56. Theatre of the Living Arts: The Middle

Copyright 2023 Peter Schmitz - All Rights Reserved

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History! Here on this show we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m Peter Schmitz, and our sound engineering and original theme music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. In this episode we continue the story of the Theatre of the Living Arts on South Street during the 1960s.

If you haven’t heard Episode 54, in which we started this story, I would suggest you should go back and find it first, of course, it will help to make everything we’re discussing here today - and in the next show - make more sense.

But wait a minute, many of you faithful listeners are no doubt saying right now, Peter, did you just say The Next Show? Did you tell us that you would wrap up this whole story, and round out Season Two? Well I did, yes I did. And believe me I have tried. I did not want to do another three part investigation - which seems to have been the pattern that every story we’ve told this season fallen into. It was my clear intention, two weeks ago, to make this a two-parter, and by the end of June slap together one big grand package for a season finale, tie up the storyline of the TLA - and even make some larger observations about the themes of Scandal, Censorship and Conflict in Philly theater we have been talking about for the last nine months.

But, as I also said in the last episode, Number 55, sometimes I make mistakes, and boy was that one of them! As I was working away this week, I just got to the point where I realized that I was not doing the right thing by the material, I was not really serving the narrative I needed to tell. By cramming everything into one show it was either going to balloon into a huge 90 minute extravaganza, which I didn’t want to do, or I would have to ruthlessly cut and remove all sorts of interesting and important elements of the story. And I did not want to do that either. Well, I should have known, I suppose. That’s what usually happened before when I’ve been putting together deep dives into fascinating topics. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. So, anyway, enough talk about Process. I won’t bore you with any more. I’ll just say that we will call this episode “A Middle” (that is to say, Part Two) and as soon as I can, I will be researching, and writing and recording and releasing the finale, which we will of course entitle “The End.”

Because that’s what we want to know - Why does the Theatre of the Living Arts fail, why is it not, this very moment the flagship regional theater in the city Philadelphia - the equivalent to the Guthrie in Minneapolis or the Arena Stage in Washington DC? Well get closer to answering that question today, we just won't get all the way there. By the time we reach the summer of 1966, there will be both enormous optimism for this young Philadelphia theater company  - and the very beginnings of what would prove to be a fatal conflict, one who’s aftershocks of which can still be felt today. In the end (when we get there), many would say, it proved that maybe Philadelphia’s audiences were hopelessly provincial and were just not ready to support great art at all.

[“DRAMA IS CONFLICT” OPENING THEME]

And if that was true, that was a remark that would cut very deeply into Philadelphia psyche, because for years the city had been accused of being hopelessly sleepy and - that deadly word “provincial" - this was precisely the image Philly was trying to escape.

To give us a little more perspective, let’s look at the story of another reaction in Philly to another great theater artist, right around that time. And it’s one that some of our listeners might recognize. In the year 1964, Great Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company came through Philadelphia on a tour of America, booked into the grand old Shubert Theatre on Broad Street next to the Academy of Music, they brought with them a production of King Lear, starring Paul Scofield and Irene Worth. 

The director of Lear was Peter Brook. Indeed Brook had even designed the set and props for this production, with rusty iron panels walling in the mostly bare stage, which was decorated only with battered tankards, swords, and wooden stools. This was a real, artistic, up-to-date modern approach of Shakespeare.

For the week-long run in Philly, the company did the great tragedy in rotation with a lighter piece, The Comedy of Errors, directed by Clifford Williams. Scofield and Worth rested on these nights, but the rest of the company, including Diana Rigg, Ian Richardson, Alec McCowen, Brian Murray, Barry MacGregor, and Julie Christie all pitched in.

Now, leaving Comedy of Errors aside, Philadelphia newspaper critics were ecstatic about King Lear, and they highly praised both Scofield's acting and Peter Brook's direction, terming them 'majestic’, 'magnificent', and 'electrifying'. Run, don't walk, to the box office to catch the one-week engagement, advised Inquirer reviewer Henry Murdock, giving Scofield credit for "providing one of those experiences which restore a reverence for the craft of the player." Wow.

