultivated a career as a playwright, the other three stayed in the public eye throughout the 60s.  Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were the most visible, on British TV and a few Hollywood films (notably Bedazzled.) Miller was studying medicine, but kept get invitations to direct plays, TV shows and movies.

Meanwhile in my life, after intense periods in Boston and Washington, I returned to western Pennsylvania in the late 70s.  I was freelancing for magazines and then working on a book, so my life consisted of short bursts of travel and long periods of relative isolation.  My intellectual stimulation came chiefly from reading, and was mostly embodied by precious moments on film and especially on television.

The Body in Question, Miller's series carried in the US on PBS stations about the history of medicine, was one of the programs of the golden age for such stimulating series that included Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, the James Burke programs, Robert Hughes' The Art of the New, Ronald Harwood's theatre history All the World's A Stage, and Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  Probably the last were produced by Bill Moyers into the 1990s.  All of these were as important to my mental nourishment, sense of self, and my sanity.

Though Miller stopped formal performing, he was such an engaging talker that he was often featured on American talk shows, which were far more present and far more likely to hold some intellectual interest in the 60s into the 80s than since. In particular, he was given entire hours by Dick Cavett in the 1980s, often several strung together. His marvellous intelligence was inspiring and encouraging as well as stimulating. Miller's talk was absolute sustenance to me in those years.

 While I was aware of Miller as producer and director of several Shakespeare plays for the BBC project of filming all of them, and I'd heard him talk about at least one of them, it was years later in California when I was writing regularly about theatre that I watched tapes of these productions provided by the Humboldt University library.  It was then that I read with great interest his 1986 book Subsequent Performances, about approaching new productions of classic plays. Even more recently I caught up with his provocative 1960s television adaptation--or reimagining--of Alice in Wonderland on DVD.

directing Alice in Wonderland

In these and other ways, Jonathan Miller was a presence in my life over 5 decades, even though I didn't know him, never met him, and never saw on stage a production he directed.  Now, since his death was announced in November, I've been reading about him (including in a 1992 book, A Profile of Jonathan Miller), re-reading Subsequent Performances and watching what I could find on YouTube. There's actually quite alot: many interviews--including the 80s appearances on Cavett and several with Clive James, who died the same week as Miller--and several television dramas he directed.  I've deepened my knowledge of the man and his achievements.

As a director, producer and administrator of the Old Vic, he brought a fearless originality to his theatrical productions, while at the same time endearing himself to the people he worked with--particularly actors--with his humor, encouragement and respect for their own creativity.  Though he was the victim of clueless criticism, he got good notices as well.  Many of his theatre productions were hits with audiences, and several of his opera productions ran for decades.  Though I probably would not have agreed with some of his interpretations, they were dazzling in their daring and internal consistency.

Early in his directing career he mounted new plays and adaptations, with authors generally enthusiastic about his approach.  Even when he tended to stay with older works and favored Shakespeare and Chekhov in particular, he also rediscovered older plays seldom done on the modern stage, and brought a range of European plays to the British mainstream, particularly when he ran the Old Vic.

directing John Cleese in BBC Taming of the Shrew

Though Miller brought conceptual frameworks to his productions, and coordinated designs (often selecting painters for his designers to see), he felt his contributions as a director were in details--in small moments and gestures by the actors.  His approach was informed by what his novelist mother told him was a function of fiction: to make the negligible considerable, and the forgettable memorable. The job of directing, he felt, was directing attention.

He used his experience as a doctor observing everything about a patient to collect small human gestures which he suggested to his actors.  To the madness of Lear and other characters, he brought medical knowledge of how disorder or old age are expressed in concrete behavior.

Bob Hoskins and Anthony Hopkins in
Miller's BBC-TV Othello

 While his interpretations were sometimes controversial, they were grounded in history and had a particular logic, often based on actual human behavior rather than a metaphorical conceit.

Some changed how many plays are now approached.  For example, after his working class Iago (Bob Hoskins), no production of Othello can ignore the precedent.  He made the racial components of Othello and The Merchant of Venice more realistic by softening the apparent differences, while revealing and sharpening racial divides in The Tempest--also an interpretation no subsequent production can ignore.

He enlivened classics like Hamlet and Lear and several Chekhov plays partly by emphasizing characters that are usually played as minor, such as Claudius in Hamlet. He approached opera as another kind of play, bringing new interest to audiences.

