Stage Voices

GINA SIGILLITO ON EDNA O’BRIEN

 

(The following selection is based on an essay on O’Brien from The Daughters of Maeve by Gina Sigillito—available from Citadel Press, Amazon link below.)

Exclusive

EDNA O’BRIEN

Writer, Playwright

1932-

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”—Edna O’Brien

 

Perhaps more than any other female writer in modern literature, Edna O’Brien has laid bare the dichotomy of the Irish character. With her fierce sensuality, deft, supple prose and lyrical voice, she has explored sex, feminism, love, and the female heart more adeptly than any author of her generation. Ironically, although she reminds of Ireland’s finest writers, she also remains its most tortured. At the age of twenty-eight, she published the Country Girls Trilogy, the novel that would introduce two girls looking for romance and adventure in Dublin. While it took the world by storm, it was banned in Edna’s own country for its “shocking” depiction of female sexuality. Like her literary hero James Joyce, Edna would be shunned by her own countrymen and be forced to leave Ireland to free her own voice. As she explains about her fellow writer, “ James Joyce lived all his life away and wrote obsessively and gloriously about Ireland. Although he had left Ireland bodily, he had not left it psychically, no more than I would say I have. I don't rule out living some of the time in Ireland, but it would be in a remote place, where I would have silence and privacy. It's important when writing to feel free, answerable to no one. The minute you feel you are answerable, you're throttled. You can't do it.”

Edna O'Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare on December 15, 1932 in the West of Ireland. It was a strict upbringing that would influence some of her greatest short stories. Although little is known about her parents, she often depicts a strict, somewhat joyless childhood in her works. Later, in her novels, A Country Girls Trilogy and short story collection, A Fanatic Heart, she recalls a tyrannical, alcoholic father and a kind, but passive mother.  In later interviews, she described her father’s drinking binges, which would last two or three days, and his crushing depressions that often frightened her as a child. She has often commented that her parents were opposed to any kind of literature. It was an opinion that would influence the rest of her work. As she recalls, “In a country so dedicated to the banning of books, it is amazing and maybe relevant that literature is still revered.”

Nevertheless, Edna was a gifted student and won a scholarship to the Convent of Mercy in Loughrea. She then moved to Dublin to escape the stifling countryside where she worked in a pharmacy, studied at the Pharmaceutical College at night, and lived with her best friend. As she recalls, “Dublin was where I veered towards and eventually I got there, arriving by train, the suitcase reinforced with twine, the head full of fancy; concerning my destiny as being that of a heroine who, upon being brought from Munster, faded into the city, for consumption has no pity for blue eyes and brown hair.”  During her time in Dublin, she fell in love with the works of James Joyce and Shakespeare and began writing pieces of her own that were published in the Irish Press. It is this time in Dublin that would become the inspiration for what many consider to be her greatest work, The Country Girls Trilogy.

A brilliant coming-of-age novel, Country Girls traces the life-long friendship of Baba Brennan and Cait Brady, two convent girls seeking adventure, love, and excitement in Dublin. In the novel, Cait escapes her repressive, backward town in the West of Ireland and works in a chemist shop. She also meets and falls in love with a married man named Eugene Galliard, a filmmaker and writer of Czech descent. By some coincidence, Edna met and married the Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler in 1954 in a “metamorphosis from child to bride,” who must have greatly inspired the character of Eugene in the novel.  Her devoutly Catholic parents were vehemently opposed to her marriage to Gebler, who was also Jewish. The two had a fraught relationship, and Gebler was jealous of his wife’s growing renown as a writer.  The couple had two sons and divorced ten years later in 1964.

