Rick On Theater

[In Part 1 of my “Berlin Memoir” (posted on 16 December), I told you about how I happened to start this reminiscence and introduced some of my earliest experiences in Berlin—including how I ended up there. This memoir isn’t really presented in chronological order—it’s more a “stream of consciousness”—but I strongly recommend reading Part 1 before embarking on Part 2 or the subsequent chapters because I explain things when I first discuss them and don’t repeat the explanations again later. (The same goes for translations of German terms I drop and definitions of army jargon and abbreviations I throw around.)]

When I first arrived in Berlin, people with security clearances like me were not allowed either to go into East Berlin or to drive the Autobahn to the Zone. When my car arrived at the port of Bremerhaven from the States, I had to hire someone to go there, retrieve my car, and drive it back to Berlin. (There were NCO’s who made extra dough doing this service. I’ll bet they were pissed when this restriction was lifted!) We either had to fly over the SZOG or take the U.S. military train. We couldn’t use the Bundesbahn, the German railroad, under any circumstances (one reason was that the Berlin railroad depot was an S-Bahn station—controlled by the East Germans even though it was on our side of the Wall; I wasn’t even allowed to go in there), but we could travel by American, British, or French military train. Ours, called the Duty Train, went to Helmstedt and Frankfurt; the Brits’ went to Braunschweig (Brunswick), which was their border town, and back (I never took it); the French Train Militaire went to Frankfurt, too, and then on to Strasbourg, and I did take it once to visit friends in France one Christmas-New Year.

We could also fly on any of the Allied military flights, though that meant using the AB’s, of course. The American AFB was also the civilian airport, Tempelhof (the one in The Big Lift), but the Brits and French had their own, Gatow and Tegel, respectively, and they were out in the boonies. I never used them. (Tegel is currently the city’s main international airport—until 2018 when it’s expected to be superseded by the new Brandenberg Airport, now under construction.) We were also allowed to fly civilian planes in and out of Berlin—but only one carrier was authorized: Pan Am. This was because it was the only airline that pledged never to land in East Germany under any circumstances; Air France and British Airways wouldn’t make such a pledge. (No other carriers, including Lufthansa, were permitted to fly into West Berlin. Aeroflot, the Soviet airlines, flew into East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport, now one of Berlin’s two international terminals.) I can’t say that that made me feel especially safe, though. The Army was worried that if the plane made an emergency landing in, say, Erfurt or Dresden or something, the Soviets would grab me and take me off to Potsdam and interrogate me for all the secrets I knew. Okay, but what’s worse, landing alive in the GDR or going down in flames because the plane can’t make it to Berlin or back to the Zone? (As far as the Army was concerned, I was expendable.) I kinda figured, pledge or no pledge, if a Pan Am plane was in trouble over East Germany, that pilot was gonna put it down. Happily, I never had to find out.

We were never cleared to travel in the SZOG or East Berlin—I regret that I never got to go to the Berliner Ensemble—but after about a year, we could drive in and out of the city. But we couldn’t drive unaccompanied. When we arrived at the checkpoint—Bravo going out of the city or Alpha coming back in—we’d have to go to the MP desk and announce that we needed an escort. That meant we had to wait there until someone driving a military vehicle, an official car, or, as a last resort, a green-plated POV was willing to drive along with us and keep us in sight. (Yeah, right!) The idea was supposed to be that if we got picked off by the Soviets or got lost en route, they could go on ahead and report the incident at the other end. (We could not be escorted by someone else who needed an escort, by the way.) The truth of the situation was, of course, that as soon as we made the necessary declarations at the MP station and got on the road, no one waited for anyone—there were no speed limits on German Autobahns—so the whole thing was a paper reg. I never heard of anyone getting pulled over, and I never heard of anyone getting in trouble for not sticking with his escort.

I said I regret not getting to see the Berliner Ensemble, but that’s not precise. I can’t really regret it—it wasn’t something I could have done and I missed my chance. The B.E. was, of course, in East Berlin and I wasn’t allowed to go there. It was never possible, never in my control. (I’ve gotten to see them since, after reunification when they’ve performed in New York City. See my report on The Threepenny Opera on 22 October 2011.) The army encouraged GI’s to go to the East, especially in uniform, to exercise our right to do so under the four-power occupation—and, as the army put it, to “show the flag.” As I’ve noted, the Occupation Agreement gave each of the four powers unrestricted access to all of the city and among people without the security clearances that I had, hopping over to East Berlin was very popular.

But the army was too paranoid at that time in the Cold War that people in sensitive positions would be targets for false arrest and kidnapping, so MI personnel and others were prohibited not only from going to East Berlin or into East Germany, but even from merely entering an S-Bahn station in the West because it was considered East German territory. I kept hoping that the restrictions would loosen up, just as the driving restrictions had—but that was too much for the Cold War era.

I always had this odd feeling because right over there was a third of the city I was living in, and I’d never seen it. I’d been to Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Warsaw—but I’d never seen East Berlin even though I was as close as a few yards away. I’d have given almost anything to get to see Brecht’s theater as close to the way he intended as possible after his death. Also, a lot of the historical city was in the Eastern Sector—and I’m a sightseer. The East Berlin opera was supposed to be much better than the West’s—I wouldn’t know anyway: I’m not an opera fan. Shopping was much cheaper, even at the one-to-one exchange rate mandated for West Marks to East Marks. Antiques were more plentiful, as was crystal (made in Czechoslovakia) and some other items. I can’t say I missed shopping at the Russian PX—it was a popular spot, lots of souvenirs: Red Army watches were popular, and uniform belts, a couple of which I got through a friend—and the antiquing might have been fun. (I did get a neat old clock, but I had to get it through an NCO who had a sideline of buying them in the East, restoring them, and reselling them to guys like me.)

Showing the flag in one way or another was a very significant result during the Cold War, and Berlin, being what it was politically and geographically, was a center of this effort. The civilian air service into Tempelhof was as much a symbolic part of this as it was a matter of transportation, and the decision of Air France and British Airways to combine their flights but not abandon them was certainly a manifestation of it. (Around the time of my arrival in Berlin, France and Britain jointly decided that there wasn’t enough air traffic into the city to maintain separate services and they combined flights by alternating the flag carrier.) So were the Berlin Orientation Tours of GI’s from the Zone and the encouragement of Berlin personnel to go to the Soviet Sector in uniform.

Another aspect of the effort were the highly visible “liaison” patrols each force sent into the others’ sectors of the country to keep the lanes of access open. One of the more specialized and less-known army units in Berlin was the U.S. Military Liaison Mission, essentially an overt intel unit. All four of the occupation powers had their versions of this organization, whose ostensible mission was to serve as liaison between the parent force and the forces of the other three powers. To do this, USMLM ran regular patrols in high-powered, four-wheel-drive vehicles, painted OD but in a matte finish that wouldn’t reflect light and carrying special equipment such as a powerful radio with an extra-long antenna and both high-intensity headlights and a set of infrareds, into the SZOG all the way to Potsdam. (Each of the other occupying forces had the same kind of vehicles, though they were models indigenous to the home country. The Brits, for instance, drove similarly-painted Land Rovers. While the three Western Allies directed their patrols toward Potsdam, the Soviet HQ in East Germany, I don’t really know where the Soviet patrols went, other than West Berlin.)

The actual mission of the liaison patrols was to keep an eye on the Soviet and East German troops scattered around the SZOG, and each patrol took a different, carefully planned, circuitous route from Berlin to Potsdam in order to make a sweep of as many Red Army installations as they could cover, taking photographs whenever they could of the units’ equipment, disposition, manpower, facilities, and so on. The patrols, which ran 24/7, kept tabs on the units’ readiness, training, maintenance, and routine so that they could act as an early-warning system for possible hostilities: if a number of Soviet units were out of their barracks at a time when they weren’t usually scheduled for maneuvers, it might be an indication that troops were assembling for some kind of attack or raid. The USMLM patrols had detected this very occurrence in 1968 when units of the 40th Tank Army surrounding Berlin had moved out to spearhead the assault on Czechoslovakia to quash the Prague Spring. Along with the busloads of Soviet soldiers and airmen which arrived regularly at the American PX in Dahlem—the Red Army didn’t allow its soldiers to wander around West Berlin on their own; they organized their forays and controlled where the soldiers went and what they brought back to the East—the liaison patrol vehicles, with their distinctive non-reflective paint jobs, were among the most visible reminders of where we were and what was going on there.

Living in Berlin was crazy-making, as you might guess. We were on an island 110 miles inside East Germany, surrounded by a wall. Two walls, actually—it was a double wall with a no-man’s land in between. (Outside the Wall, the city was surrounded by the Soviet 40th Tank Army, as I mentioned. Not a brigade or even a corps—an army.) You couldn’t go very far in the city—and West Berlin alone was two-and-a-half million people at the time—without literally running into the Wall. It made you claustrophobic. GI’s stationed in Munich or Frankfurt, when they needed to get away, could get a pass or leave and just split. Drive or take a train, all they needed was a couple of days’ notice to get their papers and they could go off wherever they wanted pretty much on a whim. For us to leave Berlin—and this wasn’t just for the folks with clearances; it was everyone—we needed special movement orders, dubbed “Flag Orders” (because they had a full-color symbol of the flag—Stars and Stripes for GI’s, Union Jack for Brits, Tricolor for the Froggies—at the top of the page), and that took up to a week under ordinary circumstances.

Then, of course, for us with the clearances, we had to get reservations on the Duty Train, a military flight, or a civilian plane (until we were permitted to drive out), and that was difficult to do at the last minute. You could hang around Tempelhof and wait for an Air Force hop if you were willing to go anywhere, of course, but that made planning trips tough. (I did do this once, though. I met my parents in Athens and flew into Athenai AB. It was the return trip that Colonel Halvorsen piloted into Berlin.) And leave travelers were low-priority: you could be bumped for official travel (including cargo) or someone with a higher rank (which wasn’t hard when you’re only a first looie). There was no such thing as a spur-of-the-moment trip out of Berlin—it took planning and paperwork no matter if it was a month or a day.

And of course, people stationed in the Zone could drive out of the city or town for a few hours when they were off duty without any paperwork—just take a country drive or go sightseeing in the area for an afternoon. I couldn’t do that in Berlin—there was no place to go! Veryclaustrophobic. The trade-off was that Berlin had the best of everything—the best PX, the best O-clubs and NCO clubs, the best recreation facilities, the best hospital, even the best quarters—of any place in USAREUR (U.S. Army, Europe). Generals from the Zone used to come to Berlin to play! The Berlin Army Hospital, by the way, had the best mess hall I have ever heard of—except one my dad told me about during the war years. It was so good—they even had Chinese and Hawaiian food sometimes—that when we had business at BAH (checking medical records was part of our personnel investigation routine), we tried to work it out so we’d be there for lunch. Beat the PX snack bar—across the street from our office—all to hell! GI’s in Berlin even had some unusual perks: in uniform (which didn’t include MI agents), for instance, they could ride the busses and U-Bahn for free. We also got our housing for free, courtesy of the German government—because Berlin was still under occupation—and they were excellent! My BOQ, for example, was a one-bedroom garden apartment. Married NCO’s had apartments in high-rises that German civilians would kill to live in.

Berlin was pretty far north, though. During the winter, the sun wasn’t up yet when I went to work and it had already set by the time I went home. My last job in Berlin was in a basement office. If I didn’t get out for lunch, which happened occasionally, I’d never see the sun all day. That could get depressing after a while. Seasonal affective disorder wasn’t commonly known back then, but there was a lot of alcoholism in Berlin. There were also suicides, maybe one every other month or so. I don’t know if there were more of those in Berlin than elsewhere in the military, but it wouldn’t surprise me. (We often had to investigate suicides to determine if there was a security reason for it, especially if the soldier had had a clearance or access to anything sensitive. I never saw one that was, though.)

The pressures of military life, especially for the very young, were exacerbated by the strangeness of the alien environment, the isolation of Berlin, and, for the personnel of Berlin Station perhaps more than others, the added stress of the secrecy and sensitivity of our routine. One of our soldiers, a teenaged specialist who ran the photo lab, got himself hooked on heroin—and he did it deliberately in order to get mustered out of the Army. He had been good at his job—he helped me immensely and expertly on a big project that involved a great many photographs, including copies of old prints—and, by all accounts, was a good soldier and a nice, bright kid; his act shocked us all when he revealed his addiction. How desperate must he have been to choose one of the worst drugs he could think of and to set out purposely to become addicted. There were certainly easier ways of getting out of the Army, less lasting and destructive.

Actually, even as far north as Berlin is, the weather’s not much worse in the winter than it is in New York—just darker. It’s not Alaska, though—the sun does come out. It’s funny, but when I knew I was being sent to Berlin, I figured it was cold up there. It never got hot in Koblenz or Bonn, in the middle of the country (and the same latitude as Labrador), so I figured Berlin, way up north, would be cold. I was arriving in late July, but I figured it’d be cool, so I packed fall clothes—nothing for summer. I arrived in a normally warm late-summer season not unlike New York—all the rest of my belongings were still in transit by ship, of course, so all I had was what was in my suitcase. And it was all wrong for the weather. I sweltered until I could get to the ’X and buy more appropriate jackets. (Remember, we wore civvies—business suits and sports jackets.) I guess I was lucky the ’X didn’t operate like civilian stores back home—by July and August they’d have been stocking fall clothes and I’d have been SOL.

Temperature-inappropriate clothing was not my only wardrobe malfunction, though. My last gig had been at Fort Holabird, the Intel School in Baltimore. (I was at USAINTS from March to June 1971. We were the last class to go through there after the Intel Center and School opened at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Holabird, a former transportation post built in 1918 in Dundalk, down near the Baltimore docks, was where the Watergate crooks were imprisoned after it was vacated by the Army. Let me tell you—they were well and truly punished by having to stay there! What a hole.) Anyway, Baltimore is—or was—a men’s clothing manufacturing center. (A family friend from Baltimore was in the business—he made uniforms, of all things. I got my dress blues from him, and he made me a gift of a new Class A felt cap as a going-overseas present.) There were lots of men’s apparel factories in Baltimore, and they all had outlets.

Since I knew by then I was going to Berlin and that I would be wearing civilian clothes, I stocked up on all the latest styles of suits and jackets and shirts. Now, remember, this was the early ’70s—remember what the styles were then? I was into Mod and boldly colored shirts, wide ties, very tailored jackets. I had some six- and eight-button double-breasteds, some boldly pin-striped fabrics—I even had one suit that had a take on the Norfolk jacket—with a belt in the back. How was I to know that when I got to Berlin, the dress code—unwritten, of course—was FBI-plain, with dark suits, narrow lapels, thin ties, and white shirts. After the second day of being in the office, just being introduced and getting oriented, I got a message from the CO through Lieutenant Lurey that my attire was inappropriate and that I needed to get some conservative jackets and shirts. (The other agents, by the way, were delighted with my clothes. It was the first chance they had to see what men were wearing back home and they wondered how I dared wear them to work. In a few months or a year, the ’X and the Army had caught up some with the States and I was able to get back into my Baltimore wardrobe. By then I wasn’t alone—other new agents, both officers and EM’s, had joined the unit and came with stateside styles. I was a trend-setter, don’cha know.)

My CO, a funny little light colonel named Pat Collins, didn’t hold my fashion faux-pas against me for long, fortunately. (He, by the way, had a penchant for black leather trench coats. He should bitch!) After I’d been in the unit for a while, I got an assignment which was to end up dominating the rest of my time at Berlin Station (until I became a spook accountant, that is). This concerned “exfiltration,” the process of helping Easterners escape into West Berlin and West Germany. Well, Colonel Collins asked me to put together a report on what we knew at that time about the personalities and methods of exfiltration, which was no longer an officially sanctioned activity for U.S. personnel. (In the late ’40s, the ’50s, and the early ’60s, exfiltration was an official, if clandestine, project of the U.S. government to bring out scientists, engineers, and other useful and high-profile people. By my day, most of those kinds of people who wanted to leave had been brought out, so the U.S. disbanded the operation.)

I went through the files with the help of one of the German legmen who did the interviews at Marienfelde, the refugee processing center in Berlin—he knew all the incidents of exfiltration and could guide me to the appropriate case files—and I wrote up a one- or two-page report summarizing what we knew. Colonel Collins read it and decided it was worth expanding and asked me to add more detail for a report he could take to a staff meeting with one or the other of the generals. That meeting was later that day, so I pulled together my notes and dictated an expanded version of the report to one of the secretaries who typed it as I dictated. Talk about hot off the presses! Colonel Collins went to his staff meeting, and the report so impressed the general—whichever one it was—that he ordered up a full staff study. (The colonel was also taken with what he saw as two of my special talents: one, that I always seemed to have a little more info in reserve whenever he needed it; and, two, that I used “civilian” words like ‘aegis’ and such. Some people are easily impressed—as we shall see.)

From then on, I was the station expert on exfiltration. I soon knew everything we had on the activity, most of the names involved, many of the cases, and all of the methods employed. One day, as I was walking down the first-floor hallway, Colonel Collins—in his black leather trench coat—came down the stairs and greeted me: “Here’s Collins’ Commando.” (Fortunately for me, no one else was in the corridor at the time.) Any case that smacked of exfiltration was sent to me. I was the go-to guy for exfiltration, and my staff study, which ended up a big book with illustrations, photos, and charts, became a best-seller in the intel community—not just in Berlin but across USAREUR. (This was the project with which that young photo technician helped me so expertly—the one who hooked himself on heroin.)

We had to produce a sanitized version of the study for the Brit and French military intel and the German cops, BfV (Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz – Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the West German counterpart to our FBI), and BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst – Federal Intelligence Service – the equivalent of the CIA) because they all wanted copies. I was almost-famous—except no one knew who I was. (I don’t think my name appeared on the study actually. Some people knew it was mine by word of mouth. Not that it was a secret, so when someone found out it was my study—like the time I was at the British intel unit for something or other—he got all excited. My first—and so far only—taste of celebrity!)

One weekend after I had become the unit exfiltration expert, a frat brother from college who was stationed in Frankfurt called to tell me he was coming to Berlin and asked if we could get together. He was coming up with a colleague, a captain who’d served with Colonel Collins. When they got to Berlin, they went to see the colonel first, then came over to my place. “Man,” said my classmate, “your CO thinks you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Apparently, Colonel Collins spent much of their time together extolling my great accomplishment.

This episode has a tragic coda, however. As you may know, this was the time of a lot of domestic terrorism in Germany, mostly perpetrated by an anarchist group called the Red Army Faction—more commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The RAF—ironic initials—liked to blow up U.S. and Allied facilities and kidnap German businessmen. A couple of months after my schoolmate and his colleague came to visit, at about 7 a.m. on 11 May 1972, the RAF set off a bomb at the I. G. Farben Building in Frankfurt. That’s where the HQ of the U.S. Army in Frankfurt was located, and my friend’s colleague was killed in the blast. He had two little daughters, one only 12. In all of the Vietnam war years, he was one of only three people I knew who was killed by violence. I don’t even remember his name now.

My little exfiltration staff study did include one semi-major coup. The common wisdom was that there were established gangs who organized and carried out the exfiltrations—like mini-Mafia families. One of the things I did in the study was put together what the Germans called a WKW Schema. (WKW stands for Wer Kennt Wen—“Who Knows Whom.”) It’s a line-and-block chart that shows the connections among all the personalities involved, tracing contacts, phone calls, collaborations, and so on. I discovered—and proved—that the gangs were a myth. There were, in fact, a half dozen or so exfiltration leaders who could organize a team to carry out an operation as needed, but there were no permanent organizations. The same operatives would work for any number of leaders, and all the leaders knew one another and cooperated with one another. This was a revelation—no one had figured this out because no one had ever pulled all the info together into one place before so that the pattern became obvious. So, from that moment on, I was the expert.

Most exfiltration cases were small matters, investigated quickly and disposed of without much effort. One exception was the case involving Berlin’s Deputy Provost Marshall. (The Provost Marshall, or PM, is the military equivalent of the chief of police. The Provost Marshall’s Office, known as the PMO, is the military counterpart of police headquarters.) We had gotten a report, from one of the German legmen who was interviewing refugees at Marienfelde, that a refugee couple had been sneaked into Berlin in a green-plated car. (The private cars, or POV’s, of GI’s in USAREUR and USAFE bore bright green license plates with black lettering. Very distinct from the long, thin black-on-white German plates in shape and size, POV tags resembled stateside plates.) The couple reported what time they had gotten into the city—or their arrival at Marienfelde provided this info, I forget, but we knew pretty accurately when their car had crossed Checkpoint Bravo. They had only seen the car from the rear—because they were climbing into the trunk when the car stopped on the Autobahn in East Germany (which is how they knew about the green plates, of course)—but they described it as a particular German model (I forget now what they said it was). From the crossing lists, we determined the likely suspect—the Deputy PM!

I had to go over to Andrews Barracks, the compound in Lichtenfelde where the PMO was located, and scope out the parking lot. I found the DPM’s car—a blue AMC Javelin, which looked from the rear almost exactly like the German model the couple described. (They’d never have known a Javelin, of course, so they saw it as a model they knew.) I had a Polaroid and, just my luck, as I was taking photos of the DPM’s car, out of the PMO the major walked. “What are you doing taking pictures of my car?” he demanded. I stammered some unconvincing lie—and he knew something was up. Not that there was much he could have done: one advantage of Berlin’s geographic isolation was that you can’t just slip out and lam. I went back and wrote up my report, including the evidence of the crossing lists and my judgment that the DPM’s Javelin looked from the rear exactly like the German car the refugee couple described, submitting the photos as evidence. Our Ops Officer, a captain who was our second-in-command, the equivalent to the XO in other units—Colonel Collins was out of town, a fact which would play a part in what was to follow—decided that since this was a case involving a member of the forces, it was legitimately a military police matter.

(Exfiltration was an odd duck, legally. It wasn’t against any U.S. or West German laws, but it was against U.S. Army regulations. But that only affected uniformed personnel; civilians weren’t subject to military regs. That’s what made it so hard to control. When a civilian was caught doing exfiltrations, the USCOB had to step in and exercise his authority over all matters within the American Sector. He expelled the person from Berlin. But a soldier could be disciplined under Army regs, so this major was subject to investigation by his own people—the MP’s.)

I compiled my report and immediately shipped it off to the PM for his action. Later that evening, at one of those briefings I had to attend in the secure room, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence of USCOB, a full colonel, asked off-handedly about the case. I told him what my conclusions had been, and said that my Ops Officer instructed me to pass the case off to the PM for action. “You sent it classified, didn’t you?” he asked, clearly assuming the answer. “No, sir, I didn’t. There isn’t anything classified in the report. I sent it FOUO.” That’s “For Official Use Only,” not a classification, but a use designation. “You sent a report implicating a senior officer of the PMO through Brigade distribution unclassified? That’s potentially embarrassing information and anyone can look at it!” He was livid. I was terrified.

“Classification isn’t authorized to avoid embarrassment, sir,” I gulped. I was right, and I knew it, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to help me now. I had a bird colonel furious at me, and there was nothing I could do. I was entirely alone in that room. I don’t know what I was thinking about, but I was pretty sure I was dead. Believe it or not, I don’t remember what happened right after that. The DCSI must have sent me back to my unit to wait for his decision or something, because I ended up in the Ops Officer’s office—it was late by now, but for some reason the Ops Officer was still in the Station. He assured me I was in the right, but he was only a captain himself. He did point out that as Ops Officer and, in the absence of Colonel Collins, the acting CO, all materials sent out of the unit went out under his signature. He was ultimately responsible, and I had merely done what I was instructed to by my superior. I wasn’t sure what that would accomplish, except maybe get us both hanged—but I guess I felt better that a) he’d stand with me and b) he would affirm that I was right according to the regs.

But just then, the cavalry rode in! Colonel Collins got back from his trip and came straight to the office. I don’t remember if he’d already heard of the flap or had been headed to the office anyway and learned of it when he got in—but he backed me to the hilt, told the DCSI that not only had I done what I was told to do, but had done it exactly right. (Collins’ Commando!) I don’t know what I did after that, but if I didn’t get very drunk, I sure should have. Still, ever since that incident, even though I was 100% correct, the DCSI didn’t like me. I guess as much because I beat him, in a way, as because I had caused potential embarrassment to the forces. (The major was shipped out to Helmstedt, I believe, to that satellite outpost of the Berlin PMO and soon left the army. He knew his career was over even if he wasn’t prosecuted. I figure he deserved whatever happened to him—for being stupid if nothing else.)

[I hope the visit to West Berlin in the 1970s has been interesting so far and that you’ll come back to the blog for Part 3 in a few weeks. I pick up then with the biggest investigation I handled while I was at Berlin Station—that one case takes up the entire chapter. I imagine you’ll see why when you read it. (I should remind readers that everything I’ve written in this memoir is true and as accurate as my memory will permit. If anything you read strains credulity, it’s not because I embellished or fabricated, but because the world of Cold War Berlin, the army, and Military Intelligence was just . . . well, different. The 2½ years I spent as an MI Special Agent at Berlin Station wasn’t like anything else I’ve lived through in my 70 years.)]

by Kirk Woodward

[After making some very pertinent and interesting comments on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (6 December), frequent guest-blogger Kirk Woodward returns now with his assessment of the current Broadway revival of William Finn and James Lapine’s Falsettos. This time, Kirk provides a more standard performance assessment, but he has an interesting (and, I think valid, from his description—since I haven’t seen the production) take on the performance. Pay particular attention to Kirk’s opinion of Lapine’s direction because not only is it perceptive in its own right, but it makes a point about some (I’d say many) published reviews: they don’t cover directing very well.]

When I read about the current revival on Broadway of the musical Falsettos (music and lyrics by William Finn, book by Finn and James Lapine, directed by Lapine, opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on October 27, 2016 for a limited run of fourteen weeks), I ordered tickets immediately for two reasons.

I wanted to see Brandon Uranowitz, who plays Mendel, the psychiatrist, in the musical. He is a family friend and a Tony Award nominee for his performance as the composer in the musical An American in Paris.

I also wanted to see Christian Borle, who plays Marvin in Falsettos and is unquestionably one of the finest actors on the musical stage. I have written about both of them in this blog (see Kirk’s “An American In Paris (Part 2),” 13 November 2015, and “Something Rotten! 1,” 11 May 2106)

Falsettos was created by combining the second and third of a trio of one-act musicals. The first of the three, In Trousers,entirely written by William Finn, premiered in 1979 at Playwrights Horizons and introduced the character of Marvin, a man who comes to realize that he is gay and ultimately leaves his wife and young son.

Mr. Finn collaborated on the books of the next two musicals with James Lapine, who directed them. The story of In Trousers leads to that of March of the Falsettos (premiering in 1981, also at Playwrights), which finds Marvin trying desperately to discover or create some kind of viable family amid the chaos of his relationships with his ex-wife (Trina), his current lover (Whizzer), his son (Jason), and his psychiatrist, who is also Trina’s psychiatrist and who falls in love with and marries her.

By the end of the show Marvin has left Whizzer but has achieved some rapport with Jason. March of the Falsettos becomes Act I of the musical Falsettos.

Act II of Falsettos is the third of the one-act plays, Falsettoland(premiering in 1990 at Playwrights). In the course of this piece Marvin and Whizzer resume their relationship, while the family wrestles with the details of Jason’s bar mitzvah. Two more characters, a lesbian couple, join the fractured but real “family” scene: Dr. Charlotte, a medical doctor, and Cordelia, a caterer specializing in Kosher food.

The dates of these plays and of the combined work Falsettos, which opened at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway in 1992, are significant, because 1981 was the year of the first clinical diagnosis of AIDS (for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; it is also known as HIV, for Human Immunodeficiency Virus), and by 1990 the brutal disease was ravaging the gay community, and, although not then acknowledged as such, was well on its way to terrorizing the entire world.

The AIDS epidemic was at its height when the various components of the musical first opened.

AIDS is a looming presence in Falsettoland– Whizzer contacts the disease. There is no cure available for him (nor is there today; however, much progress has been made in controlling the disease). Dr. Charlotte treats him, and his painful death has the effect of bringing Marvin’s formal and informal family together in a real if uneasy kind of working truce.

Wisely or not, people take AIDS more for granted today, but Falsettos is valuable also as a family story, a quirky but significant one. The show has significant strengths beyond the historical: the family story; the sympathetic portrayal of varying kinds of sexual relationships, both homosexual and other; the meaty roles for the seven actors; and the sizzling score by William Finn, who writes songs that sound like conversation that has somehow been nuzzled into musical form.

The seven characters I have identified are the only ones in the play, a remarkably small size for a cast of a Broadway musical, but then the show originated off-Broadway, where small musicals are more common, and almost all of Mr. Finn’s creations have opened off-Broadway.

His other shows include A New Brain (1998), an autobiographical account of his experience with brain surgery, and the song cycle Elegies(2003). His writing tends to be autobiographical, although this was not the case with his delightful The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005).

So, to the 2016 Broadway production of Falsettos: the acting did not disappoint. Not just Uranowitz and Borle, but the entire cast, are wonderful. The show stopping number of the musical is “Trina’s Song,” performed with mountingly manic energy by Stephanie J. Block in the role of Marvin’s ex-wife.

I was charmed by the lesbian couple played by a businesslike Tracie Thoms (Dr. Charlotte) and an exuberant Betsy Wolfe (Cordelia, the caterer). Anthony Rosenthal (Jason) is a match for the older cast members, and Andrew Rannells is just right for the role of Whizzer, who must come across as both sketchy and valuable.

And yet, and yet… the production left me with an unsatisfied feeling. I have only seen it once before, in a community theater production that presented the material realistically. The current version has a divided personality. The acting is realistic; but the production, with James Lapine returning as director, is remarkably abstract.

When the audience enters, it sees a bare stage with a huge gray cube in the center, like a giant irregular construction by Rubik. The audience certainly anticipates that the cube will be taken apart and used as furniture and other set elements, and that’s what happens, very ingeniously. (The set, by David Rockwell, is beautifully augmented by Jeff Croiter’s lighting).

As a result there are no pauses between scenes; also as a result, however, the actors are continually moving blocks around, which however smoothly choreographed nevertheless continually pulls the audience out of the play as it watches the gray geometric shapes being rearranged by actors looking to make sure they set their pieces exactly on their “spike marks” on the stage floor.

I attended the show with a friend who genuinely did not like this approach. “I don’t come to Broadway to see off-Broadway shows,” my friend said, “but I may want to hire this cast when I’m ready to move.” I’m not sure there’s not something to her remark.

Put in its simplest form, she wants sets that appear to move by themselves! She referred to this production as a “black box show,” that is, a studio theater presentation rather than a Broadway show. Perhaps her attitude is a little extreme, but if there’s strength in a typical Broadway show, surely one element is the audience’s satisfaction when a play is surrounded by an environment that embraces it.

One thinks on the other hand of productions like the director John Doyle’s 2005 and 2006 productions of Sweeney Todd and Company respectively, in which the actors both performed their roles and played musical instruments. That and similar approaches are clever, but do they really serve the play, or do they pull our focus out of it? Is the play the thing, or do we leave mostly thinking that that director really is a clever fellow?

Lapine doesn’t go to extremes in Falsettos, but his directorial hand shows in every moment of the play, which is so thoroughly directed that the actors come to seem like marionettes – so much so that when in the song “March of the Falsettos” the cast actually act like marionettes, the concept of the number doesn’t seem particularly startling.

In the second act, in particular, it seems to me that this approach does not serve the play, robbing it of a good deal of the emotion necessary for us to understand how the new ad hoc family is finally able to coalesce. When Marvin and Whizzer stand face to face and sing “What Would I Do?” practically down each other’s throats, for the entire song, it seems to me that the staging almost combats the emotion of the scene. Borle’s and Rannells’ acting is strong enough to prevail; but should they be put in that position?

Lapine “puts people in positions” throughout the entire production. He is a clever and imaginative director; but I still left the theater feeling I’d seen a display, rather than a story. The cast has been hard at work; but for me the aftertaste that’s left is the effort, not the people.

I might well be accused of inconsistency here: in my recent article “A Note About Hamilton” (6 December 2016) on this blog, I championed productions in which a director invents what I call a “new theatrical language” for the piece.

That is emphatically not what Lapine does in Falsettos. Nothing in his staging is “transformative.” Using blocks instead of furniture has been a theatrical staple for decades. Virtually every director wants to “physicalize” the action of a play. Lapine does both, but to the extent that the result feels like busywork, falling far short of what in the Hamilton piece I call a Bright Idea – not giving the play a different locational concept, just making it hyperactive.

Most of the reviews that I have read do not focus on Lapine’s direction at all. Falsettosgenerally received positive reviews, led by Christopher Isherwood in The New York Times (27 October 2016), who wrote that “there’s hardly a moment in the exhilarating, devastating revival of the musical “Falsettos” that doesn’t approach, or even achieve, perfection.”

High praise indeed. Where reviewers had reservations, they tended to be about two things. One involves the issues of whether or not the play accurately portrays gays and Jews. (I was taken aback by the vitriol of Hilton Als’ New Yorker review of 7 November 2016 – “hideously cheap sentiment . . . one of the most dishonest musicals I have ever seen.”) I have no competence to answer such questions.

The other reservations tended to be about the set design. Isherwood’s review typifies the praise:

David Rockwell’s set resembles a child’s building blocks, which are manipulated by the actors. Placed against a shifting Manhattan skyscape, it’s an ingenious illustration of what we are watching: people laboring to arrange a comfortable life for themselves and their loved ones, and continually having to readjust it.

The reservations may be represented by Alexis Soloski’s review in The Guardian (27 October 2016):

The set, by David Rockwell, with its chintzy cutouts of the Manhattan skyline and peculiar cube of furniture, is one of the ugliest to galumph onto the stage in recent years.

Christopher Kelly, in the Newark Star-Ledger (27 October 2016), is no kinder:

The set design . . . mostly consists of what appears to be a rubber foam cube, made up of many pieces that are removed from the cube and used as furniture or props. More than once, you worry the pieces of cube are going to fall on someone's head.

Actually, you do, sometimes. On the other hand, the use of the component pieces is consistently clever, a real triumph of engineering. But the important point is that a set designer’s work must reflect the director’s approach to the play; the set is not an equal among equals, but one component in an overall approach that’s coordinated by the director (or should be). Whether it’s “attractive” or “ugly” is fundamentally irrelevant; the important question is how well it serves the play.

To my mind the Falsettos set illustrates what I see as Lepine’s desire to tinker with the show, as though he were trying to include in the new production all the possibilities he’d thought of since the first Broadway production opened in 1992.

Isherwood says that Lepine’s “work is so sharp it’s as if he were seeing the show with a new pair of eyes.” Yes, but is that what the show should be about? Christopher Kelly, in the Star-Ledger, comes a little closer to my opinion, referring to “sometimes awkward staging” and saying:

Lapine directed this revival, just as he did the 1992 Broadway original -- and my guess is that "Falsettos" ultimately needed someone not quite so close to the material to make it resonate fully with a contemporary audience.

We are blessed these days with a number of outstandingly talented directors, and James Lapine is one of them. The risk involved in all that talent is that directors may come to feel their job is to make the production “go” or “work.” The script and the actors do that – or it doesn’t get done.

If our primary impression of a show is that the director put a lot of effort into it, surely that’s not a mark of success but of failure – at least, of failure to respect the play being produced.That’s a subjective judgment, no doubt about it, but it’s one we need to make.

[Kirk’s remark about reviews not saying much about Lapine's directing is a truth about most reviews in general. Directing usually gets short shrift (except for comments about pacing occasionally). I think the reason for that is that few reviewers (or anyone else, really) understand what directors do. I once edited the newsletter for an organization (now unfortunately defunct) called the American Directors Institute that was formed for that very reason: that most people—not just lay people, but theater pros as well (including reviewers)—don’t know what directors actually do beyond moving actors around the stage. ADI’s mission was to try to introduce directing to the public through panels and conferences—and Directors Notes, its newsletter. (Geoffrey Shlaes, ADI’s artistic director, once approached renowned theater critic, editor, writer, and historian Eric Bentley to be the keynoter for one of ADI’s conferences, and he disparaged directors as unnecessary.) Anyway, reviewers can't very well criticize directing if they don't know what it is, can they?]

I’ve never done improvisation as a performance except occasionally as a mime a long time ago. The closest I’ve come to the kind of improv that Will Hines writes about in How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth, “the art of making up comedy scenes as you go, on a stage,” I’ve only done in acting classes or rehearsals as an exercise. So I’m not really qualified to judge Hines’s advice from the perspective of a professional or wannabe improviser, the kind of performer who would take one of Hines’s classes and work with companies like the Compass Players, Second City, Chicago City Limits, The Committee, ImprovOlympic (iO), the Groundlings, and the Upright Citizens Brigade. Early in the book, in fact, Hines affirms that he assumes the reader has “studied the fundamentals” of improv. (Later in the book, the author recommends using Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh’s The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual [Comedy Council of Nicea, LLC, 2013] as a reference for explanations of basic terms and improv forms.)

It looks, however, like a lot—though not all—of Hines’s improv guidance is valid for "straight" acting as well—except for different terminology. At the top of a section entitled “Be Authentic,” Hines quotes UCB co-founders Roberts and Amy Poehler emphasizing, “Improv rules are life rules”; the fundamental rationale for the acting system of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), based on the psychological theories of Théodule-Armand Ribot (1839-1916), is that the rules of acting are the rules of life. So my approach to discussing Greatest Improviser will be the relation of Hines’s advice for improvising to basic acting technique—about which I do know a thing or two, having been an acting student for a good number of years and an acting teacher for several as well. I’ll consider how parallel improv is to dramatic acting and how different.

How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth (Pretty Great Publishing Co., 2016) is a how-to book by Hines, long-time member of UCB (he’s from the troupe’s second generation of performers, following the founders Roberts, Poehler, Besser, and Walsh) who eventually became “one of [UCB’s] most sought-after teachers.” Greatest Improviser, aimed at performers who are already working on stage, provides a copious helping of advice on performing improvised comedy based on Hines’s own experience and lessons passed down from his own teachers and coaches. The lessons are illustrated by scenes from actual performances and the author provides a number of exercises for practicing each category of advice he discusses.

In addition, Hines asserts in the official description of the book that Greatest Improviser is “also an examination of how doing improv transforms you. The book gets into the mental habits you automatically acquire, and how to encourage that change.” The author explains that the lessons in the book teach “the skills that the real world burns out of you. You’re socialized to think ahead, stay rigid, be careful, and often be false. Many are never taught to be funny or healthy.” Greatest Improviser includes, among others, chapters entitled “Be Present,” “Be Changeable,” “Be Brave,” “Be Authentic,” “Be Funny,” and “Be Healthy.” (With the exception of “Be Funny,” except under specific circumstances, these are all lessons a dramatic actor must learn as well.)

The book was edited by Malin von Euler-Hogan, whom Hines identifies on his blog, Improv Nonsense, as an editor who’s also on a UCB improv team in New York, with a cover by Maëlle Doliveux, a freelance illustrator, animator, and UCB-trained improviser. Hines self-published Greatest Improviser because, as he explains, “I tried to court it to publishers and had some nice meetings. But basically, I have better direct access to potential customers than any company, so besides the prestige of a publishing company, doing it myself made more sense.”

Improv, colloquial for improvisational theater, is a type of performance in which all or most of what’s presented is created on the spot as it happens. In Hines’s work, the characters, story, action, and dialogue are all created without a pre-written script as a collaboration among the improvisers as the scene unfolds in real time. As Hines describes the phenomenon, “A group of people get on a stage, ask for a single suggestion, and then create one or more comedic scenes based on the suggestion.” He lays out the creative process, which he asserts “[g]enerally . . . looks like a comedic play,” this way:

Do something inspired by a suggestion.
Understand each other.
Move the scene forward.
Find/do something funny.
Do more of the funny thing.

Throughout the book, the author makes the art of improv sound easy and logical, as if it should come naturally. Of course, it isn’t (otherwise everybody’d be doing it, right?), but I suppose, as the book’s intended for those already in the business, perhaps understatement’s the best approach for Hines’s audience. The author does, though, acknowledge that “good improv scenes always feel so much grander than what a small piece of advice looks like.”

Though there are improvised (or partly improvised) dramas, especially among avant-garde companies—Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater and Richard Schechner’s Performance Group were both celebrated for developing their dramatic pieces through improvisation and then using improvisation in performance before an audience—and even improvised films, the kind of improv about which Hines is writing, arguably the most common, is comic.

Furthermore, he states in Greatest Improviser (as well as on his blog, Improv Nonsense) that his focus is the long-form comedy, the category in which the improvisers create complete shows in which short scenes are connected by their stories, characters, or subjects. (The other improv category is the short form, which is comprised of unrelated brief scenes.) In both long-form and short-form improv, the scenes often proceed from a suggestion from the audience; Hines’s type of improv follows this pattern. The long-form improv was championed by Del Close (1934-99), a Chicago improv performer, director, teacher, and coach (with Compass Players, Second City, The Committee, among others) in its early days. An example of a long-form show is called the Harold, the common standard devised by Close for long-form improv. The signature performance structure of the iO Theater and UCB, it’s composed of the following segments:

· a suggestion from a spectator

· the opening, like an overture in which bits of the ideas developed from the suggestion are depicted

· three scenes (“first beats”)

· a group scene (unrelated to the interconnected “beats”)

· three “second beats,” scenes which revisit characters or situations from earlier scenes

· a group scene

· three “third beats”

Most long-form shows are variations of the Harold. (The name, by the way, is arbitrary and bears no relation to improv or performance.)

Modern improv comedy got its major start in Chicago with Paul Sills’s Second City (1959) and that city became a hub of improvisational theater in the ’60s and ’70s. (Sills, 1927-2008, was the son of Viola Spolin, 1906-94, author of Improvisation for the Theater [Northwestern University Press, 1963], the description of Spolin’s acting exercises and theater games often called “the bible of improvisational theater.” His mother’s teaching, directing, and coaching methods were the initial inspiration for Sills’s improv troupe.) Several prominent troupes started in Chicago, such as the Compass Players (1955) and ImprovOlympic (1980). Toronto, Canada, became a secondary center and the impulse spread around the U.S. and Canada to the United Kingdom and Australia. The original cast of NBC’s Saturday Night Live (débuted in 1975) was culled largely from Second City in both Chicago and Toronto (and the Canadian branch launched its own popular NBC show, SCTV, in 1976-1981); talk-show host Stephen Colbert and film actor Steve Carell both started in improvisational comedy (with Second City in Chicago). The current Broadway duo of John Mulaney and Nick Kroll, creators and performers of Oh, Hello (closing 22 January), are both UCB alumni. Sketch comedy shows like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968-73) and Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-74), precursors in a way to SNL, and The Kids in the Hall (1989-95), were largely developed in rehearsal through improvisation—though performances were (loosely) scripted.

Will Hines was born in 1970 in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in Ohio and Connecticut. He graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in journalism and wrote for papers in New England and then worked as a computer programmer. He started improvising on his own after moving to New York City in 1996, going to open-mic nights at local clubs. “I just wanted to meet funny people,” Hines says, “because as I got older I was being surrounded by more and more boring, resigned people, and I had been friends with a lot of funny people in college and high school.” Then he took a class with the Upright Citizens Brigade in 1999. Dissatisfied with living the “square’s life,” the world of “a normal day job and . . . a family,” the “adult world” that “was looking more and more stilted,” Hines found the improv classes “felt like tests to see if I could shake off the dull world and connect to this new exciting one” where there “were cool and interesting people.” He performed with UCB in New York and ultimately became a member of the troupe. By his own account, he developed into “a respected performer” with UCB. The company invited Hines to become a trainer of the next generation of improvisers and, in 2009, he was chosen to run the New York school. In 2010, Hines launched the blog Improv Nonsense (http://improvnonesense.tumblr.com), whose posts became the basis of Greatest Improviser. (The posts of the blog have been compiled and published as Improv Nonsense: All The Posts [Pretty Great Publishing Co., 2016].)

In 2013, Hines moved to Los Angeles—his successor at UCB-NY is his brother, Kevin—where he performed and taught at UCB-LA (and where he became a coach, occasional instructor, and fellow performer of Heather Woodward, ROT contributor Kirk Woodward’s daughter who’d joined the West Coast troupe in 2010). By May 2016, Hines estimates he’d appeared in “more than 7,854” scenes and, “as a teacher/coach,” watched “about 46,660 more.” He published How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth in June 2016. In addition to teaching, coaching, and performing improv, Hines now writes comedy sketches, performs sketch comedy, directs and appears in comedy and improv videos, and does occasional roles on television.

The Upright Citizens Brigade was founded in Chicago in 1990 by “the UCB Four”: Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh. The four had been trained at Chicago’s ImprovOlympic by Del Close before coming to New York City in 1996, where they performed in various venues until opening their own space in Chelsea on Manhattan’s West Side in 1999. This was the first permanent stage in New York devoted to improvisational comedy. UCB started the Upright Citizens Brigade Improvisational and Sketch Comedy Training Center, the only accredited improv and sketch comedy school in the country, a year before they moved into their Chelsea theater. (The school’s Latin motto, Si Haec Insolita Res Vera Est, Quid Exinde Verum Est?, translates as “If this unusual thing is true, then what else is true?,” a variation of one of the Del Close/UCB impov principles.) The troupe opened its Los Angeles branch in 2005 and a second New York location, in the East Village, in 2011. Three of the company’s founders compiled The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual, published in 2013.

