Theatre Design & Technology - Oct 1967 - 28

$12,000.00 per year. To offer all this in a brief apprentice
course and give a thorough training is naturally impossible.
But a beginning is being made at the University of Michigan.
The theatre courses in management are fine, but I wouldn't
think for a moment that a person who completes such a
course is a trained manager; he is just ready to begin his
development. Opportunities for such training might be available in the New York Public Theatre, in the Tyrone Guthrie
at Minneapolis, at the two Stratfords, in Bill Ball's company,
and with the APA. I think we can expand the number of
people being given this training. You cannot have instant
administrators for this "theatre explosion" that is developing
around the country; they must have a skill, a knowledge,
and at least some experience in dealing with politicians,
with government officials, with university officials, and with
actors and artists of all kinds. They have to serve as a buffer between the "irresponsible artist" on the one hand and
the "stupid, dull bureaucrat" on the other (as each sees the
other). It is a job which is becoming recognized as essential. You can have the finest artists in the world and the
best buildings in the world, but if you don't have administration they don't last very long.
BIRKENHEAD: Leonard Edelstein, can you tell us about the
possibilities your experience in this line has revealed?
EDELSTEIN: Well, briefly, at the Festival at Ithaca we have
a proposed three and a half million dollar theatre which will
be under Alan Schneider's direction. At this point we are
about three million dollars short of construction. We have
raised one and one third million dollars already, but some of
it has been spent on administration, some is for artistic
programs, and some of it is contingent upon construction.
The Festival Theatre will not be a resident theatre in the
sense that theatres rooted in communities are, and I want
to talk about the resident theatre in general. I wish you
would keep a quotation in mind as I talk; it is one which
Richard Gillman attributes to Eugene lonesco: "The thing
that makes me most pessimistic is the obligation to the
optimist."
We begin with a fable of the Chamber of Commerce, the
Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs, the Junior League, the Mayor,
city councils, key corporation executives, and a sufficient
portion of the social powers of L1areggub a la Dylan Thomas.
You begin by playing the culture game with the culture vultures, the education game with the principals and their
English teachers, the economic-benefit game with the Chamber crowd, the sexual-inference game with the middle-aged
matrons who are tired of their misunderstanding providers.
The results are usually one hundred to one hundred fifty
thousand dollars; if you're a real pro you can hustle up half
a million. Then you find an old church, an old movie house,
an abandoned high school, a factory loft, or a quonset hut.
You spend most of the dough renovating and finding sources
for second hand seats, used, and prayerfully safe, lighting
equipment, cast-off desks, mimeograph machines, manual
typewriters, swivel chairs, filing cabinets, and with luck. a
malfunctioning, outdated duplicating machine. Meanwhile
you're phoning anyone you've worked with, met, or ever
heard of, trying to hustle up directors, an acting company,
a technical director, who, by God, will get the set built on
time at least, a construction crew, someone to run the office, a gal who can spell and who can grind out releases
and butter up the local press. At the same time, you pick
your first season. A nice mixture of the classics: Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, Shaw, and O'Neill. Somehow,
usually haphazardly, things fall roughly into place. You may

have to chip a few corners, but your season opens with a
glittering premiere. Everyone who is anyone in L1areggub is
there. The theatre is quaint; it has atmosphere; it oozes
culture. The production is "meaningful, intense, laughfilled, antagonizing, charming, subtle, side-splitting, vibrant,
and it has placed L1areggub on the cultural map of the
United States." Crises pile on crises as the months pass.
Yet somehow one production follows another, and the
locals love their theatre. But your director quits because he
says the company is totally incapable of acting Shakespeare,
whereas you have discovered that he is totally incapable
of directing Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, Shaw orO'Neili.
The very highly talented lead actors who have come to you
have a wonderfully limited range-a gamut from A to B,
as Alexander Woollcott once said. About half way through
the season you thankfully project that you will be only about
twenty-five to fifty "Gees" in the hole, come June. But
you have your resident theatre. Now what?
Such, with a few details changed here and a unique twist
there, is a fairly accurate description of the way that many
professional resident theatres in this country began, and sadder still, the way they continued.
For the most part, the resident professional theatres have
been grafted onlO thirty-five or forty United States' citiesthe tally varies monthly-by energetic, ambitious, attractive,
and hip young men. The drive usually carries through the
first season or two-until the Board of Directors gets tired
of pressing subscriptions from their friends, twisting the
arms of their business associates for contributions, and coping wit h the hundreds of odd problems which the theatre
faces. They didn't think theatre business would take so
much of their time; they begin to wonder exactly what the
manager is doing. The public finds Shakespeare, Moliere,
Chekhov, Shaw and O'Neill fantastically interesting, but it
wishes the theatre would do something like, "Oh, what was
the name of that show we saw in New York? Oh, yeah,
Mary, Mary." The company doesn't respect you any more
because you are selling out to the board, the publ ic and
everyone else and because you won't do any Beckett. The
volunteers are becoming disenchanted because you are not
so friendly as you were before the first season opened. You
don't spend as much time at their benefits, play readings,
and socials. And now that the local critic is used to you, he
is beginning to see your short-comings with a prompt from
The New York Times, The Drama Review, Newsweek,
and Grit. You are now coming down with manic-depressive
psychosis, mononucleosis, or both. Then one day, you wake
up and find that a new man, a scrub-the-john pal from your
first season in stock has been courted behind your back and
will take over next month. In turn, after a few phone calls,
you discover that your endeavors in L1areggub haven't gone
unnoticed; you get a job as Executive Director of a new
theatre that your "pal" ran a few seasons ago.
Alan Schneider has said that if you plunk down in the middle of a performance at any resident theatre, you can't tell
which one you're in; they all look, sound, feel, and taste
alike. They do the same plays, often directed and acted by
the same people; and what is worse, they are approached
with the same concepts, or lack of them. Because of the
thorough job done by the Theatre Communications group,
everyone knows exactly what every other resident professional theatre is doing, how they are doing it, and whether
or not it has succeeded. When a production is a hit in one
resident professional theatre, it's only a matter of months
before ten others are doing the same thing, usually with the
same actors and directors whom they have cajoled into coming there for an extra $12.50 a month. It's depressing 10

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THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

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