Those who worked with him often mentioned his humor, and the sense of rehearsal as play.  "For me, what is attractive about the stage is contained in the name of what it is we do," he wrote.  "It is a play and is playful."

 He wrote this to explain his conflict at the National when Peter Hall took over.  He felt Hall (who I praise in an earlier memorial post) was too pretentious about the role of theatre.  He had enjoyed the National in the early years, when he worked closely with Lawrence Olivier, who he greatly admired.


In A Profile of Jonathan Miller, a notable number of actors and producers name Tyrone Guthrie as Miller’s closest resemblance in directorial style. In addition to his humor, they often mentioned his warmth with actors, inventiveness and keen eye for behavior. He began productions with a strong sense of time and place, and with a visual style selected, but collaborated closely with designers and actors to produce effects that worked for them, the audience and the show.

 Miller’s work in directing opera transformed opera productions down to the present. Robert Brustein claims that Miller’s direction of Robert Lowell’s Old Glory transformed American theatre. “Alot of stage directors...know only about the theatre and not too much about anything else,” observed opera orchestra conductor Kent Nagano. “Jonathan knows about everything.” In addition to his knowledge and intelligence, Nagano adds, “That’s what he brings into his productions—a sense of everyday life.”

  Miller directed tragedy, and in every play he looked for the irony.Whether or not it is a tragic irony, in the 1980s Miller helped found the UK's Alzheimer's Society and was an  its president for many years, using his skills and presence to bring attention to the previously obscure disease.  In 2019 he himself succumbed to it.  His mother died relatively young of early onset Alzheimer's, but Jonathan Miller, who once said he would be satisfied with living 80 years, made it to 85. May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.

Peter Hall

One of the many essays that appeared after Peter Hall's recent death, written by younger theatre artists he mentored,  ended with traditional words: We shall not see his like again.

Traditional, even cliched, and yet they are not only true in his case, it's hard to think of anyone in theatre since Olivier of whom these words so clearly apply.  And equally hard to think of anyone now alive to whom they could apply, at least in the same way.

His achievements were institutional and artistic.  He founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and led the National Theatre into prominence, taking it from a small company doing a half dozen plays a year at the Old Vic, to its huge new building with more than 100 actors and 500 staff producing 18 to 20 plays a year.  In the process, the National overcame general opposition to join the RSC as institutions so identified with British theatre that it seems they must have always existed.

Peter Hall was also a director who changed the way Shakespeare was performed and even spoken.  Together with John Barton (whose "Playing Shakespeare" series lives on YouTube) he found in Shakespeare verse the directions for speaking it, and playing the part.  He insisted that the director's job was to reveal the play on its own terms, not impose concepts or see the plays as opportunities for the director's self-expression.   He insisted on specifics and favored collaboration with the cast, even to the extent of involving the cast in set and costume design as well as the blocking of the play.

In the 1950s, Peter Hall introduced Samuel Beckett to England with his production of Waiting for Godot, and he was the first to direct Harold Pinter (going on to direct 10 of his plays.)  If he had done nothing else, this contribution to theatre would have been astounding.

His influence was felt in American theatre as well, as evidenced in this essay and in his New York Times obit.

Finally, these two excerpts from a kind of biographical monologue, also on YouTube.  May he rest in peace, for his legacy lives on.

R.I.P. Sam Shepard

The most exciting evening I'd experienced as an audience member of professional theatre to that time, and really never to be surpassed, was seeing Curse of the Starving Class at the Public Theatre in 1978, by a playwright unknown to me named Sam Shepard.

 I walked into the Public Theatre in complete innocence. At that time the Public was like a multiplex of live theatre, with as many as four plays on stage every night. I chose Curse of the Starving Class partly because of the title, and mostly because there was a ticket available.

 Apparently in the cast were Olympia Dukakis, Pamela Reed and Michael J. Pollard, but it was the writing that blew me away: the words. They expanded my conception of what was possible at this level. Either at intermission or after the play I bought a copy in the lobby of Angel City, Curse of the Starving Class & Other Plays by Shepard.

