Arvin Brown

Arvin Brown currently works as a television director. He was artistic director of Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theatre for 30 years. He served as board president of TCG from 1972 to 1977.

Beginnings

My father was a hardware contractor furnishing hardware to tracts of houses that were being built in L.A. in that period. Also he had a retail hardware store where I had my first job.

The only contact with theatre I had at all was that I had an aunt by marriage, whose brother was a man named Jess Oppenheimer, who was the creator and producer of a great television show called I Love Lucy. So I was fascinated by the whole idea of making movies and stuff, and I hung out there a lot without any idea ever that I’d go into theatre or film. But I realize now, as my life has gone on, that maybe by osmosis I managed to get a certain amount of knowledge just from hanging around the studios.

On the Attraction of Theatre

I wanted to be a writer. That was always my dream. But by the time I graduated from Stanford, I was so disenchanted with my own writing that I thought I would never be the kind of writer I really wanted to be. I assumed then I would be an English professor. I went off to England on a fellowship for a year and deliberately tried to come up with a project that wouldn’t keep me in a library. So I made up this project about studying Shakespearean staging, and the real advantage of it was that it allowed me to spend my time going to the theatre. I’d loved the theatre all my life, but I had no idea there was any place in it for me.

Then, at Christmas time, I was asked to direct a one-act play. Of course I knew nothing about directing. So I happily said, "Yes, I’d be delighted." It was just a revelation to me. Literally an hour into it, I knew that that’s where everything had been heading, because in a way it called on all the same impulses that writing had called on, with some major differences. I am a true collaborator right to my blood and bone. The loneliness of writing was something that I really couldn’t stand. And when I discovered the rehearsal process, I thought, "My God, I’m creating a world; I’m losing the sense of time the way I always did when I wrote, but I’m surrounded by people doing it with me." That was the start of everything.

I was afraid to really trust that, because I’d only directed one little one-act play, and I was knowledgeable enough about theatre and film to know that this was a very chancy world to move into. So I left England at the end of that year, took the grant back at Harvard in English, and got about halfway through that year and realized that my life had been forged without my even being willing to acknowledge it.

I absolutely hated Harvard and, in retrospect, couldn’t have been happier that I hated it so much, because it made all my decisions for me. I mean, otherwise I could have drifted on for a couple of years thinking that that was what my life was meant to be. But instead I was convinced within three months that graduate life and the life of an English professor were not what I wanted.

I announced that I was leaving Harvard. I had no professional credentials of any kind, or experience, but I had all these heavyweight academic credentials, so I was being very practical and I decided the only thing I could do was go to Yale, because at least I know I’d be accepted and I would be able to learn something about the theatre. Because, again, I was basing this whole life decision on 10 minutes of stage action, you know.

So I went to Harvard and I told them that I was going to leave at the end of the year. I was going to stay and get my masters and then I was going to leave and go to Yale, which did not thrill anybody that I talked to. That’s what I did. So then I went to Yale and started at Yale Drama School.

On Nikos Psacharopoulos

Nikos Psacharopoulos was not only the professor of directing at the Yale Drama School, but the founder and artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which even back then was considered one of the very top venues for summer theatre in the country, and has gone on obviously with that reputation. Nikos was a wonderful teacher for me, because basically what he did was reinforce my instincts. He was very critical and he served as a critic of the finished result of anything I did. But he never tried to tell me that there was a way to direct. I think if he had, I would have rebelled against it, or I would have been so limited by it that I would have maybe lost my excitement about the potential of the medium. Instead, he made me feel that however I felt the need to direct was the way to direct, that everybody directed in a very specific individual style that came directly out of one’s own experience and psychology and temperament.

So he opened it up for me. I mean, he made it even more exciting. It didn’t work for some students, because some students really were trying to find the way to direct. They were paying their money and they wanted to walk out of there saying, "This is what you do with a crowd scene, this is where your actors should be if they’re playing a certain kind of emotional moment." They also could never find the defenses to weather some of his criticism, because it could be extremely personal. He never meant it personally. I honestly don’t believe that he did. But, you know, all that we do is personal. For me, I respected it. He reinforced everything I felt about this new avenue in my life.

Then I got hired by him. Every year he chose one student to go to Williamstown and be his personal assistant. That year it was me, and so that was my first job in the theatre. I mean, I think it paid something like $25 a week. My father was almost in tears when I told him what the salary was. But it was great, because it was horrendous. I mean, it was as tough a summer as I’ve ever known, and by the end of it, I thought, Well, if I’m still in the theatre after this summer, I was meant to be.

On Directing

People have the idea that the really successful directors are martinets–people who explode constantly and keep the actors in a state of tension–and this is what creates the excitement that gets good work. My convictions are the exact opposite. I believe that all good work comes out of relaxation and trust. All my life I’ve directed by trying to bring people together, to create an atmosphere in which one can expose oneself and feel safe. To me, that’s the joy of the work.

One of my jobs as a director when I read a play is to decide where I need to redress the balances a bit, not to go with what’s most immediately apparent. I mean, you don’t have to be enormously perceptive to realize that Long Day’s Journey into Night is a terrible saga of family entrapment and dysfunctional relationships and inchoate rage, and all kinds of difficult human emotions. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of humor and love in it. Because the one thing is so evident on the printed page, part of my job as the director is to try to find what the balancing colors are, where the affection, the vulnerability, the wit are made manifest.

I’ve said that theatre is an art toward which I feel a tremendous compulsion. Part of it is the sense of collaboration, the feeling of community, the feeling of an art form in which there are a number of people working toward a final result. That, to me, has been life-enhancing from the very beginning and has never stopped being life-enhancing.

