Читать книгу Beautiful Chaos - Carey Perloff - Страница 6

British director Emma Rice, who has created work with the experimental Kneehigh theater company in Cornwall for two decades, uses an expression about theatrical investigation that struck me as invaluable as soon as I heard it. Whether she is talking about a particular actor or about a piece of theater, she begins her investigation by asking, “What do you have for free?” Not “What is your type?” per se, but “What qualities exist innately in your being that others can instantly ascribe to you?” I teach a class to A.C.T.’s first-year master of fine arts students titled “Why Theater?” in which we borrow from Emma and begin by exploring what each of those young artists has “for free” before we move on to discuss what might stretch them beyond their natural givens. We then do an exercise about our hometowns, in which we try to imagine what a given community has for free, to try to determine what kind of theater might thrive there.

When I took the job at A.C.T. I thought I understood what San Francisco had, as it were, for free. This is critical when you are thinking about running a major arts institution. Despite the fact that the American theater is often in danger of becoming, in the words of Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey, a kind of “McTheater” in which institutions across the country often produce the same five plays in the same packaging, I have always believed that great theater grows out of a very specific time and place, with specific artists in service to a specific audience. Repertoire is most interesting when it is determined by the unique geography, demographics, mood, and history of the given community.

After all, it was not a coincidence that A.C.T. ended up in San Francisco to begin with. When Bill Ball first conceived of the notion of a permanent company of classically trained actors committed to staging a diverse repertoire of plays to be produced on a large scale for a literate audience, he traveled across the country looking for the perfect home. Pittsburgh proved difficult because of power struggles with the Pittsburgh Playhouse; Chicago extended a hand, but the deal was never closed. It was San Francisco in 1967 that became Bill Ball’s natural partner in crime. In his book The Creation of an Ensemble, John Wilk quotes the Minneapolis Tribune’s Mike Steele about why San Francisco proved to be the perfect match for A.C.T.: “It’s a city of theatricality. Every street corner is a stage and every fourth person seems to be either a manic actor out of Genet or a street musician out of work. It’s the obvious city for the American Conservatory Theater, America’s most flamboyant regional theatre and one of its best. It reflects San Francisco exactly, erratically brilliant, vain, diverse, perverse, and very exciting.” The Actor’s Workshop founder Herbert Blau, in The Impossible Theater, described San Francisco in the fifties and sixties (with the arrogance and slightly patronizing tone of a transplanted New Yorker) as “a gilded boom town grown urban on a fissure . . . two great universities nearby, and a trolley college of high caliber; a great park of eclectic fauna; a Chinese ghetto which feels affluent and no conspicuous slums; sick comics in the bistros and a Bohemian Club of unregenerate squares . . . withal, a city reposeful and august . . . the old Pacific Union Club on Nob Hill, home of the railroad kings, lording it over the new arrivals: the students, the dockworkers, the doctors of the Kaiser Plan, the Hadassah ladies, the vagrants from the valleys, the junior executives of the new Playboy set, the Beats from Tangiers and North Platte, all the questing intellectuals . . . a city with a nervous graciousness, upholding a worldwide reputation for a culture it doesn’t quite have . . . a city that is a myth, with the golden opportunity to live up to it.” The audacity and elegance of the new American Conservatory Theater in the late sixties and early seventies matched both the appetites and nascent sophistication of San Franciscans, and elicited the kind of financial generosity necessary for a nonprofit venture of that scale to survive. During those initial years, San Franciscans fell in love with Bill Ball and he with them; Ball won their hearts with an unparalleled sixteen-play rotating repertory in the initial twenty-two weeks. As Ball told Wilk: “The idea was to have so much, such a splashy repertory that it was an undeniable experience. We had to dazzle our audience and overwhelm them.”

