The Village

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by John Strausbaugh


  IF YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE THE BIG BLACKOUT THERE ARE WAYS THAT AREN’T QUITE AS MESSY.

  —Robert Heide, The Bed

  NOTHING WAS DONE BY THE BOOK. WE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THE TITLE OF THE BOOK.

  —Paul Foster

  ON A BITTERLY COLD WINTER’S EVENING, THE PLAYWRIGHT Robert Heide stands at the corner where the block-long Cornelia Street meets West Fourth. He gazes up through clouds of his own breath at the fifth-floor windows of the tall, narrow brick tenement at number 5. He recalls another night, almost half a century ago, when he stood on this same corner. It was October 27, 1964. A little earlier, a naked young man had leaped from one of those fifth-floor windows and smashed to his death on the street.

  “They were just cleaning up,” Heide recalls, his voice going a bit dreamy with the memory. “I saw some blood and what must have been pieces of brain. I was like, ‘Oh, that must be somebody I know.’ ”

  It was. The dead man was twenty-eight-year-old Freddie Herko, a dancer and actor well known and liked in the Village. He’d leaped from the apartment shared by Johnny Dodd, the lighting designer for the theatrical performances at the Caffe Cino just down the block, and Michael Smith, a Village Voice theater critic and huge Cino booster. Opened in 1958, the Cino had quickly developed into a bustling hub of the exuberant Off-Off-Broadway theater movement. Several famous and very successful playwrights and performers started out or passed through there. But by 1964 hard drugs, decadence, and death were stalking Cornelia Street. By the mid-1960s a death like Herko’s—maybe suicide, maybe a drug accident, no one was certain—was sad but not shocking.

  GREENWICH VILLAGE WAS THE BIRTHPLACE OF BOTH OFF-BROADWAY in the 1950s and Off-Off-Broadway in the 1960s. During the war, the most notable new theatrical activity in the Village had been the New School’s Dramatic Workshop. The workshop’s director Erwin Piscator, whom the young Alfred Leslie met, had come to New York as part of the European exodus in the late 1930s. Piscator was a huge figure in the international theater community; a dadaist early on he’d then co-created epic theater with Brecht in the Weimar years. He’d fled Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Moscow before immigrating to New York. Because of his reputation his students had the opportunity to perform new work by important writers, including the U.S. premiere of Sartre’s The Flies and the first staging of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Out of his classes would come a generation of stage and film stars of the 1950s.

  A few new companies sprouted in the Village in the first years after the war. One called New Stages took over an abandoned movie theater at Bleecker and Thompson Streets and staged work by Sartre, García Lorca, and others. Another took over the Provincetown Playhouse and staged works such as Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine. In 1949 Broadway and Actors’ Equity gave the nascent scene a boost. Broadway producers and investors “were caught in a two-way economic pinch,” the theater historian Stephen J. Bottoms explains, as “a consumer-driven inflationary boom was driving the costs of production to unprecedented heights, while theater audiences were being seduced away” by film and television. Broadway producers turned increasingly to handsomely mounted musicals to lure audiences back; the 1950s would be the epoch of grand productions: The King and I, The Sound of Music, Flower Drum Song, South Pacific. There was some serious drama on Broadway but many producers didn’t want to take the risk. Work abounded for the few actors who could hoof ’n’ holler; less so for the rest. Actors’ Equity, therefore, decided to let its members work in small theaters for reduced pay, restricting the size of the audience permitted and the number of performances.

  With the promise of affordable legitimacy, new theater companies began to bloom around the Village. In 1950 the director José Quintero and others turned the former Cafe Society basement on Sheridan Square into the Circle in the Square. Their 1952 revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, which had flopped on Broadway a few years earlier, was a huge success, the first big hit of the new Off-Broadway. It made a star of Geraldine Page, who went on to do the filmed version as well. Quintero had another big hit with a revival of The Iceman Cometh. The new Village Voice handed out its first Obie awards that year to Quintero and the show’s star Jason Robards Jr. The show then moved to Broadway.