The play of personalities in theatre always changes, like a kaleidoscope. That’s why, after directing virtually nonstop for 35 years, I’m as fascinated by it now as I was when I started. Every project and every set of problems has been totally different.

And even though experience gave you certain abilities to be resilient and understand and maybe anticipate or predict where difficult areas might develop, it could never become entirely predictable. So I think that that was part of the propulsion toward that medium.

On Emotion in Theatre

From my earliest experiences with theatre, I’ve believed it is the most wonderful medium for exploring emotion. It’s not necessarily the greatest art form for the play of ideas, though theatre can give ideas a human face–create an impact that the ideas in printed form might not ever have.

But it was theatre as a forum for emotional understanding and for character relationships that was always the compulsion for me. I’m often called, in the press and whatnot, "an actor’s director," and it’s never been a label I’ve wanted to run away from. The theatre has always seemed the best possible place to try to understand myself in a certain way, by being forced to come to grips with the complexities of other people.

On Naturalism and Stylization

I sometimes agree with the idea that I’m a naturalistic director, and sometimes I would dispute it only in the sense that I think there’s an automatic stylization in the theatre, and I think the more you work in the theatre, the more adept you get, the more aware you are of that stylization: a certain larger-than-life quality.

Actually, I believe as my career went forward in the theatre, particularly in the last 10 years or so, before I made my transition into film and television, that my work was tending more and more to a certain kind of stylization, partly because I entered the world of opera and I became very excited about directing opera. By definition, almost, no matter how realistic you might try to be within an operatic form, you’re still dealing with a much larger-than-life situation most of the time. Just the act of singing elevates something to another level, another kind of something very far away from naturalism.

But in my stage work before I got into opera and before I started working on the sort of larger canvas of those kinds of pieces, I think to the extent that I always looked for a kind of emotional truth with performers and a very specific detailed emotional truth, if one wants to define naturalism that way, I suppose I was a naturalistic director. I mean, that’s what fascinated me. It led me often, certainly, to the kinds of plays that were rooted in a certain kind of recognizable reality in terms of dealing with relationships.

I started being identified with the works of Arthur Miller, Robert Anderson and Eugene O’Neill. All those men, incidentally, had their own kinds of stylizations. I’m not sure I would call any of them "naturalistic" writers. But in some of their best work they’re certainly concerned with, let’s say, domestic areas of behavior, family situations, and they’re concerned, in many cases, with the acquired or accumulated detail of daily life, everyday life.

So when I directed some of those plays I was sort of a peripheral part of so-called kitchen sink realism, which stemmed in part from a revolution in English theatre that was brought about by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, where suddenly all these high-style comedies and boulevard plays of the English theatre that had lasted up to the 1950s disappeared, and you had all these plays about working-class people, you know, dramas that often were fought out in kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms. And I think that upheaval in the British theatre certainly influenced me.

But the interesting thing is, when you look back at some of those plays now, you realize, in their own way, how stylized they were. I’m not sure there is such a thing as true realism or true naturalism in the theatre, because there is something about the nature of the experience, the fact of the communication, and the scale that one has to work on, even in a relatively small space, to communicate with an audience, that’s hardly true realism.

Artistic Preoccupations

I’ve always been fascinated by the immigrant experience, which is certainly central to American preoccupation. My mother is American-born. But my father was actually born in Russia and was brought to this country as an infant. My heritage, incidentally, is entirely Russian on all sides. I was surrounded, when I was a child, by relatives who spoke little or no English, and without my necessarily consciously realizing it, I think I was absorbing all the ways in which they had to make their adjustments to life in this new country and also fight out the battles between preserving cultural identity and seeking a sort of assimilation.

All those issues became issues in my life. So, for example, when I did a play like Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, which I did several times and did on Broadway, one of the attractions to me in that material was the sense of these cultures coming together, you know, the Italian, the visiting Italian relatives, and what it means to this Italian family to struggle with an American identity.

One of the first plays I did that was nationally successful, actually, and kind of put me on the map as a director away from Long Wharf was a play by Thomas Murphy, an Irish play called A Whistle in the Dark, which again dealt with an Irish family, a father and his sons. One son breaks away and goes to England and marries an English wife, then is visited at Christmas by the father and the sons. The Irish-English hostility that emerges was kind of close to my preoccupations and seemed in that way to me very American. It was something I understood.

Matter of fact, I always felt that it would be very possible with that particular play to change the locale, let’s say, to Boston and have it be about an Irishman who’d come to Boston and was trying to struggle with an identity as an American in Boston and was then visited by his Irish family.

I guess, in my heart of hearts, I feel that the family has always been the core of American drama, and I think that I’ve always been preoccupied with family and family issues, and I don’t necessarily find them narrow. Today, with all the family dramas that have been written, there’s a certain kind of resistance that many artists feel (and certainly many critics feel) about dealing with family drama and domestic drama of any kind, but I don’t necessarily share that resistance. I still think there’s room, and always will be room, particularly in this country, for the artist who comes with a new perspective and deals with those same family concerns in some totally fresh and new way. But that preoccupation with family, with the sense of father and mother and child relationships, sibling relationships, marital relationships, I think all of that is quite American in focus. That’s always been a preoccupation.

Collaboration and Marriage

I first saw my wife, Joyce Ebert, on stage, never imagining we would ever even know each other, much less end up together. She was appearing in a production of The Trojan Women off-Broadway, directed by Michael Cacoyannis, who had directed Zorba the Greek and was a very, very famous director at that time.