Alas, despite its glorious beginnings, A.C.T. failed to create an infrastructure to match its ambitions, with the result that by the time Ball departed in the eighties, there was precious little to hold together the brilliant idea he had created. The man who adored casts of thousands and staged legendary curtain calls (called “walk-downs”) at the end of each season (in which actors bowed in the costumes of one show and then madly changed into costumes for the next until the entire season’s repertoire had been represented in one fabulous and continuously swirling bow) had been reduced to producing The Gin Game and other small-cast plays for an increasingly disaffected audience. The story of Ball’s downfall is complex: He rarely engaged with his San Francisco fundraising group (originally called the California Theatre Foundation and later the California Association for the American Conservatory Theatre, or C.A.A.C.T.) in any substantive discussion about the direction the company was taking, because he viewed A.C.T. as a national theater and resisted outside input of any kind. Meanwhile he became more and more fanatic about his own power and need for control. This situation proved unsupportable, particularly when major foundation funding began to dry up, and according to all accounts, Ball became increasingly volatile, unpredictable, and isolated. Rumor had it that he locked Cyril Magnin, his largest and most passionate benefactor, out of the theater for alleged disloyalty, and that, nervous about the future, he had taken a large portion of an A.C.T. Ford Foundation grant and invested it in gold to create retirement accounts for himself and his trusted lieutenants. In 1986, the California Attorney General stepped in and forced his resignation. Critic Sylvie Drake described the end in her Los Angeles Times obituary for Ball in 1991: “Well-known bouts with booze and pills exacerbated [Ball’s] intemperate personality and growing reclusiveness. By the early 1980s, the work at A.C.T. began to slip. So did the finances. And Ball had lost perspective on it all. He seemed no longer to differentiate between himself as an individual and the institution he had created, dismaying associates with infuriating behavior and alienating the very people who had invited him to San Francisco in the first place. In typically flamboyant (and prophetic) style, he abruptly announced his . . . resignation while staging a crucifixion scene.” This final story may be apocryphal, but it was the beginning of a heartbreaking demise. In 1991, at the age of sixty, Ball died of an overdose in Los Angeles, “an apparent suicide.”

Ball’s successor, Edward Hastings, was a compassionate leader and an able director who mounted a major effort to move A.C.T. forward, diversifying the acting company, stimulating A.C.T.’s commitment to new work through the creation of Plays in Progress, building bridges with small local ensembles, stabilizing the finances, and staging major productions of American classics. But for many reasons, it was difficult to keep the ambitious dreams of A.C.T.’s beginnings alive.

By the time I arrived in the early nineties, A.C.T. was so complicated, so troubled, and so dysfunctional that I failed initially to grasp the depths of its paralysis. Ignoring its fraught past (and earthquake-destroyed building) for the moment, I focused instead upon the present day, and tried to envisage what A.C.T. still had for free by being housed in the very specific arts ecology that was the Bay Area in the late twentieth century. This exercise led to some disastrous assumptions that plagued my first year of programming, but it was not done without real thought. Outside of the hermetic bubble of A.C.T., here’s what I assumed 1992 San Francisco had “for free,” in no particular order:

• A tradition of physical comedy, clowning, and vaudeville dating from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s beginnings in 1959 to the inception of the Pickle Family Circus in the mid seventies and the ongoing presence of such amazing clowns as Bill Irwin, Geoff Hoyle, Joan Mankin, Sharon Lockwood, and Jeff Raz.

• A love for the radical, aggressively acted work of such directors as Robert Woodruff at the Magic Theatre.

• A cultural pluralism that has permitted a wide range of ethnic and cultural traditions to be represented equally around town, from African drumming to klezmer music to Russian Orthodox liturgy to Filipino parades to Japanese tea ceremonies.

• Gay culture—I assumed the presence of a politically powerful gay culture that made its presence felt would be a major plus in programming a season.

• A European feel—I’ve always believed that it’s easiest to make theater in a place where people can walk in off the street and find it. San Francisco’s origins as a European-style city can still be felt in its urban planning and in the intimacy of its streets and sidewalks, to say nothing of its population of Russians, Irish, and Italians. It is a city where many people get around on foot or by bicycle. This seemed to me a helpful thing when building a theater community.

• A highly literate book-reading population.

• A love for the experimental and the multidisciplinary in performance, evidenced by the presence of such visionaries as George Coates (whose new take on the Alice in Wonderland story, Right Mind, had just opened at The Geary Theater before the earthquake brought the building to the ground), Chris Hardman, Lou Harrison, David Harrington, Anna Halprin, and more.

• A sense of pride in being three hours behind New York but always with an eye to the future, a city of endless technological and social revolution, looking to the East instead of the West.

