Zelda Fichandler

Zelda Fichandler is the founder and long-time producing director of Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. She currently heads the graduate school of acting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She served as TCG president from 1993 to 1995.

Beginnings

I was born in Boston, where my parents were from, and I grew up in Washington, D.C., from the time I was four. My sister was born in D.C.–one of the few natives.

Everybody has early experiences that influence whatever their profession turns out to be. I was eight when I appeared as Helga in Helga and the White Peacock–to great reviews!–at Rose Robison Cowen’s Studio for Children's Theatre. When I was 11, I won a dollar for an essay for the Washington Star on why I wanted to be an actor–I wanted to "be different people." It wasn’t really to be famous or rich, I said, but it was to show people "what other people could be like." That’s still my interest.

My father was a scientist of note. He died when he was only 48, and he never saw Arena, and I don’t think he knew that I was going to land in the theatre. But he kind of kept hands-off of whatever direction my life was going to take, because he thought I knew more than actually I did, and because he was too busy to pay much attention. He was an inventor, and he was in the lab all the time. He invented the proximity fuse, which was the detonating device of the atom bomb, later used for numerous medical advances, as well as early navigational aids, like blind instrument flying and landing, so in those years he was absorbed with his own creative life.

I seem to remember that my parents had a subscription to the Theatre Guild. At that time the Guild brought in plays to–I believe–the Gaiety Theatre. My father knew that I had dramatic flair and that theatre attracted me, so I don’t think he would have pooh-poohed it or been surprised that my vocation became the theatre.

I went to a series of schools that were in my neighborhood, and in those years I was mostly interested in anything that pertained to the theatre or had to do with literature. I had a teacher who was very influential. She taught me Shakespeare, and she mattered a lot to me–Celia Oppenheimer–I see her strong face even now. I remember writing an essay on Knocking at the Gates in Macbeth.

When I went to college, I lived my first two years at home, my parents wanted to keep me in the nest as much as possible. I was drawn to science, actually–strongly. I loved chemistry and I remember I got the highest grade in chemistry out of 500 students, but the prize was awarded to a boy; things were different in those days. And at the same time I had an amazing teacher, I've forgotten his name, who covered the Romantic poets, and that interested me; I was very drawn to them. I was shy, but I recall speaking up a lot in class.

I went to Cornell in the summer of ’43 or ’44, because I saw a one-inch ad that described a course–a 16-week course called "Contemporary Soviet Civilization." I also studied piano all this time, and that pulled me; my teacher encouraged me to pursue a professional career, but I resisted. At Cornell I learned Russian, and I read Chekhov in the original, and earned money by translating from Russian into English. I got paid by the word. It was important that there were more words in English than in Russian, as I needed the money.

I had had plans to become a doctor, a psychoanalyst, but at George Washington University during my "science period," I had a lab accident and got saturated with hydrochloric acid; it destroyed my new sweater and did some damage to me, but mostly it alarmed my parents. But, nonetheless, I was thinking of going into pre-med and originally did some physics and chemistry and anatomy and biology, and was taking a pre-med course till I got to Cornell.

There I became socially aware, aware of the literature that was not my own, which intrigued me. I learned the Russian language so well that people used to say, "I don’t recognize the accent. Are you from Kiev? Are you from Leningrad? Are you from Siberia or Central Asia?" Evidently I was fluent but had some kind of accent.  We were in tutorials like six hours a day at Cornell. I helped set up the first Russian library in the United States.

This pull towards psychology, literature, human behavior, this underlying desire to be a psychoanalyst persisted. I graduated from Cornell Phi Beta Kappa. I was married shortly thereafter, the year after the United Nations was formed, and took a master’s degree at George Washington University in dramatic literature.

In the meantime, I had become politically active, and when I was at Military Intelligence (six days a week) in the Russian Division, which was the first job I had getting out of college, I worked on organizing the Public Workers Union, which cost me my job. But I did write a handbook on the Red Army. My husband Thomas Fichandler and I were in all the picket lines about segregation and other issues.

I did my master's thesis on Shakespeare in the Soviet Union, using Russian sources. I spent a year at the Library of Congress. I had no one to really help me through that, because there was no one at G.W. who spoke Russian.

While I was at George Washington, I acted in a number of plays, and got very good reviews: Barbara Allen in Dark of the Moon,  Giovanna in Goldoni's The Fan.

I was a young bride–I was 22 when I was married. I had some miscellaneous jobs and worked as a secretary for the vice president of the Public Workers Union. I became very disillusioned about unionism because of the way they treated the addressograph workers who wanted a raise from 65 to 75 cents an hour and picketed. I was taking my master’s at the time, and I thought I might be going into journalism. I had no idea what to do with my life, but it was very clear to me that I was ambitious to commit to something.

Beginnings of the Arena

I was in a class with Edward Mangum, who said, "Do you all know that professional theatre in America consists of 10 blocks on Broadway and nothing much more? Touring shows, a lot of community theatre, nonprofessional. How does this sound to you? How does this seem to you?"