The main distinction between acting in a scripted play (or film) and performing improv, of course, is . . . that the latter is improvised! Obvious, I suppose, but nearly all of conventional actor training, from Stanislavsky (and even his predecessor, François Delsarte) to Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Uta Hagen and all their heirs and successors, is aimed at one thing: to make rehearsed behavior seem intuitive and spontaneous rather than planned, practiced, and repeated. In improv, the behavior on stage is all spontaneous. (This makes theater improv different on another level as well. Both forms are evanescent, but in theater, the performance is gone as soon as the lights come back up—though the play remains. In improv, even the material is gone after the show. I’m not sure this is relevant to the performers, however; theoretically, they shouldn’t be thinking about “posterity.”)

This distinction raises another important difference: making up the words and the actions. Unlike a dramatic actor, an improviser has to become something of an instant playwright. As Hines advises in the book, “You are a co-writer of every scene you’re in.” Except in stage mishaps (I recount a few of these in “Short Takes: Theater War Stories,” 6 December 2010), most dramatic actors never have to be this quick on their feet—though in Realistic and Naturalistic plays, they have to seem to be. Speech on stage is behavior just as any movement or action is—and has to appear just as natural and impromptu. But dramatic actors don’t have to write the dialogue and create the plot (at least, not on the spot)—that’s usually someone else’s job.

Another difference in improvising, particularly the kind in which Hines is involved, and most acting work has to do with props, both set pieces and hand props. Put simply, improvisers don’t use them. They mime all the objects that appear in a scene, a task most dramatic actors aren’t called to perform unless they’re doing Our Town or some other exceptional script that calls for mime or pantomime. In every acting class I ever took (or taught), the students were admonished notto mime props called for in a scene; even if we had to substitute an easily-obtained item for the one described in the script, we had to have something because handling objects is a fundamental part of acting.

Costumes, too, were part of my acting training regimen—again, even if we had to approximate the dress of the character for the scene. “Clothing so influences my character, is so crucial to me,” says the late actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen (1919-2004), “that I would find it impossible to come to a rehearsal for Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire dressed in slacks and sneakers as it would be for me to work on Saint Joan in a frilly chiffon dress and high-heeled shoes.” Playing a businessman in jeans and a T-shirt was out of the question in my acting classes (unless, perhaps, you were doing Steve Jobs, I suppose); even if the student didn’t have a business suit, he was expected to come to the studio in some kind of tie and jacket and slacks. (Aaron Frankel, who taught a classical scene study class at HB Studio, kept a locker of period costumes for his students to use so they wouldn’t be tempted to do Oedipus in khakis or Chimène in a mini and boots.) I once did a scene from Albee’s Tiny Alice in which I played a cardinal, so I had to come up with some kind of robe, cap, and staff to sub for the cardinal’s regalia. Later, when I played an officer in a Revolutionary War play, I wore a rehearsal costume of an 18th-century-style cutaway coat, breeches, English riding boots, and a saber to get used to the restrictions and problems caused by the uniform I’d wear in the production. Improvisers aren’t obligated to follow this procedure because, not knowing what characters and situations will be thrown at them, they can’t dress for every possibility.

Hines, however, acknowledges the cross-over between improv and straight acting to some degree. Most of the people whom Hines quotes in Greatest Improviser are respected improvisers, including many of his own teachers; however, he cites a few figures from straight theater as well, notably Broadway casting director Michael Shurtleff (1920-2007) and famed acting teacher Sanford Meisner (1905-97). Of Meisner, Hines notes that the director of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre’s book Sanford Meisner on Acting (Meisner and Dennis Longwell; Vintage Books, 1987) contains “many passages that make for great advice for the improviser” as well as the actor. (He also mentions Shurtleff’s Audition[Walker and Co., 1978].) Hines says in his own professional life, in fact, he recognizes the significance of dramatic acting as an asset. Having had no performing or acting background before beginning improv, he took an acting class (a monologue workshop) in 2001. But if Hines (and, I would presume, other improvisers) find some actor training useful in the practice of their art form, dramatic actors will conversely find some of the facilities of improvisation that Hines inculcates beneficial in their work in scripted plays.

Among the skills Hines posits a performer will learn from doing improv or taking an improv class, he lists those below, to which I’ve added my own remarks about the applicability to scripted acting:

· “Listening. Deeper, fuller, more actively. Time will slow down during conversations and you will be able to hear them more accurately. This absolutely will happen to everyone who takes improv classes for any decent length of time.” There’s almost nothing more important to an actor than to listen to what her scene partners are saying—even if she’s memorized their lines—no matter how many times she’s heard them. It’s an important way to assure being connected to the scene. In his instructions to his acting students, Aaron Frankel (b. 1921), one of my teachers, stressed that at rehearsals, actors should look at and listen to the others in their scenes. (References to Frankel’s teaching are more fully discussed in “An Actor’s Homework,” posted on ROT on 19, 22, 25, and 28 April 2010.)

· “Brevity. Improv rewards succinct, direct talk. You’ll learn to do it because the audience laughs and listens to you more when you get to the point.” Obviously, an actor has no control over the length or brevity of his lines—but he can control the expression of such techniques as his objective, character action, and inner monologue, which should always be as concise and direct as he can make them. Loquacity gets in the way and muddles the playing of these actors’ tools.

· “Empathy. You will more easily be able to see things from other people’s points of view. You will be able to argue the other side of an argument better.” In Greatest Improviser, Hines speaks of empathy for the character with which the improviser’s been endowed, particularly if it’s a popularly unsympathetic one (Hines used Hitler as an example). Frankel would admonish his students that Hitler, Iago, Richard III, Fagin, Lady Macbeth, Joan Crawford, and all other stage villains don’t see themselves as bad guys or gals. It’s incumbent on the actor to find the empathy for his or her character in order to play him or her without coming off like a villain out of a 19th-century melodrama.

· “Acting. Improv is acting and writing but it’s more acting. You become more reactive and emotive just through the sheer reps of playing make-believe in front of others.” I think this one speaks for itself and needs no further comment.

· “Clearer opinions. You have opinions all the time but very often you don’t pay attention to them as they’re forming. Not the big ones, but the little ones. You see someone on the street eating an ice cream and lots of tiny versions of superiority, jealousy, gluttony will flit through your brain, and then vanish. Improv makes you notice and then hold onto those opinions because in a scene you might need them.” My first thought on this facility is for the actors’ habit of observing real people they encounter in their daily lives because they never know when they’ll have to play some character who reminds them of the stranger, friend, or family member. But the truth is that actors need to approach the other characters in their plays the same way. One of the techniques Frankel teaches is for the actor to determine what he calls the “main character action” (what Stanislavsky-based teachers often call the “superobjective”)—but Frankel goes on to require his students to devise a version of their MCA as it’s directed toward each other character with whom they come in contact in the play. He also teaches that actors must glean what he calls “hearsay” by going over what the other characters say about them and make judgments about whether statements are right/true or wrong/false. None of these applications will work efficiently or usefully unless the opinions are succinct and clear.

· “Patterns. Patterns are funny, and you will learn to see them early and often.” In Michael Kirby’s theatrical structural system (see “Theatrical Structure,” 15 and 18 February 2011), Patterns are a significant connective device in all aspects of a production, including dialogue and acting—both of which are the purview of actors. Kirby (1931-97) identifies several other structural devices related to Patterns, such as Themes and Echoes, which are useful for the actor to spot and capitalize on, so becoming tuned into these phenomena, whether generated by the playwright, director, designers, or other actors, is beneficial.

· “Knowledge. You’ll learn more since you’ll run across so many scenes where someone mentions something you don’t know. You’ll find out what they were saying and remember it.” Actors especially young ones who started focusing on theater training in high school and then majored in theater in college and maybe went on to an MFA in acting, develop tunnel vision, knowing about little more than their own field. Hines calls this “a deficit of life experiences to draw from.” Actors who know something about the world create deeper, more interesting characters and bring more to the play than those with limited scopes. (I once advised a high school actress who’d decided to drop out of a trip to Paris with her French class in favor of staying home to do a community theater production that she was making a foolish choice. There would always be another community play for her—she was pretty talented—but that the trip to Paris, her first visit abroad, would benefit her in ways she couldn’t even predict, both as an actor and as a person. The young woman rejected my advice, unfortunately; I don’t know if she ever regretted it—but my first trip to Paris, at just about her age, had been life-changing.) I can’t begin to count the number of times some obscure piece of knowledge about the world and the way it works has come into play in a role I was doing or a production I was directing (see my posts, “Liberal Arts in the Real World,” 24 July 2010, and “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines,” 21 July 2011); closing oneself off from those discoveries is limiting to an actor. Or, as Hines advises: “[Y]ou should try to keep up with what’s going on in the world.”

· “Bravery. You will be more comfortable to have people see you and watch you.” Believe it or not, there are actors, especially novices, who are drawn to the stage but are uncomfortable in the spotlight. If working on improv can help solve this dilemma, it’d be an excellent asset. Just as I’ve known lawyers and priests who’ve taken acting classes to help them appear before audiences (of jurors or congregants in their cases), actors taking improv classes or performing improv to learn to put themselves out there would be beneficial for acting in plays.

· “Being Present. You’ll worry less about the future, less about story, and more about what the moment feels like and what that implies.” As I noted earlier, while improvisation is by definition spontaneous and in-the-moment, acting in plays is rehearsed, prepared, and planned—but has to seem as if it’s happening in real time. Rehearsal is where the planning and preparing happens; by performance, the actor must appear to be living the circumstances as they’re happening. Combating all that rehearsing isn’t easy, and if working in improv can develop that skill, so much the better for the actor. (This is often the goal of doing improvisations in rehearsal, but not all directors use the technique, and additional practice is always good.) Furthermore, as Hines writes, the improviser becomes “a Sherlock Holmes of observing the present instant.” Granted, an improviser has “to figure out from context clues what [is] going on” in a scene that’s just starting up, something the playwright has given the straight actor; nevertheless, this skill will stand a dramatic actor in excellent stead for gleaning the “present circumstances” of a scene so that she can immerse herself in them. (Uta Hagen devised an exercise about a character from a period play in a made-up scene—that is, one not in the play—outside the crisis of the drama, like Desdemona getting ready for a ball in Venice before she met Othello. The point is to explore all the ordinary things a woman does and feels when she’s not the subject of a play. The same examination is useful for contemporary characters, and the goal is to find the reality of their moment-to-moment lives.)

Arguably, the clearest convergence of improv and scripted acting is in the somewhat abstract and diffuse advice Hines gives to commit to the premise of the scene and the character with which the improviser has been endowed. Accept the circumstances of the scene and go with it. This is what’s called “yes-anding” in improv-speak: you say “yes” to the set-up and then you take it further. Hines writes that the improviser needs “to stop thinking and to start watching and committing.” He commands, “Get out of your head”! Every acting teacher and director will tell students and cast members to commit to their choices and to the circumstances in the script, to make bold decisions for their characters—dramatic for dramas and comedic for comedies, but big. As for getting out of their heads, Aaron Frankel had an expression that revealed what he thought about actors’ getting stuck in their heads and over-thinking or over-intellectualizing their roles: he called it “head-fucking.” (I always thought this was an especially apt term: not only does it communicate the point that relying too much on left-brain analysis was counterproductive, the expression also connotes that the actor’s using the wrong body part for the function indicated.)

Part of committing to and immersing themselves in the scene requires improvisers to engage the creativity of their right brains. When confronted with an "unfamiliar scenario,” Hines instructs the improviser, “Use an ‘as if,’” one of the most familiar tools among Stanislavsky-based actors and teachers. Also known as the “magic if,” it’s “a lever to lift us out of everyday life onto the plane of imagination.” According to Hagen, it ties the actor’s imagination to the given circumstances of the scene. It’s an essential technique for both improvisers and actors in scripted plays, virtually a sine qua non, for, as Stanislavsky declares, if a would-be actor lacks imagination, “He must develop it . . . or else leave the theatre.”

Of course, even where there are parallels, the applications can be different, from just slightly to vastly. Among the reasons for this is the development time for an improv scene and a play: improvs are fairly brief, several minutes on average, so the performers need to get to the meat of the scene—what Hines calls the “game of the scene,” the part that’s funny or “the unusual thing”—pretty quickly; the dramatic actor has anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes for a short one-act to two hours and up for a full-length play to build the arc of his character and his objective.

Another reason the function of similar skills can be different is the goal of improv, which is comedy, in contrast to dramatic acting, which can be funny, seriocomic, melodramatic, or tragic—or various combinations of any of these (“pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”). When faced with choices in a scene, straight actors select behavior that’s appropriate for their characters within the play, always taking into consideration the genre of script on which they’re working: actors in comedies pick funny actions, actors in tragedies pick tragic actions, actors in dramas pick dramatic actions. Improvisers, however, are constrained to make comic choices. In the chapter “Be Funny,” Hines warns: “to be good at improv, you have to be funny.” That’s not a burden the conventional actor must bear; many an actor who can’t be funny on cue has had a perfectly successful career in dramas.

Being changeable, Hines insists, is “uniquely important” to improvising, but it, too, has a practical application to scripted acting. Unlike improvs, plays may be rehearsed and “set,” but there are accidents, and actors also change what they’re doing. If your scene partner does this without warning you (an ethical breach, granted, but it happens), you have to be ready to go with the new impulse—even if after the performance the stage manager comes back stage and says, “Take out the improvements.” One of the facts about live performances is that they’re never the same from show to show—and actors have to be prepared to respond to changes, intentional or otherwise.

An aspect of changeability Hines identifies is switching from thinking “What is going to happen next?” to “What must have already happened?” In other words, Hines says, “Stop thinking forward and start thinking about the moment before.” Usually, a straight actor is oriented toward the future, pursuing his character’s objective, which is his goal in the play. But Stanislavsky requires that the actor must never appear to anticipate his actions (because the character can’t know what’s going to happen next), and Hagen writes, “The fight to prevent anticipation, to prevent thinking and planning ahead . . . is a struggle that seems to go on and on . . . .” To help establish “immediacy” (Hagen’s term for “being present”), she has exercises to guide actors to work on the “immediate preceding circumstances” of each of their scenes, each entrance they make so that they’re coming from a past in which they were doing something specific somewhere specific under specific conditions—a life before the scene starts or the entrance is made. “While waiting for the entrance,” explains Hagen, “you have responded to an imagined immediately preceding event by a real doing which allows you to continue your assumed life on stage.” Though the application of inventing what’s just happened is different for an actor in a play and an improviser (for whom, Hines instructs, the “future is not worth worrying about”), the task is analogous.

To accomplish authenticity, to make their characters truthful, Hines tells improvisers “to simply be yourself.” He asserts that great improvisers’ “real selves—their temperaments, their opinions, their reactions—are a huge part of every character they play.” Now, obviously this advice can’t be applied directly to dramatic acting—every character an actor plays can’t be himself. But acting teachers will all tell their students that when building a character, it’s always advisable to start with themselves—to use as much of their real personalities and lives as they can and build on that (with endowments, “as ifs,” substitutions, and so on) because, as Hines continues, “As an actor, you’ll never have more experience playing any character besides yourself.” (In eight of Hagen’s ten Object Exercises, the actor uses himself as the “character”; the same is true of eight of the ten assignments in my own acting technique curriculum.)

Nevertheless, despite any appearance that improvisational theater and scripted acting are incompatible performance forms, there are cross-overs. The fact that Hines sought out an acting class in his early training and refers to theater figures like acting teacher Sandy Meisner and theatrical casting director Michael Shurtleff, whose books he obviously studied, demonstrates that he finds parallels. In fact, Hines considers himself an actor and has said that improv classes are “more like acting classes” than exercises in silly fun. When I was an acting student and, later, when I was trying to carve out a career on the stage, it was clear that the fundamentals of improvisation were useful skills for a straight actors, too. (I suppose that’s obvious considering how many acting teachers and directors use improvisation in their classes and rehearsals.) So, how well does Hines press his case for improv—or, to be precise, his guidance for the improviser?

There are no professional reviews of Greatest Improviser of the kind that run in the New York Times Book Review or the arts pages of your local paper. There are blurbs on the back cover of the book from improv pros and reader reviews on sites like Barnes & Noble and Amazon. All of them are extremely positive and laudatory. All of the reviewers I read seemed to be improvisers—which is the audience Hines is aiming at, so that makes sense. But I do wonder what someone like me, someone in the performing arts or at least knowledgeable about the field but not an improviser, thinks about Hines’s book and his advice.

For instance, my friend Kirk Woodward, who, in addition to being the father of Heather Woodward, a member of UCB who’s quoted in the book, is an actor, director, and acting teacher himself, liked Hines’s book “a good deal, mostly because he seems to keep his chosen field in perspective.” Indeed, the author points out, “Improv doesn’t doesn’t try to lead you anywhere. It’s just something that attracts certain kinds of people.” He acknowledges, further, “Improv is something you do because you like it, not for what it gives you” in terms of financial rewards or notoriety. This is awfully close to Stanislavsky’s advice to actors: “Love art in yourself and not yourself in art.” Hines warns that “commercial success is not the same as happiness.”

I had a serious and continuing problem with the scenes Hines presents as illustrations of his instructions, however. Hines’s own definition of improv is “making up comedy scenes” and he bluntly states in the book that ”to be good at improv, you have to be funny.” Funny is kinda the point of the form. But I was very disturbed to find that most of the scenes Hines describes in Greatest Improviser just aren’t funny. (A couple even struck me as downright creepy. One focusing on menstruation has a decided ick-factor!) Now, maybe Hines’s readers are more in tune with improv than I am and I just don’t get it. Maybe the scenes don’t seem funny on the page—after all, improv is not a literary form—but when performed live before an audience by improvisers using all their intuitive acting talents, it works. I’m usually very good at visualizing a performance from a description, though. When I read a play (or even a review), I “see” the performance.

Alternatively, maybe the parts of the scenes Hines cites illustrate something instructive, but aren’t actually funny. That could be true, but it seems counterproductive—especially when it’s operating nearly all through the book. (Furthermore, most of Hines’s examples are whole scenes—or, at least, the game of the scene—the part that’s supposed to be funny.) What were not talking about here is what in acting classes is called “studio acting” where the student actor is working on a specific acting problem, not trying to solve the scene. This is particularly true in acting technique classes, but even in scene study classes the student isn’t focused on performance issues like pacing, timing, or even staging. If a civilian watched an acting-class scene, she’d probably think it was awful—because it’s not a performance. I’m sure there is similar classroom work in all the arts, whether it’s dance, singing, music, or improvisation. This is not that; the scenes Hines cites are from actual performances. Where spectators (presumably) laughed.

I broached this quandary with Kirk, who agreed that it’s “possible that some of this material doesn’t look funny on paper because it isn’t, but that it’s given life by the performers,” but went on to propose, “A lot of it seems to be of the ‘you had to be there’ quality.” The difficulty here, though, is that if Hines is presenting these scenes as teaching points in a book, they should come off the page as funny so the reader, hopefully even a non-improviser like me, can see the culmination of the lesson Hines is trying to impart. This strikes me as a serious deficiency for a how-to book.

This isn’t to say that the pointers Hines provides aren’t useful and even fundamental truths in improv. I have to trust the dozens of readers who testified that Hines’s techniques have worked for them. Hines’s reputation as a performer, and even more as a teacher and coach, leave me little choice, given my own lack of experience on which to base a judgment, but to believe the testimonials. (Also, nothing Hines says in Greatest Improviser seems remotely illogical or unlikely.) If Will Hines is the Uta Hagen of improv (I’m thinking Respect for Acting here) and I were an improviser, I might be out putting his lessons to the acid test on stage forthwith. Except, how do I get around the impression that the product of his advice isn’t funny? How’d you feel about a book on carpentry that presents instructions for building a chair that sound fine, but are illustrated by a photo of a chair that doesn’t look like it’ll stand straight or hold your weight?

“I don’t think you can teach people to be funny,” Hines admits. “But you can teach people how to maximize the funny that they have,” he continued. That’s what the UCB training, including the advice in Greatest Improviser, is all about. As Kirk phrased it, “[T]he whole point of the UCB approach seems to be to set up something, if not permanent, at least more structured than just getting up there and being hilarious.” It’s precisely the rationale for Stanislavsky’s development of his actor-training system (and for Hagen’s book and teaching philosophy—as with nearly all modern training for the stage): teach the student actors (or improvisers) how to marshal what innate talent and inspiration provide them so they can control it, use it, even call it up when needed, rather than wait around for it to show and just let it run wild and lead them by the nose. “You can teach people to take the things they are amused at in the real world,” Hines explains, “and translate that to the stage.”

In the introduction to theUCB improvisation manual, the authors affirm, “In reality, no matter how much fun they are having onstage, great improvisers are working together while adhering to a set of clear guidelines. Every improviser who starts a scene with another improviser is entering into a tacit agreement to use these guidelines to build a comedic scene with his or her scene partner.” As Hines puts it, “Improv is a real art form that can be worked at and that takes preparation.” That’s what UCB’s classes, the UCB manual, and How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth all are about.

[Some theater stories are just too good to go unshared. Life in the theater can be more bizarre than even the world of espionage, accounts of some of which I’ve related several times on ROT. (In fact, I’m in the midst of posting a series of reminiscences of my tour of duty as an intel officer in West Berlin in the 1970s.) I also recounted some ”Theater War Stories” on this blog on 6 December 2010. Below are a couple of stories, both from the New York Times that demonstrate what I mean. They’re not ”war stories” in the sense that they don’t concern a problem or disaster onstage or backstage, but they certainly illustrate that in the world of professional theater, you’re likely to run into all manner of odd occurrences.]

WHITE RODENT FINDS FAME ON THE GREAT WHITE WAY

by Corey Kilgannon

[The following story, which is about the Tony-, Drama Desk-, and Theatre World-winning Broadway production of Simon Stephens’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Ethel Barrymore Theater, 5 October 2014-4 September 2016) ran on the Times website (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/nyregion/white-rat-in-the-curious-incident-is-unexpected-broadway-hit.html) on 10 November 2014. It appeared in the print edition of 11 November in the front section with the headline: “A White Rat Finds Fame on the Great White Way.”]

‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ Has an Unexpected Star: A Rat Named Toby

The Broadway cast was less than thrilled when it found out who one of their fellow performers would be. It made them squeamish — not because of who it was but because of what it was.

They would be sharing the stage, it turned out, with a live rat.

“The idea of a rat was not exactly familiar to me,” said Alex Sharp, an actor who plays the leading role. “It was just a thing you see in the subway that has diseases.”

But Toby, the name of the rat kept by the teenager with autism at the center of the show, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” has managed to win over the affection of audiences and the cast — so much so that the rodent role has been expanded.

“She’s a special rat,” said Benjamin Klein, the associate director of the play, which opened in October to critical acclaim.

Indeed, Toby is not your subway-scampering, stomach-turning gray varmint. She — Toby is a female, but plays a male in the play — is a 9-month-old, affable albino who has the cast and crew of the play thoroughly wrapped around her long, tapered tail.

“I’m just a rat servant now — I’m the rat butler,” said Lydia DesRoche, Toby’s trainer, who says she has become sort of a social secretary, chaperoning Toby as she interacts with the smitten cast and crew backstage at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. “People come to visit me after the show just to meet Toby.”

Toby is even more popular than Dr. Watson, a cuddly golden retriever puppy who also appears in the play.

“She just makes being backstage a completely different experience,” said Francesca Faridany, who plays a special-education teacher to Christopher Boone, the British teenager who is the main protagonist.

Ms. DesRoche, who runs a service called Sit Stay dog training, has prepared animals for the stage — in fact, she trained two dogs for the current Broadway production of “Of Mice and Men.” But she had never worked with a rat until the producers of “Curious Incident” called to offer her the opportunity of furnishing and training a rat for Broadway.

“I was terrified of them; I run screaming when a rat crosses my path,” she said. “But I wanted the job, and if that involved touching a rat, I’m going to do it.”

Ms. DesRoche adopted Toby in September from Social Tees Animal Rescue in the East Village.

“They told me she was going to be” — and here, she put her hands over Toby’s little ears and whispered — “snake food.”

Toby was initially afraid of people and would not venture out of her cage, said Ms. DesRoche, who began by getting Toby more comfortable to being handled in small doses.

Then, in rehearsals, she held Toby offstage to acclimate Toby to the flashing lights and loud noises.

She said she trained Toby “the same way I would train a dog.”

“Instead of being motivated by treats, she likes to explore and meet new people,” she said. “So if I wanted her to do something, that would be the reward. I’d praise her and let her go meet somebody.”

While Ms. DesRoche takes Toby home on the weekends to her apartment on the Upper West Side, the rat goes home on weeknights with members of the cast and crew. There is no shortage of takers; members with children usually get first choice.

As she sat in the greenroom behind the stage before a recent Wednesday matinee, Ms. Faridany fed Toby string beans from her lunch and described how thrilled her 4-year-old daughter was when she got to bring Toby home for a couple of nights.

Sitting nearby was Mr. Sharp, who, after initially being daunted by Toby’s presence, now says, “She’s a clean lovely rat, like a little puppy.”

“At first, she just stayed in the cage, and that was the relationship we had,” he added. “Then they convinced me to take her home. Toby is one of Christopher’s best friends, so it’s very important” to be on friendly terms.

Mr. Klein said, “When we first told the cast we were having a real rat, people were not very excited we would have a live rat around.” But now, he added, “this is our star.”

Befitting Toby’s status, the rat has her own dressing room alongside the other actors’ dressing rooms. She shares it with Dr. Watson, and a sign on the door reads, “Puppy and Rat Room.”

Inside, yes, there are light bulbs around the mirrors and fresh roses on the makeup counter (Toby likes to nibble on roses). Also, on the counter is a long tube, for scampering through, and a glass of water, which she climbs up onto, and nearly hops into, as she drinks.

The cage in the room is a formality, since Toby has free range. To satisfy the rat’s insatiable appetite for playing with people, Ms. DesRoche allows her to stay in the greenroom where the cast passes through. Ms. DesRoche has also made a preshow ritual of escorting Toby throughout the backstage area, for short play-dates with those she encounters.

Since rats like small spaces, Ms. DesRoche said, Toby had little problem going into the small carrying case that Christopher carries onstage. Plus, Ms. DesRoche said, Toby does not run away “because rats don’t leave when they have it good.”

Toby displayed such skills and appeal that the decision was made to amplify her stage presence. During rehearsals and previews, Toby, who appears for much of the second half of the play, was kept inside her cage.

“But seeing how good our Toby was, we said, ‘Let’s see what we can do,’ ” said Mr. Klein, the associate director.

Now, Toby hops out to nuzzle, and sometimes scamper over Mr. Sharp. Ms. DesRoche has also taught Toby to run up Mr. Sharp’s arm, across his shoulders and down the other arm.

Toby is also popular with audiences. She elicits hearty laughter when she appears onstage, and Ms. DesRoche said that when she walked out the stage door with Toby on her shoulder, fans swarmed and snapped photographs.

There are a few holdouts in the cast who have not joined the Toby fan club. “But,” Ms. DesRoche said, “at least they don’t jump and scream anymore when they see her.”

Before a recent performance, Ian Barford, who plays Christopher’s father, passed a crowd of fellow cast members gathered around Toby, and mouthed the words, “I do not like that rat,” as if not to let Toby or her fans hear.

It was getting close to show time and in the dressing room, Ms. DesRoche held up the cage. “Toby, five minutes,” she said, and the rat scampered into her cage.

* * * *

THAT BROADWAY BABY, NOW IN ‘IN TRANSIT’

by Joanne Kaufman

[The story below, concerning the a cappellamusical In Transit (book, music, and lyrics by Kristen Anderson-Lopez, James-Allen Ford, Russ Kaplan and Sara Wordsworth)currently-running at the Circle in the Square Theatre (opened 11 December 2016), was posted on the Times’ website, (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/theater/broadway-baby-twan-in-transit-from-pittsburgh-civic-light-opera.html) on 28 December 2016; it ran in print on 3 January 2017 in the “Arts” section with the headline: “He’s Short and Phony, but Finds Steady Work on Broadway.”]

When Margo Seibert joined the cast of the Broadway show “In Transit” this past fall and learned that the script called for an infant, she knew who’d be perfect for the part: the theater veteran Twan Baker.

He made his debut in a 2009 production of “Into the Woods,” as the newborn offspring of the Baker and the Baker’s Wife at the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera. Since then, Twan — an 18-inch-long, 10-pound (just a guess) blue-eyed doll with an alert expression — has appeared in five Broadway shows, including “Cinderella,” “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Honeymoon in Vegas.” James Earl Jones cuddled him this summer in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” in an “Encores!” Off-Center production.

And yes, that was Twan as Marie (he’s clearly versatile), the love child of George and Dot in the recent Encores! rendition of “Sunday in the Park With George.” (Word is he’ll be auditioning to join the human stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford when the show moves to Broadway in the spring.)

“Prop babies are usually hollow,” said Hunter Foster, who played the Baker in that Pittsburgh production. “When they handed us Twan it was the first time I had a prop baby that felt like a baby.”

Credit Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera’s prop coordinator, Marty Savolskis, who bought a large doll off the rack at a toy store and filled it with beans to create heft.

“It sounds simple, but the actors got so excited,” Mr. Savolskis said. “Adding that weight really seemed to change their experience onstage.”

An infant so special — and so solid — apparently deserved a name. “We thought Antoine suited him,” said Mr. Foster, who shortened it to Twan, in homage to a character in the R. Kelly rap opera “Trapped in the Closet.”

When the Pittsburgh run ended, Mr. Foster and Brynn O’Malley, who had played his wife, kidnapped Twan, and from that day forward have shared custody and occasionally performed in the same shows as their charge: with Mr. Foster in “Bridges,” Ms. O’Malley in “Annie” and “Honeymoon in Vegas.” They have also served as talent agents, publicists and stage parents — creating accounts for him on Twitter (@Twan_Baker) and Facebook, and dropping him off at stage doors and rehearsal studios all over town.

“If there’s a dog in a show, it’s usually a real dog,” Ms. O’Malley said. “If there’s a baby, it’s a doll and you really appreciate it if it feels real.”

“The less you have to pretend the better,” added Ms. O’Malley, who was at first given what she describes as “an old CPR baby” when she reprised her “Into the Woods” role at the Kansas City Repertory Theater.

“It was really bulky and had big plastic arms and legs and smelled like stale talcum powder,’’ she recalled. “It made me queasy, so how could I pretend I loved it?” (At her request, Twan stepped in instead.)

Ms. Seibert made Twan’s intimate acquaintance in a 2012 production of “Pregnancy Pact” at the Weston Playhouse in Vermont. When she learned that her “In Transit” character would have a baby by that musical’s end, she texted Ms. O’Malley to see if the doll was looking for work.

“It’s fun to have a bit of Broadway lore,” Ms. Seibert said, leading the way backstage at the Circle in the Square Theater, where Twan dangled unceremoniously from a hook on a wall near the stage, his head covered in a white cap, his body encased in a Baby Bjorn.

Frankly, “In Transit” doesn’t ask all that much of Twan, who, by the looks of it, is a slave to his art. For other roles he has been covered in blood or dirt. One of his eyes opens while the other tends to stay shut, perhaps the consequence of reported rowdiness at the “Bridges” cast party.

“He’s been through a lot,” Ms. O’Malley said tenderly. “And it’s only made him a better actor.”

[As I promised in my closing note to “Berlin Memoir, Part 2” (see 31 December 2016), this installment will detail the most significant investigation in which I was engaged during the 2½ years I was stationed in Berlin. It’s probably no surprise to ROTters who’ve been following this reminiscence that the case involved exfiltration, that peculiar phenomenon in which I’d become the Station expert. (For an explanation of what exfiltration is and how I got involved in its investigation, I recommend going back and reading parts 1 and 2 of this memoir before embarking on the latest chapter. That’s also where readers’ll find definitions of the intel terms and army jargon I bandy about. “Berlin Memoir, Part 1” was posted on 16 December 2016.)]

As I said, most exfiltration cases were minor incidents, especially from the counterintel perspective. The case involving the Deputy Provost Matchall of Berlin Brigade was an exception. One other time, however, I hooked a really big one. The events of this episode, which only took a few hours, were actually set in motion months earlier. Some time in mid-1971, an ex-GI named “Red” Kappel (I think his actual given name was Martin, but everyone called him Red anyway), now working in Berlin at the PX warehouse, got caught on the Autobahn between Berlin and West Germany driving a car with five would-be refugees concealed in it. To complicate matters, he was driving his boss’s Caddy, a favorite of the exfiltrators because of its big trunk, implicating this high-ranking Civil Servant—he was a GS-12 or something, the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel—in the tangle. The East German Vopos turned Kappel over to the Soviets and after they took Kappel to Potsdam for a few days, the Soviets returned him to East German custody and he ended up in jail in East Berlin.

Military Intelligence interest began in this case because when Kappel had been a GI he had had a security clearance, and when he first came to Berlin after he got out of the army, he delivered pizza for a local restaurant and one of his regular delivery stops was Field Station Berlin, the super-secret, mountain-top ASA SIGINT and ELINT facility—our version of what I described at Helmstedt earlier—and no one knew what he might be able to tell someone about that place. FSB, located on the highest point in Berlin, Teufelsberg, a little mountain in Wilmersdorf created from the rubble of the city’s wartime destruction (which you see being shoveled into wheelbarrows in The Big Lift), bristled with antennas, domes, spheres, and silos—it looked like a set from the space opera Star Trek—and was a major target of Soviet espionage both because of its extreme sensitivity and because it was aimed at them.

We eventually determined that Kappel didn’t really have any info that the Soviets wouldn’t already possess, though at the beginning we didn’t know that. Security questions set aside, the case became part of the muddle of diplomatic-military-political issues that made up the Cold War. An American had committed a crime on Soviet-controlled soil, and the Soviets were going to make as big a deal out of it as they could. My job was to find out who else was involved and how far the participation of any official Americans, GI and civilian, went. The people running exfiltrations were the same ones who controlled the worst of Berlin’s crime; as I’ll describe later, they were about as nasty as anyone could be and the generals didn’t want any of their people in bed with them. And smuggling people across the East-West border by someone associated with the U.S. Forces was clearly a provocation to the Soviets at a time when that was a dangerous button to push.

We already knew about the warehouse manager, but as the investigation developed and other U.S. Forces personnel were identified, I also ended up coordinating with the OSI, the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, which combines the responsibilities of both MI and CID. I even did a good cop-bad cop interrogation of one AF NCO who turned out to be the lynchpin for exposing the whole team involved in the Kappel operation—he copped out under pressure and named names. (I was the bad cop. As we’ll see, I’m very good as playing a hard-ass. There was also one exercise at Holabird that sort of stunned everyone. But that’s another story.) To find out if anyone else was involved we monitored the mail at Kappel’s home and had his phone tapped. (The rules for this were a lot easier in Germany than in the U.S., and within the military community—and in occupied Berlin, that included civilian employees like Kappel anyway—it was at the discretion of the USCOB. In Berlin, the three Western generals had supreme authority, though the USCOB seldom exercised it over Germans or Americans with no official connection.)

Now, Kappel, like many GI’s, had married a German woman. Beside the fact that she wasn’t a U.S. citizen, a circumstance always considered a potential security risk, nearly every West German had family in East Germany. Family in the East was a pressure point the East Germans and Soviets were never reluctant to exploit. Helene Kappel was very vulnerable now, with no income and her connection to the American community and its safety net severed; there was no telling what she might do. In addition, before her marriage to Red, Helene had been a prostitute. I can tell you, I learned some interesting German from her mail and the phone tap because when she ran out of money, she went back to her old profession. She also made contact with the people who had hired her husband to drive the refugees to West Germany (actually they contacted her) and she began to recruit more drivers and car-owners for the organization.

While all this was going on, though, Kappel was just sitting in an East Berlin jail. I was on 24-hour call and couldn’t leave my BOQ without telling the Duty Agent where to reach me and calling in every hour or so. (The Duty Agent, or DA—usually an EM, though for a period when we were understaffed junior officers pulled this duty, too—stayed in the Station all night to answer the phones and respond to an alert by calling the section SAIC’s—Special Agents in Charge.) My parents came to Berlin for a visit during this time, and they were very impressed at how important I seemed to be because while we were out wandering around the city, I kept ducking into Stuben and bars to use the phone. Of course, I couldn’t tell them exactly what was going on, but they were very impressed nevertheless.

All this time, of course, I was writing reports on everything we were learning about the exfiltrators and their operations, as well as the contacts Helene was making and everything else related even remotely to the investigation. I attended high-level briefings with colonels and generals and ministers—sometimes in that secure room—where I was generally the only junior officer present. I’d have been impressed myself, if I hadn’t been so afraid of making a mistake. (I can tell you, I was replaying that previous run-in with the DCSI over the incident concerning the DPM. The DCSI didn’t like me, and we both knew it.) I learned at these briefings that my reports were going to the State Department and being read by Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State at the time. I even had intimations that some of my stuff was going to the White House. This was a really big deal, and I was the point man. (Somewhere, in some State Department or DOD archive is a big file with all my reports on this case, plus whatever other people were sending. That staff study’s probably moldering somewhere, too.)

Obviously, at one point there ceased to be much more we could do. Kappel had been caught red-handed (pardon the expression), so there was no denying his guilt. Except for trying to roll up the exfiltration operations, which we eventually pretty much did, there wasn’t anything left to investigate. Getting Kappel released became a diplomatic function, so the case went cold except for monitoring sources for word of his whereabouts and potential release. Everything pretty much went back to normal (which at Berlin Station was frequently hectic and crazy anyway, as you may have learned). I went back to my regular duties and was no longer on 24-hour call except when I was my section’s duty officer in the regular rotation. And that’s when it happened.

I was on call for the Counterespionage Section one evening, and I was just hanging out at my BOQ. (One agent from each section was on call every night and on the weekends. We had to be available and contactable at all times. Remember, there were no cell phones, or even beepers, in those days.) Sometime around 7 in the evening, the DA phoned me at home to come in and take a call. A guy thought that a recent photo of a wanted Baader-Meinhof member in the newspaper looked like his wife’s brother-in-law (or something). I talked the guy down, thanked him, and got rid of him. But as I was preparing to go back home, the phone rang again and the duty agent passed it on to me. The man on the other end said he was Red Kappel, that he had been released in West Berlin, and he wanted to meet someone.

Well, this didn’t sound kosher. Our latest information was that Kappel was still in the East Berlin lock-up, and while it was possible that the East Germans might release him suddenly and without notice, it was highly unlikely. They were all making too much hay out of holding him. (Kappel’s eventual release was almost certainly a direct result of Nixon’s trip to Moscow in May 1972. If they were working at that level, letting him go unannounced, with no bargaining or propaganda, would be pretty silly on their part. The Soviets could be petty, but they were seldom silly.) And even if he had been released that way, why would he call Military Intelligence? Not his wife, not his boss, not the guys who hired him (and probably hadn’t paid him yet), not some friends. Still, I couldn’t just ignore the call. I arranged to meet “Kappel” at the PX snack bar across Clayallee. It was about 8 p.m. now, and the place closed at 9, so it would be neutral, safe, but somewhat private. We made a date for a short time later.

Now, because this case fell between all the floorboards of military investigations—it wasn’t a security matter, it wasn’t a military crime, and since none of the people involved were GI’s, it wasn’t even a breach of military regs—we shared the case with the military detectives, the CID (Criminal Investigation Division of the MP’s). I had a CID counterpart, a German-born, naturalized-American warrant officer who didn’t want to be on this case any more than I did. Karl-Heinz Wiedermeyer also shared with his CID and MP colleagues a tendency to overreact whenever something got a little spooky. One whiff of spy stuff, and military cops sometimes went off half-cocked. Not that I was so cool, with my vast experience in counterespionage. (I once got into some trouble with my CO because I lost my cool when I got stuck with an malfunctioning radio when I was doing security for General Westmoreland at an Armed Forces Day parade. I started cursing over what I thought was a dead radio, but it was only broken at my end. They could hear me perfectly well back at base, and cursing on the air is a major RTO—Radio-Telephone Operator—no-no. So much for cool under pressure.) I was, however, at least trained for this stuff. Karl-Heinz wasn’t. He was a cop, not a spook. Anyway, I called Karl-Heinz and, because his office was at Andrews Barracks in Lichtenfelde and the ’X and I were in Zehlendorf, we decided that I’d go meet “Kappel” and he’d join us later. So I went on across the street to the PX complex, and went into the snack bar.

The PX snack bar is a cafeteria. This one was nearly all glass, with windows all around the two exterior walls, and the entrance in a completely glass wall. (The fourth side was the food counter and the kitchen.) At 8 o’clock in the evening, an hour before closing, there was virtually no one there except the workers closing up. As I entered, I saw one lone guy sitting at the opposite end of the room. He was at a table, with his broad-brimmed hat pulled down sort of ’40s style, and he was buried in the brigade Daily Bulletin. Every military post puts this out, with all the announcements, official and unofficial, and it’s a couple of pages long, printed—mimeographed in those days—on legal-sized paper. A guy in a slouch hat, poring over the DB looks pretty silly, believe me. The only other people in the snack bar were the cooks and servers cleaning up behind the counter and one teenager turning the chairs up onto the tables in the main part of the room. Obviously, the guy with the DB was my guy—but he wasn’t Red Kappel. I’d seen enough pictures of him over the months of investigation to know what he looked like, and this guy was ten years too old, ten pounds too heavy, and a good six inches too sort. And even with the hat, I could see that his hair was not red (Kappel didn’t get his nickname for nothing). I had to talk to the guy in any case. Even with all the deception, he might actually know something we should know. I doubted that, but I had to make a report anyway, so I had to find out what he wanted.

I crossed the room and went up to the guy’s table. I stood across from him, but he didn’t look up from the DB. Christ, I thought, the guy’s gonna play Sam Spade or something.

“Are you looking to talk to someone?” I said.

“You CIA?”

“No.”

“You got ID?” He still hadn’t looked up.

“No. Do you want to talk, or not?”

“OK.” I sat across from him.

“You got any ID?” I asked. He handed me his DOD ID card (though I’ve forgotten now what his name really was).

“I hear the Reds got one of our guys,” he said a little heatedly.

Oh, God. He’s a John Bircher or something. Where’s this gonna go? “Where’d you hear that?”

“Around. I work in the EES beverage shop. The words out.”

“OK. Why’d you want to see us?”

“I got a brother-in-law—well, my wife’s brother-in-law—in the East. He’s a party member, but he don’t like it there. I can go over and get him to find out where they’re holding Red.”

“Ah, no, that wouldn’t be a good idea. We really know where Red is, anyway. But thanks for offering.” Somewhere about here, I saw Karl-Heinz look in through the glass doors across the room. It was near closing now, and all the activity in the snack bar had pretty much ceased. There was only our James Bond wannabe and me in the room, and that teen mopping the floor. But Karl-Heinz looked around, didn’t come in, and left. What the hell, I figured, this isn’t important and I’ll just fill him in later, after I talk this guy down and send him home. I was a little afraid, considering how ditzy the guy was, that he might be armed and if I signaled Karl-Heinz across the room, “Kappel” might lose it or something. It wasn’t worth the chance under the circumstances. I let Karl-Heinz go without making a move or saying anything.

“Well, what if I go over and get my wife’s brother-in-law to help me break Red out? We could go over and get him before anybody knew. My wife’s brother-in-law”—he never used the man’s name, it was always “my wife’s brother-in-law”—”has access. He knows stuff, and he can find out things.”

“Fine. But don’t do anything until we get back to you. I have to report to my superiors, you know, and they’ll let you know. Promise me you’ll wait until you hear from me.”

“Sure. But I want to help. We can’t just let them get one of our guys like that.”

Jesus, this guy’s gonna do something dumb, I know it. He’s seen too many spy flicks. “Of course not. We’re doing things right now, don’t you worry. Believe me, we’re not just sitting on our hands here. Just don’t do anything without hearing from us. You might get in the way of another operation, you know. Don’t even talk to your wife’s brother-in-law yet. Just wait.”

“Sure. I understand. But you’ll get back to me. I’m ready to do something. I know I can trust my wife’s brother-in-law.”

I stood up then, and pointed out that the snack bar was closing up. I walked him out and across Clayallee. We stopped in front of the entrance gate to the compound. “Now, remember, you promised not to do anything until you hear from us. Right? Don’t even go to the East until then.”

“Right. I gotcha. I’ll wait to hear from you.” We shook hands and he walked away toward Saargemünderstrasse, around the corner of which was the small compound where the EES beverage store was, and where I imagined his car was parked. I watched him go until he turned the corner, then went into the headquarters compound and into the Station. When I entered the Station, there were three people in the DA’s little office and the phones—there were ten or a dozen lines—were all ringing. The DA was there, Karl-Heinz, and another agent from the Station who, it turned out, just happened along and got shanghaied.

“Karl-Heinz, where the hell did you go? Why didn’t you come into the snack-bar? I saw you look in, but you left right away.”

“I, uhh . . . . What the hell are you doing here?”

“I work here! What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

“Where were you?” asked the DA.

“Right where I said I was going to be. What’s this all about?”

“Wait a minute, let me call off the dogs,” said Karl-Heinz. Most of this dialogue is recreated from my memory—though it’s very close to what we all said. But this particular line was precisely what Karl-Heinz said. That phrase is etched in my brain.

After a second’s hesitation, the three started dialing and talking again, very nervously.

