Programming Theater History

“One of the great stories of the American theater..., The Workshop not only built an international reputation with its daring choice of plays and non-traditional productions, it also helped launch a movement of regional, or resident, companies that would change forever how Americans thought about and consumed theater.” (Elin Diamond, from the Introduction.)

Herbert Blau founded, with , the legendary Actor’s Workshop of , in 1952, starting with ten people in a loft above a judo academy. Over the course of the next thirteen years and its hundred or so productions, it introduced American audiences to plays by Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, Arden, Fornes, and various unknown others. Most of the productions were accompanied by a stunningly concise and often provocative program note by Blau. These documents now comprise, within their compelling perspective, a critique of the modern theater. They vividly reveal what these now canonical works could mean, fi rst time round, and in the context of 1950s and 1960s American culture, in the shadow of the Cold War. Programming Theater History curates these notes, with a selection of The Workshop’s incrementally artful, alluring program covers, Blau’s recollections, and evocative production photographs, into a narrative of indispensable artefacts and observations. The result is an inspiring testimony by a giant of American performance theory and practice, and a unique refl ection of what it is to create theatre history in the present.

Herbert Blau is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at the , USA. He has also had a parallel career in the theater, as co-founder and co-director of The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco, then co-director of the Repertory Theater of in New York, and as artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN. His publications include The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater (2002), Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion (1988), Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (2004), As If: An Autobiography (Volume 1 2012), and Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual (2011). Programming Theater History

The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco

Herbert Blau

Introduction by Elin Diamond First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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© 2013 Herbert Blau

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-415-51669-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-51670-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-12407-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby In memory of Jules Irving Contents

List of illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

1 A Loft, in the Early Days 9

2 Coming Up the Ramp: Mid-Term Variations 32

3 Alienation and the Absurd: The Mystery Remains 57

4 Reason Not the Need: Faith or Fury, Farce or Dream 80

5 Mixed Blessings and the Sorcery of Persuasion 109

6 Home Stretch: What Will the Future Think? 130

The Winding Sheet: A Requiem-Coda 165

Index 168 Illustrations

Photographs Note: unless otherwise stated, photographer unknown

Chapter 1 1.1 Ebenezer Baptist Church: Mark Lapin 10 1.2 Down at the Encore Theater: Chic Lloyd 11 1.3 I Am A Camera 17 1.4 Hedda Gabler 21 1.5 Blood Wedding 24 1.6 The Playboy of the Western World 26 1.7 Summer and Smoke 29

Chapter 2 2.1 Elgin Street Theater 32 2.2 Lysistrata: Chic Lloyd 35 2.3 Venus Observed 36 2.4. Death of a Salesman: Chic Lloyd 39 2.5 Death of a Salesman: Chic Lloyd 40 2.6 The Cherry Orchard 42 2.7 Oedipus Rex 43 2.8 Maître Pierre Patelin 44 2.9 The Crucible 46 2.10 Marines Memorial Club Hotel 47 2.11 Camino Real 50 2.12 Camino Real 51 2.13 Captive at Large: Ed Winter 52 2.14 The Importance of Being Earnest: Ed Winter 54 x Illustrations

Chapter 3 3.1 Mother Courage: Phiz Mozesson 59 3.2 Mother Courage: Phiz Mozesson 60 3.3 Miss Julie 63 3.4 The Plough and the Stars: Ted Streshinsky 65 3.5 The Flowering Peach: Chic Lloyd 68 3.6 : Wagner Set: Chic Lloyd 70 3.7 Waiting for Godot: Chic Lloyd 70 3.8 Waiting for Godot at San Quentin 71 3.9 The Country Wife: Chic Lloyd 74 3.10 The Ticklish Acrobat 78