I always had sort of mixed feelings about classical drama. I would sometimes admire, but very seldom be really moved by it. I mean specifically Greek drama. So when I went to see this production, I was knocked out by it, and I couldn’t believe that I was as emotionally involved as I was, and it was largely due to her performance. She was playing Andromache and she had won all the awards in New York that particular year and was talked about as one of the major upcoming actresses of her generation. I had almost this sort of heroine worship of her, because she had been so brilliant in this play.

By coincidence, the second play I was asked to direct at Williamstown was going to be The Lion in Winter, the James Goldman play, and Joyce Ebert was going to be the star. She was coming in a week late, actually, into a two-week rehearsal period, because she was finishing a play somewhere else. I was terrified, because I felt so inexperienced and I thought she was such an amazing actress. But, lo and behold, we got along just fine.

I then persuaded her to come to Long Wharf and do a play with me, Shaw’s play Misalliance. Then that year, it was the year I was asked to take over Long Wharf as artistic director, and we had by that point begun a relationship. So I persuaded her to come and be a part of my first season as artistic director. Indeed, she was in Glass Menagerie. It was my first production at Longworth as artistic director, with a great American actress named Mildred Dunnock, whom I’d worked with before several times. And Joyce played Laura.

By the end of our double careers together, I think we must have worked on maybe 35, 40 plays together. I’m not even sure of the number, but it was, I think, in all ways a successful collaboration. It wasn’t always an easy collaboration, because as the years went on, we expected in a certain way more and more of each other, you know, because we knew each other so well.

We also–and I think this is probably key to any artistic collaboration that lasts–we had an enormous sense of respect for those areas of each other’s privacy out of which the work often came. So that, as well as I knew Joyce and as deeply as I would direct her, it would never occur to me to ask her where some of the material, the inner material, that she dealt with in fulfilling a role came from. That was her private place. And she did the same in return, recognizing, I think, how personally I worked as a director, but never questioning where my impulses for something necessarily came from. I think that’s one of the reasons why we could collaborate as successfully as we did.

She had a remarkable ability to turn off the character at the end of the working day and come home and lead a normal life with me. Once in a while she couldn’t, depending on the character in the play, and would find it very hard, find the character consuming her life in a certain way, but that was really, really the rare instance.

But she had what I used to call her click-off time, because about three o’clock in the afternoon, when she was performing, she wouldn’t be there anymore. I mean, it wouldn’t matter what we were doing. We could be out for a drive or having a meal, whatever, I mean, she was somewhere else. She was in that place that she had to go to be ready to do the performance that evening. We used to laugh about it, and it was something I recognized was part of her work pattern and just accepted it.

Beginnings at Long Wharf

Jon Jory and Harlan Kleinman, the founders of Long Wharf, were watching my scene work in class. One didn’t do full-length productions, obviously. I was doing scenes. They were already planning to build Long Wharf out of community contribution, basically, and asked me if I would leave school to come in with them and direct the children’s theatre and direct one full-length production. I never told them, of course, that I’d only directed up to that point this little one-act in England and whatever scene work I had done at Yale, and that was the sum total of my theatrical experience.

But by that time I would have been willing to leave school to do just about anything. I felt like I’d been in school my entire life. So I came in with them and I ran the apprentice program and directed a children’s theatre in this new theatre that was just beginning. Then they forgot that they had promised me a full-length production, and, of course, I reminded them. It turned out that there was only one play left on the season and everyone was too exhausted to tackle it, and it was Long Day's Journey into Night. So that’s how Long Day’s Journey became the first play I ever directed. So it was like starting with the mountain. It was really an unbelievable experience.

Then to make it even more complicated, up to that point Long Wharf really hadn’t had actors of, I would say, national or international reputation. They were wonderful actors, but they were actors who had come from the Cleveland Play House for the most part, where Jon Jory had been as a young director. When we announced we were going to do Long Day's Journey into Night, suddenly Mildred Dunnock showed up, and she pursued us, and said she would be interested in playing the role of Mary Tyrone, because she had actually been slated to play it originally on Broadway in the first production and had lost the part to Florence Eldridge when Fredric March was contracted to do James Tyrone.

So there I was about to direct the first play I had ever directed with a woman who was at that point one of America’s greatest actresses and most well known. For those people who may not remember now, Mildred Dunnock was the original Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman, the original Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. You know, the credits just went on and on and on, plus every movie that was made for a period of 20 or 30 years. She was even the old woman, when she was a young woman, pushed down the stairs by Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, the movie that made Widmark famous.

So she was this great, great actress, and I was this kid who had never directed a play. I always assumed that she had seen through me. I vividly remember, for example, the first night before my first rehearsal, I had worked with a white model, a white set model, and all those little white people that were cut out. I moved them all around the model in relation to speeches and places in the scene and whatnot. After the reading when I got into the first rehearsal, I remember saying to Mildred Dunnock, "Well, on that speech when you say all that, I think it would be great if you were just like at the stairway." And she said, "Why?" None of the little white people had ever said that.

So it was the moment in which I either chucked it all and decided that I was in the wrong profession altogether, or went on with it, and threw everything I had preplanned out the window and just learned how to direct. Years later I was presenting her an award somewhere, and I told that story. She looked absolutely shell-shocked when she got up to get the award. I’d been better at faking her out than I thought I had been. But it was a pretty overwhelming debut.

For the first week or so of that rehearsal period I was just scared to death. I had a tremendous sense of humility about tackling that play and working with those actors.