“What do you mean, ‘Call off the dogs’?”

“I didn’t see you in the snack-bar. I thought you got grabbed. We’ve called your CO, my CO”—that’s the PM—“the USCOB, the Brigade Commander, and the DCSI. We’ve put out APB’s on you, Kappel, your car, and the Caddy Kappel was driving. They’re shutting the whole city down.”

“Jesus, Karl-Heinz, did you overreact! I was right where I said I’d be. The only thing was, when I got there, I found out it wasn’t Kappel at all, of course. It was just some nut from the EES. He heard through the grapevine that Kappel got picked up in East Germany, and he wanted to go over and bust him out. He was a little hinky, so when I saw you peek in, I didn’t want to signal. Since it wasn’t Kappel or anyone important to the case, I figured I’d tell you later.”

“Well, I wasn’t looking for you, actually; I was looking for Kappel. When I didn’t see him, I just naturally assumed . . . .”

At this moment, Colonel Collins arrived. He was already on his way when the DA called to head him off. Besides, with the DCSI and two generals informed that I’d been kidnapped, he figured he’d better be in the Station to settle the flap. Unfortunately for me, the DCSI was also on his way in. The generals, at least, had been caught in time.

Colonel Collins picked up a phone and made several calls. I was still watching this whole scene in amusement and disbelief. After all, I hadn’t done anything. Was it my fault that Karl-Heinz had jumped to conclusions and overreacted?

“Well, the shit’s gonna hit,” said my CO. “The DCSI wants to see us in his office at USCOB. The PM’s closed the checkpoints and stopped the military train. The military part of Tempelhof’s been closed, too. They got the French and the Brits to lock down their sectors also, and the PM’s been on to the German agencies to shut down the civilian crossing points and exits as well. It took about half an hour to shut the city down. It’ll take hours to open it all up again. The DCSI’s gonna be pissed.”

“But why at me, sir? I was right where I said I’d be, doing just what I was supposed to do.” I knew the DCSI was just looking for a reason to chew my tail again. Would Colonel Collins back me again, as he had done before?

Well, the DCSI did light into me. At least he started to. And Colonel Collins pointed out right away that the flap had not been caused by anything I had done. The DCSI backed off, but he was clearly not happy about that.

As we left the DCSI’s office, Colonel Collins told me, “When I heard that you were kidnapped, my first fear was that you had your creds with you. Then I wondered if you had a weapon.” I looked at him a moment. He was really more worried about my boxtops and my .38 than about my safety. How comforting.

As far as I know, the city untangled itself and was back to normal by morning. I doubt anyone outside the Station, the PMO, and USCOB really knew what had happened. Probably some travelers were inconvenienced—mostly military ones, since the civilian stuff probably never got closed before the all-clear came down—but they probably never learned why. Anyway, I’m the only person I know who had a city shut down for him. Kinda makes me proud to be an American. This case had gone on for months—over a year I think. Then, suddenly, the case was over. Kappel was released. The scuttlebutt was that his release had been negotiated during Nixon’s trip to Moscow a few weeks earlier. (I was never able to confirm that, of course, but that’s what everyone assumed.)

The most this case did was ID some more exfiltration personalities, and drive up the fees they paid for cars and drivers. Because of the more detailed info my study provided, the Allied forces were able to clamp down pretty tightly on the operations and essentially deny the leaders access to Allied personnel as drivers—they could get through checkpoints with less scrutiny than Germans or other nationals—and cars with Allied plates, especially big American cars in which whole families could hide. The more difficult it got to get these assets, the higher the payment they offered. The PX warehouse manager had gotten $500 for the use of his Caddy (which he ended up losing, along with his job with the EES; we figured some Soviet general was tooling around Moscow in the Caddy); as a result of our operation, we pulled the lid so tight the exfiltration organizers were offering several thousand for cars, drivers were getting $10,000 and more, and Helene herself was promised a Mercedes for just recruiting people. For the rest of the time I was in Berlin, GI’s were out of the exfiltration biz—it was too risky, even for that kind of money. (As the costs went up, so, of course, did the price paid by the refugees. It was a cash deal, and I imagine fewer and fewer would-be escapees could afford it anymore.)

[So, how many people do you know who’ve had a city closed on their account? Not many, I’ll wager. (My Dad was actually thrown out of a city by the mayor . . . but that’s a different story.) If this episode whets your appetite for more reminiscences about Cold War Berlin, please come back in a couple of weeks for part 4 of “Berlin Memoir.” Since I’m posting the installments somewhat haphazardly, I can’t say exactly when the next chapter—which covers some of the other intel activities in which I was involved (just the highlights, of course!)—will appear, but they’ve been coming about once every two to three weeks.]

[As readers of ROT will know by now, one of my overriding interests in good writing, I’m a recovering writing teacher, having attempted to inculcate the notion that good writing is an asset to everyone, no matter in what field you endeavor. I’ve taught writing, composition, or English at both the high school level and college, I’ve included an emphasis on clear, simple prose in classes such as theater appreciation and even acting, and I’ve tutored and coached writers and acted as an editor even beyond this blog. Pursuant to that goal, I’m republishing two columns from the New York Times here on a phenomenon that’s become all too visible in recent years. Read what writer Henry Hutchins has said about turning verbs and adjectives into nouns on the Times’ blog, “Opinionator.” The first column appeared on 30 March 2013 at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com.]

“THOSE IRRITATING VERBS-AS-NOUNS”

by Henry Hitchings

“Do you have a solve for this problem?” “Let’s all focus on the build.” “That’s the take-away from today’s seminar.” Or, to quote a song that was recently a No. 1 hit in Britain, “Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?”

If you find these sentences annoying, you are not alone. Each contains an example of nominalization: a word we are used to encountering as a verb or adjective that has been transmuted into a noun. Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns, and associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly.

There are two types of nominalization. Type A involves a morphological change, namely suffixation: the verb “to investigate” produces the noun “investigation,” and “to nominalize” yields “nominalization.”

Type B is known as “zero derivation”—or, more straightforwardly, “conversion.” This is what has taken place in my opening illustrations: a word has been switched from verb into noun (or, in the last two cases, from adjective into noun), without the addition of a suffix.

Plenty of teachers discourage heavy use of the first type of nominalization. Students are urged to turn nouns of this kind back into verbs, as if undoing a conjurer’s temporary hoax. On this principle, “The violence was Ted’s retaliation for years of abuse” is better rendered as “Ted retaliated violently after years of abuse.”

The argument for doing this is that the first version is weaker: dynamic writing makes use of “stronger” verbs. Yet in practice there are times when we may want to phrase a matter in a way that is not so dynamic. Perhaps we feel the need to be tactful or cautious, to avoid emotiveness or the most naked kind of assertion. Type A nominalization can afford us flexibility as we try to structure what we say. It can also help us accentuate the main point we want to get across. Sure, it can be clunky, but sometimes it can be trenchant.

On the whole, it is Type B nominalization that really grates. “How can anybody use ‘sequester’ as a noun?” asks a friend. “The word is ‘sequestration,’ and if you say anything else you should be defenestrated.”

“I’ll look forward to the defenestrate,” I say, and he calls me something I’d sooner not repeat.

Even in the face of such opprobrium, people continue to redeploy verbs as nouns. I am less interested in demonizing this than in thinking about the psychology behind what they are doing.

Why say “solve” rather than “solution”? One answer is that it gives an impression of freshness, by avoiding an everyday word. To some, “I have a solve” will sound jauntier and more pragmatic than “I have a solution.” It’s also more concise and less obviously Latinate (though the root of “solve” is the Latin solvere).

These aren’t necessarily virtues, but they can be. If I speak of “the magician’s reveal” rather than of “the magician’s moment of revelation,” I am evoking the thrill of this sudden unveiling or disclosure. The more traditional version is less immediate.

Using a Type B nominalization may also seem humorous and vivid. Thus, compare “that was an epic fail” (Type B nominalization), “that was an epic failure” (Type A nominalization) and “they failed to an epic degree” (neither).

There are other reasons for favoring nominalizations. They can have a distancing effect. “What is the ask?” is less personal than “What are they asking?” This form of words may improve our chances of eliciting a more objective response. It can also turn something amorphous into a discrete conceptual unit, of a kind that is easier to grasp or sounds more specific. Whatever I think of “what is the ask?” it focuses me on what’s at stake.

Some regard unwieldy nominalizations as alarming evidence of the depraved zeitgeist. But the phenomenon itself is hardly new. For instance, “solve” as a noun is found in the 18th century, and the noun “fail” is older than “failure” (which effectively supplanted it).

“Reveal” has been used as a noun since the 16th century. Even in its narrow broadcasting context, as a term for the final revelation at the end of a show, it has been around since the 1950s.

“Ask” has been used as a noun for a thousand years—though the way we most often encounter it today, with a modifier (“a big ask”), is a 1980s development.

It is easy to decry nominalization. I don’t feel that a writer is doing me any favors when he expresses himself thus: “The successful implementation of the scheme was a validation of the exertions involved in its conception.” There are crisper ways to say this. And yes, while we’re about it, I don’t actually care for “Do you have a solve?”

Still, it is simplistic to have a blanket policy of avoiding and condemning nominalizations. Even when critics couch their antipathy in a language of clinical reasonableness, they are expressing an aesthetic judgment.

Aesthetics will always play a part in the decisions we make about how to express ourselves—and in our assessment of other people’s expression—but sometimes we need to do things that are aesthetically unpleasant in order to achieve other effects, be they polemical or diplomatic.

[A version of this article appeared in print on Sunday, 31 March 2013, in the “Sunday Review” section of the New York Times.

[By the way, for those who didn’t really catch it, defenestration, an odd word in any case, means simply “the act of throwing someone or something out a window,” as in the historical Defenestration of Prague which launched the Thirty Years’ War in 1618.]

* * * *

“THE DARK SIDE OF VERBS-AS-NOUNS”

by Henry Hitchings

[In his follow-up column on “Opinionator,” on Friday, 5 April 2013, Hitchings continues his discussion of nominalization.]

In my previous essay, I wrote about nominalization—the deployment as nouns of words we mostly expect to encounter as verbs or adjectives. Aware of many people’s tendency to vilify this kind of usage, I speculated about the psychology behind it. I was interested in thinking about whysomeone might prefer “Do you have a solve for this problem?” to “Can you solve this problem?”

Like many of the readers who commented, I find that some nominalizations are useful and others are jarring. I can accept that language changes (and has to change) without necessarily cherishing all manifestations of that change. I don’t shudder when I see or hear “This year’s spend is excessive” and “Her book was a good read,” even though I can think of other, perhaps more elegant ways of saying these things. On the other hand, “There is no undo for that” strikes me as infelicitous, and I am still not completely comfortable with the use of the noun “disconnect” as a synonym for “disparity” or “discrepancy”—although it has been around since the 1980s.

In some cases a nominalization is the specialist vocabulary of a particular profession or community: it has connotations of expertise and—less often—of an insider’s self-regard. For instance, people who work in software talk about the “build,” and I recently heard a real estate agent speak of creating a “seduce” for property. When these terms of art gain wider currency, it is largely because nonspecialists are eager to seem conversant with the ins and outs of an esoteric subject. Sometimes we adopt such terms in a jocular or satirical spirit—but end up using them without a whiff of irony.

In the last couple of decades, many condensed forms of expression have achieved currency thanks to the spread of electronic communication: when we bash out e-mails and text messages, we feel the need for speed. Several readers made this point. Nominalizations allow us to pack the information in our sentences more densely. This urgency comes in other guises: nouns get verbed as often as verbs get nouned. (I had to go and lie down after writing that.)

What I didn’t discuss in my first post was the dark side of nominalization. It’s not just that nominalization can sap the vitality of one’s speech or prose; it can also eliminate context and mask any sense of agency. Furthermore, it can make something that is nebulous or fuzzy seem stable, mechanical and precisely defined. That may sound like a virtue, but it’s really a way of repudiating ambiguity and complexity.

Nominalizations give priority to actions rather than to the people responsible for them. Sometimes this is apt, perhaps because we don’t know who is responsible or because responsibility isn’t relevant. But often they conceal power relationships and reduce our sense of what’s truly involved in a transaction. As such, they are an instrument of manipulation, in politics and in business. They emphasize products and results, rather than the processes by which products and results are achieved.

I touched previously on “What is the ask?” As an alternative to “What are they asking?” or “What are we being asked to do?” this can seem crisp. It takes an aerial view of an issue. But it calculatedly omits reference to the people doing the asking, as a way of keeping their authority and power out of the question.

At the same time, by turning the act of asking into something narrow and impersonal, “What is the ask?” repositions a question as a command. It leaves little or no room for the “ask” to be refused. As a noun, “ask” is pretty much a synonym for “order.” Even when we retain details of agency—as in “What is their ask of us?” – the noun ossifies what could and should be a more dynamic process.

Compared with “What is the ask?” the question “What’s the take-away from today’s lecture?” may look harmless. Yet it minimizes audience members’ sense of their responsibility to absorb the lecture’s lessons. “What should I take away from today’s lecture?” is a question that betrays a cramped and probably exam-focused understanding of what it means to learn. But “What’s the take-away?” seems to represent education as a product rather than a practice. It invites an answer that’s a sound bite, a Styrofoam-sheathed portion of spice, a handy little package to be slavishly reproduced.

Such phrasing also curtails the lecturer’s role, making him or her not so much a source of ideas and a repository of intellectual trust as a purveyor of data packets. This may be an unhappy accident, or it may be strategic – perhaps a disavowal of the very notion that education is personal.

Nominalizations aren’t intrinsically either good or bad. Yet, used profusely, they strip the humanity out of what we write and say. They can also be furtively political. Their boosters see them as marvels of concision, but one person’s idea of streamlining is another’s idea of a specious and ethically doubtful simplicity.

[Henry Hitchings isa British author, reviewer, and critic with a particular focus on language and cultural history. He’s the theatre critic for the London Evening Standard, and has also written for the Financial Times, the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and the Times Literary Supplement. The author of five books exploring language and culture, his most recent is Sorry! The English and their Manners (2013). Hitchings’s secondbook, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, won the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.]

[As I recounted in my two-part article “Actors’ Equity at 100” (19 and 22 June 2013), the Actors’ Equity Association, the union that represents professional stage actors and stage managers, was established in 1913. Many people who follow theater know that AEA represents actors who work on the live stage (SAG-AFTRA represents those who perform in the big and small screens), but I wonder how many outside the profession are aware that the same union also represents stage managers, the theater pros who keep the productions running smoothly from back stage. (I published an article from an earlier issue of Equity News, “Stage Managers Wear Many Different Hats” by Michael Sommers, that addresses the question of what a stage manager does. It’s part of a post called “Stage Hands”[14 January 2014].) AEA used to represent directors, too, until 1959 (when they split off and formed what is now the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, known as SDC), but why didn’t the SM’s follow them or form their own guild? Surely, what SM’s do is more akin to what directors do than it is to actors, right? Indeed, it’s the responsibility of the stage manager to keep the show stage-worthy in the absence of the director, say after opening, and to rehearse understudies and replacements.

[First, many SM’s are also actors—as you’ll read below—and continue to work in both capacities. Second, unlike directors, whose jobs are essentially done when the play opens, stage managers are often called upon to play small roles, especially in touring productions and at small rep companies where cast size is a serious consideration. This puts them squarely in Equity’s wheelhouse, and so they remain part of the same union as their performing brothers and sisters. The Winter 2017 issue of Equity News is devoted to paying tribute to he union’s stage manager members, and so I’ve collected the six articles from the union’s house magazine for republishing on ROT. I hope readers find them edifying. ~Rick]

From The Executive Director

CELEBRATING OUR STAGE MANAGERS

by Mary McColl

Every performer loves stage managers. Stage managers are the artists who maintain the production. They keep time, keep the schedule, keep everyone on stage and on their mark. If you follow us [i.e., Actors’ Equity Association] on social media, you know that we have spent the past couple of months celebrating and highlighting Equity’s stage managers with #LoveMySMs. We asked members to submit photos of themselves, or stage mangers they have worked work with, for us to celebrate. The result has been inspiring. We have heard from and showcased many of our stage managers who work across the country. We encourage you to continue sending us photos (send to jaustin@actorsequity.org) so that we can keep #LoveMySMs going.

While working at Actors’ Equity I’ve had the opportunity to interact with many of the stage managers featured in this month’s magazine. One conversation that stands out for me was with a stage manager who works Off-Broadway. She spoke about how stage managers are artists who “conduct” each performance. She said that every call she makes brings the show to life. That conversation helped give me a new perspective on how stage managers work and further solidified why they are so important to this industry.

Performers in a company depend in so many ways on their stage manager. Not only are they a wealth of information when it comes to your contract, rules and breaks, but he or she helps ensure your safety. Your stage manager is often the first line of defense in your workplace. (Make sure you talk to your Deputy as well if you encounter any issues. He or she is there to help and will make sure we know what is going on.) The fact that we represent stage managers as well as actors is good for the production and good for the industry.

This issue brings us stories of stage managers across the country. We hear from two stage managers who have disabilities, stage managers who have the added pressure of awards season, a stage manager who works full-time as a resident stage manager and another who is often working at various houses.

2016 was a big year for Equity. Not only did we implement the new format of Equity News, we introduced the Equity News Center and ECC [Equity Chorus Call] and EPA [Equity Principal Audition] online sign-ups in the Member Portal, we negotiated strong contracts across the country. We also strengthened our commitment to diversity and inclusion within our industry (look for more news and statistics in my next column).

As 2017 begins, we stand with our brothers and sisters in the labor community. Together, we will face challenges. As a union, we will work to protect your rights.

Now, more than ever, we need to stand together because we are stronger together.

* * * *

WE LOVE OUR STAGE MANAGERS

by Ira Mont

A stage manager is a vital role that I view as the central hub of both the production and the company. We are responsible for facilitation, communication, collation, collaboration and administration. We are the protector, the sounding board and disciplinarian of the company. The stage manager is the eyes, ears and, I believe, the heart and mind of the producer and director when they aren’t in the room.

I thought I was going to be an actor. I joined the union in the spring of 1987. I scored my first contract at the Theater Factory St. Louis, an SPT [Small Professional Theatre] company. Having done some stage management work, I was hired for the company’s summer season to not only perform in several shows, but to also stage manage several others.

Stage managing came naturally to me; one, because I like to know everything that’s going on and two, in addition to being organized, I like to make things work. When I was a student at Circle in the Square, I spent a lot of time watching Present Laughter [1982-83] from the booth with PSM [Production Stage Manager] Michael Ritchie. I became the friend who could help light a cabaret or assist in stage managing a showcase. Between ’87 and ’88, I started getting calls and job offers for stage management. Without looking for it or realizing it, I transitioned from actor to stage manager. It was and is a perfect fit.

Getting to be on both sides of the curtain has helped shape my union tenure. I currently serve as the 3rd Vice President of Equity. I believe that many of the qualities that make me a good stage manager make me a good union leader. I thoroughly enjoy all of the intricacies of how our union works. I joined my first committee (Developing Theatre) the minute I returned home from St. Louis in 1987. Since then I have served on and chaired several committees, represented our members at organizations like the AFL-CIO, among others, and have continued to advocate and fight for members on contract negotiations. My role with the union is not much different than my role in the theater.

Having been a performer, I believe stage managers and actors serve each other well as members of the same union. If you view the life of a show as first rehearsal to closing night, only two groups are there in the room every day from beginning to end—actors and stage managers. We bring out the best in each other.

I am proud to have made a career as a stage manager. I’m even more proud to serve all of you, my fellow brothers and sisters. I’m thrilled to celebrate our stage managers and to acknowledge their tireless work and dedication to the production. I love my fellow SMs!

[Ira Mont is 3rd Vice President of Actors’ Equity. He’s currently PSM on Broadway’s Cats, before which he stage-managed 18 Broadway shows, including all three of the Norman Conquest trilogy revivals (2011), the stage première of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (2013-15), The Producers (2001-07), Smokey Joe’s Café (1995-2000), and Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995). Mont’s also worked Off-Broadway on Full Gallop (1996-97), I Do! I Do! (1996), and Manhattan Class Company’s Class 1 Acts: '91-'92 (1992).]

* * * *

STAGE MANAGING WITH A DISABILITY

by Josh Austin

Members Philip B. Richard and Elizabeth Salisch share what it’s like working with a disability in this industry

When Philip B. Richard II had his worst epileptic seizure to date, he was at work. He fell, landing hard on his chin. He broke both sides of his jaw and lost two teeth. After visiting the hospital and leaving with a wired-shut mouth, he returned to work that day.

“I was told I couldn’t do my job with my mouth wired shut, and I couldn’t get workers’ comp since my epilepsy was pre-existing,” he said. “But just like with everything else, I told them I could do my job and I was back to work that same day—blending my food and eating from a turkey baster.”

That was prior to becoming an Equity member. Richard has been a union stage manager for just under one year—and is flourishing. He was born with epilepsy, a neurological disability that affects over 3 million Americans, and causes unpredictable seizures. For Richard, his longest span without an episode has been 12 years. But, like anyone with a disability, and in particular working as a stage manager, there have been a lot of “figure it out for yourself” moments.

“The theatre has always been a place that I felt that I fit in and belong,” he said. “I’ve never wanted to do anything else.” That’s meant, for Richard, figuring out bus rides or walking routes (he’s not allowed to drive a car; though, he noted, Equity doesn’t allow that to affect the hiring of a stage manager) and working effectively with strobe lighting (which can trigger a seizure). “I always make sure that my disability never stops me from doing what I want.”

Elizabeth Salisch was born orthopedically impaired. Between the ages of one to six years old, she went through 15 surgeries to make her hands functional.

And though Salisch said that she is unable to operate a drill gun, “I am highly adaptable to finding ways to do what I need to do, whether it’s finding another way or by knowing how to find the right person to help me. This is very useful as a stage manager.”

Salisch saw her first Broadway show when she was just five years old. Immediately, she knew she wanted in. Attending the University of Pittsburgh as a Theatre Arts major, she found stage management from asking how she could be involved. “I fell in love with stage management because it not only fits my personality, but is one of the few positions that sees the journey of the production from the very beginning to the very end.”

Though both Salisch and Richard admit that Equity has made their lives easier (for Salisch, it’s saving for a pension and health benefits; Richard is grateful that the union has taken major strides to protect those with disabilities and to ensure they are not discriminated against), Richard acknowledged that those in the industry might have preconceived notions about workers with disabilities. Perhaps, he said, people believe those with a disability can’t handle the stress of the job. “Stage managers have so much that we do on a daily basis and a lot of that is last-minute along with being fast-paced,” he said. “That is the normal level—for those with disabilities, it adds another layer, but it’s not impossible.”

Salisch has stage managed many young audience productions. She noted that the students most often ask her what happened to her hands. “My response to them, and to anyone who perceived people with a physical disability as being different, is that we are the same and I can do the same things as you, but I look different just like some people have brown hair and some may have blonde.”

Richard also pointed out that those with a disability tend to have a preconceived notion about themselves: They assume they can’t do something when all they have to do is find another path.

And for those with disabilities thinking of entering the world of stage management, both Salisch and Richard would say “follow your dreams.”

“For someone with a disability, it can be harder, but don’t let it stop you,” Richard said. “Never, never let your disability stop you. Work with it. Think outside the box. I’ve never let anything stop me.”

---------------

I would tell someone else who may have a disability if they want to stage manage, or do anything else in the theater, they should go for it. —Elizabeth Salisch

* * * *

DEAR STAGE MANAGERS, THANK YOU.

“To be an SM is to run an adult daycare at times. Colleen Nielsen knows that a balanced amount of respect while maintaining an organized and safe environment to explore the human condition is its own art. You are so essential to the success of our storytelling. Thank you!” —Iris Elton

“Jill Gold is always a class act. She’s a family woman with kids my age, so I can relate. She always has a smile on her face and kind words for everyone, and she seems to truly love actors. My last Equity job was Empire with McCoy Rigby [Entertainment; La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, La Mirada, California; 2016] and I was very excited to hear she was helping steer the ship.” —Richard A. Bulda

“There is no better SM around than long time stage manager Pat Adams at the Wilma Theater—and I think she has been there almost 20 years. Another wonderful Philadelphia SM who is now at Delaware Theater Company is Marguerite Price. These are two exceptional women, devoted union SMs and the backbone of theatre in the Philadelphia area.” —Nancy Boykin

“Before the last show of the week, Stephen Milosevich (production stage manager for Hir [by Taylor Mac, Playwrights Horizons; 2015]) would play disco over the monitor at our places call. He is the most organized, most professional goofball I’ve ever met.” —Tom Phelan

“Bryan Rodney Bauer is one of the most inspiring young stage managers I have met. While juggling a main stage production at Playwrights Horizons, he facilitated an organized, warm room for us to create Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop [by Michael R. Jackson; Feinstein's/54 Below; 2016]; I cannot wait to work with him again!” —Larry Owens

“I have to give a shout out to the amazing Kate Bartels. Kate is always professional, always smiling and she always gets the job done! There’s nothing better as an actor than knowing that the stage manager is on top of everything, and with Kate, there’s never a question!” —Amy Alvarez

“Craig Horness is the PSM at Ford’s Theater [Washington, D.C.], and I was lucky to do five seasons of A Christmas Carol with him. He keeps the show in shape and keeps the company in great spirits, and is a fantastic human.” —Vishal Vaidya

* * * *

GETTING INTO THE BUSINESS EQUITY MEMBER

by Stephanie Masucci

Two stage managers talk about starting their careers and mentoring those who are up-and-coming in the industry

Cheryl G. Mintz, the current Resident Production Stage Manager for McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., knew in high school that she wanted to be a stage manager. “In 11th grade I had the opportunity to stage manage The Crucible, and that opened up my theatrical world and changed my direction. I had very positive undergraduate theatre experiences at SUNY [State University of New York] Stony Brook and University of Loughborough in England, all of which led me to the Directing & Stage Management MFA at the Yale School of Drama.”

Yale proved to be a definitive experience for Mintz. Over the course of three years, she worked with over 300 passionate students and was able to network (a very different [sic] in the 1980s, she noted). After graduation she began her professional career with the National Theatre’s production of Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C. [1987], and then returned to New York City with a new production of the play [Promenade Theatre, 1988], in her first Equity Production Contract as a PSM.

On the flipside, becoming a stage manager was a career member Hope Villanueva accidentally fell into. “It was under one of the first directors that I worked for in Los Angeles that I realized this job appeals to both my desire to be around and create art, as well as my organizational sensibilities,” she said. “Becoming an Equity member wasn’t easy, though. “Since I started as a PSM and fell into job after job, I couldn't get into an EMC [Equity Membership Candidate] program when I wanted to join the union because I was ‘overqualified.’ Thankfully, a production manager in D.C. was willing to take a chance on me and offer me my first Equity contract as a PSM. I’ve been doing the D.C. thing ever since and even get to pick up an NYC project once a year or so.”

In 1984, Mintz first observed Susie Cordon backstage when she was the production stage manager for Noises Off on Broadway. Fast forward to 1991, when Cordon brought her in to be the rehearsal stage manager for Artistic Director Emily Mann’s production of The Three Sisters [McCarter Theater, Princeton, New Jersey]. “She remembered me, and seven years later that networking paid off. A perfect example of ‘you never know where you might get a job from.’ The McCarter was having a challenging time mounting its then-new production of A Christmas Carol, and Susie had to focus her energies upstairs, thus bringing me in for the next production that was in rehearsal. I was 29 years old, and Susie was an impeccable role model. There were few first-class female production stage managers in the ’80s and early ’90s, and Susie was one of them.” Mintz has since built a deep collaborative relationship with Mann, having done 31 productions together at McCarter and the Kennedy Center and on Broadway.

While Villanueva also believes networking is a key tool for success in this business, when it comes to job searching, she uses Equity’s Casting Call and other resources, even when she has a job. “I’m grateful that in the last year or so, I’m starting to get directors or companies to ask for me.” She also offers advice to those who may be just starting on this path: “Be flexible and be nice. Anyone can learn to be organized or do the paperwork or call a show with enough practice. The hardest thing will be being gracious and efficient, even when you’re being treated badly. You help set the tone for the whole production, and if you can keep a lightness and kindness to you, I believe the show ends up being a healthier place for everyone.”

The success of her staff is something Mintz takes great pride in, “and the 40 interns that have passed through the McCarter Stage Management Internship inspire me to no end. Last year, during my 25th season, I decided to step back and evaluate what my interns don’t learn while at McCarter. I contacted two dozen past interns asking that question. Out of that feedback I have created some master classes, which I conduct with the current interns, such as Opera Stage Management Boot Camp, and the Business of the Business. I definitely have my systems for doing things, but the interns shake things up, and keep me fresh and constantly re-evaluating things.”

For Villanueva, the “post show glow” is her favorite part of being a stage manager. “When everyone knows it came off great and the audience loved it or were moved, it feels like a job well done. I also enjoy tech more than most, I think. Unless there’s a crazy hurdle, I feel like it’s the time when I actually learn to do my job on the show instead of just supporting the learning of everyone else.”

* * * *

GET ME TO THE STAGE ON TIME

The road to the Tony Awards as told by stage managers

Councillor and stage manager Marjorie Horne sat down with three Equity stage managers—Peter Hanson, Bess Marie and Michael Passaro—to talk about getting their casts and productions ready for the Tony Awards.

MarjorieHorne:What are your experiences from the time nominations are announced to getting into the theater for that week?

PeterHanson:It’s complicated if your show opens late in the season. You barely get a chance to catch your breath— you’re trying to think about understudy rehearsal, bringing the swings up to speed—and you’re immediately having to figure out your number for the Tony Awards, rehearse it, show it to the Tony producers, and all those things that happen in the run-up.

BessMarie:What’s unfortunate is the performers are running on empty, especially those who are nominated. It’s also difficult when you have stars in your show who are not nominated, or when your show doesn’t get any nominations and you’re asked to perform.

MichaelPassaro:When we did How to Succeed [in Business Without Really Trying; 2011 Best Revival of a Musical nominee] and Dan [Radcliffe] wasn’t nominated for Best Actor in a Musical, everyone was tiptoeing around this. To his credit, he pulled the company together and said, “Listen, I’m so proud of the show and what we’ve all done here. We should celebrate the fact that John Laroquette [Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical winner] and Tammy Blanchard [Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical nominee] and the show and all these things are nominated. Don’t worry about me. I know the people are coming to see this show because of the movies I’ve been in, and if I can have one person develop a lifetime of theatregoing because they came to see us in this show, then my job is done.” That was the greatest thing to turn that whole situation around because it can be so fraught with pressure and jealousy.

Horne: What’s your relationship to the creatives in building the number for the awards show?

Passaro: With Bright Star [2016 Best Musical nominee], once the producers decided to do the opening number, we had to determine how many of the cast we’d bring; would we include the swings, were we bringing all the musicians or just the ones that were visible in the house? Were they going to bring the scenic unit from the theater, were they going to build a separate one or bring a modified one?

Hanson: To take an eight-minute-long number and reduce it to three and a half minutes means work for the creatives, the musical team and the choreographer before we even show it to the actors. You have a number in your bones that you’ve been doing for a couple months, and now we’re asking you to do a surgical snip here in musical time and then go to this 15 bars and then go to this, and it gets complicated. When the producers of the Tonys are out in the house with their video cameras, you want them to look good.

Marie: There’s nothing like it.

Passaro: Particularly at the dress rehearsal, you get to see a lot of people you haven’t seen in a while. It’s a small industry, but we all have our shows and we all have our lives—we don’t ever see each other that much. It’s a wacky day, and many of my most cherished memories of doing Tony Awards are the morning rehearsals.

Hanson: One of my great memories from Evita [2012 Best Revival of a Musical nominee] was that we were coming on stage, and as we headed up with Elena Roger in front, coming off stage was Patti LuPone, who originated the role of Evita. Those two women jumped into each other’s arms and had this incredible introduction to each other. [NB: There seems to be some error here: Michael Passaro stage-managed the 2012 revival of Evita. ~Rick]

Marie: It’s fun, too, when they do the backstage stuff. During Once [2012 Best Musical winner], they wanted to do outtakes when going to commercial break, so they were showing some of my cast members warming up, and I just happened to be there because Cristin Milioti [2012 Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical nominee] needed her spray for her throat. I was there giving Ricola out, and next thing I know my phone is blowing up in the middle of the night with, “Oh my God, oh my God, you were just on TV!”

Passaro: I became interested in theatre because of the Tony Awards, in the days when the only Broadway we got to see in upstate New York was the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Tony Awards. My mother was watching television one Sunday night the year that A Chorus Line [1976 Best Musical winner; 2007 Best Revival of a Musical nominee] opened the awards with that incredible number, and I said, “I want to do that.” To be able to participate at this level is such a thrill and an honor, I can’t even describe it.

[About a year ago, the New York Times published an article about playwright Mac Wellman (Antigone, 2004; Second-Hand Smoke, 1997; The Hyacinth Macaw, 1994; A Murder of Crows, 1992) as a teacher at Brooklyn College. His teaching techniques and his tutorial points about playwriting are very reminiscent of his own writing—no just in his play scripts, but also in his essays about theater.

[I‘ve seen three of Wellman’s plays (Sincerity Forever, 1990; Hyacinth Macaw; Energumen, 1985) and an anti-Iraq war collage called Collateral Damage to which Wellman contributed in 1991. (I posted a brief report on Energumen in “I’m So Confused . . . !” on 4 July 2012, Unhappily, there’s no report on Hyacinth Macaw.) As part of my research on Leonardo Shapiro, the founder and director of The Shaliko Company on whom I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater, I looked into another Wellman play, Whirligig, which Shaliko commissioned. For that same research, I also read Wellman’s wonderful—but idiosyncratic—essay “A Chrestomathy Of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater,” published originally in Yale School of Drama’s Theater magazine (Vol. 24, No. 1, 1993).

[So I’m going to republish “A Mentor Whose Only Mantra Is Oddity” by Alexis Soloski below and then close this post with my description of Whirligig. I hope you all will find both (or at least one, please) interesting.}

“A MENTOR WHOSE ONLY MANTRA IS ODDITY”

by Alexis Soloski

[This article first appeared in print in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 18 February 2015.]

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Mac Wellman, the Donald I. Fine Distinguished Professor of Play Writing, sat at the head of a table in a Brooklyn College classroom. It was the first meeting of the semester, and he needed to arrange tutorials with his graduate students. He asked them to draw up a plan for the term’s work: something small, something secret. “Pick something you’re a little afraid of,” he advised in his gentle, raspy tenor.

“Pick something that scares you. Plays that are covered in fur, for instance.”

Since Mr. Wellman joined the Brooklyn College faculty in 1998, he has trained many of New York’s wildest and woolliest playwrights. Annie Baker, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for “The Flick,” studied with him. So did Young Jean Lee, Thomas Bradshaw, Tina Satter and members of Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the National Theater of the United States of America.

This winter and spring [i.e., 2015], JACK, a theater space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, is devoting much of its season to recent graduates of the program. The festival is called Damnable Scribbling, a nod to Mr. Wellman’s favored appellation, the one that graces his website: Damnable Scribbler.

There are other places to study playwriting, of course. And other professors to study it with. No one sniffs at a master of fine arts degree from New York University, a certificate in playwriting from Juilliard. But Mr. Wellman’s program has the distinction of turning out audacious writers with very little in common with him or with one another. Try to find the overlap of Ms. Baker’s empathetic neorealism and Mr. Bradshaw’s scabrous provocations. Look for the intersection between Ms. Lee’s canny deconstructions of identity politics and Sibyl Kempson’s rapturous nonsense. Keep looking.

Mr. Wellman, 69, came to playwriting accidentally. As he explained over a glass of rosé at a cafe near his Park Slope apartment, he was hitchhiking in the Netherlands during a junior year abroad when the Dutch director Annemarie Prins happened to give him a ride. He gave her a few of his poems, and she asked him if he had ever considered writing plays. “No,” he told her. “I don’t like plays.” But she persisted, and he obliged her, writing plays for Dutch radio.

In his own estimation, his early poetical plays “were really pretty awful.” It took him a decade of constant theatergoing and constant practice to learn how to write. Since then, he has won three Obies and numerous grants and awards and has completed more than 80 plays, some epic and one only a single word long (“Psychopannychy”). He has written history plays, mystery plays, biographical plays, political plays, science fiction plays and plays composed of gleefully bad grammar.

He loathes what he calls “the theater of the already known” — the predictable, the formulaic, the tasteful, the complacent. As a consequence, his work is strange. He favors, as an article in the journal Postmodern Culture suggested, “wrongness, ceremony and a bit of demonism.”

There’s an exacting attention to language — every sentence, every word, every syllable — that would seem exhausting if the works weren’t so mischievous, so exultant, so fun. (He signed a scheduling email, “See you tamale!” This was not a case of autocorrect.) And he’s fond of impossible stage directions like “something strange happens” or “a furry pause.”

To Mr. Wellman’s annoyance and delight, his students tend to treat him as a cross between a favorite uncle and a minor deity. He teases them, mispronouncing their names or kidding them when they turn serious, but when he offers one of his playwriting koans — “The theater is a very strange and elusive thing to do,” he told his seminar participants — they reach for their notebooks.

Mr. Wellman and his colleague Erin Courtney, who graduated from the program in 2003, design an individual curriculum for each student. They’ll assign readings in philosophy, poetry, structural anthropology, nonsense or an early American novel about a murderous ventriloquist.

Ms. Kempson, who graduated from the program in 2007, wrote in an email: “He taught me that we have the right to read whatever the hell we want, and write whatever the hell we want, whether we’re smart, dumb, worthy, irresponsible, interesting, boring, pious, satanic or confused, and whether we ‘get it’ or not. And he’s right.”

He asks students to write bad plays, to write plays with their nondominant hands, to write a play that takes five hours to perform and covers a period of seven years. Ms. Satter recalled an exercise in which she had to write a play in a language she barely knew.

“I wrote mine in extremely limited Russian,” she wrote in an email. “Then we translated them back into English and read them aloud. The results were these oddly clarified, quiveringly bizarre mini-gems.”

Mr. Wellman explained: “I’m not trying to teach them how to write a play. I’m trying to teach them to think about what kind of play they want to write.”

Alec Duffy, the artistic director of JACK, enthusiastically described the work that emerges from the program as “plays that don’t really behave like plays, plays that feature an adventure in form.”

Mr. Bradshaw, who graduated in 2004, said in an email that Mr. Wellman is “an expert at helping you unlock your mind.”

“He’s not interested in getting you to write like him,” he added. “He never attempts to force a particular aesthetic down your throat. He wants everything that’s unique about you to emerge on the page.”

And once that singular voice emerges, Mr. Wellman will champion it. He follows the careers of his current and former students avidly. He mentioned a dozen or so in the course of an hourlong conversation. Then he sent a follow-up email mentioning more. Then a second email. Then a third. Then a fourth. At the end of the last one, he wrote that he loses sleep worrying about all the writers who haven’t yet received “the attention they deserve!”

Mr. Wellman’s own work no longer receives the attention it once did, although he’s still writing plays, as well as poetry, novels and opera librettos. He’d like to see these new works staged, though he worries about taking opportunities away from young writers like his students.

“I’ve had a lot of productions,” he said as he finished his wine. “I would like to have more. But if it means somebody I think highly of can’t get a production, I don’t need it.”

[Alexis Soloski is a contributor to the New York Times and the theater review-writer for the U.S. edition of The Guardian. She’’s a reviewer former for the Village Voice, and a writer for American Theater and Capitol New York. She’s a lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University.]

* * * *

WHIRLIGIG(1989)

[I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater about Leonardo Shapiro and his work with The Shaliko Company, his East Village experimental theater company. While the company began reimagining classic plays (Children of the Gods, based on several Greek tragedies; Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts; and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, included inthefirst part of my “Faust Clones,” posted on 15 January 2016) and ended with company-built pieces (Strangers, examined in “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 March 2014; The Yellow House; Mystery History Bouffe Goof), in between Shaliko commissioned works by contemporary playwrights. In the spring of 1989, Shapiro staged Whirligigby Mac Wellman at the Cooper Square Theatre in New York City (producer: MaryEllen Kernaghan, music: Charlie Morrow, set designer: Kyle Chepulis, scenic artist: Polly Walker, cast: Geza Kovacs – Man, Cecil MacKinnon – Sister, Elena Nicholas [Prischepenko] – Girl, Michael Preston – Bus Man, Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann – Girl Huns). The play premièred from 5 April to 7 May 1989, right after Doctor Faustus. From my research on Shapiro and Shaliko, I compiled a brief examination of this sci-fi-based play.]

From the demons of Hell in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shaliko shifted to demons from space in Whirligig, commissioned from Mac Wellman in 1989. Described by photographer and writer Allen Frame in a Bomb interview of Shapiro as “William Inge meets Rod Serling meets The Three Stooges,” Shaliko’s Whirligig was a display of pyrotechnical language and sight gags featuring a green-haired runaway girl at a bus station (Elena Nicholas) who meets a metallic spaceman (Geza Kovacs). Visiting Earth to discover why we are so happy, the Man, known as a Weird, had escaped a marauding band of female space warriors, the Girl Huns (Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann), and the Girl had run away from her goody-goody, materialistic sister (Cecil MacKinnon). Alisa Solomon characterized the play in the Village Voice as Wellman’s “wry look at our hopeful fascination with the final frontier.”

Not that the plot was so easy to follow, or so significant to begin with. (The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold disparaged it as “nonsense . . . like having the first act of The Tempest suddenly followed by two reels of a schlocky Cinecittà flck about women warriors.” The Show Business reviewer, Martin Blake, dubbed the plot “whimsical” but “at times unfocused.”) It was Wellman’s language and the political satire, biting if sometimes obscure, that drove this production. As James Rasenberger wrote in City Paper: “As a respected poet, Wellman understandably delights in linguistic trickery: his characters speak with twisted eloquence, turning the American idiom inside out and upside down.” Calling the play’s language “an amazement,” Martin Blake insisted that Wellman “is a poet of formidable power and biting wit,” asserting, “Poets can make great playwrights if they pay as much attention to form and structure as they do words”—though I’m not convinced that Wellman would buy the caveat.

Like all Shaliko work, Whirligigis political—the bus stop in the middle of nowhere is Wellman’s stand-in for a fascist universe. When the Girl describes her sister, she is describing Wellman’s idea of the American middle class:

This is my good sister, Jennifer.

Jennifer, meet Xuphus. Xuphus meet

Jennifer. Jennifer is a normal American

cunt. She can’t stand the idea someone

might not want to be like her. She hates

anybody is different, or looks different,

or aspires to strange gods. She thinks

the Arabs should unilaterally accept UN

resolution 242. She thinks South Africa

is America’s best friend in Africa. She

believes in god, Somoza, Swaggart and Margaret

Thatcher. Look at her, Xuphus, she’s a closet

religious maniac who wants to be reborn so

badly she’d blow the world up gladly. Pleasure

is lost on her, simple fun means nothing to her.

Human life horrifies her unless it’s a famine

on TV that reminds her how much America is not doing. . . .

Further on, in a speech by the Man, Wellman evoked what is clearly his vision of the rules governing American society:

God curse those who do what is

Forbidden. And chief among the things

which are forbidden are the combing of hair

not our way, the eating of food not to our

taste, the enactment of dramatic scenes not

to our liking, and the rubbing out of our

very being, when we have merely been

engaged in the working out of our destiny,

as described in the Big Book of Tlooth,

who you may not reckon as amounting to

a pot of piss compared to your god

Tengri, but I assure you it is not so,

because Tlooth [. . .]

is called Tlooth for good reason. For Tlooth

is truth made manifest and angelic and eternal.

And the truth is eternal, that is why it is

called truth [. . .].

Politics aside, Whirligigwas also a very physical play like much of Shaliko’s work. The small cast included Cecil MacKinnon and Michael Preston, veteran circus performers, and Wellman created a piece for this group. The playwright had actually been working on something very different when Shapiro told him Shaliko had gotten a grant to commission a play from Wellman.

I met with Leo’s company, which at that time consisted of the two women, Cecil and Elena, and basically talked with them about what they wanted to do—what sort of theater they liked to do—and tried to figure out a play that . . . . Both of them were fairly interested in physical theater. Cecil in particular: she has a background in clown work. So I tried to figure out something that would do that and then also allow me to do what I wanted to do with language. And we worked on it, and the result was Whirligig.

The production was also loaded with special effects—low tech, though they may have been. A body, for example, manages to turn up repeatedly and inexplicably in bus station lockers—among other sight gags. Show Business’s Blake characterized the FX as “remarkable, featuring an outerspace ride to rival the Hayden Planetariums’ [sic] splashiest shows.”