In 1960, Edna published The Country Girls Trilogy, which was the first novel written by a female Irish author to depict women’s sexuality openly and honestly. As she recalls, “"The novel is autobiographical insofar as I was born and bred in the west of Ireland, educated at a convent, and was full of romantic yearnings, coupled with a sense of outrage."  Because of its frankness, it was banned in Ireland. And just like her idol, James Joyce she felt she had to leave her native country to freely express her voice as a writer. And like him, she wrote of nothing else.  During this time, Edna would also explore her passion for the theater with her first play, A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers. As Grace Eckley remarks in her biography, Edna O’Brien, “reviewers’ remarks on its performance in London also indicate the audience was not yet ready for the unpalatable feminine reality Miss O’Brien depicted.”

In 1971, Edna returned to the Ireland of her childhood in A Pagan Place, her homage to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Edna’s protagonist must deal with her burgeoning sexuality, her artistic drive, and the oppressive Catholicism that surrounds her, as seen in this passage.

You tried to whistle. Only men should whistle .The Blessed Virgin blushed when women whistled and likewise when women crossed their legs. It intrigues you thinking of the Blessed Virgin having to blush so frequently. The bird that had the most lifelike whistle was the curlew.

The novel echoes Joyce’s stream of consciousness style and sense of disillusionment, and remains one of Edna’s darkest and most poignant works. In 1976, she published Mother Ireland, a sensual and unrelenting memoir of her childhood in Ireland in which she writes, “To be on an island makes you realize that it's going to be harder to escape and that it will involve another birth, a further breach of waters.”  In 1984, Edna wrote A Fanatic Heart, a short story collection that revisited her life in the convent. In it we see all the brutality, oppression, and sometimes joy that she experienced. The short story “The Doll’ depicts the cruelty of the nuns and tells the story of one girl who is tortured by the sister who teaches her class. In “Sister Imelda” she recalls her love for a young nun who has just entered the convent. She also discloses some of the more bizarre aspects of convent life, where baths were considered “immoral” and the girls had to undress under their nightgowns in preservation of their modesty.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, Edna continued to pen award winning stories and plays about her native land. As she writes in her short story A Scandalous Woman, “I have always thought that ours was indeed a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women.”  She returned to her passion for the theater and wrote and produced, Virginia, in 1981, which explored the letters of Virginia Woolf and starred the formidable Maggie Smith. Premiering at the Public Theater in New York, the play was lauded for its portrayal of Virginia Woolf as more than just a feminist icon. O’Brien chose to explore Virginia’s romantic life and her eternal quest for love and her feelings of isolation and abandonment that stemmed from her fraught relationship with her father.  It was the perfect topic for Edna, whose own relationship with her father would color so much of her own work. It was also during this foray into theater they she encountered some of the challenges that plague female playwrights. “The problem is getting a play on. It's much harder for a woman," she says. "I'm all for young writers but I'm also for writers who don't have to be young. What should be judged is the merit of the work, not whether it's by a black, white, old, young, gay, androgynous or whatever writer. The rigidity by which things are judged in our cultural world irks me very much. I would write a political play, I would write about Darfur if I knew Darfur, but I don't."

(Read more next Wednesday.)

© 2007, 2010 by Gina Sigillito.  All rights reserved.

(View The Daughters of Maeve on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Maeve-Irish-Women-Changed/dp/0806527056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268836355&sr=8-1 )

LEONARD BERNSTEIN: DAUGHTER NINA RECALLS LIFE WITH A LEGEND

(Ginny Dougary's article appeared in the Times of London, 3/13.)

 

Leonard Bernstein: ‘charismatic, pompous - and a great father'

His daughter Nina tells Ginny Dougary about the joys and traumas of life with one of music’s greats

Had you been fortunate enough to be in the company of the most charismatic American conductor-composer- teacher-broadcaster of all time for long enough, it is likely that you would have heard this explosion at regular intervals in living rooms and auditoriums across the world: “That’s STEIN!” whenever someone affronted the late, great Leonard Bernstein by introducing him incorrectly as “BernSTEEN.”

His youngest child, Nina, now 48, is talking to me about her father, whose life and art is being celebrated all year at the Southbank Centre. It’s a tantalising and illuminating process attempting to channel such an exuberantly talented man through the women who were close to him (I also speak to Marin Alsop, the conductor, who was his protégée) but ultimately frustrating since everything you hear — good and bad — just makes you wish, even more, that you had met him.