But the broader population of regular Philadelphia audience members had found this King Lear a bit of a trial, frankly. As Brook had directed it, the first intermission did not come for almost two hours, which was a long sit, and the second half of the evening was almost as long again. In addition, Philadelphia Daily News reviewer Jerry Gaghan noted that many in the audience strained to understand the accents of the British actors. 

One night, a squalling baby had even interrupted the show. The mother of this baby attempted to mollify it with a bottle, but that didn’t work. Eventually, embarrassed, the mother left her seat, and took the baby home, explaining to the Shubert's house manager that she had been unable to find a sitter for the evening. Other people left, sleepy and yawning, at the intermission. The show was simply too long, they said, and they were going home to bed.

Peter Brook later wrote about the dispiriting 1964 experience in his famous and influential book about modern theater, The Empty Space. He compared the performances of Lear at the Shubert in Philadelphia to the enthusiastic reception the production had previously received from European audiences - who did not even necessarily quite understand the Early Modern English of the text. Here’s what he says in his book:

[MUSIC UNDERSCORING]

"In Philadelphia, the audience understood English all right, but this audience was composed largely of people who were not interested in the play; people who came for all the conventional reasons - because their wives insisted, and so on. Undoubtedly, a way existed to involve this particular audience in King Lear, but it was not our way. The austerity of the production which had seemed so right for Europe no longer made sense. Seeing people yawn, I felt guilty, realizing something else was demanded from us all. I knew, were I doing a production of King Lear  for the people of Philadelphia, I would without condescension stress everything differently - and in immediate terms, I would get it to work better." [UNDERSCORING OUT]

Now, that’s a very interesting quote, and it’s important to note that Brook used the story NOT to disparage Philadelphia or to judge Philadelphia theater goers, but to illustrate the point that the theatrical event - as a complete experience - is always, necessarily, composed of fragile, changeable elements, not of the least of which is the audience.

I think we can safely assume that it was this largely this same Philadelphia audience, demographically speaking, that also would form the majority of the folks who eventually found their way to the Theatre of the Living Arts in 1965 and 1966. I can see that from the photographs of the audience that I can find in the archives. On the whole they were middle class, were well dressed . .these were folks who went to the theater regularly, and this theatergoing habit had likely been part of their lives ever since childhood.

They were also - again I can see this from photographs - almost exclusively white. Black and other minority theater artists and theater patrons in the city were not much considered - I’m sorry to say I just don’t see anything in the records of the TLA about them. In fact, this was precisely the point in time when Philadelphia's own Black Arts-inspired theater groups got underway - because there were only faint efforts by the white establishment to include them at all in this new theater. So put a pin in that - this is definitely a topic we are going to directly address in future episodes.

Anyway, this white middle-class Philadelphia audience, this was regarded by many at the time as the proven target audience for serious new theater, these were the folks that had been supporting the tryout productions that came to Philadelphia during the 40s and 50s, but that had begun to feel abandoned after serious non-musical Broadway and off-Broadway productions increasingly skipped Philadelphia in the early 60s. These were folks who were ready to see plays, though some of them, as Brook phrased it, came for all the conventional reasons - their wives insisted, and so forth.

But we should not make the mistake - because certainly Brook did not - of thinking  that none was interested in intellectual theater and artistic endeavor - after all here’s what the TLA’s founders had stated in the very start from their initial brochure:

The Producing committee is devoted to theatre as an art form and as a vital part of civilized life.”

This is what Celia Silverman and Jean Goldman, the two women who had really got the ball rolling in founding a non-profit regional theater for Philly - this is what they had always wanted. In fact they were quite clear: they wanted to found a theater that would be like Hedgerow (go back and listen to our episode about that if you can), out in Rose Valley, but larger, and in an urban setting, rather than a bucolic suburban context that Jasper Deeter had preferred. Silverman and Goldman were interested in staging Brecht and Shakespeare and Moliere and Shaw and O’Neill, just as Deeter had been, but also wanted to explore modern playwrights. And they wanted it to use Philadelphia actors and designers and be a part of this community - but they didn’t want to put people to sleep, they didn’t want to send them home early, and they didn’t want to attack their sensibilities. And on the whole Andre Gregory was totally on board with that.