Chapter 4 4.1 The Potting Shed: Chic Lloyd 82 4.2 Tiger at the Gates: Chic Lloyd 84 4.3 A Gift of Fury: Chic Lloyd 85 4.4 The Miser: Chic Lloyd 88 4.5 The Iceman Cometh: Chic Lloyd 91 4.6 Waltz of the Toreadors: Chic Lloyd 93 4.7 Garden District: Chic Lloyd 96 4.8 The Entertainer: Chic Lloyd 97 4.9 The Infernal Machine: Chic Lloyd 100 4.10 Encore Theatre (The Caretaker) 102 4.11 Endgame: Chic Lloyd 104 4.12 Endgame: Chic Lloyd 105 4.13 Cock-A-Doodle Dandy 108

Chapter 5 5.1 Jack, or the Submission 113 5.2 The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi: Chic Lloyd 115 5.3 Saint’s Day: Chic Lloyd 118 5.4 The Birthday Party: Chic Lloyd 119 5.5 King Lear: Chic Lloyd 123 5.6 King Lear: Chic Lloyd 123 5.7 Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance 126 5.8 Henry IV Part I: Chic Lloyd 129

Chapter 6 6.1 The Glass Menagerie: Chic Lloyd 132 6.2 Galileo: Chic Lloyd 135 Illustrations xi

6.3 Galileo: Chic Lloyd 136 6.4 Volpone: Chic Lloyd 141 6.5 The Balcony: Hank Kranzler 142 6.6 The Balcony: Hank Kranzler 145 6.7 The Balcony: Hank Kranzler 146 6.8 The Caretaker 150 6.9 The Caucasian Chalk Circle: Hank Kranzler 151 6.10 The Birds 154 6.11 The Wall: Hank Kranzler 157 6.12 The Country Wife: Hank Kranzler 160 6.13 Uncle Vanya: Hank Kranzler 164

Program Covers

Sleeve 1 [(between pages 50 and 51)] Plate 1 John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (1953; by Helen Breger) Plate 2 Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (1954; by Leonard Breger) Plate 3 Alfred Hayes, The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1955; by Malcolm Smith) Plate 4 David Mark, Captive at Large (1955; by Malcolm Smith) Plate 5 Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage (1956; by Malcolm Smith) Plate 6 Clifford Odets, The Flowering Peach (1956; by Marion Kronfeld) Plate 7 , Waiting for Godot (1957; by Malcolm Smith) Plate 8 James Schevill, The Bloody Tenet (1957; by Malcolm Smith) Plate 9 Jean Giraudoux, Tiger at the Gates (1957; by Helen Breger) Plate 10 Herbert Blau, A Gift of Fury (1958; by Richard Robinson) Plate 11 Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh (1958; by Robert McClay) Plate 12 Jean Anouilh, Waltz of the Toreadors (1958; by Helen Breger) Plate 13 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1959; by Robert LaVigne) Plate 14 Jean Cocteau, The Infernal Machine (1959; by Leonard Breger) Plate 15 John Osborne and Anthony Creighton, Epitaph for George Dillon (1959; by Peter Bailey) Plate 16 Yukio Mishima, Three Noh Plays (1959; by Jacques Overhoff) Plate 17 Miriam Stovall, The Rocks Cried Out (1960; by Judy Collins) Plate 18 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi (1960; by Judith Saunders and David L. Haselwood) xii Illustrations

Sleeve 2 [(between pages 146 and 147)] Plate 19 Sean O’Casey, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1959; by David Green) Plate 20 John Whiting, Saint’s Day (1960; by Judy Saunders) Plate 21 Eugene O’Neill, A Touch of the Poet (1960; by Robert LaVigne) Plate 22 Jean Genet, The Maids and The Widow (1961; by Robert LaVigne) Plate 23 John Arden, Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1961; by Robert LaVigne) Plate 24 Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters (1961; by Ann Horton) Plate 25 William Shakespeare, King Lear (1961; by Cornelia Schulz) Plate 26 , The Birthday Party (1960; by Judy Saunders) Plate 27 George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance (1961; by Judy Collins) Plate 28 Bertolt Brecht, Galileo (1962; by Judith Davis) Plate 29 Herbert Blau, Telegraph Hill (1963; by Helen Breger) Plate 30 Jean Genet, The Balcony (1963; by Robert LaVigne) Plate 31 Harold Pinter, The Caretaker (1963; by Ann Horton) Plate 32 Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1963; by Tadeusz Kulisiewicz) Plate 33 Conrad Bromberg, The Defense of Taipei (1964; by Ann Burger) Plate 34 William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1964; by William Stewart Jones) Plate 35 Ben Jonson, Volpone (1963; by James H. Stearns) Plate 36 Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya (1965; by Edward Winter) Acknowledgments