(Read more)

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/classical/article7059407.ece

Visit Stage Voices blog for video: http://stagevoices.typepad.com/stage_voices/

IMOGEN STUBBS ON VANESSA REDGRAVE IN 'ORPHEUS DESCENDING'

(Stubbs’s article appeared in the Guardian, 3/7.)

Orpheus Descending

Haymarket 

In 1989 I saw Vanessa Redgrave in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending, directed by Peter Hall. I vaguely knew Vanessa as mother to Natasha and Joely. But I had never seen her act live. The boy – Jean-Marc Barr – was the reason I went; he had been in the film The Big Blue. I was smitten. Now I can't remember him at all.

Vanessa's character, Lady, had to have an Italian accent. Accents are not her forte (I had accent classes at Rada and was hot at spotting good or bad accents). This one was a mixture of Italian, Welsh and Pakistani. But as I sat there, I became totally caught up in her performance. At the end, she had been utterly broken. She sat on stage with one leg out – like a broken doll – diminished and defeated. That could have looked like a rehearsal idea but it was devastating. At the curtain call it felt inappropriate to clap.

(Read more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/mar/07/best-performance-imogen-stubbs

(The following clip is from the TV movie of ‘Orpheus Descending’ starring Redgrave.)

 

Visit Stage Voices blog:  http://stagevoices.typepad.com/stage_voices/

CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE REMEMBRANCES: JOYCE E. HENRY ON O’NEILL’S ‘ICEMAN’ (Part V)

Exclusive

 

RE-PRODUCING 'THE ICEMAN'

 

Joyce E. Henry, Ph.D. 

 

There were other unwelcome visitors to my lobby box office besides the copulating rats.  From time to time Bowery residents would stop in, looking for a handout.  At showtime, with customers waiting for the theater to open, their presence was a tad embarrassing, and drove Ted Mann crazy.  He would tell them in no uncertain terms to “Get Out!” and instructed me to say the same.  And as a New Yorker, I could be as callous as he.

 

But there was one fellow who seemed to be a little different.  He would not come right before the show started, but, perhaps, in the middle of the afternoon.  He was a giant of a man, with a big head surrounded by a wisp of white hair; his cheeks were ruddy and his eyes were blue.  I fancied he might have been a sailor—he looked as though he belonged on a ship. There was no question he was looking for a handout, though, but he had the decency or tact not to approach customers—just me.  My finances were stretched thin as it was, but I could usually find a quarter or so to send him on his way with “Many thanks” and a “God bless you” or two.

 

His visits came almost weekly, and I grew quite fond of him.  I even fantasized that perhaps I should offer him shelter—take him home to my Village apartment, give him a bowl of soup and a shower, and even help him to find a job.  Or maybe he could sleep on my pull-out sofa.  I didn’t tell Ted, of course, who would have thought me certifiable.

 

And then one day I realized that I hadn’t seen the bum for a while.  A couple of weeks went by, a month, two, and even three months.  I thought maybe he’d become ill, or even died, and I felt a little guilty that I hadn’t done something for him.  Then my schedule changed, and I pretty much forgot about the rehab plans.  One Sunday afternoon, when I ordinarily didn’t work, I was organizing the evening’s reservations, and I saw a familiar figure pass the glass entrance doors. 

 

He passed the door, then apparently stopped, turned back, looked, and shouted in the most thrilled voice, “Yeee-re Heere!”  They could have heard him down in Washington Square.

 

He came in, of course, as I was searching for some coins in my purse.  He looked good; he had on a red checked shirt and his face was tanned and healthy.  We had a fond

reunion, and he gave me a hug—a bear hug, I must say.

 

I found out later, from Timmy, the cop on the beat, that fellows of his ilk take off for Florida when it gets too cold.  They hitchhike down, sleep on the beach, and do their panhandling there.  But they’re New Yorkers at heart, and when the weather warms

up, they’re back in the Bowery.  So my friend was doing quite well for himself—he’d spent the winter months in Florida, while I froze in New York City!