And I really should mention here . . . That in my reporting and research of this story I am relying heavily on a document written in 1991 by Patricia McLaughlin. It was prepared for a meeting of LMDA, the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. It really is an amazing resource - I found it in the collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Though McLaughlin didn’t have the same access to the quick power searches that I can these days in newspaper archives. She really went into the available physical historical archives here and in New York. And most impressively, she went out and interviewed and talked to almost all of the major participants in the story, including Andre Gregory, the Goldmans and Silvermans, many members of the acting company (including Lois Smith and Jerry Dempsey) and other artistic staff of the theater - she even got Adam Gopnik (who as you recall was just a boy at the time) to talk about his boyhood experiences at TLA. These were interviews I just could not possibly have done myself. I’m so grateful for them. First, I don’t have that kind of access, and second, although many of these major participants are still around, it is still sixty years on, and many people I have gotten in touch with have sort of sighed and said, “well it was all so long ago.” But Patricia McLaughlin really caught them at just the right time - in the early nineties - it was three decades on, and many of the old passions and resentments had faded, and people had some perspective, and the people she talked to were quite philosophical and nostalgic and could see how what happened at the TLA all fit into the larger experience of their lives and artistic careers. The only people who did not really seem interested in talking to her, I note, were the former Board Members of the TLA, many of whom had been left holding the financial bag in the final breakup of the organization. It was nothing they wanted to revisit, evidently - even for history’s sake.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

When we last left the story, in January of 1965, Andre Gregory’s production of the Brecht play Galileo had just opened the TLA’s very first season. Now, even though Galileo was a rather long and intellectually challenging night of the theater, just like King Lear had been, there was much goodwill left behind for the TLA’s next show, which were both modern translations of old French plays, interestingly. First there was Tiger at the Gates, Christopher Fry’s adaptation of Jean Giradoux play which in English translates to The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, and then a production of the 17th century play Moliere’s The Misanthrope.

Misanthrope (let’s use the American pronunciation) was a show that really showed the newly formed resident Southwark Acting Company - as they called themselves - at its best. The director was Gregory L. Sherman, who by all accounts was a delight to work with, and really got everybody relaxed about performing in verse. He had chosen Richard Wilbur’s then brand-new translation, which kept the rhyming couplets of the original French but used a modern American vocabulary and locutions. Sherman and designer Robert Darling employed modern clothing and furniture too, with the men wearing sport coats and the women wearing high style 1960s fashions. Ron Leibman, as Alceste, the title character who insists on virtue and candor from everyone, no matter the social cost, drew enormous praise from local critics, as did Lois Smith who played his lover Celimene. Also in the company were Jerry Dempsey, Sally Kirkland, and Estelle Parsons - who had come in from New York just for this show.

The Inquirer’s Henry Murdoch wrote that The Misanthrope’s intrinsic wit and humor were well-served by Sherman’s light and fast-paced direction, and the Daily News’ Jerry Gaghan said it could be considered the highlight of the entire Philadelphia theatrical season. The production got national attention, too, as the influential magazine The Saturday Review sent critic Henry Crewes, who wrote that it was “fascinatingly adventurous.” Andre Gregory, for his part, was so pleased that he invited Sherman to join the company as Associate Artistic Director for the next season, which Sherman agreed to do.

Everything was going very well. The Board of the Theatre of the Living Arts was pleased and gave Andre Gregory a three-year extension on his initial contract. And Gregory moved his family from a rental on Delancey Street near Rittenhouse Square to a new home in Society Hill, so that he could be closer to the theater at all times. At a cocktail party he hosted before he moved to the other side of town, he declared that looking back it had been a “difficult but a marvelous year.” And he boasted that there were now 7000 regular subscribers for the theater, and that he expected it to double  the next year.

“They told us at first Philadelphia wouldn’t back good plays, and would never go to South Street to look at them,” he told the assembled guests. But soon enough, he predicted, the theater would grow, would have a new and even larger home, and would someday rival the Philadelphia Orchestra itself as the premier performing arts institution in town. 

