[Read Part 1 of this two-part column here.]
The acting company at the O’Neill was sublime. It seemed that everyone admirable who appeared onstage in New York wanted at least a few weeks of Connecticut greenery and the breeze from Long Island Sound. Not that it was always sunshiny. There were heat waves and hurricane warnings, and those dreaded gray mornings when the fog would roll in and never seem to lift; “Mary Tyrone mornings” we called them. There were foggy evenings too: Once I remember going for an afternoon walk on the beach with two friends up from New York for the day. As we turned to go back, the fog rolled in behind us, which we didn’t see till it had engulfed us, so thick it made us totally invisible to each other. I with my wretched night vision panicked; they had to clutch me, one by each arm, to get me safely back to the O’Neill grounds.
Climate change has burnt away much of the fog, but has brought other problems in its wake, including an increased population of deer ticks and sometimes sweltering heat. Nobody has ever really loved the Amphitheatre, the largest of the O’Neill’s four performance spaces, but in extreme heat its open-air spaciousness can become nigh on unbearable. Even back in the day, an actor rehearsing in the Amp during a heat wave once passed out from heatstroke. Mercifully, he was uninjured and recovered in time for the performance that night. The Amp is also plagued with noise from the nearby Ocean Beach Amusement Park, particularly during its annual “Polka-bration,” which arrives in time to plague one of the O’Neill’s big weekends every summer.
My favorite story about the Amp and the amusement park, though, has to do with the Fourth of July, one year when I was dramaturg on a show there. The amusement park of course had fireworks planned, and the O’Neill had worked out a schedule with them so that the fireworks would, we hoped, occur during our act break. Unfortunately, there were many visitors up from New York that holiday weekend. They took a while to get settled, and Lloyd in his introductory speech—he gave one at every show—seized his opportunity to work the crowd, urging donations. Between the slow house-filling and his speech, we started later than planned, and had only just gotten to the first act’s climactic moment—where Dianne Wiest exclaimed to Jeffrey DeMunn, “God in the sky! Are you a virgin?”—when a very large Roman candle went up, signaling the start of the amusement park’s fireworks display. Between the fireworks and the laughter, I don’t think our audience that night noticed much of the rest of Act One.
[Read more Feingold Columns here.]
Plays at the O’Neill rehearsed for two and a half days, performed with scripts in hand, then had a day off, with a few afternoon hours allowed for notes and for any quick revisions the playwright and director chose to make, before the second performance, also with scripts in hand. Some directors pressured their playwrights to rewrite (the Broadway out-of-town tryout tradition still sent its vibes our way), and some dramaturgs abetted them. I usually strove to put the brakes on, warning playwrights, “You don’t have to do this. It’s your choice.” And some directors didn’t love me for it; others, who approached rewriting more gingerly, were grateful for the support my warnings offered. Some playwrights had come expecting to go through a manic rewrite process, and couldn’t stop themselves; the script office was kept busy churning out last-minute new pages. Others refused to make any changes at all—I suspect the phrase kill your darlings was invented as a rebuke to them. Some of this latter group had a fondness for what I called “gizmos”—verbal tricks or clever twists in the action that seemed to me (and often to their directors) to add nothing to the play’s substance. Gently, I would try to persuade them to take these things out—only to find, ironically, in several such cases, that when the play got a full production, in New York or at some resident theater, that all the gizmos had been put back in place, because there are directors and producers in the world who love gizmos too. They think of a play simply as a means of keeping the audience diverted, not of leading them somewhere.
The best playwrights had to struggle, deeply, to find exactly where they were leading the audience. I had the honor to serve, at the O’Neill, as dramaturg on two of the plays by August Wilson first seen there. The first was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, an astonishing discovery by a then-unknown artist. We all marveled at the cumulative power of its talk and its spellbinding confrontations. Somewhere, buried in an archival box, I think I may still have my O’Neill script, with a remarkable epilogue that August, when reworking the play for its full production, elected to abandon. Following the murder, Ma and the remaining members of her band are seen waiting for the police to complete their investigation and release them. Their talk is a requiem—shockingly, not for the murdered piano player and amateur philosopher, Toledo, but for Levee, the hot-headed young trumpeter who has killed him, and who now will never be able to display the musical brilliance of which his early (and intrusive) efforts to assert himself in Ma’s accompaniment have shown such an exciting foretaste.