 Although I would later see another original production--Fool for Love ( with Will Paton the week after he took over the role from Ed Harris)--plus the PBS filming of the Steppenwolf production of True West, and a production somewhere of Buried Child, my main experience thereafter would be reading his works--other plays and play collections, and his prose pieces in Motel Chronicles. All about the words.

 Shepard was a downtown Manhattan star before he became a movie star, and his lore was everywhere there. Wikipedia has him meeting Jessica Lang on the set of a movie, but legend of that time said he met her when she worked as a waitress at the hip downtown bar where he hung out.

 Shepard influenced others, and helped establish a theatre of words for awhile (the most successful of which probably was David Rabe's Hurlyburly which made it to Broadway.) This was much to my predilections as a writer, though I realized that I was not comfortable enough with violence to write quite like he did, nor as a consequence would I reach such deep places in an audience. But those long arias of words, spoken in one play by an actor playing drums, were riveting.

I saw all his movies for awhile, including the one he directed, Far North. Though his New York Times obit refers to his play A Lie of the Mind as "great," at the time reviewers called it disappointing, as I recall. He seemed to fade into the firmament by the end of the 1980s, though he kept writing and acting.

 Oddly then, it was only a couple of years ago that Fool For Love was first produced on Broadway. I don't know when Shepard was diagnosed with ALS, a disease that varies a great deal in his symptoms and progress, but always ends the same, as it did for my father. It's said that Shepard dealt with it with the same stoic dignity of his on-screen persona.

 At the New Yorker, Patti Smith writes an intimate memorial. I had no intimate or even actual relationship, but he touched my life nevertheless, and that's as much as I can honestly write about him. Sam Shepard died at age 73.  May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.

Arthur Miller Revivals

In addition to the much lauded local production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons, recently produced by Ferndale Rep and Arcata Playhouse, directed by Jane Hill, there is currently a Broadway revival of Miller's play The Price.  President Obama attended a performance with his daughter Malia.  The last time The Price was in New York was in 1992, when the playwright was alive.  It was the occasion for this interview with Charlie Rose.  Much of what he says about American theatre still pertains (though perhaps the quality of older actors in regional theatre is better), and what he says about playwriting and the role of theatre in society is perennially relevant.

It seems also that Miller's stature as an American playwright continues to grow. Both The Crucible and Death of a Salesman are produced frequently around the world by professional theatres as well as others.  In an American Theatre interview, contemporary playwright Theresa Rebeck said, "I have a theory that anyone who ends up with a career in the theatre was in either Our Town or The Crucible in high school or college."

Now other of his better known plays like The Price, All My Sons and A View From the Bridge are being done more often as well.  But Miller wrote other fine plays, including some shorter works with small casts late in his career.  These are at least as stageworthy as many such contemporary plays, and deserve to be seen.

The President Who Read Shakespeare

Only one more reason this country is going to miss this extraordinary President:

"Mr. Obama’s long view of history and the optimism (combined with a stirring reminder of the hard work required by democracy) that he articulated in his farewell speech last week are part of a hard-won faith, grounded in his reading, in his knowledge of history (and its unexpected zigs and zags), and his embrace of artists like Shakespeare who saw the human situation entire: its follies, cruelties and mad blunders, but also its resilience, decencies and acts of grace. The playwright’s tragedies, he says, have been “foundational for me in understanding how certain patterns repeat themselves and play themselves out between human beings.”"

Michiko Kakutani
New York Times 1/19/2017

Guess Who Turns Out to Be Shakespeare? (Hint: It Starts With S)

The so-called controversy over who wrote Shakespeare's plays has always been irritating, based mostly on the uninformed and class-ridden assumption that a glover's son from little Stratford couldn't possibly have gone to London and written all those plays of genius.

While textual arguments may go on, a writer for the Guardian asserts that new research findings by manuscript scholar Heather Wolfe pretty much prove that the Shakespeare who wrote the plays was indeed the Shakespeare from Stratford, and not some Earl or other.

Whenever the "controversy" is resurrected, with everybody presenting their evidence, it's routinely asserted that alas nobody has the proof and the available information has been so thoroughly analyzed that it's unlikely to be settled unless something completely new turns up.

That turns out to be nonsense as well. Because Heather Wolfe found the evidence in the library. She just looked where earlier researchers didn't--in the controversy over the Stratford Shakespeare's attempts to get a family coat of arms approved.  Though she doesn't make sweeping claims, she found enough to settle the matter--contemporaries knew that the Stratford Shakespeare and the playwright were the same.