I had cast Frank Langella, who was at that point a young actor, to play Edmund. But he was already very well known. He had already had a couple of major successes in New York, primarily a play called The Amoralist, the Gide play, and he was being touted as the one of the great stars of the future.

One rehearsal had been very difficult for me. It was tough, and I was feeling very drained and very insecure at the end of it. Langella was about to drive back to New York at that point with Mildred Dunnock. He slipped me a note, just into my hand, and went on, went out of the room. I opened the note and it said, "I think you’re doing a great job."

I get emotional even now when I think about that, because it was gratuitous. He didn’t need to do it. He sensed somehow that I needed it, and I did. And it somehow was all I ever needed, just that one little vote of confidence, and I kind of went from there.

Three Sisters was my second production for Long Wharf. I again had a very strong cast. I’d been at school with Stacy Keach and I got him to come to Long Wharf. He and I have remained friends all these years, even though we haven’t seen each other as much as I wish. But again, boy, I was really taking on the challenges. I mean, to do Chekhov as virtually my second play. It was tricky.

I think I did a good job. I mean, it was after that that I was asked to become artistic director. I think whenever you do a play by Chekhov, you solve one problem and you create another. It could be a life-long pursuit trying to believe that you’ve really accomplished an altogether successful production of any Chekhov play. But, nevertheless, it was a wonderful growth experience and I absolutely loved doing it.

The transition from school to being artistic director was very quick and I was very young. I think it was partly a question of being in the right place at the right time. There were tensions with the board of directors at that time. In those early days of the regional theatre movement, it was very, very hard to really get the public to be aware of what was meant by a nonprofit institution. I mean, up to that point there really was no theatre in America that was not commercial theatre. There had only been experiments here and there.

Of course, before Long Wharf there were important theatres like the Guthrie and the Arena Stage, etc. But, nevertheless, they were kind of beacons in the darkness, and in many communities across America people thought if a theatre lost money, it had no reason to survive.

There hadn’t been a good-enough selling job or a good-enough communication between the original founders of Long Wharf and the board of directors to allow them to understand that the nature of the institution would be nonprofit, that it would require fund-raising and contribution, no matter how successful at the box office.

They were further spoiled by the fact that I believe the first summer season, which I wasn’t much a part of, had been a success. The summer before the official season started, there were a couple of plays done. I was around, but I didn’t have anything to do with them, really. They had been hugely successful, because it was a novelty. I mean, the theatre was just brand-new and everybody was excited and there wasn’t that much to do in New Haven during the summer, and everybody went to the theatre. Cooler heads would have realized that that was a great little sendoff, but it was not going to solve the problems of helping the institution survive.

So anyway, there were these tensions, and the board of directors made it clear that Jon and Harlan, at different times, were going to be leaving the theatre no matter what happened. At first I felt very odd when I was asked to become artistic director, because I had a tremendous sense of gratitude toward Jory and Kleinman. I mean, they were the start of everything for me and they had taken me out of school. I didn’t want to be in a position where I felt I was costing either one of them a job. But finally I was reassured that on both sides, I think from their own volition as well as the board’s sensibility, they were going to be leaving.

Then it was a question of did I want the job. And I took it. So I became artistic director, having done only those two productions. Then I did a third, the one with Joyce that I mentioned, Misalliance, before I actually officially took on my duties as artistic director.

Working with Geraldine Fitzgerald

When I did Long Day's Journey into Night, I already had a sense that the only thing that would get me through directing such a masterpiece at that age was that I would somehow or another have the chance to do it again, and hopefully with some more maturity to put into it, and it turned out exactly that way.

About five years after I did it at Long Wharf, I was asked to do it in New York, a major revival that was going to star an actor who was a big star at that time named Robert Ryan. He’d been a big film star. He originally suggested Geraldine Fitzgerald as the mother. I knew Geraldine Fitzgerald basically only from her film roles and most particularly from a movie she had done relatively recently called The Pawnbroker, with Rod Steiger. I didn’t remember or really know much about a lot of the movies that had made her a great star, like Dark Victory and Wuthering Heights–all these classic films that she was a part of.

But anyway, when I met her, I knew almost immediately that she was the woman I needed for Mary Tyrone, because in tracing what had happened to me over a five-year period, between the time I did it first with Mildred Dunnock and the time I was going to do it again in New York, my feelings about the family dynamic had shifted and changed and, I think, deepened. I had now an understanding of Mary Tyrone, which had to do with the fact that she was in her own way a truly neurotic woman, and that she wasn’t simply a victim of the men in the play, which had kind of been the traditional way she had been played. Certainly it’s the way Florence Eldridge played her in the first production. She was this kind of lost waif-like figure dragging a wedding gown at the end.

In a certain way that may have even been how O’Neill himself would have consciously thought of her, but it wasn’t what he had written. He was too great an artist. The woman he wrote was far more complex than that, and also, I think, had a capacity for rage and destruction at times that was as true as her vulnerability and her love, maybe part of the same phenomenon.

So when I directed it the second time, I wanted to find an actress who would have the courage to do that. In those days–and I think this was maybe the first or second major revival of the play–it was a courageous thing to do, because this image of Mary Tyrone was very much implanted in the public mind, and to really go after some of the more negative aspects of the character would require an actress who was really willing to go out on a limb, and Fitzgerald was that actress.

She told me years later, actually, that when we were in previews in New York, people had been coming backstage during the whole preview period and saying to her, "You cannot play the role this way. Your career will be over." And she had kept that from me. I could never get over that, that she had so trusted our work together that she did not want me to know that that was going on and she shouldered all that and played the role the way we had worked it out. And thank God the story had a wonderfully happy ending for her, because it was a personal triumph. Her career took a whole new kick-start from that.