For the final offering of the season, Gregory took the directing reins again himself with a production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The acting company’s David Hurst, who had earlier starred in Galileo, was playing Hamm, and Ron Liebman was Clov, both men dressed as clowns. Jerry Dempsey and Mirriam Phillips were the parents, Nag and Nell, cruelly crammed into barrels for most of the evening, as Beckett had instructed. Now this is a famously difficult text, its allusions to the end of the world and the Book of Revelations require a lot of erudition to fully comprehend, and although by 1965 people were beginning to accept the demanding conventions of Absurdist drama - it was nothing new - If any play was going to drive Philadelphians screaming out of the theater, this was it. Gregory was going all out.

In fact, according to Gregory's 1991 interview with McLaughlin, thirty years later, this was the first play he had ever done that just reached out and grabbed him and obsessed him. In fact, his attitude became that “I knew that it wasn’t Beckett who wrote this play, I wrote the play. I somehow mysteriously needed Samuel Beckett, but really it was a complete expression of my own self. . . And it was the story of my own life, and my family, and the way I felt about the world, my childhood, everything. It just got me.”

This was the first production that Gregory collaborated on with the designer Eugene Lee. They created a set in which a steel and mesh cube was constructed onstage, and it was lit from within. There was a thin screen in front of the cube which slightly obscured the view of the stage from the audience, and certainly kept actors from seeing out into the house. David Hurst as the blind and crippled Hamm had blacked out glasses on, so literally he couldn’t see anyway. Liebman, as Clov, was never allowed to sit down, which was a real physical trial given the discomfort of metal grating that Eugene Lee placed on the floor. But Andre Gregory gave both actors free rein to find all the mordant comedy they could in Beckett’s bleak lines and the two actors ran with it - they responded with a flurry of impressions and voices, from Betty Davis, to Bert Lahr, to Cyril Richard to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy. It was a real tour de force performance and, again, there was wide praise from the larger American theater world. But though many in the Philadelphia audience had been left rather bewildered by Endgame, nobody walked out - well, they couldn’t - because during the two hour show, as Gregory directed it, there was no intermission.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

By the fall of 1965, the second Theatre of the Living Arts season was underway. The repertoire again was again mostly by European playwrights, but very in line with what other American regional theaters were doing in that era: Chekhov, Sheridan, Strindberg, Anouilh. Most encouragingly, by this time the resident acting company had really gelled into a cohesive unit with a common vocabulary and a way of working.

But there were some changes. George Sherman, as we mentioned, was now the associate artistic director, and he was a warm and gregarious presence in rehearsals and social events. Though extremely respected, of course, Andre Gregroy was somewhat more distant and intellectual in his affect, and he himself later recalled it felt like sometimes he was the father and George Sheerman was the mother figure in the company.

Fred Goldman, one of the four initial founders of the whole enterprise, had come back, and he had stepped in to become the chair of the TLA Board, in fact he was  financial adviser, as well as running the PCPA, the organization which still held title to the theater itself, and sponsored the concerts, the films and they dance recitals which also took place in the space during times plays were not being staged there. 

Goldman was determined to keep a firm hand on the TLA finances, not really trusting the managing director David Lunney, whom he felt was too deferential to Gregory’s free spending and artistically freewheeling ways. Lunney was running an apprentice program - bringing in young people from the Philadelphia community - and hiring new personnel, including carpenters, technicians and prop masters. One of the apprentices who was working for TLA at the time was a young Philadelphian named Stuart Finkelstein. A graduate of Central High School, Finkelstein had left the Temple University theater program after his first semester in order to get real theater experience working backstage at the TLA with the exciting new group. There he met Mary Kaye Bernardo, who had just been recruited from Cleveland, Ohio to run the prop department at TLA at what she regarded as a gratifyingly generous salary. “I was probably the highest paid prop person in the country” she later admitted.

Andre Gregory was developing the reputation of spending what he needed to spend, and worrying about the consequences later. Fred Goldman’s proposed solution was to give each of the five plays in the TLA season exactly one fifth of the annual budget and only releasing the money exactly when each of the five plays was scheduled to begin rehearsals. As you might expect, this led to increasing tension with Gregory, who felt he needed flexibility in order to pursue his artistic ends. And increasingly the Board president - who had more operational control - Thomas Fleming, was taking Gregory’s side in these disputes, and not Goldman’s. 