 

(This is the final segment of Joyce Henry's articles on Circle in the Square.)  

© 2010 by Joyce E. Henry.  All rights reserved.   

 

(A graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse, Joyce E. Henry acted off-Broadway and in regional theaters, managed a dozen off-Broadway shows, wrote A Matter of Conscience, a play about Fanny Kemble, directed the theater program at Ursinus College, and edited five books, including One on One:  The Best Women’s Monologues for the 21^st Century; One on One: The Best Men’s Monologues for the 21^st Century; and Duo!:  The Best Scenes for Two for the 21^st Century—all from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. For three years or so in the late ‘50s, during the runs of Iceman, Children of Darkness, and Our Town, she worked at Circle in the Square.)

 

(Read Theodore Mann’s memoir, Journeys in the Night, also from Applause. Visit his Web site for the book: http://www.journeysinthenight.com/index.htm.) 

 

Visit Stage Voices blog: http://stagevoices.typepad.com/stage_voices/

DAVID SWANSON ON ‘PROPHECY’ BY KAREN MALPEDE

The Horror of War on Stage
By David Swanson
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/50005/

"Prophecy" is the title of a new play by Karen Malpede, and I'm here to attempt the unamerican task of telling you to see it without telling you it's a comedy.  In fact, I'm going to confess that I had to take a break from it and recover before I could write about it.  I felt like I'd taken a blow with an enormous sledge hammer, even though I knew that a whole orchestra of smaller instruments had produced what I was feeling. 

It was not a bad feeling, not an undesirable feeling.  The play is a thing of beauty, and not all beauty fits into that Hollywood sensation of wouldn't-such-a-thing-be-sweet-but-I-bet-they're-divorced-in-a-year-and-I-shouldn't-have-had-that-last-gallon-of-coke. 

There was also comfort in the fact that someone had written this play and understood the grief that we all know is real even when we avoid it.  And I merely read the play.  If a group of actors can successfully perform something with this much emotional intensity (far more just in reading it than in any antiwar movie I've seen), I think there will be more comfort in that, and in the solidarity of feeling in the audience, many of whose members will probably go home without imagining the play to be at all political.

And yet there is something unavoidably political in depicting soul shattering grief when George W. Bush is off golfing and the root cause of masses of people enduring the misery performed here now bears the brand name of a peace prize laureate.  That thought may occur to people the day after they see this play.  It won't hit them while they're in it.  Politics is off-stage.  Wars are off-stage.  Violence is off-stage.  And the unfairness of war to all variety of parties, from those creating it, to those hit by it, to those trying to undo it, to those trying to avoid it, is built into this drama in a manner that reminds me of how James Baldwin dealt with the unfairness of racism.

For perhaps the first third of the play, war is hardly even discussed.  The early scenes are relatively calm as we enter into the lives of characters, some young, and some old enough to have lived more than once, to have gone through stages and relationships that -- it turns out -- interacted tragically with more than one insane distant war for empire.  By the time you're two-thirds into the play, however, these wars have come exploding into these people's lives from distant lands, from decades past, and from the present, including through newly revealed understandings for the audience and the characters of what's already happened in the early scenes, and a new understanding for some of the characters of what happened much earlier in their lives.

These explosions take the form of horror, regret, jealousy, resentment, shame, fear, beauty, compassion, and perseverance.  And they leave the stage covered with two feet of blood although we never see a drop.

I look forward to seeing this performed in person in New York, where it is being staged from May 27 to June 20 with a cast of award-winning actors that may just be up to it.  The play will be performed Tuesdays through Sundays at 7:30 p.m. with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m. at Theater Three Collaborative, Inc., East 4th Street Theater (84 East 4th Street, New York, NY): http://www.theaterthreecollaborative.org 

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press.  You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book. 