And I said, "Wow. That seems awful." I asked to see him after class. I don’t think it was at that moment, but one time I said, "You know what? We should start a theatre." He was running a lively amateur group called the Mount Vernon Players that was attached to a church in Washington. It came whimsically. It came without much thought, actually.  We said, "Okay, why don’t we do that?"

So, I think it was during my last year of getting my master’s that we started work on this. It was, as I say, miscellaneous, whimsical, as whimsical as falling in love: a something that you can’t evade, you can’t avoid, you can’t dodge, you can’t go around. You don't listen to your parents. You think all obstacles are mythological and that you’re going to have this thing, love, this person you love, this idea, at whatever cost. Your life is made in those moments. It’s a moment of self-donation: "I give myself to this." So in a very lighthearted but serious way, that’s how it happened.

We found this abandoned movie house in the slums of Washington (actually it was showing porno films), and we raised $15,000, and this group of heterogeneous people of all professions–a tennis pro, a policeman at the White House, the head of the Theatre Guild (Bess Davis Shriner), a scientist, a lawyer, a retired restaurateur–and the 12 or 15 of us converted this into a 247-seat arena. Ed Mangum, from Dallas,  had seen Margo Jones’s arena theatre there and was very intrigued with it; it was the intimacy of the form that caught his imagination. There was this economic fallacy which we bought into–that it would be cheaper because it didn’t have flats and drops. We were to learn otherwise.

Also in the air at the time was the notion that the small opera house that was handed down from the Italian Renaissance with the audience in one room and the play in the other had outlived its day and that confinement in the box of the proscenium no longer reflected contemporary society. That idea was floating around in the air.

There had been an attempt around that time to set up a theatre-in-the-round in the Hotel Edison in New York, I remember seeing Julius Caesar there. And in Europe ever since the turn of the century, since actually about 1908, there had been experiments with the open stage. The Russian theatre in particular had experimented with this form, and there was Jacques Copeau with his Theatre du Vieux-Colombier. And in this country, the University of Washington, I believe, had an arena, maybe Tufts by that time. And, of course, Margo Jones. It was in the air that this old form which had come down via the optical illusion of perspective drama and the rococo application of design was no longer suited to this new time. We needed a more open, more plastic, more democratic form.

At this time Eisenhower spoke of a lack of achievement in the cultural sphere: Who did we have to export in terms of ballet, opera and theatre companies? How could we compete with Russia, which had such a rich cultural spectrum of performing arts? This sense of nationalist competition was also there.

Margo Jones  wrote–I approximate– about her dream in 1955: "Imagine if there were 40 theatres across the country, what a rich land we would be–how the experience of life that all those theatres could afford would enrich the lives of its citizens." Of course we should have theatres! We have museums, we have churches, we have fine universities, and libraries, and traffic lights and garbage collection. But in Washington, and in most other cities, there was not one resident professional theatre.

The Arena was the first new theatre in Washington since 1895, and the other theatres that followed us in D.C. spun from or spun away from that model. I don't think I exaggerate when I say that Arena launched a renaissance of theatre in D.C., though in earlier decades it had been known as a good theatre town. But Margo Jones, who started her theatre in 1947, is really the mother of us all. She was actually a very important inspiration to me personally. She gave me that wonderful slogan which I often repeat, that if you have a million-dollar idea, you can raise a million dollars. She said that in the early ’50s, when a meeting between us was organized by ANTA (the American National Theatre and Academy).

We thought in terms of a resident company; I never thought in any other way. I’m not sure how  that came to my mind, or stuck so tenaciously; I suspect I was influenced by European models: the theatre of Okhlopov or Stanislavski; French, Scandinavian, English, German models. It was the way I thought theatre proceeded when it served the function that I thought it should serve. I’ve never, never questioned it, and don’t question it today. Production by means of the acting company is the organic way.

The Company System

The company idea was seminal. I think we’re going to go back to it in America, it’s in the air again. It’s what young people want after they wander around between film and television and incidental work on the stage. I don’t think they want it as permanently as we did, for 10 or 20 years, but they want it as a base. The idea of having an artistic home was born with Margo, Nina Vance and me.

Students at NYU–not every student, but I would say half to two-thirds–dream of being a member of a company. No wonder, that’s where the great talents have been formed. If you want to find great French actors, look to the Comedie Francaise or Vilar. The great actors of England came out of the early Old Vic and the repertory system. Then came the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare, and now the new Globe is developing a company. A lot of the important actors in America came out of companies–the Group Theatre, Eva Le Gallienne's theatre, and later Arena Stage. You can list them by name, people who got their start working in companies. And why is that? In a company, you play parts that you might not be cast for if you were auditioning for a theatre that’s going to "job" you in. I mean, maybe you’re too fat for the role, maybe you’re too young, maybe you’re not beautiful enough, etc., etc. But if you’re in a company, you’re going to play that role.