One can see why August cut this scene: It sheers away from the play’s main dramatic focus, and the unexpected jolt its topic gives the audience could come off seeming like—well, like a gizmo. Yet at the same time, it widens the scope of the play’s tragedy, casting light on its social context from an unexpected angle. Sometimes, seeing revivals, I have regretted its deletion.
Writing was a particularly deep struggle for August, and every completed script a hard-won victory. The ending of The Piano Lesson, the second of his plays on which I served as dramaturg at the O’Neill, was a source of true anguish for him as well as a challenge for us. Later, when Lloyd staged the full production at Yale Rep that moved to Broadway, August found an ending that, at that time, seemed to me like a patch—too facile and too easily settling a conflict weighed down by the riveting power of the play’s backstory. (Berniece’s line “Money can’t buy what that piano cost” is burned on my heart.) Only when Ruben Santiago-Hudson staged its Signature revival did the end seem right and fulfilling.
While playwrights struggled to bring their scripts into sharper focus, directors—at least, the more commercially minded ones—entertained themselves with fantasies of being linked to a play that was a “hot property,” with visions of regional and Main Stem productions dancing in their heads. Such directors were not always asked back for a second season, but it was hard to ignore the success stories of plays that had traveled the rocky road from the O’Neill to New York and moneymaking: Ron Cowen’s Summertree, Chris Durang’s History of the American Film, John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and so many others. However often Lloyd bemoaned The New York Times feature that had dubbed the O’Neill “Tryout Town, USA,” neither he nor anyone else could ignore the prestige, and the funding, that such successes brought the O’Neill. For most of us, it was simply another burden of the kind nonprofit arts organizations have learned to live with; but there were directors, and a few playwrights, who saw the successful transfer as their chief goal in life. I remember one director who loaded so many props (and not modular props, either) onto a rather slight comedy that his stage manager reported him to the “art police”—meaning that she complained quietly about the excessive prop list to Lloyd’s office staff, so that the director duly received one of Lloyd’s gentle but firm reprimands. And in good time, too, for while overloading the play with his gimmickry, the director had almost succeeded in turning its meager satirical point upside down.
On another occasion, I found myself, at breakfast, trapped between the director and writer of the previous night’s performance, each of whom had stayed up all night preparing a very different version of the play’s second act, which each insisted must be inserted at that afternoon’s rehearsal. As each was equally determined that his version be the one used, there was nothing for me to say but “Let’s go talk to Lloyd.” So off we went. Not for the first time did it occur to me that Lloyd’s role model was Abraham Lincoln, in his “Great Compromiser” mode. He listened patiently to the two clashing accounts of what needed to be done to repair the play, then turned to the playwright, saying that of course his version would have priority; the Conference was about him and was dedicated to helping him make his play better. But, he added, it might be that the director’s version was worth a look, before jumping in with a brand-new second act so hastily prepared; perhaps the playwright might find some of the director’s revisions of use, as clues or even as shortcuts to the material he was striving to sort out. Both went away content with this, mollified by Lloyd’s calming, soft-spoken presence. I breathed a sigh of relief and stayed out of what I knew would be a long and knotty wrangle between then and our late afternoon rehearsal hours. The new pages that arrived that afternoon were very much a merger of the playwright’s rewrites with the director’s cut-and-paste edits. The act played much better, and everyone involved was happy. Lloyd didn’t say anything to me about the incident, but at the conclusion of the second performance, he smiled at me and said, “Good work.”