I should also mention that in this second season of TLA Jean Goldman and Celia Silverman were no longer listed as “producers” of each play in the program credits, nor do their names pop up in any more newspaper articles about the institution - at least not that I can find. Though for the moment they remained on the board and there had some say in the selection of repertoire, these two women who did so much to get TLA started seemed in fact, to have been mostly sidelined by Gregory in any other active role in the running of the place.

As far as the season itself, it’s perhaps significant to note that Gregory opened by directing Uncle Vanya - a text he would return to famously many years later on 42nd Street in New York. Sherman followed that with a delightfully zany production of Sheridan’s The Critic, a well-loved spoof on 18th Century theater practices, much in the style as it used to be done in the long-ago Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia’s colonial days, just up the street. Ron Leibman, by now well established as the young leading man of the company, got the plum role of Mr. Puff. 

The most famous show of that second season, however, in Philadelphia theater lore, was Gregory’s production of Jean Anouilh’s play Poor Bitos. This play had been mounted both in Paris and London and subsequently on Broadway in 1964, but nowhere had it been a commercial success. It takes place at a dinner party in post-World War II France. The title character, Bitos, is a remorseless prosecutor charged with investigating collaborators with the Nazis during the recent war. Half way through the action of the play Bitos is shot by one of the guests (or at least everyone thinks he is shot), and the rest of the play is mostly a hallucinatory vision by Bitos in which he imagines himself transformed back into the 18th Century and is contending with historical characters from the French Revolution. It was a scathing dark comedy about the hypocrisies of the ruling classes of the world as well as the heartless sanctimony of powerful people who regard themselves as being on the cutting edge of history, it was exactly the sort of thing that was in Andre Gregory’s wheelhouse. (Although Fred Goldman might say it had a lot of ironic resonances for him, as well.) During rehearsals, Gregory played jazz and rock music to accompany movement and improvisation exercises, and a lot of this material made it into the final product - including an orgy scene in which actors writhed together passionately on the floor.

The biggest technical challenge made by Anhouilh’s script is that transformation moment after the shooting. A modern upper class dining room must change into a bare 18th Century council chamber, in almost a cinematic quick cut. But because after all, the TLA was a new-fangled thrust stage, there were no curtains to cover a set change, unlike all previous productions of the play. Furthermore Gregory, once again working with Eugene Lee, had created a set with a drastic rake on the floor, so that it angled steeply towards the audience, nothing could be rolled off into the wings (which were almost non-existent, anyway). Instead, they engineered an inventive coup de theatre. At the moment the gun went off, a bank of photographer’s flash bulbs along the edge of the stage all exploded right in the audience's eyes, momentarily blinding everyone. The tabletop in the middle of the stage was rigged to flip over, during that moment, whisking away all the plates and food from Act One, and leaving behind only a bare surface. And during those same few seconds all the actors slipped offstage. And when the audience looked up, suddenly the world was transformed.

Now, during intermission, this effect was all the audience could talk about - at least until the second act started. Because in this part of Poor Bitos, the actors all were now dressed as famous historical personages from the infamous Committee of Public Safety, during the French Revolution. Bitos, played by George Bartenieff, was now Robespierre. Other actors were Desmoulins, Tallien, Mirabeau and St. Juste. Sally Kirkland was Queen Marie Antoinette and Madame Tallien was played by Flora Elkins. This character was based on a historical person, who was known for publicly wearing revealing clothing that freed her body - and a note to that effect was inserted in the program. The latter woman’s costume, designed by Adam Sage, was rather modeled after the famous painting of Marianne the Spirit of France in, “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugene Delacroix. And though in that painting, Marianne is fully topless, in this costume Elkins had one breast showing, fully exposed.

Well, now you can guess pretty much what everybody in the audience was talking about after the show - that Delacroix’s painting is about the Revolution of 1830, not the Revolution of 1789 - my gosh, what an embarrassing historical howler! As a former college History Major and a devoted fan of Mike Duncan’s podcast Revolutions, I share their outrage, all these years later.