To receive updates from After Downing Street register at 

http://afterdowningstreet.org/user/register

Visit Stage Voices blog: http://stagevoices.typepad.com/stage_voices/

CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE REMEMBRANCES: JOYCE E. HENRY ON O’NEILL’S ‘ICEMAN’ (Part IV)

RE-PRODUCING 'THE ICEMAN'

 

Joyce E. Henry, Ph.D. 

 

 

Among the actors, there were several who would remain in the public eye: Peter Falk, Leo Penn, George Segal, William Daniels, and Henderson Forsythe.  There was a German who had worked with Reinhardt and a middle-aged fat man who had never been on the professional stage before.  Jason Robards, of course, was the star.  Often I went up into the theatre just to watch his first entrance, which was always different, with new tricks, new ad libs to the actors, something special for each of the assembled denizens of Harry Hope's establishment.  And with his entrance the level of excitement leaped high.

 

Another performance not so frequently described was that of Farrell Pelly as Harry Hope.  Farrell was a sweet little Irishman, who had once acted for Lady Gregory, whom O'Neill would certainly have felt an affinity with.  Farrell introduced me to Callard & Bowser toffees, and many times stuck one of those small rectangular cartons into my desk drawer with a twinkle and a grin.  He was 72 at the time--we knew that because he was collecting social security--but he guarded his age jealously and once asked Jose if he should powder his hair to look older.  Since the fringe of hair that he had was snow white, the question was moot.  Farrell was usually the first actor to arrive for the 7:30 performance.  He would stand at my desk, watch the others come in, share a story, and then disappear into the dressing room.  One night during the week between Christmas and New Year's he arrived somewhat later than usual, and seemed a little unsteady.  I was working hard trying to sell every seat in the house, canceling late reservations, shifting tickets, dealing with irate customers, and I breathed a sign of relief when the performance began and the ticket drawer was empty.  Five minutes or so into the performance Mike Murray, the stage manager, came down to the box office.  "Farrell's drunk," he said.  "I'm calling Jose."  I went up to the auditorium to watch.  Sure enough.  Peter Falk and the actors were covering for him, but his performance was wild, and, of course, there was no understudy.  Truthfully, I don't remember whether Jose or Ted arrived, or both, but one of them went out on stage and gave the lie to the audience that an actor who came on later in the show--the implication was that it was Jason--had been in an auto accident and, therefore, the management was forced to cancel the performance and refund the money or provide tickets for another show.  Ted and I serviced the public for the next hour, and Jose took Farrell home.  Although he could have been brought up on charges with Equity, no one was angry;  Farrell had no family, lived alone in a rooming house on 14th Street, and it was Christmas. We understood.

(Read more next week.)  

© 2010 by Joyce E. Henry.  All rights reserved.   

(A graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse, Joyce E. Henry acted, off-Broadway and in regional theaters, managed a dozen off-Broadway shows, wrote A Matter of Conscience, a play about Fanny Kemble, directed the theater program at Ursinus College, and edited five books, including One on One:  The Best Women’s Monologues for the 21^st Century; One on One, The Best Men’s Monologues for the 21^st Century; and Duo!:  The Best Scenes for Two for the 21^st Century—all from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. For three years or so in the late ‘50s, during the runs of Iceman, Children of Darkness, and Our Town, she worked at Circle in the Square.)

(Read Theodore Mann’s memoir, Journeys in the Night, also from Applause.)

Visit Stage Voices blog: http://stagevoices.typepad.com/stage_voices/

 

THOMAS KILROY: HOW 'SPRING AWAKENING' BECAME 'CHRIST DELIVER US'

(Kilroy's article appeared in the Irish Times, 2/13.)

Adaptation: a privileged conversation with a dead author

Some people have misgivings about adaptations, but playwrights have always been inspired by the works of their predecessors, just as my play, ‘Christ Deliver Us!’, which draws on my growing up in 1950s Ireland, is deeply indebted to Wedekind’s ‘Spring Awakening’

SOME PEOPLE ARE bothered by adaptations. They say: what’s wrong with the original? Why make changes to it? Indeed, where do you get the authority to do so?

