Lynne Meadow's Next Stage

Tempering passion with practicality, she steers Manhattan Theatre Club to a Broadway berth

By Randy Gener

On this cold windy morning in October, Lynne Meadow and Barry Grove are smiling and schmoozing in front of a giant novelty switch on an outdoor platform erected at the northeast corner of West 47th Street and Eighth Avenue. The proud duo—at present, the longest-running professional theatre partnership not just in the not-for-profit New York theatre but in the entire country—take turns speaking before a huddled motley of city officials, architects, real estate developers, businesspeople and Broadway actors who have put on proud faces and dark suits for this auspicious occasion: the reconsecration of the Biltmore Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club's new Broadway home.

This is it—the formal culmination of a grand, $35-million expansion effort that was launched some eight or nine years ago but whose real roots lie deep within the bone and marrow of MTC, the enterprising 34-year-old institution that now becomes one of the three not-for-profit stalwarts with Broadway stages. This is the eagerly anticipated reopening of one of the last historic Broadway palaces. Built in 1925, dormant since 1987, home at various times to Hair, The Heiress, George Abbott and the Federal Theatre Project, the Biltmore had somehow been bypassed by the renaissance of Times Square redevelopment and has now been transformed into a 650-seat house. Today's headline is the opening of MTC's inaugural production at the Biltmore, Richard Greenberg's The Violet Hour, directed by Evan Yionoulis and starring Mario Cantone, Dagmara Dominczyk, Scott Foley, Robin Miles and Robert Sean Leonard.

After the speeches and acknowledgments are made, Meadow and Grove join hands with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and MTC's board chair Peter J. Solomon to flip the prop switch, and a blast of red and white confetti fills the air, along with a medley of jaunty songs from past MTC shows (“The Joint Is Jumping” from Ain't Misbehavin' and “Better” from A Class Act). And the crowd streams through the Biltmore's bright, renovated façade to enter its warmly appointed, cream-colored interior.

The Meadow-Grove partnership is now 28 years old, stronger than ever and still engaged in a struggle to produce intelligent works of the highest possible quality and standards—and for the longest possible runs. Through lean times and flush, through events painful and triumphal, Meadow as artistic director and Grove as executive producer have been prolific providers of new and untried American plays and musicals. For their troop of campfire playwrights like Greenberg, A. R. Gurney, Donald Margulies, Terrence McNally, Alan Ayckbourn and John Patrick Shanley, MTC has been an informal base of operations. It has also supported new works by writers like David Lindsay-Abaire, David Auburn, Charles Busch, Marsha Norman and Sam Shepard. Actors who have since been propelled to greater renown—Christine Baranski, Cherry Jones, Nathan Lane, Bernadette Peters, Charlayne Woodard—have, like many of these frequently produced writers, joined the MTC board.

“After the disappointment of The Green Heart, a musical I wrote that did not receive an open-ended run, Lynne came to me and said that she wanted MTC to be my artistic home,” recalls actor/playwright Charles Busch, whose Tale of the Allergist's Wife Meadow herself produced and directed. “She said she would definitely do my next play, sight unseen. It was wonderful to have someone like that express her faith and confidence in me, even after getting mixed reviews for my latest work. That was a main impetus for my writing Allergist's Wife—the kind of Jewish, boulevard comedy that, if you look at the history books, would have once found a home on Broadway.”

The durability of Meadow-and-Grove teamwork—the endurance of their artistic collaborations and business relationships in an always-precarious industry riddled with high-risk flings and fledgling operations—is largely responsible for MTC's systematic growth. The company's deliberate transformation into a high-visibility, Tony-eligible institution, comparable to Roundabout Theatre Company and Lincoln Center Theater, speaks powerfully to their continuity of vision as well as to a boldness and persistence that comes with maturity and a sturdy managerial foundation. As Grove himself points out, while steering this writer through a personal tour of the renovated Biltmore: “This is not going to be a transfer house. This will not be a place for long, open-ended runs of shows that we premiere at our other two stages at the City Center. It will be a place for new works that will be produced in a regular season. Each of our theatres will have different strengths. Lynne will find the right way to use them.”