Some years ago, when I was sorting out photographs for an autobiography, there were so many—going back to my childhood in —spread out in our living room and on the dining room table, it was really hard to choose. Moreover, since everything these days has to go electronically to the publisher, and I’m still neanderthal with digitality, my son Dick fl ew out from Wisconsin with a scanner (since I don’t have one) and put everything on disks. And then, having grown up at The Actor’s Workshop, when he saw boxes of archives in my study, with photographs and programs, he started to scan just about everything in sight. As he went along, sitting at the scanner for about eight hours a day, for several days, he was also reading the program notes, and at one point he stopped and said, “These have got to be published.” Others had said that before, but when it came to preparing this book, which is with its photos and color covers a kind of assemblage, Dick fl ew out again with his scanner, and since then, offl ine, online, he has been infallibly there, and if he weren’t, given the complications of putting it all together, the book would have been impossible. So it was, too, with , who—as I often say about her regarding materials from The Workshop, where she acted from the beginning— is now a virtual archive. And indeed, when we were looking for production photographs I didn’t have, or alternatives to those I did, or programs somehow missing, we’d simply email or call Priscilla, and it wouldn’t take long before she’d fi nd them. She lives now in Santa Monica, and there were times when she and Dick, back in Wisconsin, were in incessant contact about the right ones, the wrong ones, or what maybe didn’t exist, though if it didn’t she’d come up with something else. And then sometimes there was another problem, about identifying certain actors in a photograph that might have been taken fi fty or sixty years ago, whereupon Priscilla and I, still guessing, would be consulting Alan Mandell, our business manager then, who also acted with the company. Alan is still performing, off in New York when not in Los Angeles, tap dancing back and forth (he’s been taking lessons for years), and even doing a shuffl e recently in Waiting for Godot. So then, like the tramps unsure of history, there we’d be, an xiv Acknowledgments aging trio in that guessing game, emails going, debating or correcting each other, as to who’s really there in a picture—and indeed, I must confess, there might be an error or two in the names given in the photo captions. About those in the photos, and the many who are not, if you want to see how many, you can go to The Workshop website (http:// sanfranciscoactorsworkshop.com/) and the names are there—not only actors, but designers, technicians, stage managers, those who built scenery, handled props, or dutifully mopped the fl oors, even without salaries doing what had to be done. I’m long indebted to them, and the list keeps expanding as the forgotten are added on. As for the website, that was put together a few years ago by Dick and David Irving, the son of Jules and Priscilla, who also grew up in our theater, and both were, until recently, heads of university fi lm departments. The website, more or less managed by David, is worth looking into not only as a supplement to this book, but for the testaments of company members to what The Workshop meant in their lives. Tom Bamberger was not on that scene, but I’m grateful for his mastery of both analog and digital photography, and for his Photoshop magic, which more than helped refi ne the visual materials that, synchronized with the text, take us back in time. Others who provided technical assistance were Dan Boville, Vianne Robitaille, Ben Wolfi nsohn, and Nate Theis, and thanks to them from a distance. Various colleagues at the University of Washington, where I’ve taught (as I always do) in English and Comparative Literature, have been curious about my career in the theater, though none of them knows more about it than the encyclopedic historian, Thomas Postlewait, now an Affi liate Professor in the School of Drama. It was Tom who probably did most to convince me that the program notes should be published. Once the idea took hold, and I chanced upon the editor Talia Rodgers, here from London at a conference in Los Angeles—not having seen her for a while—I mentioned the prospect of such a book, and she immediately went for it. As I recall, it was Talia who fi rst said it should be an artbook, and she has certainly been more than encouraging through the complexities of it all. In that regard, her editorial assistant Sam Kinchin-Smith has always been patiently there, responsive to questions and, with suggestions and cautions about formatting, proposals for design. With patience as a blessing at home, my wife Kathy Woodward—back from a hectic day at the humanities center she directs—was ready for those after-dinner readings as the book progressed, catching up with what I thought, and how I thought, long before we met, in those program notes written half a century ago. As I think of those days, and all those there at The Workshop, I’m tempted to sing, and jokingly sometimes do, “I left my heart in San Francisco,” but with Kathy now, whatever I’m thinking, elliptical as it may be, my heart knows where it is. Introduction