George White was a passionate internationalist, and there were always groups of foreign visitors at the O’Neill—frequently from then–Soviet Russia and from China, for the Cold War was still on and George felt vehemently that theater could be the best way of bridging the political gap. The Russians came in the hope of raising “valuta” by selling Soviet plays in the U.S.: There were always one or two men from the State Copyright Bureau in the delegation, whom most of the Conference assumed to be KGB agents sent to keep the artists in line. That always made me laugh, since to me they seemed exactly like hardware salesmen from the Midwest—just guys trying to market a product they were pretty sure wouldn’t sell. My fun came from trying to guess by their behavior which of the Soviet playwrights were the actual KGB agents and which were mild dissidents being let out for a brief breath of free air. The Russians always had breakfast, all together, on the sea porch of the mansion, with its beautiful view of Long Island Sound. A regular Conference joke was that they did so hoping to catch a glimpse of the Electric Boat Company’s latest products. (EBC, one of New London’s major industries, manufactured nuclear subs for the Navy. There was a rumor that, during the O’Neill’s earliest years, they had tainted the local water supply, and in fact a number of actors from those years died of cancer.)
Plays by Russians, mostly not very good, were sometimes put on the Conference schedule. They usually came with equally mediocre, British-inflected translations by the State Translation Bureau. I recall being assigned to one (authored by one of the mild dissidents), and sitting down with a Russian-speaking American advisor, to retranslate it, line by painful line, because the actors had found the script they were given literally unspeakable.
The Chinese, who were just picking themselves up from the disaster of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, came chiefly to honor the spirit of O’Neill himself, whose plays had become a sensational rediscovery there as the nation started to rebuild its interest in Western-style theater. With them, as with the Russians, conversation had its limits, and one learned not to press a touchy point. (The Russians always came prepared to answer attacks on the Soviet system which, most of the conferees being politically unawakened, almost never occurred.) One year, the Chinese visitors included the young woman who had just translated O’Neill’s’ The Iceman Cometh into Chinese. Rashly, because I couldn’t resist, I asked her how she had translated the slang expression pipe dream, which occurs several hundred times in the play’s lengthy text. “We use the word for illusion,” she replied demurely, but with a firmness that clearly shut down any further discussion of the matter. She had no intention of delving into the twisty topic of China’s long and tangled history of opium smoking, from which the phrase derives.
On another occasion I found myself chatting with a Russian librettist who told me he had written a musical version of a play “by a writer you probably never heard of.” He was floored when I told him that Isaac Babel’s work was not only well known in English, but that I had actually seen an off-Broadway production of the very play he was adapting. Then, unfortunately, I mentioned the film Babel had written for Sergei Eisenstein (which had been suppressed and destroyed in the Stalinist 1930s), and our conversation, like my exchange with the Chinese O’Neill translator, ground to a dead halt. The topic was one that an artist from a politically regulated totalitarian state firmly (and no doubt wisely) declined to discuss.
Besides Russians and Chinese, the most frequent foreign visitors were Scandinavians, chiefly Danes and Swedes; I don’t recall British, French, German or Italian visitors turning up with any frequency, and there were surprisingly few from the then-Soviet satellite countries, except for an occasional Hungarian. The Swedish drama critic Ingmar Bjorkstejn, who later did me a kindness for which I will be forever grateful, loved the place, and for a time came regularly every summer. (Years later, he arranged for me to visit the Ibsen Fest in Oslo and the Dramaten in Stockholm. I spent two weeks seeing some of the best theater in the world.)
One year Ingmar’s visit happened to coincide with a black play, not unworthy but of only mild interest in itself, about the struggles of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. A significant figure in the play was Dunbar’s determined mother, a former slave fiercely ambitious for her son, and this was Ingmar’s first opportunity to experience the work of Mary Alice, an extraordinary actress who had become a beloved fixture at the O’Neill. The first act ended with a ferocious scene between Dunbar (powerfully played by Roc Dutton) and his mother, as he fought to get free from her domination. I’ll never forget the way Ingmar came out of the Barn Theatre, on fire with amazement. He caught sight of me, grabbed me by the shoulders, and shouted, “Who is this woman? Why isn’t she playing Medea?” I explained to him that she was Mary Alice and could play anything, and would set ablaze with her inner light anything she chose to do, from a condom commercial to an avant-garde poetic threnody. Thinking back, I now rather regret that I never followed up that conversation by urging Mary to play Medea, and everyone who remembers her Tony-winning performance in August Wilson’s Fences on Broadway will know exactly what I mean. The climactic moment, when she takes the illegitimate newborn child from her faithless husband’s arms and says, “From now on, Troy Maxson, this child has got a home. But you a womanless man,” Mary played this with a seemingly unemphatic quietude that nonetheless made every spectator feel nailed to the back wall by its intensity. (Fences, too, began at the O’Neill, though in nowhere near the taut shape in which it arrived on Broadway.)