Founding, running and maintaining a theatre always involves risks. But as far back as 1975, when Grove joined Meadow as a business partner, MTC found it a source of frustration and bewilderment that theatre artists would work so hard and for so long only to have their shows run for a handful of performances. “I try to hang on to what we do,” Meadow says. “Barry tries to figures out how we can do what we want to do. He has really been the visionary in terms of all this. It's been his contention from the very beginning that our work isn't being seen by enough people.”

Conceived in 1969 by a group of businessmen (all avid playgoers) led by public relations executive Albert E. Jeffcoat, MTC began in the early 1970s as a small chamber theatre in the National Bohemian Hall, an old social club on East 73rd Street. Although it was modeled after the intimate London Arts Club, MTC actually emerged as the Off-Broadway equivalent of the Theatre Guild, appealing to a mainstream, subscriber-based audience and founded primarily as an alternative to Broadway.

The 24-year-old Meadow, fresh out of the Yale School of Drama (where she was the only woman director), had little experience in the professional theatre prior to being hired at MTC in September 1972. At the time, the company had a four-person staff and a $75,000 deficit, which Meadow managed to wipe out in two years. When she began looking in 1975 for someone to run the business end of the company, George White, an early MTC board member and former head of the O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, recommended Grove, a Dartmouth grad who ran a small theatre at the University of Rhode Island. Grove's arrival was the first major turning point in the history of MTC, which, then, as now, remained committed to writers, actors and directors, while often operating on a “why not” policy.

MTC's next major turning point took place in 1978 when the Fats Waller revue Ain't Misbehavin' was picked up by independent producers, who transferred it from East 73rd Street to Broadway, where it won the Tony for best musical. As Meadow recounts, that 1977?78 season was a banner year—and in many ways quite emblematic, because three wildly different shows were happening under one roof: Ain't Misbehavin' in the cabaret; an Athol Fugard premiere, Statements after an Arrest; and Red Fox, Second Hanging, a Kentucky import by Don Baker and Dudley Cocke. Those successes were followed two years later by MTC's New York premiere of Beth Henley's Pulitzer-winning Crimes of the Heart, which also moved to Broadway in November '81.

But in 1984, MTC found itself in peril when it was unable to pay a drastically increased rent and lost its lease on its East 73rd home. The company found a new home in the basement of the City Center on West 55th Street, where it continues to operate two stages of 299 and 165 seats. The move enabled MTC to produce eight productions a year—and the company continued to produce plays that appealed to wide audiences (like Shanley's Four Dogs and a Bone and McNally's Lisbon Traviata) and that could now quickly transfer to longer runs.

“I think of Lynne as working in the tradition of Joseph Papp,” remarks Donald Margulies, whose 1992 Sight Unseen moved on to a short-lived open run at the Orpheum Theatre. “Playwrights who are associated with MTC have changed in the public eye, as I have, and Richard Greenberg continues to do. But Lynne felt that MTC had closed Sight Unseen prematurely. I had a good run of nine months, but she thinks it could probably have run longer, which would have given it a new momentum and more attention.” So it comes as no surprise that Sight Unseen is going to be one of the first plays in the new Biltmore lineup, with Laura Linney and Liev Schreiber in the cast and Daniel Sullivan as director. “It's great that in this new venue Lynne and Barry feel that they can revisit work that has succeeded, but maybe not as much as it might have or could have,” Margulies adds.

In the same year that saw both Sight Unseen and McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart moving to commercial Off-Broadway, MTC also produced Meadow's adroit staging of Alan Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business directly for Broadway. Though it received generally good reviews, it was not the success the company had hoped, and its run lasted only 48 performances. But this first Broadway venture set the stage for McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! in 1995. That Tony-winning play was one of MTC's biggest hits—and one of the most poignant: Meadow, in her first public appearance after being treated for breast cancer, accepted the Tony for producing L!V!C! while wearing a dark-haired wig.