The first thing to be said about an adaptation is that, no matter how faithful it may be to the original, it and the original are always two very different, distinct works, sometimes profoundly so. A second point worth making is that the history of European theatre, like that of other performing arts, such as music, both orchestral and operatic, is a history of adaptation. Starting with Greek theatre and down to our own times there has been this endless process of adaptation, variation, imitation and recycling of other material.

(Read more)

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/0213/1224264323239.html

Visit Stage Voices blog: http://stagevoices.typepad.com/stage_voices/

CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE REMEMBRANCES: JOYCE E. HENRY ON O’NEILL’S ‘ICEMAN’ (Part III)

RE-PRODUCING 'THE ICEMAN'

 

Joyce E. Henry, Ph.D.  

We paid the union electrician $50.00 a week to stay away (a young actor handled the lights for $5.00).  We paid $125.00 monthly to a mysterious person in City Hall who was supposed to keep us out of trouble.  We paid the Building Inspector--that is, Ted did, in the Men's Room, I was never quite certain of the figure--and I paid Timmy, the Irish cop on the beat, $2.00 per week, which he supposedly spread around the station house.  He earned his money, though; whenever I had an unruly patron or visiting Bowery inhabitant, a loud shriek in the Square would bring Timmy on the run.

In addition, the building always needed something.  Seats collapsed depositing patrons on the floor.  Fuses blew, requiring a hunt of hours for the offending source.  When it snowed the roof leaked, usually onto the most expensive seats.  We went out on the roof and shoveled snow.  "The first rule of the off-Broadway theatre is know your drains," said Ted.  The toilet in the ladies rest room clogged.  The plumber characterized it as a "prima donna.  Sometime she does and sometimes she don’t.”

To Ted, the Circle in the Square was no temple of the arts, and once, at the height of an artistic argument with Jose over the religious overtones in Iceman, he shouted in total frustration, “It’s not that I believe in Jesus Christ or don’t believe in Jesus Christ!  All I want is my own little business that I can operate myself.”

One afternoon in the fall, when the leaves were swirling around Sheridan Square, I was sitting at my box-office desk in the lobby organizing reservations, when my eye was caught by movement on the rug in front of me.  Two little squirrels were chasing each other back and forth across the lobby.  “Oh, aren’t they cute!” I thought, as I paused to watch them. 

Then I saw—Yikes!  No bushy tails!  Now I don’t think I’d ever seen a live rat before, in fact, I don’t think I’d ever seen a dead one, but I didn’t need a lot of education—and totally on female instinct (why is it that women always take the high ground?) I levitated to the top of the desk and screamed:  “Ted!”  Ted!  Get the exterminator!  Teeddddd!  Get the exterminator!” He didn’t need the intercom to hear the message. 

Meanwhile, the rats had entered into the ladies’ room, which was the first door on the right in front of my desk.  It was a small space; there were two stalls, and always a line of women during intermission.  What if---?

Ted, a good deal cooler than I was, appeared and indicated that I was being immature (he wasn’t impressed with Box Office divas) and stayed for a while, but when the exterminator arrived, he left. 

Still standing on top of the desk, I explained to the exterminator, “There are two rats in there!  You have to get them out!  Kill them!” 

“How big were they?”  He asked with a shrug, and I realized that he thought I was screaming about a couple of mice.

“I thought they were squirrels!  But they were rats!  RATS!  And we have a show tonight!”

“Okay, lady, okay.”  He was not convinced, but he went into the ladies room for about thirty seconds, then returned rather hastily.   

“Yup.  They’re rats, all right.”

“Did you kill them?”

“Lady, I ain’t gonna take on two cornered rats.  No way!   They’re dangerous!”

“But you’ve got to get them out of there!  We have a show tonight!”

“I left poison down.  You won’t see them again.”