This adds to what was already a pretty convincing case made by other scholars for Shakespeare as the author of his own plays.  Opponents built their doubts on the class system.   They assumed that someone  brought up in a provincial town couldn't get an adequate education, but the Stratford Shakespeare had a classical education more rigorous than most Americans get today, even in PhD programs.  

So if it wasn't education, it must be because lower middle class provincials, perhaps even raised Catholic, couldn't possibly have that level of verbal expression, let alone genius.

Well, guess what?

Answer to The Question I Was Never Asked

It's been more than a year now since I stopped writing Stage Matters, and about a year since I collected past columns and wrote retrospective introductions for this site.

It seems more like ten.  A certain knot of anxiety is not even a memory.  What anxiety remains is based on the energies I spent over a decade on this endeavor, and as a consequence what I didn't do.  And what in that time apparently went away.

I had an explanation for my approach to Stage Matters that I don't think I ever presented.  I recall that I thought it was most appropriate as an answer to the question that was never asked.  For in all those years, I never once was interviewed (on radio for example) or asked to speak or participate in any sort of forum or discussion on the North Coast. (The sole exception was a class for students in theatre criticism held by an intercollegiate organization--the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival.)  Perhaps that's a comment on the importance of theatre or theatre reviewing here, or perhaps just on me.  Or likely both.

So at least for the record, here it is.

Draw a circle representing everyone involved in North Coast theatre, both audiences and participants.

Draw another circle representing the readers of the newspaper.

There will be a place where the two circles intersect: denoting that subset of people who are both involved in theatre and read the newspaper.

How large or small that subset might be is open to debate.  But by necessity I wrote my theatre column for the people constituting the circle representing the newspaper's readership, with particular but not exclusive attention to the readers represented by the area where the two circles intersect: people interested in theatre who read the newspaper.

This is almost self-evident but a point that many people miss, especially theatre people.  But it should be especially clear to them.  They perform for the audience that comes to the theatre.  I performed for the readers who came to the newspaper.

In practice that meant writing to inform and entertain readers, most of whom had not seen a given production, and many who never would see it, including those who did not go to theatre at all.

People read reviews of books they will never read.  Probably less often, people read reviews of movies they won't immediately see.  I suspect for theatre, it's somewhere in between, but I did believe that I wrote also for people who might be enticed to read about theatre, but never or very seldom actually saw theatre.

I did hope that my writing would also nudge them towards seeing theatre, and I sometimes wrote with that advocacy as a chief goal of a particular column.

Some periodical writers come to see themselves as representing their theatrical community.  Spending so much time going to theatre, and talking to participants about theatre, a reviewer or columnist inevitably develops relationships, and sometimes friendships.  Some pursue these more than others, and inevitably feel responsible to them. It's a particular temptation for those who were or are participants themselves.

Tom Stoppard expressed this conundrum in an early interview.  He had been a newspaper theatre reviewer before becoming an established playwright.  In discussing his wonderful farce The Real Inspector Hound (which features two theatre critics) with New York Times writer Mel Gussow, he noted about his reviewing days: "I never had the moral character to pan a friend.  I'll rephrase that. I had the moral character never to pan a friend."

Priorities, moral and otherwise, come into play on a case by case basis, I suppose, especially when it comes to friends.  Some people go into criticism with an ideological agenda, and some because they enjoy saying nasty things.  I was neither of those.  A certain tact and delicacy is necessary because real people, their hard work and their feelings, are involved.

But the primary role is journalist, and the primary responsibility is to the profession of journalism (such as it is) and to the readers (whoever they are.)  The theatre community is necessarily of secondary priority, though my goal was to write for that subset as part of the readership.

What this means is various.  Some is regular practice, like making sure the name of the play, the theatre where it is presented and whether it is being presented at the time of publication, are all in the opening paragraph.  (Apparently not everyone holds to this standard.)

 But some of what it means is expressed in judgments particular to each case.  How much of the play's plot to describe, for the benefit of readers but not to the detriment of future playgoers?  Generally more description of the production than judgment is the goal.  Background to the play, the playwright, other productions can be of interest to all readers, even if participants in that particular show may be irked at the space wasted not writing about them.

