In the months leading up to our start date, things got a little strange. At the very time that I had begun to cook up a summer theater in Princeton, Tim Mayer had had the much more sensible idea of starting one in Cambridge. Quite naturally, Harvard actors flocked to Tim’s company. As a result, I was hard put to lure anyone to mine. By the time Paul and I had finally assembled our core group, he had enlisted six stalwarts from his New York crowd. I had brought aboard only one actress and a stage manager (the fiercely loyal Vicki Traube). And the Harvard-to-Columbia ratio was about to become even more unbalanced. In the middle of the recruitment process, Paul phoned me from New York with what he considered sensational news. His revered Shakespeare mentor, the great Tony Boyd himself, had agreed to join our company as an actor, and had even condescended to direct our production of Twelfth Night. Despite a growing sense of unease, I accepted Boyd’s offer with bovine submissiveness.
The debacle known as “The Great Road Players” unfolded like a ten-car pileup. Sadly, it took much longer.
With Tony Boyd in the title role, Woyzeck badly misfired. Its curtain-raiser, “Sweeney Agonistes,” was bewildering. Hardly anyone showed up.
Our board of directors, who had been expecting a palatable season of Shaw, Wilde, and Kaufman and Hart, treated us with withering scorn. They never showed up, either.
The Molière one-acts were diverting and fun, but still nobody came. I took to making curtain speeches, begging the sparse crowds to tell their friends about us.
Staffers from The Princeton Day School angrily complained as we began to leave our messy mark on their pristine theater.
Despite our paltry budget, subsistence salaries, and grab-bag sets, red ink flowed like a river.
The living room of my parents’ home became a crowded war room for our embattled staff. My mother, playing hostess to a second generation of theater lunatics, approached the breaking point.
Tony Boyd revealed himself to be a wildly inconsistent actor and a contempt-spewing megalomaniac. The notion of him directing us in a play was inconceivable to me. I fired him.
I quickly learned that Boyd’s presence in the company had been the principal reason that his devoted students had signed on. When I fired him, they were enraged.
My father offered to bail me out by taking over Twelfth Night. I presented the idea in a meeting of the full company. The Columbia contingent mutinied. They screamed invective at me and stormed out.
Two actors got other job offers (or claimed they did) and blithely walked away.
I called a halt to the season with two productions to go. Our tiny pool of subscribers were livid and demanded their money back. What money?
Word reached me from Cambridge, where, in the meantime, Timothy Mayer’s Harvard Dramatic Club Summer Players were in the midst of a triumphant inaugural season.
Until that summer, everything I’d attempted as an actor and as a director had been kissed by success. Not The Great Road Players. It was a total fiasco. Its failure stunned and stupefied me. But it should not have surprised me. In retrospect, the project was fated to collapse. The odds were heavily stacked against us from the outset. I was woefully inexperienced. I had no sense of the challenges of creating a new institution or cultivating an audience. I had no support system beyond a well-meaning but distracted father. I had no leadership skills. I tried to accommodate everyone and recoiled from confrontation. When I hired people, my instincts were abysmal. When I fired them, I waited far too long. These failings, of course, would characterize virtually all twenty-year-old young men, and very few of them would ever put themselves in a position of such responsibility and stress. But I had no such perspective that summer. When The Great Road Players clumsily folded its tents, I could not forgive myself. And if the experience does not quite qualify as a major trauma, it certainly left its mark. I never again attempted to start up a theater company, nor aspired to run one.
By then, Jean Taynton had been my girlfriend for a year. She had accompanied me to Princeton that summer. She’d even played a small role in our first show. Through all of my Joblike agonies she had been staunchly in my corner. At that harrowing company meeting when everything fell apart, she was there to witness the insurrection. She even spoke up in an attempt to cool hostilities, bringing down upon herself a volley of angry insults. After the meeting, the two of us sneaked off to lick our wounds, benumbed by all that had gone before. We drove out of town, heading for the Jersey shore. We ate supper in a restaurant and went to see Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade. We did all that we could to put The Great Road Players out of our minds, at least for one evening. I felt comforted, grateful, and deeply attached to her. I’d left my own mother back in Princeton, but I was enfolded in Jean’s maternal love. And eight weeks later, in an Episcopal church service in Philadelphia, with fifty guests in attendance, including the two stricken parents of the groom, I married her.
[14] Three Lincolns
MS Thr 546 (155), Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
At some point, every skinny six-foot-four American character actor is asked to play Abraham Lincoln. I’ve been asked three or four times. The only time I actually did it was in the summer of 1967, when I was twenty-one years old. I had graduated from Harvard and was heading to London in the fall to study acting on a Fulbright grant. I’d decided to stick around Cambridge for the summer prior to my departure, as a member of the Harvard Summer School Repertory Theatre. This was a company run by the professional staff of the Loeb Drama Center and made up of recent graduates of several college drama departments. After the runaway turmoil of the summer before, this job was comfortable and risk-free. (Tim Mayer’s far more raffish and daring troupe, now in its second season, was at the tiny Agassiz Theatre, across the street.) Our Loeb company presented four shows. The last of them was a new play about Abraham Lincoln called White House Happening. The writer and director of the play was, surprisingly, the larger-than-life impresario of the New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein. And in Lincoln’s play, I was Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln Kirstein was a mighty figure in American arts and letters, particularly in the world of dance. Over many years he had poured his titanic energies and his considerable fortune into the creation of the New York City Ballet and its feeder institution, the School of American Ballet. He had lured the great choreographer George Balanchine to New York, inviting him to create the repertory of ballets that continues to define the company’s artistic identity. But since I knew precious little about the Manhattan arts scene, and even less about the world of ballet, I’d never heard of Lincoln Kirstein. Months before starting work on his play, I was sent to New York to meet him. It was like making the acquaintance of a turbulent, fast-moving human storm system.