Poison?  You left poison?  That did not seem like a viable solution to me.  The rodents might not see it, or might not eat it.  But the exterminator was not going to do one single thing more.  It was dangerous.  He was not going to confront two rats, leaving such a confrontation to the ladies at the theatre that night. 

I sat the next hour or two stiffly at my desk, waiting for a large rodent or two to appear staggering at my feet.  Then Ted appeared, Ted always with a solution. He put a large sign on the door to the Ladies Room saying, “Sorry, Temporarily out of Order,” so the ladies were left to their own devices during the three-and-a-half-hour show.  Well, there was the bar on the corner.

I was nervous about rodents for the next few days, but nothing happened.  However, the next week there was a disgusting smell up in the auditorium, and it took several members of the crew to disassemble the seats on the risers and remove a couple of carcasses. But the Ladies Room was back in operation.

(Read more next week.)  

© 2010 by Joyce E. Henry.  All rights reserved.   

(A graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse, Joyce E. Henry acted, off-Broadway and in regional theaters, managed a dozen off-Broadway shows, wrote A Matter of Conscience, a play about Fanny Kemble, directed the theater program at Ursinus College, and edited five books, including One on One:  The Best Women’s Monologues for the 21^st Century; One on One, The Best Men’s Monologues for the 21^st Century; and Duo!:  The Best Scenes for Two for the 21^st Century—all from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. For three years or so in the late ‘50s, during the runs of Iceman, Children of Darkness, and Our Town, she worked at Circle in the Square.)

(Read Theodore Mann’s memoir, Journeys in the Night, also from Applause.)

Visit Stage Voices blog: http://stagevoices.typepad.com/stage_voices/

ANTONY SHER: DISCOVERING THE REAL HENRIK IBSEN

 

(Sher's article appeared in the Guardian, 2/2.)

Confession time: I have ­always harboured a ­prejudice against Ibsen. I have thought he was too solemn for my taste, too sober, too glum. I believe that comedy must live alongside ­tragedy, as my two favourite ­playwrights – Shakespeare and ­Chekhov – prove.

Antony Sher: My quest to find Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen's plays are gloomy, solemn affairs, full of sad, thwarted lives. Or so I thought – until I went on a voyage around Norway to find out what made the writer tick

But when I was offered the part of Dr Stockmann in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, and read the play, I found I couldn't put it down. Never mind the comedy/tragedy issue, this was like a thriller. In fact, Peter Benchley ­borrowed the plot for his bestseller, Jaws: a small coastal town is threatened with closure, except in Ibsen's version it's a health spa and the danger in the water is not a shark, but poisonous contamination. The man who has made this discovery, Dr Stockmann, finds himself in a battle against the mayor (his brother) and the rest of the town. I accepted the job with a feeling of ­excitement and curiosity. Would this be the moment I became ­converted to Ibsen?

(Read more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/feb/02/antony-sher-henrik-ibsen

Visit Stage Voices blog for video: http://stagevoices.typepad.com/stage_voices/

CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE REMEMBRANCES: JOYCE E. HENRY ON O’NEILL’S ‘ICEMAN’ (Part II)

EXCLUSIVE

RE-PRODUCING 'THE ICEMAN'

 

Joyce E. Henry, Ph.D. 

 

The lobby was a long, narrow hall space down a flight of stairs, and what pretended to be a box office was a simple desk open to the world with tickets and cash in a drawer.  The boy at the desk was the roommate of an old friend; as I greeted him, I noticed someone walk through the lobby, who stared somewhat curiously at me and then vanished.

“That’s Ted,” said the boy at the desk.

“Oh.”  I had barely seen him.  He’d come from somewhere so quietly and passed through so quickly I had no image remaining, but when the boy called out that I was there to see him, he suddenly materialized from a room, which seemed to run underneath the sidewalk (later, I recognized a dressing room).

“Let’s go upstairs to my office, “he said.  “Follow me.”  I pattered after him as he went through the lobby doors onto the street, with the familiar O’Neill head looming on the production sign above, through a side entrance, up a flight of broken-down stairs, down a long dimly lit corridor, and, finally, into his “office.”