Elin Diamond

What Herbert Blau and Jules Irving accomplished with The Actor’s Workshop is one of the great stories of the American theater. Founded on January 16, 1952, in a rundown loft on San Francisco’s Divisidero Street, The Workshop was the creation of Blau and Irving, two university professors, their wives, the actresses Beatrice Manley and Priscilla Pointer, and a core group of actors. Starting cautiously, refusing at fi rst to plan beyond the next show, the company expanded over the next thirteen years to around 150 people, producing over 100 plays often in two or three theaters simultaneously. Between 1952 and 1965, when Blau and Irving left San Francisco, The Workshop not only built an international reputation with its daring choice of plays and nontraditional productions, it also helped launch a movement of regional, or resident, companies that would change forever how Americans thought about and consumed theater. The regional theater movement was brand new in the 1950s. Only the Alley Theater, the Arena Stage, and Margo Jones’s Theatre ’47 preceded The Actor’s Workshop. In the early Sixties, the fl oodgates opened with the founding of the Seattle Repertory, the Mark Taper Forum, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, Center Stage, and many others. All different, they shared a common desire to produce a serious dramatic art out of the pig’s ear that was American commercial theater. Aiming to produce the best drama with the highest professional standards, they defi ned themselves against Broadway’s star-based product, refusing to be mere “tributaries” of touring New York shows. The late 1940s and 1950s saw major work from Williams, Miller, O’Neill, Hellman, and others, but most commercial theater avoided the post-war tensions and malaise that characterized American society in the affl uent and conservative 1950s. The Actor’s Workshop embraced these tensions with legendary ferocity. Irving and Blau not only offered thoughtful and beautiful productions of the best of the Western canon, they produced, more than any regional theater before or since, the newest and most radical drama being written at the moment. Audiences at The San Francisco Actor’s Workshop saw the U.S. premieres of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother 2 Introduction

Courage, and John Arden’s Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance. They were treated to the fi rst West Coast production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with its legendary restaging at San Quentin, and an inspired production of Endgame (documented in photos that Blau presented to Beckett not long after). Along with major works by and Tennessee Williams, and classics from Lysistrata and The Birds to King Lear and The House of Bernarda Alba, audiences also saw, at times enthusiastically, at others uncom pre- hendingly, plays by John Osborne, John Whiting, Max Frisch, and Maria Irene Fornes—her very fi rst play There! You Died (later Tango Palace), produced at The Workshop in 1964. Perhaps most notoriously, Blau directed an unzipped production of Genet’s The Balcony in 1963 that brought the police in and sent some spectators running to the exits. The Balcony also shocked Harold Clurman when he, like Robert Brustein and other New York theater people, trekked out to San Francisco to see what everyone was talking about. Having Clurman in their theater must have been a sweet moment for Blau and Irving. The Group Theater (1931– 41) like the Federal Theater Project (1935–39), had left-wing world-changing ambitions that Irving and Blau, grandsons of Jewish immigrants and native New Yorkers, well understood. But the early Fifties was a different moment and there was no blueprint for how The Workshop should proceed. Blau in particular had no blueprint. It’s almost funny to recall that unlike Jules Irving, already a gifted actor, and their talented spouses, Blau had no prior theater experience. Having completed a degree in chemical engineering at , and while helping to launch The Workshop, he was writing a doctoral dissertation on Yeats and Eliot in the Department of English at Stanford under the direction of New Critic Yvor Winters, who hated the theater. How, from this unlikely resumé, did he produce and sustain a new theater? An inveterate contrarian, Blau took the absence of blueprint—the “drift” at The Workshop’s beginning—as a sharp provocation. With his “literary/ critical consciousness” at a constant low boil, with the rare language of fi ne writers propelled into stage space by imaginative actors, with fi ctions materializing into strange lives before his eyes in rehearsals, he began to write program notes—mini essays really—with titles different from the plays they introduced. From the beginning Blau saw theater as a “mode of inquiry” and his program notes as an opportunity to make drama part of public discourse, a challenge to McCarthyism’s lies and petty tyrannies. A card- carrying modernist, Blau was not, however, seeking mere relevance when he placed The Workshop repertory, whether I am a Camera or Uncle Vanya, in the context of political history, economics, religion, and psychology. Instead, his notes take the play’s pulse, record the surge of history through its characters, words, and action, and, unlike the stereotype of the modernist, Blau treats the playwright as a fellow thinker and sufferer, someone we should know. Introduction 3

