by Susan Cooper
One by one, with each Revels that went by, the team of Revels people grew. Those of us working backstage became a permanent family, with Jack as the paternal connection: so did some of the individual performers and groups, and a talented central core of the chorus. And everything began to grow. Jack increased the number of performances to five, and reluctantly raised the ticket prices to $2 for children and $4 for adults. The demand for tickets was huge; in 1977 all five performances sold out, and four thousand ticket orders had to be returned unfulfilled.
Since very few of those orders were for a single ticket, and since Sanders Theatre holds more than a thousand, that meant that we could probably have sold out at least six more performances. But we couldn’t afford it; we were still a shoestring operation. Even for a gorgeously costumed production, Raine’s costume budget was $850 — about $7 per costume. I still can’t imagine how she did it.
As the Cambridge Revels grew, Carol’s Revels North was thriving. While still contributing hugely to the content and nature of the Cambridge shows, she was directing not only the Christmas Revels in Hanover but a summer Country Revels in Strafford, Vermont, and taking a small performing company to summer farmers’ markets. Revels North gave three or four Christmas performances, in those days often using the same script as Cambridge and some of the same artists, particularly Jack and Alexander’s Feast. There was a great deal of traffic between the northern and southern Revels, sometimes in terrible weather. Gayle Rich was once summoned in an emergency to drive a carload of fake snow to the Hanover production — and ran into a blinding snowstorm on the way.
Jack’s trips were often eventful as well, since his mind was always in so many places at once that his driving became legendary. I had a phone call from him one winter at some wholly unexpected time of day, and I asked where he was.
“Well,” said Jack reluctantly. “Well . . . there’s nothing wrong, but I’m in this hospital. . . . There was just this little incident with the car. . . .”
He had hit a deer, driving back from Hanover, and the car was a total loss. Deer are of course a familiar hazard of winter driving in New England, so it wasn’t his fault. Perhaps it was never his fault. I do remember, though, the expression on my small son Jon’s face one day after Jack had given him a ride home from school. “Mummy,” he said in wonder, “when Mr. Langstaff is talking, sometimes he goes very fast and sometimes he goes very slow, and sometimes he takes both hands off the wheel!”
Jack’s approach to professional matters was also idiosyncratic, though less perilous. He was a delight to work with, but he was not easy, or direct. In his own quiet way he was profoundly obstinate, but he hated confrontation. It was a virtue and a vice. Though he would occasionally admit to being angry — “I am very provoked!” he would say — he would wriggle like a worm in sunlight to avoid a fight.
He even had a problem uttering any negative criticism. I learned over the years that I could gauge his true opinion of something I’d written only by listening to the degree of his enthusiasm. A direct negative statement wouldn’t do, for Jack — which could lead to misunderstandings. Gayle Rich, who became the Executive Director of Revels, and who is a wise woman, once said, “Right from the beginning I have always seen myself as Jack’s translator.”
But when there was something he wanted, it was very hard to stop him.
One day, before rehearsals began for a Spring Revels, Jack said to me, “I’m going to use your English words for ‘L’Homme Armé,’ they fit so well.”
Since he was so often indirect, this sounded a little like an introduction.
“Ah,” I said carefully, waiting to see what might be coming next.
“And I want to end with that wonderful Mennonite hymn, you know — ‘We Are Going Down the Valley.’”
“Great.”
“I just wondered if you could rewrite the words.”
“What?”
“Well, it’s such a downer. I mean, listen:
We are going down the valley one by one,
With our faces tow’rd the setting of the sun;
Down the valley where the mournful cypress grows,
Where the stream of death in silence onward flows.”
He was right, it certainly wasn’t cheerful.
He said, “Couldn’t you make it the rising of the sun?”
“But, Jack, it’s a classic. People would freak. It’s like asking me to rewrite ‘God Save the Queen.’”
Jack grinned. “We’ve already done that over here,” he said. “It’s called ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’”
So of course I did what he wanted. We all did, always, in the end.
We are going down the valley one by one,
Dawn is breaking and the day has just begun;
We are free of all the terrors of the night
And ahead of us the eastern sky is bright:
We are going down the valley, going down the valley,
Going toward the rising of the sun.
Carol’s Hanover stage manager, a true Revels person, was so dedicated to theater that he persuaded Jack to let him come and help stage-manage at Sanders; he was an enchanting young man named Winthrop Bean, known as Winkie, who made friends wherever he went. Winkie was cheerful, talented, highly intelligent, and quietly iconoclastic; at his high-school graduation he secretly gave each member of his class a glass marble, which they were instructed to transfer to the palm of the headmaster as they crossed the stage and shook his hand. We never found out how the poor headmaster coped with all the marbles.
When working with Jack, Winkie kept his imaginative powers focused on the stage; he was particularly creative when making props, and was clearly headed for a lively career in stage design. By 1979 he was the Revels stage manager not only in Cambridge but in New York. Almost twenty years after Jack’s first New York Revels at Town Hall, a dedicated group led by Jack’s brother Ken and Jerry Epstein had brought it back to the city again — this time to the Upper West Side, for three days at St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University. Early in the proceedings Jack managed to put his foot through the boards of the special stage being erected in the chapel and sprained his ankle, but this didn’t stop him from giving three performances — and four days later, seven more in Cambridge.