I let Lloyd down one summer. I had been hired to translate a new opera for Santa Fe, and did not give him enough advance warning that I would be unavailable for the Conference that summer. He did not reproach me, and our relations remained cordial when we ran into each other, but he did not invite me to serve as a dramaturg again. Luckily, by then I had already established myself in a role which allowed me a further link to the Conference for many years; as a teacher in the National Critics Institute, run when I first taught there by Ernie Schier of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and after his retirement by Dan Sullivan of the Los Angeles Times, who had been his second in command.
NCI was another outgrowth of Lloyd and George’s quest to integrate criticism into the O’Neill process. Its fellows were a mixture of recent journalism school graduates with an interest in the arts and fairly inexperienced or artistically untutored critics from newspapers around the country. Many were reporters or feature writers who had been handed the theater-critic “beat” simply because the vacancy needed filling. Their teachers—who included, besides Ernie, Dan, and myself, Judy Rousuck of The Baltimore Sun and the invaluable Linda Winer, then at Newsday—were seasoned critics, mostly East Coast–based, with long experience of professional theater, as well as the terminology and tools with which to evaluate it.
But the critic-fellows’ best teacher was, quite simply, the Conference itself. Many of them, even among those who had seen a good deal of professional theater, had rarely watched a professional company rehearse. And at the O’Neill, where the process was accelerated and compressed, like time-lapse photography of flowers blooming, they could see it all, schedule permitting, from first read-through to closing performance. In some summers, Dan facilitated this by assigning each critic-fellow a feature article on one of the Conference plays, so that he or she was exempt from most other assignments during that play’s three-day process. And in addition to all this, there was the unexampled joy of being able to socialize, in off hours, with those mysterious beings who make theater, usually viewed by journalists as a race apart: playwrights, directors, actors and even designers. For although sets at the O’Neill were strictly modular, there was a professional scenic designer or two in residence throughout the Conference. Every playwright was invited to discuss what he or she “saw” onstage in terms of scenery, and the designer would create a full rendering based on this input, which was posted at the theater entrance for audiences seeing the performance to inspect.
Of course the critic-fellows were there to polish their craft as critics, and, except when assigned a feature, they each reviewed every Conference play, along with jaunts to some of the area’s summer-stock playhouses, including a visit to the scenically delicious Goodspeed Opera House, a lovingly restored Victorian town hall which presented mostly old musicals, situated on the bank of the Connecticut River in nearby East Haddam.
But then came the reviews—which Ernie, an old hand on the beat, insisted should be done overnight. (When he retired, Dan relaxed the schedule somewhat, taking account of the reality of press previews, which gave the critic-fellows some breathing time.) The reviews were due before breakfast, and when we convened after breakfast (or after that morning’s critique), copies were handed out to everyone, the fellows were divided into two groups, each with a teacher, and the fun began. Each critic read his or her review aloud, the teacher sometimes interrupting the reading to point out an issue or question a choice of words. Linda, who taught a course in critical writing at Columbia during the academic year, was by far the best at this, smooth and reassuring while still challenging any misused terms or misguided assertions. I tended to be clumsy and laborious, plodding through every sentence in my obstinate way. One former student has recorded, in an online blog post, his horror on realizing that I was going to question every sentence in one of his reviews. But I was only doing for him what my editors at the Voice, Ross Wetzsteon and Erika Munk, had done for me. Ross was meticulous about verbal clarity; Erika tended to approach assertions of opinion in a jovially combative spirit (“Is that really what you mean?”). They had sharpened my perceptions, and I didn’t see why these youngsters shouldn’t have their perceptions sharpened as well, for the four weeks they were there. It was exhausting, but it was heartening. Everybody, including the teachers, learned a good deal. Then Helene Goldfarb, Dan’s invaluable assistant, carefully locked the reviews away in her files, where nobody else could see them—though I think playwrights who asked specifically may have been allowed to look at those for their show. Most of them did not ask, which was probably just as well.