The company is the equivalent in the world of theatre to the family in a social form; when you knock on the door, they have to let you in. The people stick with you; you can make a mistake and go home again. You can do something bad, not play a role well, and they let you get up on the horse again. Also, you’ve lived with these people, you have a life with them outside of the theatre, they know you, you can take a risk. You can improvise in a foolish way, try something that isn’t good, throw it away–it’s a piece of Kleenex. They’re not going to fire you at the end of the first week of rehearsal. They have a stake in your versatility, your process of work, your growth.

So trust is built up, a common way of work, a way of finding truth within style, and the style of truth, and out of that search come great actors. If you believe, as I do, that the actor is the center of the theatre (because it’s the behavior of the actor, the experience of the actor that reveals to the audience who they are), then this natural relationship is best expressed in terms of a company.

I question myself about everything: Is this the right repertory? Is this the right design? Is this the right relationship with the audience? Am I using everything I know to raise funds? Am I keeping my left brain and my right brain in balance? Am I allowing the actors to develop to their fullest range out of their uniqueness? But I have never, ever questioned, and do not today question, that the way to create the most developed, important actors is the acting company.

I also understand when directors say, "But it’s too expensive to have an acting company." I can understand that thought, because if you’re doing Hamlet and a two-character Beckett in the same season, you need to retain all the people who are playing Hamlet. But it’s not exactly true, because I budgeted that out and the amount of money that is spent going to New York or Los Angeles for casting, the air fares, the housing, the double casts–one cast rehearsing during the day and another cast playing at night–with all that money you can hold a company together. I’m not talking 35 or 60 or 70 actors, I’m talking 18 to 20. And if you need to bring in actors to surround that company, at least that core company of 18 to 20 retains a definite signature of style and range.

So I don’t think the economic argument bears up. I think, rather, that it’s the responsibility to 18, 20 actor/human beings through a season, through 5, through 10, through a lifetime of creativity. You become very, very close, and that isn’t always easy. I remember an actor coming in to my office one day and saying, "I just thought I’d tell you, I really hate you," and he said it half playfully and half not.

And I said, "Oh dear, that doesn’t make me happy. Why do you hate me?"

He said, "Because you control my life. You control my artistic life."

I said, "It’s not true. You get to turn down roles, you get to decide which of these two plays you want to be in, you have to agree to casting. How do I control you?"

He said, "You do, because if you think Stanley is a better actor than I, then that controls my image of myself, and,  therefore, my artistic life. I can tell by the roles I get who I am as an artist."

This is the kind of intimacy you have with a lot of people.

When I came to NYU, one of the things that I thought was: I love my Arena company, I'm in mourning for leaving the company. (I was for a while.) But it will be nice to commit to people for three years and then kiss them goodbye, bless them, and say, "Come back any time you want, call any time you want." But now I find when a class leaves, I’m in mourning again. So I think it’s the intimacy that you have with a group of people that weighs. It’s heavy when you’ve got so many souls that you are attached to, that you're responsible–response-able to.

On Women as Leaders in Theatre

I get asked quite a bit why women excel at running theatres. I don’t think that’s so much the case any more. In the beginning of the movement, maybe, but I think there are more men than women now. Perhaps "we girls" started our own because men wouldn't hire us, didn't trust us as leaders, or to manage money.

A digression: I don’t think administrators are noncreative people. They create in a different way. I think a leadership position in theatre can belong to any human being who’s sensitive to the human condition. I’m not sure it’s a feminine job. The only thing I might add is that women can stick to things for a long time; patience seems to come with the female territory, though surely not in even measure to all of us. I think it’s a biological given that men tend to roam from the nest or they roam from the theatre. They don’t have long terms, other pastures look greener–maybe they really are.

After 40 years, I left. I might have stayed forever, except I thought my term was done. I just felt, "Well, it’s as far as I can take this. Now I have to do something else. I can’t push this any further." Someone sent me a telegram: "Congratulations on your 40 years. Couldn’t hold down a job, is that it?" Which I thought was kind of funny.

On Arena’s Continuing Development

We began planning for our permanent home while we were in our second home, dubbed the Old Vat because it had been a brewery and there were all these beer-making kettles lying around. Our costume designer, Jane Stanhope, had just been to England and seen the Old Vic–so she named our theatre the Old Vat, and it stuck.

The theatre was converted from the hospitality hall of the Christian-Heurich Brewery, and it was wonderful. You had to go up a rickety staircase to get there. It sat 500 people. It was not air-conditioned. We did some really wonderful things there, including what seemed very risky at the time–Shakespeare, Shaw and Chekhov. We opened in 1957 with the new, expanded version of A View from the Bridge. I had my second baby two months before we opened.