With a backdrop painted by artist Polly Walker and real bus station lockers designer Kyle Chepulis found somewhere, the production ended with what City Paper reviewer called “one of the most transporting theatrical sights I’ve ever seen.” In an interview I did with the director in 1992, Shapiro described that moment as we looked through some production photos:

The end of that show—you can’t see it, the pictures don’t show it because it was so dark . . . . The Ride of the Valkyrie thing was done . . . . The backdrop, you see, is these stars which are—I don’t remember what they are. I don’t know if there were holes in the canvas or light bulbs. I think they were light bulbs. Anyway, at the end what I did was, I had a strobe go off and over the whole set we dropped black, velvet drops—covered the whole set. The set disappeared [. . .] and they were covered with stars cut out of glow-tape. And we had hit them with two strobe flashes so that it lit them as stars for five minutes. And the last scene took five or six minutes and it was done totally in the dark with these stars, and it was totally illusionistic. Nobody had any idea how we created this. Nobody would have guessed it was glow-tape— something so low-tech. And they did their choreography . . . . They had helmets that were made out of plexiglass with tubes that had light-emitting diodes in them so their antler-things were lit. And there was a little light on their eyes that was made by a little, tiny flashlight inside the helmet. So their faces were lit and their antlers were lit but you couldn’t see their bodies at all. And they’re in this infinite black and their riding horses. [. . . .] And the horses’ heads were hollow and they had a light inside—a colored light—and they were made by Polly. So you could see the glowing horses’ heads and the faces and the antlers, and they’re doing this sort of riding choreography. But they’re floating in space. One is on a chair and one is down and low, and you can’t tell where they are, and so there’s an illusion of infinite space with these things. It was really beautiful, but it doesn’t show up in any photographs or video because there’s literally no light. There’s no light that goes out of anything.

The press, however, showed little interest. Frame felt that Shaliko’s Whirligig, a “highly original satire of the American scene,” was “a sleeper” that had been “underrated by critics.” The playwright thought that had Whirligig been delayed until the fall of 1989, after he had done Bad Penny in Central Park, Whirligigwould have attracted much more press attention. After liking his first play, Wellman contended, the New York Times“didn’t like a couple of things, then they wouldn’t review me for four years during which time I did Whirligig.” After Bad Penny, however, Wellman’s work had gotten good coverage.

Those reviewers who did come, including Feingold of the Voice, mostly conceded that they did not understand the play, but some enjoyed the theatrics anyway; Feingold was not among these last, though Wellman recalled that other Voice critics—Erika Munk and Alisa Solomon—liked the production but did not publish full reviews. Solomon published a capsule notice in the “Voice Choices” section of the paper in which she described the production as “[b]ending language like blues guitarists bend notes.” In his notice, Feingold declared that “Whirligig, like earlier acts of Wellmania. rapidly reduces itself to repetitive trash entertainment, in this case the comic-book scit-fi kind.” The play, lamented the Voice reviewer, “could have been developed into something witty, scathing, painfully true.”

In City Paper, James Rasenberger affirmed that “the play fully lives up to its title: its plot is convoluted, its meanings obscure—Whirligig is dizzying.” The reviewer continued, “But this is not the kind of stupefying experimental theatre that leaves one feeling numb. You may not ‘get’ Whirligig—I sure didn’t—but it is so entertaining and electrifying that it doesn’t matter.” In TheaterWeek, Neal E. O’Hara wrote that “boy is my head spinning” and reported that once MacKinnon’s Jennifer “arrives on the scene, the dramaturgical fireworks ignite. And it’s not even the Fourth of July.”

Show Business’s Blake asserted that Whirligig succeeded “mostly because of [Wellman’s] masterful and imaginative use of language.” He specified: “His monologues are not merely emotional episodes or opportunities for character development, but twisters of words that fill the theater and set the atmosphere.” The trade weekly’s review-writer pronounced, “The audience is hypnotized . . . .” Comparing Whirligig with the work of Twilight Zone’s Serling, “whose influence is palpable,” Blake applauded how well, through Shapiro’s direction and design, the play “communicates a marvelous creepiness.”

[My quotations from Whirligig were taken from the unpublished text used in the 1989 Shaliko production, but Wellman’s play was published in 1989 by the Theatre Communications Group as part of its Plays in Process series and subsequently in The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).]

[This is the fourth of eight installments of my recollections of serving in West Berlin, Germany, as a Military Intelligence officer during the early 1970s, a high point in the Cold War. “Berlin Memoir, Part 4” covers some of the small events of my work and the oddities that were part and parcel of that world. If you haven’t read parts 1 through 3, I recommend going back and catching up on them before starting on part 4, not only for the background, but because some things are explained and defined in the earlier sections and it might be hard to follow what I’m talking about from here forward without that information. (Part 1 was posted on 16 December 2016, part 2 on 31 December, and part 3 on 20 January 2017.)]

Working in Berlin was different from working anywhere else. We did things in Berlin that our sister units in the Zone or elsewhere in USAREUR never heard of. I said that Berlin got the best of everything—it also got the best personnel. MI was one of the branches that took only the most qualified applicants, and the best of the best were assigned to Berlin. I had colleagues, NCO’s, with multiple graduate degrees. One of my own NCO’s, a buck sergeant, had been Phi Bet in college. The average education level in my unit was five years of college. That was the average. Me, with my measly four-year BA, was below average. Our unit clerk was one of the most articulate guys I ever met—and he was a corporal or something. (We had mostly hard-stripers in our unit—only a few specialists.)

Because of this, and the fact that our unit was so small and we were so segregated because of our jobs, we did quite a bit of fraternizing. We were a little isolated, though. First of all, we weren’t part of Berlin Brigade, so our chain of command was different. Second, we wore civilian clothes and that separated us from the other GI’s in Berlin. Third, and most significantly, we couldn’t talk to outsiders about our work—and Army people almost always talk shop when they’re smokin’ and jokin’. There’s a certain level of paranoia that goes with doing intel work in Berlin. (All those spies I mentioned before weren’t there for their health!) Anything to do with Berlin was automatically classified higher than the same thing would be anywhere else in the Army. I had clearances so far above TS, I didn’t know what many of them meant. That’s not a joke. My clearances had so many acronyms and initials, I couldn’t remember them all (and I can’t remember most of them at all now). You ever hear of OFCO-RODCA clearance? I had that. (Sounds like some dire disease, don’t it? The acronyms stand for Offensive Counterintelligence Operation and Reporting of Defense Collection Activities.) In some cases, the acronym itself was classified!

You work around that stuff, it’s hard to socialize with people outside your field. And if you do make a friend from outside, especially outside the forces, you have to run a file check on him or her. (Like that guy in The Big Lift!) Now that’s the basis for a lasting friendship, much less a romance. “Listen, honey, before we get too serious, I have to do a background check on you. Would you mind filling out this personal history form?” That’s a buzz-kill for sure. While even wives were kept out of the loop when it came to work, they were at the parties like anywhere else. But it was so awkward to bring a date that no one ever did. If the Wall made the city claustrophobic, our own security practices made the unit claustrophobic, too. (This didn’t mean we couldn’t socialize outside the unit. Dating or friendships were perfectly fine—they just had to stay outside unit functions, even unofficial ones. And, of course, you couldn’t say much about what you did OTJ. And you did have to do that file check. I did one on a woman I met, a Brit—and she turned out to have a very unsavory record. Nothing criminal or spooky—just very, very flaky—enough to be in the files. Had to stop seeing her, but I couldn’t tell her why. “Sorry, Babe. I had you checked out, and there are some things in your record that won’t do. See ya.” That was awkward.)

Anyway, working MI in Berlin wasn’t just nutsy from our own perspective. There were nuts beyond our control, too. (I mean the ones who weren’t wearing green suits!) Berlin Station wasn’t a covert unit, just low-profile, as I said earlier. We had offices with our name on them—right at the front of the HQ compound, just inside the gate. In contrast, our sister unit (the 9668’s), the positive intel outfit of 66th MI in Berlin, was covert and lived in unmarked offices near ours. The “non-existent” CIA unit in Berlin—they weren’t supposed to be there—were in “mismarked” offices hidden away in “Building 7” at the rear of the compound. Unless you knew what they were, you’d assume they were some esoteric tech-support unit. (Something to do with maps, I recall.)

My friend Rich Gilbert, now a lawyer in D.C., who had been an infantry officer in BB and then was in the Public Information Office, told me that there was one thing about my job that used to aggravate him. Not that I couldn’t talk about what I did or that occasionally I’d have to run off suddenly because of a phone call. That was just SOP. It was a look I got when he started telling me about some crazy thing that he came across at work. For instance, he’d start to tell me about this odd unit he heard about that he’d never run across before and that he didn’t know what it did. He said I got this look that said to him, “Oh, yeah? Well, I know what that unit really is—and I can’t tell you. But you just go on and talk.” Sometimes he’d stop in mid-sentence and say, “You know all about this, don’t you? It’s some spook agency, right—and you can’t say anything?” I guess I’d just smile and keep my mouth shut. I mean, he knew I couldn’t say anything. It wasn’t my fault. One time he launched into one of these monologues—and he was talking about the CIA’s cover ID. (Ironically, there’s a TV series, on one of the streaming networks I believe, about the CIA in Berlin today, and it’s called—can you guess?—Berlin Station!)

One night some time back I watched a TV show in which the FBI was a central presence. At one point in the story, a local cop, despite having been warned off, inserted himself into a federal operation and almost compromised it and nearly got a UC agent killed. In order to get him to back off, the FBI ultimately had to reveal the existence of the UC agent, but this potentially endangered the operation and the agent, so the cop had to be neutralized. The feds decided to bring him into the Joint Terrorism Task Force—but he would be assigned to the “Legal Attaché in Sri Lanka.” The Legal Attaché, or LEGAT, was the cover designation of the FBI overseas. (You remember that the FBI isn’t supposed to operate in foreign countries, just as the CIA isn’t supposed to operate in the States. Hence the cover name.) LEGAT was one of the agencies we commonly queried for a records check in a background investigation. (I also heard a character on another TV show, an FBI agent, refer to an overseas office of the Bureau this way, but the character pronounced it l∂-GAT, as if it were related to the Anne Rice vampire, Lestat. Silly wabbits.)

Well, anyway, we weren’t undercover that way. We were the contact point for intelligence for the U.S. Forces in Berlin. If something came to us and it was in the jurisdiction or operational area of another unit or agency, we made the referral and served as go-between for the initial contact if necessary. Everyone knew where we were—we had a listed phone number (only one, however; our individual office phones were unlisted—and we answered them with the last four digits of the number, not our names or the unit’s name) and even the German Labor Force guards at the gate knew how to reach us. This was expressly for “walk-ins”—people off the street who came to the HQ compound and said they had something to report. If they were old enough to remember WWII or the Occupation, they asked for the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA) or the CIC (the Counterintelligence Corps, the forerunner of Military Intelligence Branch); if they were younger, they asked for the CIA. No one ever asked for MI as far as I know—but that’s whom they got. When a walk-in came to the gate and told the guard he wanted to talk to the CIA (or CIC), they sent him to a small outbuilding just to the right of the gate, right next to the corner of the main building where our offices were located. This was our debriefing and interview room for outsiders, before we let someone into our offices proper. You’ll see why this disconnect was necessary.

As you might imagine, 99% of walk-ins were nonsense. Many, even a majority I’d say, were nuts. The following anecdotes are either from my own experience or from stories my colleagues told—but based on my experience, they’re all true. One guy I talked to came to report that the Soviets had agents on the moon (no shit) and that he was in contact with them by “eye television.” (By the way, all these interviews were conducted in German, so there was always one agent and one German legman as translator/interviewer. My German—and I spoke way better than most other GI’s in the unit—would never have been good enough to get through most of this stuff. I do remember, though, that what this guy said was Augenfernseh—that’s a literal translation for “eye television.”) What he meant was that he received images in his mind transmitted from the moon by these Soviet agents. (Schizophrenia, anyone?) This same guy also wanted us to know that the Russians were leaving poisoned cigarette butts on the streets so GI’s would pick them up and smoke them. (I used to see GI’s picking up discarded cigarette butts all the time. I mean, who could afford 35¢ a pack? Riiight.)

As soon as we arrived to interview the walk-in, we’d get his ID documents and all other pertinent info. The legman, who was an experienced interviewer/interrogator—ours had worked for us longer than any of the GI’s in the unit and probably most of the DAC’s—patted the guy down and we searched any bags he brought. Meanwhile, before we even started to talk to the guy, the agent called the office and give them the ID info so they could run records checks and search our files. Some of these walk-ins were frequent fliers: they’d come in before. Not surprisingly in other instances, we often learned that the walk-in was a mental patient who had walked away from some minimum-security asylum. When that was true—and I recall that it was in the case of the “eye television” guy—we’d call the hospital and they send someone out to get the guy back. We’d have to stay with him and talk to him to keep him occupied until the van arrived, never more than a few minutes later. When there was no such record, we’d talk the guy down—thank him for his help, tell him we’d look into the matter, and say we’d contact him if we needed anything more. Then we’d escort him back to the gate and see him off the compound. These were usually guys who’d seen too many James Bond movies. If we thought the guy was nuts even if he hadn’t come from a hospital to start with, we might get him taken to one. Rarely, we’d have to call the cops.

Another walk-in was a woman who used to come in every six months or so—had been showing up for a couple of years. I even remember her name—Hanna Bregemeyer. Her story was that someone had stolen her identity and was going around being her. She insisted that we report this to the UN (the UN?) so that they’d make the other person stop being her. (Are you following this?) Because her identity had been stolen—we’re not talking stolen ID documents here, by the way (this was long before real identity-theft was ever heard of)—she refused to carry official papers. She made her own documents. It turns out that her actual name was Hanna Meyer; B. Reg. stood for bürgerlich registriert, a made-up term she used to mean “registered by the citizen.” If I recall, she came along one more time while I was in Berlin, then she seemed to disappear. (Maybe someone finally stole the rest of her. Who knows?)

One of my friends told me of a young man who came in and reported that spies were poisoning him. That’s not so weird, as you might guess by now, but what was frightening was what he had brought along as proof. He had a couple of tote bags with him, and my friend opened one to reveal that it was full of little bottles of the guy’s blood. When the legman opened the guy’s other bag and found that it was full of handguns, he was summarily bundled off to jail—and probably a hospital after that.

Most walk-ins were just poor souls who wanted some attention. Some were nuts and some were just lonely. One I spoke to was a 19-year-old kid who’d run out of money, been thrown out by his girlfriend, and just lost himself. He was pathetic, but not dangerous. He even broke down crying as the legman questioned him. No one I ever saw or heard of had any real information. Anything like that came from other routes. These included phone-ins, which were seldom any more productive than walk-ins. That dork who said he was Red Kappel was a phone-in, you’ll remember. So was the guy who claimed to know one of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

But sometimes . . . . One evening when I was on call, I was called by the DA to come in and take a phone call. The call was from a German man who worked for the U.S. Forces in Berlin and who said he had been in contact with East German agents. He was scared for several reasons, not the least of which was that German law made contact with Soviet or East German agents a crime. (The FROG had political crimes on the books. Membership in the Nazi or Communist Parties, for instance, was illegal.) I arranged to meet the guy in one of the remote districts—Tegel, I think it was, in the French Sector—at an U-Bahn station. I got one of our legmen (they were called this, by the way, because they did a lot of the legwork) and went out after the guy. No show. We waited around, checked out the area nearby, but no one was around who fitted the description the guy gave us. We gave up and went back home.

A few days or a week later, the guy called again, during the day. I remember it was February 14, Valentine’s Day. The legman and I went out after him again, and this time he showed at the meeting place. We took him out to one of the safe houses we used for serious interviews—not the little building on the compound grounds we used for walk-ins; this was a house in town—and sat him down in the dining room at the big table. The man was scared shitless—he was shaking and nervous and nearly unable to talk. But we finally got his story—and it’s pretty typical except that his went further. He had taken a vacation in Bulgaria and had met a woman. This, too, was common: trips to the Eastern Bloc were much cheaper than similar trips to Western Europe; Black Sea vacations in Bulgaria were very popular among working Germans. She was from East Berlin, and they arranged to meet there when they got back home. (West Berliners weren’t actually permitted to cross into the Eastern Sector, but many got around this by registering as a resident of some West German city, using a friend’s or relative’s address. This was illegal, of course, but very common.)

So, the man went over to East Berlin and met his new girlfriend at her apartment. They started up a romance and this continued for several visits. One day, the man showed up at the woman’s apartment and found a visitor. An East German intel agent was waiting for him. “Here’s the situation,” the agent explained. “Help us out with a few little things and we won’t report you to the West for this meeting.” Remember, contact with an agent of EGIS (the U.S. Army term for the East German Intelligence Service; in the DDR, it was known as the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit—Ministry for State Security—or, infamously, the Stasi) was a crime in West Germany. Of course, if the guy had simply gone back to the West and reported the meeting and the circumstances, nothing would have happened—the West German Kripos (Kriminalpolizei, or criminal police) knew what went on in the East.

This was a very common scenario. But the EGIS agent counts on the fear and ignorance of the target, and if it doesn’t work—well, nothing’s lost but a little time. If it does work, they get someone on the hook for little effort, and they can play it out as long as it lasts. Again, nothing has been expended but a little time. If the guy goes for it, they get him to hand over some seemingly innocuous document—a BB phone book, a tank manual—nothing classified or obviously sensitive. Maybe they do that two or three times, then they move up a notch. “If you don’t cooperate more, we’ll report everything you’ve done to the West. You’ve helped us out now, so you’re not innocent.” Then they’ll tell him to get a job with the U.S. or other Allied forces—any job will do. This man was an upholsterer so he got a job with the maintenance service for the U.S. facilities in Berlin.

When he had done that, the EGIS agent gave him a “concealment device.” That’s spook-speak for a secret pouch for hiding and carrying documents. And that was the clinching evidence that this man’s story was true—the device wasn’t something you got at the local stationery store. It looked like a pencil case, but it had a hidden pocket you could only open with a pin and knowledge of where to maneuver it. Obviously the EGIS agent was going to start getting the man to steal more important papers and smuggle them into East Berlin. But that’s where the man got too scared to continue. He stopped going to East Berlin, but then he started to be afraid of the West German police. That’s when he called us the first time—but he was too scared to follow through. In addition, he was an alcoholic, and he started drinking so heavily that he was fired for being drunk on the job. That’s when he called us the second time and met us. During the interview, by the way, the man got so nervous that he reached for a vial of pills in his jacket pocket. The legman literally pounced on the man and grabbed the pill vial. He was afraid they might have been poison—this guy was that scared. (They weren’t; they were antacids.)

We finished the interview, got the man’s story, arranged to be in contact again. I wrote up the interview, turned in the report, and briefed the Ops Officer. A while later, the “guys who aren’t there” inquired if we would get them together with the man. They had decided that the story was credible enough that it would be worth trying to double the man. He was turned over to the folks in Building 7, and we were out of it. (Berlin Station wasn’t an intel-gathering agency; we were a counterintel unit. Positive intel was the responsibility of other units; we only ran sources—that’s what they were called—if it was a counterespionage operation.) The “Company” wasn’t very good about sharing info—they didn’t play well with others—so we seldom learned what they were up to. Some time later, however, we heard about the upholsterer—the Company got him his job back—but his alcoholism had gotten so bad that even the CIA couldn’t keep him in his job. He was fired again, and without a job with the U.S. forces, he wasn’t much use to EGIS. He tried to get a job with the French and the Brits, but failed. EGIS cut him loose, and so did the CIA. I have no idea what became of him after that.

Most Germans had family on both sides of the border—either in East Berlin or East Germany. The division of Germany after the war split almost every German family, and even those without relatives in the East had close friends or circumstances like the upholsterer. Except for West Berliners, West Germans were free to cross into the East to visit, and thousands did regularly. (Berliners, however, could travel elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc—just not East Berlin until after 1973.) A typical scenario would go like this: Hans from Frankfurt would go every month to visit his mother’s elderly sister in East Berlin. He’d bring cigarettes, wine, food, other small gifts—some of which were considered contraband. Maybe he’d also give her money, probably in West Marks because the black-market exchange rate was much better than the official one-to-one rate he’d get if he bought East Marks at the border. Hans’s aunt could get much more for the West Marks than he could—but possessing western currency was illegal in the East. One day, Hans would arrive at his aunt’s apartment, and there’d be a strange man in the living room—an EGIS agent. “We’ve been monitoring your visits to your aunt,” he’d tell Hans. “We know what you’ve been bringing into the DDR. Would you like us to arrest your aunt? Take away her identity papers so she can’t buy food? Have her evicted from her state-owned apartment?” Of course, Hans couldn’t let that happen. “The next time you come over, bring a U.S. military phone book. It’s not even classified—just a little favor.”

Maybe the EGIS agent would ask Hans to get a job with the Allies or in a Western embassy. It would always be something easy and relatively innocuous. It was both a test and a hook. If Hans bit, EGIS would ask him for increasingly sensitive stuff, plus the threat to reveal his cooperation to the Western authorities. (Another way of setting the hook they liked to use was to exploit alcohol, gambling, or drug problems, homosexuality, illicit affairs, indebtedness, and petty or trumped-up crimes committed in the East. The recruitment always involved a threat and coercion—these were not politically-motivated or paid agents.) If the hook worked, the Soviets and their friends would get a source in the West for almost nothing. Whatever benefit they got was all gravy. If Hans didn’t bite, if he reported the contact, or if it wasn’t a family member he was visiting—say, a woman he met (a very common occurrence)—and he just stopped coming East, the Soviets lost nothing in the attempt. More than likely, they wouldn’t even bother to punish the relatives in the East—too much trouble—or they’d do something petty like harassing them for a few months, just so the word would get back to Hans in the West.

Another scenario was to approach minor criminals in the East like burglars, bootleggers, pimps, or prostitutes who had been caught. The KGB or EGIS offers a deal: “Go over to the West, get into some position where you can get useful info, and bring it back to us periodically, and we’ll let you go.” Who wouldn’t agree to that? Be a refugee in West Germany versus sitting in an East German jail for some months or a year. Duh. So what if the recruit cops out as soon as she gets to the West—what have they lost? They get rid of an undesirable who is now the problem of the FROG. If the recruit actually does get info and passes it back . . . well, all the better. It’s a win-win situation—and no expenses except some phony documents for the “refugee” and transportation to some border location. (This is, of course, why we had screeners at Marienfelde to interview refugees. You’d be surprised how often someone would admit right away that they’d been sent over by EGIS or the East German cops. I’m sure it sounds paranoid, but, take my word for it, it was real and common. And more often than not, mostly harmless—except perhaps to the psyche of the person who’d been approached by EGIS. It must have been a very strange existence for people like that, caught between the East and the West that way. And the Soviets used a shotgun approach: fire as many pellets as you can—a few are bound to hit a target. For many, many reasons—ethics being only one—we could never get away with that.

(Approaching GI’s and other official U.S. personnel was slightly different. The Eastern agents still looked for exploitable weaknesses like indebtedness or an addiction, but there had to be money in the bargain as well—often in very large sums. Seldom were the American sources impelled by ideological commitment, though that happened now and then, but other emotional motivations played a role, such as anger or resentment and family loyalty. This last was particularly effective with naturalized Americans with family still living in Eastern Bloc countries. The risks, however, for the Soviets or East Germans in the event of failure was much greater. They nonetheless tried, and surprisingly often considering how limited our attempts to recruit sources in the East were. Even when a successful recruitment was unlikely, the Soviets and their surrogates used the same logic: the more attempts, the more the chances of success—and a failed recruitment was a small loss.)

The Cold War was a wondrous time—if you’re Franz Kafka!

The upholsterer case was the closest I ever came to an actual spook operation. (My brush with real spookery was somewhat reminiscent of a German TV mini-series that aired while I was at the German military intel school in Bad Ems: the three-part TV movie, Der Illegale: Biografie eines Spions—“The illegal [agent]: biography of a spy.” I blogged about this show and its connection to my stint at the Bundeswehr MAD-Schule in “Der Illegale,” posted on 5 July 2009.) I did some surveillance, some demo coverage, lots of interviews, and a smattering of other tasks—before they made me an accountant. I even did a couple of stake-outs from a car—like you see on TV. Do you know what a cop or an agent does when he’s in a car trying to watch someone and he has to go to the bathroom? It’s a bit of esoteric lore you don’t often learn, but I did. In Germany, the law requires bars and restaurants to allow pedestrians to use their bathrooms, so that’s option number one—but you can’t really drop the surveillance and leave the subject unobserved. What if he or she goes on the move while you’re away from your car? So, the agent keeps a bottle in the car—it’s much harder for female agents than males for obvious anatomical reasons. Now you know. It may sound a little disgusting, but it’s a practical necessity.

I did one vehicle surveillance that involved a brief car chase—a mini-Bullitt. (Very mini.) My partner and I had been watching an apartment for a potential visitor we suspected was an EGIS agent. He’d been courting a lonely, middle-aged German secretaryin an Army office. No one had actually ever seen the man, but the secretary’s phone was tapped and her mail was monitored, so we knew about his visits from the woman’s conversations with her friends. But he never communicated with her directly, either by phone or mail; he sent her flowers by Fleuropa (the European counterpart of FTD) and made their dates via the messages accompany the bouquets. I inherited the case, which had been running for a couple of years or more, and it seemed obvious that nothing was happening anymore. The woman had retired and there hadn’t been any contact from the mystery man for months.

I determined that we probably ought to end the eavesdropping and close the case, but then the woman reported a new contact from her beau—more flowers arrived—and reported the he was going to come to her apartment for a date. I set up the vehicular surveillance to see if we could finally see the guy and try to ID him. We sat across the street from the woman’s apartment at the time set for the date and waited. No one showed up. The woman was on the phone indicating that she still expected her gentleman caller, however, so we hung around until a man did arrive and go into the building. He stayed a little while and then left, and we took off to follow him in his car. We did just like the cops do on TV until we were able to get a look at the driver, and when he didn’t match the description we had of the subject, we abandoned the chase. In the end, I concluded that if there ever had been a real man in the secretary’s life, he had long since vanished and she had kept him “alive” with tales to her friends and flowers she sent herself. In any case, since no breach of security had ever been detected, and since the woman’s access had ceased when she retired, I closed the case. But I got to do a car chase!

As I said, running sources wasn’t our job (that’s what the 9668’s were there for), which was to keep the other side from doing to us what we were trying to do to them. We were basically a security unit. We had three main sections at Berlin Station, aside from Ops, Files, Tech Services (photography, bugging and miking, lock-picking, polygraphy, and so on), and CCU (which, despite its similarity to a medical abbreviation, stood for the Classified Control Unit—a big vault where all our classified files were kept. The teams were Counterespionage, Countersurveillance, and Personnel Investigations (usually referred to by their initials: CE, CS, and PI). CE, as you might guess, was tasked with preventing the Soviets and their crew from planting agents in our midst; CS was responsible for detecting, clearing, and preventing listening devices, bugs, electronic spyware, and so on in the facilities in our jurisdiction; PI was just what the name suggests: conducting background investigations on personnel up for security clearances (including getting higher clearances and renewing clearances). PI was the bread-and-butter of Berlin Station (and all MI units like it around the world). It was the largest section, and the busiest. I was briefly OIC of PI Team—before they made me an accountant! (Piss me off. I waited for over a year for my own section, doing stints in both CS and CE as an ordinary Special Agent—the same as the NCO’s on the job, with a boss who was maybe six months my senior. Then I finally got a section on 1 February 1973 and a few months later, on 25 May, Colonel Collins handed me orders to take over the spook bank in the basement! Believe me, I am not an accountant. I can only balance my checkbook because I have a calculator!)

[I hope you’ve found my reminiscences of Cold War Berlin interesting and worthwhile. As I’ve been saying, this series isn’t being released on a regular schedule, so I can’t say for certain when part 5 will appear, but I’ve been posting the installments every two or three weeks. So come back sometime later this month to see what comes next. In “Berlin Memoir, Part 5,” I will talk about some of the common activities of my daily—or at least weekly—life as an MI officer in West Berlin. I think you’ll find a lot of it absurd almost to the level of Kafkaesque. I hope you’ll catch it.]

My maternal grandfather, Harry Freedman (1896-1967), made dolls for a living. It was a pretty good living: he supported my grandmother, my mother, and her sister pretty nicely right through the Great Depression and World War II, and they all came out the other side in good shape and went on to live comfortable lives. Grandpa Harry—sometimes HF when I was little—eventually got both his sons-in-law and a couple of nieces’ husbands jobs after World War II and supported or subsidized, unbeknownst to the rest of his family until after his death, other relatives and in-laws who had fallen on hard times. Harry was a good businessman, investing in or starting several other concerns in addition to the doll company—but he was also a soft touch. I recently learned from a cousin on my dad’s side that after my mother and father were married, my other grandfather, Jack (1890-1963), who was a pharmacist, was in danger of losing his Manhattan drugstore; I believe the landlord had raised the rent—a problem that still frequently occurs today.

When my mother’s parents met my father’s folks after my future parents were engaged, the family lore is that Harry and my paternal grandmother, Lena, immediately adored each other. (I never knew Lena—she died when I was about a year old—but my mother always told me that she was the nicest person ever. She couldn’t cook worth a damn, Mom told me—except one dish: stuffed cabbage—but she never had a bad word to say about anyone, even the worst good-for-nothing in the family circle! Harry, on the other hand, who was only 5' 4" tall, was known by his business colleagues as “Little Caesar” (no connection to the pizza business, started in 1959, but may have been a reference to the character played by Edward G. Robinson—who was 5' 7"—in the 1931 movie of that title.) Out of this inter-family affection, Grandpa Harry bought the building in which Grandpa Jack (JL when I was a boy) had his pharmacy. Jack, and I presume Lena, knew that Harry’d done this, but none of the rest of either family did. (I learned this from my cousin only about a year ago. Jack had died in 1963 and Harry in 1967.)

(In a curious coincidence, my Grandfather Jack’s drugstore was at 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, which is seven blocks north and a block-and-a-half east of where I now live. I often pass the site where the building stood—though it’s no longer the same structure. My dad’s family even lived in an apartment in the same building—“over the shop,” if you will—in the ’30s and ’40s, which is when my mom and dad met and became engaged. Furthermore, Grandpa Harry’s office, the sales offices of Horsman Dolls, was in 200 Fifth Avenue, known as the Toy Center South, at 23rd and Fifth, literally just up the street from my current apartment, and 1½ blocks west of Jack’s drugstore. When I first moved to New York and Dad, the family representative on the Horsman board, came up from Washington for board meetings, we’d meet for lunch and if he stayed overnight in New York, he’d stay at my apartment down Fifth Avenue from the Toy Center.)

Harry was a World War I vet. He fought in France and was wounded so that he was sent home prior to Armistice Day (11 November 1918)—before most of the other Doughboys came back. (The family story was that when Harry’s parents got the telegram informing them that their son had been wounded, it read curtly: “Harry Freedman shot in buttocks.” My grandfather’s family, not very knowledgeable about European geography—my father’s parents were born abroad, but my mother’s family had been Americans for several generations—and knowing only where Harry’d been fighting, pored over the map of France looking for a place called “Buttocks”! I have no idea if this anecdote is accurate—or even true—but that’s the story and I’m stickin’ to it.) And so, Harry came home, invalided out of the service, at loose ends, and, having recovered from his wound, one of few able-bodied young men in the States while the war was winding up in Europe. He began looking for something to do with his life.

Many years earlier, when Harry was a boy and vehicles on New York City streets were still drawn by horses, he was hit by a city garbage wagon and slightly injured. As compensation for the accident, the city paid him $10,000, a mighty sum in those days (about $250,000 today, calculating from 1906 when Harry’d have been 10). The money had been put aside for his future, as people used to say, but now Harry, 22 or 23 (I’m not sure exactly when he got back from France), decided it was time to put it to work and start that future. The budding businessman started looking for something worthy of his investment and he found a company: the Regal Doll Manufacturing Company of New York City. Before the war, Regal was known as the German American Doll Company; the reason for the name-change is pretty obvious, I think. It was a going concern, with plenty of orders and a busy factory on West Houston Street at the southern edge of what is now NoHo, but it needed capital to buy raw materials to fill the orders. So Harry bought into Regal Dolls and became a partner, eventually taking over leadership of the business. After a few years, Regal Doll Manufacturing changed its name again, becoming the Regal Doll Corporation.

Before the 20th century, dolls in the U.S. were almost exclusively imported from Europe, most frequently from Germany. Even when American companies started manufacturing domestic products just after the turn of the century, the materials were brought over from Europe. World War I disrupted that supply chain and the American doll manufacturers like Regal began making a product based largely on local materials. So when my grandfather invested his nest egg in Regal Doll, it was ripe for success, and the company prospered, making a good-quality, popular-priced doll.

In middle of the 19th century, dolls—really the doll’s heads and sometimes the hands and feet—were made of porcelain, either china (shiny and not very realistic-looking) or bisque (matte and much more lifelike). Homemade dolls could be made of rags, corn husks, carved wood, or any available material, but manufactured dolls were porcelain—and they were highly breakable, a serious drawback for a child’s toy.

A major improvement came along as early as 1877: the composition doll. Made of a composite of sawdust, glue, and such additives as cornstarch, resin, and wood flour (finely pulverized wood), composition dolls had the great advantage of being unbreakable, and by the beginning of the 20th century, composition dolls were the most popular kind of doll on the American market. Horsman (which would be Regal’s successor) secured the rights to the process, which was the principal material for dolls from about 1909 until World War II. (The two dolls I mention below were composition dolls.)

In the ’30s, Regal made a 19-inch-tall doll with composition shoulders and head, composition arms, partial composition legs, cloth stuffed body and stitched hips. The head had molded, painted hair; blue tin eyes; and a closed painted mouth. The doll’s name? The Judy Girl Doll. My mother’s name was Judith!

Later that same decade, Regal marketed a 12-inch-tall all-composition doll with a jointed body and painted, molded hair; painted blue eyes; and closed painted mouth that came in a cardboard carrying case with a wardrobe and roller skates. (This doll also came with “sleep” eyes,or “open-and-close” eyes, and a mohair wig over her molded hair.) This baby’s name? Bobby Anne. My mother’s little sister was Roberta Ann, called Bobby.

By the ’30s, however, Regal’s Manhattan factory was no longer adequate for the growing business and Harry went in search of larger facilities for his burgeoning company.

He found the Horsman Doll Company, the oldest doll-maker in the United States established in New York City in 1865 by Edward Imeson (E. I.) Horsman (1843-1927). “No other company even comes close to its record of longevity,” says a corporate description on Zoominfo. E. I. Horsman had retired in the early years of the 20th century and turned the company, one of the pioneers in the manufacture of American dolls, over to his son, but Edward, Jr. (1873-1918), died suddenly at 45 and E.I. returned to the business. Then E. I. Horsman died in 1927 and the previously greatly successful company fell into serious financial trouble. In the early 1930s, the foundering company had built a large, but under-used factory in the Chambersburg neighborhood of Trenton, New Jersey, so Regal bought it for its new manufacturing base.

Having already purchased Horsman’s newly-built Trenton plant, Regal Doll, now under the direction of my grandfather and his chief salesman, Lawrence Lipson (1896-1959), acquired the nearly bankrupt Horsman Doll in October 1933. The new leadership and Regal’s solid business position revived the fortunes of Horsman (whose name was pronounced like horse-man and whose logo was a horse’s head) and the new company continued to make dolls under both trade names, Regal and Horsman. Regal produced a mid-level, less-expensive doll, while Horsman’s product was a higher-quality doll at a slightly higher (but still affordable) price. By 1937, however, Harry Freedman and Larry Lipson realized that Horsman was the superior brand and in 1940, Regal Doll formally became Horsman Doll and the Regal label disappeared from the market. (The present-day Regal Toy Company of Toronto, Canada, is a different company unaffiliated with my grandfather’s business.)

At the time of the purchase, my mother’s family moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where much of Harry’s family also lived, to Fisher Place on the Delaware River in downtown Trenton so my grandfather could be near his business, a scant three miles away. (The new company’s business headquarters was still located in Manhattan—in the Toy Center South, which had become a home base for the toy industry during World War I.) Mom (1923-2015) lived in Trenton from then until she was married (not counting prep school in Pennsylvania and college in upstate New York), and my Aunt Bobby (1927-2006) stayed there after marriage (to a man who became a Horsman VP and its in-house counsel) until she and her husband separated in the ’50s. My grandparents moved back to New York City after World War II, once both daughters were married (my mother in January 1946 and Aunt Bobby in November 1947), living at 68th and Fifth, across from Central Park. (I said the doll business provided Mom’s family with a comfortable life, didn’t I?)

From about 1880 to the end of the 1960s, the State of New Jersey was one of the country’s most productive toy-making states. With over 50 toy companies with names like Tyco (HO scale toy trains), Lionel (model trains), J. Chein (mechanical toys), Remco (remote control toys), Topper Toys (model cars and inexpensive dolls), Courtland (wind-up toys), and Colorforms (creative toys) operating in the state, Regal and Horsman weren’t alone in the Garden State. In its heyday, Horsman’s Chambersburg plant was touted as the largest toy factory in the United States. One block square, at its peak the two-building, three-story brick complex at 350 Grand Street in an otherwise residential neighborhood of South Trenton employed 1,200 workers and manufactured hundreds of thousands of dolls every year, earning the nickname “World’s Largest Doll House.” “Not many people realize it, but if you purchased a doll from 1930 to 1960 it was probably made here in Trenton,” says Nicholas Ciotola, curator of cultural history at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, where an exhibit called Toy World is running just steps away from the Horsman factory. (The exhibit, in the Riverside Gallery from 15 October 2016-30 April 2017, focuses on the toys manufactured in New Jersey during the 20th century. I went down to Trenton to see it on 7 February so I could check out the Regal and Horsman displays.)

By the 1940s, Horsman Doll was a great success on the basis of its moderately priced, good-quality, baby dolls that little girls loved. (It was my mother’s hard luck that she had two sons and no daughters on whom she could lavish Horsman dolls every Christmas and birthday. The attic of the house in which my brother and I grew up was half-filled with boxed Horsman dolls for our female cousins and the daughters of my parents’ friends—but none for her own children. Aunt Bobby, on the other hand, had two daughters—the youngest one named Judith.) The beautiful baby dolls came without fancy names (the child got to name her dolly whatever she wanted; the box didn’t provide a name) or marketing gimmicks, but dressed in lovely doll clothes. (My grandfather was color-blind but he could tell fine fabric and excellent workmanship; he just needed employees to help him pick out the colors. In fact, he had the same problem with his own clothes—and sometimes his socks and trousers or jackets and ties really clashed. But they were made from top-quality fabrics!)

During World War II, shortages of raw materials dealt the American toy industry a serious blow. Some essential supplies were imported from overseas, including Axis territory and occupied countries. Kapok, for example, a fiber from the silk-cotton tree used for stuffing doll bodies, came principally from the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies—and, of course, shipping of any kind was at risk. Most domestic materials, like the mohair for doll wigs and metal for sleep-eye mechanisms, were diverted to war industries, so little remained available for toy manufacturers. Some toy companies began making products for the war effort. Horsman was able to continue making some dolls, but the Chambersburg factory turned part of its manufacturing floor over to soft vinyl prostheses, such as artificial hands for amputee veterans. After the war, most doll-makers scrambled to return to the production of dolls, but Horsman capitalized on its wartime experience with vinyl.

For all its advantages as doll-making material, composition was difficult to work with and it was hard to the touch. Vinyl was a soft, easily-molded, durable, unbreakable plastic that could be sculpted into life-like faces and was pleasing to a little girl’s touch. It was the perfect doll material and Horsman was a pioneer in its use in the doll industry. It wasn’t the first doll firm to use plastic, though in 1947 it was the first to do so on a large scale. From the post-war years until my family relinquished control of Horsman for the final time (I’ll get to this), its dolls were made with vinyl heads.

In the 1950s, Horsman developed an even more flexible material it dubbed Super-Flex, used for the dolls’ bodies, which for the composite dolls had been made of stuffed fabric and for the all-vinyl dolls were soft plastic that allowed for only minimal manipulation. Super-Flex permitted the dolls’ knees and elbows to be bent so the dolls could be posed in many different ways. Later in the ’50s, Horsman introduced further advancements in the dolls’ vinyl skin, giving it an even more like-like feel.

In the same decade, the company introduced Polly, an African-American doll. (A Polly was included in the NJSM exhibit.) Horsman wasn’t the first doll-manufacturer to market a black doll—there were African-American dolls available in the 19th and early 20th centuries—but most of the earlier African-American dolls were merely models of the companies’ standard dolls from white molds painted dark brown. Horsman’s Polly was an attempt to create a black doll with more realistic features. She was sold from the mid-’50s through the 1970s and ’80s (the latter years by a derivative company that had duplicated Horsman’s original products).

Horsman dolls were seldom sold under the company name in the ’50s and ’60s. Horsman made most of its dolls for retailers like Sears, Montgomery Ward, Gimbels, and Macys and packaged them under the stores’ names. (Occasionally, I’d hear the name Horsman Doll on a TV show which used them as giveaways for game-show contestants or participants. I recall that Art Linkletter, 1912-2010, gave away Horsman dolls on his variety and kiddie TV shows between 1950 and 1969. I always had a little twinge of pride when Linkletter would announce that all the girls on the show would receive a Horsman doll as a gift from the show. I don’t remember what the boys got.)

By the 1950s, however, Harry Freedman and his now-partner, Larry Lipson, saw that the doll company had grown to its limit. It had supported the Freedmans and the Lipsons very well, but it wasn’t going to get any bigger. Horsman made only baby dolls; it didn’t make “action figures” for boys or any other toys (not since the original Horsman family years) and it didn’t diversify its factory to make other plastic items (aside from that wartime foray). Like most toy businesses, Horsman’s one big sales period, when it made its annual profit, was Christmas; the rest of the year, business dragged until it was time to gear up for the holiday gift season—and that wasn’t going to change. Larry Lipson’s son, Gerald (1925-88), would take over the business when his father retired, just as Larry had taken over for Harry—but Gerry’s children were disinclined to run the company and Harry’s grandchildren (there were four of us: my brother and me, and Aunt Bobby’s two daughters) were still little kids. So the shareholders—the Freedman and Lipson families and a few key Horsman employees, made the decision to sell the company. A conglomerate, Botany Industries, purchased Horsman Dolls in 1957 in a period of expansion.

I’m no businessman (and I was very young at the time), but as I understood it later, the deal, in which my father, by then a member of Horsman’s board of directors, was instrumental, was standard. Botany agreed to pay off the purchase price over several years, a decade I believe, and if at any point during that period the buyer defaulted on the payments, Botany would forfeit all the money it had paid up to that time and the company would revert to the sellers. And that’s what happened sometime in the early ’60s—1961 or ’62 as I recall. Botany had decided that it had over-expanded and over-diversified and had to divest of several smaller acquisitions and downsize (though that term wasn’t in general use quite yet). So after paying off nearly the entire purchase price for Horsman, Botany backed out of the sale and the Freedmans and the Lipsons got the company back. I tell people that this is the only real-life instance of which I’ve ever heard of someone actually having their cake and eating it, too.

During the time that Botany owned Horsman, the Trenton factory was deemed outdated and beyond upgrading or retooling. So in 1960, Botany closed the Chambersburg plant and built a new facility in Columbia, South Carolina, a right-to-work state. That’s where Horseman dolls were made when we got the company back. (After I got out of the army in 1974, I went to visit an army buddy with whom I’d served in Berlin who was stationed at Fort Jackson. I took him and his wife out to see the factory—which I’d never seen myself—and watch them make dolls.) The plant in Trenton was abandoned and, despite some interest a decade or so ago in converting it to residences, it remains unused. There’s some discussion of preserving it as an example of industrial architecture of the first decades of the 20th century, but I’m not sure how much traction that idea has—the old brick buildings are hardly worth looking at from an aesthetic point of view. They’re under threat in a gentrifying neighborhood because a developer who controls the property has proposed to raze the entire complex in order to build townhouses.

Not long after that trip to Columbia, the families put the company on the block again. Gerry Lipson was retiring and no one from either the Lipson or Freedman families was qualified (or interested) to assume control. This time, Drew Industries, another conglomerate, bought Horsman—but the terms of the sale were a little different. Drew issued promissory notes to the shareholders (which now included my two cousins, my brother, and me as a result of the death of Harry’s widow, our maternal grandmother, Valerie, 1900-74, whose estate, with the Horsman shares she’d inherited from Grandpa Harry, went to her grandchildren) that became due over just a few years. When the purchase was concluded, Horsman Dolls became Drew Dolls, under which name it produced dolls for a few more years, and then Drew Industries liquidated the company and Horsman Dolls, one of the last companies to manufacture dolls in the United States and never made them abroad, passed out of existence. The dolls from both Regal (including the Judy Girl, Bobby Anne Dolls, and Polly) are now all collectors’ items and there are books on them and the companies.

As a coda, in 1986 the Horsman name was sold—I guess by Drew—to Gatabox, Limited, of Hong Hong, which produced dolls, including reproductions of Horsman classics, under the name Horsman, Limited. The new company has no connection to either the original E. I. Horsman company or to my grandfather’s business—Gata just bought the name. That company dissolved in 2002 but was succeeded by a new corporation known as Horsman, Limited, headquartered in Great Neck, New York, on Long Island and it continues to market dolls, but they’re made in Hong Kong now.

* * * *

Aside from a nice inheritance from my grandfather and a comfortable life growing up because Grandpa Harry engineered a good job for my father after World War II, I didn’t derive any direct benefit from Horsman Dolls. My two cousins, Aunt Bobby’s daughters, may have had plenty of dolls to play with when they were little girls—and, of course, their father had a good job at the company until he and my aunt split up, but the doll company was never a huge presence in my life. As a kid, I got some fun out of my dad’s job. I thought it was kind of neat in the 1950s that he ran a movie-theater company and I got to go to the movies for free a lot and treat my friends—all the theater companies in Washington gave passes to their competitors—and that was thanks to Grandpa Harry, although I really didn’t think of it that way back then. It was just Dad’s work.