Finally there was the problem of writing about theatre in a place with limited resources, where few participants are professionals, where the theatres themselves are physically difficult--several hereabouts cause reactions to mold etc. among members of their audiences--and most often with inadequate restroom facilities, all adding up to a less than professional impression.  Is criticism even appropriate for something pretending not to be basically amateur or academic?

That, plus my own discomfort with publishing what is essentially a judgment based on one particular experience on one particular night (for I agree with Stoppard that the job is to communicate that particular experience) was a factor in making Stage Matters a column rather than all reviews.  The balance got thrown off when it was for a time the only venue for timely reviews of current productions, and then by a new editor,  but my intent was always to do previews, interviews and news. Given the amateur compensation, I didn't have time or the resources to do as much as I wanted.

Theatre of course can be done anywhere, and the back of a wagon has been its principal venue for much of its history.  But writing about theatre is much more awkward in a small place.  The great writers about theatre like Eric Bentley and Kenneth Tynan could also be participants (Bentley wrote and directed, Tynan chose plays for the National Theatre) but they had the scope and the room to do both. (Not that I was ever given the opportunity here, except a couple of times in very limited circumstances.)  There's something even a little ridiculous about being a theatre critic or reviewer here.

On the other hand, I never would have wanted to be, say, the lead reviewer for the New York Times.  I knew Frank Rich before he became that, and talked with him about it while he was doing it.  He was philosophical about the effects of his reviews, but the alleged power to close a show (which he disputed he really had, but others claimed his reviews did to such an extent that it became conventional wisdom) is not something I ever would have wanted.

The career that was closer to my comfort zone was that of Frank Rich's colleague, Mel Gussow.  He was the second-string critic for the Times for many years.  He didn't get the big Broadway shows.  He either wrote about off and off-off Broadway shows, or did features and interviews connected with some big productions.  He interviewed Tom Stoppard (that quote comes from one of his), Edward Albee, Pinter, Samuel Beckett and others, and published book-length collections of these interviews with several of them, over years and decades.  In the process he got to know them, and they got to know him.

He wrote for the Times for 35 years, and became a valued part of the international theatrical and literary communities. After his death in 2005 he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.   It was a modest career and yet a capacious one, and I admire it.

The Songs of Cole Porter

In connection with the Humboldt State University production of Kiss Me, Kate (October 2015), I researched and wrote background stories that seem appropriate for the archives at this site.  There's even more at HSU Stage and HSU Music, indexed under Kiss, Me Kate on both sites.

An aside 10/18: By one of those flashes of serendipity that's become a familiar part of immersing myself in a particular subject, on the night after seeing the premiere of the HSU production of Kiss Me, Kate I happened to see a completely unrelated old movie, or so it seemed.  It was the 1982 Evil Under the Sun, based on an Agatha Christie novel. (It's one of the Peter Ustinov ones.)  But the composer credited with the score was none other than Cole Porter.  It took place at a seaside hotel, and when late in the film Hercule Poirot examines the guest book, the names of Cole Porter and "Fred and Adele" (Fred Astaire and his sister, who were dancing partners on Broadway for years) could be seen. The story is set in about 1938, and thanks to my research into Mr. Porter, I could appreciate that the particular Cole Porter music used--mostly "Night and Day"--first heard in one of those Fred and Adele Broadway shows--"You're the Top," "Anything Goes" and "Begin the Beguine"were all written in the 1930s, before 1938, and so were historically accurate.   

Songs from Kiss Me, Kate like “Another Op’nin', Another Show,” “From This Moment On,” “Too Darn Hot” and others have had lives of their own, but one notable feature of Cole Porter tunes is that they nearly all were introduced in Broadway shows or Hollywood movies, sung by Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Jimmy Durante, Mary Martin, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, among others.

 But his tunes (including “Don’t Fence Me In,” “I Love Paris,” “Night and Day,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “True Love” as well as “Begin the Beguine,” “Let’s Do It,” “Anything Goes” and “You’re the Top”) were kept alive through recording and reinterpretations by several generations of singers.

These range from Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald through Elvis Presley, George Harrison, Natalie Cole, Elton John, Carly Simon and Celine Dion to U2, Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello, K.D. Laing, Alanis Morisette, Sheryl Crow and Diana Krall. Lady Gaga has recorded several Porter songs, and calls him one of her favorite composers.