We were there for five years. It was at 26th and D, NW, right in the pathway of what were to be roads leading to the Roosevelt Bridge, and we knew it was a temporary site. In our first theatre, the Hippodrome, we did 55 productions in five years. We closed down in July of 1955; we were playing The Crucible and packing the house, but we couldn’t make ends meet because the house was too small. I presented to the Board a paper titled The Economics of the Too-Small Theatre and they agreed with the logic.

So we closed that theatre and opened the other, larger theatre (The Old Vat) about a year and a half later, in November of ’57. The current permanent Arena Stage came in two parts–October, ’61 (the Arena) and the winter of ’70 (the Kreeger). I prefer the Arena. I think I can do anything in there and it invites a more expressionistic, a more poetic discovery of the play. But some directors prefer the Kreeger, a more conventional form, less threatening–I think probably plays of high language work better there, Restoration plays for example. I don’t recall our ever doing a Shakespeare in that smaller space, but I think that would be interesting. We did Beckett there, but we did Beckett in the Arena, too: Waiting for Godot.

When the company toured the Soviet Union in 1973, we wanted to leave something behind. Alan Schneider directed Beckett's Not I, written for Jessica Tandy, who played it for us. All you could see was a mouth talking. I recall thinking–"I guess they're right, you can't do everything in the Arena."

So the Kreeger serves its purpose. It allowed us also to do plays where only 500 people a night need come, instead of 832, so maybe we could do our riskier plays in there. I directed a play by Max Frisch called The Public Prosecutor Is Sick of It All (originally, Count Oederland, I took the title from the first scene) and put it in the Kreeger, thinking that nobody would want to come and see it. But they flocked. I was wrong, they loved it. Go figure.

And I directed another play called The Ascent of Mt. Fuji, by two playwrights from Azerbaijan, which was Ming Cho Lee’s famous mountain design. It was stunning, the mountain against the sky, the lights moving from morning to dusk, but we could have done that in the Arena, too, less realistically, with the characters sitting in a circle of confession. We produced K2, another mountain play, in the Kreeger, with Ming again designing. We could really create the icy ledges and the look of slippery ice as one of the two characters dropped down off the mountain–down, down, down into a trap in the stage–the audience shrieked, just like kids. They believed in what we asked them to believe in.

International Collaborations

As for our collaborations, many were with directors from outside the country, mostly Eastern Europeans. I think what intrigued me about Eastern European artists was that the political and, collaterally, psychological repression they lived under caused them to find in their art the most expressive metaphors for human behavior, and that intrigued me. And the literature intrigued me, because it–usually on the deepest level–dealt with the inevitable explosion of the human psyche under repression, that inevitable explosion coming out of the need to be free. That was a theme that interested me, and it proved to interest the audience very much–more than I ever anticipated that it would.

Also, I happened to have the good fortune of seeing productions of Lyubimov, Pintilie, Ciulei  that overwhelmed me with their artistry and their combination of psychological and political acumen, the ability–this is, I think, very important–the ability to reveal the political scene through human behavior. Politics are embedded in human behavior more than in pamphlets, in demonstrations, in manifestoes–not overtly, but in images, metaphor and the subtext of events.

Liviu Ciulei had come through while we were building the Arena in  1960 or  '61;  we had felt comfortable with each other and interested in each other’s work. He was the architect of the post-World War II Romanian theatre, and his stage, which I’ve never seen except in photographs, was a cousin–it wasn’t a twin, it was a cousin–of the Arena that we were building. He said that the Arena had been a strong influence on the form of his own theatre in Budapest. Alan Schneider had suggested to me that we bring him in to do a play. He had lost the artistic directorship of his theatre because of a very suspect production of The Inspector General, which the authorities had thought was too radical and anti-state. He began at Arena with Buchner's Leonce and Lena, and went on to Hamlet, several plays of Pirandello, Moliere, Saroyan's Time of Your Life, Midsummer Night's Dream, Hedda Gabler and others. We began with a cultural clash–very friendly, but there it was. Liviu expected three months' rehearsal, and he couldn't really comprehend that we were talking about six weeks. He said he would try, he wasn't sure. In Romania, they would not open a play till it was ready. They might post a sign saying something like, "We expected to be ready tonight, but we’re not. Come back in two weeks. Instead, we’re showing one of the plays we hold in repertory."

So Liviu learned at the Arena how to work in this hasty way. Also the European sense of budget is different–was different–I’m sure it isn’t anymore. It has changed enormously in the past decade or so. But their whole staffing was different. I remember him saying, "But I had three Spencer Tracys in my company." He had 80 actors in his company and he had a wig-maker and an assistant wig-maker and seven assistant directors, so forth and so on. So the reduced scale was simply something he had to get used to.

On the first preview night of Leonce and Lena, his first production with us, the audience was totally baffled, and we thought the production was in a lot of trouble. In a meeting in my office after the show, we decided to restructure the play so it became more linear and accessible to the audience. It was really what you’d call a postmodern production, whatever that ambiguous word means, and we decided to sculpture it a little more linearly so there was some thread of  "and then and then and then." I took the lead on that, knowing our audience, and it became an enormous hit–still outside the pale of the well-made-play, of course, but available. Young people flocked, our subscribers adored it, we had standing room and lines at the box office.