Some of these assumptions proved in the long run to be true and valuable as guiding principles. Others turned out to be misleading. What didn’t occur to me was that, although it had arrived in San Francisco as the brash, brilliant, and exciting new kid on the block, by the early nineties A.C.T. had become a bastion of culture, a somewhat intimidating monolith housed in a gilded structure out of another century. Its relationship to the city as a whole was oblique; from the beginning, Bill Ball wanted to create a national rather than a regional theater (hence the name “American Conservatory Theater” rather than “San Francisco Conservatory Theater”). Ball was grateful for local philanthropy, but his biggest support came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and under his leadership A.C.T. became a self-contained entity within the cultural landscape of San Francisco. Ball brought his acting company with him from Pittsburgh, trained them in the confines of his own very private institution, and produced a repertoire heavy on classical literature without requiring much collaboration from the community at large. Despite the fact that Ed Hastings was an intensely generous community builder who helped spawn many smaller companies (including Turtle Island Ensemble, Asian American Theater Company, and Encore Theatre Company), it was startling to me when I arrived at A.C.T. to discover just how isolated the organization had become.

Trauma leaves its marks on a theater just as it does on a human being, and A.C.T.’s history was one of repeated glory followed by repeated trauma. By the time I arrived, the organization was twisted around its own pathologies like a strange family that has learned to live with its brilliant but transgressive father, its competitive angry siblings, and its wary jealous neighbors. It also seemed to be a very male institution. Few women had held positions of leadership at A.C.T. over the years; in addition to Ball, the power had been housed in the hands of such men as James McKenzie, Robert Goldsby, Allen Fletcher, and Ed Hastings. Some talented women directors had left their mark, including Elizabeth Huddle and Joy Carlin, but they were the exception rather than the rule. When I arrived, the atmosphere was grim. It was as if Daddy had killed himself, Uncle Ed had left town, and now the potentially evil stepmother had arrived. No one had any idea what to make of me. I remember my first A.C.T. company meeting with horror: I walked into an immense studio in which the entire company, from actors to stagehands to stitchers to faculty members, had lined up to hear from the new artistic director. They greeted my words with complete silence and would barely meet my gaze as I looked around the room. It was clear that survival at A.C.T. had come to mean keeping one’s head down so as not to make waves; everything was done by code, there were no policies on anything from maternity leave to sick days to parking, nor any clarity about how decisions were to be reached about play choices, casting, or academic admission. If the buzzword of the new millennium is transparency, the buzzword of A.C.T. in the nineties was secrecy. The very geography of the office space, a rabbit warren of small rooms inaccessible to each other and impossible to navigate, epitomized the culture in which I found myself when I first arrived, and the anxiety in the air was palpable.

It should be said at the outset that the recruitment process that led to my hire was anything but transparent. The board handled the search internally with great care, but very few people outside the small circle of the board had any say in my appointment or any knowledge of me or my work. When Producing Director James Haire, who had been with the company almost since its inception, was asked to give me a tour of the theater while I was in town for one of my interviews, he had no idea who I was or that I was a candidate for the artistic directorship of his own theater until Joan Sadler called him later and inquired, “What did you think of our girl?” To which Jim replied, “What girl?” The person most opposed to my appointment was supposed to be my closest colleague, Managing Director John Sullivan. I discovered halfway into my negotiations that during the search process John had proposed a new organizational scheme whereby he would be named general director and supervise two stage directors (Anne Bogart and Robert Woodruff), who would report to him. The board had considered but ultimately rejected his proposal. John had chosen to stay on as managing director regardless, a disastrous decision from my point of view, and probably from his. He was, perhaps without quite knowing it, deeply invested in my failure, and my year’s “collaboration” with him was among the hardest of my professional life.

Without giving me any real guidelines, Sullivan announced at our first meeting, in November 1991, that I would have to have the following season announced and budgeted by January. If I had been less naïve and compliant I would have refused; it takes at least six months to understand an organization and its culture well enough to begin to make remotely informed decisions about the work ahead. But I said yes, and made every mistake I could possibly have made.

It all went back to what I thought we had “for free.”

In celebration of an artist whose work had had a dramatic impact on Bay Area theater during his distinguished career at the Magic Theatre (and to please Sullivan), I asked director Robert Woodruff whether he would like to be part of my first season at A.C.T. This seemed like an obvious way to bring younger, edgier audiences into the A.C.T. fold, to salute the city’s cultural history, and to give us license to do more adventurous work. Woodruff eagerly accepted and chose a classic I loved that had strong meaning for him at the time: Webster’s Jacobean masterpiece The Duchess of Malfi.

To honor the company of actors who had meant so much to A.C.T. over the past decades, I found roles for many of them in a 1930s American comedy I had always admired, Dinner at Eight, and in a new translation of Molière’s The Learned Ladies that Richard Seyd had directed very successfully for me in New York. These two plays would give me a chance to see how I related to a whole raft of A.C.T. talent (including Peter Donat, Sydney Walker, Richard Butterfield, and Frances Lee McCain) and to do a few comedies on the grand scale that Bill Ball had espoused and adored.