  In 1954 Marc Blitzstein’s translation of The Threepenny Opera opened at the Theater de Lys (later the Lucille Lortel) on Christopher Street, with a cast including Lotte Lenya, Bea Arthur, and John Astin. It played ninety-six performances before it had to clear the stage for another show. Audience demand brought it back to the theater in 1955 and it ran for six years, with casts that included Ed Asner, Estelle Parsons, Jerry Orbach, and Jerry Stiller. That was nothing compared to another musical the young Orbach was in, The Fantastics, from which came the standard “Try to Remember.” It opened at the Off-Broadway Sullivan Street Playhouse in 1960 and ran until the theater closed in 2002, an amazing 17,162 performances, said to be the longest-running musical in the world. It was there so long that for decades people referred to Sullivan Street between Houston and Bleecker Streets as “the Fantastics block.” Not that anyone in the Village would admit to seeing the show, which they considered hopelessly middlebrow pap for the tourists. The poet and critic Alfred Chester lived in an apartment upstairs for years and never saw the show. After the show closed, the building was converted into luxury condos.

  Reviving plays by Williams and O’Neill was “not particularly daring,” Bottoms argues. “In effect, the serious drama being squeezed off Broadway by economic forces found an alternative home in these smaller theaters.” For really new and challenging work, there were the haphazard collaborations of John Myers and Herbert Machiz’s short-lived Artists Theatre, and there was Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre, both closer in spirit to what came to be known as Off-Off-Broadway than Off-Broadway. In 1959 the Living Theatre produced a kind of junkie Godot: Jack Gelber’s The Connection, the most controversial Off-Broadway play yet and its biggest succès de scandale.

  Beck and Malina had founded the Living Theatre in the postwar years and from the start had charted a singular course for it. Malina was born in Germany and came to New York with her Jewish parents in 1929, when she was three. In 1943 she met Beck. She was seventeen and an aspiring actress; he was eighteen, a painter, and had just dropped out of Yale to be part of the downtown art scene. She studied theater under Piscator. Inspired by his approach to theater as a political art form, and by Antonin Artaud’s extremist Theater of Cruelty, she and Beck founded the Living Theatre in 1947. Because Malina was pregnant with the first of their two children—to whom they gave the venerable theater name Garrick—they got married that year. It was an open marriage, both of them free to pursue other men.

  Chronically broke, they staged their first performances in their apartment before renting Cherry Lane in 1951 to produce Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, which John Ashbery called “one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on the stage.” In 1952 they presented an evening of one-acts: Stein’s Ladies’ Voices, T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, and Picasso’s surrealist Desire Trapped by the Tail, best known for Gertrude Stein’s remark on first encountering it that the painter should stick to painting. Ashbery and Frank O’Hara played dogs in it. A scoffing reviewer for Billboard wrote that if such work “must be done, an off-Broadway theater . . . is the best place for it . . . It’s like nothing seen before. Even Bohemia was never like this.” A double bill of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi with Ashbery’s mildly homoerotic The Heroes the following year got Beck and Malina into their first of many scrapes with the authorities. The fire department shut it down after three nights, citing the gauzy Ubu set as a fire hazard. They were shut down again for building code violations in 1956 and spent the next few years finding and then outfitting a beautiful space in an old storefront at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. In the interim they became increasingly involved in radical politics, participating in, and getting arrested at, a number of antinuke, antiwar protests. Their
thinking about theater evolved in the same direction, away from poetical European texts and arty sets to something more confrontational and topical. They wanted, as Beck later put it, to “be real on stage, without feigning realism.”

  In 1959 they did just that with Gelber’s Connection, about a group of heroin addicts waiting for the Man. Everything about the production obscured the lines separating theater and reality. The set re-created a scummy Lower East Side pad. The audience was told that the performers weren’t actors but actual junkies, including the jazz band on stage, some of whom occasionally appeared to nod off. The action, much of it improvised, happened in real time, not theatrical time. The performers fidgeted like jonesing addicts, mumbled junkie small talk, spatted, and for long stretches did nothing at all but wait, while the audience took over the fidgeting. Finally the dealer arrived, they all shot up, and one of the junkies overdosed as the band wailed bebop. The End.

