We Play Harder
Theatre artists are turning Pittsburgh's conservatism into an asset
By Elizabeth Kaiden
Pittsburgh is a steel town. It will always be a steel town, though the steel industry is long gone. Its history has burned itself into the national consciousness as much as it still marks, like an outdated tattoo, the civic forearm.
With the history comes a legacy. Pittsburgh is conservative in a profound sense, explains Attilio (Buck) Favorini, longtime director of theatre studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Still largely divided by race, income and ethnicity—and separated into small groups by the city’s hills—the mostly working-class population has resisted national social and cultural trends. Pittsburghers maintain a traditional value system shaped by the city’s historic relationship to, and dependence on, its corporate leadership.
This conservatism affects the city’s current culture in ways that are many and varied, but for the most part, it bodes surprisingly well for performing arts companies. Pittsburgh’s civic pride is formidable, and civic leaders and residents alike sport a sense of commitment to the community—to fostering a first-class local arts scene with a national profile. Like the famous 1970s Steelers football team, theatre professionals and those supporting them are determined to play harder than everyone else. Behind every new project lurks a kind of desperation to overcome the most extreme odds. Pittsburgh works on itself, and it is now applying its ferocious energy to the arts.
Indeed, in talking to members of the theatre community here, I was surprised by the widespread optimism. While acknowledging that a general distaste for highly experimental or risqué material exists, everyone I met in Pittsburgh during a week there in early November was excited about the city’s theatre scene and almost surprised that it has as much breadth and sophistication as it does.
Of course, theatre does have a long history in the city. Carnegie Mellon University has been training actors since 1941. Pittsburgh Playhouse did spectacularly well as a community theatre from 1934 until its decline in the ’70s, after William Ball started the competing American Conservatory Theater (now located in San Francisco) in 1965. Two new companies subsequently came to life: Pittsburgh Public Theater resulted from community efforts to establish a professional theatre in 1974; and City Theatre grew out of the University of Pittsburgh a year later. Among the widely known actors hailing from Pittsburgh are Michael Keaton, Jeff Goldblum and Dennis Miller—and the city generates its share of pop-culture inspiration, spawning television shows like “Hill Street Blues,” “The Guardian” and “Queer as Folk,” as well as George Romero’s B-movie classic Night of the Living Dead and Pulitzer-winning author Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Today’s crop of theatre leaders and artists are building on a solid foundation.
Playing a key role among the builders is Pittsburgh Public Theater artistic director Ted Pappas, who—fittingly—grew up in Gary, Ind., the son of a Greek steelworker, and who has headed the Public since 2000. The city’s largest LORT operation, the Public has a loyal following, and the city views it as an anchor arts organization—so all Pappas needs to do is pick appealing shows that ruffle few feathers and execute those shows well. (That’s all?)
He acknowledges as much, and has dedicated himself energetically to the task, presenting classics and popular newer works that bring big names to town and offer impressively high production values: Medea, Man of La Mancha and Paper Doll (with Marlo Thomas and F. Murray Abraham) have all marched across the Public’s stage in the last two seasons. August Wilson, a native son, still premieres much of his work at the theatre and requires that Pittsburgh stagings meet his high standards. Recent productions of Jitney and King Hedley II went on to Broadway.
The Public posted a loss last year (2001-02) of $500,000, but this year it is selling out. And it has an ace that is always on the table: a spacious, elegant theatre facility designed by Michael Graves, sitting behind a glass and brick facade in the middle of Pittsburgh’s downtown.
Pappas’s strategy is both bold and simple: “In times of economic uncertainty, you don’t cut back. You keep all your lights on and you do the musical a little bigger,” he says. “The answer to all of it is keeping the quality high. Great art sells tickets.” Thus Medea, in September 2001, proved to be a highly sought-after vehicle for public catharsis. Plays like Much Ado About Nothing and Driving Miss Daisy, this season, brought families in from all over the region.
Tracy Brigden, in her second year at the helm of City Theatre, takes an entirely different approach. She took over the company when Marc Masterson departed for Louisville. Over 20 years, Masterson had built City Theatre into a scrappy, edgy alternative to the Public. Brigden inherited a company housed in its own brick building, situated among the Art Deco storefronts of Pittsburgh’s South Side, a post-industrial neighborhood of bars, restaurants, coffee shops and record and book stores. The theatre had a reputation for doing new, often difficult work. At the same time, it had become a substantial theatre with a subscriber base some 5,000 strong.