No, haha just kidding - of course everyone was talking about the breast, and nobody cared about which French Revolution was being referenced. Well, clearly the Sexual Revolution had come to Philadelphia theater, at long last, anyway. To this day, in fact, in Philly if anyone remembers anything about Andre Gregory’s time at the Theatre of the Living Arts, they mention that one exposed body part. Every time. And it’s not really surprising. Just imagine what our old friend the Reverend Frederick Poole would have had to say about that happening on a Philadelphia stage! Just imagine the report our old friend Detective Jacob Gomborov would have written! And we can also imagine how delighted our old friend the opera singer Mary Garden would have been at the whole spectacle! Even though attitudes and laws had changed in in the city since those days, apparently the theater management did have notify the Philadelphia police, and every night during the second act of Poor Bitos a couple of officer would have to show up at the back of the house and observe, just to make sure the single naked female bosom was not being part of a truly artistic production, and not displayed for lewd or lascivious purposes. Apparently the Philly PD officers were altogether delighted with their nightly assignment, and were rather disappointed when Poor Bitos finally ended its run.

Now this show as a whole again attracted huge amounts of national critical attention to Philadelphia. Though I can note that almost NOBODY, in any of their reviews, mentions the exposed breast - everybody was trying to be sophisticated - the Swinging Sixties were well underway, it would just not be cool. Even when Stanley Kauffmann himself, then the leading critic for the New York Times came down to Philly just to see that show, he did not say a word about it, except elliptically referencing Gregory’s fondness for what he called ‘startling effects’. Kauffmann published his thoughts in a major article in the Sunday edition of the Times, in April of 1966, along with his round-up of other recent plays he had seen in other American regional theaters. Kauffmann declared that the TLA production was “infinitely more interesting” than the ones he had seen in London and New York, and that overall the abilities of the Southwark Acting Company was actually higher than any other companies he had seen.

One thing that Kauffmann advised Gregory and other talented directors at American regional theaters if they wanted to refresh their artistry, and keep their audiences moving along with them in their efforts to create a new American theater. Do not just mount prestigious European works, like Poor Bitos, stage new American plays. “Theaters don’t want to be museums of drama, no matter how fine their repertories are. They know that their health depends in some measure on sharp, contemporary American pertinence.” And further, Kauffmann asserted that there ought to be less people coming into New York to see shows, and more trains and buses going out of New York and coming to see what was going on in places like Philadelphia. Every week.

And in fact, though Kauffman didn’t know it, that was already happening! On the closing night of Poor Bitos, a Baltimore Sun reviewer came up to Philly, where he was amazed to find several members of the British cast of the RSC’s Marat/Sade - which was then performing on Broadway - in the audience, in Philadelphia, at the TLA. These British actors had heard great things about Poor Bitos, which after all was set in the same historical period as their own show - which was, let us remember, directed by the same Peter Brook who had been frustrated by his own failure to excite the imaginations of the Philadelphia crowd with his King Lear two years before. And though he wasn’t there, no doubt he heard about it, and maybe he thought Andre Gregory was onto something big.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

The TLA’s second season concluded in May 1966 with a production of The Last Analysis, by novelist Saul Bellow - an American writer this time, but again it was a restaging of a work that had previously failed on Broadway. David Hurst led the company as an aging famous comedian named Phillip (“Bummy”) Bummage, who produces a closed circuit TV show about his life - and his complex psyche. His audience for the show is a group of leading psychiatrists at a professional conference, who munch on caviar and drink champagne while they comment on the spectacle they’re watching. In the cast were Sylvia Gassell (as Bummy’s wife) Lois Smith (as his mistress), Ruth Baker (as his sister), Flora Elkins (as his secretary), Jerry Dempsey (as his lawyer), and Ron Liebman played his son.

The reviews for the show in the local papers again were generally complementary. In the Philadelphia Daily News, reviewer Jack Helsel wrote: “‘You can’t get the whole public on a couch, but that’s what they’re doing nightly at the Living Arts with ‘The Last Analysis,’ which in the last analysis is an eavesdropping, educational and entertaining evening.”