Winkie Bean moved to New York, like so many young theater hopefuls. But both Revels and the stage lost him, because one night in 1983 he was brutally murdered on a New York street. The show that Christmas in Cambridge was a Slavic Revels directed by Carol, as lively as Winkie himself had always been. Jack wrote a muted dedication paragraph for the program:
We dedicate this Revels to our young friend Winthrop Bean, who, with us, envisioned this special production. He was killed this year before he could help us mount this show, but many of the imaginative props he created for Revels are on stage.
“It’s not enough,” he said, looking at what he’d written. “But what could anyone possibly say that would be enough?”
Jack had been busy before, but now he was a man in perpetual motion; he always had so many plans and ideas bouncing around his head that no day ever seemed quite long enough. (Nancy Langstaff once observed that she dreaded his reading the daily newspaper, because it would produce fifty new ideas before breakfast.) Certainly no day was quite like the last or the next, and if he wasn’t occupied with work for Young Audiences or Revels, his flow of energy swiftly curved around to a new book, or an Orff-based way of teaching children music, or plans to visit a labyrinth in an obscure part of Belgium.
The projects were never predictable; nor was the range of the people in his life. Finding once that we had a few unoccupied hours at a literary conference in Oxford, he whisked me off to have tea at Christ Church College with a religious friend who was about to retreat from the world into an enclosed Carthusian order in France. She was a genial lady who had just come back from six months’ solitude in Alaska. I never did discover where or how they had met.
The senior Langstaff siblings were sti
ll close, Jack and Ken in particular, and there was a growing generation of younger Langstaffs; inevitably all of them were musical, though not always by occupation. After two decades of international business experience, Ken had settled down with a firm of extremely high-level headhunters, and was living in Stamford, Connecticut. His eldest son, David, was at Harvard and already singing in the Cambridge Revels; before long he was one of its producers too, and he has played an important background — and sometimes onstage — role in Revels ever since.
Jack’s own immediate family was as important a part of his life as it had ever been, though they could probably only be sure of his continuous presence and attention if they were all in some remote, peaceful family retreat. At first this was “the island,” which meant Pomquet Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, a tiny islet that Jack had bought one day on impulse, sight unseen, after learning that the Crown Commissioners were calling for sealed bids to sell off former lighthouse islands. It was, says Deborah, one of his totally crazy ideas that turned out to be a wonderful thing.
My mother had a fit, since it was more than twenty-four hours from home, uninhabited, and cost something like twelve hundred dollars, which was a lot to spend on a lark! But we all loved it, and we’d go tenting there for weeks at a time, swimming off the rocks, cooking over fires, sharing the woods with the great blue heron colony.
Before ten years were out, there was another crazy-wonderful idea, though this time it was a family enterprise, and lasted far longer; they all built a cabin on a hillside in Vermont. It was a very Langstaff idea: the communal creation of something that would become the home of a summer family gathering — a kind of ritual. Off they all went from Lexington to Vermont with their tents and tools, one summer in the late 1970s: Jack, Nancy, John, Gary, Deborah, the boys’ girlfriends, and a permutation of friends who would stay for a few days to help. Deborah was about twenty-three; she had worked for a year as a carpenter, so she oversaw the construction — with, she says, a lot of help from her brothers.
There was lots of communal head-scratching and figuring things out when we got to challenging junctures. Local carpenters came to inspect us, nodding in amazed approval. John did the plumbing. We all did everything: measuring, sawing, hammering, getting up on the roof, making rustic furniture . . . It rained a lot that summer, and we were there for a month. It was a beautiful time together, working, talking, laughing, having meals, falling into bed at the end of the day. And a summer week or two there became our family gathering time and place — not Thanksgiving or Christmas, as with so many other families. It was wonderful.
Jack, the performer, the endlessly active Maker, loved to escape into the tranquillity and simplicity of both places. The Vermont cabin and the island overlapped for a few years, and I have a letter he wrote to me from Pomquet Island in the summer of 1979:
We are at the mercy of the elements and primitive living — boiling our drinking water, firewood from the woods, mussels from the shoals, sunlight only source for reading by, no contact with the mainland for food or post unless the ocean is calm enough to row. But we are surrounded with beauty and wonderful life — the enormous expanse of sea, changes in sky, ocean, and winds, as well as the gorgeous seabirds that live here with us.
Then at once there follow two pages of detailed suggestions of songs and dances that he felt we should consider for the following winter’s Christmas Revels. To mail this letter, he had rowed to the mainland and back in a very small dinghy. Even in his remote, peaceful wilderness the ebullience of his creative imagination wouldn’t let him rest.
To feed that imagination, Jack had a phenomenal memory for songs and sources, and his research was indefatigable. All year long, he would burrow into obscure books from assorted libraries, make copies of every reference he could find, and send me batches of them annotated in his unmistakable handwriting, which always looked as if a very busy insect had been leaping inky-footed about the page. Sometimes he forgot to take the books back, and uncomplainingly paid amazingly large library fines. (His only similar expenditure was on parking tickets.) The list of the songs and dances he wanted to include in each show was always two or three times longer than we had time for; never, ever, was there a shortage of material.