Over the years, we worked together many, many times at Long Wharf, on Broadway, on television, and she was in some ways, next to Joyce Ebert, the most seminal contributor to my early years as a theatre person.

On Edgar Rosenblum

Edgar Rosenblum was my partner at the theatre for all those years, and I think we were a really successful team. As a matter of fact, by the time we both left Long Wharf, we were the longest running act in America, as far as executive director / artistic director combos were concerned. In many ways we had very different temperaments, which I think was part of the reason we got along so successfully. We were, every once in a while, a bit of a good cop/bad cop act, which was very helpful at times. I tend to be a non-confrontational person, sometimes to my detriment. He was able to fight some of those battles and fight them very successfully.

On the other hand, what we shared–which may have been even more important than where we contrasted–was a tremendous love for the art form. Edgar, underneath his business acumen and his seeming toughness at times, was extremely sentimental about the theatre and vulnerable to great work in the theatre. Indeed, he took the job initially because he had seen a few productions of mine and been excited by them and he made the judgment from an artistic point of view to go to work with me.

So it was a very fruitful and meaningful collaboration again, and one which goes on. I mean, we’re still very close friends, even though our lives have taken us in two different directions. But I have dinner with him on a pretty regular basis. We talk to each other on the phone on a regular basis. So this was a real life collaboration.

On Ron Wallace, Lighting Designer

There’s a story about my telling Ron Wallace, my lighting designer, to create a Camille Corot effect. In some ways I think that particular collaboration with Ron Wallace became a hallmark of the way I tend to collaborate with a lot of the people I work with. I find that if I can talk in feelings and to a certain extent with a visual sensibility, I don’t need to spell out specifics. I feel that part of my job is to stimulate the imaginations of the people that I’m working with.

I came from this vast academic background, where, of course, I had a pretty good background in the visual arts and I knew a lot about painting. To use a name like Corot was second nature to me, but Ron came from a different background, did not have a tremendous academic background, was by nature a good visual artist, but did not have a lot of backup for it at that point in terms of the tradition of visual art.

So when I used that in a production meeting, an early production meeting, without ever telling me that he really didn’t have a knowledge of Corot, he went out and spent a lot of very hard-earned money on a book of Corot and studied those paintings. Of course, what I had in mind was a very specific silvery light that dominates so many of Corot’s paintings. After he had studied that book–and he never told me that that’s what he was doing–he recreated that light for me on stage, and it was wonderful. It can be a wonderful way to communicate, I think, with your fellow artists, because it allows them to find the wherewithal to create what it is you have in mind, as long as what you have in mind is reasonably specific.

On Al Pacino

I once said that the thrill of working with great artists is that they force you onto their wavelength. The relationship with Al Pacino has been one of the most important professional relationships of my life, and it’s now gone on over many, many, many years and has developed over these years into a very deep friendship, as well as a professional collaboration.What I meant by that statement, and it holds true even today, is there is a process that Al goes through as an actor that is in many ways unique to him in that there’s a journey that he has to make that’s deep, deep, deep down into his being.

Somehow or another, as director you have to aid that journey, and sometimes the way to aid it is by making sure that you don’t impede it. I very seldom work in terms of results or making early demands of actors to do something a certain way. My whole process is to try to find where we’re going to go together so that it’s about the exploration that’s mutual in the moment. But with Al, I sometimes find that even to give the slightest indication that there might be a result of some kind to what the process is going through, stymies him. It’s not willful on his part. He’s not resisting your authority or something like that. He can’t go there if he feels that in any way he knows the outcome of where he’s going. It’s very hard to explain.

But what I found over the years of working with Al as his director is you act as censor, you act as, to a certain extent, his gentle critic. You act, most importantly of all, as an audience who needs clarity. So that, for example, when he has finally found his way into a scene, I will often say to him, "You know, I follow you there, I follow you there, I follow you there, but somehow when you get from there to there, I’m not following you anymore."

That’s sometimes all you need to say for him to go back into this process and discover what isn’t clear about how he got from point F to point G. That becomes very exciting, but that’s a specific way in which I work with him and it would not necessarily work with someone else. But my admiration for that journey, and the depth he’s willing to go and the talent that allows him to go there in the first place, is absolutely enormous.

When we did American Buffalo, the Mamet play, together, that was a four-year saga on and off. I mean, he would go off and do a movie, I’d go off and do other things, we’d meet again. We’d do the play again. We did it many, many times in New York. We did it in England and Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and Washington. And every time we returned to it, it never was where we had left it. It always was deeper and richer, because he had never stopped thinking about it, never stopped the process. So, yes, I mean, in that sense, when I work with artists of that caliber, there’s no way that I can’t be myself affected and challenged.

I really do believe Al is in his own way a kind of genius, and that’s a word I don’t use very frequently. It’s a very overused word that’s lost its currency, I think. But in the case of someone like that, I believe it.

On Selecting Projects

For me the criterion in picking a project is always the script, always the material. One of the things that I think has stood me in good stead over my life is that I do have a pretty wide-ranging taste and I respect almost all genres if the work is an honest attempt at that particular genre. I say this often and it certainly was true of my years in the theatre; it’s still true of my work in television or film. I like mysteries, I like romantic comedy, I like deep profound drama. I can understand the excitement behind all those forms. What I can’t respond to always is anything within those forms that’s dishonest or cynical or I feel not really believed in by the writer, because then I feel I’ll have no ability to be honest with the actors.