  The daily newspapers’ critics despised it, the Voice loved it, and no self-respecting downtown type failed to see it at least once. Larry Rivers, who turned down an offer to play/be one of the junkies, says it “reflected the avant-garde conceits of that period . . . one of which was to be sure their audience found something in the production annoying.” He calls Beck and Malina “violent pacifists . . . Whatever they and their productions were, they gave you the feeling you were witnessing something important.” They followed The Connection with The Brig, an even grimmer, more “realistic” production set in a U.S. Marine prison compound, where the actors suffered physical and psychological brutalities. During the run of The Brig in 1963 the IRS seized the Living Theatre’s space for nonpayment of roughly twenty-eight thousand dollars in back taxes. Agents chopped up the set and put whatever they could find in the building on auction. It netted less than three hundred dollars.

  Locked out at Fourteenth Street, they remounted The Brig in a space on Forty-second Street near Tenth Avenue, where they were soon shut down again. Jonas Mekas, who’d known the Becks and followed their work since the early 1950s, caught one of those last performances and decided he had to film The Brig. He persuaded the company to “do one more performance, just for me.” To capture the sense of reality the Becks were going for onstage, he decided to rent two Auricon single system sound-on-film cameras, used by news agencies because you could very quickly print, edit, and project what you shot. Since the Forty-second Street space was now closed he, his crew, and the company sneaked in through a coal chute. While lookouts kept watch for the cops, they shot the performance in one take, pausing only to reload film. The performance “was so precisely orchestrated that my being there disrupted it completely. The actor had to be there, but I was there with my camera,” so the cast had to think on their feet and work around him. “That made it [a] very, very special performance. It became much more real. Those little changes made a big, big difference. Two days later I projected it at the Bridge Theatre on St. Mark’s Place for like ten people, fifteen. The Living Theatre, Andy Warhol came, a couple more. And Andy went gaga. ‘This is it! This is it!’ So I feel guilty. He was doing such good work in silent cinema, and I infected him with Auricon. So that’s how Andy’s sound period begins, because it was so easy.”

  In their subsequent trial on the tax charges, Beck and Malina were given short, symbolic jail sentences, which they appealed. Many saw it all as a government crackdown on Beck and Malina for their peacenik activities. The two agreed that America wasn’t going to let them do their kind of theater anymore. They took the Living Theatre into a long exile in Europe, during which they created Paradise Now, a highly improvised audience-participation spectacle that included, like many avant-garde performances of the time, nudity. Touring that piece in the United States in 1968 resulted in numerous arrests for indecent exposure; performing it in Brazil in 1971 got them imprisoned for months and deported. Beck and Malina’s marriage and theatrical partnership lasted until he died in 1985, shortly after the filming of Poltergeist II, one of his very rare forays into the commercial sphere. (He was also in Candy and The Cotton Club.) Malina soldiered on, back in New York. In 1993 the Buildings Department closed yet another Living Theatre space, this one in the East Village, for code violations. In 2006 Malina signed a ten-year lease on an intimate, spare space in a basement on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side.

  WATCHING ALL THE NEW THEATERS CROPPING UP IN THE VILLAGE in the 1950s was a young failed poet and novelist who’d moved there at the start of the decade. He later told an interviewer he’d sometimes go to two plays a day. He saw Iceman, the Picasso, the Beckett, the Tennessee Williams. In 1958, as his thirtieth birthday loomed, he decided to write a play of his own. His name was Edward Albee.

  He’d come, in a way, from a theater background. Shortly after his birth in 1928, he was adopted by the wealthy Reed Albee, whose father had made a fortune from the Keith-Albee vaudeville chain. Growing up in Westchester and on Park Avenue, he was often taken to the theater as a child. As parents the Albees were cold and distant, magnifying his sense of being alone in the world. He went to, and did poorly at, the finest private schools, including Choate and the Valley Forge Military Academy, where, he later joked, they taught only two subjects, sadism and masochism, and where he discovered his attraction to other boys. In 1949 he broke with the Albees. “They were deeply bigoted, reactionary, materialistic,” he wrote in Time in 2002. He spent the next decade moving around to various apartments in the Village and Chelsea, working odd jobs, including delivering telegrams for Western Union, to supplement a small stipend from an adopted grandmother and quietly soaking up culture. He met his lover, the wickedly smart, handsome, and self-destructive composer Bill Flanagan, and, like most everyone else in the Village in the 1950s, they did a lot of drinking together. They drank with the painters at the Cedar Tavern, with the composers Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter up at the Carnegie Tavern next to Carnegie Hall, and in the still largely clandestine gay meeting places in the Village: Goody’s (which had been one of the bars where Joseph Mitchell met up with Joe Gould in the 1940s); Mary’s on Eighth Street; Julius’s on West Tenth Street; and Lenny’s Hideaway, a basement dive on West Tenth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues (now the jazz club Smalls). Robert Heide met them there in the mid-1950s, along with the composer Ned Rorem, the playwright Tom Eyen, and composer Jerry Herman. “It had a kind of artistic and pretentious aura about it,” Heide recalls. He remembers a “surly German bartender,” a former ballet dancer, who “served a special deadly drink he called ‘der clinker,’ ” a mix of brandy and vodka. Flanagan and Albee lived together in a tenement on West Fourth Street and dressed and acted so alike that friends called them clones. They also fought fiercely; Heide maintains that some of Martha and George’s verbal battles in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? come verbatim from Albee and Flanagan’s arguments. Albee got the title from graffiti he saw in a West Tenth Street bar, the College of Complexes (later the Ninth Circle).

