I promised to continue my account of the way our lives have been infused with theater experiences at every stage. Before I move on to our extended – and happy – years in Houston and Chicago, let me stay in New Hampshire a bit longer to add something important that I forgot to include last week.
For six years, I was the teaching principal in a small NH town. Many of my parents worked in a paper mill that was the driver of the town’s economy. Don’t get the wrong picture. Unlike some paper mill towns I’ve driven through in upstate NY whose smell greeted you several miles before your arrival, this mill was environmentally attuned and its employees were unionized.
The residents were hard-working folk; theater did not play a prominent role in their lives – with one exception. I inherited a long-standing tradition of the school performing a play in the town hall every year. So, abracadabra, I was temporarily transformed into a producer/director for each year’s extravaganza. Good scripts for middle schoolers were hard to come by, but we managed to salvage from the junk pile adaptations of Tom Sawyer, Androcles and the Lion, Peter Pan and a short story by Tolstoy called How Much Land Does a Man Need? (I bet you can guess at the answer to that question.)
The town hall, shall we say, showed its age, but it had the only honest-to-goodness stage, which dominated one end of the well-used basketball court. There was a tattered curtain to punctuate the start and finish of scenes and a powerful spotlight mounted in the balcony that we used promiscuously; it was our only toy. The sets were painted on flats that were precariously balanced and sometimes gave way at inopportune moments.
I knew nothing about stagecraft, but I knew my kids; that enabled me to cast the shows in ways that maximized the chances of success under the leadership of someone (me) flying by the seat of his proverbial pants. Fortunately, I got some help from people in the towns nearby who were more seasoned practitioners than I, so show nights were always successful, with every seat on the gym floor filled. I learned a lot and added another feather to my theater cap – audience member, actor and producer/director.
I have to mention one moment that marked the pinnacle of my staging prowess. The challenge of Peter Pan is that characters fly. In professional productions this is achieved by using harnesses and overhead wires, but there was no way we could do that safely in our rickety town hall. Instead, we resorted to the use of strobe lights which, at least from my vantage point, sort of created the illusion of flight. All the actors went home in one piece.
Houston was the home of one nationally known theater company, The Alley Theater, to which we immediately subscribed, and several small venues which did admirable work, one of which was the setting for another unexpected theater role for me and Rosellen. When we arrived in the city in the early 80’s, the Jewish community was actively involved in a movement to enable Jews in the Soviet Union to emigrate. Refuseniks, as they were called, paid a heavy price for declaring their desire to leave. A local organization called Houston Action for Soviet Jewry (HASJ) engaged in lobbying in their behalf and organized pilgrimages to Russia. Houstonians met secretly with Refuseniks to deliver items ranging from Jewish texts to clothing and medications unavailable to them in the homeland they desperately wished to leave. Rosellen participated in one of those trips and returned with stories of cloak and dagger rendezvous with Refuseniks who often suffered serious consequences for meeting with Westerners.
Some members of HASJ also hired me and Rosellen to write a play, a docudrama in today’s lingo, about the long history of antisemitism in Russia. They even paid for a graduate student to assist us with the formidable research we needed access to. The result was a weekend of performances at one of those valiant small theater companies, whose cast members were, in effect, volunteering huge chunks of rehearsal and performance time, for which they were compensated ten dollars per night. It was a heady experience, which completed a kind of theater hat trick for us – audience, actor, producer/director and, finally playwright. Somewhere in our mountains of paper there must be a copy of that script, which, mercifully, should probably remain buried.
One of the reasons for our move to Houston, was the opportunity for Adina to attend the nationally known High School for Performing and Visual Arts which, later, was the home of its most illustrious alumna, Beyonce. Theater pervaded our dinner conversations, and we suffered vicariously all of Adina’s casting disappointments. Her room became a one-person stage where she danced and sang to the large collection of cast recordings of Broadway musicals, a useful outlet for the frustrations of HSPVA’s casting. We did get to see some spectacular performances by the gifted performers who attended that unique school.
We arrived in Chicago in 1995 where we were confronted with an abundance of theatrical riches similar to what had overwhelmed us in New York. Chicago is an amazing theater city, with 80 or so small theaters orbiting around the biggies – Steppenwolf, The Goodman Theater, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater – as well as a number of touring companies attached to recent Broadway hits. There’s a huge pool of talent, as well as eager audiences in the city to populate all those theaters. It’s stunning to find yourself in a storefront theater with no more than 40 seats watching a totally professional, compelling production.
The challenge is to navigate through the choices without being overwhelmed by them. At times we have had subscriptions to five different theaters, some majors like Steppenwolf and Goodman and smaller companies with a record of success, like Steep, Timeline and Court, the latter of which sits in the middle between the biggies and the storefronts. We have subscriptions as a way of overcoming the inertia which might result in staying home if a show was not already on our calendar, its tickets paid for. Unfortunately, the heavy subscription commitments meant that we missed a lot of great productions in one of the many small houses, but something’s gotta give. The subscription commitments mean that we sometimes go home feeling let down by a show in the subscription package that misfired, but that hasn’t brought on a retreat from theater like the one I described in New York.
If you have any interest in Chicago theater, you must read Ensemble by our friend Mark Larson. It’s a superb oral history of small theater in Chicago, based on interview with hundreds of actors, directors and backstage staff which traces, among other things, the origins of many companies in college theater programs on campuses like DePaul, Northern Illinois and Illinois State and Northwestern, where groups of young people lived out their dreams by graduating together into small storefronts that are still thriving decades later. How lucky we are to have landed in this land of theatrical milk and honey.
There’s so much more that I don’t have room for:
- The origins of Rosellen’s best-selling novel, Before and After as a play, one act of which won a prize in Houston that won her a staged reading and feedback from theater professionals.
- Adina’s return to New Hampshire one summer late in her high school years, for an internship at the Peterborough Players, where she served as stage manager from one of that summer’s major productions.
- Our several theater-focused trips to London, which included a memorable evening performance of A Chorus Line at a time when the brand-new show was an impossible ticket to land. The loud opening notes shocked two sleepy touristed-out young children who awoke with a start and remained riveted through the entire show.
- Our many evenings around Columbia, Maryland where our musical theater lover daughter Elana, her husband Ben and granddaughter Dalia have arranged tickets to countless shows – school performances, community theaters, touring companies in Baltimore – which again amazed us at the wide distribution of talent throughout the country.
- Ben’s creation of a musical on the unlikely subject of hospice care, a concert version of which has been performed in many venues, including our own Chicago living room.
Elana said recently, “If I was rich, I would be at the theater every night.” I second that.