But there was one benny I got from Horsman that I really took advantage of from time to time—and quite a bit when I moved to New York City after the army. The company had a ticket broker on retainer for the sales staff so they could take buyers to Broadway shows. The broker could get seats to just about any show, even ones that were otherwise hard to get into and was an effective way to entertain Horsman clients. The company made this service available to the families, and when we came to New York, my parents would get tix for the big shows like My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Camelot. (I wrote about this in my post “A Broadway Baby,” 22 September 2010.) Later, when I was old enough to come to New York on my own, from prep school in New Jersey or college in Virginia, I used the Horsman perk. One spring break, I took my two college apartmentmates and another frat brother, all New Yorkers, to three plays, two Broadway shows (Man of La Mancha, The Impossible Years) and my first Off-Broadway drama (Ceremonies in Dark Old Men), courtesy of Horsman Dolls.

When I came her to live in New York, I tried to see as many shows as I could, taking an acting classmate with me whenever I could, until we sold the company for the last time. (I knew the sale was coming, probably soon rather than later, so I was bound to take advantage of the privilege as much as I could before I lost it.) I figured I ought to spread the wealth around a little. After all, I wasn’t paying for the tix out of my pocket (they were coming out of my inheritance, in a manner of speaking), but it wasn’t a freebie. The producers, and therefore the artists, were getting paid, so everyone was benefitting. When we sold Horsman to Drew, I lost that perk and had to cut way back on Broadway theatergoing. Broadway ticket prices had gone way up and for the cost of one Broadway seat I could see two or three Off-Broadway productions or more than a half dozen Off-Off-Broadway shows. It was a deprivation I sorely lamented—the one thing Horsman Dolls gave me that I really appreciated while I had it.

[In Part 5 of my “Berlin Memoir,” I try to describe some of the unusual—you might even say weird—experiences that occurred daily, or at least weekly, in the West Berlin of the Cold War. As you’ll see, living in this little island of democracy inside the German Democratic Republic, especially as a Military Intelligence agent, could be . . . well, odd is a moderate way of saying it. If you haven’t read he first four parts of this series, I suggest you go back and catch up on them before setting out on part 5. It provides background for much of what follows and I explain and define some things in the earlier sections that come up again in the rest of the series. (Parts 1 through 4 were posted on 16 and 31 December 2016, and 20 January and 9 February 2017.)]

The city of Berlin is a slightly peculiar entity in itself. It’s a very old city—something like 750 years now, I think—and, like New York, it grew out and swallowed up other towns which became boroughs of the city. Unlike New York, with its discreet five boroughs, Berlin had some two dozen (reduced in recent years to about a dozen), and some of the official boroughs had neighborhoods that seemed more like separate boroughs. When someone asked a Berliner where she lived, she’d usually start with the borough or neighborhood: Tempelhof (where the airport was), Kreuzberg (where a surveillance fiasco in which I was involved happened), Zehlendorf (where the U.S. HQ was), Spandau (where the infamous prison that held Rudolf Hess was), and so on. The Wall split Berlin in two parts, each with its own boroughs; the Soviet Sector was approximately one-third of the old city (about a million people) and the Allied Sectors about two-thirds. (The reason that the three Allies shared two-thirds instead of the obvious three-quarters of the city—the same had been true of Germany as a whole—was that at the Yalta and Potsdam wartime conferences, the Soviets rejected an equal share in the Occupation for France, so the U.S. and Britain agreed that the French zone would be ceded from their areas.) The Wall did not always conform exactly to the border dividing the eastern section from the west; the Soviets built the Wall within its territory and sometimes construction, roads, or the Spree River meant that the Wall was many yards east of the actual border.

One aggravating result of this formation of the city is that streets with the same name could exist in several boroughs but not be connected at all—like Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. But the reverse is also true: the same road might change names as it passes through each borough. If someone gave you an address to find in Berlin, you needed to know in which borough it was in order to find it. Driving in Berlin was hard enough—an old city with unplanned street layouts and narrow and crowded streets, not to mention my big, American car. (I had a red 1970 Ford Torino I got after I graduated from college. Man, it was a pretty car! And did it attract attention on the streets of Berlin and the roads of West Germany! Candy-apple red with airplane bucket seats, a black interior, and a fastback. Mmm-mmm.) I’ll never know how I learned to drive around that town—but I did. (There was a tiny little stretch of Autobahn in Berlin, and I used to take the Torino on it and let ’er loose for a couple of miles to let the engine run after weeks of cramped city driving. There are—or were in those days—no speed limits on Autobahns, even within Berlin. I’d get ‘er up to 100+ mph for a few minutes, once up and once back.)

The Wall went up beginning in August 1961 and took about a year to construct—though it was always under alteration and sections were rebuilt and sometimes shifted from time to time. Mostly, however, the Wall was a constant presence in the city and in the minds of Berliners for 28 years. It was grey concrete and ugly—a scar across the middle of the city. I arrived in Berlin just before August 1971, the tenth anniversary of the Wall’s construction, and was immediately added to the Station’s contingent of observers for the massive demonstrations that were planned for the commemoration. One of the tasks we had was demo coverage—watching political demonstrations to note who was there and what anyone said or did. I know that this sounds totalitarian, and I suppose in the abstract it is. But we only observed—we did not disrupt any demonstration, hassle any participants, bug anyone’s office or home in connection with a demonstration (we did for other reasons), or in any way try to prevent a demonstration.

Remember that Berlin was not only the spy center of Europe, so keeping an eye out at such large political gatherings was no more than watchfulness, but the city attracted large numbers of young anarchists and militant activists who were performing terrorist acts all over Germany. (Students in Berlin were exempt from the German draft, so many West German young men came to the city for university.) I mentioned the RAF/Baader-Meinhof Gang; there were other, smaller cells, too, such as the Movement 2 June and SPK (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv– Socialist Patients’ Collective). These folks had a habit of blowing things up and kidnapping people. And people like Michael “Bommi” Baumann (1947-2016) and Red Rudi Dutschke (1940-79), radical student revolutionaries, were active in Berlin. Prudence dictated that we keep an eye on them, especially when something as charged as the Wall was the subject of an action.

Those 1971 demos—there were two, one leftist-oriented in favor of the Wall and one rightist, opposing it—were both aimed at the same spot: the saddest place in Cold War Berlin—the Peter Fechter Memorial. Fechter was a 19-year-old laborer in East Berlin who made an escape attempt with a friend in 1962, one of the first after the Wall was erected. Fechter and his friend hid in an abandoned building next to the Wall on the eastern side—the Soviets kept the area uninhabited, unlike the FROG which encouraged people to move into the area near the western side—and watched the Vopos (Volkspolizei, ot “people’s police,” the East German police and border guards.). When they thought there was a gap in the coverage, they made a run for it, scaling the fence that formed the eastern side of the no-man’s strip (sometimes, for obvious reasons, called the death strip) on the eastern side of the Wall. They made it over the fence and through the death strip, and Fechter’s friend made it over the Wall into West Berlin, but Fechter was shot in the hip as he scaled the Wall and fell back into the no-man’s land. Western Observers, including journalists and some U.S. military, were prevented from helping Fechter by the Vopos who threatened to shoot anyone entering the strip. No one from the East went to Fechter’s aid, though he screamed in pain for help for several hours as he bled to death. When he died, the Vopos did enter the no-man’s land to recover his body. A memorial plaque was mounted in front of the Wall on the Western side at the spot where Fechter fell and died.

Both demos, numbering several thousand each—maybe even tens of thousands—were headed for that same spot. Everyone knew that if they got there together, there’d be a street battle between the leftists and the rightists, and no one wanted that. (We observers, following along with one or the other march, also knew that we didn’t want to get caught either between the two groups of protestors or between the protestors and the police. We had a special code word to shout at the police line as we ran toward them for protection—we were not armed, of course—so they’d let us through their ranks and not shoot us in mistake for attacking protestors.)

This was the most astonishing example of competence, resolve, and steadfastness I have ever witnessed. When signs of violence broke out—some stones thrown, some sticks that had been holding up protest signs snapped off and swung—the police moved in to clear the streets. They had been lining the streets—just standing still along the curb, in riot gear, with tall shields, and the biggest German shepherds I have ever seen—until the violence started. Now they just moved in slowly, walking with their shields in front of them, forming a moving wall. They simply herded the protestors, from whichever side, down the streets and into the subway entrances. The message was clear: You can stay in the subway station or you can get on a train and come up somewhere else, but you’re not coming back up here.

Not one billy club was swung, not one weapon was drawn (much less fired), not one cop shouted an epithet or insult (some of the protestors did, though—but the cops didn’t overreact). They just calmly and professionally—and evenhandedly—cleared the streets and restored order before things got out of hand. Bang, it was over. No riot, no serious injuries, no nothin’. The protestors got to march, carry their signs, make their statement—and they would have been able to make their speeches or whatever if they hadn’t turned potentially violent—and the police kept order without any excess. Now, the Berlin police had infantry training—the German army was not permitted to operate in Berlin, so the cops were paramilitary stand-ins if necessary—but I was still impressed with the way they handled this situation. Think of it: a generation earlier, the predecessors of these cops were the guys who roughed up and killed civilians in the streets. But these cops were in better control of themselves and their turf than any U.S. force (or the National Guard—Kent State had been just a little over a year earlier) at the time.

One odd thing about the Wall (and old Berlin, too) that has no real counterpart in New York is that, though the Wall did surround the Western Sectors of the divided city, it also had little orphans. All of Berlin isn’t contiguous: there are little communities that are legally and politically part of the city, but which aren’t attached. Like little islands—maybe that’s where the parallel to New York lies. Think of land-locked versions of Governor’s Island, Roosevelt Island, and North and South Brother Islands. Each of these little satellite communities of the Western Sectors was also surrounded by a wall, since they were still Allied territory in the midst of the DDR. (Eastern satellites didn’t need this, of course) Some of these enclaves—they’re not towns, but neighborhoods—were connected to West Berlin by walled corridors so residents could get back and forth and the enclaves could be serviced by Berlin police and firefighters. I don’t know how many of these little islets there were, but it was at least half a dozen or ten, I’d guess. I never visited one—I don’t even know if I could have.

Berlin attracted young people, both political and not, because of a couple of very salient reasons. When I was there, in the early ’70s, West Berlin was a vibrant and active city, with a full social and cultural life—a real city of two-and-a-half million inhabitants. (East Berlin was a little grey and lifeless, even 25 years after the war.) In contrast, when my parents visited Berlin in the early ’60s—they were there, by the way, for Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech—they reported that the city seemed artificial, that life was sort of staged and forced, like a Potemkin city.

I mentioned in passing that Berlin Station had to participate in BB alerts, like any other unit. I also said that there was an agent on duty all night and over holidays and weekends—like the CQ in ordinary line units. He spent the night in an office just inside the building entrance and between the building entrance and the second entrance, controlled by an electronic lock which required a numerical combination to open, into the unit’s offices. The DA office was furnished with a bed, a desk, a TV, a file cabinet (mostly empty)—and a bank of telephones, perhaps a dozen or so. Some of the phones were ordinary BB lines—one of them “9666,” our public number. (9666, colloquially known as “Trip-6,” was the Military Occupational Specialty for counterintel officers, which is what we all were. There were similar or equivalent MOS’s for enlisted personnel. This was also the license number of the CO’s staff car.)

Other phones on the Duty Agent’s desk were special lines which were used for sources to call in with information and to arrange meets with their handlers. Since in most cases, these sources had cover stories, and sometimes so did the handlers, these phones all had to be answered with specific cover phrases, as if they were extensions at some business, say, or some innocuous agency. (During the time when junior officers pulled this duty, none of those phones ever rang when I was DA. I suspect some were part of defunct operations.) One phone was, of course, the red alert phone. That rang once a night to check the communications system, and the DA had to answer it with a prescribed phrase: the name of the unit and the DA’s initials in phonetic alphabet. So, when I was DA, I’d have to say, “66th MI. Romeo-Echo-Kilo.” It invariably rang when I was sound asleep—which I assume was intentional.

(There was one other piece of equipment in the DA’s office at night. Until I handled money, at the end of my tour in Berlin, except for the firing range, this was the only time I went armed. At the end of the day, the assigned Duty Agent drew his weapon and six rounds of ammo—we carried .38 caliber Police Special revolvers—from the unit armorer. Standard procedure while on duty was to keep the pistol loaded, but the cylinder open, and stand it on the desk, propped up by the open cylinder. Since every DA drew the same rounds, I sometimes wondered if they’d even fire if the need ever arose. Lord knows how old they were!)

I never got an alert call while I was DA, but during the time I was in Berlin, we had three or four full alerts. Since we wore civvies to work, we kept uniforms at the Station to change into, so we all reported to the locker room when we got the call. Each unit has an assignment for the outbreak of hostilities, and we are all supposed to go about preparing for that mission in an alert. The infantry and armor units all gear up and go to the points they are expected to defend, the MP’s get into their positions to guard the compounds and other sites and to control the streets, and so on. Our mission was to round up potential enemy agents who have been previously identified, secure sensitive personnel and get them on ’copters out of the city, and assist with the security of VIP’s and U.S. facilities.

Obviously, in an alert, there’s not much of that we can actually do—I can just see us running around Berlin, pretending to arrest suspected commie agents. That would go over big. So we ended up sitting around our locker room, after putting on our “unmarked” fatigues—the ones with the U.S. device where the branch and rank insignia ought to go—and making jokes until the alert had ended. The recurring theme of those jokes is what would probably happen if an actual war did break out in Central Europe. As I’ve mentioned, Berlin is 110 miles inside East Germany, surrounded by the Soviet 40th Tank Army, a total of about 300,000 Red Army soldiers plus whatever East German units were out there, and any additional Warsaw Pact troops that happened to be in the region. The Soviets, not being stupid, probably wouldn’t fight for Berlin—why waste the men and time. We decided what they’d do is simply roll some tanks up to Checkpoints Bravo and Charlie, hang a sign on the boom gates that read “Berlin POW Camp,” and move on to the real war on the border and beyond. That would be the end of our participation aside from some Warsaw Ghetto-type uprising or a sort of hyper-Great Escape.

(By the way—those U.S. insignia for our fatigues? By this time, all insignia on fatigue uniforms were “subdued”—no shiny silver or brass or bright yellow chevrons. The Vietcong had developed a habit of taking potshots at anything that glittered in the jungle. But there’s no such thing as a subdued U.S. device—they only came in brass because they’re only officially worn on dress uniforms, not fatigues. So we each had to get a couple of pair of U.S.’s and turn them in to the unit clerk; he’d get them painted matte black so we could put them on a set of fatigues to stash at the Station for alerts, range-firing, and other activities that required that uniform. I think I still have mine put away somewhere. Needless to say, since this uniform configuration didn’t officially exist, we got some stares and wry remarks when anyone saw us dressed in it. Most people figured we were CIA or something. Of course, we could neither confirm nor deny . . . .)

I said that aside from the firing range—I think we went out there once officially; I went privately once to fire Dad’s souvenir Luger he brought back from WWII—the only other time I was armed beside DA duty was when I carried Army cash. When an officer is carrying money, such as a payroll, he must be armed. When I was reassigned to the spook bank for Intelligence Contingency Funds (ICF) in the Station’s basement, I would periodically have to buy Marks, Francs, and occasionally other currencies. We bought Marks at the Army Finance Office in another part of the main compound, so I didn’t have to leave the grounds—but I had to wear my sidearm. Just like the cops on TV, I had a holster on my belt, under my suit jacket. A .38’s not large, especially the snub-nosed Police Special, but it makes a noticeable lump on your hip beneath the jacket. So, I walked into the Finance Office the first time I had to buy Marks, feeling pretty self-conscious to start with, and, of course, there were lots of other people in there transacting business. The FO is where the GI savings accounts are maintained, the credit union is, payments are made for such things as late pay or special disbursements, and all kinds of money business. And in I walked, packin’ iron. So what did the NCO behind the counter shout? “I’ll take the guy with the gun first!” Well, I felt like Butch Cassidy fixin’ to rob a bank! Everybody in the place turned to took—no, stare at me. And my gun! I felt like I was packin’ a howitzer! “No, that’s all right. I’ll just wait.” Haw-haw!!

The first time I had to get Francs, which we bought at the American Express bank in the PX across the street—where everyone had his personal checking account and what have you—I didn’t know what to expect. I still had to carry the weapon, but this time I was going out in public. Thank goodness, nothing happened—but I was very self-conscious. Veryself-conscious.

Needless to add, this was not a job I liked much. Not that it wasn’t important. It was extremely important. But it was booooring. First of all, it’s nothing but numbers. Keeping books, checking requests for disbursements (I did get to know about all the really spooky stuff people in my old unit and its sister unit next door were doing, which I didn’t need to know before—but most of it turns out to be routine), reconciling conversion losses and gains (when the dollar amount is different from the amount of Marks or other foreign currency because the exchange rates are never an even ratio), counting up the cash on hand, and such. The most excitement I had was when we had to prepare for an audit, quarterly by the Class A Agent from Group or semi-annually by the Class B Agent from USAREUR.

Second, since I’m not a banker or an accountant and I got slammed into this job without any preparation, I couldn’t really run the day-to-day routine until I learned it OTJ. So I had a Spec 4 clerk who had been there for some time, and he did most of the daily stuff—it was his job anyway. He was all of 19, by the way—we had lots in common (though he was a nice enough kid). Third, the job was what it was—I had to wait in my office until someone needed money for an op. I couldn’t develop ops, I couldn’t make work; I just waited, drank coffee (not a habit I ever really developed except here), and read the newspaper or the Sears catalogue when it came.

Fourth, I was no longer part of Berlin Station. The ICF Class A Custodian (that’s what I was) is part of HQ—which, you remember was in Munich. None of my old colleagues were, well, colleagues anymore. Fifth, my office was in a vault in the basement. Even if a former colleague wanted to come by to chat—I was way out of the way, with a big vault door to greet them. As soon as the Army started riffing people, when the reduction in force began after combat in Vietnam ended, I started asking around if I could get out even though my tour in Berlin still had six months to run and I still had a few years on the obligation I incurred to get Trip-6 and Europe. (Berlin was a lagniappe, but I worked the system to get Europe.) Also, my name was on the promotion list for captain, and it used to be that an officer had to stay in for, I think it was a year, in order to accept promotion. I figured I earned that promotion—it took long enough, I thought—and I was damned if I was going to be cheated out of it if I didn’t have to be.

I was hoping that the Army, which was paying people who were riffed something like $10K for each year over five, I think, they served (unless they were riffed for incompetence), would jump at the chance to get a freebie. If you got out at your own request, the Army didn’t pay. I’d been in just over five years, seven counting senior ROTC—which did count as enlisted reserve—so the Army’d have had to pay me $20K or so if they riffed me. I found out that I could accept my promotion—the requirement to stay in had been dropped when the time-in-grade for eligibility was extended—and that the Army would release me from the remaining obligation, though I’d still have to be in the inactive reserve for the remainder of my obligation. I put in my papers. (I might have stayed in the Army longer if they hadn’t made me an accountant. Maybe we were both better off in the long run.)

As a parting shot, I recommended that the Class A Custodian, which had to be an officer—it was actually supposed to be a captain—should be redesignated as an extra duty for someone. It seemed wrong to waste a trained and experienced officer like that for so little activity. I believe they accepted my suggestion, though, of course, I wasn’t around to see if they implemented it.

I was promoted to captain on 1 December 1973, shortly before I left Berlin. I had planned a big party at the Officers’ Club, the Harnack House, to celebrate my 26th birthday (“Closer to 30 than to 20”) in ’72, but first Harry Truman died (26 December 1972, the day after my birthday) and then Lyndon Johnson died (22 January 1973), and O-club parties were cancelled or postponed. So I had a combined belated-birthday/promotion/departure left-over party: we tried to drink up all my remaining booze. (We did pretty good, as I recall. And I kept a well-stocked bar in Berlin—it was sooocheap to get the best stuff.) At the promotion ceremony in the CO’s office—I wasn’t part of the unit officially, but they were my administrative support since the umbilical didn’t stretch as far as Munich—I used my dad’s WWII railroad tracks. I had had him send them to me just for that purpose. I still have them. (My dad made captain in WWII, and it took him about three years, I think—but he started as an EM. It took me nearly four years, and I started as a second looie. I got first looie about 12 months in—while I was at Monterey.)

(Speaking of my dad. there was one very personal peculiarity for me to this assignment in Berlin. Because there hadn’t been a peace treaty to end WWII, Berlin was still under occupation until 1990 when a formal peace was finally negotiated. While the Allies had relinquished political responsibility for what became the Federal Republic in 1949, Berlin remained occupied territory for half a century. That meant that my service in Berlin in the ’70s made me eligible for the Army of Occupation Medal. That’s the same ribbon my dad was awarded for service in the Occupation of Germany—he was in Cologne after VE Day—30 years earlier. I always found it a little ironic that my dad and I both wore the same military decoration from the same war, a generation apart. Maybe I’m the only one to find this an odd comment about the state of our modern world. I recall there’s a Cold War Recognition Certificate that was authorized a few years back. I qualify and I think my dad did, too, since it recognizes all Federal service, military and civilian; I had some vague idea of getting us both the same award—there’s no official medal to go along with it, though I think someone has put out an unofficial one—for some sentimental reason. My mom didn’t feel like I did, so I never followed up on this notion.)

I had decided to go to acting school after leaving the service by this time—I had contacted Lee Kahn, the professor of theater at W&L, my alma mater, for advice and he was going to help me prepare audition pieces and, of course, recommend me to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts where he was a member of the board (and a grad school friend of the director at the time, Charles Raison). When people asked me what I was going to do when I got out and I told them I was going to acting school, they thought that that was a helluva change from the military. “Why?” I asked. “I’ve been playing the part of an Army officer for five years.” (Mine wasn’t the oddest change in career path by any means. A friend in Berlin, who had been an infantry officer and part of our theater group—his dad was a general, and was furious about this—got out and went to clown school! No comment.)

I’ve said that while I was living in Germany when I was a teenager, back in the early ’60s, I knew while it was happening that I was having an adventure. When I was in Berlin, my feeling was a little different. I had this sense that I was into something special and edgy. It wasn’t so much danger—there was some, but, of course, nothing to compare to what was happening in Southeast Asia. Maybe I was just taken with the romantic notion of the world’s second oldest profession—I had read all the James Bond books and, of course, the movies had already been around for a decade. Not to mention Manfrom U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, Mission: Impossible, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and so many other fictionalized renditions. (I’ve already mentioned our unofficial theme song, “Secret Agent Man.”) But I had this pervasive sense that I was involved in something special. The fact that other people with whom I came into contact treated me somehow differently—some with a kind of hostile resentment, some almost with awe—didn’t hurt, that’s certain. (Flashing our “box tops”—what we called our badges and credentials, also known as “B’s & C’s”—was a lot like being in a neat movie. Special Agent K*****, Military Intelligence. I used to watch The FBI and now I was in it!) But on top of any of this, was the feeling that I was actually doing something fairly important—even the background investigations. My decisions would affect the security of the country, even if it was at the lowest level. Drilling with an idiot stick or driving a tank in an exercise just didn’t match that, not in Berlin. Of course, I was all of 24 when I arrived in Berlin, and my sole Army duties up till then had been going to class: armor school, language school, intel school. Now I was getting to do something, and something for which I was specially and uniquely qualified—and I’m sure that had a significant effect on my attitude. But, man, I got to know things—things other people weren’t supposed to know. How cool was that?

Being back in Germany was also part of my consciousness. As soon as I got off the plane at Tempelhof and drove off with Chuck through the city—remember, the airport is right downtown: you drive through the city as soon as you leave the arrivals terminal—I felt a surge of nostalgia. (I had never been to Berlin when I lived in Germany before, but a German town is a German town in many ways. If nothing else, all the street and store signs were in German.) It felt like, not being home again, but being someplace very familiar. I’m sure I was projecting, but nevertheless . . . .

(I remember watching Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, about two angels who hang around Berlin and watch as the humans live their lives until one of them decides he wants to become human and experience life himself. The movie was released in ’88 and meanders around odd parts of Berlin, including some sites near sections of the Wall. I’m not sure I can make this make sense—I’ve never articulated it before—but at one point, one of the angels crosses a street and passes in front of a row of buildings that all looked as if they dated from the immediate post-war period—’50s and ’60s or thereabouts. It was only a few seconds of film, and it wasn’t in the least significant to the movie, but it made an odd connection for me. For those few seconds, the scene could have been anywhere in West Germany where those kinds of buildings were ubiquitous in the early days of my family’s time there. They were just little shops—bakeries, groceries, tobacconists, and such; I don’t even know what they were, but it could have been any street in any West German town where new buildings had been erected to replace older ones that had been destroyed in the war—they went up fast as Germany was recovering, and they all looked alike.

All of a sudden, and just for a second or two, I was right back there in ’63 in Koblenz in those first weeks and months when my brother and I moved there to join my folks. (See my two-part post, “An American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013.) It was the oddest kind of nostalgic sense—sort of Proustian, I guess. I reexperienced a feeling I remember having, but had never tried to describe or even, really, recognized until much, much later. It was this absolutely certain feeling that here I was, doing this extraordinary thing—living in a foreign country—that I knew was both unique and special and exciting. I was doing this really, really different thing—and I knew it. All this came back to me in that brief piece of movie, just because the setting looked vaguely familiar, the Germanness of it all, the strangeness, was actually palpable. That’s the feeling that came back driving away from Tempelhof that first day in Berlin.)

* * * *

From 18 June to 12 July 1981, the New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater) presented a stage adaptation of Wie Alles Anfing (How It All Began) by one of the anarchist militants whom I mention above, Michael “Bommi” Baumann. I saw the show and on 1 July 1981, wrote the following brief report (slightly edited), which I’m appending here as a sidebar to Part 5 of my “Berlin Memoir”:

Based on the 1979 autobiography of former West German terrorist Michael “Bommi” Baumann (1947-2016), How It All Beganwas developed by the May 1981 graduating class of the Juilliard School’s Theater Division. It was started as a class project and both dramatically and thematically, that is what it remains in the Dodger Theater production at The Other Stage (later the Susan Stein Shiva Theater) at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater. It appeals neither as good theater nor as good socio-history.

Pieced together from excerpts of Baumann’s book Wie Alles Anfing (How It All Began, published in Germany in 1975 and in the U.S. in 1979 as Terror or Love?) and other bits of research from the period of the mid-’60s to the early ’70s in West Germany and West Berlin during the heyday of Baumann, the Red Army Faction (AKA: The Baader-Meinhof Gang), Baumann’s Bewegung 2. Juni, and various other terrorist and anarchist groups, the student actors improvised, rehearsed, and taped the scenes and transcribed them into the collage presented here before a tar-black set resembling a ghostly version of a Feydeaux farce, with several doors, windows, and alcoves which provided access to the myriad characters of Baumann’s terrorist life in Berlin. Most of the scenes were staged by director Des MacAnuff in the center of the floor with locale-differentiation accomplished by the use of odd pieces of furniture. Since most of the actors played multiple roles (including several women playing men), it was not always easy to know where we were or whom we were watching.

In the end, though earnest performances were turned in by the young cast (including Val Kilmer as Baumann, Linda Kozlowski as his lover, Benjamin Donenberg as “Red” Rudi Dutschke, Jessica Drake as Ulrike Meinhof, Pamela M. White as Andreas Baader, and Mary Lynn Johnson as Gudrun Ensslin), nothing unique was accomplished, and it all remained a somewhat curious foray into the milieu of the leftist terrorist without having learned much at all that we did not already know.

One thing that I found most disturbing was the (apparently) inadvertent near-romanticization of Baumann and his RAF comrades. Though passing lip-service was given to the violence these anarchists (their own term) perpetrated on often innocent people (an elderly night watchman in Berlin killed in the bombing of a recreational yacht basin; two sergeants and a captain blown up at the U.S. Army headquarters in Frankfurt), they were allowed to come off as lost little children, searching for vague justice—sort of Robin Hood-cum-Peter Pans. It was my experience while I was in Berlin between 1971 and 1974 that they were no such things. I knew that captain in Frankfurt: he had a wife and two little girls. he was not a threat—or even a symbol; just a man. Baumann, Baader, and Meinhof were not attractive, romantic outlaws, and they stood for nothing concrete. They were violent and politically fuzzy-minded. One important bit of research the young students missed was the reaction of the people for whom the RAF claimed to fight. There was little support outside their radical student enclaves at Berlin’s Technical and Free Universities. They were not the German counterparts of our war-protesters or even the radical Weathermen. This missing element rendered How It All Began a vaguely troubling experience.

[I hope ROTters will return in a few weeks for Part 6 of this memoir, which will continue with my life as a GI in West Berlin and some of my escapades on and off duty.]

Until two weeks ago, I had seen eight of August Wilson’s ten Century Cycle plays. Up till then, I’d missed the last one he wrote, Radio Golf, the play that covers the last decade in the century and was completed in 2005, the year it premièred at the Yale Repertory Theatre, and the first cycle play the dramatist composed, 1982’s Jitney, the play that covers the 1970’s and the only one of the decalogue that hadn’t been presented on Broadway before now. But on Friday night, 10 February, I met my frequent theater companion, Diana, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in the Theatre District to see the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Wilson’s play.

Directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who’s staged or appeared in many of Wilson’s Pittsburgh plays, MTC’s Jitneybegan previews at the company’s Broadway, and Tony-eligible, house on West 47th Street on 28 December 2016 and opened on 19 January 2017. The run is scheduled to close on 12 March. According to his introduction to the special edition of the play text published this year (Overlook Press) to mark the Broadway première, Santiago-Hudson explained that two weeks before the playwright died in October 2005, he asked the director “to bring Jitney to Broadway.” The director proclaimed:

There had been nine jewels placed in August Wilson’s formidable crown, each had changed the landscape of Broadway in their respective seasons. Until now, only one gem was missing. With the production of Jitney at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel Friedman Theatre the final gem is in place.

Wilson (1945-2005) wrote Jitneyin 1979 and it received its first production at the small Allegheny Repertory Theatre in Pittsburgh, the playwright’s hometown, in 1982. (The story is that Wilson and his mother arrived at the opening performance in an actual jitney.) The Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, presented a one-act version in 1984 independently of the earlier mounting. In 1996, Wilson rewrote the play extensively for what was essentially its second première at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, directed by Marion McClinton—the first major Century Cycle première that wasn’t directed by the late Lloyd Richards, Wilson’s principal collaborator. During the next four years, Jitney was produced nationwide in dozens of theaters, such as the Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey (1997), and Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company (1998). Wilson continued to revise the play occasionally and it came to New York City, opening Off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre on 25 April 2000, winning the 2000-2001 Outer Critics’ Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play. It closed on 10 September and moved to the Union Square Theater on 19 September 2000 for a commercial run until 28 January 2001 (2000 Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play for August Wilson; 2001 Lucille Lortel nomination for Outstanding Play). The play opened in London at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre, running from 16 October through 21 November 2001, winning the Olivier Award for best play of the year.

After the Crossroads and Huntington Theatre presentations, CenterStage in Baltimore, the Studio Arena in Buffalo, the GeVa Theatre in Rochester, New York, and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago staged the play in 1999; Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum presented it in 2000; the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., presented it in 2001; the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in 2002; Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C., in 2007; and the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., in 2008—among many others around the world. Ruben Santiago-Hudson, director of the MTC Broadway première, staged a production in 2012 at the Two River Theater Company in Red Bank, New Jersey; the cast included Anthony Chisholm, who also appears, in the same role, in this mounting.

When Wilson, born Frederick August Kittel, Jr., in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, wrote Jitney, he hadn’t conceived of the Century Cycle of the African-American experience in the United States through the 20th century. He always knew he wanted to be a writer, and educated himself at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library after dropping out of high school in 10th grade. He particularly favored the works of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other black authors. He went on to add Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, playwright Amiri Baraka, and writers Ed Bullins and James Baldwin to his reading repertoire and he discovered the music of the blues, especially Bessie Smith, jazz, spurred by hearing John Coltrane in his home neighborhood, and hip-hop, which Wilson called “the spiritual fist of the [black] culture”; the art of Romare Bearden; and the political ideas of Malcolm X. After the 1965 death of his father, a German immigrant from Czechoslovakia, the nascent writer adopted his mother’s maiden name, Wilson.

After years of working in menial jobs, including janitor, porter, short-order cook, gardener, and dishwasher, Wilson started writing, sitting in bars and other public spaces where he observed the people of his neighborhood who would become his characters and absorbed their language. But he was writing poetry at this time. He helped found the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District in 1968 and wrote his first play, Recycling, in 1973. Other plays followed in the ’70s and early ’80s, one of which was Jitney. Then he conceived of his magnum opus (though, I suspect he didn’t think of it that way at the time), the cycle of plays recounting the black American experience in the 20th century, one play dedicated to each decade of the period.

After Wilson began what became known as his Century Cycle or Pittsburgh Cycle (a misnomer since one play isn’t set in Pittsburgh), starting in 1982 with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom(the only one of the 10 not to be set in the Hill District), Wilson extensively revised Jitney for its 1996 second première and fit it into the cycle as the eighth play in the series. (It’s the only play of the 10 that was actually written in the decade it covers.) The playwright continued to compose work outside the cycle, including his last piece, the autobiographical How I Learned What I Learned (2002), a solo performance piece he planned to perform for the Signature Theatre Company’s season devoted to Wilson’s work in 2006-07. (Signature’s Wilson season, the only one it’s devoted to a non-living playwright, came to fruition after the dramatist’s death, but without the monologue; Ruben Santiago-Hudson, director of the Broadway staging of Jitney, stood in for Wilson in How I Learned at Signature’s mounting of that monodrama in 2013.)

Wilson, who died of liver cancer on 2 October 2005 (age 60), finished the last play he wrote for his decalogue, Radio Golf, in 2005 and saw it premièred at the Yale Repertory Theatre but didn’t survive to see it open on Broadway in 2007. Fourteen days after his death, on 16 October 2005, the Virginia Theatre on Broadway, owned by Jujamcyn Theaters, was renamed in his honor, one of the few Broadway houses named for a writer and the first to be named for an African-American.

Overall, August Wilson’s a magnificent prose poet, with rhythms redolent of his influence from blues, which the writer calls, “My greatest influence . . . because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have,” and jazz, which gave Wilson the improvisational quality of his scripts. He makes his characters street poets and he takes from collagist Bearden “the fullness and richness of everyday ritual . . . rendered without compromise or sentimentality.” He’s not good with plot, however, and he needs an editor: Wilson’s said he tries “to make my plays the equal of [Bearden’s] canvases.”

In creating plays I often use the image of a stewing pot in which I toss various things that I’m going to make use of—a black cat, a garden, a bicycle, a man with a scar on his face, a pregnant woman, a man with a gun. Then I assemble the pieces into a cohesive whole guided by history and anthropology and architecture and my own sense of aesthetic statement.

In a quotation I jotted down from a wall panel at an exhibit of his work back in 2011, Bearden said: “The function of the artist is to organize the facts of life according to his imagination.” This seems particularly applicable to August Wilson’s dramaturgy, especially in light of the assessment of the Village Voice’s Michael Feingold: “He just didn’t bother to contrive and manipulate as a way of narrating those destinies. His sense of life was too powerful—perhaps too overpowering—for him to bother with that.” His characters, nonetheless, are actors’ dreams and his language is delicious.

The decalogue is truly a magnificent achievement by any measure. In a New York Times column about Wilson’s cycle, Ben Brantley pronounced that the series “will be remembered as one of the great achievements of the American theater, a work unrivaled by any contemporary in its expansive scale and richness of voice.” Nine of Wilson’s cycle plays were mounted on Broadway over 23 years, an accomplishment neither David Mamet nor Tom Stoppard matched, according to the Times’ Jason Zinoman. Critical acclaim was nearly unanimous for every staging—though there was also common criticism for the author’s haphazard and overburdened plotting, wordiness, and digressions. All of the nine Broadway productions were nominated for Tony Award, though Fences is the only one that won (twice: both in 1987 for the première and in 2010 for the revival).

The 10 plays aren’t strictly connected like, say, Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests or Richard Nelson’s Apple Family Plays, but some characters or their descendents appear in more than one; Seven Guitars, set in 1948, and King Hedley II, set in 1985, are the only two plays that are specifically linked. Nonetheless, Wilson’s plays have “many storytelling elements in common,” according to Erik Piepenburg, senior staff editor on the New York Times:

[T]they almost all took place in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the playwright’s hometown; they bracingly examined issues of racism, friendship, romance and memory; the shadow of slavery was ever-present, if sparingly depicted; and they were also vibrantly distinct in their settings, ambitions and theatrical destinations.

Remarkably, Wilson creates the world of all this life in microcosmic places: the backyard of a Hill District house, a living room, the musicians’ band room of a recording studio, a luncheonette, a car-service station.

Regular taxi cabs won’t travel to the Pittsburgh Hill District of the 1970s, and so the residents turn to jitneys—unofficial, unlicensed taxi cabs (which we know as “gypsy cabs” in New York City)—that operate in the community. Jitney, set in 1977 during a period of “urban renewal” in Pittsburgh, depicts the lives of the car-service drivers at the run-down jitney station, complete with junk cars outside, owned by Becker (John Douglas Thompson) as the city shuts down businesses and tears down whole blocks, including the car-service dispatch office, to make way for new buildings. There are five jitney drivers struggling to survive out of Becker’s station: the boss, Youngblood (André Holland, who gives a highly praised performance in the current film Moonlight), Turnbo (Michael Potts), Fielding (Anthony Chisholm, a veteran of the 2000 Second Stage production), and Doub (Keith Randolph Smith). The impending gentrification will put all of them, as well as many of their neighboring business-owners and their employees, out of work.

Youngblood, a veteran of Vietnam, and his girlfriend Rena (Carra Patterson), have a two-year-old son named Jesse. In the past, Youngblood—the name almost feels too on-the-nose, but it seems that this was a nickname the playwright himself acquired in his youth—has cheated on Rena, and now Rena thinks Youngblood is again being unfaithful—this time with her sister, because he disappears at times during the day and night, and also because, without explanation, he’s been taking the money they were saving for food. Finally, when Rena confronts him angrily, he reveals that he’s been going around with Rena’s sister to shop for a new house for himself, Rena, and Jesse. Rena, however, remains angry at Youngblood because he bought the house without getting her approval.

Becker’s son, Booster (Brandon J. Dirden), is released from prison, where he’s been incarcerated 20 years for murdering his girlfriend, who’d falsely claimed that he’d raped her. (Just to put this in fuller context: the woman was white and her father wouldn’t have tolerated the relationship. Let’s also recall that this would have been in the mid-’50s, about the time that Mildred and Richard Loving were arrested in Virginia for miscegenation and 10 years before Loving v. Virginia.) When he shows up at the jitney dispatch office, he finds that his father, who never visited him in prison, is deeply disappointed not just that his son is a murderer, but that Booster doesn’t see what he did as wrong. He and his father argue, and his father turns his back on him and walks out.

Turnbo is older than the other drivers and is aggravated by the behavior of younger folks, especially hotheaded Youngblood, whom Turnbo—who keeps a pistol in his car—delights in antagonizing. Fielding, who used to be a tailor (he made suits for Billy Ekstine and Count Basie), is a drunk unsuccessfully fighting against his urge to swig from the pint he always has in his pocket—even though Becker has threatened to fire him if he continues. Doub, the man of reason and wisdom, is a Korean War vet—the former warrior who keeps the peace. When he gets tired of hearing his fellow drivers blame the white man for all their bad fortunes, he instructs them, “That white man ain’t paying you no mind. . . . Hell, they don’t even know you alive.”

Under Becker’s leadership, the drivers and the other business-owners in the neighborhood decide to organize in the face of the threatened demolition. They plan to stay put and defy the evictors; Becker calls a meeting for the evening. But he’s been called to the mill where he used to work to help fill in when they came up short-handed. When an accident at the mill kills him (off stage, between scenes), the drivers all assemble at the station to mourn their friend and employer, and Booster, who hadn’t heard the news, shows up looking for his father. After the funeral, they all return to the station as if they didn’t know where else to go, and Booster instinctively answers the ringing phone: “Car service!” he says—as if he were taking over where his father left off.

MTC’s production of Jitney is terrific. It’s August Wilson’s first play in the cycle (and his fourth script overall), so it’s a tyro effort and it shows all his faults very clearly—a diffuse plot that meanders and never congeals; scenes and moments that, while wonderful little vignettes, are digressions; characters that don’t really become part of the ensemble. It’s also 2½ hours long. The poetry of his dialogue isn’t fully developed yet, so the language doesn’t quite soar the way it does in later plays in the decalogue. (It’s still pretty damn “actable.”) But the characters are magnificent portraits, each distinct and fully drawn. (Brantley of the Timesnoted of the characters that “it is remarkable how much we learn about each of them within two and a half hours.”) Aaron Frankel, one of my acting teachers, would call them “juicy” roles—the kind actors really love to play.

As you can probably tell from my synopsis above, there really isn’t a plot in Jitney. The events of the play are beads, and the string, as tenuous as it is, is the coming demolishment of the block of buildings that includes the cab station, reminiscent of Madame Ranevskaya’s cherry trees in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. When Booster comes into the station to reunite with Becker at the end of act one, it looks as if a narrative is about to be initiated, but when act two begins, it’s clear that was a false impression. Even the proposed action to fight the demolition and impending gentrification peters out as a through-line since it comes so near the end of the play and then Becker, the motivating force for the demonstration, dies precipitously. Maybe Booster, who signals he’s ready to assume his father’s mantle when he answers the dispatch office’s pay phone, will take up this fight—but we don’t know that and the play ends long before Booster or anybody else can be anointed Becker’s successor. So we’re left with a string of pearls, lustrous and intriguing though they are, vibrant with Wilson’s depiction of life in the Hill District that does recall a series of Bearden collages brought to life, but they’re snapshots, not stories.

The characters, too, are tenuously held together. They’re connected, aside from their common residence in the Hill District, by their association with the jitney service and, in the physical sense, their attachment to the station, which in David Gallo’s set is a sort of island of life isolated from the outside world which is only glimpsed through sooty widows and the quickly opened door as someone enters or leaves. (The backdrop is composed of blown-up photos, some historical and some taken by the designer, to create a collage of Hill District buildings, inspired by Romare Bearden. Gallo, who also designed the 2000 Off-Broadway production of Jitney, developed his concept of the set from conversations then with Wilson, in which the two “spent a lot of time talking about what this place is, and what it was.”) Not only is the streetscape outside the station barely visible, as if seen through etched glass, there’s no life going on out there except the occasional arrival or departure of one of the characters from the station. Within the station, though, the life of the play is so magnificently limned, so palpably drawn, that it brings the theatrical portrait to life for a nearly sublime two hours and thirty minutes that never lags.

The characters who aren’t drivers are least tied to the action, particularly Shealy (Harvy Blanks, who’s played in all 10 of Wilson’s cycle plays), the numbers runner who uses the dispatch office’s phone to take bets, and Booster, whose significance to the play is telegraphed but never develops. Shealy’s appearances seem to do little more than affirm that folks in the Hill District play the numbers and Booster exists as a flesh-and-blood character pretty much only so he can pick up the phone at the end of the play; otherwise both characters could be implied by dialogue. If Wilson weren’t such a fabulous creator of characters for the stage (meaning, for actors to inhabit), they’d be throw-aways. They are, however, like the other denizens of the Hill District, of part that Beardenian view of the blues-infused world Wilson saw. The acting in Santiago-Hudson’s Jitneyis so good that there needs to be a “best ensemble” Tony for this cast. (The Obies have one and the Drama Desks have one as a special award; the Screen Actors Guild Awards also have ensemble categories for both film and TV. The Tonys don’t.)

There’s no star role in Jitney, a dominant figure like Troy Maxson in Fences. The closest Jitney comes to such a unifying character is John Douglas Thompson’s Becker, who holds the ensemble together not just because he employs most of them, but because he, alone, has some kind of relationship—sometimes tenuous, granted—with each of the others. (Diana and I saw Thompson, who has a reputation as a top-flight classical actor, as Thorwald Helmer in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Captain Adolf in Strindberg’s The Father at Theatre for a New Audience last June. My report, “TFANA’s Scandinavian Rep,” was posted on 13 June 2016.) Though Becker runs the car service according to specific rules and policies he’s laid down for the drivers, Thompson plays him as something of a soft touch—he can be gotten ’round. Except, it seems, by his ex-con son, for whom Becker shows no sympathy—as far as we can know, since Becker dies before much can change in that relationship.

Two other roles stand out in the Jitney ensemble, Doub, played by Keith Randolph Smith, and Michael Potts’s Turnbo. It’s not so much the quality of Smith’s and Potts’s performances that make these characters salient here—all the actors do equally terrific turns—but the prominence of their characters. Thompson is the man of compassion, as compared to Doub as the man of reason, but sterner than Thompson’s Becker. Still Smith, a big man who looks like he could crush any of the rest of the men without a lot of effort, gives the air of a giant who’s not so much gentle as one who very carefully picks his fights. Potts, a much less likeable person as Turnbo, behaves like a man who just can’t help sticking his nose in other people’s affairs. (Turnbo provokes Youngblood until the younger driver turns on him in rage and then Turnbo runs to grab the gun he keeps in his car. Turnbo’s also the one who informs Rena that her sister’s been riding around in her boyfriend’s car, deliberately implying that Youngblood’s being unfaithful again.) “I just talk what I know,” he insists, and Potts made me believe Turnbo believes it. I should also make mention of the strong, passionate connections actors Thompson and Dirden, Potts and Holland, and Holland and Patterson create between their characters.