It was the audience that encouraged us by packing the house when we developed this relationship with foreign directors. It’s partially because the work was superb on an artistic level–visually, kinetically, and in the sense that it really excavated the life underneath and around the text. But also they enjoyed the metaphoric quality of the work, the meanings were signaled rather than stated in a blatant way, and that they needed to reach towards and into the stage, use their imagination and intellect, both.

The audience in Washington is variegated, and one of the major strands of it is the international audience. I don’t know how many embassies are there, but I know when I was doing Doll House, the Norwegian embassy was so helpful with it. When we did work with Russian directors, the Russian Embassy, or Soviet Embassy, was very much on board . And people–the staff as well as the officials of each embassy–would come. So it’s a very international community. I have a gorgeous poster, a woodcut of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, with an inscription from the Norwegian ambassador, expressing his delight in our collaboration. I hold this dear.

The Wild Duck of Lucien Pintille was set in a kind of abandoned warehouse, and it had a metal staircase going from the floor to the loft, where the ducks were kept. So what we would get now and again were the eggs plopping down on the floor, splattering and leaving a mess. And there was an enormous camera–that was expected, since Hjalmar  was a photographer. It was quite logical for him to have a camera, but this camera was six or eight feet long, and two feet thick, and it would be whirled around within the scenes as a metaphor for the search for truth, because the play is about when the truth is useful and when is it destructive..

Pintille’s way of showing that was just amazing. He also wanted–talk about funds!–the back wall of the Kreeger cut through in several places. I had to call in an engineer to see if it was at all possible. Anyway, we went over budget, way over budget, with the staircase and the wall. But we were using a version that Pintille had done himself, so he renounced his royalty, exchanging it for the metal staircase, $35,000, the wall openings, probably another $100,000, something like that. The reason he opened the back wall was so that we could see Gina Ekdal, Hjalmar's wife, in her endless duties to keep this family going and this life-lie from coming into light; it was the deception that held the family together. She would go back and forth, back and forth, and we’d see her and then not see her, as she passed behind the wall, performing her endless housewifely chores. People came from all over the country to see this production.

There was also Yuri Lyubimov’s Crime and Punishment. I had been trying to get him to come over for years, and finally when he was exiled from the Soviet Union and was in London, I called him and wrote him and cabled him, and finally he came. The news cameras were all there for his arrival at Dulles, with his wife and 7-year-old Peter. The lighting designer, scenic designer, sound designer, costume designer, the whole acting company and technical staff started from day one of rehearsal, and we were rehearsing Piggy Back in the other theatre, in the Arena, and I had hired another group of technicians to support that production. Of course, Lyubimov thought that was the way things were done in America, because that’s how it’s done in his theatre. You got everybody on the first day of rehearsal. Why not? When he found out later that we had done this just for him, he and his wife cooked a Russian meal for everybody and delivered it themselves to the theatre.

We had this enormous success, we extended it a month and you couldn’t buy a copy of Crime and Punishment in any local bookstore or get it out of any library. He was invited to direct in another theatre in America, went there, and I'm told he said, in Russian, he had no English,  "Where’s the sound designer? Where’s the set designer? Where’s my costume designer? Where is the lighting designer? Today is the right day, this is the right time, I'm in the right place, where is everyone?" They said, "You get them all for the final week," and he walked out, because he had been spoiled. He hadn't internalized that while the Arena might do that for him once, a distinguished guest, the American theatre in general didn't have the resources to sustain that kind of support. 

On The Great White Hope

Everyone wants to know about The Great White Hope! It opened on Dec. 7, 1967, after about two years of working on the text. It was an entirely exhilarating experience. Ed Sherin, who was my associate at the time, was the director and a friend of Howard's. He introduced me to Howard Sackler and to the play. It was this thick, phonebook size. The first three scenes were a kind of automatic writing–very subjective and unstructured, and I fell in love with the style of writing and with the first two monologues. Coming up was a season of repertory, an integrated acting company, and on a grand hunch, I decided to do the play.

The theatre as a whole was against doing it because the play was not ready, and they doubted the subject matter–all except Ed, who was right there with me. We tried to raise money. The NEA turned us down, I petitioned, they turned it down, I petitioned again, and the founding director of the Theatre Program, Ruth Mayleas, gave us $25,000, which was small but pivotal.

The rewriting was extensive–Howard and Ed and I formed a great team. On opening night the production ended at quarter to twelve. A lot of the Washington and local reviews castigated us for it's being too long. There were 68 actors, 250 costumes and 11 sets rolled in on wagons. It was a stunning production, I must say, with Jimmy and Jane, and most wonderful in its long form, which allowed it to be an epic tragedy, which it was, not a melodrama, as it was presented subsequently, cut to two hours and a half hours for the Broadway production that won the Pulitzer Prize.