Well, elated by the success of the entire season, Andre Gregory announced to the press that next year he was planning to expand the season from five shows running five weeks each to six shows running six weeks each. And he was going to give the acting company six weeks of rehearsals. And he was going to expand the permanent acting company from 12 to 17 members, and he was going to give them what amounted to almost year-round work. He also announced was about to take the TLA’s production of Endgame from the previous year to New Haven CT at the invitation of Robert Brustein, the new dean of the Yale Drama School to launch the season of its new repertory company. And, perhaps influenced by Stanley Kauffman’s advice, he was already planning the third season to begin in October, which would consist of entirely American plays and playwrights.

A hundred thousand dollars had just come in for the TLA from the National Endowment from the Arts, and he was going to begin a 2 million dollar fundraising drive to create an entirely new theater space within the next six years. And - maybe soon, he thought - they would have the personnel and facilities to become a true repertory company with a changing bill of performances every night, just like the old Moscow Art Theatre. It was just mind-boggling, but maybe it was possible. The Inquirer editorial board wrote an editorial praising what the Theatre of the Living Arts had accomplished in just a short time of two years, and they urged Phialdelphians to support the effort with their money and with their patronage. . . Everything was going so well, right? 

In the midst of all this good news, I am going to report that there were also several troubling indications that not all was well at the little Theater that Could on South Street. First, Associate Artistic Director George Sherman, the gregarious and comforting ‘Mother’ of the company, suddenly announced he was leaving, for ‘artistic reasons’, and he would not say anything more definite. It was all very strange.

And although this sudden departure was handled rather deftly and quietly in public at least, backstage - well the knives were suddenly out. Boardroom politics especially at this non-profit theater got suddenly quite ugly. First, in a pure power play, Andre Gregory persuaded his allies on the board to expand the number of voting members, admitting all sorts of new people. And when he had done so, one of the first things he did was to use this new majority to vote to remove anyone who had consistently been opposing his ideas about the repertoire for the upcoming All-American season; And guess who recalcitrant stick-in-muds were? Well it was the Silvermans and the Goldmans, the two couples who had founded the theater in the first place two years before. 

Well this was just an astounding and heartbreaking development, as you might imagine. Though (as we shall see next time) it was not at all unusual for non-profit theater board politics of the day. Striking back, Fred Goldman issued a formal report that he had evidently been working on for months, in case something like this should happen. And In this report he charged Andre Gregory and managing director David Lunney with gross fiscal incompetence and mismanagement. Due to extravagant spending, he said the TLAs deficit from the first season was not being made up at all, it was expanding, despite all these new grants and gift revenues. Now, the new board was just a rubber stamp for Gregory, and couldn’t see the danger ahead, said Goldman, they were so dazzled by his aura. In fact, accused Goldman, Gregory was exhibiting ‘dictatorial’ tendencies. With all his recent success, nobody was going to be allowed to stand in his way. Maybe this was why George Sherman had left, he intimated. The artistic director was no longer going to be committing to a ‘Theater of Ideas’, and the TLA was being steered away from the old communitarian Hedgerow Theatre model of group consensus.

Andre Gregory wanted to take the theater in a different direction entirely. Like Peter Brooks’s highly successful and influential show Marat/Sade, he was going to attack the smug pieties of the Philadelphia audience, who were going to be exposed to a Artaudian “Theater of Cruelty.” Gregory wanted to do plays of sex and violence and rather than cater to the old crowd, he wanted to attract “a new kind of audience, . . homosexuals, drug addicts, and would-be suicides”!

Well, how true were these accusations? Was this fair? And would Fred Goldman’s charges bring down Andre Gregory’s supposedly dictatorial regime? Would there be a third season at all? 

Would the Theatre of Living Arts become a byword in American theater, or an ominous warning about the future direction of the entire American regional theater movement, and the non-profit theater in Philadelphia?

But here comes the phrase: Find out next time - in what I promise - really truly promise, no backsies, this time, I’m going to do it. This will be the thrilling conclusion of our Season Two, Drama is Conflict.

[DRAMA IS CONFLICT CLOSING THEME]

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Thank you, thank you, everyone, for listening today, and for coming along on yet another Adventure in Theater History Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]