The critic-fellows had other activities too. Dan might shanghai any notable playwright, director, or actor who had some free time from rehearsal to spend a few afternoon hours talking with them about what his or her work entailed. The fellows all read Long Day’s Journey (I was always startled by the number who had never read or seen it), and sometimes Dan found a designer with a few free hours, who would invite them to supply their own rough sketches of a possible design for its set. After the O’Neill had acquired Monte Cristo Cottage, he instituted what many critic-fellows said was their most memorable Conference experience: A director, often Amy Saltz or Tina Ball, would spend a day with them in the cottage’s front parlor, staging them, in groups of four, in the play’s opening scene.
I don’t know how many of the critic-fellows remained theater critics. It’s an ever-shrinking job market, and not everyone has the vocation. One I know went back to his first love, reporting; one teaches musical theater in Boston, another in Philadelphia; still another became a foundation executive. Some of those who established themselves as critics duly found their way back to NCI as teachers, including the delightful Mike Phillips, today a prominent film critic. Several others found their way into dramaturgy, and today have literary posts at various resident theaters. And one, I regret to say, has become a religious fundamentalist, though I believe a nonharmful one; her posts flowing with God and devoutness crop up on my Facebook news feed.
The days I am talking about are quite long gone. When George and Lloyd retired, the world of the O’Neill changed. Today it is a different operation, more streamlined and high-powered, with new buildings which I have not yet seen. Its time-frame has been compressed. No actor and no working critic has time to spend four idyllic weeks in the country anymore. Casts and directors come up for one play and then return home; critiques have been abolished. There is communality, but, I suspect, little communal spirit, though the flow of talent remains extensive. Many other organizations have risen over the years, in emulation of the O’Neill or in the effort to create an alternative to it; virtually every resident theater has its own play development program, some of them far more extensive and thorough than the O’Neill’s is or ever was.
The O’Neill I recall is probably un-recreateable. The new O’Neill is like the rest of the modern world, not as much to my somewhat old-fashioned taste as I could wish, though still full of admirable and exciting things. I miss the less hurried, less pressured ways of that earlier time. I miss the late Phyllis Kaye, head of Reception, who lovingly hand-calligraphed the name tags we all wore so proudly on our lapels. (I cherish the memory of playwright Harry Kondoleon’s mother, striding proudly across the grass, her ample bosom bearing an extra-long name tag that read “Mrs. Sophocles Kondoleon.”) Phyllis also brewed the devastating punch that knocked everyone for a loop at the end-of-Conference party each year. I imagine the recipe, like Phyllis herself, is gone. Global warming has burnt away most of the Mary Tyrone fog, and the increased heat makes air-conditioned indoor spaces preferable for rehearsals. Constant traffic in the mansion seems to have worn away or scared off any remaining ghosts. One of the ancient copper beeches—the one in the sunken garden that Lloyd always used to call “the Conference tree,” has gone too, struck by lightning during a bad storm. Some of these are the inevitable changes wrought by time; others are the foolish changes that we, foolish humans, carelessly allow to happen when they might better be prevented. Yet the memory of what the O’Neill once was remains, and it strikes me that today, when diversity is the cry on everybody’s lips, it might be useful to remember a place where diversity was practiced rather than preached, where artistic development was an article of faith, not a slogan to paste on grant applications, and where people came to work because the place made it fun for them to work together, and gave them time to breathe and enjoy themselves while doing that work. It was a good place in a not-so-great world. If Lloyd and George could create its goodness then, there is no reason to suppose that a place of such goodness could not be created now, though the world has grown far less great. We have only to feel the need of it, and believe that it can happen, and then it will.