Commercial transfers of new American works from the nonprofit sphere are typically brought about through licensing, an outright sale to independent producers (as Papp did with Hair, a mistake he vowed never to repeat) or agreements with enhancement money. Then, as now, Meadow has maintained that “commercial productions are a byproduct, not the goal of the work we do or the criterion for our artistic policy.” The difference is that today many subsidized companies in New York are seizing the opportunity to own their works, capitalize on their success, if they are hits, and serve their theatres' larger mission. In addition, the theatre club helped bolster the Broadway fates of August Wilson's Seven Guitars and Conor McPherson's The Weir by offering them to its 17,500 subscribers as part of its series.

Despite the greater financial risks, Meadow and Grove seem to relish their new Broadway presence at the Biltmore. MTC achieved, after all, what many observers thought would never happen: During the 2001?02 season, David Auburn's Proof and Charles Busch's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife—new plays by relative unknowns with no Hollywood stars—both recouped their respective $1.1 and $1.65 million investments.

As Grove states, the new Broadway digs will make a big difference; it will allow the theatre club to double its subscriber numbers, substantially increase single-ticket sales, extend its educational outreach program and sell cheaper seats in the front rows. And in October, Meadow joined the likes of Mike Nichols, Agnes DeMille, Hal Prince and Bob Fosse when the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation presented her with the “Mr. Abbott” Award for lifetime achievement, one of the highest honors given to a director. “If Ellen Stewart is La Mama of Off-Off Broadway,” the actress Christine Baranski once quipped, “Lynne Meadow is La Mère of Midtown.” I spoke to Meadow, appropriately, in her office at the theatre's headquarters on 43rd Street.

RANDY GENER: I think that your roles as MTC's artistic director and producer have, in the public mind, somewhat overshadowed your primary love, which is directing. I almost feel that I need to deconstruct your career; the real challenge lies in separating the director from the artistic director from the producer—where one role ends and where the others begin.
LYNNE MEADOW: It's true. I suspect that this is probably because I've stayed in one place throughout most of my career, and so my identities (as a director, and then my intimate involvement as an artistic director in some of the plays we've done here) are all very wrapped up into this one place. There's no question that there are a lot of facets to what I identify with most. In addition to that, I am a mom. My son, Jonathan, who is 18 years old, just went off to college this fall. For many years, I was a mom with a child at home, and that influenced my choices about how much directing work I would do. I'm entering a different phase now; I have an opportunity to nurture my directing work more than I have in the past. I'm an artist at heart. Directing is what I treasure most. I'm lucky that I have these administrative skills, that I have great people I work with at MTC. There's no way I could do what I do here without their tremendous support, and without the gifted qualities that Barry has brought as an executive producer.

How are you able to balance all those roles?
My soul is nourished by being in rehearsal and by working with playwrights. There's no question that directing is the most intense and time consuming. In a way, I go beyond fatigue and beyond a sense of being burdened. The wonderful thing about going back to the office after you've done a play is that somehow your life in the theatre continues. The experience itself of having an ongoing theatre with its own demands means that, as important as the shows that I direct may be, I also know that I go to work no matter what. I'm not going to be unemployed the next day.

There's a new team of people working here now: Paige Evans, the new director of artistic development; Mandy Greenfeld, the new artistic associate in charge of artistic operations; and Dan Fields, an artistic associate who will be doing a lot of producing. I feel invigorated by their energy and contribution to this theatre. They're the next generation of people who will be re-inventing MTC for the next decade. Now I think I can attend to the creative side of myself. I'm directing Neil Simon's new play, Rose's Dilemma [currently performing at City Center]; I've just had a couple of meetings with Mary Tyler Moore and Tom Lynch, who are starring in it. This is where I want to be.