For the rest, Wilson, Santiago-Hudson, and the actors give each character a serious flaw—short-tempered Youngblood, alcoholic Fielding, hard-hearted Rena—but imbue them all with such sympathy and even warmth that I rooted for each of them to come through the deprivations being visited on Jimmy Carter-era Pittsburgh. The actors never let me feel any of them was beyond hope, not even unrepentant Booster, who may have come around in the end to realize what he’d done. As Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review, the 2017 Broadway première of this 1979 play now seems to be “not only saying that black lives matter; but also that black life matters.” In large part, that Trump-era resonance is due to Santiago-Hudson’s directing and the cast’s performances.

Santiago-Hudson, a dab hand at Wilson’s work now (as an actor—Seven Guitars, Gem of the Ocean, How I Learned What I Learned—and director—Seven Guitars, The Piano Lesson—and even a little as a writer: a playwright in his own right, he’s been working on the screenplay for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in actor-director-producer Denzel Washington’s plan to adapt all 10 of the cycle plays for HBO following the success of Fences, released last year), did a terrific job staging this Jitney and David Gallo’s set, lit by Jane Cox, is a beautiful jumble of street junk and cast-offs. (Scott Laule is the show’s properties supervisor.) Starting with a superb cast of actors, Santiago-Hudson tuned them into an integrated jazz-like ensemble so interwoven, each character and actor riffing on his or her own theme, that none of Wilson’s dramaturgical deficiencies has a lasting effect. Like Bearden’s collages, made up of bits cut from diverse sources and fused with the artist’s own additions, a viewer can step back and just let the whole experience flow. Santiago-Hudson understands this dynamic and mostly keeps out of the way enough to let the actors and Wilson’s writing carry the play.

The physical production is of the same vein. In Gallo’s cluttered storefront, looking like a squatter’s nest of salvaged odds and ends, the outside world only intrudes in small bursts: the constantly ringing telephone—almost another character in the play—bringing in Hill District residents in need of a ride; noises and sounds (created by Darron L. West) from the street; the hazy view through the station’s windows of the rest of the block; the incursions now and then by outsiders to the car service like Shealy, Rena, and Philmore (Ray Anthony Thomas), a neighborhood doorman who uses the jitneys frequently; and the conversations of the drivers about goings-on and people in the neighborhood. This corner of the universe is enhanced beautifully by the jazz-colored music composed by Bill Sims, Jr., the period-perfect costumes (in all their 1970s kitchiness) of Toni-Leslie James, and the hair and make-up styles of Robert-Charles Vallance. Cox’s lighting scheme not only evokes the time of day, but the designer alternately illuminates corners of the room and hides them in shadows. (Some reviewers complained about an expressionistic effect Cox uses at the end as inconsistent with the tone of Santiago-Hudson’s production, but it went by me so fast, I didn’t even catch it so it couldn’t have been that intrusive.)

On the basis of 51 published reviews, Show-Score gave MTC’s Jitney an average rating of 87 (including some out-of-town sources) with 98% of the notices positive, 2% mixed, and none negative. Show-Score’s tally included 11 95’s (including the New York Times), the highest rating, and 15 90’s; the lowest score was 65, the sole mixed notice. My survey will comprise 32 outlets, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the hometown paper of the Hill District.

“Conversation sings and swings, bends and bounces and hits heaven smack in the clouds,” wrote Brantley in his Timesreview of Jitney, which he dubbed a “glorious new production” at MTC. Brantley added, “In Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s vital revival . . ., words take on the shimmer of molten-gold notes from the trumpets of Louis and Miles.” The Timesman fairly raved about the show: “How sweet the sound. And how sorrowful and jubilant, as life in a storefront taxi company . . . comes to feel like a free-form urban concerto, shaped by the quick-witted, improvisatory spirit that makes jazz soar.” (No wonder the notice scored a 95!) Linking the play’s Broadway opening (the evening before the inauguration) to the political atmosphere of the new Trump administration and linking Wilson’s dramaturgy to “another great American dramatist, Arthur Miller,” the Timesreviewer praised the “impeccably tuned ensemble” and singled out John Douglas Thompson for special notice, and Brantley remarked that Gallo’s set “exudes an aura of both contingency and vibrancy.” (The Times published a fascinating article, “Picturing Pittsburgh, Iron City Beer Included” by Erik Piepenburg, that discusses in detail Gallo’s stage design for Jitney. It ran in the print edition on 12 February in the “Arts & Leisure” section and is on the Times website at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/theater/jitney-august-wilson-pittsburgh-set-design-david-gallo.html. Both versions are illustrated with photos of details of the set. ROTters who are interested in—or even just curious about—scenic design should take a look.)

In the Wall Street Journal, Edward Rothstein said of the play: “Everything feels thoroughly authentic . . . . Wilson’s play . . . is so disciplined, so full of distinctive voices with their own pungent passions and fears, and so meticulously brought to life by a taut ensemble feelingly directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson that we fully accept this world as it is given to us . . . (with excellent scenic design by David Gallo).” Rothstein affirmed, as I expect Wilson intended, that theatergoers don’t just see a performance: “We are eavesdropping; we are witnessing.” Calling the play a “vibrant group portrait,” Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York Daily News declared that Jitney“delivers a gripping ride.” Dziemianowicz dubbed Santiago-Hudson’s production “atmospheric” and characterized the cast as a “fine-tuned ensemble.”

In amNew York, Matt Windman labeled MTC’s Jitney“a focused and penetrating production . . . featuring an outstanding ensemble cast” who “excel at delivering Wilson’s colloquial but lyrical language.^” Windman observed that the play provides “bits and pieces of plot, . . . but ‘Jitney’ functions primarily as a detailed study of the characters and their rough environment.” Linda Winer of Long Island’s Newsdaycalled MTC’s Jitney a “[l]oving, authoritative Broadway premiere” in her “Bottom Line” and went on to characterize the play as a “rich, chatty, eerily mature work” in “a meticulously cast” production. In the U.S. edition of The Guardian, Alexis Soloski pronounced that Jitney“is that very rare thing—a play that ought to be longer.” Even at 2½ hours, Soloski explained, “the immersion in these characters and their world is so closely woven and complete that when the final line peals out, it’s hard not to wish for another act, another scene, another ride.” The Guardian reviewer affirmed, “Much of the acting is extraordinary,” especially noting the confrontation scene between Thompson’s Becker and Dirden’s Booster, and praised Santiago-Hudson’s “fine ear for the play’s musicality.”

“Directed with nuance by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and featuring a stellar ensemble,” asserted Patrick Maley for the Newark Star-Ledger (on nj.com) of MTC’s Jitney, “the show finds real nobility in the everyday lives of a downtrodden community . . . .” The review-writer added, “‘Jitney’ is full of rich, flawed human characters whom Wilson treats with compassion and empathy.” The physical design, Maley stated, made the show seem “not a museum piece, but a dynamic visit from the past” and the director “finds the soul of ‘Jitney’ and guides his team toward it with a steady hand” while “capturing the profound human drama of ‘Jitney’ with palpable grace.” On NorthJersey.com, Robert Feldberg of the Bergen County Record warned that the 1979 Jitney script “bears the imprint of a young playwright who hadn’t fully found his voice. There are moments of melodrama and sentimentality that seem borrowed from a common dramatic shelf.” Still, Feldberg affirmed, it has the Wilsonian quality of “a vibrant awareness of the community he was writing about.” Though the Record reviewer noted that Jitneyis “a vivid signpost to the more significant plays that followed,” he noted that it “is not a great work,” with “story elements . . . wanting dramatically in various ways.”

Just to get the perspective of someone who lives in the milieu of Wilsoniana, I checked the notice of Christopher Rawson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (Apparently a paper of more neighborhood interest in the day would have been the afternoon Pittsburgh Press, pages from which appear on the set, but it stopped publishing in 1992.) Rawson called the Broadway début of Jitney“a splendid, feisty production” of “one of the most robustly comic and audience-friendly of the Cycle plays.” The MTC mounting, he said, “is a full-blooded August Wilson play, realized with professional skill and heartfelt zest.” Rawson, who’s seen many a production of Jitney (which, remember, started in Pittsburgh with two premières), has developed some “presumptions” about casting. Nonetheless, he praised nearly all the New York actors—some, like Dirden as Booster, he even found as good as any he’d seen in the roles. One or two even surprised him with fresh interpretations or nuances by actors with different stage presences. Rawson concluded that in MTC’s Jitney, “the result is a rich seam of emotion within a lively tragicomedy that speaks to us all.”

Complaining only about “the minor drag” of “a little too much blues music to mark the transitions,” the New Yorker reviewer for “Goings On About Town” reported that Santiago-Hudson “keeps the story moving” while he “handles the large cast . . . with verve.” The actors, an ensemble of “uniformly good work,” all demonstrate “great skill and humor,” with particular notice for Michael Potts and André Holland. In New York magazine, Jesse Green called Jitney“not only a worthy evening of theater but a fascinating archeological artifact,” but complained, “There is no central spine to the story, only—. . . as in some jazz—a round robin of variations.” Santiago-Hudson, said Green, tries to integrate the pieces “but is limited by the patchwork text.” The man from New York concluded, “If in Jitney we see the marks of Wilson’s ambition but not yet the payoff, that only makes it more valuable. Jitney was the way he got there.” The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold gave a lengthy and detailed analysis of Wilson’s play and his dramaturgy, then acknowledged that director Santiago-Hudson staged the MTC revival so that the “depth and density comes out vividly” and “[e]very role is fulfilled handsomely and inventively.” The Voice review-writer concluded, “Far better than following the rules of playwriting, Jitney follows the unruly, unpredictable, inexplicable patterns of life.”

In Time Out New York, David Cote compared Jitney, “a soul-sustaining, symphonic piece,” to the cars the characters drive and decided it “is built to last and moves like a dream.” Santiago-Hudson “steersa powerhouse cast through” performances that are a “deliverance for audiences hungry for soaring language and tough truths.” The man from TONY concluded that MTC’s Jitney is “a thrilling journey.” Maya Stanton of Entertainment Weekly dubbed Jitneyan “intelligent, thought-provoking piece” and “an emotionally bruising gem of a play” that is “[b]y turns hilarious and devastating.” Stanton further reported, “The talented cast soars under the confident direction of Tony-winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson,” who “offers a straightforward interpretation of the material.” The EWreviewer ends by stating, “From the stellar performances to the sharp script, Jitney is a substantial piece, and a breath of fresh air to boot.”

Marilyn Stasio characterized MTC’s production as a “pitch-perfect revival” with a “fine cast” in Variety. The review-writer’s take on the Broadway Jitney was that director Santiago-Hudson “dances to the rhythms of ensemble directing, which assures that these actors live for and through their characters.” David Rooney’s “Bottom Line” on the play in the Hollywood Reporter was: “A bustling microcosm of boundless scope and texture.” Labeling it “superb” and “gorgeous,” the HR review-writer declared the production is “shaped with imperceptible skill into a hypnotic blues symphony” conducted with “fluidity.” Of the cast, Rooney wrote, “There’s not an actor on the stage who doesn’t thoroughly inhabit his or her flavorful character,” and he singled out several for special mention.

In the cyber press, Steven Suskin declared of MTC’s Jitney in the first of two Huffington Post reviews, “Given that . . . director Ruben Santiago-Hudson has filled his cast with grand performers giving grand performances, theatergoers can head to the Samuel Friedman prepared to be entranced and entertained.” With praise for the cast, especially Thompson and Dirden, the HP reviewer reported, “Santiago-Hudson helps his cast . . . bring out the richness in the characters.” Suskin characterized the revival as an “excellent production of an intriguing play, overflowing with that incomparable language of the master.” He found, however, that “the script itself, as rich as it is in performance, is not quite an American classic and not quite up to the other nine plays. Jitney,” he explained, “is built in fits and starts.” Suskin concluded, though: “That said, the cast and the production make this Jitney a must-see for those who appreciate the voice of August Wilson.” In Huffington Post’s second notice, Regina Weinreich also pronounced the show “a must-see,” especially given Santiago-Hudson’s “superb direction.” In her last comment, Weinreich admonished, “By play’s end, with the wrecking ball of gentrification looming large over this fine-tuned ensemble, you are no more ready to leave the station than Jitney’s drivers are. RRRRring! It must go on.”

Elyse Sommer congratulated MTC on CurtainUp for “giving Jitney the production it deserves,” in a “well-paced, sensitive” mounting with the “top to bottom excellence of this ensemble.” Sommer spotlighted the work of designers Gallo and James and composer Sims. The CUreviewer concluded that the evening comes “together for . . . an uplifting and bracing moment.” On New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell described the MTC production as “superbly acted and directed,” reporting that Santiago-Hudson “makes the play as lively and funny as it should be.” Each of the cast members gets due praise from Mandell, as do the contributions of scenarist Gallo, costumer James, and composer Sims. The New York Theater reviewer concluded that “for the moment at least, ‘Jitney’ feels not just rewarding, but necessary.”

Jitney“has a rougher, more contrived quality than later works . . .,” asserted Zachary Stewart on TheaterMania, “but it crackles with the energyof a writer eager to wrestle with difficult questions.” The TMreview-writer continued: “The result is a deeply satisfying drama that leaves us grappling with these issues as they pertain to the present day.” Calling the “excellent” production, “directed with loving attention to detail,” a “stellar revival,” Stewart noted that “great performances outnumber mediocre ones,” though he is unenthusiastic about “miscast” Dirden as Booster. The cyber reviewer praised the rest of the cast as well as James’s costumes, Cox’s lighting, Sims’s music, and Gallo’s set, and summed up by stating that “Jitney tells [Wilson’s African-American] story beautifully in two and a half hours. Samuel L. Leiter, blogging on Theatre’s Leiter Side, dubbed Santiago-Hudson’s staging of the play “revved-up,” comparing it to “a boxing ring for champion actors” who engage here in “a slugfest of performance give and take” under the director’s “coaching.” He warned, however, that “there’s so much high-octane acting one wishes the actors could now and then step on the brakes.” Leiter offered praise for Gallo’s set, James’s costumes, Cox’s lighting, and West’s sound design, and in the end, he quipped, “There may be no jitneys in New York but there are plenty of other ways to get to the MTC. It’ll be well worth the ride.”

Michele Willens, calling the direction and the ensemble acting in Jitney“pitch perfect” on Theatre Reviews Limited, confessed that she “thoroughly enjoyed spending two and a half hours with this working-class gang, so touchingly and honestly just trying to make a living.” The TRLreviewer concluded, “This is Pittsburgh poetry, August Wilson style, and it is very fine indeed.” On Broadway World, Michael Dale reported that Santiago-Hudson “delivers a superb production filled with funk, grit, humor and some positively thrilling acting.” Dale summed up by asserting, “While Jitney’s impact may not reach the magnitude of Wilson’s zenith, . . . this compelling production is continually engaging and thick with humor and emotion.”

Matthew Murray wrote on Talkin’ Broadway of the production that the characters

form a magnetic bond you can feel emanating from the stage, and, under the capable direction of Ruben Santiago-Hudson, have the properly melodic way with Wilson’s epically musical downscale dialogue, which bestows an added respectability and sense of size to the street patois so many of these people speak.

Murray complained, however, about “the externals”:

David Gallo’s set does not sit comfortably in the space, and has a too-sweeping look that mutes some of the sense of claustrophobic dread. (The costumes by Toni-Leslie James, the original music by Bill Sims Jr., and the sound design by Darron L. West more accurately capture the mood.) And though Santiago-Hudson scarcely falters in his work with the actors, his staging of the scene transitions and one critical second-act moment come across as too self-involved, more about the unexpected effects of Jane Cox’s lights (which are otherwise strong) than giving these moments the stark clarity they really require.

On Theater Scene,Victor Gluck dubbed MTC’s Jitney“a magnificent revival” that, in the current environment, “is timely once again.” Gluck asserted, “a better staging could not be imagined of this involving and engrossing play,” for which Santiago-Hudson has assembled a “true ensemble.” The TS reviewer paid compliments to the designs of Gallo and James, and the music of Sims. He compared the current production with its 2000 Off-Broadway predecessor, which “made Jitney seem like a series of vignettes, bits and pieces, that didn’t actually cohere.” Director Santiago-Hudson makes it “a great American story of men struggling to make ends meet and live their disparate lives side by side.” Gluck concluded, “Not only is the play absorbing, it is both wise and compassionate.” The review-writer closed by admonishing that “this is a play that must be seen.”

Calling the Broadway début of Jitney a “sterling revival,” Mich[a]el Bracken reported on Theater Pizzazz that Santiago-Hudson “capitalizes on [the] flow [of the natural comings and goings], ensuring smooth and seamless transitions.” The director has assembled a “remarkable ensemble cast “ among whom “[n]o one stands out because they’re all outstanding. They play off each other beautifully.” Though Bracken noted the long journey Jitney took to get to Broadway, he closed by asserting, “This splendid production gives it the wholehearted welcome it deserves.” On NY Theatre Guide (not to be confused with New York Theatre Guide below), Jeff Myhre declared, “Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs my choice for best play of the year.” Wilson’s “words allow mediocre actors to give good performances, and good actors to give great ones. In this production, we get a glimpse of what lies beyond great, and it is a gift to the audience, the cast, and the crew.” He included praise not only for Gallo’s set, Cox’s lighting, James’s costumes, West’s soundscape, and Sims’s music, but also Robert-Charles Vallance’s make-up and hair and Thomas Schall’s fight choreography. The NY Theatre Guide review-writer concluded, “This is theatre at its most serious and at its most useful.”

On Front Row Center, Show-Score’s only low (mixed) rating at 65, Tulis McCall (who also posted on New York Theatre Guide) commented, “Sometimes I think of August Wilson as a composer. The text of his plays comes through as music.” She then asserted, “Jitney has moments that are transcendent.” McCall, however, caviled that the pay was “a bit disjoint[ed] on the one hand and predictable on the other” and held “no real surprises for me.” The FRCreviewer, though, thought she was in a minority because the audience around her “was vocal in their response”: “It was as if the music of the piece swept off the stage and grabbed them up.”

On the air, declaring the Century Cycle “a masterpiece,” Jennifer Vanasco said on WNYC, an outlet of National Public Radio in New York City, that after its many revisions, Jitney is “now close to perfect.” The radio reviewer asserted that “as directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, this is a magnificent production, one of the best shows to be staged this year,” reporting, “The ensemble conveys authenticity and a sparkling vibrancy.” Venasco concluded, “The drivers in Jitney have a deep respect for one another and we have a deep respect for them. To generate this kind of empathy is art’s highest purpose.” Roma Torre of NY1, the news channel of the Spectrum cable system (formerly TimeWarner Cable), affirmed that Jitney“speaks with an eloquence that transcends time and place.” The characters are “portrayed by an excellent ensemble” and director Santiago-Hudson “recognizes, more than almost anyone else, the universal themes in Wilson’s plays that sing to us all.” At WNBC, the New York City outlet of the TV network, Robert Kahn characterized Broadway’s Jitneyas “an artful and melodic staging” by Santiago-Hudson and praised each member of the cast. He explained, “The MTC’s ensemble does a glorious job bringing home [the play’s] message.”

* * * *

[The ten plays in August Wilson’s Century Cycle, in the order of their setting, are:

· 1904 – Gem of the Ocean (premièred 2003, Goodman Theatre, Chicago; Broadway 2004)

· 1911 – Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986, Yale Rep, New Haven, CT; 1988; Broadway revival, 2009, Lincoln Center Theater)

· 1927 – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984, Yale; 1984; Broadway revival, 2003)

· 1936 – The Piano Lesson (1987, Yale; 1990; Drama Desk Award, Pulitzer Prize; Lucille Lortel Award [Revival], 2013)

· 1948 – Seven Guitars (1995, Goodman; 1996’; Pulitzer nomination)

· 1957 – Fences (1985, Yale; 1987; Broadway revival, 2010’ Tony, Drama Desk, Pulitzer; Tony [Revival], Drama Desk [Revival])

· 1969 – Two Trains Running (1990, Yale; 1992; Lucille Lortel [Revival],2007)

· 1977 – Jitney (1982, Allegheny Rep, Pittsburgh/1996, Pittsburgh Public Theater; 2017)

· 1985 – King Hedley II (1999, Pittsburgh Public; 2001; Pulitzer nomination)

· 1997 – Radio Golf (2005, Yale; 2007)

[In addition to this production of Jitney,I saw Fences on Broadway (with James Earl Jones and Mary Alice, directed by Lloyd Richards; all won Tonys, as did the play) in July 1987 (I haven’t seen the movie yet), Two Trains (the only play in the cycle I’ve seen twice on stage) on Broadway (with Larry Fishburne, who won a Tony, and Roscoe Lee Browne, directed by Lloyd Richards) in May 1992 and at the Signature Theatre Company in December 2006, Joe Turner by the New Federal Theatre at the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in late fall, 1996, Ma Raineyat Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in late fall, 2002, Seven Guitars at Signature (with Lance Reddick, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson) in September 2006, Gem at Arena in February 2007, King Hedley at Signature in March 2007, and Piano Lesson at Signature (directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson) in December 2012 (and on television with Charles Dutton and Alfre Woodard and directed by Lloyd Richards in February 1995). I also saw Santiago-Hudson perform How I Learned What I Learned at Signature in December 2013. (I’ve posted reports on ROT of Piano Lesson on 14 December 2012 and How I Learned on 20 December 2014. Earlier Wilson performances—Seven Guitars, 2006 Two Trains, Gem, and King Hedley—predated this blog, but I’ll consider posting the archival reports at some near-future date. Unfortunately, there are no write-ups of Fences, 1992 Two Trains, Joe Turner, or Ma Rainey.)]

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward has been a major contributor to Rick On Theater since its inception in March 2009—which isn’t surprising because Kirk suggested to me that I start the blog in the first place and, being an IT guy in his day job, helped me find the host site. A playwright, director, actor, composer, lyricist, and teacher, he’s written on many topics for ROT, including non-theater subjects. He’s written about directing in several of his posts, starting with “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal” (which gets a mention below), posted on 4 June 2010. Later contributions on this subject are “Directing Twelfth Night for Children,” 16 and 19 December 2010, and “Reflections On Directing,” 11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013. Of course, Kirk’s knowledge of directing has come into play in many of his other pieces for ROT, but now he’s coming back to the blog with a slightly different perspective on the craft: how to assess a prospective director for potential employment. “Evaluating a Director” is based on Kirk’s recent experience applying for a directing position with a theater company in the New Jersey suburb where he lives. The process was an unusual experience—Kirk described it for me when it started and I agreed that I hadn’t ever heard of one like it—but (as with most of Kirk’s experiences, I’ve discovered) he found it instructive. So here my friend shares with ROTters what he gleaned from the evaluation process he went through; I know you’ll find it revealing as well as interesting. ~Rick]

A recent experience has given me an interesting opportunity for thinking about what a director does and how a director does it, and to change my own mind about an aspect of it. The following is a journal, tracing my thoughts, such as they are, or my stream of consciousness, about the experience as it went along.

(12 December 2016)

I recently applied to direct a play (not yet chosen) for the St. James Players of Montclair, New Jersey (www.stjamesplayers.org), a community-based theater in my area that performs one Shakespeare production a year – that’s their whole season. I sent them a cover letter and my resume.

I received a cordial reply thanking me for my application, suggesting a date for an interview, and mentioning that part of the interview would involve my staging a short scene in front of the board of directors, with a cast including members of that same board.

This surprised me; I’ve never before staged a sample scene as part of a directing job interview. I told my correspondent that the date and the procedure were fine. To be honest, I saw no reason to worry about it. At first glance the request seems fine.

If you were interviewing someone for a job as, say, a church pianist, you wouldn’t be satisfied with looking over resumes; you’d ask the applicants to play something for you. If you were interviewing portrait painters, you’d at least like to see their portfolios. If you were interviewing wedding bands, you’d at least want to hear some recordings, and maybe hear them play a song or two live.

My application to direct had been forwarded to the group by one of its members whom I had recently directed elsewhere. Hopefully he didn’t think I was too bad as a director; at least he apparently didn’t blackball me. Many times a theater will choose a director based on a recommendation, or perhaps on a production that several people saw. In desperate situations they may even select a director based solely on a resume. Interviews are a standard practice. (I first met my wife Pat when she interviewed me for a directing job!)

Still, though, surely a better procedure is to watch a director direct? Seems logical. But that request did start me wondering what such a procedure could actually demonstrate.

One obvious answer is that watching a director work with people may answer the question: is this applicant someone you could endure for an entire production?

It seems unlikely that an applicant could disguise an abrasive personality for an entire working session. (And after all, for a chance at an unpaid and strenuous directing task, who would try?)

An aside on auditioning – the fact is that the “thumbs up, thumbs down” of many – I would guess nearly all – interviews is decided, not even in the first few minutes, but in the first few secondsof an interview. I have never talked on the subject with a director who didn’t confirm that her or his mind was made up about each actor within a very few moments of the first encounter with the actor.

I see no reason why the same shouldn’t be true about interviewing directors. My guess is that the board of the St. James Players will have decided whether they’re willing to consider me for the job before I’ve finished walking through the door. That’s how it works, and if you are skeptical, audition a group of actors (or directors!) for a play and see for yourself.

How is this possible, this practically instantaneous reaction and evaluation? The answer appears to be that, consciously or unconsciously, the interviewer has in mind a desired result – an image, a picture, a conception of what the interviewee ideally will be like - before the interviews start. Match that image, and you’re in, or at least further in. Fail to match it, and you’re out.

Actors often don’t realize that it’s almost impossible for them to “win” or “lose” a role because of talent or skill. Of course someone may make a favorable impression and then cancel it out, for example by turning out to be crazy. (I have seen that happen.)

Or the reverse may occasionally happen, with a bad first impression followed by something overwhelmingly fine that changes the interviewer’s mind. The casting director and teacher Michael Shurtleff, in his invaluable book Audition(1979), says that Robert De Niro, the outstanding actor, could hardly bring himself to speak in initial interviews because of shyness. Obviously he had the talent to overcome this obstacle, but most of us don’t.

Both situations are rare, however. Usually first impressions rule. Auditioners and interviewers have ideas of what they want to see, whether those ideas are conscious or subconscious.

Back, now, to the upcoming interview. A complication in the present case, of course, is that the decision on me and my fellow directors will be made, not by an individual (as far as I know) but by a board of directors. That complicates matters but probably not too much; generally the board ought to be able to determine, essentially, whether they like me or not.

What beyond that? What does the board hope to see from me as a director, and what can I show them?

I’m told that I’ll be sent the scene I’m supposed to stage in advance, which I think is appropriate. A director is supposed to prepare before rehearsals (leaving the question of “prepare what?” unspecified for a moment).

If you ask a director to prepare and she or he doesn’t, you’ve learned something problematic about that director . . . or have you? We will return to that issue.

I haven’t been sent the scene yet and don’t know what it will be, or how long I’ll have to work on it. My feeling is that it won’t matter much whether I get it a month in advance or the night before. For better or worse, I should be able to do the work on it that I need to in whatever time is available.

Will it be a scene from one of the plays the theater has already staged? These include:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The Tempest

Twelfth Night

The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Taming of the Shrew

Macbeth

I’m pretty sure the scene will be from a play by Shakespeare, since the theater does only his plays. This has both advantages and disadvantages, which is where we start getting into more specifics about this process.

An obvious advantage, if the play does turn out to be by Shakespeare, is that I’ve read various articles and essays about all of his plays; I’ve read most of the plays themselves; I’m substantially familiar with many of them; and I’ve directed a half dozen already. That’s on the advantage side.

The disadvantage side – possibly – is that directing Shakespeare’s plays has its own specific problems, many of them problems of language. As a result I would never begin staging a scene in one of his plays without first having the cast do it in “paraphrase” – putting the text in their own words – at least once, and possibly several times, and then using that paraphrase work as a basis for staging the scene.

A number of times I have seen actors speak Shakespearian verse in confident tones that masked their complete incomprehension of it. (I give an example of this in my report in this blog on directing some of King Lear [see “Kirk Woodward’s King LearJournal,” 4 June 2010].) I don’t want to direct on the assumption that everyone already knows what all the lines mean.

To sum up, questions about the interview scene I’ll be directing include:

1. What expectations does the board have about what I’m going to do?

2. Does the board have a fixed idea about how a director ought to work?

3. Should I approach the scene as though I’m really directing it, or as though I’m giving a demonstration of the way I direct? Should I possibly narrate my process as I go along (for example, “At this point I’d have the actors use paraphrase on the scene”), or is this a “real time enactment” in which I really try to bring the scene along to a particular point?

4. In that case, what point am I supposed to bring the scene to? So it’s ready for the next rehearsal? Ready to perform before an audience? Or something else?

5. Is the board’s real desire to see how I stagethe scene – in other words, how I arrange the movement of the actors? Is that what they’re looking for?

6. How much time do I have in which to direct this mini-scene? Will the next interviewee be outside, waiting impatiently if I take too long? Is the board watching to see if I can direct quickly? Is speed of the essence in their minds?

8. For that matter, are the board members in the scene actually actors?

I will probably come up with other questions, and I doubt that I’ll actually ask most of these before the interview, but I think these do show that the idea of directing interview scenes is not as simple as it may appear at first glance.

My hope would be that the board would want to see a “snapshot” of my directing – to watch how I handle a specific moment in the directing process, whatever that moment might be. I suspect that such a “snapshot” would tell the board about as much as they can learn from the interview beyond what my resume and recommendations tell them.

Their request has made me realize how much directing is a cumulative process. It’s not a matter of doing “A,” it’s a matter of helping a cast move from “A” to “Z” in a solid way by opening night.

To take one example, I mentioned the possibility above that the board might be looking at how I stage the scene – how I “block,” that is, physically arrange, the actors. I have no problem with that – I certainly don’t always think my blocking is brilliant, but I’m glad to do my best.

But the director doesn’t direct a play in the abstract. There’s always some kind of set and setting, whether it’s an elaborate system of levels on a stage or a couch in a living room. Blocking that works in one location probably will not work in another.

What’s more, while some directors may block their plays and never change their blocking again, that’s not my procedure. If necessary I’ll change my blocking up to, and once in a while during, the last week of rehearsals.

As rehearsals go on I may see a better way of staging something. As the actors and I get to know each other and the play better, we may mutually find that there are ways of doing things that fit their abilities and personalities better. I would be foolish not to want to take advantage of that.

So a director is not necessarily a magician who says a magic word and – poof! – there’s a completely staged play. I’m not.

Every director works differently, anyway. Some directors are brutal tyrants with their actors – and sometimes those tactics result in brilliant productions. On the other hand, some directors want to work with their actors, not over them. (I believe and hope I’m one of those.)

There are even good directors who don’t prepare much. That might seem unlikely, but take the example of the legendary Broadway director George Abbott (1887-1995). As William Goldman reports in his splendid book about Broadway, The Season (1969):

Abbott is known in the business for not doing a great deal of homework. Once, when a new scene was about to be blocked, he called to the stage manager, “Where are the doors?” That was really all he wanted to know. “I do less than anybody, I think,” he said. “I shock everybody with how little I do to prepare. I could make designs of actors’ crossings, but if I did, I wouldn’t use them, so I don’t bother. Blocking’s unimportant anyway; just so you get things to look natural.”

Goldman’s entire chapter about Abbott in The Season, incidentally (it’s called “How Are Things in the Teacher’s Room Tonight?”), is one that any director would get something out of. [Kirk discussed this book on ROT: see “William Goldman’s The Season,” 30 April 2013.]

I’d say that there are more and less effective ways of doing things as a director, but not “right” ones and “wrong” ones. The only “proof of the pudding” is the final result, the play as it’s ultimately performed.

Even then a director may not achieve every intention. Harold Clurman (1901-1980), in his classic book On Directing (1972), says that he felt good when he achieved sixty per cent of what he hoped to achieve, and he was no slouch as a director, either.

Does the board know any of this? What are they looking for? We’ll see what happens.

It’s terribly tempting to adopt a persona for the interview. One friend suggested I wear a scarf, a coat hung on my shoulders like a cape, and a beret, and bring my own director’s chair. Another said, “I'm not sure if you should try ‘Louder, faster, funnier,’ or, ‘Could you make it more like rainwater?’”

(21 December 2016)

Since the theater apparently hasn’t decided on a play for next year, it occurs to me that I ought to suggest a few I’d be interested in directing. To be honest, I’d direct anything they asked me to, and in fact I’d prefer that they choose the play themselves.

The reason for this is that I don’t know what their company is aiming for. Do they intend, eventually, to stage every play Shakespeare wrote? Or do they feel their audience insists on lighter and/or more familiar fare? They ought to know their audiences better than anyone else.

They did stage Macbeth, which is a tragedy; but it’s an accessible one, while others offer additional well known difficulties. And are they interested in the history plays at all?

Needing something to say, I suppose my suggestions would be (not in order of preference):

As You Like It (I’ve directed it before, but it never runs dry)

Two Gentlemen of Verona(not a great play, but fun)

The Comedy of Errors (same)

The Merchant of Venice(major interpretive issues and a tricky fifth act; breathtakingly topical)

The Winter’s Tale (glorious; a huge undertaking)

Much Ado about Nothing

All’s Well That Ends Well

Love’s Labour’s Lost (conceivably)

If for a change they’re looking for a history play, I’d suggest doing a combination of Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II,and Henry V– several of these exist. And I have a Shakespeare compilation of my own that I may throw in the pot if the opportunity arises.

(16 January 2017)

“Hi Kirk – just wanted to confirm that we are planning to meet with you for the director interview this Saturday, January 21 from 9-10:15a at St. James Church. I will be sending a final email with additional details beforehand, just wanted to make sure you had it confirmed on your calendar. Look forward to meeting then!”

(19 January 2017)

“Dear Director Candidate:

“The Board . . . looks forward to meeting you this Saturday! Please enter the church from the rear. There is a parking lot behind the church, and you are welcome to park in any spot reserved for the church. We will post signs for you to follow once you come into the building.

“After introductions, we will spend the first 30 minutes asking some questions we have prepared in an effort to get to know you. You will then have 30 minutes to prepare/coach and run the scene below from Hamlet with two of our members (male and female with different levels of acting experience).

“As they say. . . the floor is yours! So feel free to exercise creative freedom and showcase your directing talent. After the activity, we will leave 15 minutes for you to ask any questions you wish of the board. See you then and please let me know if you have any questions beforehand.”

The scene is Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1, the scene with the two “clown gravediggers.”

I will say that communication from the group has been exemplary.

I woke up Thursday night/Friday morning about 2 AM, thought about the scene and about possible questions they might ask me until 4, got up, printed out copies of the scene (just in case they might not have their own, although they almost certainly will) and my resume, and sketched out the blocking of the scene, which ran about 4 minutes when I read it out loud.

(21 January 2017)

The big day. I got to the church early, then couldn’t find a parking place and ran the risk of running over several people coming from or going to church activities. The first person I met was the one who’d sent the email messages. By the time everyone arrived there were eight board members present, in a smallish room with a space, clearly the acting area, between a board table and a circle of comfortable chairs and sofas, which is where we sat.

The atmosphere was friendly, even hearty. They had divided up the task of asking nine questions; some more questions emerged in the conversation, after one member gave a background on the group, saying that their purposes were to benefit the company members, the audience, and, by bringing people into the building, the church.

QUESTION: You saw our production of Macbeth. What did you think of it?

ANSWER: I thought it was GREAT!!!

I had tried to think in advance of as many questions as possible that they might ask me (like the one above), and what my replies might be (also above). This turned out to have been a good idea, since I was able to answer, fairly coherently, questions such as my ideas about directing Shakespeare (approach it as you would a musical; as much as possible, make the scenes continuous, eliminating pauses for scene changes; the emphasis in lines of iambic pentameter often comes at the end of a line) and my directing style (create a secure atmosphere, give goals for each rehearsal, expect a difficult rehearsal when new elements, such as lights or line memorization targets, are introduced).

Some of the group’s questions clearly reflected their own plans going forward. Did I need big sets, and would I consider staging the play in various alternative spaces? (All things being equal, no to big sets; I’ve directed in many alternative spaces – Midsummer in the round, As You Like It outdoors – and enjoyed it.) Suppose the board wanted to work with the director, as opposed to choosing the director and then disappearing? (Fine with me.) How would you work with people who had little or no stage experience? (Supportively, I hope.) What play(s) might you want to direct? (Maybe MuchAdo About Nothing . . . but the theater ought to select the play based on what they know about their audience.) Would you be willing to work with us in selecting a play? (Absolutely.)

Finally it was time for me to direct two actors (one was a board member, one was not) in the scene from Hamlet. We got off on the right foot when I offered pencils if either of the actors needed them – “You brought PENCILS?” one board member said in amazement. Before we started the exercise I talked a bit about what would have happened in real life up to this point in a production – we’d have had a number of read-throughs, at first sitting down and then gradually standing and moving around, and we’d have done a great deal of work paraphrasing the lines, to make sure everyone knew what they were saying and to give a realistic foundation to the scenes.

Then I tried to ignore the board completely, facing the actors instead of them, and working as much as possible the way we would if we were putting a scene on its feet. I will say that I did not feel I did a brilliant job. “Blocking” rehearsals aren’t much fun under any conditions, and doing them with people watching is even less fun. Still, I figured the board ought to see the real thing, so we plowed on, I tried to work roughly the way I ordinarily work, and we did get through the material, even the song at the end of the scene. It was not a particularly smooth half hour. I can comfort myself by saying that blocking rehearsals seldom are.

Only afterward did I start to think of alternate ways I might have handled the demonstration. After all, we directors had been encouraged to “exercise creative freedom and showcase your directing talent.” Should I have shaped the scene with exercises, begun with an improvisation, perhaps guided the actors through a visualization? Maybe next time. Those ideas, and others, are probably not what I’ll be doing as we’re blocking the actual show, should that moment come. Or maybe we will do those things. I reserve the right to choose my strategies. In any event, for better or for worse, for this “audition” I made the choice to work in a pretty conventional way.

In retrospect, what do I feel about the board’s request that each director stage a scene as part of the interview? As I’ve already indicated, I was initially skeptical. I thought of a couple of analogies. If the board were trying to select a psychologist to be on the church staff, would they say to each candidate, “As part of the interview, we’d like you to do half an hour of therapy on a board member, in front of the rest of the board”? Chances are that the psychologist would not be thrilled, and more than likely would have to turn down the request on ethical grounds anyway. And directors are in their own way psychologists – or they had better be.

Or if the board were interviewing artists for the job of painting a portrait of the minister in oils, would they say, “We’d like you to do a painting in front of the board first”? The artists would almost certainly say, “That’s not how my process works. I create a painting over a period of time. All you’ll get to see today is a bit of pencil sketching.” Directors, like many portrait painters, work over a period of time, or, again, they had better. The show doesn’t open today. It opens weeks or months from now, and not until then can it be judged. This is why the audience is seldom invited to rehearsals.

Despite all that, looking back at my interview today I can see I’ve fundamentally changed my mind about the idea of directing auditions, for a simple reason. I know that as an interviewee, I did a good job today. I talked charmingly and knowledgably about directing and theater. I showed that I was reasonably likeable and reasonably smart. (All right, let’s assume that I did those things. I tried to.) But does that mean I can direct, or does it just mean I can talk? How do I – how does any director – deal with actors when they’re actually face to face with the director?

I think that’s a legitimate question to ask, and odd though the board’s request strikes me and everyone I know who’s heard about it, it seems to me that that there are more plusses than minuses in the idea. In addition to hearing my answers to questions, the board saw a reasonable if not exhaustive sample of me at work. Ultimately, if it turns out they don’t like the sample, it shouldn’t make any difference to them how well I talked. Hire me for a workshop, maybe. But hire a director for the show who demonstrates that she or he works well at a practical level.

It may even be that the limitations of the sample – restricted time, borrowed actors, searching eyes – may actually compel a more accurate estimate of a director’s real skill, or lack of it. And I have to say that most of the questions I listed above about the process resolved themselves without fuss. Here are my questions again, with comments on how they worked out:

1. What expectations does the board have about what I’m going to do? How much does that matter? I could have provided anything specific they asked, if I’d had to.

2. Does the board have a fixed idea about how a director ought to work? Again, should I care? Either I’ll be a good fit for them or I won’t.

4. In that case, what point am I supposed to bring the scene to? So it’s ready for the next rehearsal? Ready to perform before an audience? Or something else? Not a realistic question, since as it turns out, I only had half an hour, and you can only do so much in that time frame.

5. Is the board’s real desire to see how I stage the scene – in other words, how I arrange the movement of the actors? Is that what they’re looking for? Once more, what’s the problem? If they don’t want to see the scene staged, what DO they want? They’re adults; they can tell me.

6. How much time do I have in which to direct this mini-scene? I was given this answer – one half hour – in advance. Will the next interviewee be outside, waiting impatiently if I take too long? The next interviewee WAS outside, probably relieved that I’d taken as long as I did. Is the board watching to see if I can direct quickly? Is speed of the essence in their minds? If so, then so. It’s an audition. Let it be.

7. Do the actors (some or all of whom are board members) know the scene already, or are they starting from scratch? Do they have it memorized? How familiar are they with it? Is it a scene they’ve already performed, perhaps from their most recent production? This question strikes me as logical, but in practice it didn’t matter, because we were starting the scene at such an early stage of work. One production seldom resembles another much. If they had the scene memorized, they didn’t show it.

8. For that matter, are the board members in the scene actually actors? One was; one possibly either was not or was pretending not to be, perhaps to see how I’d deal with someone who hadn’t acted much.

(22 January 2017)

Waiting time. It occurs to me that I didn’t ask when they’d notify candidates, and they didn’t say. I’d think they’d have to tell us this month, because they indicated they’d like to select a play in February.

I don’t think I’ll be too upset if I don’t get the job. It is, after all, a great deal of work. The final question I was asked yesterday was, “Considering that this job involves lots of time and effort for no pay, why on earth do you want it?” All I could think to say was, “Because I love directing and I love Shakespeare.” After my wife Pat, a wonderful director, choreographer, performer, and teacher, died four and a half years ago, I lost my interest in directing. Little by little, it appears, I’ve gotten it back.

There doesn’t seem to be any harm in thinking ahead to what I might say if I did by any chance get the job. The following ideas evolved out of comments during the interview:

· The board wants to have at least one assistant director – read “trainee” – work on the show. I told them I’d started directing in that way (on a production of King Lear, an experience about which I’ve written in this blog) and would gladly support such a program. It strikes me that we should choose the AD (or AD’s) early so they can participate in the meetings that will precede the rehearsal period.

· As soon as the play is selected, I’d like to wander around the church with the board and identify the different kinds of spaces in which the play might be performed – the sanctuary, obviously, but also other possibilities.

· I wonder if the board would like a series of pre-audition workshops on Shakespearian verse. This would have the dual advantages of handling some of the language work early, and of letting me familiarize myself with many in the acting pool ahead of the auditions.

(24 January 2017)

I wrote thanking the board for the opportunity to interview with them, and received this reply:

“Thanks for your kind note Kirk! We had a pretty full day of excellent candidates Saturday. We very much enjoyed meeting you as well.

“The board is still deliberating and giving time to follow up with a few internal folks who applied, but we hope to circle back by next week.

“Thanks again and look forward to being in touch again soon.”

Does not sound terribly positive, but you never can tell.

(31 January 2017)

“Hi Kirk – hope all is well with you on this snowy day! Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, but we all needed to run after our day of interviews, and were not able to meet/deliberate until this week.

“I would very much appreciate the chance to speak with you by phone in the next day or so about next steps. I am available today after 5p, tomorrow/Wednesday from 9:30-11:30a or after 7p. Please let me know what works for you. Look forward to connecting soon!”

(2 February 2017)

So I did get the job – we’ll be doing As You Like It – and in the process learned a great deal from the experience. As Sherlock Holmes says in “The Red Circle” from His Last Bow, “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.” Directing is a fascinating activity. It calls on us to continue to work on doing it better. Hats off to the St. James players!

[Rehearsals for Kirk’s As You Like It will begin on 30 April and the show will run the first two weekends in September. Performances are at St. James Episcopal Church, 581 Valley Road, Upper Montclair, New Jersey; telephone: (973) 744-0270.

[For other posts on ROT by Kirk Woodward, which are now too many to list here, I suggest using the blog’s own search engine (in the upper left-hand corner of the site) and simply search for “Kirk Woodward,” or use the “Labels” below and click on Kirk’s name. His contributions have covered many aspects of theater, including playwriting and reviewing, as well as music, pop culture, and some fascinating personal and family memories. (There are about 65 posts—including several multi-part pieces—to choose from!)]

Plays built around gimmicks are often more interesting as theatrical fillips than satisfying as artistic experiences—curiosities more than dramas. That’s how I felt about Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody, a world première at the Signature Theatre Company until 19 March (an extension from the 12th). Aside from anything else, this circumstance also means there are two ways to approach writing up the production: discuss the play as a script in performance and describe the performative game devised by the playwright and the director. Just to make my task more complex, I’m going to try to do both here and hope I can manage to depict both to some degree.

Everybody, the second play of Jacobs-Jenkins’s Residency Five tenure which began with Appropriate in 2014 (see my report on 31 March 2014), started previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage on 31 January and opened on 21 February. (Signature’s Residency Five guarantees the writer three productions over five years.) Diana, my STC subscription partner, and I went to Theatre Row to catch the performance on Friday evening, 24 February.