On Integrating Arena Stage

My husband Tom and I each came to life from a political point-of-view, mine more psycho/political than his. After marrying we spent a lot of our time on picket lines, so it seemed, protesting the Southern practice of segregation. Arena was the first theatre in Washington to integrate its audience; I still look back on that with pride, even though Washington accepted it so easily, was so ready for it.

After The Great White Hope, we took on this issue with even greater attentiveness. With a Ford Foundation grant of about a quarter of a million dollars, we had enlarged the company to include some 15 African-American actors. It was a thrilling but not a successful experiment because, I think, the African-American experience was being newly explored in New York and African-American actors were more caught up in defining themselves. They were not really interested, nor was their audience, in the classics of Western literature. For us as producers and directors, however, it was a fertile idea. I recall with pride King Lear with Frank Silvera as Lear and Mary Alice as Cordelia, and our production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, where the second family, the outcast family, was black. With Threepenny Opera and 32 actors these three plays formed an exciting three-play repertory. The casting was carefully considered to open up the actions and meaning of the plays for a new time.

What we learned from that experiment was that if we wanted the African-American population of Washington to come, we needed to stage plays that were of immediate interest to them, that reflected and refracted their own lives. I don’t know why I thought just changing the casting would make things different. I was warned by Mac Lowry, vice president in charge of arts and humanities at the Ford Foundation, who said, "It’s the wrong time, you have the wrong thought for this time in history." But he subsidized the experiment, anyway, expressing his faith in my intention. Later I wrote that the experiment was either five years too late or five years too early. Mac was right. But the intentionality of the experiment itself was right.

We went back to the idea in the late ’80s; when we integrated the whole institution, top to bottom. The effort was to make the institution part of the natural life of the city, which was 63 percent African American. And so the effort continued under Doug Wager, and now under Molly Smith, and it seems that's how it always was.

Theatre must be of its times, of its audiences and their concerns as well as, of course, of pressing interest to its artists. It departs from reality, upon which theatre is based, not to ingather the variegated strains that are now part of our everyday life. The central question in training actors today is–how do you train actors from diverse ethnicities with diverse goals and construct a repertory for them, while still graduating actors who are capable of playing Shakespeare and other classics that make up so much of the American repertory and provide opportunities that they should have, not to mention a living?

On Theatre’s Potency

It’s said that the theatre has lost its potency in the electronic age. My response to that thought is that it’s more important to affect a few people deeply than many, many millions in a way that can be forgotten when the knob is turned. I don’t know whether I believe that because I have to, since the living theatre is my chosen medium. But when I directed Death of a Salesman, I would stay afterwards to witness how people didn’t leave the theatre, and fathers and sons were sitting there and weeping, and I suppose in some way reexamining their expectations of each other and how they had disappointed each other and how they should reconstruct a relationship. Is that unimportant?

I’m not one who pooh-poohs television, because I love some of the stuff on television. But the living experience of the audience and the actors breathing the same air, and the audience actually participating in the experience even as they watch it–to have that duality of being in it and out of it at the same time–that’s an experience that no electronic medium can equal. It’s just a deeper experience. Just like being off-line is more bruising and more exhilarating than any on-line experience.

On Running a Theatre

I once wrote something like: "A person who runs a theatre has to be ahead of their audience, ahead of their perception of the world." People don’t always know what’s preoccupying them. Only unusually introspective people spend time thinking, "What is really on my mind? What do I really want to do? Do I want to be here? Do I want to be in this marriage? Do I want to be in this job? Do I want to be this busy? Does it matter that I’m flying in a tree from Brazil for my back yard? So I have an 8,000-square-foot house, does it matter? Does the Rolex watch matter or the alpaca coat? Why am I still unhappy?" Unless they’re very introspective and sit down and think about that, people don’t usually know what’s on their mind.

So a person selecting plays has to get in touch with what’s on their own mind, heart, psyche, soul, spirit, in a deeper way than maybe the people walking down the street do. In running a theatre, one comes to know oneself very well–for better and for worse.

At the time that I wrote that, I used the example of Our Town because I read that play in the ’60s, a time of casual sexuality, even among very young people, among married people: open marriages, experimentation with the freedom of the body. And here in Our Town is this not-sentimental, rather sardonic but pure examination of love. In the wonderful scene of Emily and George at the soda fountain, they declare their love for each other, sipping their sodas through a straw, using, to us, very circuitous, very tentative, language. That play struck a nerve in the population of Washington about what was being missed in this uncovering of self, in this "search for self" in the ’60s. Our Town articulated something that was ahead of their conscious thinking, something that they hadn’t yet brought up to the conscious level. We know that that period passed, and then, in reaction, we went into a period where marriage was "in," and, despite the lapses, monogamy became something very desirable. So after excess came an attitude of respect and commitment.

The role of an artistic director is to go beneath the surface of events and find the just-surfacing opposite of what is going on overtly. The artistic director must become familiar with opposite phenomena and the tension between them, and with which force, though it be buried, has the greater energy.