By the same token, I was on the phone at 10 o'clock two nights ago with Richard Greenberg. We had a precarious situation—an issue about whether one of the actors in The Violet Hour is going to make it here to start rehearsal. I am not directing that show, but I feel great that we were able to sort things out and everyone is happy, because I adore Richard. So I get a lot of pleasure from different aspects of my life, but the deepest sense of who I am comes, as you said, from the craft of directing—the craft that I've had a longing to do since when I was a kid.

As the artistic head of MTC, you get the pick of the litter, so how do you decide what plays you want to direct yourself?
If you look at the body of my work, it's very eclectic. I am an interpreter, not an auteur. Probably my best work has been the work that is closest to me emotionally. Ashes by David Rudkin, Tale of the Allergist's Wife by Charles Busch, or some of the Alan Ayckbourn plays—all those plays spoke to me. The thing that makes my career unusual is that I grew up with MTC; I've become an adult here. It has been the canvas on which I have learned about who I am. I can't imagine having done it any other way. I remember that the man who hired me [Gerald Freund] said, “We need to find someone who will run this theatre and grow with this institution.” That's what's happened. As I've been working, I've come to have a clearer sense of what I'm interested in and what I want to do, which I surely didn't know when I was 24 years old and out of Yale School of Drama.

I do think that there are certain tendencies that are very telling. I find it fascinating it that you have always, always focused on untried work.
Yes, new work has been my passion. I think the part of my spirit that is creative and intrepid loves the idea of cutting a new path through the jungle. I like the idea of creating something that has never been seen, as opposed to reinterpreting works. Some of the reasons for that has to do with the era I came from—I was a child of the '60s and early '70s, and we wanted to break the mold and invent new things. Back then, Joe [Papp] was a real champion of mine as a director. I remember when I directed Ashes in 1976. It was a co-production with the New York Shakespeare Festival, so I did it down there and got to know Joe. I remember that a theatre in Haifa got in touch with me and asked, “Do you want to do the play in Israel?” I wrote the man back and said, “I would love to come to Haifa. But I have already done the play. I really don't want to do it again.” I was young and restless, and I wanted to do something else; that was my nature back then. Okay, I've done that. What mountain are we climbing next?

You recently directed the national tour of Tale of the Allergist's Wife with Valerie Harper—which I find curious, because you rarely return to work that you've premiered.
As I've grown older, I've had more patience to re-look at things and go deeper. I think I've mellowed as a person and an artist, and I probably have a greater attention span and more ease. I think I could re-look at something today and say, “Well, I did it and got a certain amount out of it this time. And now I could do it again and be able to go deeper and learn something else.”

You are one of the country's leading champions of Alan Ayckbourn, but you haven't directed Ayckbourn's recent works. Instead, you directed Marsha Norman's The Last Dance.
e become a very proficient interpreter of Ayckbourn's work for American audiences. Marsha writes about women in such a particular way; she is expressing things that other people haven't expressed. In my own career, I stayed away from being a woman's director early on, probably because I was so fiercely trying to get away from stereotypes. I feel there's so much compartmentalizing that gets done—this is a woman's play and only a woman should direct it—that sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot. I did a play called Principia Scriptoriae by Richard Nelson in 1986, and it was all guys in a prison cell. I think was wailing against the idea of being categorized and being marginalized and being gendered. I wanted to say: I can do a prison play that has guys being beaten up. I can do a woman's play—I guess I was more zealous then. My orientation is very psychological. I did this musical, Captains Courageous, with these guys [including Treat Williams] who had backgrounds in musicals. I don't think they were necessarily used to working with a director who worked with actors in quite the way I did—I brought all my psychological stuff.

You like plays that involve families or close relationships, often with a strong woman figure at the center.
Definitely, I do. Ultimately, the plays I love the most are the things where you really can laugh and then really feel something deeper. To me that's the greatest. Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind was about a woman who was completely misunderstood within her environment. As I get older, I am more committed to allowing my sense of humor to come out. Often a director makes choices that you really can't explain; something speaks to you and you gravitate toward it, like a magnet. (Pause) Maybe part of me wants to direct everything we produce. (Laughs) Maybe really if I'm honest, I want to direct every single play that we do at MTC. Maybe that's the truth.

