Broadway, Off, and Off-Off

In the United States, Broadway has long been the center of the nation's theatre, but beginning in the 1950s, that began to change.

Fire codes and labor regulations prevented certain forms of artistic experimentation, such as performing shows in the round, so small companies like Circle in the Square began operating under cabaret licenses in order to skirt the rules. These plays were usually performed outside of the "Broadway Box" between 40th Street and 54th Street, so they came to be known as Off-Broadway.

Eventually the term Off-Broadway was defined as theatres with 100 to 499 seats. These theatres' smaller seating capacity allows them to have different performance contracts than Broadway houses. The emergence of Off-Broadway theatres allowed for an increased variety on New York stages, including the performance of classic plays and works of European modernism that would otherwise not have reached American audiences.

However, most American playwrights were still unable to get their plays produced either on Broadway or in Off-Broadway houses, so many began turning to even smaller stages, with fewer than 100 seats and operating with non-union performers or under union waivers. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of enterprising individuals ran small spaces where theatre artists could produce their own work. These included Joe Chino who opened up his Café Chino to nearly anyone who asked, Ellen Stewart who founded LaMama Experimental Theatre Club as an allegedly private club in order to get around fire codes, and Ralph Cook whose Theatre Genesis operated out of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.

The venues they created became known as Off-Off-Broadway, and they offered a home to playwrights unable to get produced elsewhere. Some began their careers Off-Off-Broadway with experimental plays and went on to Off-Broadway and even Broadway stages. Sam Shepard, for instance, began writing obscure pieces for Off-Off-Broadway, but was later canonized when his 1978 play Buried Child won the Pulitzer prize for drama.

One of the landmark Off-Off-Broadway productions of the 1960s was Promenade, a surreal musical comedy written by Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés with music by Al Carmines. After having a short run Off-Off-Broadway at Judson Memorial Church, it went on to have a commercial Off-Broadway run in 1969.

Fornés achieved great acclaim as an experimental playwright with Fefu and Her Friends, a play that after an opening scene, divides the audience into four groups and has them watch the same four scenes, but in different orders. At the end of the play, the audience convenes again in the same spot to watch the play's conclusion together, though they have experienced the story in four distinctly different ways.

Fefu and Her Friends recently had an Off-Broadway production at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. Sadly, I missed it. (And now I'm missing theatre a lot...)

Immigrant Dramatists

Today there were protests all across the United States in support of immigrants, so I wanted to blog about some of the great American dramatists who were immigrants:

Dion Boucicault - Born in Ireland, Dion Boucicault moved to England where he rose to fame with his play London Assurance, which Madame Vestris produced at Covent Garden. After a string of hits in London, he moved to New York, where he conquered Broadway with his melodrama The Poor of New York. The play was actual adapted from a French work, but Boucicault went on to write the quintessentially American play The Octoroon, which Branden Jacobs-Jenkins recently adapted for the 21st century. Boucicault is perhaps the first truly great American playwright. (Though you could argue for the French-born Anna Cora Mowatt.) And, of course, he was an immigrant.

Kurt Weill - Don't you love "Mack the Knife," "September Song," and "The Saga of Jenny"? All of those hit Broadway songs were written by the German immigrant Kurt Weill. "Mack the Knife" of course came from The Threepenny Opera, which Weill originally wrote in Berlin with Bertolt Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann. Being as he was a gay Jewish leftist, Weill had to flee Hitler's Germany, first to Paris, then London, and eventually New York. That's where he collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on Knickerbocker Holiday, which gave us the jazz standard "September Song." "The Saga of Jenny" comes from Lady in the Dark, and featured lyrics by the all-American Ira Gershwin, who was--incidentally--the son of immigrants.