Even in television, where people assume that I’m always having to make allowances for flimsy material, it really hasn’t been the case. I’m not going to compare the scripts of some of the TV shows I do with the great works in the theatre that I’ve been privileged to be a part of, but I think, within their own terms, the scripts that I’ve done in television, for the most part, have really been remarkably solid and tackled some very interesting issues and character situations.

But occasionally it has happened to me in television where I have had to deal with material that I felt was manipulative and cynical in its origin, and I find that unbelievably painful. Frankly, when I’ve had that experience, I would never return to whatever show or series I found that to be true of.

On Honesty in the Theatre

I believe that genuineness in the rehearsal process and honesty and trust among the actors is a communicable phenomenon. It’s not just something that you all feel good about within the rehearsal process. Now, it takes skill to allow that communication to happen. I’m not somebody who is technically casual about the theatre. I’ve most of my life been surrounded by actors who have been trained, who have wonderful voices, who move beautifully, who have all the tools at their command to reach out to an audience on no matter what scale. But if there hasn’t been a truthfulness in the rehearsal process, what are they reaching out with? What’s being communicated?

I saw Laurence Olivier on stage many, many times, and I was not a huge Olivier fan. When I did become a big Olivier fan it was because I saw him on stage just after his first major bout with surgery. He was doing Dance of Death, and he was a sick man and he didn’t have the resources to do all the kinds of flamboyant–and sometimes, for my taste, unnecessary–embroidery that he could so brilliantly do. On this night, for me, he totally justified his position in the world of theatre by being simply there and being able to play the insides of this character in a heartbreaking way. It was because he had some sense, I think, of his own mortality and his own vulnerability and was willing, instead of backing away from it or being frightened by it, to pour it into his character.

Subscribers’ Loyalty to Long Wharf

My fascination with actors and with plays about character led to what I would have called a kind of floating rep company. Early on, we discovered that we couldn’t really have a large resident company in a classic sense of that word. There were many reasons for that, some of them economical. I also felt that artistically, for all of the fascination with resident companies, there are downsides to the idea, and particularly if you do a lot of new material, a lot of new plays. The writer of a new play has so few chances to see his play realized that he or she is going to have enormous concerns about the rightness of casting. The experiment that you might make with a resident cast, which might be very healthy for the actor, is not necessarily so healthy for the playwright.

So there are these factors which sometimes make a completely resident company difficult. Long Wharf’s geography wouldn’t have helped that either, because being so close to a major media center, as Long Wharf was to New York, you just have to have that kind of movement back and forth.

But having said that, there were certain actors I admired enormously and certain actors who made great successes with the audience, and they returned again and again and again and again, when in many cases there would be almost no season that would go by without that actor or actress being there for several plays. So I think there was a great loyalty built up to a certain extent with the audience for performers.

I always believed that one of the things Long Wharf had to offer is the nature of the space itself. I still believe Long Wharf is almost a perfect theatre space for its kind of theatre. It’s a three-quarter stage, but it’s almost equal on all sides, which is very unusual. It’s not a thrust proscenium. So that means that when you stage for that space, you really have to have a fluid sense of action and you have to be very sensitive all times to the side sections.

But the other great thing that the space has going for it is the intimacy with the performer. It’s just large enough for the performer to be able to tackle a certain scale, which is required by certain kinds of material–classical, Shakespeare, musical, whatever–at the same time preserving a kind of intimacy with the audience.

So I thought from the beginning that, in addition to having resident actors who would return to us again and again and again, it would be a great space to bring very accomplished, successful actors to be seen maybe in a play that they might not otherwise have a chance with and let our audiences benefit from that. That’s the way someone like Pacino came to Long Wharf or someone like Richard Dreyfus or Geraldine Fitzgerald or any number of these wonderful people who appeared with us over the years.

Sometimes I’d be accused of orienting the theatre toward "stars," but, in fact, that was never the case. It was always about great performers coming to do roles that I felt in one way or another they were eminently suited for and giving our audiences a chance to enjoy that in a kind of intimacy.

I carried that to the point when I started to do opera at Long Wharf. I took Long Wharf toward small musical theatre pieces that lent themselves to that kind of a space and that were falling through the cracks for the most part all over the country, because they were too small in scale for the big opera houses, and they were being done primarily in college situations where you weren’t necessarily getting a very high-caliber professional cast. So I would introduce these pieces into Long Wharf with the idea, again, that it would be wonderful for an audience to hear great music in intimate circumstances.

There was a time in musical history when that happened all the time; chamber music came out of such venues. But by and large, in today’s America, because of the costs of musical production and whatnot, you’re seeing music events, whether they’re classical or pop or musical comedy, in large, large spaces, large venues. There’s a thrill that I’d always felt at hearing great voices in close proximity that I felt was a natural venue of the theatre.

On Leaving Long Wharf

Some of my reasons for leaving Long Wharf were personal. I have family still in Los Angeles. I had a brother, a younger brother, who got ill, and this was about six years ago now, and it was clear to me that he wasn’t going to make it, and my parents are still alive in Los Angeles. Up to this point I had dedicated myself to Long Wharf, but it was understood by my board of directors always that the only way I could survive as the head of an institution would be to have freedom to work elsewhere and bring those experiences and influences and personalities back to my home base. Otherwise, I could never have committed myself to one institution for such a long period of time.

Now, suddenly that was going to change, because the times I spent away, where I traveled to Broadway or I traveled to Europe, or I did an opera somewhere in the world, could not happen anymore, because I was going to have to spend more and more time in Los Angeles. So that was one factor.

