Boulos, Daniel
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UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Fortresses of Culture: Cold War Mobilization, Urban Renewal, and Institutional Identity in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center and Center Theatre Group Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n50d91d Author Boulos, Daniel Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Fortresses of Culture: Cold War Mobilization, Urban Renewal, and Institutional Identity in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center and Center Theatre Group A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Theater Studies by Daniel Boulos Committee in charge: Professor W. Davies King, Chair Professor Leo Cabranes-Grant Professor Simon Williams June 2018 The dissertation of Daniel Boulos is approved. _____________________________________________ Leo Cabranes-Grant _____________________________________________ Simon Williams _____________________________________________ W. Davies King, Committee Chair March 2018 Fortresses of Culture: Cold War Mobilization, Urban Renewal, and Institutional Identity in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center and Center Theatre Group Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Boulos iii VITA OF DANIEL BOULOS EDUCATION Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theater, Montclair State University, May 1997 Master of Arts in Theater History and Criticism, Brooklyn College, June 2012 Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2018 (expected) PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2016-2017: Teaching Assistant, Writing Program, University of California, Santa Barbara 2012-2016: Teaching Assistant, Department of Theater and Dance, University of California, Santa Barbara 2014-2017: Writing Center Tutor, Santa Barbara City College 2006-2012: Administrator, Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2000-2006: Stage Manager, Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Theatreworks/USA, ArtsPower National Touring Theatre PUBLICATIONS “‘Anna Christie,’ Chris Christophersen, and dat ole davil Broadway,” Eugene O’Neill Review. 36.2 (2015): 176-193. Book Review. Programming Theater History: The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco by Herbert Blau (New York: Routledge, 2013). Theatre Research International. 42.1 (2017): 91-92. FIELDS OF STUDY American Theater History and Drama Theater Economics, Cultural Policy, and Urban History iv ABSTRACT Fortresses of Culture: Cold War Mobilization, Urban Renewal, and Institutional Identity in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center and Center Theatre Group by Daniel Boulos The Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center and Center Theatre Group were just two of dozens of regional theaters that emerged across the United States in the mid-twentieth century, but for many reasons they stand apart from most others. Because of their position as constituents of institutions directly tied to economic and political imperatives of New York and Los Angeles, they were linked more explicitly to their respective cities’ identities than most other theaters in the United States. New York and Los Angeles looked, respectively, to Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Music Center as sources of civic pride, while theater makers, audiences, and critics looked to the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center and Center Theatre Group as focal points in the quest for alternatives to Broadway and the development of an institutionalized national theater. This dissertation examines the ways in which each of the organizations studied herein established their authority to represent their cities and the nation as civic institutions and explores how they legitimated their identities as such in the context of Cold War culture. Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Music Center, despite their purported cultural aspirations, grew out of pragmatic desires among urban elites to replace one vision of urbanity with another and to raise the national and international stature of their respective v cities. Lincoln Center had no officially sanctioned designation as a national cultural center, but nonetheless was said to stand as a symbol of American cultural might by virtue of its location in New York, whose global profile was on the rise following World War II. Los Angeles, meanwhile, worked to reconcile its booming population with a decidedly un- metropolitan national image, while the city’s business elite sought to wrest control of the Los Angeles’s built environment from the political forces of the left, and the Music Center figured prominently into these circumstances. The centers’ theater constituents, meanwhile, were not directly linked to the urban renewal efforts but were nonetheless strongly influenced by the conditions shaping Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Music Center, particularly in relation to establishing the theaters’ legitimacy as civic institutions. In tracing the genesis of these theaters and their parent organizations, this dissertation seeks to make visible the plethora of forces, both internal and external, that converged to shape their emerging identities. Moreover, this dissertation posits that the rise of the institutionalized theater in the United States, a relatively overlooked area of study, offers a valuable site of interrogation for theater historians. To be sure, the individual works of playwrights, actors, and directors offer valuable insight into the ways in which artists respond to prevailing social, political, and economic conditions in any given historical moment. However, the rise of institutionalized theater caused a profound shift in how theatrical works are legitimated in the United States by adding a new level of legitimation: the institutional identity of a theatrical organization. Such institutions, therefore, figure as prominently into theatrical history as any playwright, actor, director, or producer in that their identities are as reflective of social, political, economic, and artistic circumstances as the works created within them. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: “A Mighty Influence for Peace:” Lincoln Center, Urban Renewal, and Cold War Mobilization………………………………………………………………………………….44 Chapter 2: Travertine and Turmoil: Contestation and Identity in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center……………………………………………………………………………...106 Chapter 3: Modern Marvel: The Los Angeles Music Center and the Narrative of Civic Progress……………………………………………………………………………………..175 Chapter 4: “The True Theatre Audience:” Center Theatre Group and Cultural Maturity in Los Angeles………………………………………………………………………………...254 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….330 vii INTRODUCTION Preamble: A Tale of Two Cities, Two Cultural Centers, and Two Theaters When Lincoln Center was first conceived in the mid-1950s, New York was in the midst of a major transformation of its landscape as Robert Moses, chairman of the city’s Slum Clearance Committee, pursued an ambitious program of urban renewal projects designed to align the city with his own vision of progress by eradicating buildings and neighborhoods he deemed derelict and obsolete with clusters of apartment towers and public buildings including university facilities, hospitals, convention centers and, of course, the behemoth cultural center that now stands proudly a few blocks north of Columbus Circle. Nearly sixty years after its 1959 groundbreaking, Lincoln Center remains a dominant presence on Manhattan’s West Side while the people—mostly people of color with low incomes—who inhabited San Juan Hill, the neighborhood bulldozed to make way for the Center, are all but forgotten, as is their valiant fight to save their neighborhood from Moses’s brand of progress that valued order and efficiency over all else. One of the last of Moses’s major urban renewal projects, Lincoln Center was pitched to the public as an important symbol of America’s cultural maturity during the Cold War and, its backers argued, Lincoln Center would put the world on notice that the United States would be second to none not only in matters of economic and military might but also in the arena of high art and culture. Like the displaced population of San Juan Hill, the Cold War rhetoric that underscored the founding of Lincoln Center has faded into memory, but the Center and its constituent organizations like the Metropolitan Opera and the New York 1 Philharmonic have solidified their preeminence as important and influential cultural institutions. The same cannot be said for the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center. When Lincoln Center announced that its plans would include not just homes for the Met and the Philharmonic but also a permanent repertory theater, the prospect of a permanent theater company, free from the commercial constraints of Broadway, was heralded as “undoubtedly the most exciting news to develop in a long time for the American theatre.”1 Already home to dozens of theater buildings, New York had been the center of theatrical production in the United States for nearly a century, as the “combination system” had led to the demise of locally produced theater across the country only to be replaced by touring productions emanating from New York. That centrality formed the basis for a constant refrain among artists and critics alike that the dominance of commercial theater in the United States “tolerated only plays that would appeal to the common denominator in a large and divergent group of people spread out over the country,