There’s a Russian word, which is "missal." It means thought or idea. "Za" in front of it is an intensive prefix, so it means the really deep, important idea. In theatre "zamissal" is that connecting tissue or that central conflict that, if you find it, will explode the meanings of the play, the reverberations of the play and wake the audience up to a new perception of reality. That's what we mean, I think, when we say that theatre has the capacity to change lives, to change the world.

I recently had a breakfast with Peter Hall, whom I’ve been dying to meet for a long time. In our talk, he said he evolves the concept of a production in the course of it, what he learns through the living process, through his actors. He doesn't know how he sees it or sees into it until the process of work reveals it to him.

I feel that if you don’t start with that central clue, that the designers have nothing to begin with. Where shall they begin? You can’t gather in a team that responds to each other, all looking for the same way of embodying this central thing. And the actors don’t have the thread upon which to string the moment-to-moment life of their character or, indeed, their relationships with each other.

Take, for example–I’m picking a play out of the air–A Doll's House. What is really, really going on in that play at the root of it? Is it about a stuffy Victorian man who is subjugating a woman who eventually doesn’t want to take it anymore, rebels and leaves, slamming the door? That’s how it was done, I think, in the ’60s. I saw Clare Bloom play it. She was fragile, wonderful, wonderfully delicate and warm, a subjugated woman who eventually found her voice and left and slammed the door. Liv Ullman in the '70s was a stronger Nora, a latent feminist, who came to full power in the course of the play. People cheered when she slammed that door. But what about that door?

But as I was studying that play a few years ago, preparing to direct it, I found that what was really going on was an agreement between them, not consciously arrived at, but socially prepared for. It was an enabling relationship on both parts, that she would play the doll if he would play the white knight and rescue her from any situation, bring home the good wine, make more money. He would play the master of his house and his children and his wife and his job, if she would play the doll. So it was a codependent relationship, really. And what blew it up was that he didn’t come through as the white knight. As soon as she got into trouble, he blamed her and accused her, in a quite terrible outburst, of ruining his career, and took from her her right to be a mother and a wife and be in charge of this house. This myth was shattered. She was a nobody. She couldn’t sleep with him anymore because she had become nobody to herself. His lectures saying that she wasn’t fit to bring up the children revealed him for what he was. And she internalized what he said and felt unfit.

So, then, she doesn’t slam the door, in a sense, in victory. She has to leave to reconstruct a persona. Her future is very much up in the air. There’s no slamming door. There’s no sense that she "has it made," because economically how is she going to survive? Does she leave her children just because she feels, "I have to find myself"? That’s a very feminist thought. Or does she leave them because she’s internalized his castigation of her as unfit to raise the children?

Our set for this production was a symbol of home. There was a light box in the center that evoked the feeling of a hearth. We wanted to work in the abstractions that we thought Ibsen would have worked in, had he not been confined by the box in an Italian court theatre, so to speak. So we had a light box in the middle of the stage. We took the emblem of Christmas, because Ibsen picks that as a time when the family is supposed to be exquisitely together. But we all know that holidays are the most difficult because all of the stresses come out in the open. And we hung in the Arena, in various places, large cutouts of dolls and toys, large ones that were symbols of the childlike centeredness of the family, but also of Nora’s childishness, as well as of Torvald's. The title implies not a house for a doll, but a house for miniaturized people. The furniture was quite Victorian; it was the home they had put together.

The audience was really very absorbed. I loved it when I heard a man say to his wife on the way out, "I just really think they could have worked it out some way. There was something really going on between them. They should have worked it out. She shouldn’t have left." They’d really taken it into their own life. Because what you want to do with any classic, any play, is to allow the audience to take the "zamissal" of that play into their own life. Otherwise, why do it? All theatre is contemporary. All theatre is about the audience via the make-believe of the actors. Of course, the more realistic the make-believe–the more you can con them–the better it is.

On Her Decision to Work at NYU

I wanted to keep working with the actors, the center of the theatre. Also, my company was growing older and I wanted to replenish it with young actors trained in a certain way. If I could have afforded to attach a training institution–a really first-class training institution–to the theatre, I would never have left. For six or seven years I was doing both jobs and I did bring actors trained at NYU into the company.

So I had several motives. One was to keep the part I loved the most: to work with actors, to contribute to Arena and to other theatres a kind of actor who could play the range of repertory–not just realism, but a reality-based technique that could encompass all of the repertory, a physically based technique, because psycho/physical action is our evolutionary inheritance. It works for the theatre, because that's how human beings actually behave.

Along with that, I was really tired of investing my life in the apparatus of making theatre: the fundraising, the board relations, the promotion and marketing–the paraphernalia of institutionalization. I’d given a lot to that because I knew you had to build a cradle to contain the baby, which is the art. You had to do that if you loved the art. I found I was quite good at it, actually, but I was tired of it. I had become bored by it, and I’d actually become depressed by it. I found that every time we began a play in those last five years, instead of being exhilarated and curious, and thinking this is it– the one play I want to put my heart and soul into, I kept thinking, "I’m tired of this."