Wasn't Nikos Psacharopoulos [the late founder of Williamstown Theatre Festival] another significant influence?
Yes. Because I was a young woman who wanted to direct—and there weren't women directors back then—he was concerned that I would get into an assistant position. He felt that I should get into a leadership position. I don't think that's true now, because things have changed somewhat for women; a woman can assist and still be considered a director. You almost have to ask a stage manager what's its like to work with me, because I've never been in the rehearsal room with another director. I didn't come up in the path of assisting people and seeing this is how she or he works, and I'm going to work differently. I never had that.

Looking back, is there something that you used to do that you wouldn't do today?
In 1982, Christine Baranski and I did a show called Sally and Marsha by Sybille Pearson, with Bernadette Peters. Later on Christine and I did Margulies's The Loman Family Picnic. Christine was telling me about how I had changed in all those years. What I used to do early on, she said—it was my way of caring—was attend to everything. I had a big list of all the stuff that I was going to worry about, and I would bring all of that into rehearsal. You don't have to worry about yourself because I'm covering your back; I've got you. I don't do that anymore. Now I know I'll catch them if they fall.

I was so intense when I was younger. As you know, I faced a life-threatening illness a number of years ago [breast cancer in 1995]. After that, everything became so much easier and lighter. Directing became that place of privilege—it was not the hospital. I saw what a real hospital was. In some way, I probably confused the operating room in real life and what was going on with the life and death in the theatre. I was looking down the barrel of the gun. That's life and death. Now, I try to have as much fun as possible. I deal with things one day at a time. I'm very demanding. I'm a perfectionist. I have definite ideas about what I work on, but I try to create an atmosphere in rehearsal where actors don't feel they are being judged.

You've been through several struggles as artistic director. Early on in the life of MTC, in the early 1970s, you fought for artistic control over a chamber-theatre series, which stood apart from the other activities of MTC, in part because it offered revivals of classic works.
That was a painful moment—and a watershed experience for me. There were a lot of other issues involved, but there's no question that one of the main issues was about my being a young woman who's in charge of an institution. I realized that if you don't stand up for yourself, no one is going to. I'm not sure what the board would've done had I not said, almost naïvely, that my artistic autonomy was threatened. If you don't like what the artistic vision is, you tell the person to go away. I was a young woman, making virtually no money. I would've made more money working in the cheese department at Zabar's. Maybe the whole process of being at MTC during these last years has been a long journey of putting me in touch with my soul and my authority, and that was one of many steps along the way.

I would imagine that today the ultimate challenge is not just about creating a theatre anymore, but about protecting the house that you built.
And figuring out how that house would look. I want that house to reflect the things, people and ideas I cherish. I don't know yet how the Biltmore will influence our artistic policy, but I know it will have an extraordinary impact on the works we do. I'm sorry I'm not directing at the Biltmore this year—that's the only thing. But I'm proud that Richard Greenberg and Donald Margulies, writers whose work I've believed in for a long time, are at the Biltmore. I'm proud Regina Taylor's Drowning Crow is being done on Broadway for the first time in January. I'm proud that I get to do Neil's play at home. I'm directing Daniel Goldfarb's new play, Sarah, Sarah, at home. The stakes are higher, and I'd like it to be successful. I hope people will feel connected to the works they are seeing.

Basically, we're reinventing who we are. The Biltmore should reflect what MTC has been for the last 30 years and also what it will be. That includes working with writers who have been part of its history and taking a look at what I call contemporary classics. One of my strengths as a director and artistic director has been in nurturing and enjoying collaborations and encouraging people to do their best work. And I am definitely looking to find a way to be in the rehearsal room, which is where I want to be. Or cooking. Or doing my needlepoint in the rehearsal room.

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