Revels was the primary object of this constant flow of ideas; along with his deep respect for all things traditional, Jack had an aversion to boring repetition. His audience’s comfortable acceptance of the Christmas Revels as a sequence of medieval words, song, and dance was, for him, the signal that it was time to do something different. This had been the major impulse behind the Victorian Revels for which he imported Ron Smedley and which was as much fun as any Revels before or since. Perhaps it was the nearest he ever came to reproducing his delight in the Langstaff family carol parties — which had their roots in the same period, since both his parents had been born in the reign of Queen Victoria.
He made that Revels a kind of magical distillation of the nineteenth-century Christmas, a rival for any of those endless dramatizations of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that pop up annually all over the United States. Indeed the magic embraced each audience before they even reached the theater. Jack managed to enlist the Cambridge Salvation Army band for the show, and Raine Miller found somewhere in storage — to the amazement of the band — a set of the original Army uniforms from the turn of the century. So as the audiences arrived at Sanders Theatre, there in the snow stood a nineteenth-century Sally Army playing carols to greet them, taking them back in time before they’d even entered the theater’s very Victorian doors.
Using the real band was a classic example of Jack’s principle of community celebration, and the musicians themselves had a great time. They manfully turned up for four of the year’s five performances, and at the Saturday matinee, which they couldn’t manage, Brian Holmes led a substitute group of professional musicians whom Jack happily labeled in the program the Bram Stoker Ad Hoc Brass Sextet. Devising imaginative names for performing groups within each Revels was one of his trademarks, and he came up with some gleeful London names that year: the Tottenham Criers, the Pudding Lane Waits, the Strand Singers, the Pickwick Mummers, the Dingley Dell Dancers, and Fezziwig’s Parlour Players.
He began this Revels with the closest thing to a stage set that his designers could manage on the cramped Sanders Theatre stage: it became a London street, with glowing shop fronts (painted by Raine Miller’s mother, also an artist), simulated gas lamps, and a pub sign. When he had finished his usual preshow ritual of teaching the audience the carols they would eventually sing, he brought down the houselights and turned the stage to dusk, and out of the wings, silently, came the lamplighter with his long pole, to light the “gas lamps.” Members of the chorus began drifting onstage, and down the aisles in all parts of the audience, street criers came wandering, a succession of plaintive or robust voices hawking their wares. Chairs to mend, old chairs to mend. . . . There was no shortage of street cries; Jack had already published a whole book of them. Then suddenly with a great cheerful blast of sound, the Salvation Army band came marching down the center aisle playing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and the audience was singing too and the Revels had begun.
There were music hall songs in the lively, Cockney first act, rocking the audience with a variety of nineteenth-century pop music that most of them had never heard before. And when the Lord of Misrule was dragged from the audience, he was enrobed not as a medieval lord but as a Cockney Pearly King — thanks to a saintly volunteer named Susan Yates, who sewed thousands of little pearl buttons onto a jacket in the tradition of East London’s Pearly King and Queen. But it was the second act that became the echo of Jack’s childhood, though set back some twenty years: it was a Christmas carol party complete with host.
This time the host wasn’t Meredith Langstaff but his son, in white tie and tails, and there were a thousand guests out there in the Sanders Theatre audience. Revels’ stage crew had an unusually busy intermission, and the street scene became a Christmas dr
awing room with children decorating a tree. It was an upscale party; a small orchestra was playing onstage while the arriving chorus-member guests were greeted not only by their host but by a butler. But then, the audiences and choruses of Revels tended to be fairly well up the scale in terms of income and education too. Jack did what he could to broaden their range, and brought in city schoolchildren free to watch the dress rehearsals, but his theater was after all part of an Ivy League university, in the most prosperous part of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even the onstage butler was played by Charles “Chuck” Hammond, the curator of Gore Place, one of the Boston area’s stately homes.
And there’s my favorite Revels story, concerning the performance of this Victorian Revels before which the tailcoat of one of the tallest chorus members went missing. Raine Miller, on impulse, went running out into the streets around Sanders Theatre and started banging on front doors.
“Please,” she cried when the first one opened, “can you lend Revels a tailcoat?”
The man who opened the door smiled at her. He was not only a world-famous economist, he was six feet-eight inches tall. “Certainly,” said John Kenneth Galbraith.
After the carols and dances of the onstage party, and a send-up of Dickens called The Sorry Tale of Jacob Marley (“Can you do a piece of drama?” Jack had said hopefully), the jewel of this second act came from another one of the more unexpected Langstaff recruits. Somehow, Jack had found and enlisted a wonderful paper-sculptor named Jim Bottomley to make props representing every single object mentioned in the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Jim designed them, and for three months a team of volunteers had helped him to make them, every single one, from the partridge in the pear tree to the twelve drummers drumming. They were large and lifelike and all the same color: silver.