The other thing was, the board was asking for yet another five-year plan, and I didn’t have one. I didn’t know which way to go except the way I was going. Looking back, I see now that five-year plans were not even feasible; a good one-year plan that really worked was what was needed at a perilous time in the history of the non-profit theatre. It was a time of enormous economic pressure. But we had just raised about $4 million dollars for a cultural diversity grant, which became of primary importance to the theatre. It was this grant that brought Tazewell Thompson to the theatre as artistic associate, that brought Cheryl West and other playwrights, that integrated the theatre, top to bottom, that started the Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship Program, which trains artists of color–not actors, but directors and designers, scene painters, publicity people, etc.,10 a year–to go back into ethnically specific theatres or mainstream theatre and affect them by who they are and what they know. The various components of the grant represented the next forward thrust of the Arena. Having launched that and seen it on its feet, I felt it was okay for me to go. The theatre was in good shape, even though it faced these money hazards, which I thought were going to go on for another 20, 25 years, longer than I was going to go on surely, so it seemed to me the right time to do something else with my professional life.

TCG and the Regional Theatre Movement

TCG was founded in 1961. W. McNeil Lowry, whom I mentioned before, Vice President of the Ford Foundation for humanities and arts, convened a number of us working in the field, some artistic directors and some educators, about 15 of us. I don’t remember who was sitting around the table, but I remember I had on a new red wool dress. It had to be a red dress. I thought, "Something important is going to happen in this room."

It was the beginning of the growth spurt of the regional theatres. We were just about to experience the flare-up of this idea around the country. It was a positive time. Kennedy was president, to be assassinated in 1963. But there was a positivism in the air. Mac, as he always did–and he should be given constant credit and a badge in heaven for what he did–put his finger on the need–that we were all operating separately, as if the others didn’t exist, and that we had information to share with each other, and that we could speed up the process of what seemed to be a renaissance of the idea of company theatres in different communities, having permanence and a continuing dialogue with their audiences.

So he asked us, "Do you feel you would like to be connected to each other? What would you think of a central organization that kept you all informed of what the others were doing, and expedited visits to see the work of each other, and offered you the possibility of mutual support?"

Out of that, for me, personally, came the invitation to Nina Vance to direct something at Arena and at the same time share my experience in just having built the new Arena Stage, as she faced building the new Alley Theatre. She came and directed a play with the company. This was for me a modest beginning of connection with sister theatres. In 1961, there were 15 of us. In 1991 there are 412. See how important asking the right question is.

When I presided over the transition from Peter Zeisler’s directorship in the mid-1990s, we were facing censorship of the work we were doing. We had to sign loyalty oaths as a condition of accepting money from the government, and restrictions, now in place, were on the horizon of giving money to individual artists; even channeling money through receiving organizations to individual artists is now prohibited. It was a time of increasing conservatism all around the country, with the strengthening of the Religious Right, the censorship of textbooks that reminded one of Inherit the Wind and of the Stokes trial of 1925. Censorship was looming very large, as was a diminution in funding. I remember testifying with Jane Alexander before Sidney Yates about the pressing need for continued funding. Peter was very active in his last years as executive director of TCG in fighting censorship and the withdrawl of funds.

The other thing that was on our plate was how to maintain an artistic flowering despite economic pressures; how not to yield to the bottom line, as expressed in dollars, because there was another bottom line below that bottom line, which was the bottom line of artistic achievement. What were theatres worth if they weren’t continuing in a nonprofit spirit? That is, a spirit that saw profit psychically, emotionally, intellectually, and not monetarily.

So there were large, large issues, and I remember discussions of the breath of consumerism as Zeisler was leaving and a new leadership was coming in, and these issues remain for us today, and their resolution requires artistic courage and educating our various communities about the bounty that theatre has for them and how urgently we need their support.

On her Heroes

The person who taught me theatre was Alan Schneider. My theatrical training was minimal, if it existed at all (I had majored in Russian language and literature), and I had a lot of learning to do. I took Alan’s directorial notes for him, one note per piece of paper,  and I observed his rehearsals whenever I could find the time. Our styles of directing diverged in time, but he remains a hero to me. His productions of Beckett at Arena–several were first American productions–taught me so much. His way of taking off from reality into the imaginative world of style, his sensitive use of all of the tools of the theatre–light, sound, design, costuming, space, time, montage–and his standards of perfection–gave me the roots of my artistic life. He was my closest colleague. He died in 1986 and is still mourned by many of us.

Margo Jones was a hero to me as well. She gave me the courage to move forward, when, after Edward Mangum’s health took him to Hawaii, I was left alone with the theatre, a very low budget, and a tiny first baby, not knowing a great deal about how to deal with any of them!