To share my own personal aesthetic and theatrical training with my new audience, I chose to commission a new Timberlake Wertenbaker translation of Euripides’ Hecuba, which was to star Olympia Dukakis in the title role. And to appease those who felt my tastes were not popular or American enough, I agreed to produce Ken Ludwig’s Broadway farce Lend Me a Tenor, which was not a play that particularly spoke to me but which I thought might appeal to the opera lovers in San Francisco and balance out my Jacobean drama.

And finally, because it never occurred to me that Strindberg’s dark psychological landscape might be a bizarre way to usher in a new theatrical era, I chose to begin my tenure at A.C.T. with Paul Walsh’s new version of Creditors, which we had done so successfully at CSC the season before.

All this was thought through and decided on planes and phone calls between November 1991, when I was hired, and March 1992, when the season was announced. I was still living in New York, still running CSC, and still raising a two-year-old. It was hardly the calmest and most propitious way to plan an inaugural season. Not realizing until I had accepted the job how disastrous A.C.T.’s cash flow was and how complex the union contracts and administrative budgets were, I allowed myself to be railroaded into decisions that had far-reaching consequences. Many of these decisions were shepherded by a shadow marketing consultant whose salary was nowhere to be found on A.C.T.’s official payroll but whose Denver-based office seemed to be generating whatever thinking was going on about how to introduce new artistic leadership to A.C.T. and how to communicate with the audience. “If your theater were a vegetable, what kind might it be?” was one of her first questions to me. I think it was this encounter that led to my ongoing antipathy for consultants and my resistance to the kind of marketing speak so ubiquitous in the field today.

If I was surprised by what I discovered, so was the theater community when they learned that a thirty-two-year-old neophyte from New York had been hired to run one of the five largest companies in America, a once great institution with a theater full of earthquake rubble, a troubled school, a negative cash flow, a dwindling audience, and a traumatic history. Why did A.C.T. choose to gamble on me? Trustee Joan Sadler recently shared with me the letter she wrote to the full board that fall, in which she articulated her unqualified support for their candidate (me), not just “because she was capable, talented, experienced, committed to excellence—they all were. But because for A.C.T., with the special characteristics of its history and its special needs of the moment, she seemed uniquely suited, offering unusual strengths, skills, and understanding. First, because she communicated immediately the kind of passion, the ‘fire in the belly’ that will be a critical factor for us in our daunting task of capturing the public’s imagination and rallying its support. . . . Furthermore, because she recognizes A.C.T.’s unique role . . . with its dedication to training and ensemble, and she is committed to furthering and enhancing both. . . . Thirdly, because she recognized immediately the particular challenge and opportunities offered by the enormous diversity of the Bay Area.” It was a brave and unpredictable choice that this committed but beleaguered board was making. And San Francisco had little idea what it was getting.

Not that I have ever been secretive about my tastes and desires. I am passionate about complex dramatic literature, heightened text, big ideas, deeply invested acting, beautiful visuals, and international collaborations. I am woefully ignorant of pop culture, have little appetite for television, and have kept the remotest track of popular music only in recent years because my son is a musician. I realize this is a terrible admission, one that today would most likely disqualify me for the very job I have been doing for over twenty years. But I came of age at a time when live theater was meant to do something different from pop culture, and when success was measured in ways other than simply the number of people served. The current punishing fiscal climate and the challenge of attracting new audiences has led to a hunger for theater to aim more and more closely for the commercial center, in terms of subject matter, casting, and methods of outreach. The arts have come to rely on metrics that measure success according to the cost per person of producing a given play or mounting a given art exhibition. Obviously, broadening audiences in an era of niche marketing and the ability to self-curate any artistic experience is hard. But as Ezra Pound famously said, “Literature is news that stays news,” and the converse can also be the case: those pop-culture phenomena that may seem on the cutting edge of cool one year may be obsolete the next. If part of the mandate of the nonprofit theater is to nurture and cultivate that which may have lasting value, I believe it’s worth being cautious about the endlessly seductive pull of the trendy and the transient. Looking back on my years at A.C.T., the thing I am proudest of is that we have for the most part managed to consistently fill a large house by programming juicy literature with great actors, rather than by chasing every passing trend. But it’s certainly been a long hard fight, and it’s not over yet.