The Rise of Rep

THE STAGE The Rise of Rep Repertory theater, never much of an institution in the U.S., has grown in recent years in every region of the country, and the movement is overdue. Rep companies are the tap source and five-foot shelf of theater in other nations; they give actors unmatchable experience, they try new forms, and they keep the so-called classics dusted.

A Rembrandt can be seen and Mel ville can be read; but Marlowe or Moliere are pale shadows in paperback. They must be performed on the stage to come alive, and the commercial theaters are not going to underwrite such performances. Only professional repertory companies, through constant revivals, can preserve the history of the drama in a meaningful form. Similarly, when the art of theater is to be advanced, only a company that is not hooped to commerce can try something new and almost certainly unpopular without fear of financial ruin. By and large, the American theater ignored the obvious need of rep groups until it could ignore them no longer.

Out of the Quagmire. The rise of repertory owes much to Broadway, in a negative sort of way. Broadway has got itself into such an economic quagmire that only its most negotiable shows last very long. Hence acting jobs are few and dispiriting, and actors with big names as well as small ones are more than willing to sign on with rep companies, in most cases abandoning New York. They want to act--in three or four different plays a week sometimes--and they want to know what they are going to be doing a month from now. They don't mind the lower pay; at least it is steady. One good reason that it is steady--beyond the well-demonstrated popularity of rep groups with local audiences--is that the Ford Foundation believes in repertory theater perhaps even more than actors do. In the last four years, Ford has given almost $7,000,000 to various repertory groups.

Rep companies across the country are shown in the adjoining color portfolio. An index of how advanced the movement has now become is the fact that New York is catching up with it. Biggest event of the 1963-64 theatrical season was the debut last month of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center.

On paper, the group is an assembled dream. The permanent acting company consists of 26 actors working under 2 1/2year contracts, and includes such names as Jason Robards Jr., David Wayne, Hal Holbrook, Ralph Meeker, Mildred Dunnock, Zohra Lampert and Salome Jens. About half the actors are young newcomers who are being trained as they go, both in productions and in daily classes that have been going on for more than a year. The group's guiding lights are Robert Whitehead, who was one of Broadway's most successful producers (Member of the Wedding), and Director Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire). Its "executive consultant" is Critic-Director Har old Clurman (Waiting for Lefty). Its stage designer is Jo Mielziner, like the others one of the top men in his profession in the U.S.

Established playwrights are giving their plays to Lincoln Center as well. Getting things off to a quite literally sensational start, the company's first production is Arthur Miller's controversial After the Fall (TIME, Jan. 3), and its third will be S. N. Behrman's But For Whom Charlie. Behrman is 70. "I'm left over from another era," he says, "but I'm glad I didn't die." Behrman's Charlie is now in rehearsal, as is Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions, which opens next week.

Most Broadway plays rehearse for three weeks. After the Fall had run-throughs last summer and started rehearsals three months before opening night. "It wasn't really a play we began with," says Robards. "It was more like a large encyclopedia containing all the thoughts Miller had." Miller showed up almost every day to tell Director Kazan just what he wanted, and he even roughed out a Plasticine model of the play's thrusting set as a guide for Jo Mielziner. Thus the playwright had an unparalleled opportunity to shape his work as he envisioned it--and its confessional nature, its immediate excitement but its artistic failure, are Miller's own doing.

Beyond the Boundaries. That sort of failure--having nothing to do with box-office receipts, which are quite good because of 46,500 presold subscriptions --is part of the repertory idea. "Success?" says Kazan. "I'm through with that crap game now. We feel we have an absolute right to errors. No one is on trial. No one is in danger." A play or an individual performer is free to feel his way, to grope toward the boundaries of talent, even to stumble beyond.

Most insular New Yorkers do not realize that their city is joining, not setting a trend. New York thinks it discovered Bertolt Brecht, for example; but San Francisco's Actor's Workshop had Mother Courage in its repertory for seven years, long anticipating the Brecht vogue that later appeared off-Broadway. Sir John Gielgud is about to flash into Manhattan with a backstage modern Hamlet, but Sir Tyrone Guthrie was doing much the same a year ago in his new rep theater in Minneapolis, which is not to suggest that Guthrie invented modern-dress Hamlets, but merely that regional theater is now doing what New York does, and often some time ahead.

There are now, in fact, about as many first-rate professional rep companies as there are franchises in the American League. Among them: -- The Seattle Center Playhouse, less than three months old, has three productions going in rotation (King Lear, The Firebugs, The Lady's Not for Burning), a fourth opening this week (Death of a Salesman), and Robert Ardrey's Shadow of Heroes in rehearsal for presentation April 1. "The plays running now are infinitely better than they were when they opened, and they continue to improve," says Director Stuart Vaughan. "That is the beauty of repertory." Operating in a theater built as part of the 1962 World's Fair, the company is heavily subscribed (10,000).

> Milwaukee's Fred Miller Theater is battling odds and winning. The odds are Milwaukee itself, where the highest praise the drama critics know how to give is to compare the Miller's actors with the Green Bay Packers. But the Miller Theater is winning because of the extraordinary energy of its 29-year-old director, John Alexander McQuiggan. He has ten players who do eight shows in an October-April season. The Hostage is the current draw, with Pirandello's Right You Are If You Think You Are coming next. "No one can direct eight shows," he says. "We bring in one man for each show and he shoots his wad." In the summer, McQuiggan raises money. What about the Ford Foundation? "That foundation has all the mon ey and has no idea what's happening in the theater," he says, biting off all five fingers and half of the Ford palm. "They gave $17,000 to some theater in San Francisco and nobody even knows where it is. I mean, they don't advertise or anything."