Fred Astaire, Porter, Eleanor Powell
on set of Broadway Melody of 1940

Another notable feature of Cole Porter’s songs was that he wrote both lyrics and music. Along with Irving Berlin (Porter’s lifelong friend and supporter, who got him his first Broadway assignments), Cole Porter is exceptional among songwriters of his era in this regard.

 So while his lyrics are legendary, his music is strong enough to be recorded on its own, by big bands and jazz instrumentalists including Artie Shaw (who plucked “Begin the Beguine” out of a forgotten show and made it famous), Benny Goodman, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley and Charlie Parker.

 Though Porter wrote songs or parts of songs and kept them “in the drawer” for possible future use, he tended to write pretty much to order for specific shows. This was especially true for Kiss Me, Kate, since it was his first show to integrate the songs so completely with the story.

original 1948 Broadway cast of Kiss Me, Kate

He could write quickly, as the four day weekend when he wrote three of the songs in this show, including “Another Op’nin’, Another Show.”

  But there was some trial and error involved.When the choreographer complained about one particular song, he dropped it and substituted “Too Darn Hot,” which the choreographer immediately loved because he could see it as a dance. Harold Lang, who played Bill/Lucentio in the original production, complained that his part wasn’t big enough and he didn’t even have a song. Porter wrote “Bianca” for him, pretty much on the spot, with cast members shouting out rhymes for "Bianca."

 Cole Porter wrote 23 to 25 songs for the show. Some were cut in rehearsals, but 17 remained. Kiss Me, Kate was so successful in its Philadelphia tryouts that no further songs were cut. In fact, a couple of choruses of “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” that had been dropped were added back.

Porter & Shakespeare

 Two of the songs in Kiss Me, Kate include lyrics by Shakespeare as well as Cole Porter: "I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua” and “I Am Ashamed Women Are So Simple.” And despite the show’s title—Kiss Me, Kate—sounding like a snappy modernization, Petruchio actually speaks those words several times in The Taming of the Shrew. 

 Even though Porter had his doubts that a musical built around a Shakespeare play would attract Broadway theatregoers (something that potential backers also doubted), he seems to have found a kindred spirit in one aspect of the Bard’s comic writing: his use of wordplay, especially double entendres with sexual innuendo.

 Cole Porter was a past master of this himself, and it’s evident in this show in “Too Darn Hot” and “Always True to You in My Fashion,” for example. But Porter made the connection explicit in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” when he playfully turned titles of Shakespeare’s plays into sexual banter.

Song Lore

 There are stories about many of the songs, and they may even be true. 

“Wunderbar”: When Kiss Me, Kate was in early stages of preparation, the leading candidate to play the lead role of Lilli/Kate was opera star Jarmila Novotna. She was a social friend of Porter’s and one evening she brought a pianist with her to his apartment, who specialized in playing Viennese waltzes. When he finished she kept crying “Wunderbar! Wunderbar!” (“Wonderful!") The song by that title in the show is also a waltz.

"I Hate Men”: Several cast members told Patricia Morison, who ended up playing Lilli/Kate (see Kiss Me, Kate Meets Cinderella) that this song would embarrass her. It wasn’t going over in rehearsals. She mentioned her own misgivings to Porter, who remembered an operetta he’d seen in which the singer had emphasized a line by pounding his fist on a table. He suggested that she slam the metal tankard she was carrying. The effect worked so well that it was further emphasized by having her bang the tankard down on a couple of metal trays to make more noise. The song became a show-stopper.

 “Always True to You in My Fashion:” Cole Porter had that phrase of the title in his head but he couldn’t remember the source. The show’s writers, Bella and Sam Spewack, told him it was from a poem by Ernest Dowson, a late 19th century English poet and contemporary of Oscar Wilde who also contributed the phrase, “the days of wine and roses.” Porter’s song doesn’t bear much resemblance to this poem except for that repeated line of the title.

“Brush Up Your Shakespeare": Bella and Sam Spewack, who had worked with Porter before, were writing the script (“the book”) of Kiss Me, Kate. But at some point in creating this story about a couple having conflicts that bleed into the conflicts of the couple they are playing on stage, Bella and Sam themselves split up when Sam ran off with a ballerina.