The Workshop’s very fi rst production, Philip Barry’s 1930 play Hotel Universe, was almost a secret affair. The play was deemed good for their actors but the cautious new company performed it only once and for an invited audience. Blau’s note for this production, however, shows no signs of caution. Indeed while each note is unique and wide-ranging, this fi rst one lays down tracks that future notes will follow. With professorial panache Blau observes that the play’s “wit and gentility” indicate a comedy of manners but that Barry’s “bewildered and badgered characters” are in fact members of the Lost Generation made more famous by novelists than by playwrights: “Expressionism of the European theater invaded the soul but became stranded there. In America only Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, in his morbid adventure into psychology, dared explore these same regions.” Barry attempts such exploration through form and ideas:

As originally staged, the play was continuous…, set in a splendid villa out of the very edge of the world where time and space commingle….If [characters] do not speak in soliloquies, they do not either conceal their thoughts. Spontaneously [they] go back and forth in time: the universe is Einstein’s, infi nitely expandable; the souls are Freud’s, dreamy and frustrated….But Barry, with his Catholic heritage, could not permit his creatures to wander,…decadent and unredeemed.

The “proletarian Thirties” rejected Barry’s universe but Blau seeks more open thinking: “However much we may regret the ultimate obscurity of Barry’s thought, we cannot but admire his dramatic sensibility, precocity, and his desire to fi nd peace—for the lost souls of his age and, no doubt, for himself.” What was it like for The Workshop’s audience when, having driven through a foggy San Francisco evening after highballs, martinis, and maybe dinner (this is San Francisco in the Fifties), they took their seats and opened their programs? First off, who was this program note written for? Not for the quietly soused casual spectator or even for the serious arts patron who expected the performance to pander to her tastes. Rather these program notes, usually unsigned and hot off the typewriter, spoke to the Bomb- weary, Cold War-worried, sexually repressed and anxious crowd and invited them, with a quip and a grin, to sit up and see the play and players, the sets and music, and themselves through that nervous wide-angled historical lens. Welcome to The Actor’s Workshop! In the early years, Jules Irving worried that the company was going to be labeled an “art theater.” If Herbert Blau worried about that, he never dumbed down his notes. Instead, dead serious, he learned to play the artful jester. His notes inform, woo, hector, tickle, and attempt to respect the intelligence of his public. He cajoles the audience of Waiting for Godot with enough Brooklyn wisecracks to enable them to swallow his insights. (“Who is Godot? Never mind. We ain’t talking.”). In his Mother Courage note, Blau writes an erudite piece on epic 4 Introduction theater (“a tribunal drama judged and judging”) that makes Brecht seem absolutely essential for understanding post-WWII society. The program note to The Balcony, with its epigraph from Our Lady of the Flowers, is a small masterpiece liberally sprinkled with lines designed to provoke and amuse: “With Genet, the barbarians are always at the gates; the hordes are loose. They cannot be denied,…only propitiated….But there is laughter at the gallows, and erections.” One wonders what the San Francisco police thought about that last line, as they sat in the front row after opening night to appease audiences and reviewers who called the production “a horrendous…revolting experience.” Blau writes that the cops never interrupted the performance. Perhaps, gazing at all that fl esh at the gallows, they preferred not to expose themselves. In any case The Balcony, having completed its run, was eventually brought back; like all scandalous art, it was the show you had to see. Telling history through his program notes—fi fty-one in this book, over eighty in all—is Blau’s way of honoring the magnifi cent labor of The Actor’s Workshop. Programming Theater History traces the arc of The Workshop’s history from the ratty loft on Divisidero, to the Elgin Street Theater off Market, to its more or less stable residency at the Marines Memorial downtown. New theater spaces meant more seats for growing audiences, yet in Blau’s “notes on the notes” prefacing and following each program note, we hear the steady drumbeat of money worries (“the incessant plague of raising money”; “impending bankruptcy”), intensifi ed by constant frustration when the city of San Francisco repeatedly balked at building them a permanent home. A Ford Foundation grant, a lifesaver for some regional theaters, provided relief but it also unspooled the tight coherence of the company. In exchange for fi nancial support, the Foundation demanded that The Workshop, as Blau puts it, “enhance our professionalism” by bringing out “ten ‘experienced’ actors from New York to augment the nuclear company.” Money washed over The Workshop for a while but there were problems with New York