But also I’d always wanted to work more with the camera. I was coming up on my 30th anniversary, which was obviously, I felt, something of a major milestone. I’d reached one of those places in my life where I thought, well, either I accept the fact that this is my life, I’ve had a wonderful life with the theatrical institution and I’m a theatre director and I treasure all of that, and that’s what it is, or maybe the time has come to try something new.

There were problems coming up again at Long Wharf, especially since the economy had begun to slip. I suddenly thought, I have a lot of energy left, but that’s not where I want my energy to go anymore. I’ve said all that. I’ve fought those battles. Now it’s time for younger people to come into the picture and visit their muscle on those issues.

So all those things kind of combined, and I used my 30th anniversary as my milestone and I gave Long Wharf a year’s notice. Tragically, the one thing I hadn’t anticipated in that final year was seeing my wife Joyce through her final illness. So it was kind of a year out of time.

But I never questioned, even with all that kind of personal stuff going on, I never questioned that it was the right decision for me to make at that time. Indeed, it still feels totally right, and there’s something so invigorating at this stage of the game about tackling a new medium and giving yourself challenges that are so scary. The first day that I walked onto a studio lot to direct my first television show, I don’t think I had been that terrified since the first day that I walked into that Long Day’s Journey rehearsal with my little white model and the four little white people.

First of all, I always get to the set an hour before, even before the crew arrives. I’m obsessive about that. So I was on the lot at Twentieth Century Fox at probably about 4:30 a.m., just me and one lone custodian, who was kind of sweeping up or whatever. I thought to myself, In about an hour and a half there are going to be a hundred people asking me what it is that I want them to do, and I haven’t a clue. But it’s great to feel that scared at this stage of the game, I mean, when it all should be kind of easy and comfortable.

Theatre Communications Group’s Priorities

In my years as president of TCG, I had a double feeling about the issue of support for individual artists as opposed to support for institutions. I felt the need to support the individual artists tremendously, but I also felt that in many, many cases–not all cases certainly–the individual artist needed to know that there were secure institutions in the country to work out of. Not everybody could be a one-man or one-woman performance artist. That’s not how everyone’s artistry might perhaps express itself.

My biggest concern when the movement was fresh and new and these theatres were just beginning to come up all over the country, was that without support of the institution, where would some of these artists develop? But then, over the years, circumstances changed a great deal, and while none of these theatres was ever entirely solvent or secure, we all know that theatre by its nature will never be this way. Nevertheless, look where we are today. Look how we look around the country and there are many, many cities everywhere that have their own theatres.

There is a network out there that didn’t exist. I think in a certain way as that progressed, while I never believed that the focus should entirely go off the institutions, I began to believe in more focus on the individual artist, especially as the art expanded in certain ways so that there were many new artists coming up who were not institutionally bound and never would be. And I admire and respect those people, and I do think, just as with institutions, they very often need support. They’re not going to be commercial artists.

It’s easier now to go after that support for them, because many of the institutions are not quite as precarious as they once were. The very fact that they’ve existed for the length of time that they’ve existed, even under dire financial circumstances, means they are "facts of life." And while that’s a risky way to think, because we all know they can be snatched away realistically, nevertheless, it becomes more and more difficult for a community to lose a certain institution when it’s been a part of that community’s life for a very long period of time.

It just means that when the institution is threatened, there’s a vested interest on the part of a lot more people to try to keep it alive and functioning. Therefore, in that way alone, there’s a little bit more security than the institution might have had 25 years ago, or 20 years ago.

Some of the concerns in the 1975 annual report were general auditions for actors, assistance to playwrights, printing news of grants, placing artists in residence, etc. Among secondary concerns were management services. As our institutions grew in those days, there weren’t necessarily people who were trained to run them fiscally. That’s a very different set of skills from those used by the artistic director of a company. Most of the most solid institutions in America were outgrowths of a strong artistic spirit and should have been. I’ve always believed that that’s the way a theatre institution should evolve.

I know Edgar Rosenblum, my partner, always felt that way. I thought it was a remarkable thing that as he became one of the more successful theatre managers in America, he never lost the belief that the impulse for the theatre always had to be the artistic impulse from the artistic director.

But having said that, it became more and more apparent as these institutions all over the country faced all these very specific and dangerous economic situations, there would have to be a group of people who were trained to deal with them. A brilliant bank president or a great CEO of any existing corporation is not necessarily the person to deal with the financial end of a theatre, no matter how brilliant his financial knowledge is. A theatre is a very specific animal and each theatre is specific in its own right.

There was a tremendous need in those early years for those people who felt an attraction to the idea of being arts managers–to learn what they could that was specific to their profession. My perception is we’ve been fairly successful at that over the years, certainly compared to where we started TCG was very instrumental in this area.

TCG was also instrumental in another area. It began to happen during my tenure and expanded afterward. When I first entered TCG it was a relatively narrow institution and had a narrow constituency, partly because there were just a handful of theatres really functioning.

But as often happens in that situation there was a certain protecting of turf that went on in those early years of TCG. Peter Zeisler was certainly one of the people who came in right from the beginning with a sense that, if this organization was going to be truly representative of the American theatre, it was going to have to expand its concept of what that American theatre was and who should come under its aegis. As an organization, TCG began to concern itself with women’s theatre, with black theatre, with Asian theatre, with gay theatre, the list that goes on and on now of all the kinds of theatre organizations that have grown up, which have very specific interests and clear audiences that were at one time considered peripheral or marginal and were taken under the banner of TCG. And I always believed that that was a very important movement. I saw the beginnings of that, as I say, during my tenure as president and then it rapidly expanded after that.