Brigden began her tenure by directing the American premiere of Adam Rapp’s Blackbird, a quirky love story about an injured Gulf War veteran and a hepatitis-struck former stripper. She staged it in the smaller of the theatre’s two spaces but still could only sell about a third of the 100-seat house. The experience does not seem to have rained on her parade. She claims that Pittsburgh audiences are sophisticated, smart and enthusiastic. This season she directed Christopher Durang’s new anti-Christmas holiday extravaganza, Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, and is helming Karl Gajdusek’s Fair Game through April 6. The Durang piece and Cheryl L. West’s Birdie Blue, running through May 4, are among the hottest theatrical properties in the country.
Rapp’s edgy scenario notwithstanding, the city is embracing Brigden, and most of the company’s productions sell out. She also talks of expanding City Theatre’s scope. “I would love to do a Joe’s Pub thing,” the affable young director says. “One of my models is the National Theatre in London. You can just go there and there’s so much going on—the pubs, the galleries. It makes theatre a destination. That’s the future. On Saturday afternoons we want to make a kiddie acting class upstairs, so parents can go to the matinee. We want to make it a town hall for the community.”
This pair of LORT theatres is not unlike what you’d find in other cities of comparable size; nor is it unique that more than a handful of smaller troupes are mounting reasonably good shows here. The difference in Pittsburgh is this: All the city’s theatres are selling tickets. People are going. Why? One reason might be the discounts available for young theatregoers: Both the Public and City Theatre offer seats to anyone 25 and under for $10 or $12. The cheap-ticket factor, however, is not the reply that springs most readily to people’s lips. Rather, every theatre professional to whom I posed the “why” question beamed back at me with the sunniest of spring-watered smiles and answered more or less the same way—the work is good, they declared, and Pittsburgh has an audience that’s primed and ready to be entertained.
The city’s success at keeping and even expanding its theatre offerings is largely the result of an enormous effort on the part of the civic leadership to do so. For years, the city has been rebuilding its downtown as an arts hub, under the direction first of Jack Heinz II, starting in 1966, and then of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, established in 1984 to execute his vision. The Public’s theatre is a landmark development in this ongoing project; two years ago, it opened around the corner from the city’s gilded titans, Heinz Hall and the Benedum Center, with Wilson’s King Hedley II, only blocks away from the neighborhood in which the play is set.
Kevin McMahon, director of the Cultural Trust, says: “If we want to be known as an arts town, we have to act like one. If we bring in the Kirov or the Bolshoi, we won’t hurt the Pittsburgh Ballet; we will help it. I fundamentally believe that the pie is expandable. More begets more.”
Certainly this assertion is proving true for the pool of performers. Partly because of opportunities at the local universities, the caliber of local actors has steadily risen. More Equity actors are moving to the city for the combination of conservatory teaching positions at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and Point Park College; professional acting opportunities; and the affordability and accessibility of this almost midwestern town. Pitt offers teaching residencies to theatre artists. CMU’s theatre department may soon prove even more attractive to performing artists, now that it’s under the leadership of Elizabeth Bradley, who was hired last year from Toronto to give the program a new international outlook.
The story of Rick Kemp, an early member of the U.K.’s Theatre de Complicite who was weaned on European “devised theatre” and now lives outside Pittsburgh, illustrates just how hospitable—and even invigorating—the city’s theatre climate has become. Kemp retired to the woods of Butler County, where his wife grew up, burnt out on theatre. He spent a year fixing up his log cabin and learning to use a chainsaw, then embarked on a Ph.D. in theatre studies at Pitt. In the past two years he has directed four productions in Pittsburgh and has lined up five to come (including the next piece for Pittsburgh’s Broadway-stamped multidisciplinary performance group Squonk Opera). He never expected to return to theatre, he claims, but he found “the theatre community here to be welcoming, supportive and inspiring.”
Kemp puts it this way: “The professional theatre community is of a size where it’s pretty easy to get to know people, so there is an extraordinary level of cross-fertilization between styles of theatre that wouldn’t shake hands in bigger cities. The same actors do both the mainstream and the avant-garde. The theatrical establishment doesn’t have the monolithic feel that it had in London, with both Tracy at City Theatre and Ted at the Public being very approachable.”
Of course, it doesn’t quite feel like the cutting edge. When asked for reservations about the local theatre scene, Kemp explained: “One of the fundamental aspects of my work is the belief that the actor is a creative, not just an interpretive, artist. The way that the vast majority of actor-training is conducted does not encourage proactive creative decision-making, or give the actor technical tools to support that creativity. The comment that I’ve heard most frequently here in response to my work is, ‘How did you come up with all that stuff that’s not in the text?’”