 They’d split before, and would get back together again this time as well, but for awhile, Bella didn’t want to have anything to do with Sam. Sam’s major contribution to the story was the gangster subplot, and Bella was determined that it remain a small subplot, without a song involved.

 Unfortunately, Cole Porter came up with “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” for the two comic gangsters. When Bella recognized its quality—and guessed correctly that it would also be a show-stopper—she dropped her objections.

 “So In Love:” A song that Cole Porter said he’d intended for a movie musical, but was persuaded to use in Kiss Me, Kate. It was subsequently became a top 20 hit for Patti Page, Gordon McRae, Dinah Shore and Bing Crosby—all in the same year of 1949. More recently it’s been recorded by K.D. Laing.

Ann Miller in 1953 movie version

"From This Moment On":  It was common for songwriters to lift songs from other shows (especially those that didn’t do so well) but Kiss Me, Kate had a unique variation of this.

 The play itself had finished its run after two years, and a Hollywood film version was being prepared. At the same time, Porter had written songs for another Broadway show that had personnel problems, with the director being replaced. The new director threw out one of Porter’s songs, so it was never heard.

 But when the Kiss Me, Kate film producers asked Porter for another song, he gave them this rejected one. It was “From This Moment On,” now one of Porter’s all-time classics. This song was then included in the 1999 Broadway stage revival, and it’s been in Kiss Me, Kate ever since.

 “We Shall Never Be Younger:” This song was one of those cut from Kiss Me, Kate (because, according to Porter biographer William McBrien, “it reduced the audience to tears,” presumably at the wrong time.) It never made it into another show, nor was it published in Porter’s lifetime. But it, too, has had a life since, included in Porter songbooks and recorded by Bobby Short.

Cole Porter

“In a way no other songs of the period quite did,” wrote journalist Walter Clemons, “Porter’s created a world.”

 But the man who personified continental elegance and Manhattan sophistication grew up in a small Indiana town on the banks of the Wabash River. Its only distinguishing feature was as the winter home for a circus, and it was watching circus acts rehearse for the next season that young Cole got his first taste of show business.

 His maternal grandfather had made a fortune, starting with a dry goods business supplying miners during the California Gold Rush. His mother, Katie Cole, was born in Brandy City in Sierra County, now a ghost town.

His grandfather was determined that Cole would be a businessman, but his mother supported his artistic expressions. Cole went to Yale where he wrote over 100 songs and was the center of most musical and theatrical activity.

 His grandfather insisted he go on to law school, but after Porter’s disastrous first semester, the Dean of the Harvard law school himself suggested Cole pursue songwriting, and sent him over to the Harvard School of Music.

 He continued his musical studies in Paris, where he met and married another American, Linda Lee (a descendant of Robert E. Lee.) Though Cole Porter was actively gay and this marriage was in part a cover in an intolerant time, he and Linda remained devoted to each other until her death. He relied on her judgment for every song. Said Saint Subber, producer of Kiss Me, Kate, “Linda was the air that made his sails move.”

Linda Porter

They were in Paris in the 1920s, among notable American expatriates in the unique artistic ferment of this time and place. One summer the Porters rented a seaside chateau at Cap d’Antibes, an unheard of place to spend the hot months. They invited Porter’s Yale friend Gerald Murphy and his wife to join them for two weeks.

The Murphys loved the place, and returned for many summers afterwards, bringing with them such friends as Picasso, Stravinsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Eric Satie. The Murphys (celebrated in Calvin Tomkins’ book, Living Well Is The Best Revenge) essentially created the Riviera. But Cole Porter had discovered it.

 In 1923 Murphy and Porter collaborated on an American ballet to be performed as a curtain-raiser for La Creation du Monde, a ballet by French composer Darius Milhaud. Porter wrote the score, a “witty parody of the piano music played in silent-movie theaters” (according to Calvin Tomkins) while Murphy wrote the story and painted “a striking backdrop, which was a parody of the Hearst newspapers of the day.”

 Murphy also helped Porter’s musical education. He arranged with Jimmy Durante’s drummer to send him the latest American jazz records every month, and he knew and sang still obscure American folk songs and spirituals.