actors getting better roles and the ever- present pressure to raise matching funds. When money was again tight and “the pressure was on for some revenue-making play,” Blau and Irving didn’t back down. In fact “we were rabidly into an experimental mode,” producing in three successive seasons (1959–62) The Birthday Party, The Maids, Krapp’s Last Tape, The Zoo Story, Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, The Chairs, along with King Lear, The Alchemist, The Three Sisters, The Dance of Death, The Devil’s Disciple, A Touch of the Poet, Misalliance, Henry IV, part 1, the now unperformed Saint’s Day (Whiting), The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi (Dürrenmatt), and new plays by Miriam Stovall, George Hitchcock, Sidney Michaels, and Mark Harris. Notes for all these plays sparkle in different ways. In Dürrenmatt Blau fi nds a “detective story writer and theologian…, a master of the merry art of annihilation and that specialized art of the continental coffee house, Introduction 5 conversation which goes all over a question without feeling constrained to go anywhere in particular. The stage is littered with corpses and devastated ideas.” About Whiting, whom he admires, Blau writes soberly, “The sin of the present generation is the disaffi liation which Whiting shares. Saint’s Day refl ects the cost of setting limits on obligation, the risk of neutrality, and the catastrophe of partial commitment.” The Fifties are fashionable these days, but readers of Blau’s note for Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance will engage with events that are tantalizingly out of reach. I knew about Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament but had to look up the Aldermaston Marches to learn that these anti-nuclear protests took place yearly between 1959 and 1963. The global tension surrounding Arden’s play, performed at The Actor’s Workshop in October 1961 and framed by Blau’s program note, suddenly felt visceral and strident, the politics messy and all too human. San Francisco audiences hated Arden’s play and this too, Blau reminds us, is theater history. Another vector in the history of The Workshop—and a special pleasure for the reader—is the gradual development of a repertory structure. Irving and Blau may not have envisioned a repertory theater at the launch of The Actor’s Workshop, but their energy and hunger for new challenges, the talent of the company and the enthusiasm of audiences (when they were enthusiastic), meant that The Workshop started to bring back plays that were successful and simultaneously to mount others that were more risky. The fi rst chapters record how the company incorporated itself, how it became a (very) off-Broadway Equity company, how Blau and Irving started to plan a whole season instead of mounting one play after another. By the late Fifties, a full repertory operation became a reality, a busy reality. Blau and Irving and their growing company needed an experimental theater and opened, just down from the Marines, the Encore—a basement theater at the bottom of three fl ights of stairs with a lobby just above that was once a cable car. Claustrophobic and “sepulchral” the Encore was inaugurated as a Workshop theater with Blau’s direction of Beckett’s Endgame, the production of which he remains the most proud. Ironically the Encore was located around the corner from the Geary and the Curran, the old “tributary” theaters of San Francisco—or as Blau puts it, “those once-dominant professional houses, now irrelevant to our future”). With the Marines and the Encore on line, The Actor’s Workshop swung into intense repertory action. John Osborne’s incendiary The Entertainer and Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine were playing at the Marines in repertory with Three Noh Plays by Yukio Mishima. Blau writes exciting notes for all these plays while fi nding himself “in the midst of rehearsals for two productions at once: Beckett’s Endgame and O’Casey’s Cock-a-Doodle Dandy”! About the startling juxtapositions produced by repertory—and there were many—Blau writes a brilliant note late in 1960: “The point of repertory is not mere show but constant performance…, not long runs or sparse runs, but 6 Introduction ripening variety…, not just a lot of plays but a certain relationship among plays over a sustained period of time.” The subtext for the note may be yet another plea for the funds that would enable a “sustained period” of survival for The Actor’s Workshop. But the intellectual payoff of the “certain relationship” of plays is evident in Blau’s commentary as he looks more and more for “consanguinity” across time and space. Assembling this book, he fi nds connections in the folk energies shared between Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (the fi rst play he directs), both in The Workshop’s fi rst season. Similarly, Blau observes that he came to King Lear by way of Beckett and Genet. For the actors of The Actor’s Workshop, repertory meant not just a hectic schedule but deeper connection to their lives in the theater. In The Impossible Theater, Blau quotes from a letter written by actor Robert Symonds about precisely this moment in Workshop history:

I wish you could have been here during the last month [Blau was in Europe], because in many ways it seemed to indicate what the rhythm of our daily life is to become in the future. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday saw the successful revival of The Crucible, Saturday The Entertainer at Marines and the Noh plays. At the same time The Busy Martyr [a new play by George Hitchcock] was in rehearsal, The Plaster Bambino [a new play by Sidney Michaels] and Epitaph for George Dillon [John Osborne] in the planning and I had a set of workshops going. The rhythm I speak of, however, is not just stepped-up activity. What I really mean is that the actual performing of three such varied and positive dramatic events as Entertainer, Crucible and Endgame set up a kind of cultural counterpoint within the company…; for each member of the company there was something going on which he could identify with and defend as an artist. (The Impossible Theater, 179)

Lacking that primal connection to the repertory, we readers can create cultural counterpoints of our own. Certainly the pairing of Endgame and Cock-a-doodle Dandy, Blau’s simultaneous directing projects in the late spring of 1959, is one to savor. The photos reprinted here tell it all: in one, the terminally chair-bound Hamm of Endgame and in the other, the wildly kinetic dancers of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy featuring a beaming, whirling Priscilla Pointer closest to the camera, and the company—many of them in their seventh season together—confi dently, wantonly, thrillingly doing it. That comic energy is worthy of its own comment. During the life of The Actor’s Workshop’s existence, “the Absurd” was named and deifi ed. Blau’s note on Waiting for Godot appeared in February 1957, nine months before the famous San Quentin performance and four years before Martin Esslin would enshrine that production in The Theatre of the Absurd. After the wise-cracking opener I mentioned earlier, Blau develops the comical pile-up of useless objects in Godot’s universe before it became a widespread critical practice: Introduction 7

With techniques borrowed from the circus, the pantomime, the music hall, Marcel Proust, burlesque, vaudeville, the daily newspaper, Kafka, the comic strip and St. Thomas Aquinas, Godot acts out the project of being, just being. The two tramps are nothing but the concrete fact of their waiting. Sans history, sans memory, with nothing but a few carrots, radishes and verbal scraps and tatters and greasepots from the rag and boneshop of the Western tradition, they wait.