Maria Irene Fornes - Born in Cuba, Maria Irene Fornes moved to New York in the 1950s. Her play Fefu and Her Friends has become a modern classic. I've always been a fan of her brutal one-act play The Conduct of Life, and spoke about it when she received the 2015 Edwin Booth Award. Recently, the Signature Theatre produced her short play Drowning, which reimagined a story by Anton Chekhov, but was told from the point of view of aliens from outer space. Fornes wasn't from outer space, but she was once an alien to this country, before become one of America's great playwrights of the 20th century.

Nilo Cruz - Speaking of Cuban-American playwrights, Nilo Cruz, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his drama Anna in the Tropics, was born in Matanzas in Cuba, but immigrated to Miami as a child when his parents fled communism. Cruz's play Sotto Voce tells the story of a woman mourning the failure of both Cuba and the United States to take in Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. As a former refugee himself, Cruz certainly knows the importance of showing compassion to those who arrive on your borders.

Martyna Majok - And who won the most recent Pulitzer Prize for drama? That would be Polish-born playwright Martyna Majok. I haven't seen The Cost of Living, which garnered her the award, but her play Ironbound is wonderful, and deals quite poignantly with coming of age in urban America.

So thank you, immigrants. You make America great!

Maria Irene Fornes

This evening, the 2015 Edwin Booth Award for outstanding contributions to New York theatre was awarded to Maria Irene Fornes.

Unfortunately, Ms. Fornes was unable to attend the ceremony in her honor, due to the extraordinary illness from which she suffers. However, a special event at the Graduate Center of City University of New York paid tribute to her.

Jennifer Thompson coordinated a staged reading of scenes from Fefu and Her Friends, and Maria Alexandra Beech, a former student of Fornes, gave a moving speech in her honor. I was invited to read a selection of an interview Fornes gave a number of years ago, which thrilled me, since her play The Conduct of Life was a big influence on me in college and grad school.

This is the answer Fornes gave to the question of how long she had been directing her own plays:

Since 1968 with Molly’s Dream. That summer there was a workshop for playwrights at Tanglewood in connection with Boston University. They had a company of fine actors. The plays were done in elaborately directed readings, with a lot of people memorizing as much as they could. Robert Lewis was the director of the program, but he wasn’t directing any of the plays. I told him I wanted to direct and he said, “No. The directors will direct.” I said, “But this is a playwrights’ project and, as a playwright, I need to direct this play.” He said no. I was annoyed, but I asked Ed Setrakian because I knew him as an actor and liked him and thought, “Why not?”

Then Ed started doing things that I didn’t think were right. The play was very simple and he was making it too abstract. So I went to Bobby Lewis and said, “This is not right. He’s asking people to do this bizarre behavior. The play’s a kind of movie fantasy where people behave normally.” So Bobby Lewis said, “You have to ask Ed to do it the way you want. And if you have any problems, I’ll talk to him.” So Ed did what I asked and then he said to me, “I haven’t been able to sleep because of what you’re doing to me.” And I looked at him and said, “Ed, I’d rather you don’t sleep than I don’t sleep.”

I’d always been so timid. When a director would say, “Boo,” I would acquiesce. But that situation taught me never again to give in. I didn’t want to make Ed not sleep. I wanted to do it myself. If then it doesn’t come out right, I did it wrong and nobody else has to suffer. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to let anyone else direct my work. And I didn’t care if it never got done again.

So I went to New Dramatists—I was a member there—to do Molly’s Dream again. I wanted to do it with Julie Bovasso. They said, “All right, but we have to get you a director.” I said, “No, I want to direct it.” They said, “There’s a rule here that playwrights are not to direct.” And I started screaming, “I’m directing or I’m quitting. If this is a playwright’s organization you have to do what is good for the playwrights. What are you going to lose?” So they made an exception for me. I directed Julie Bovasso and it was a bumpy ride. I didn’t know her history of quitting and throwing chairs at directors. It worked because I didn’t have a director’s ego. I just wanted her to do my play. And she was wonderful.

I have no doubt she was! So congratulations to Maria Irene Fornes for yet another well deserved award.