The local synergies that lured Kemp back to the theatre fold have kept other Pittsburgh artists from straying beyond it. Pitt graduated three of the leading players in the local scene: Karla Boos of Quantum Theatre, Laura Smiley of Unseam’d Shakespeare Co., and Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre (PICT) artistic director Andrew Paul, who sums up the city’s drama scene with the axiom: “You can do world-class theatre if you have the artists—and we have them.”
Paul stayed in Pittsburgh to do theatre after finishing his economics degree because he felt the time was ripe. Nobody else was making the kind of intelligent, intimate, language-focused theatre he likes, and he determined that he could fill that void. Operating in the summer months when the Equity theatres take a break, PICT, which Paul co-founded with Stephanie Riso, performs classics, as well as works by modern Irish playwrights. A translation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, set among the Anglo-Irish by playwright Thomas Kilroy, was particularly well received last year. The company maintains ongoing relationships with Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh. (And, if business has been good, it could be that it has been boosted by raves from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s universally appreciated critic, Christopher Rawson.) Paul himself has set his aspirations on a national and even international profile, taking his first step last fall by transporting his production of Friel’s Faith Healer to Ireland and Northern Ireland and selling out there.
Artistic director Karla Boos and her Quantum Theatre have less conventional, more transgressive aspirations. Almost every theatre professional and regular theatregoer I met during my visit raved about Quantum’s distinctive, sometimes disconcerting style, as if unable to comprehend why something so special should be happening in Pittsburgh. “Pound for pound, the most interesting work being done in the city is being done by Quantum,” Dr. Favorini says flatly. “Karla doesn’t hit a home run every time, but it’s always interesting.”
What Boos does do is craft sophisticated multimedia productions that present great works of world theatre in uncommon settings (Stoppard in a cemetery, Cocteau in a museum, Shakespeare in an industrial warehouse). Homelessness is the proverbial mother of invention for Quantum. It has inspired Boos, over the past 12 years, to come up with creative combinations of plays and settings. Quantum now sells out almost every performance.
Boos, who grew up in nearby West Virginia and cut her teeth in the experimental theatre scene of L.A., made a calculated decision to set up shop at this intersection of three rivers. “I felt I could approach the systems that make the city work,” she explains. “I wanted to go to a city where I could knock on a door and make intelligent conversation.”
Like many others, she first raised her fist at the door of Teresa Heinz, chairman of the Heinz Family Philanthropies, and it opened. “I immediately went to a funding source and said, ‘I want to do this. It’s intercultural and multimedia.’ And Pittsburgh was totally open to supporting something cultural that it didn’t yet have. They are forward-thinking enough to get it.”
Even without a venue, Boos has proven remarkably resourceful. In the summer of 2001, she says, “We were doing the American premiere of a play called Splendour by Abi Morgan at the pump house of the razed Homestead Steel Works. On that site at the turn of the century was the first strike in which hired guns were ordered to fire on workers. And the river ran red with their blood. That was the beginning of American labor history.
“So we were rehearsing there and the steelworkers came down from the hills and said, ‘What are youn’s doing here?’ They’d point and say, ‘I used to work down there.’ We told them we were making a play, and they came—and that was when I connected my art to this city.”
It is through an impressive combination of patience, cunning and (pun intended) steely determination that professionals like Boos and Paul are turning this city’s entrenched conservatism into an asset. The Public, City Theatre, PICT, Quantum and Squonk Opera have cultivated successful followings and taken savvy advantage of a foundation-giving agenda that is almost excessive for a city of Pittsburgh’s size—and that is heavily focused on the arts.
Perhaps the old ways give the city a kind of cachet today. As author and CMU professor Richard Florida points out in his best-selling book The Creative Class, creative people increasingly choose to move to congenial cities, rather than following job security as their predecessors did. Pittsburgh has a kind of authenticity, an anti-cool quality that—although Florida does not see it this way—is arguably hyper-hip. In Pennsylvania’s recent gubernatorial race, the current “brain drain” from the region was a hot topic. The area has indeed been losing its younger population for years. But its artistic and social scenes are vibrant today, and it is tempting to speculate about the imminence of a turnaround.
Elizabeth Kaiden is a 2002-2003 American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support from a grant by the Jerome Foundation.
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