  In 1958, his poetry and fiction going nowhere, Albee sat down at an old typewriter he’d lifted from the Western Union office and spent three weeks banging out his one-act The Zoo Story. Jerry, a probably gay loner, confronts Peter, a married and possibly closeted middle-aged man in Central Park, and goads Peter into stabbing him to death, in effect sacrificing himself to shock Peter out of his complacent torpor. The story reflected some of the sad, solitary New Yorkers Albee had met on his Western Union job. The seedy Upper West Side boardinghouse where Jerry lives, for example, was inspired by Albee’s regular delivery of telegrams to the gruff actor Lawrence Tierney, then down on his luck and living in a run-down place in that neighborhood.

  The Zoo Story didn’t premiere Off-Broadway but way off Broadway. Albee sent it to a friend in Rome, who showed it to a friend in Berlin, where it was translated into German and double-billed with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in 1959. Meanwhile the Actors Studio staged a reading, at the end of which Norman Mailer jumped up and in his blustery Mailerian way proclaimed The Zoo Story “the best fucki
ng one-act play I’ve ever seen.” In 1960 producer Richard Barr brought the double bill to the Provincetown Playhouse. It began a long collaboration between Albee and Barr, who had been Orson Welles’s assistant at the Mercury Theatre in the late 1930s. Despite mixed reviews from newspaper critics The Zoo Story was a big success, and subsequent productions spread around the country and the world. It vaulted Albee to overnight celebrity as America’s hottest new playwright. Heide remembers a night soon after the play opened when the San Remo was crowded with big names—Tennessee Williams, Simone Signoret, Leonard Bernstein, Malina and Beck. When Albee walked in and stood alone at the end of the bar every head in the place turned. He had arrived.

  Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? exploded on Broadway in 1962, with Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof’s wife and partner at the Bank Street acting school HB Studio, playing Martha. Some critics failed to get it, denouncing it as “a sick play for sick people” and “for dirty-minded females only,” but it proved to be a gigantic success anyway. Albee was hailed as the new O’Neill, won prizes, and made the cover of Newsweek. Fitting the downtown pattern, fame sat uneasily with him. He lashed out at the critics, was surly and peckish in interviews, and made no effort to hide his contempt for Broadway and its audiences. He was another downtown celebrity the media loved to hate, the quintessential angry young man. While Albee’s career soared, Flanagan’s remained earthbound. Albee eventually left him for the young playwright Terrence McNally. “As Ed became a celebrity he distanced himself from everybody,” Heide says. Battling alcoholism and depression, Flanagan deteriorated mentally and physically through the 1960s. He was found three days’ dead in his apartment in 1969. He had just turned forty-six.

  As Albee’s star continued to rise he moved to fancier digs on Fifth Avenue and a place out at Montauk, then bought a loft in Tribeca. Through the 1970s and ’80s his own alcoholism derailed his career and badly damaged his writing. In his Albee biography, Mel Gussow describes a dinner party he and his wife gave in their Village apartment in 1977 for assorted great names of New York theater, at which a drunk Albee and Joseph Papp, founder of Shakespeare in the Park and the Public Theater, flew into a vicious shouting match that began with insults about each other’s work and descended to ad hominems, Albee needling Papp about his former CPUSA membership and Papp attacking Albee’s homosexuality. Albee finally got his drinking under control and made his comeback in the 1990s with the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Three Tall Women.

 

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