On Theatre and Other Media

Even before I was actively involved in film and television, I never believed in the exclusivity of theatre. I don’t see any reason why the media shouldn’t all come together in some way. I’m not threatened by that. I don’t think there’s any reason why a space that houses an exciting theatre can’t also be doing some sort of experimental work in film-making or television work. Why not?

For years the cry in the theatre has been that we lose our writers to film and television. Maybe if we thought of ourselves a little less separately, that wouldn’t seem such an automatic loss–we’d try to find ways in which young writers could do it all. That would take some broad thinking on the part of film and television, as well.

Theatre, maybe sometimes out of its own sense of precariousness, feels that it has to hold on to its boundaries very strongly and is challenged by those actors who go off and have successful careers in television or film, and doesn’t welcome them back with open arms. So sometimes, if only in retaliation, there’s a sense on the part of television, for example that theatre people feel "too good" for the work that television does. A defensiveness sets in, and television says, "Well, look, we’re doing some very interesting work. We’re dealing with issues. We’re dealing with character. We’re dealing with some of the very things that the theatre has dealt with all these years."

A kind of mutual distrust develops, and I frankly think it’s often fomented by the American critical community, which will take on a very patronizing tone when, for example, a film or television actor comes to Broadway. It works mostly in that direction, because, of course, the critic doesn’t have the same impact in terms of film and television as a medium that he has in the theatre. All that is kind of sad. My feeling is there should be a mutual atmosphere of warmth and welcome going both ways.

The Press and Theatre

There is sometimes an insularity in the theatre that worries me, particularly in New York. Once again, I think it’s fed to a great extent by the impact of the press, of reviews, journalism.

I went to see a show the other day, which I won’t even mention by name, but it had gotten just absolutely wretched reviews. I have no stake in the show whatsoever. I know some of the people in it, but I have no particular emotional involvement in it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go see it. I went purely out of a sense of duty to a couple of people I do know in the show. It was not a great production, but it was a very worthy one. It was a lot of people trying to work intelligently and clearly about a very difficult piece of material. Yet the nature of the notices toward this work were totally out of synch with the reality on the stage.

If it were just a question of what appeared in the press, it would be less of an issue, but I think over the years more and more the general audience has internalized what they read in the press. So there’s a set of standards in the theatre that feel to me–now that I’m outside and kind of looking from a more objective point of view–more false than ever. The nature of what’s really good and really important and really heartfelt is minimized in favor of what seems to be chic or involving novelty for its own sake or coming with credentials already intact from England or Europe. I guess that’s the main thing I feel sometimes–that there’s a kind of artificiality about the theatrical experiment or the theatrical community in New York. I feel it particularly intensely coming as an outsider.

I think there’s great work in the theatre. There’s some great stuff going on. And the hit-and-miss psychology, particularly in the commercial theatre, has always been there. But now it has an impact on the nonprofit theatre, as well, because so much of the New York theatre is fed by all the theatres in the regions that there’s a rather unhealthy sense of what’s admired at the expense of what’s–sometimes incorrectly–denigrated.

On the Future of Theatre

I believe that the digital age will only enhance the live theatre experience. No matter how much more technologically involved we get, the theatre experience will always be something completely different. It satisfies, at its best, certain hungers that are in many ways basic to human nature–hungers that never will be satisfied by any kind of technological experience. The problem has always been how to educate new generations of people to what that experience has to offer. But I can’t imagine that there will ever be any technological development that will supersede the theatre, simply because in the nature of the beast they are different–it’s apples and oranges.

Theatrical Heroes

There are several. Colleen Dewhurst: There you have an actress of a certain kind of scale and humanity so that, as good as she was in all media, only the theatre was really the home for that kind of expansive talent.

Jason Robards. Arthur Miller. Tennessee Williams. I mean, I’ve been lucky enough to work with all of these people. Lillian Hellman, with whom I had a close personal and working relationship for many years.

It’s hard not to feel, especially as time goes by, that these people were kind of titans of a sort, as difficult as they may individually have been. But they all were able to find a home for major personalities, temperaments, and intelligences on the stage. It’s hard not to be affected by those people.

The Importance of Outside Influences

I think the life of someone like Arthur Miller is a very interesting life for anyone entering the theatre to look at. Because I think that he has–maybe sometimes to his artistic detriment, but very often to his artistic fulfillment–managed to remain connected to so many areas of life beyond the theatre. For all that, he’s arguably our greatest living playwright, he’s got a social conscience, he’s involved in political issues, he’s concerned about visual artists.

I guess something I would say to all people entering the theatre is, whatever you do and whatever area of the theatre that you choose to go into, have a life outside the theatre. Don’t see it as somehow or another a province that’s shut off. If you’re an actor and you shut off–and many, many people do, it’s not an imaginary problem–then what you’re doing is reproducing other people’s performances, or you’re reproducing your own performances, rather than reproducing life. Same is true for a writer. Same is even true for visual artists.

If you’re not somehow fed by the enjoyment of a European sunset or a Northwestern rainstorm, you’re not going to be the artist you might potentially be. There’s something about celebrating the wholeness of life, if you’re any kind of a theatre artist. And it takes effort to keep that going, you know, because the compulsion, the obsession, the whatever you want to call it, can so much be toward forcing your energies into a kind of narrow funnel. It’s attractive to do that because it comes out of the funnel with such force, but I think it’s so ultimately dangerous. I think you need to spread wider and wider and wider to find the narrowness that finally means something. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but that’s what I believe, anyway.