The Murphys and Porters in Venice 1923

 Throughout his life Porter loved to travel around the world. He absorbed the local music wherever he went, and made use of it in his songs. In this era, if you wanted the world’s music, you mostly had to go and find it.

 Porter’s ballet score and his songs for various theatrical events won the enthusiasm of the artistic community and wealthy sophisticates in Paris and New York, but they were not mainstream enough for Broadway in the 1920s.

 Then popular tastes caught up to him in a big way in the 30s. He got his first Broadway revues thanks to recommendations by Irving Berlin, and a string of hit shows followed, notably the enduring classic Anything Goes.

 He transitioned to Hollywood with the star of one of his Broadway shows, Fred Astaire. Porter alternated between Broadway and Hollywood, often doing one show and one movie a year. His movie work continued into the 1950s.

 A performer friend described him as “kind, gentle, very elegant.” A journalist called him “The Indiana lad with the Buddha gaze.” He lived in luxury in a huge apartment in Manhattan’s Waldorf Towers with his two cats, Anything and Goes.

 But in the mid 1940s he’d hit a dry spell. Though it had been nearly 10 years since a riding accident crushed his legs, he was still in near constant pain. He saw that musical theatre was changing, and he wondered if he could change with it.

 Then he was presented with an idea for a Broadway musical based on, of all things, a play by Shakespeare. Kiss Me, Kate became his biggest hit and as a complete show, his most enduring success.

By this time, Cole Porter was deeply involved in all aspects of his Broadway productions--he raised money, participated in casting, attended rehearsals and largely staged the show.  This makes the success of  Kiss Me, Kate even more the success of Cole Porter.

Kiss Me, Kate Meets Cinderella

Patricia Morison in Hollywood

What would a hit musical be without a Cinderella story? In this case it wasn’t in the plot but in the original production.

 Cole Porter often wrote songs with the vocal range of the actor/singer in mind. But he started writing for Kiss Me, Kate before all the roles were cast, especially the female lead, the characters of Lilli and Kate.

 In the early stages, opera star Jarmilla Novotna was the likely choice. But eventually she couldn't commit to the show. Cole Porter offered the role to another operatic singer and actor, Lily Pons, and considered yet another opera singer, Dorothy Kirsten. Pons couldn't do it, and Kirsten wasn't interested.

 So Porter found himself without a leading lady. The show’s director suggested an unknown: Patricia Morison, not an opera singer or a professional singer of any kind. She was a working movie actress in supporting roles, from B pictures (Queen of the Amazons) to a cut above that. She has the distinction of performing in the last film of three popular series: the Thin Man, the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan and the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes.

 Though she sang for soldiers on USO tours and at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II, she hadn’t sung a note in the movies. Cole Porter invited her to sing for him at his house in Hollywood. Her agent told her it wasn’t for any particular role, and she did it just for the contact and the experience. But according to Porter, as soon as she walked in he knew she was the one—if she could sing.

He accompanied her on piano, and discovered, yes, she could.

 After she’d taken lessons to strengthen her voice, worked on some of the show's songs and brushed up her Shakespeare, Porter was even more convinced. He believed that overnight she might become “a great new star.”

 But the producers were still considering other possibilities, and the writers had to be consulted. Unfortunately they were all in New York, and Patricia couldn’t afford the plane fare to go meet them. Then out of the blue she was invited to sing at a Bob Hope USO reunion concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The producers and writer Bella Sprewack were in the audience, and they all were enthusiastic. Patricia Morison got the role as Lilli Vanessi.

She was an immediate success. At the opening night party, after the rave reviews came in, she told everyone that she felt Cole Porter “has just lifted me out of my pumpkin coach.” It was a Cinderella story for real.

After 1,077 performances on Broadway, Patricia Morison starred in the London production for another 400 performances. In the backstory she created for Lilli, Morison used her own life--disillusioned with Hollywood, seeking redemption through a hit stage play.

 Morison had another success in the original production of The King and I, both on Broadway and on its national tour. She subsequently sang in many touring musicals, and performed her starring role in Kiss Me, Kate many times, including in a television movie in 1964, onstage in Seattle in 1965 and for the last time, in Birmingham, England in 1978—30 years after her Broadway opening.

Patricia Morison turned 100 earlier this year [2015], and is the last surviving member of the original cast of Kiss Me, Kate. She lives in southern California.