Blau was stirred by the rag and boneshop of the Western tradition, particularly of classic comedy, which occasions some of his best notes, sometimes fl avored with the bracing negativity of the absurd. Blau’s note on Volpone sets up a contrast with Falstaff: the latter “all belly and burp… [who would] sleep it off at the Boar’s Head, if the world and wars would just let him alone.” Volpone, on the other hand, “puts his old shoulder to the wheel, he plays the game…. If Volpone is unbridled Eros playing the market, Mosca is the middle-man, living off the fringe benefi ts and secretly cornering the stock.” With equally venomous pleasure Blau skewers our world by sniffi ng the rot in Wycherley’s The Country Wife:

Restoration drama is the abstract and brief chronicle of a time when social disease could be read in the pockmarks like a Dow Jones average… Horner, the pseudo-impotent hero…, is a sort of Clean Bomb [Fifties lingo for an atom bomb that supposedly leaves no radioactive contamination] in the Body Politic, perpetuated by common consent. To denounce him would jeopardize the profi table order of things.

The Actor’s Workshop, despite its affi nity for Restoration comedy, certainly endured its share of denouncing. The incidents are legion. After a sold-out production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in 1954, audiences became incensed with The Workshop’s next offering, Brecht’s Mother Courage, which the local theater reviewer called “a tedious piece…[of] unrelenting grimness.” Blau who could give as good as he got, fi red back a protest and the Bay Area lit up with comment. The reviewer stuck to his guns, asking again why, if thirty years had passed, did Anna Fierling’s wagon look exactly the same at the end of the play as at the beginning. (It’s good to remember the level of incomprehension that greeted plays that have now become canonical.) But conventional theater critics were not the only ones denouncing. The Workshop’s left-wing audience, delighted by O’Casey’s political The Plough and the Stars and Miller’s The Crucible, felt betrayed by Waiting for Godot and loudly complained. Blau himself, as readers of The Impossible Theater know, is a vigorous denouncer, especially of the theater: “…about which I was still dubious.” Even after the success of his production of Godot, and despite “the turnaround in the company because of [its positive] reception…I hadn’t made my peace with being in the theater.” Facing his critics, who were 8 Introduction often his audiences, Blau embraced W.B. Yeats’ sublime hostility toward the Abbey Theater’s audience: “Not what you want but what we want.” Or, as Blau put it in his note on repertory: “The theater must be for the public welfare without being at public disposal” Unquestionably The Actor’s Workshop produced dissention and debate. I was a child growing up in the Bay Area during the life of The Workshop. My parents were not subscribers but my best friend’s parents were, and I recall furrowed brows and heated talk about the latest Actor’s Workshop production. Perhaps Herbert Blau’s program notes set them off. I can’t remember. But I do know that they always went back for more. The Actor’s Workshop was, in fact, a regional and eventually a national magnet, attracting some of the best actors and visual artists in the country. The set designer Robin Wagner cut his teeth on Blau’s production of Waiting for Godot and the painter Robert LaVigne designed Blau’s Lear and many other Workshop shows. They and other artists created beautiful program covers, some of which are reproduced in this volume. Irving and Blau also nurtured Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech who later founded Mabou Mines, and R.G. Davis who, in one of The Workshop’s workshops, launched what would become the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The great electronic music composer Morton Subotnick was also a member of The Actor’s Workshop and designed the sound for Blau’s King Lear. Blau and Irving maintained their vitally active theater company in San Francisco until they decamped to co-direct ’s Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in 1965. The Workshop folded offi cially a year later. For the last chapter of his Programming Theater History: The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco, Herbert Blau borrows a subtitle from the last and longest note in the volume, the one for Uncle Vanya: “What will the future think?” This is an odd question given the ephemeral nature of theater and the impossibility of predicting the future, and, most of all, the growing pastness of The Workshop itself, with so many of the company gone. But it turns out that Blau has insured a future for The Actor’s Workshop by giving it a past—a particular past, to be sure—but a real one: these program notes. Written in the heat of rehearsing, teaching, reading, thinking, cadging for money, they spring not only from Blau’s mind but also from the artistic experiment he launched with his friend Jules Irving and a company of dedicated actors and artists. In his many books, and especially in The Impossible Theater, Blau quotes from these notes and weaves them into his commentaries, theories, and remembrances. These notes are his mother lode and now they are ours, part archive, part exhalation, an unchangeable yet living piece of The San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, just as Blau wrote them some sixty years ago. Rutgers University 5 September 2012