> San Francisco's Actor's Workshop does advertise, but its 4,362 subscribers know where it is anyway. Of all U.S. rep companies (now that Greenwich Village's Living Theater is no longer living), this one has its head most completely immersed in Cloud 81. "We limit ourselves to what is not considered popular fare," says Director Jules Irving. "Our audience has to be patient with the kind of discoveries we make."

Besides pioneering Brecht, the Workshop was the first American theater to produce Harold Pinter, whose Birthday Party ran there for three years. It has a company of 13, frequently produces the works of unknowns. "We didn't spring full-blown like the Tyrone Guthrie Theater," says Founder Irving, who comes from New York. "We're indigenous."

>Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater, established last year, did indeed spring full-blown--on a land grant plus $400,000 from a local foundation, a $337,000 Ford Foundation grant, and scattered donations that launched it in a $2,250,000 theater. That Guthrie was eager to go to Minneapolis indicates the value placed on regional repertory by men of the theater: he was once artistic director of the Old Vic; he helped found the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ont., and his name is a draw both on Broadway and the West End. The Minneapolis group reflects Director Guthrie's special flamboyance. Trumpets blare and drums roll before each performance. Laertes was running about last year with a .38 in his hand. In this season's Henry V, the tide at Agincourt may well be turned by a hand grenade.

>Memphis' Front Street Theater started six years ago in the bottom of an empty swimming pool (stage in the deep end, orchestra seats in the shallow), and has been trying to get out from under ever since. Now, with a rented theater, its debt is diminishing, and Founder George Touliatos, 34, hopes to surface this summer, can turn to what his theater ought to produce --"an American theater instead of a New York theater, doing plays born out of the social roots of the communi ty." Meanwhile, he has been sweetening his ledger with things like The Boy Friend and The Tender Trap.

>Oklahoma City's Mummers Theater was started 15 years ago by Mack Seism, 36, a graduate in chemical engineering from the University of Oklahoma,who decided that the life of the stage was more interesting than cracking oil. Housed in an old warehouse, the Mummers have set some sort of record by being solvent from the start, especially since they produce Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett as well as surer things like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which closed a successful run last week. "A successful resident theater," says the Ford Foundation, "appears to be dependent upon a single driving, talented director or producer determined to have his own theater company and to have it in a particular place." Ford recently gave Seism $1,250,000 to build a new theater.

> Houston's Alley Theater is the oldest rep group of national importance. It was founded in 1947 by Nina Vance, a girl from Yoakum, Texas, who had decided she wanted to be a director but found that New York could not care less. "You know the story about how if you're in college and can't get into a sorority, you can always start your own," she says. "That's what I did." Her company occupies a converted electric-fan factory and does seven mixed-bag productions a year (Harvey, Moliere's Imaginary Invalid, Chekhov), was an amateur group for seven years before going Equity in 1954. In 1960, the Ford Foundation began giving the Alley $2,000 a week to hire ten professional actors and keep them there for at least three seasons. New York professionals rushed to the scene and stayed. The subscription roll has built to 4,500. And last year the Ford Foundation promised Nina Vance $2,100,000 to get out of the fan factory--provided that she could raise another $900,000 on her own. She did, and she is building two theaters: a 600-seater for the moneymakers and a 250-seater for art.

>Dallas' Theater Center group is housed in a theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, which looks as if it had been chopped out of a Cunard liner. The Theater Center was opened in 1959. Its director is Paul Baker, once head of the widely acclaimed drama department at Baylor University. Among this season's productions are two new plays and such varied old ones as Robinson Jeffers' poetic drama Medea and Cole Porter's frolic Can-Can.

> Princeton University's McCarter Theater is one of only four professional rep groups that exist at U.S. colleges. Its 25-member company has a fall and a spring season (all Shakespeare this memorial spring), and is intended as a living library of theater: in four years at the university, an undergraduate can see performed examples of great drama from all periods.

>The Guthrie Theater serves as a graduate study laboratory for the drama department of the University of Minnesota; a roving Equity group called the Association of Producing Artists is at the University of Michigan; and the Theater Group, founded by Producer John Houseman, is at U.C.L.A. >Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, with 11,000 subscribers, has become "comfortably self-supporting," says Zelda Fichandler, who founded it in 1950 just after taking her master's degree in drama from George Washington University. First playing in an old movie theater and later in a brewery, the

Arena was understandably known for a time as the Old Vat. New Yorkers used to snicker at it, but no longer. On scattered grants, contributions and box-office success, the Arena built itself a stunning, 773-seat theater two years ago, which is as impressive as its solid, no-star company. It likes revivals such as John Hersey's The Wall (now playing) and John Whiting's The Devils.

America has thus been made safe for citizens who live and breathe theater. The Lincoln Tunnel is no longer a rainspout leading from the hanging gardens to the desert. And the most curious footnote to all this is that Broadway shows are having difficulty finding understudies. On the mere rumor of such an opening, six candidates would once have appeared like genii. But now Luther, for example, is playing without a substitute Luther because almost every serious young actor who can walk or crawl has gone off to a rep company.

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