In between these out-of-town jaunts, I continued to scratch around for other ways to make a little cash. A bunch of Princeton undergraduates hired me to stage a Mozart chamber opera for $500 (which was quickly swallowed up by gas and tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike). I solicited group sales on commission for dance programs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (I never sold a single ticket). With two friends, I cooked up a moneymaking scheme to perform Chekhov’s one-act farce The Marriage Proposal in city schools (we performed it exactly once, for no pay). I even got my medallion and tried my hand at driving a taxi (long enough to discover that nobody measuring six-foot-four could sit in the front seat of a New York City cab for a ten-hour stretch without crippling himself for life). And on what was possibly the cheesiest program ever produced in the early days of cable television, I earned fifty dollars for narrating a TV tour of Robert Redford’s home in the mountains of Utah. Oh, the indignity!
Such desperate measures yielded meager returns and cost me dearly in ways that had nothing to do with money. As Jean drew closer and closer to her due date, my confidence and self-esteem were trickling away. At what should have been our most hopeful, life-embracing moment, I was drooping with pessimism. But if nothing else, I was at least learning about the inane vicissitudes of my chosen profession: all of this desolate demi-prostitution was happening within months of sipping whiskey in George Segal’s living room and having lunch at the Polo Lounge with Raquel Welch.
Finally, three months before the baby was due to arrive, I got a proper job. But, true to the nutty illogic of show business, it wasn’t the job I was looking for. I was asked to direct a play. A year before, I had put a director’s résumé into circulation. I had sent it to many of the very same regional theaters I had since approached for acting work. One day I got a call from a man named John Stix. An intense little gnome with a mane of wiry gray hair, Stix was the artistic director of Baltimore’s Center Stage. My year-old director’s résumé had caught his attention. For a December slot in his upcoming season, he had scheduled The Beaux’ Stratagem, a late Restoration comedy by George Farquhar. When Stix had perused my credits on the résumé, The Way of the World at McCarter had jumped off the page. It placed me on a very short list of American directors who had directed a Restoration comedy. So Stix summoned me to his dingy New York office on the dark and dusty top floor of the Lyceum Theatre on Forty-fifth Street. At the end of an interview punctuated by long, inscrutable pauses, he hired me on the spot. I packed my bags for a month-long stay, said goodbye to my pregnant wife, took a train south from Penn Station, and for the first time acquainted myself with the city of Baltimore, Maryland, and with the resident company of its estimable little repertory theater.
As it turned out, The Beaux’ Stratagem was a tremendous success, both for Center Stage and for me personally. It was the first time I had marshaled the forces of a large professional artistic staff under some aegis other than my father’s. Working with excellent costume, lighting, and set designers, I devised a show that managed to be both spare and lavish, both contemporary and true to its period. In the course of four weeks of rehearsal, I rushed the cast through a brisk boot camp of Restoration language and high style, and worked closely with them to invent all sorts of bawdy stage business. The finished product was a Hogarth painting brought to life, with all the hilarity and high spirits of Tony Richardson’s great film version of Tom Jones. It burst upon bleak, wintry Baltimore like a brightly colored Christmas present (the review in the Baltimore Sun was every bit as glowing as my own).
The play features a classic comedy plot involving a clash of landed English aristocrats and their rustic, countrified neighbors. To project this duality I came up with a nifty theatrical device, thrilling in its simplicity. The setting was a bare, raked platform with a symmetrical seventeenth-century pattern covering its floor. Suspended above this platform were four large panels, each mounted vertically on a pivoting central axis. One side of each panel was covered with rough-hewn planks. On the other side were elegantly carved bas-relief moldings in the style of Grinling Gibbons. Every time the setting shifted between rustic and aristocratic, the panels would swivel 180 degrees and the stage would be transformed in an instant. Simultaneously members of the cast would sweep across the platform, changing the furnishings and props as they went, to a lush torrent of Henry Purcell’s incidental theater music. Often these set changes would fold right into the action. For example, when highwaymen stormed the manor house, the actors changing the furniture would shriek out “Thieves! Thieves!” as they rushed wildly on and off the stage in their nightclothes.
The Baltimore audiences lapped up the production, the Center Stage board was ecstatic, and even the taciturn John Stix managed a furtive smile. As for the actors, they were in heaven. For them, the show was pure pleasure. They even loved doing the set changes. Incredibly, several of them even volunteered to stand in the darkness backstage and man the long poles that made the big panels swivel. Onstage, their performances were uniformly fine — expert, witty, and heartfelt. The names Wil Love, Henry Strozier, and Fran Brill may have rung few bells in New York theater circles, but their wonderful work in The Beaux’ Stratagem was ample evidence of the talent and commitment of American rep actors, happily toiling away in the vineyards.
But on the morning after our opening night I was in a lousy mood. I sat on the train heading back to New York with a heavy heart. I was in the grips of postpartum blues. I’d labored through a month of hard work and worry, savored a single evening’s flash of triumph, and then relinquished to the actors the fun of performing the show. The production belonged to them now. They no longer needed me. Indeed, when I revisited the show a few weeks later, they were demonstrably uninterested when I offered them my notes. They had each other and their audience. I was no longer a part of the equation. Far from being welcomed back into the fold, I was now a meddling uncle, fondly remembered but merely tolerated and indulged. Every time I’ve directed a play, this phenomenon has left me with the same sharp sensation of letdown and loss. I’ve always suspected that most stage directors go through some version of this peculiar actor-envy whenever they launch a production and depart the scene. But surely they never feel it as keenly as I. After all, they’re not actors.