Jacobs-Jenkins, now 32, has composed five previous plays, starting with Neighbors in 2010 (New York’s Public Theater), all of which have been produced Off-Broadway or in such prestigious rep companies as the Yale Repertory Theatre. Among his awards and honors, the dramatist is a MacArthur (“genius”) Fellow (2016), the recipient of Yale’s 2016 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Drama), and a nominee for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (for Gloria, presented in 2015 by the Vineyard Theatre of New York City); STC’s Appropriateand Theatre for a New Audience’s2015 An Octoroon both won Obies. (A more extensive bio of the playwright appears in my report on Appropriate.) Everybody, Jacobs-Jenkins’s latest play, is a reworking of the medieval morality play Everyman(formally The Summoning of Everyman;anonymous, late 15th century).

While Appropriate started its stage life at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays a year before its Signature début, Everybodyis receiving its theatrical initiation in STC’s 294-seat proscenium house. At 100 minutes, Everybody pretty much hews to the medieval original for its storyline, even occasionally quoting from a modern-English translation of its middle-English text—though most of Jacobs-Jenkins’s language is colloquially modern (and occasionally vulgar) for the most part. (Many of the allegorical characters’ labels have been updated—“Goods” has become “Stuff,” for example. “Everyman” was changed to “Everybody” for purposes of inclusivity: “This is the 21st century—we know there’s more than men among us,” as David Finkle—who also reviews for the Huffington Post—put it on the Clyde Fitch Report.)

The gimmick is that among the cast of nine, five rotate in the role of Everybody; at each performance, she or he is selected by lot and the remaining four company members play the attributes Friendship and Strength; Kinship and Mind; Cousinship, Beauty, and All the Shitty Evil Things (that last is Everybody’s bad deeds); and Stuff and Senses. Jacobs-Jenkins asserts that there are 120 different combinations that can happen (I don’t actually get this math), so the five castmates, of varied races, genders, and ages, have a lot of memorizing to do—essentially the whole play, but from five different perspectives, one for each character they could play (not to mention the subtle variations for playing against five different Everybodys). By now, considering the law of averages, after over 25 performances, all the alternate Everybodys should have had a chance to do the role—not necessarily in all 120 variations of ensembles—but I was still astonished at how smoothly the cast pulled this off on what amounts to a moment’s notice. Possibly as a result of this gimmick and director Lila Neugebauer’s staging on a set that looks like a section of an empty row of a theater auditorium, the seats facing the spectators—somehow nestled within a fairly packed one (yeah, I can’t explain that, either)—along with nooks, crannies, and aisles of the actual Diamond Stage, there’s a veneer of improvisation over the whole production—some of it built in and some organic.

Just at curtain time, with the house lights still up, a staffer from Signature, dressed in an aqua T-shirt emblazoned with the company’s name (and “STAFF” on the back) and complete with headset and walkie-talkie on her belt, comes to the front of the auditorium just below the stage left corner of the platform to make the usual announcements about turning off cell phones, locating the fire exits, and opening candy wrappers before the show starts—except that the spiel is a lot longer and much more elaborate than the pro forma message. This usher is far too voluble about the play and the performance, so it’s quickly obvious this is part of the show. That’s because this usher (Jocelyn Bioh) isn’t on the staff of the theater; she’s a member of the cast of Everybody and she proceeds to explain the basic premise of the play, starting with its origins as the “oldest recorded play” in Western literature, derived from the Dutch morality play Elckerlijc, itself possibly adapted from “a Buddhist fable.” (Yes, she gives a mini-medieval-lit lecture.)

Bioh then transforms into God—just vocally—and calls on Death (Marylouise Burke) to summon Everybody to account for his life, and Death—“who fears no man,” as she keeps telling us (or her mortal charges . . . or herself)—goes into the house to confront the five actors (Lakisha Michelle May, Brooke Bloom, Michael Braun, Louis Cancelmi. David Patrick Kelly), seated around the auditorium, planted among the theatergoers. (Because, you see, Everybody is one of us, any of us . . . all of us.) They all protest that they’re unprepared for such an accounting as they gather at the foot of the stage at house right, where the usher/God had previously stood and continue to argue with Death.

The usher—Bioh’s really less a mere usher than a house manager, a somewhat godlike figure in the theater—returns and explains that one of the five actors will be chosen by lot to play Everybody in the evening’s performance, and she spins a bingo cage loaded with (I presume five) ping-pong balls. (Some reviewers suggested this process is rigged, but I don’t see why it isn’t legit. Go know.) The one to portray the title character this night was Kelly, an older man with receding, white hair that’s long at the back, and a long, white beard and full mustache that make him look somewhat like George Bernard Shaw. (Hardly an appropriate image for an everyman—but, hey, what can you do?) Through Death, God calls Everybody to his final accounting and he asks if he can have some time to find someone to go with him on this frightening journey . . . from which he’ll never return. “Sure,” Death replies exuberantly, “if any were brave enough to come with you.”

But after promising “literally go to hell and back” for him, Friendship, whose as glib and superficial as any generic fair-weather comrade, “flakes out” (the kicker here is “and back”!), as do Kinship and Cousinship. Stuff is far more comforting, but is willing to go only so far, as are Strength, Mind, Senses, Beauty, Time (Lilyana Tiare Cornell, a girl of maybe 10), and, ultimately, Understanding (Bioh once again), who all abandon Everybody at grave’s edge. (This is the way with dying, of course—all our attributes and faculties fall away as we approach the end. My Dad used to like to joke, “If you can’t take it with you, then I’m not going!” That didn’t work out for him in the end, however.) Love (Chris Perfetti) alone is willing to go the whole distance—after he spends a few minutes humiliating Everybody as payback for not coming to him earlier—but this all leads to the unavoidable truth: Everybody (and everybody) dies alone.

Between the allegorical scenes in which Everybody confronts his various attributes to try to convince them to go with him into the grave, Jacobs-Jenkins has contrived black-out scenes in which Everybody seems to be describing a dream to the other members of his former group of actors. We can’t really see anything—Kelly's dimly lit at the front of the theater but the others seem to be behind the scenes someplace—and the voices all emanate from the PA system so they sound disembodied. (The voices may, in fact, be recorded.) I never figured out exactly what Jacobs-Jenkins intends with this gambit, but it seems to have something to do with witnessing Everybody’s dying visions, as if the play were a terminal dream. From my perspective, it conflicts with the allegory of the Everyman adaptation—though I’m not sure that matters much.

Neugebauer, whose previous productions of the Signature Plays and A. R. Gurney’s The Wayside Motor Inn Diana and I saw at STC (reports posted on 3 June 2016 and 1 October 2014, respectively), stages Everybodythroughout the auditorium with only a little of it actually on the stage—which isn’t even used extensively until the last scene; it’s no more than a runway for the rest of the play. The only part of the play with a representative set, revealed above the row of 18 theater seats that occupies the stage’s apron when a black curtain is parted, comes at the end: scenic designer Laura Jellinek has conceived a gray, rocky hillside that looks like the slope of a dormant volcano into which has been dug a grave-sized, but apparently bottomless, hole into which descend Everybody, Love, and Death (the only one to come back up). Except for this scene and one theatrically stunning bit (which I’ll get to shortly), the play is presented like a no-budget, student-produced show mostly performed either in black-out (yes, in the semi-dark) or with the house lights up. (The lighting designer is Matt Frey, who also provides one elaborate light show with strobes and blinding spots. I’m not sure what it was meant to impart other than sound and fury.)

That one really impressive bit I mentioned earlier is a terrific dance-like sequence, choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly (to music and sound created by Brandon Wolcott), with two giant human-skeleton puppets that glow in a near black-out (so you can’t see the black-clad puppeteers inside the huge skeletons) that dance through the house. (Think Mexico’s Day of the Dead.) The scene itself is ultimately an over-long digression, a set piece plopped in presumably to wake everyone (not to be confused with Everybody) up, but it’s theatrically stunning.

As far as the acting goes, the cast is clearly an ensemble. They’d have to be to get away with that casting gag. The actors playing the attributes are all fine, but I can’t say anyone has a particularly hard row to hoe here—allegorical characters have little depth and all their appearances are brief and self-contained. Kelly, as Everybody, has a little more work to do, and he carries it off it perfectly competently, even energetically; at one point, he’s challenged by Love to strip down to his underclothes and run several laps around the theater’s orchestra section. Kelly’s the second-oldest member of the cast, after Burke; all the other actors are much younger. This lends his portrayal of Everybody—Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway called his performance “avuncular,” which I’ll accept—an extra frison of sympathy since death is so naturally associated with advanced age. (Sorry, David—I’m even older than you, but it’s still true, I’m afraid!)

As God and the usher, Bioh also accomplishes what she has to; her usher combines authority and a flippant jolliness. Burke’s Death is entirely puckish—not a fearsome Mephistopheles but a slightly dotty angel (with a squeaky little baby voice) who might have been Clarence’s tutor in It’s a Wonderful Life (but far less sure of herself than Claude Rains’s Mr. Jordan is in Here Comes Mr. Jordan). It’s an amusing and enjoyable performance, what the English would call an “old dear,” but finally more contrived than fitting. The cast all do what they’re supposed to, no one missteps—but it’s all just lightweight. There’s just no heft to anything.

Everybody is blatantly meta-theatrical—and self-referential. Jacobs-Jenkins makes this clear in the program—which, to prevent too many spoilers, isn’t distributed until the audience exits the theater after the intermissionless performance—with the setting description: “The Irene Diamond Stage, The Pershing Square Signature Center, 2017.” Along with the usher’s outfit, there’s also a mention in the play that the participants are all at the Signature Theatre. (The seats across the front of the stage are identical to the ones in the Diamond’s actual auditorium.) And let’s not forget that at the beginning of the performance, the usher points out that this is a play—adapted from another play, based on yet another play. Theater as Russian nesting dolls!

In the end, Everybody is more interesting than good, an idea with several built-in problems. First, the basic idea: why retell this 600-year-old tale? Does it need to be told again? I don’t think so—although, maybe we do need to be reminded to be nicer and kinder during our lifetimes. I just wonder if Every-whatever is an effective way of saying that to a 21st-century, Trump-era populace/audience. Second, why make a new adaptation, rather than just presenting the original in a new production? The play’s certainly open to all kinds of innovative staging interpretations and even “retranslation” from the original early English. Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation isn’t sufficiently impressive to make the point new or relevant. As my friend Kirk Woodward put it, “[A]llegory just isn’t a scintillating approach”—and once you’ve figured out the premise, the end is pretty predictable.

The text and ideas aren’t above the level of a precocious undergrad college troupe. The take-away is still that we all face death alone except for . . . well, Love in Jacobs-Jenkins’s new version. (In the original play, it’s Good Deeds who accompanies Everyman to the grave. I don’t really get Jacobs-Jenkins’s point of making it Love in Everybody. Strikes me as self-indulgent.) The ideas aren’t really new, just up-dated, mostly in language, but not content. (Everyman is a Christian religious tract and its derivative doesn’t alter that. It’s not even Judeo-Christian, much less ecumenical or pan-sectarian; it’s pretty straight-up Catholic, intended for a homogeneously Catholic viewership.) Jacobs-Jenkins basically follows the plot and concept of the medieval original—old wine in new bottles, so to speak. Maybe even just recycled bottles.

Theatrically, the only new idea is the casting lottery at the center of the whole production concept. Director Neugebauer, asserting that Jacobs-Jenkins always “knew he wanted some element of chance” to play a part in Everybody, said that she and the playwright didn’t want Everybody to be represented by “a single actor, who necessarily has an age, a gender, a race, a sexual orientation.” They also contemplated “the notion that death could strike any one of us, at any moment . . . .” I have to say, I didn’t feel anything in the performance so profound as that sounds. Each of the scenes in which Everybody entreats his attributes to go with him on his final journey is pretty much the same as the others, so the whole evening becomes a series of minor variations on a repetitive theme. Jacobs-Jenkins’s casting gimmick doesn’t alter that.

The only intriguing thing about the lottery gambit—to me, at any rate—is contemplating what the rehearsal process must have been like, with five actors all learning five different roles in different combinations and the whole cast running the show for each set of those five performers. I can’t even begin to imagine it. It’d be like a whole rehearsal period of endless replacement rehearsals. Thank goodness, I’d think, the play’s only an hour and 40 minutes long—they could run it more than once each session with different actors in the alternating roles. (The other four actors only have to learn one part and be prepared to play opposite a shifting cast of scene partners. Only Death, however, really interacts with characters other than Everybody.) But as far as the performances are concerned, I can’t see that this casting trick was at all significant. (As one of my Rutgers teachers would say it’s “Hamlet on roller-skates.”) The roles aren’t so complex or deep that one actor’s going to do anything substantially different from any other.

The reviews of Jitney (the subject of my last play report, posted on 19 February) were close to unanimous—98% were positive and 2% (one notice) were mixed according to Show-Score, and all the reviewers essentially liked the same things and disliked the same things; they all had the same opinions about Wilson’s script and the acting and staging—but after this performance, I predicted that the reviews of Everybody will be all over the map. The summary of the surveyed notices on Show-Score suggests I’m right about this (as we’re about to see).

Based on 32 published reviews (as of 2 March) with an average total rating of 63, Show-Score tallied that 47% of the notices were positive, 31% were mixed, and 22% were negative. 63 is a low average among the productions I’ve checked on this site, but more significantly, the spread of review types is much more evenly dispersed than any I’ve encountered so far. (There was only one 95, two 90’s, and three 85’s. At the other end of the scale, there were three 35’s and three 45’s.) All over the map it is, then. (My survey will comprise 19 notices. Many of the reviewers will have seen different combinations of actors and characters, all probably different from my own experience.)

Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York Daily Newscalled Everybody a “talky, sometimes trying show” and remarked of the lottery that it’s “an interesting gambit, though more so for the cast than theatergoers.” On NorthJersey.com, the website for the suburban Record of Bergen County, New Jersey, Robert Feldberg found, “There’s wit, humor and inventiveness in the play, . . . but pure allegory, with actors portraying generic figures and abstract ideas, is tough to keep aloft,” observing, “The point is elucidated at great length and with much repetition before” the play’s end. Of the casting gag, Feldberg felt that “it must be an interesting challenge for the actors, but it comes across as an ‘in’ thing, of little matter to the audience.” The New Jersey reviewer concluded, “‘Everybody’ descends into tedium well before it ends.”

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley felt that “the seriously talented” Jacobs-Jenkins “seems to be running (and writhing) in place in” Everybody and the Timesman quipped that the play’s “prevailing tone” is “self-consciously whimsical and repetitive.” Brantley’s assessment of the production was: “Much painstaking rehearsal and synchronization of cues, for the tech crew as well as the performers, has gone into ‘Everybody.’ Yet it still feels like a work in progress, waiting to be sharpened into focus.” The review-writer suggested, “Perhaps this is appropriate to the idea of life itself as a perpetual work in progress,” but added, “Still, there’s a sense of sustained thumb-twiddling that starts with the script.” Each of Everybody’s encounters with his attributes “feels oppressively the same.” In the end, Brantley concluded:

The entertainment value of “Everybody” as an acting exercise would probably be enhanced if you could see, well, everybody playing Everybody. But that would require buying many tickets and sitting through many, many hours of people translating medieval ontology into arch latter-day vernacular, saying what is essentially the same thing again and again and again.

The Village Voice’s Miriam Felton-Dansky, labeling Everybody“intriguing, moving, and sometimes disappointing,” decided that Jacobs-Jenkins and Neugebauer are “reveling in allegory’s unabashedly presentational quality, and implicating spectators at every turn.” Though director Neugebauer “stages the piece with precision and humor” and assembled an “excellent ensemble,” Felton-Dansky concluded, “It’s hard not to wish Jacobs-Jenkins had trusted his material, and his audience, a little more.” In the New Yorker, Hilton Als felt, “Thinking about the original script while watching Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation is like listening to an expert d.j. play two records at once, and at different speeds.” With Everybody, Als believes, “Jacobs-Jenkins has written a play about love—or, rather, a play that shows how impossible it is to write about love—” a subject the New Yorker journalist thinks “cannot be explained”—“and it fills the heart in a new and unexpected way.” He was very taken with the dancing skeletons, which Als described as “electrified by eternal being.” Going far beyond anything I took from the interlude, the New Yorkerreview-writer continued:

Those skeletons reminded me of Antonin Artaud’s writing from Mexico, where he did so much of his thinking about the theatre. In a 1936 lecture, he noted, “For me, the essence of Surrealism was an affirmation of life against all caricatures.” And it was in this surreal moment that, in my mind at least, all of us sitting in the theatre abandoned the beings we were supposed to be and became atomized into this lovely, wordless physical manifestation of a feeling that Jacobs-Jenkins couldn’t control with his considerable intellect but allowed to dance free in his considerable heart.

In New York magazine, Jesse Green asserted, “The play is trenchant, certainly, and often quite moving,” but objected that “all [Jacobs-Jenkins’s] substitutions [have] the effect of turning the meaning of the play inside out.” Noting that “Everybody is basically about the fear of death . . . . Everyman is about the horror that awaits us after.” Green continued, “Without dramatizing sin, you can’t have the Everyman plot . . . . Without a common faith system, you can’t have the Everyman motive of correction. All Jacobs-Jenkins can do with this marvelous dinosaur bone is shellac the surface with sarcasm and lower our expectations.” In the end, the New York reviewer wrote, “Everybody offers only its destabilization, and a decidedly weak-tea moral.”

“Apart from the cast’s charm and visual coups engineered by director Lila Neugebauer . . ., the 100-minute experiment feels overlong and talky,” reported David Cote in Time Out New York. With the black-out interludes and other insertions, “the extra verbiage blunts any philosophical edge.” Like me, the man from TONY found that “a ‘faithful’ revival of this theatrical fossil” was unnecessary but that “I’m not sure this slangy, digressive gloss adds much substance.” Cote concluded, “Stranded between cosmic earnestness and a collegiate urge to interrogate weird old texts, Everybody has trouble holding onto a fixed identity.” Marilyn Stasio of Variety advised of working with ancient sources, “Something is inevitably lost in adapting the material for a modern audience that has outgrown its fear and awe of hellfire and damnation. But the story retains some power on a human level, and Jacobs-Jenkins plays up the randomness of death and the universality of the human condition” via the casting lottery.

Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter put in his “Bottom Line”: “This ambitious production proves too self-consciously theatrical to be emotionally involving.” He explained, “Despite clever moments, Everybody . . . proves a trial to sit through.” Furthermore, the HR reviewer observed, “For all its artistic ambitions, Everybody turns out to be confusing and disjointed, filled with stylistic diversions that more often than not prove underwhelming.” Scheck caviled that the actors “sometimes have trouble with their lines” because of the casting gimmick (something I didn’t encounter, by the way), and except for a few stalwarts, “the ensemble is uneven at best.” Neugebauer “does her best to involve the audience”; finally, however, “Everybody fails in its goal to make its themes universal and its centuries-old inspiration feel contemporary. In the end, its overemphasis on self-conscious theatrical flourishes proves more distancing than immersive.”

On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer asserted that “the witty and inventive Jacob-Jenkins has put his own comic spin on” Everyman, which with the “versatile” cast and Neugebauer’s direction “manages to be a very much ‘now’ production.” The CUreviewer labeled the play and production “cheeky, provocative and laugh-filled” and reported it’s “all very clever and audience involving.” She concluded, “It should be said, however, that this whimsical sort of satire isn’t everyone’s coup-de-comic-riff. For this viewer the humor ran thin early on, picked up with Burke’s arrival, but ultimately left me less satisfied with Everybody than the author’s previous plays.” On New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell affirmed of Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation, “The idea here is inspired, and the world premiere production at the Signature can be inspiring; it even provoked some reflection on my own mortality.” But though the play “can also be very funny,” Mandell deemed that “both the playwright and director Lila Neugebauer seem hell-bent on deliberately ‘destabilizing’ the story, making it less accessible.” The cyber reviewer further complained, “The playwright also gives his characters too much to say that is digressive, repetitious or overlong,” asking, “What is the message here—that life is difficult and dreary, so this show will be too?” His conclusion? “The result of what seems to be a kind of creative over-thinking, though, is that unlike the aim of its 15th century source, ‘Everybody’ is not for everybody.”

Full of “admirable experiments,” Everybody, according to TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart, “is at turns ambitious, witty, and a bit dull.” The casting lottery, Stewart found, is “the most innovative aspect of this surprisingly tepid treatment of the story.” Despite what the TM reviewer felt was “convincing” acting, he judged that “solid performances still don’t fully rescue the play from its didactic origins.” He asserted, “Dress a medieval morality play up in 21st-century slang and it comes off sounding like a skit for incoming college freshman performed by the resident assistants of purgatory.” Of Neugebauer’s staging, Stewart affirmed that “it is often very impressive,” but also noted that it never “quite rises to the tone set in” the early moments of the performance. Stewart concluded, “Jacob-Jenkins cannot be accused of deviating from the morality play form to push his own agenda, but we really wish he would. It would make for a far livelier and more challenging night at the theater.” Characterizing the play as “a pretty raucous comedy that can remind us just how foolish, selfish, and childish people can be” on Theater Pizzazz, Brian Scott Lipton summed up his theater experience at Everybodyby saying, “As much as I enjoyed most of the play, it can feel long.”

PJ Grisar decribed Everybody as “a rare play that uses theater, both its history and its practical reality, to make theater” on Stage Buddy. Even with its “remarkable” cast, though, Grisar warned that the play “risks becoming, as it self-describes at one point, a ‘theater in-joke’”; nonetheless, our Stage Buddy deemed, “Everybody may be all things to all people, but I can’t imagine anybody not enjoying themselves and thinking a lot about it after they’ve been ushered off.” (Maybe Grisar can’t, but I can . . . .) On New York Theatre Guide, Tulis McCall wrote that Jacobs-Jenkins “pulls [Everyman], kicking and screaming, into a contemporary setting” to create Everybody. She contended that the playwright “has created another circuitous and intriguing route for us to follow” and “takes no prisoners. You either keep up with the pace or you fall off the wagon train.” McCall observed, “One gets the feeling that Jacobs-Jennings doesn’t care either way because his eye is locked onto the trail ahead.” Even though the “ensemble is consistent and tight,” McCall found that the “tale itself turns out to be unremarkable, which is disappointing.” The NYTG reviewer summed up her assessment:

The journey of Everybody is clear, but it is interrupted by the whispers in the dark, the appearance and disappearance of the odd character, and of course the character raffle that begins the tale. These elements feel unnecessary and border on being gimmicks. They clutter our field of vision/concentration/spiritual connection. They only serve to make the piece too clever by half and thus dilute the proceedings.

Matthew Murray contended on Talkin’ Broadway that Jacobs-Jenkins’s “highly egalitarian, contemporary retelling” of Everyman“wants to push as many of the original’s buttons as possible, while also offending as little as it can get away with.” He had a problem, however, with Jacobs-Jenkins’s (and, really, Neugebauer’s) approach to the adaptation of the “unapologetically Catholic view of life, the universe, and everything” that is Everyman, particularly with the casting of Burke as Death. “A production that makes you long to jump into the grave alongside her [Death], though, is somewhat missing the point,” proclaimed Murray. “Okay, it’s a lot missing the point.” In Everyman, Death “is the terrifying enemy; God is the only one who can save us,” instructed Murray, but in Everybody, “Death acts and sounds like a better traveling companion than He does.” Furthermore, the TB blogger explained, God, despite Bioh’s efforts, “feels designed as a non-presence throughout.” Murray felt that “neither [Jacobs-Jenkins] nor his director, Lila Neugebauer, can overcome this fundamental flaw” at the core of the play. Declaring that “Everybodydoesn’t do much more but crumble in slow motion,” the cyber reviewer concluded that “when you’re not focusing on how to make your experience better because Death is reminding you of how great it already is, the message that comes through doesn’t remotely seem like one anyone would want to send.”

Dubbing the play “fun and breezy” with “a tad of zaniness,” Michael Dale explained the show on Broadway World this way:

In its day, EVERYMAN scared good Catholics onto a righteous path. In director Lila Neugebauer’s slick and irreverent production, Jacobs-Jenkins seems more content with riffing on old-time religion by replacing the fear of God with the humorous acceptance of life’s disappointments.

But, of course, that may be the point in only one of the production’s 120 variations.

Steven Suskin suspects that descriptions of Jacobs-Jenkins Everybody“might well leave you feeling a bit hesitant about an evening’s proffered entertainment,” but on the Huffington Post, the reviewer countered, “Get over it, and get over to . . . Everybody. This is theatre rather unlike anything you might have seen.” Suskin labeled the play “unusual, unconventional and eye-opening” and warned that, like Everyman, it’s “no barrel of laughs, being a morality play about death,” adding, “but it is not only provocative and involving, it is also funny. Wildly funny, in fact.” Director Neugebauer “does a wonderful job,” reported the HP review-writer, and “the cast does wonderfully well.” As a conclusion, Suskin recounted a brief anecdote about Bioh’s usher’s preamble at the top of the performance, after which “a patron behind me blurted out ‘I hope the play is as good as she is.’ As it turned out, Jacobs-Jenkins and his Everybody is very good indeed.”

On radio station WNYC, a New York City outlet for National Public Radio, Jennifer Vanasco asserted that the casting lottery “gives the play an impromptu, seat-of-the pants energy that’s combined with a meditative, repetitive quality that adds heft and makes ‘Everybody’ feel almost like a religious ritual.” “There’s a sketched-in plot,” noted Vanasco, which “might all be a dream—or it might not. Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins hints, but doesn’t tell.”

[Thank you for returning to ROT for the sixth installment of my “Berlin Memoir,” a chronicle of my adventures on and off duty while I served in West Berlin as a counterintelligence agent in the 1970s. Part 6 covers several of the activities in which I engaged both as part of my MI assignment and in my leisure time; a large section of this segment of “Berlin Memoir” is devoted to my attendance at a German military intelligence school. For readers who haven’t been following the series, I strongly recommend going back and reading Parts 1 through 5 before going on to Part 6 below. I use some jargon and some German expressions which are defined and explained in the earlier sections and some topics mentioned below are more fully described in the first sections. (Parts 1 through 5 were posted on 16 and 31 December 2016, and 20 January, and 9 and 15 February 2017, respectively).]

I had a little taste of the absurd side of MI duty in Berlin on my way to the city. I flew out of McGuire AFB in Bordentown, New Jersey, on a MATS flight. (Not a troop carrier, but a chartered airliner—we had seats and everything.) I had to wear my uni, of course, but that flight only went to Frankfurt where most of the other GI’s, the majority of whom were EM’s, were supposed to assemble for transfer to their units by truck or train. I changed to a Pan Am flight to Berlin, and my sponsor had told me that I was expected to arrive in Berlin in civvies. So I had to duck into a restroom and change from my Class A’s into a suit. I was already doing spook stuff. (I remember the suit I wore—it was one of the Baltimore acquisitions—a light gray, pin-striped double-breasted with stovepipe trouser legs. I believe the shirt I wore with it was a dark blue one with red and yellow stripes and a long collar. My tie was probably wide, and some bright contrasting color. Chuck Lurey was the first to remark on my, ummm . . . sartorial splendor. That was my first hint.)

I said there was occasional actual danger. There was, but it was very occasional. I mentioned that every month or so, there’d be a firing incident at the Wall or Checkpoint Charlie. I was never near any of those, of course, but they were part of our consciousness. Of course, you know about the fear of kidnapping. This was actually going on, though most kidnapping victims were German businessmen grabbed by anarchist cells like the RAF. (As I also reported, they also liked to blow things up. Aside from the Farben building in Frankfurt where the young officer I had met was killed in a blast, on 2 February 1972, the Movement 2 June, affiliated with the RAF, set one off at the British recreation center on the Wannsee in Berlin—and killed Irwin Beelitz, a sweet old man, a German who was caretaker at the facility, had no connection to anything governmental except that he was paid by the Brits, and whom everyone loved.)

The Soviets seldom actually kidnapped anyone, but the fear existed that, if we were caught in the SZOG or East Berlin, we could be arrested on some pretense and carried off to Potsdam or Moscow and interrogated. This, of course, was the rationale for the pledge demanded of civilian airlines that they wouldn’t land in East Germany, the prohibition on travel into East Berlin and the SZOG (and entry into an S-Bahn station), and the later requirement that we get escorts to drive through the SZOG. It was also the backstory of the incident that closed down Berlin because my CID partner reported that I’d been kidnapped. Of course, people were killed while I was in Berlin, but by the RAF and other radical groups, not by the East Germans or the Soviets.

There was, however, also a large population of Turks in Berlin—originally guest-workers who stayed on. They constituted the criminal element in the city the way the Italians did here in the ’30s and the Colombian drug gangs did in the ’80s. They were violent, nasty, and heavily armed, and into most criminal activities that could be imagined, including smuggling, gun-running, dope trafficking, white slavery, pornography, and so on. Just before I arrived in Berlin, there had been a pitched battle downtown between the cops and a Turkish gang armed with machine guns. Nothing like that happened while I was there, but, again, it hung over us when we were out in the field. We weren’t usually armed, so we were vulnerable if anything did happen. I remember doing a surveillance in Kreuzberg, one that ended disastrously (if humorously). Kreuzberg was like the South Bronx of Berlin, and was heavily populated by Turks. We drove German-plated cars to the surveillance apartment, but we parked some blocks away and walked to the apartment. I had the red-eye shift, midnight to 8 a.m., so it was the middle of the night when I arrived. I had my heart in my throat more than once getting to the surveillance, as I did a few other times in districts like Kreuzberg when I was alone. Nothing ever actually happened, but it all didn’t do my heart much good.

By the way, because of a security concern similar to the kidnapping fear, if an MI agent ever had to go under anesthesia, we had to be monitored in the OR by another agent. (I recall an incident like this in the TV M*A*S*H with that kooky MI officer Colonel Flagg, played by Edward Winter, who made recurring appearances. Parenthetically, that show ran on AFRTS and was quite popular.) This was because the usual anesthetic was sodium pentothal, which is also “truth serum.” The Army was worried that someone might start questioning us about classified stuff while we were under! The agent wouldn’t stop the procedure, but he would prevent any untoward interrogation. (I never actually heard of an instance of this provision having been invoked in Berlin, though I’m sure it was somewhere.)

Life in Berlin, outside of work, was terrific. I said that by this time, city life had redeveloped, and there were lots of restaurants, good shops (the Kurfürstendamm—Ku’damm to GI’s—was a world-famous shopping street, the 5th Avenue of Berlin), many museums (a wonderful one, the Dahlem Museum for both art and ethnology, was right in our neighborhood), and other sites (the Charlottenburg Palace, the Kaiser’s residence in Berlin, was like a Germanic Versailles). Since I was not shy about going out and about, like some GI’s often are, and because I spoke German, I explored all over the city, both with my colleagues and friends and by myself. (I remember wandering around downtown West Berlin looking for a somewhat obscure site that was the preserved warehouse-like room in which the would-be assassins of Hitler had been briefly imprisoned before they were executed. I found it then—I doubt I could ever find it again on my own.)

Our quarters in Berlin, which I said were the best in USAREUR (and, maybe even anywhere, including stateside), were full apartments. BOQ’s were one-bedrooms in a garden-apartment complex about a half mile down the road from the PX and commissary. It was like living in a suburb somewhere in the states. Married officers had larger places nearby, and NCO’s with families had equally nice apartments in high-rises further out. Senior officers with families had houses in a development that looked exactly like a residential community outside an American town somewhere. (Except all the buildings were German—there was a very recognizable architectural style of post-war German construction from the ’50s and ’60s. It was very familiar! Many Amis in Germany used to call the States “the land of the round doorknobs” because all European doors had handles, not knobs. I always thought of the U.S. as the land of the sash windows—as opposed to the casement windoes that swing in from hinges along the sides. It’s impossible to keep anything on a windowsill with those kinds of windows and you can’t keep the curtains closed with the casements open.)

Our EM’s by the way, got a really good set-up. For obvious reasons, they couldn’t be assigned to a barracks with other GI’s so they had to be housed some place else. They could have been set up in some separate apartment, say one of the NCO high-rises, but I suppose that would have drawn too much attention. Putting them up in a civilian house was viable, I suppose, but the expense and the security problem were probably prohibitive. But we had a ready-made situation which would be mutually beneficial. The Station EM’s were housed in the safe houses we had around the city. They got a house to live in, with a kitchen and separate bedrooms, a living room and dining room, even a yard—all the luxuries—and we got someone to keep up the appearance of residents in the house so it wouldn’t attract attention as an empty house into which various Amis occasional snuck. (When an agent needed the house for an interview, the GI’s living there just made themselves scarce in some other part of the house.) Each house had a senior NCO (who was assigned a station car for transportation) and he and the other EM’s would act as security for the property as well. Can’t beat it with a stick! (I can’t say for sure that no other unit in 66th MI had this set up, but I don’t think any did, at least not in Germany. In the Zone, our units were treated much more like the line units—most wore uniforms on duty and weren’t even as low-profile as we were. Stations in Vicenza, Italy, or Rota, Spain, may have had similar arrangements—for the housing, not necessarily for the rest—because they were so much smaller bases of U.S. Forces. I don’t know that that was true, however; Berlin is the only place I know that did this. I said it was the best duty station in Europe.)

We were a sociable bunch at Berlin Station—lots of parties. I’m sure this was as much because we were forced to associate mostly with each other as it was because Army families just like to party. As I’ve said, our parties included both the officers and the EM’s, and one of the NCO’s was famous for the way he signaled the end of the party at his BEQ. He just lay down on the floor and went to sleep. Guests could stay on if they wanted, but he was plainly saying he was ready for the party to end. And it did—for him.

Shortly after I got to Berlin, my sponsor, who had gotten married just before I arrived, threw a cocktail party to introduce his new wife to everyone “officially.” Now, both Chuck and Ro Lurey were military brats—his dad was a retired Army colonel (I think that was his rank) and hers was a former Marine major, both of whom had gone into USAID after retirement. Chuck and Ro had met in Laos, where their parents were serving, as teenagers or young college kids. Naturally, they featured some Laotian delicacies among the hors d’oeuvres. So, we’re all smokin’ and jokin’, just standing around cocktail-party style and chatting, and I’m nibbling at finger-food like everyone else. At one point, I’m standing next to a bowl of carrots. They just looked like raw carrots—what we’d now call “crudités.” I’m talking with someone, and I reach over and grab a couple—and I’m surprised to find that they’re soft, but I didn’t think anything more of that and popped one in my mouth. And my mouth caught on fire! I mean, like I downed a lit glass of grain alcohol or something. What I had had no idea of was that these were Laotian pickled carrots, as sharp as the hottest pepper. I remember a Perry Mason episode in which Perry, Della, and Paul go to a Mexican restaurant for dinner after a case, and Paul brags about how he can handle any of the spicy Mexican peppers, and swallows one. There’s a beat. Then he leaps for a pitcher of water and just downs the whole thing. Well, that’s what I felt like. My host said later that he had seen me out of the corner of his eye as I reached for the carrot, but he figured I knew what I was doing so he didn’t say anything. WRONG! Big joke, huh?

We also had the Harnack House, the O-club. As I said, it was one the best in USAREUR, maybe the whole Army. (There were enlisted personnel clubs and NCO clubs, which were also top flight, but I didn’t sample them myself, of course.) We officers all ate at the O-club fairly often, if not for dinner then for lunch—and most of our more formal unit functions were there. But the one really unique thing there was a special meal after a special event. Berlin has a counterpart of Central Park, though it’s much wilder: the Grunewald. The Germans love their outdoors—they’re inveterate hikers and walkers and Germany was one of the few countries in Europe that never deforested its countryside—and the Grunewald was more like woods than a simple park. (The name means “green wood” or “green forest.”) And it had boar, known among the GI’s as “grunie pigs,” living in it. The boar population, however, was uncontrolled and every year it got too large for the park to sustain. So there was an annual boar hunt to which senior Allied officers and diplomats were always invited—from all over Europe, not just Berlin. It was a big deal. At least one boar is given to the Harnack House, and after the hunt, there is a special dinner of roast boar. Now, I was nowhere near high enough on the food chain to get into the hunt—not that I’d want to; I’m not a hunter—but the roster for the dinner is much broader, and I aman eater. So I went. (Tastes like pork, but stronger.)

The O-club also did other special events, of course I remember that it did a Seder at Passover, and because Chuck is Jewish but his wife is Catholic, he wanted to introduce her to some of our practices—but in a protected and comfortable way. So he asked me to go with them to the Harnack House Seder, so there’d be people she knew around her. We also went to a service at a Berlin synagogue—though I don’t remember if it was the same Passover, some other holiday, or just a Friday Sabbath service. It was the same deal—I’d go along so that there’d be at least two of us around whom Ro could feel comfortable. Unfortunately, what Chuck hadn’t realized was that the synagogue he selected was a conservative congregation and Ro had to sit separate from us with the other women. So much for protection in numbers.

There were also some less orthodox—if you’ll pardon the alternative use of the term here—amusements in which we indulged occasionally. (I did some amateur theater in Berlin, as you’ll see momentarily—but I’m thinking of slightly different diversions here.) I’ve mentioned that living in Berlin got claustrophobic at times, and though the Army and the other occupational forces offered outlets, as did the city itself, we could go stir-crazy sometimes if we hadn’t been out of the city for a while—especially if we’d been working overmuch for a while, like when I was on 24-hour call for an extended time. I was still pretty young then and still prone to adolescent excesses. Physics suggests that if you put too much pressure on one place, something’s likely to pop out somewhere else, and I guess that’s what happened to a bunch of us.

At one time while I was in Berlin we got a visit from the U.S. Army Synchronized Swim Team. That’s what used to be called water ballet—and the team was all WAC’s. I don’t recall if I actually went to the “performance” (I’m not sure what you call it) or not—probably not, since I don’t remember it. But one of my friends, who was especially adept at that kind of thing, had hooked up with the team afterwards. A group of us—mostly junior officers, but a few NCO’s were included—gathered to party. (Yup, we were fraternizing. Just one of the no-no’s on out list by the end of the evening.) Nothing lewd, just a moveable drinking and eating event. Think frat party on wheels. Somewhere along the line—I’m sure we’d consumed a fair amount by that time in the evening—someone from our gang, a Special Services officer who was in charge of Berlin Brigade’s recreation facilities, announced that he still had the keys for the pool. “Whoooaaa! Let’s go swimming with the WAC’s,” we all decided at once. And why not? It’s not like it was against any rules or anything. Not much!

Well, we organized car pools on the spot—I don’t remember where we were at that moment; probably someone’s BOQ—and off we went to the pool on one of the compounds. “Hey! Let’s go skinny-dipping!” someone suggested. So we did. (There were some wives along, too, by the way. But what the hey.) So there we were, maybe a dozen or so junior officers and NCO’s, a couple of wives, and the WAC swim team skinny-dipping and partying at the empty recreation services swimming pool after hours. I don’t recall that anyone brought booze to the pool, but we’d had enough before to last well into the night. I won’t describe what went on, but I’m sure you can give it a good guess. We stayed there until after dawn started to show and the buzz began to wear off. I was one of the first to leave—I’d begun to prune up, not to mention sober up—and I took one or two partiers with me (I was one of the drivers—not to say “designated drivers”); I don’t know how long anyone else stayed at the pool. Astonishingly, as far as I know, no one ever learned of our midnight escapade. Considering how many of us there were and how much we’d all had to drink during the evening, that’s amazing. It’s possible, I suppose, that the word got out but no one decided to do anything about it—but I doubt that would have been the case, considering the number of regs we broke.

In any case, I was in Germany (again), and I was going to partake of German culture. Not just the food, either. I mentioned in passing that I had attended the Bundeswehr intel school. I had been sent as a guest-officer to the MAD-Schule. (MAD was the Militärischer Abschirmdienst, the military counterintelligence service of the Bundeswehr. Unlike MI, which is solely Army intel, MAD was an all-service organization. It is now called the Amt für Sicherheit der Bundeswehr, the Office for the Security of the Bundeswehr.) That was something of a fluke, as it turns out. I don’t know how often the Bundeswehr—the combined military of the FROG—invited foreign officers to any of their schools, especially the MAD-Schule, or if they ever invited any but Americans, but they had invited two to join the class in the summer and fall of ’72.

The requirements for the program were that the guest had to be an officer (there were also NCO classes, but I don’t know if guest NCO’s were ever invited, too), have at least a year left on his tour, and speak German. And, of course, be available during the dates of the two-part course. That apparently narrowed the available pool at 66th MI enough so that Munich reached out to Berlin for one officer. Since the point for us was to get to know some German MI officers and perhaps to establish personal relationships with some who might later be in positions of real authority, it was something of a wasted invitation because there was no Bundeswehr in Berlin—it wasn’t permitted by the Occupation. The point for them was pretty much the same thing, so it wasn’t much use for an officer stationed in Berlin to make the trip and take the slot. But better use it than lose it, so there I was, with a good two years left to go in Germany (or so we all thought at the time) and speaking German well enough to do the course. Off I drove to Bad Ems. (Coincidently, Bad Ems was across the Rhine from Koblenz, the town I had lived in ten years before as a teenager so I got a little nostalgic trip “home” thrown in. I planned my arrival so I could spend the night in Koblenz—at a pension right by the Deutsches Eck, down the Rheinanlagen from where we used to live—and I could check out the town and then report to the MAD-Schule in Bad Ems fresh and in uniform the next morning.)

I didn’t actually go off to Bad Ems right away. The Bundeswehr isn’t any more efficient sometimes than the U.S. Army—despite Germany’s rep for efficiency. (Germans knew exactly when a piece of mail was supposed to be delivered after it was sent. If it was even one day late, they’d call the post office and complain. Made it hard for us to intercept mail.) I was supposed to go just as rehearsals had gotten underway for the American Community Theater production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. I had been cast in one of the supporting roles—for the life of me, I don’t remember who—and I had to tell the director that I’d been ordered away on TDY and would have to drop out. This being a military base, they were used to that, but no one was thrilled with having to recast the role—and I had wanted to start working with the group and this would have been my first chance. A week or so later, though, word came in that the class had been rescheduled and I wouldn’t be leaving until after the production. I went back to the director and offered her my services as a volunteer, just so I could get into the group. To my surprise, she asked me to resume my role. I don’t remember if they just hadn’t recast it yet or were unhappy with the choice, or what.

It didn’t really matter, because a few days later, the director kept me after a rehearsal and told me that they were very displeased with the actor playing Chance Wayne, the male lead, and would I take over the role. (The only thing I remember specifically about this guy is that in the hash-smoking scene in the beginning—we used chunks of stale brownie—he didn’t have any idea what it was like to smoke hash or get high or anything. The director and the rest of us sort of tried to “teach” him what it was like—great, big pot-head that I was, don’cha know—but he never really got it.) Believe me, I was flattered—besides being a lead, Chance is, as one of my teachers later would describe it, a sex-pot role. (Paul Newman played the part in the Broadway première. That wasn’t my usual casting, even before I got gray, grizzled, and fat.) However, I wasn’t real comfortable about the idea of displacing an actor already in rehearsal, so I said I’d do it on one condition: that I not be around when they told the guy playing the part then. Coward, right? Dot’s I’m! (Turns out he was relieved—he was way over his head and knew it. He was pleased to take a smaller part, probably mine, but I don’t remember that detail.) So, anyway, we went back into rehearsals and got ready to do our show.

There were a few incidents connected to the show that are amusing. (In hindsight!) First and foremost, I had a Princess Kosmonopolis who liked to shorten her lines—more and more each time. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember them—she was fine in rehearsal—she just seemed not to like to say them. Unfortunately, there was a lot of exposition in our scenes in the first act, and she was dropping lots of information about the backstory. So I kept picking up her lines and adding them to mine. Why I never said anything to the director—or why she never noticed it or, if she did, said anything to the actress, I’ll never know. Little by little, then, I was developing a monologue!

Then there was the night that I had heard from backstage scuttlebutt that the assistant director, an Entertainment Specialist in the Special Services office (which ran ACT), had told a few people that he was going to walk on in the bar scene as an unannounced extra. Well, I was furious, and went off looking for him. He got the word that I was, and he actually hid from me. I think he actually thought I might kill him. (He was one of those who was in awe of my MI status—and I never disillusioned him.) I found him hiding upstairs from the auditorium, in the Entertainment Section offices, and I gave him a severe tongue-lashing. I let him think I might kill him if he set foot on the stage. Dat’s right. I’m baad. Uh-huh, uh-huh. (With gratitude and apologies to the late, great Gene Wilder.)

There had been an earlier incident where I wore my MI hat. Well, cloak I guess. Someone in the Special Services office—the Entertainment Director,I think—came to me because that same guy had been telling people he was a spook. He’d even taken to wearsing a fedora! I never made it official, but I gave him one of my “stern talking-to’s”—like those SAEDA briefings I mentioned earlier. I put him on notice—like a traffic cop who says, “I’ll let you go with a warning this time, but don’t let me catch you speeding again!” He being a PFC or whatever, was ummmm . . . shall we say, chastened? He thought I was King Shit after that. I just let him. (Now you also see what I meant when I said I’d been acting a role all the time I was in the Army.)