The Circle in the Square building, probably dating from the 1870s, might have been an elegant brownstone, and the second floor rooms once bedrooms.  But 80 years of service as a restaurant, speakeasy, nightclub, and now theatre, had effectively obscured any opulence it might have had.  Ted’s office, a good-sized square room with a boarded-up fireplace, had two large windows overlooking the Square.  The floor slanted, cracked, and rotted.  Paint and plaster peeled off the walls.  Suspended by a large cord from the once-elegant ceiling, hung a naked, glaring light bulb.

Ted’s desk was the only piece of furniture, littered with papers, scripts, ornaments, and dirt.  When I became his assistant, I worked on one side of the desk, he on the other.  At that first meeting he paced up and down, staring at me; he was of medium height, thinning black hair, enormous dark brown eyes—across the left cheek ran a scar.  Ted handled the finances, and within a few moments he informed me that he wanted only one person in the box office, instead of the six or seven would-be actors who worked part-time selling tickets.  There had been significant shortages of cash in the receipts—perhaps several thousand dollars a month—and to an off-Broadway house in the 1950s, that really meant the difference between an ongoing run and demise.  The accountant, Al Shedler, had suggested that too many people had their hands in the till, and that one person should be responsible.  Iceman was selling out; the boys—Ted, Jose, and Leigh—had just been given the rights to Long Day’s Journey—someone had to assume the day-to-day financial management of Iceman.

For some reason I took the job, although Ted was demanding a 60-hour week at the princely salary of $90.00 per week.  And it was not long before I realized that at least some of the shortages were occasioned by the producers themselves, who frequently dipped into the cash for $10.00 or $20.00 without leaving a chit.  Of course, it was also true that the previous occupants of the box office, often hard-pressed for money, resentful of the wages they were receiving, and tempted by what seemed like an easy fiddle had also skimmed a little here and there.  At first I worked on the box office, but, as the months passed, I became assistant to Ted, bookkeeper, secretary, rental agent of Circle Studios upstairs, and, at one point when Long Day’s Journey went to Paris, the nervous General Manager of The Iceman Cometh.

The common perception is, I think, that all a show needs is good reviews and the rest is gravy.  Not so.  Jose was, of course, the creative artist, and Iceman received superb reviews. Without Ted, however, Iceman might not have survived for a two-year run despite all its accolades--and O’Neill might not have been catapulted back into a revered status.  Even with good reviews--a show that closes after a month or two does not make a lasting impression—longevity was crucial.  There were unions threatening all sorts of difficulties, creditors suing for bills of five years back, banks calling about overdrawn accounts.  Iceman had an uncommonly large cast of nineteen, plus a stage manager, electrician, house manager, box-office people, ushers, a concession-stand person, a press agent, and three producers.  With a 200-seat house, and tickets at $2.00, $3.00, and $4.00, we had to sell out to break even, and there was no endowment or foundation helping.  Many a Friday I quietly counseled actors not to cash their checks until Monday, knowing the payroll could only be met with the receipts from Saturday’s and Sunday’s performances.  Many a time, I sweet-talked creditors, begging an extension of a week or two on a bill.

There were payoffs to be made—

(Read more next week.)  

© 2010 by Joyce E. Henry.  All rights reserved.   

(A graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse, Joyce E. Henry acted, off-Broadway and in regional theaters, managed a dozen off-Broadway shows, wrote A Matter of Conscience, a play about Fanny Kemble, directed the theater program at Ursinus College, and edited five books, including One on One:  The Best Women’s Monologues for the 21^st Century; One on One, The Best Men’s Monologues for the 21^st Century; and Duo!:  The Best Scenes for Two for the 21^st Century—all from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books.)

(Read Theodore Mann’s memoir, Journeys in the Night, also from Applause.)

Visit Stage Voices blog: http://stagevoices.typepad.com/stage_voices/