Finally, one night—I believe it was the night my parents were visiting and came to the show (my mom wasn’t too thrilled with the castration stuff at the end of the play, I can tell you!)—the crew person who was supposed to close the curtain at the end of the first act didn’t show up and no one noticed. That act ends with Chance and Princess going back to bed, ostensibly to make love—but the curtain’s supposed to close as we’re getting back in the bed. Well, we’re moving toward the bed—no curtain. We’re getting in bed—no curtain. We’re in bed—NO CURTAIN. The lights are off—NO CURTAIN! “What shall we do?” one of us whispers. “I don’t know,” the other replies. No one noticed the curtain was still up—or they didn’t know what to do about it. “Well, should we just get up?” “Yeah, I guess. What else can we do?” So, finally, that’s exactly what we did. In the semi-darkness, we simply climbed back out of bed and tip-toed off the stage. At which point I did my Hulk routine again, and went apoplectic about who let the curtain go unattended, why didn’t anyone remedy the situation when it developed, and I better not find that crew person alive anytime soon. (As I’ve admitted, I was good at bluster.)

Well, that was the start of my theatrical career in Berlin. The ACT, which later became the Berlin Entertainment Center, went on to do John Murray and Allen Boretz’s Room Service and Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company! and some others I wasn’t in, like TheCaine Mutiny Court Martial by Herman Wouk. I remember the guy who played the doctor in Room Service one night when he was supposed to be in the bathroom (off stage) came wandering back on stage because he had gotten a splinter in a finger. Amateurs! (A bunch of us later decided we wanted more continuity than a show-to-show association, so we started an independent theater group and got the NCO club at Tempelhof to sponsor us. That’s how I got to meet Colonel Halvorsen.)

But I did go off to the MAD-Schule eventually.

MAD Spezial Lehrgruppe “Abwehroperation” für Offiziere (MAD Special Class “Counterintelligence Operations” for Officers) was a two-part course over the summer and fall of 1972, and I was one of two U.S. officers in the class—the other being a captain from Munich, Doug Waters. The rest of the class were German army, navy, and Luftwaffe officers, mostly majors and lieutenant colonels and the naval equivalents, and that was an experience. I don’t mean the classes—they were interesting, of course, but purely from a professional perspective, nothing amusing. Going to class in German, especially an esoteric class like intel, was a trip, but it was a terrific exercise for me. The German officers—who were all older than both Captain Waters and me—were rather astonished to find that we could get on so well in German. (When I was a kid in Koblenz a decade before, I learned that Germans love the idea of foreigners learning their language.) And that’s where the revelations started.

I’m assuming that this bunch was pretty much typical—I don’t see why they wouldn’t be. The school was a self-contained facility in the little hot-water spa of Bad Ems on the banks of the Lahn (Bad means ‘bath’ in German; all towns with that in their names are or were thermal spas)—there was no military base to which it was attached like the Armor School at Ft. Knox or the Intel School at either Holabird or Huachuca. (Even the language school in Monterey was at the Presidio, a satellite of the huge Ft. Ord on the other side of town.) So we had a little mess—good food, by the way—and an O-club. Well, a bar. After classes, we’d all gather there for drinks and conversation—everyone was very gemütlich (an untranslatable word which here is best rendered as ‘convivial’)—and then we’d return after dinner. Man, could those German officers drink! My American colleague gave up trying to keep up with them pretty quickly—they kept buying rounds, and you can’t really say no. So I’m drinking mine . . . and his to keep the Germans from feeling slighted. And not only are they buying round after round, but they keep changing liquor. (They even drank some bourbon, in deference to us Americans. I’m surprised they had any in stock.) They also bought a round of Ratzeputz, a German liqueur I had experienced in my earlier days in the country. The name means something like “cleans out your stomach” and it’ll eat the enamel off your teeth. It’s pretty vile.

Okay, so we’re all getting pretty plastered—nothing rude, but loose. We’re comparing backgrounds and home lives and so on, and then the Germans start to sing. Now, these guys weren’t all in the same service as I said, or from the same part of the country, but they all knew the same songs. And they knew them all the way through. They asked us to sing some American songs, and do you know that between the two of us, we didn’t know one song together all the way? Germany is a singing society—or it was until that generation, at least. Germans would sing when they got together. (Russians are like that, too.) We just don’t.

There were no classes on weekends and the school pretty much closed down. Everyone went back home then; even Doug Waters went back to Munich. But I couldn’t go back to Berlin. Even if the drive weren’t prohibitively long (370 miles—about six hours without the checkpoints), the paperwork would have been impossible to negotiate. So I stayed in Bad Ems and took trips. Like I said, you can’t do that in Berlin—so I took advantage of the situation, and sightsaw. One weekend, I drove up to Aachen—Charlemagne’s capital (known in French as Aix-la-Chapelle). Another weekend, I did day trips in the area. Remember, I had lived near there 10 years earlier, so there were places I knew about but hadn’t gotten to back in those days. I also poked around Koblenz to see if I could find any of the old places I remembered, but the town had changed so much physically that I wasn’t able to find a lot of them. It was a very strange experience—going back after a decade—especially that decade. From the ’60s to the ’70s, Europe changed a lot, and Koblenz reflected every aspect of that change. I hardly recognized the town—a real city by 1972.

When I first arrived in Koblenz on that June day in 1972 and I was driving around looking for a place to stay, I inadvertently got myself onto an elaborate cloverleaf I never remembered from the 1960s which forced me onto the Pfaffendorf Bridge across the Rhine to Ehrenbreitstein. I looked for the former Amerika Haus on Schlossstrasse, my father’s office back then—but couldn't find it. I located our house because I remembered the address, but the house, which was some kind of office—a lawyer, I think—didn't look the same. The whole experience was disheartening. Over one of the weekends, I ate in two of the old restaurants we used to enjoy. One was the Königsbacher brewery where we used to love to go for basic, plain German food. The restaurant was really the mess hall for the brewery workers, but it was open to the public. We had great meals served at long wooden tables with benches, no adornments, and I was stunned to find that the old dining hall had been replaced by a fancy terrace restaurant overlooking the Mosel where the closest thing to German food on the menu was Wiener Schnitzel, which is Austrian. What a drag. (Thomas Wolfe was right: You can’t go home again.)

The other restaurant, near the railroad station, was Die Ewige Lampe (The Eternal Lamp). It almost looked as if it hadn’t changed. While I was waiting for my meal, the waiter got into a dispute with an American couple nearby. They had asked for water and the waiter had brought them a bottle of mineral water. They demanded tap water and wouldn’t accept the waiter’s explanation that they would be unhappy and that the restaurant wouldn’t serve them tap water. I felt compelled to step in and explained, “I used to live in this town and believe me, you don’t want to drink the tap water here. It’s hard as rock, full of iron, and tastes vile. It’s undrinkable. You can’t even make tea with it.” Whether they believed me or not, they did give up the fight and the waiter brought me a brandy after dinner. (That’s true about the water in Koblenz. It won’t make you sick or anything, but it’s unpalatable—and eventually turns everything, like my mother’s dishes, rust-brown.)

The MAD course was a two-parter, and we went during June and July for the first stage. We were there over 4 July, so Doug Waters and I decided that we had to throw a Fourth of July barbecue for our German classmates. Even by 1972, barbecuing the American way—over a grill outdoors then eating outside pretty much with your hands—was still un-German. (My mom had done a cook-out for some ladies of Koblenz, and they didn’t quite know how to manage it. They ate hamburgers with knives and forks and then wanted to wash the paper plates.) Well, since Doug, who was married after all, went back to Munich for the weekends, I was tasked with doing the shopping. I drove up to the commissaries in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden—where my family used to do their big periodic shopping trips from Koblenz—and stocked up on steaks, hot dogs, and burgers. I got number-10 cans of baked beans and all the fixin’s for a traditional Independence Day barbecue. We had a half day on Tuesday, the Fourth—a coincidence, as far as I know—and the morning was devoted to Sport. We had done this before, and gone to a swimming pool for the day, but this time we were going kegeling—German bowling. Wouldn’t you know it, most Kegelbahns were also bars!

That morning was rainy and gray, and it looked like the barbecue was going to be a wash-out. But we came out of the Kegelbahnand the sun was shining. One of the German officers cracked, “Is it Jesus or the good Lord himself who loves America?” And off we went to our cook-out. The mess hall had come up with a grill, and we set up everything outside—the Germans sprang for the beer—and the cook-out was a blazing success. (All that beer didn’t hurt.) What went over best, I was surprised to find, was the baked beans. Man, those guys just loved that stuff. I had over-bought a little, and they served the rest at mess until it ran out. I think they even prevailed on me to get more from the commissary. I think I created a bunch of addicts! But we paid those guys back for all their jovial kindness and cordiality—even if we never could keep up with their singing—and stood America in good repute with a small group of folks.

They really were a gemütlichbunch, and they had a good deal of fun among themselves, too. We took a field trip one day up to Bonn—back home again (again)!—so the Germans could take advantage of being so near the capital to stop in at the Bundeswehr HQ/Defense Ministry and do a little career schmoozing. As we were driving through the city in the bus, one of the officers shouted out, “There’s the Bavarian Embassy!” and everyone laughed uproariously. One of our number was Bavarian, and they all explained that the office we passed was the Bavarian tourist office—but that Bavaria was so much like a different country, that they teased the guy about needing an embassy in Bonn like a foreign state. (Bavaria’s sort of the Texas of Germany. It’s also Catholic while the rest of the country is Protestant.)

The senior officer of the class, Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) Siegfried Rühfel, was from the Allgäu, another region in southern Germany. Allgäuers, like Swabians, speak a dialect of German that is so different from Hoch Deutsch as to be unintelligible. All through the course, the other officers used to tease this guy—who outranked us all, mind you—about needing a translator. The Americans spoke better German than he did, they’d say. (The officer didn’t actually speak his native dialect among us; the worst he had was an accent not much different from, say, a Southern or Southwestern accent in American English) None of this was biting or nasty—it was all good-natured, and returned by the recipients in the same vein. As I look back on this, it’s a little astounding, because it was all in German—not just the classes (my notes were in German, too—it didn’t make sense to try to translate on the spot; it would take to much concentration away from listening), but all this drinking and schmoozing. Some of the Germans must have spoken some English—most Europeans spoke some other language than their own, and many spoke several; English was already the most important international language, so I’m sure there were several who spoke it at least a little. But I don’t recall ever getting into a full conversation in English

When I got back to Berlin, of course, I had to make a written Intelligence Report on everything I picked up. (I’m sure the IR’s lying in some DOD archive, too, along with my exfiltration staff study.) It was mostly about the personalities—the instruction wasn’t news. We had taken snapshots all the time—well, not me, but the German officers—and I turned in a set with ID’s of all the Germans. (I still have a set—taken at the Independence Day party—with the officers’ names all written on the backs.) The funny thing is, in some Bundeswehr archive somewhere, there’s a file on an American junior intel officer with red hair and a mustache who could speak German, but didn’t know all the words to any songs. (And who drove a big, red American car!) A lot o’ good it did ’em. I was gone in two years. (And whose fault was that?)

[I hope ROTters are enjoying this visit to a portion of my past. I guess it’s obvious that my 2½ years in West Berlin—back when there was such a place as West Berlin—was a significant experience for me. Even the most ordinary-seeming events seemed intense to me then, partly, I imagine, because it was Cold War Berlin and partly because I was very young and really being a grown-up for the first time.

[I invite you all to come back for Part 7, to be published in a couple of weeks or so, which will cover a couple of trips I took out of Berlin and some SNAFU’s in which I was involved as a result of my duties back in the divided city.]

[On 24 February, I posted a report on the Broadway première of August Wilson’s Jitney, the last of the playwright’s 10-play Century Cycle to make it to the Great White Way. It was also the ninth of Wilson’s cycle plays that I’ve seen; I’m missing only Radio Golf now, the play that covers the 20th century’s final decade and the last play Wilson composed before his death in October 2005. (He saw Radio Golf début at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2005, but didn’t survive to see it open on Broadway two years later.)

[I started Rick On Theater on 16 March 2009, eight years ago today, so there are many play reports I wrote before I launched the blog in what I call my archive, which stretches back to the 1970s, soon after I moved to New York City. (There are also, as you’ll hear, many plays that I never wrote about as well; I didn’t start writing up all the plays I see until 2003.) Of the now nine Wilson cycle plays I’ve seen, I’ve posted blog reports on The Piano Lesson (13 December 2012);and Jitney. (There’s also a report on How I Learned What I Learned,30 December 2013, Wilson’s solo performance piece he didn’t live to deliver in New York City; I saw Ruben Santiago-Hudson perform it.) The plays I saw when I wasn’t writing them up were Fences (July 1987), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Fall 1996), and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Fall 2002); there are no reports on those three. I also saw the Broadway premières of Two Trains Running in May 1992 and Seven Guitars in May 1996, before I regularly reported on performances, but I saw them again Off-Broadway in December and October 2006, and I did write about those productions. (Two Trains will be in Part 2 of this short series.)

[When I wrote the report on Jitney, I suggested that I might post my archival reports on the August Wilson plays I saw before ROT existed. In the second part of this archival series, I’ll post the reports on Two Trains, the cycle play that covers the 1960s, and Gem of the Ocean, the one about the 1900s. Below, in Part 1 of “From My August Wilson Archive,” I’m presenting my reports on Seven Guitars and King Hedley II, the only two plays in Wilson’s series that are narratively linked: Seven Guitars, set in 1948, includes a character named King Hedley and the title character of King Hedley II, set 12 years later, is an unborn child in Seven Guitars who’s named for Hedley. I thought it’d be appropriate to present these two old reports together for that reason.]

SEVEN GUITARS

Signature Theatre Company

New York City

22 October 2006

Diana, my subscription partner, and I managed to get to see August Wilson’s Seven Guitars Friday evening, 13 October [2006]—but it was touch-and-go for a moment. We just seem to have bad luck with that show! Our originally-scheduled performance at the Peter Norton Space on far West 42nd Street last month was canceled at the last minute—we had actually gotten to the theater before we learned—because a member of the cast got sick and Signature Theatre doesn’t use understudies. Friday night, an actor had an accident on stage (or just off stage—I’m not sure where it happened exactly) and apparently gave himself a small cut just above his right eye. They had to stop the scene—one early in the show—so he could exit and have it attended to backstage. Then they returned about 15 minutes later, rewound a few beats, and picked up again. Since I haven’t seen any other performances, I don’t have the basis for a real judgment, but as far as I could tell, the work was as strong as it probably would have been if they hadn’t had the mishap and the interruption.

I suppose that’s the big “news” for this show, which is about Pittsburgh Blues singer Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton. Set in the back yard of a dilapidated house in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 1948, the Second World War has been over for just three years. At the start of the play, Floyd’s friends have gathered after his funeral; he died suddenly and inexplicably. (This production was staged just 10 months after Wilson’s own death at 60 from liver cancer. The plans for STC’s August Wilson season were laid before the playwright announced he was ill.) Then the play flashes back to the week leading to Floyd’s death.

Just released from jail, Floyd’s invited to sign a record deal when a song he recorded months earlier becomes an unexpected hit. After a year of difficulties, Floyd is ready to correct the mistakes of past years and return to Chicago with a new understanding of what's important in his life. Unfortunately his means of righting wrongs are inherently flawed.

The acting (and Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s directing) was superb. This was one of the best ensemble casts I’ve seen in a very long time—everyone was solid, alive, and in touch with one another; no one seemed to be overshadowing anyone else, and they were all in the same play. I’ll single out two performers, but mostly because of their characters—though, of course, it’s important to add that the actors communicated those characters exceptionally. First, Kevin T. Carroll, who plays Canewell, just seemed to be in a kind of special spotlight (not literally, of course). I can’t really say why his performance stood out for me—he was just real, though so were his comrades, and at the same time, special. I’m going to take a wild-ass guess here, but what it felt like to me was that Carroll wasn’t doing straight Stanislavsky, with all that inside work. It seemed as if he was working from some portion of the British method, which is more technical. Not exclusively—he didn’t come off as technical. You can often tell when one actor in a cast is working externally while the rest are working internally. No, what I felt was that he somehow blended the two techniques so that he enhanced the Stanislavskian verisimilitude so that his Canewell was more sharply etched. I don’t even know if that makes any sense. (This is the role for which Ruben Santiago-Hudson, the director of this revival, got his 1996 supporting-actor Tony.)

The other actor who stood out was Charles Weldon who plays Hedley. The character is a little contrived—Wilson makes him slightly nuts so that he can get away with being oversized and outrageous—but Weldon pulls it off marvelously. (I will cavil that his accent was a little confusing. At first I thought the character was West Indian—I saw this play back when it was on Broadway in ‘96, but I don’t recall this aspect of the role—but I realized from the lines that he’s from Louisiana, and it’s Cajun-spiced speech—bayou English, I guess (as opposed to Louis Armstrong “Southern Brooklyn.” It wasn’t a significant problem.) Hedley, of course, is the character that connects to the ’80s play in the series (Seven Guitars is set in 1948), King Hedley II. (One of the women in Seven Guitars, Ruby, played by Cassandra Freeman, is pregnant, and even though Hedley—whose actual first name is King—isn’t the father, Ruby says she’ll name the child after him; that would make the child ”King Hedley II.”)

By the way, there’s a cop series on now, The Wire on Showtime cable [it ran from 2002 to 2008]. Well, the actor who plays Floyd Barton, the focal character of Seven Guitars, is Lance Reddick who plays Lieutenant—now Captain—Daniels in that show. (He’s the actor who had the accident at the start of the performance.)

Seven Guitarsis really a study in Wilson’s work. He writes terrific characters—characters that actors can just devour—and he captures a milieu, both a moment in time and a place in the world, that sparkles and shines. Santiago-Hudson and the actors nailed this just about perfectly, I’d say—with tremendous assistance from Richard Hoover’s set. (I remember complaining about an Arena Stage production of Awake and Sing! back in February that the cast didn’t seem to be living in the play’s world. That was decidedly not true of this troupe.)

Wilson also writes soaring dialogue that is absolutely vernacular prose poetry. It sounds both natural and extraordinary at the same time. And he conjures wonderful scenes, little moments of truth and life that are simply magic on stage. But his plots are rudimentary and meandering. He doesn’t tell stories—which is certainly his right as a dramatist; he shoots word-photographs, snapshots of a certain world. It can get a little frustrating watching as he lets his plays go off on little side trips or stay put for a little extra while. (Wilson’s plays aren’t short. He’s also not an editor.) And even when his plot does come to fruition, it’s not necessarily a surprise or a particularly significant event. The journey, not the destination, is his focus. But that can be hard on the spectator, I think. (I remember saying to my companion after seeing Fences with James Earl Jones that if it weren’t for Jones’s performance, the play wouldn’t be very interesting because so little actually happens. I can’t prove it’s related, but shortly after Jones was replaced by Billie Dee Williams on 2 February 1988, the play closed—on 26 June.)

One costume question, however: When did seamless stockings arrive on the market? In one scene, one of the women strikes a deliberately provocative pose and asks, “Are my stockings straight?” But they were seamless, so how could anyone really tell? In 1948, wouldn’t women still have been wearing stockings with seams? Small point.

In the end, though, I’m very glad I managed to see the production. It takes an exceptional production to overcome Wilson’s dramaturgical problems, and this one qualifies, no question.

The next Wilson at the Signature, which I’m not seeing until December, is Two Trains Running, which I also saw on Broadway (with Laurence Fishburne). I’ve heard that the regular run at STC was sold out within a few days of opening the sales to the public (since Diana and I subscribe, we get advanced notice to book our seats), the run was extended, and the extension is sold out. (The regular runs are all $15 seats this season [it’s now up to $30] due to a subsidy the Signature got. The extensions, however, go for $55 a pop.) King Hedley II is the third play in the season, and I haven’t seen that one before. (Actually, I’ve been expecting some theater to announce a presentation of Wilson’s complete cycle since his death, but so far no one I’ve heard about has done so. My mom told me, though, that the Kennedy Center has announced a series of staged readings of all the plays next year. [In 1986, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre became the first company in the world to launch productions of the entire 10-play cycle, concluding in 2007 with Radio Golf. The first company to produce the cycle after Wilson’s death was the Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, New York, which from 2007 to 2011 presented the 10 plays in order of their setting.])

KING HEDLEY II

Signature Theatre Company

New York City

3 April 2007

Well, I saw the last of the August Wilson series at the Signature Theatre’s Peter Norton Space Friday night, 30 March [2007]. (I have now seen eight of the ten plays in Wilson’s decalogue of the African-American experience. I missed Jitney, and Radio Golf, his last play, opens on Broadway later this month for previews.) I can say that King Hedley II measures up creditably to the two previous Wilson shows at Signature (and Gem of the Ocean at Arena which I saw in February.) in terms of production, and especially the acting. (Charles Isherwood’s Timesreview earlier in March, which was a near rave, pointed out that Hedley’s Broadway run had been miscast with Brian Stokes Mitchell, a romantic lead usually appearing in musicals, in the title role. I can now see how that would throw off the dynamic of the play. I didn’t see the 2001 Broadway production—this was the only play in the Signature series that I hadn’t seen before—mostly because it only ran two months and I didn’t get to it before it closed. By many accounts—some critics actually didn’t like it—this production is better an all ways, and I don’t doubt it.)

Though occasional characters do figure in more than one of Wilson’s plays (Sterling Johnson, the ex-con of Two Trains Running, reappears in Radio Golf; Aunt Ester, the focal character of Gem, is mentioned both in this play, in which her death is reported, and in Two Trains—though she doesn’t appear in either of the last two), King Hedley II is the only play that is actually a kind of sequel to a previous one. Set in 1985 or so, Hedley picks up the story of Ruby (Linda Gravatt) from Seven Guitars, set in 1948. She had arrived in Pittsburgh’s Hill District from Alabama, pregnant and fleeing a violent situation in which the baby’s father had been killed by a rival. Living in the house of Louise, she became acquainted with the off-balance Hedley—a Louisianan whose given name was King—and in an act of empathy, decided to name her unborn baby after him as if Hedley were its father. Thirty-seven years later, Louise, who raised the boy in Ruby’s absence, has died and Ruby has returned to the Hill District—and her son (Russell Hornsby), who has recently been released after seven years in prison for killing a neighborhood antagonist—to a house next door to Canewell (now known as Stool Pigeon; Lou Meyers), a fellow musician of Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton, who also lived in Louise’s house in 1948. (Canewell/Stool Pigeon is now the slightly unbalanced character, the seer and griot who appears in almost all Wilson’s plays, having become something of a religious fanatic. “God’s a bad motherfucker!” he warns us every now and then.) King Hedley II, the title character and focal figure of the play, has rejected Ruby for abandoning him, though he knows “Mama Louise” wasn’t his actual mother. He does believe, however, that Hedley was his father, and Ruby doesn’t want him to know different. (This truth will ultimately light the fuse that implodes King’s world.)

King is immediately revealed to be a bitter, angry, self-centered, and violent man and I wondered how Wilson was going to make him the play’s protagonist, even hero, without simply brushing aside the fact that he’s pretty much a bad man. Aside from having killed another man, essentially for consistently calling him “Champ” when he insists his name is King—in a confrontation born of this conflict, the other man had slashed King’s face and King hunted him down later and shot him numerous times in broad daylight in a barber shop—King makes his money to support his wife and unborn child by selling stolen goods (refrigerators at the moment) and committing armed robbery. He always carries a Glock automatic pistol (the cousin of the man he killed is looking for him) and at the slightest provocation, intentional or not, bursts out in threats of violence and uncontrolled anger. (King tells of an incident at school when a teacher grabbed him and he kicked her, after which he was permanently branded “unruly.” He obviously can’t see it, but that’s an understatement.) Now, you can psychologize about the roots and causes of King’s temper and tendency to violence—his abandonment, the lack of opportunity, the unfair treatment he’d been subjected to all his life, the heritage of his real father—but in the end, he’s a violent thug (with, given Wilson’s hand in his creation, a poetic tongue). Yet he’s the center of the play, and it was hard to imagine how Wilson was going to construct a play around him. Be assured, he does—and it’s not a cheat.

In all of Wilson’s other plays I’ve seen, there’s some kind of redemption at the end. In some, like Two Trains, everyone pretty much gets what they’ve been chasing after; in others, like Gem, a stormy sea is crossed, a corner turned. Even in Seven Guitars, in which the action is inexorably leading to the death of Floyd Barton (the play’s a flashback: the opening scene takes place right after his funeral), that event acts as a kind of catalyst for the transformation of other characters. But Hedley is a tragedy—I think you can call it that, in Wilsonian terms in any case. No matter what he does, no matter what anyone else does, King is heading for disaster. He doesn’t get anything right—every choice he makes, no matter what advice he gets, is wrong and you can see him careening toward a bad end, like a runaway car rolling downhill, gaining speed on its way down. (It is ironic that King wants money for him and his buddy so they can open a video store—a business we know will become doomed in a decade or two. I suspect Wilson knew that when he wrote the play in 1999.) The configuration of his end is a surprise, but you know it’s going to be bad. (I’m loath to reveal the end beyond this in case anyone of you hasn’t seen the play and still might. It’s so clear King’s fate is going to be bad, telling you that isn’t a spoiler, but any more might be.)

What Wilson seems to be doing is including in his panorama of life in black America a picture of the less redemptive side of that world—the violent, brutish, nasty aspect that results in some cases from the never-ending sense of never being allowed to get up off your knees. The Reagonomic ’80s, the decade of greed that drove the permanent wedge between the working people and the Midas-like CEO’s, is the perfect matrix. “I used to be worth twelve hundred dollars during slavery,” King laments. “Now I’m worth $3.35 an hour. I’m going backwards. Everybody else moving forward.”

Even King’s legit job, working deconstruction, is a trap. His (African-American) boss has put in the lowest bid for a demolition job, but loses the contract because the contractor says the bid’s too low! (The demolition man is in court to force the contractor to honor the rules, and he actually wins, but it comes too late for King.) Even the small things seem part of the conspiracy: King goes to Sears to get his wife’s photo taken, but when he returns to collect the portrait, the clerk tells him there’s no record of the job, and the receipt King shows him doesn’t mean anything. It’s not an excuse: Wilson never apologizes or excuses King, but he does show us the increments by which that man becomes part of society. And just to clinch the fact that Wilson doesn’t put the blame for everything on white society or the establishment, King’s death doesn’t come at the hands of any of those forces—it comes from one of his own. And it comes out of his own past, his heritage, you might say.

The acting and directing (by Derrick Sanders, founder of Chicago’s Congo Square Theatre where his production of Seven Guitars won a Joseph Jefferson Award) are, once again, excellent. Wilson has lots of dramaturgical problems, as I’ve observed before. (Hedley, though it has more plot than most other Wilson plays, still clocks in at just under 3 hours.) And while they’re not insignificant deficiencies, he still writes plays that are more than worthy of attention because of what he says and the wonderful language in which he says it. His characters are so vivid, and his individual scenes so powerful that he attracts top actors, making the productions special pleasures for audiences. (In a break with the trend I spotted up to now, this cast has no actors who list either The Wire or Homicideas credits. [I mention this in my reports on Two Trains Running and Gem of the Ocean, both in part 2 of this Wilson archive series, 19 March.] All three of the other Wilsons I saw this season had at least one actor who worked those shows. One actor, however, did appear in an earlier Wilson at the Signature: Stephen McKinley Henderson plays Elmore, Ruby’s former lover for whom she left Pittsburgh and King, but he played Red Carter, one of Floyd Barton’s musicians, in Seven Guitars. Ironically, Mister (Curtis McClarin), King’s running buddy in this play, is Carter’s son. Henderson also appeared as Stool Pigeon on Broadway.)

While everyone gives a strong performance, the standout has to be Russell Hornsby as King. While he assuredly doesn’t play for sympathy, his most remarkable achievement in the role is that he manages to make King seem like a reasonable man until he erupts. (Early in the play, and several times afterwards, he asks other characters if they see a halo around his head. This is the residue of a dream he had—but, of course, no one sees anything. That he takes the vision seriously says something about who King might have been if things—everything—had been different.) This is no Bill Sykes villain, no psychotic bully, but a man with a hair trigger. It doesn’t take much to set him off, but until something does, he’s just a rough guy in a rough part of town. (It is easy to see why an actor like Brian Stokes Mitchell would be wrong for this role. It’d have been a little like seeing Cary Grant switch parts with, say, Charles Bronson. In Kabuki terms, King is an aragoto—rough style—part, but Mitchell is a wagoto—soft style—actor. I also can’t see Leslie Uggams as King’s mother, Ruby, played with an earthy force here by Lynda Gravatt. If a star were needed, Della Reese would have been a better choice.) Once again, however, the actors each carved out a distinct, credible, unique, and wholly believable person—I don’t want to say “character.”

Speaking of acting: for some reason I was really focusing on the dialogue this time. I don’t know why—it wasn’t as if the cast weren’t doing anything else—but I was listening to the actors speak Wilson’s lines. I believe I’ve compared Wilson’s language to that of Chekhov, Ibsen, and Tennessee Williams before. They all share something in common: They write dialogue that at first sounds like ordinary speech, but isn’t. They all write a heightened, a lyric Realism. Spectators think they are hearing common speech, but no one really talks that eloquently, that expressively, that aptly, that poetically. (This was a quality that was missing in Gem of the Ocean, I noted. [See part 2 of thus series, 19 March.]) Of course, the actors have to sense this because they have to voice these extraordinary words without either crossing over into “declaiming verse” or falling into Mamet-speak, maintaining the illusion that they are talking ordinary street talk. Obviously, Wilson’s language is one of his main attractions for actors, and Signature’s casts have been excellent at doing this. (There are some magnificent monologues in Hedley—make a note, all you acting teachers with African-American students! Look especially at Tonya’s blistering explanation of why she doesn’t want to bear King’s son.)

But listening specifically to the lines confirms something that makes the work of writers like Wilson really exceptional. When I first taught writing, the text we were using made a point that has always stayed with me for some reason: “While we think of eloquence as being expressed in literary language, it is really the spirit that counts, not the words.” The example the book had given for eloquence was a passage by Jesse Jackson in which he used the most commonplace diction to express the loftiest sentiments. That’s what Wilson, Williams, Chekhov, and Ibsen do (taking into account for the last two that they were writing in the 19th century and we read them in translations): The words they use are perfectly ordinary, their syntax is simple—which is why we think we’re listening to common speech—but they assemble those elements to produce the most amazing images and sounds! Now, I don’t think this is a revelation, of course. Theater people—and I suspect literary people, too—recognize it. Actors and directors certainly do. But I do think that it’s an underestimatedly awesome achievement. It comes close to pure magic. Maybe “close” is an unnecessary equivocation.

I need to make a brief note about the set. David Gallo, who also designed the Broadway sets (and Radio Golf as well, it seems), conceived a hyperrealistic backyard of two decrepit houses—one missing its top floor. The two yards, Canewell’s and Louise’s, are contiguous and nothing but stony dirt, bound on two sides by rusted chain-link fences. (King insists on planting flowers in a plot of it, but it’s not soil—it’s dirt. Nonetheless, he coaxes life from the seeds!) It is Wilson’s blasted heath, the barren terrain of Beckett’s Godot (without even the bare tree). It is perfectly evocative of the dilapidated world and lives of King and his companions. (Canewell/Stool Pigeon fills his house with discarded newspapers, his historical records—You got to know this!—like a Collyer brother; but his yard remains barren even as he buries Aunt Ester’s cat there, near King’s flower patch. The flowers poke through the dusty earth—and the cat gives signs of resurrection!)

A question I had, however—not especially important, I suppose—is whether this was supposed to be the same backyard as depicted in Seven Guitars. I figure it is, but Gallo didn’t attempt to duplicate Richard Hoover’s set as it might have become 37 years later. There’s no real reason he needed to, if I’m even right—though costume designer Constanza Romero, Wilson’s widow, says that it’s “practically the same back yard, only forty years later”; notes in a theater newsletter report that an urban renewal in the 1950’s known as the “Pittsburgh Renaissance” displaced many Hill residents, and maybe the old house has been demolished—but it might have been interesting, since most of the audience for Hedley would be Signature season subscribers and would have seen the earlier play, to make the connection.

I’m often a sucker for gimmicks, as you’ve no doubt discovered—especially clever ones. Note the use by the Theater for a New Audience of the computer monitors to display the usual cell phone warning in Italian, English, and Hebrew/Yiddish before its production of Merchant of Venice [see my report, “TFANA’s Merchant of Venice (2007),” 28 February 2011]. Director Sanders has done his own version of this. Using a radio broadcasting a local Pittsburgh station playing ’80s rock music during preset, scene changes, and intermission, the DJ breaks in before opening curtain and, as if announcing a song or selling a product, makes the cell phone announcement.

Just a footnote, which some of you may already know: The Kennedy Center in Washington is planning to do all ten of Wilson’s plays of this series in staged readings over a month in March ’08. Apparently Signature intended to produce all ten of the plays, plus a new one, Wilson’s first after the completion of his decalogue, but when the playwright died suddenly in 2005, those plans were changed. (In fact, Signature almost had to cancel the August Wilson Season altogether.) So, unless another theater jumps in before the Kennedy Center gets underway, this will be the first Wilson marathon since he completed the cycle.

[I hope you found these old reports interesting—and maybe even illuminating. Please come back on 19 March for the conclusion of this two-part series, “From My August Wilson Archive,” for the reports on Two Trains Running and Gem of the Ocean. (For those interested, at the end of my 24 February report on Jitney, I appended a list of the 10 plays in Wilson’s Century Cycle with pertinent dates--setting, première, and Broadway début. There’s also a brief discussion in the report on the decalogue as a theatrical and literary accomplishment.)]

[This is the second installment of my 2-part series of archival August Wilson play reports, performances I saw before I started Rick On Theater. Part 1, which included the linked plays Seven Guitars (1995), set in 1948, and King Hedley II (1999), set in 1985, was posted on 16 March. I recommend checking it out before or after reading Part 2.]

TWO TRAINS RUNNING

Signature Theatre Company

New York City

13 December 2006

I saw the second play in the Signature Theatre’s August Wilson season on Friday, 8 December [2006]: Two Trains Running, which, in a capsule, has both the pleasures and the problems of most Wilson plays, and it has them in extremis. The production at Signature’s Peter Norton Space is generally excellent from both the directing and acting perspectives. (Though, for some reason, several of the cast were still having line problems now and then, even though the play opened the previous Sunday, the 3rd. Ben Brantley mentions this in his 4 December review in the New York Times; however, he saw the show in a preview and I saw it almost a week after opening.)

Set in 1969 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Two Trains unfolds in the rundown diner of Memphis Lee (Frankie Faison), the locals’ communal hang-out. The neighborhood is slated for “urban renewal,” and the city intends to exercise eminent domain to raze what remains of the block that includes Memphis’s restaurant. Memphis owns the rundown building that houses the diner, and the plot begins with his determination to make the city meet his price of $25,000—which he’s unlikely to realize. But Memphis isn’t the only one wrestling with problems. The diner’s replete with habitués, some regulars and some strangers, and employees who’re struggling to figure their lives out. Holloway (Arthur French), a bit of secular preacher and the play’s Wilsonian sage, scoffs at the white idea that blacks are lazy, pointing out that they toiled day and night as slaves for hundreds of years, and now that the white man has to pay them, suddenly there are no jobs. West (Ed Wheeler), the undertaker whose funeral parlor is across the street from Memphis’s diner, has become the richest man in the neighborhood from selling his neighbors expensive caskets and “laying them out in style.” Hambone (Leon Addison Brown), a mad and damaged soul, spends much of his stage time at the counter over a bowl of beans, periodically shouting, “I want my ham! He gonna give me my ham!” Risa (January LaVoy), the diner’s waitress has cut up her legs to make them ugly so men will leave her alone. Sterling (Chad L. Coleman), a young man who recently got out of prison, just wants some money and a woman. Wolf (Ron Cephas Jones), the numbers runner, is a dream peddler: his illegal business gives the players the hope of improving their material lives.

One of the chief pleasures of the performance is the ensemble work of the cast. They really create the sense of a micro-community within that diner, even while each actor creates a character of eccentricity and precise individuality. That, of course, is one of Wilson’s main strengths—he writes striking characters, each a sort of portrait of someone from Wilson’s life. They are all actors’ dreams. Even the most eccentric, oddball character, like Hambone in this play (and Hedley in Seven Guitars), is credible in Wilson’s world and fits right in with the other inhabitants. Even though you know Wilson has contrived his population this way, it never seems contrived. (In a coincidence, this is the second Signature company which features a member of the cast of the HBO series The Wire. Frankie Faison, Memphis in this play, plays the police commissioner in that show and Lance Reddick—Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton in Seven Guitars—plays now-Colonel Daniels.)

The same is true of his language. If the characters are all actors’ dream roles, Wilson’s dialogue is a great part of what makes that so. Wilson writes vernacular poetry, and like other poets of the modern stage—Tennessee Williams, say, or Chekhov and Ibsen—his words never seem out of place even though they are extraordinary speech that sparkles the way no ordinary person could manage to utter. There was plenty of this in evidence in Two Trains, especially since there is little action in the play so language shares the primary focus with character. (In his Times review, Brantley called Two Trainsone of Wilson’s two—with Jitney—“least eventful” plays.)

As I remarked, I think, in my comments on Seven Guitars [see part 1 of this Wilson archive series, 16 March], Wilson puts his characters into these wonderful little slices of life with each scene. Two Trainsis perhaps more episodic than other Wilson plays, especially Seven Guitars, so there are many, many scenes (separated by brief blackouts, just to emphasize this structure), and each of them could almost stand as a little one-act, a moment from Wilson’s world captured as if in some passing headlight. And like a gem in a headlight, each one sparkles with life and truth and honesty. Wilson, as I’ve said several times, draws an absolutely indelible and vivid portrait of a time and place. It’s more than just photographs, of course, because it’s imbued with his impressions and insights—not to mention that prose poetry. I imagine actors could mine their parts for months and keep finding new details and aspects. (If acting classes aren’t full of August Wilson scenes and monologues, I’d be shocked.)

But, of course, this is part also of the problems evident in Two Trains—one of Wilson’s major dramaturgical faults: his lack of plot. In Seven Guitars, there is the slimmest thread of storyline—and an end we know the play is aiming at. The play starts with Schoolboy’s funeral, so we know he dies, and then flashes back to the weeks before his death. We learn quickly that he’s been offered a chance to cut a record in Chicago, but he needs front money to get there. The play’s not about that, but the story is, and we have that little chain of events to follow: what Schoolboy does that ends up in his death. There isn’t even that much of a plot in Two Trains—we have no expected ending to pull us along, and no goal someone is trying to reach (except Hambone’s ham, really just a leitmotif, and Memphis’s deal with the city). There is a theme, however: life and death—the two trains of the title. Life is represented by, among other elements, the hustle and bustle of the activity in the diner and death is symbolized by the funeral parlor across the street, owned by the neighborhood’s richest citizen and a regular patron of the diner. But that’s not enough to stitch a play together; as a result, even though the scenes are each golden on their own, it remains a collage of small glimpses of the life of the 1969 Hill District, unlinked causally to a whole. The scenes don’t connect and there’s no throughline. (I wonder if this has something to do with the line problems among the cast.) The only structural connectives in Two Trainsare, of course, the consistent presence of the same characters, the recurring references to various subjects—the ham that Hambone feels he’s owed by a local (white) storeowner; the upcoming rally in honor of Malcolm X; the discussions of the unseen (until a later play) character of Aunt Ester; everyone’s pursuit of money—and, obviously, the unvarying locale, Memphis’s diner.

But the characters are also somewhat disconnected, though they all exist in the same small place when we see them. (The characters in Seven Guitars are all tied to one another in various ways.) Most of the men deal with Wolf, the numbers man, but he’s really a peripheral character except when Sterling hits the number and there’s a briefly extended drama of the winner seeking out the runner for his payoff while Wolf avoids him (because the numbers bosses cut the winnings in half when too many people hit it). Sterling and the waitress, Risa, have a sort of connection—he pursues her, but she mostly resists, and the dance seems cold and perfunctory even though they do connect in the end. Otherwise, the characters all have their own, private concerns—aside from Hambone’s ham, there is Memphis’s fight with the city to get his price for the diner building which has been condemned to make way for civic improvements, for instance—which they pursue pretty much independently and with little consequence for anyone else. (In a somewhat odd turn, everyone gets what he or she wants at the end. Even Hambone gets his ham—when Sterling steals it from the store after Hambone’s death. Even that death, although unexpected and sudden, isn’t harsh—Hambone dies in his sleep at home in bed.)

Though Wilson’s dramatic worlds are often compared to Chekhov’s, I believe it’s Uta Hagen who replied to the common complaint that nothing happens in a Chekhov play by saying, “Nothing but the end of one world and the beginning of another.” 1969, when the play’s set, would seem like an apt time for such a shift in the lives of African Americans—the end of the era of sanctioned segregation and lawful discrimination and the beginning of the time of black empowerment and hope for a colorblind society, demarcated by the violent deaths of first Malcolm X (1965) and then Martin Luther King (1968) the year before the play takes place. But Two Trainsisn’t about that at all; it’s both smaller than that—local and personal concerns, not national ones—and larger—life and death as the characters experience them day to day, pretty much as we all do. In the end, there’s no sense of upheaval in Two Trains, just a (very poetic) glimpse into Wilson’s world at one moment in its history. It’s hardly Chekhovian.

The second dramaturgical problem that is exemplified by Two Trains is that Wilson isn’t a very good editor. The play runs three hours (plus intermission). Because the performance started a few minutes late, that meant we didn’t get out of the theater until almost 11:30—a long evening at the theater (and not a very good hour on a cold night to be hanging around far West 42nd Street waiting for a crosstown bus!). I don’t know if any real damage might have been done to the play if Wilson had cut a few of the scenes, but since they aren’t causally linked to each other, the consequences would seem to have been minimal. I remember some advice one of my teachers passed along from an editor she had had: “Kill your babies.” In other words, be ready to cut the parts you really like—a problem I myself have. (But, then, I don’t write plays—for which there’s probably a very good reason.)

I remember saying that I saw the 1992 Broadway production of Two Trains but that I remembered seeing Laurence Fishburne (as the ex-con Sterling, played here by Chad L. Coleman—who also appeared in The Wire, though not as a regular) but that I have little recollection of the play. Now I can understand why—it doesn’t hang together to amount to much as a drama. It’s a series of moments—wonderful moments, but still just moments. Wilson’s plays that I’ve seen all have these same problems, some more than others, and I remember saying when I left Fencesin 1987, my first encounter with Wilson’s theater, that if it hadn’t been for the performance of James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson that the play wouldn’t be running because so little happened in it. (Sure enough, when Billy Dee Williams replaced Jones, the play closed in five months.) Happily, the pleasures of Wilson’s writing outweigh the deficiencies, and I was more than glad to have seen this revival.

GEM OF THE OCEAN

Arena Stage

Washington, D.C.

20 February 2007

I went down to Washington, D.C., last week to see the Arena Stage’s production of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, the play in Wilson’s Century Cycle covering the first decade of the 20th century. I had missed it when it ran on Broadway between December 2004 and February 2005 because the production lost an investor shortly before opening and the producers postponed the opening date, canceling some early performances. I had had tickets during the period of cancellation and couldn’t accommodate the replacement dates the show offered and had to settle for a refund instead. When I saw while I was in D.C to spend the 2006-07 year-end holidays with my mother that Arena was mounting Gem, I decided to go back down and catch it.

My mother, who subscribes to Arena, and I went to the show on Thursday, 15 February [2007]. A spate of snow and sub-freezing temperatures in Washington had made nighttime driving, especially through Rock Creek Park, potentially treacherous, so Mother took a less direct route and a little extra time to get to the Southwest neighborhood of the Arena Stage. We also needed to exchange the tickets, originally for the previous evening when bad weather had been forecast, which necessitated a stop at the box office. Gem of the Ocean, the next-to-last play Wilson wrote in his ten-year cycle (his last two scripts—Radio Golf was Wilson’s last play in the series, written the year he died, 2005—cover the first and last decades of the 20th century), was staged in the Fichandler, Arena’s original theater-in-the-round. Peter Marks gave the production a good review in the Washington Post ten days earlier (though mentioning its nearly-three-hour length) and despite the bad weather reports, the audience was fairly large at midweek. (The Moonie Washington Times also came out positive for the production.)

Marks calls Gem“a lesser achievement” in Wilson’s series, and he’s right. Compared to Fences, Two Trains Running, and Seven Guitars, it’s less poetic and more preachy (Marks called it “tipped . . . toward the didactic,” another thing he got right). It seems as if Wilson had planned this script to launch the panorama by introducing ideas and his general intent as if it were a kind of prologue. Set in 1904 (precisely 100 years before Wilson wrote it), Gem focuses on the residual legacy of slavery on African Americans, both those born under it (several characters are old enough to have been born in bondage; two had been involved in the Underground Railway) and those born later (the focal character, Citizen Barlow, played here by Jimonn Cole, was so named by his mother to acknowledge his status as a free-born American). Everyone in the play and those only mentioned are still facing the lasting effects of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, even as they have moved north to Pittsburgh. (The play is set in the Hill District of Wilson’s native city, where most of the decalogue takes place.)

There’s a lot of discussion about slavery and its history and its impact, both actual and metaphorical. As Marks describes it, it’s a history lesson. And right in the middle of the second act is a symbolic reenactment of the Middle Passage, induced by Aunt Ester (the 235-year-old sage, played by Lynnie Godfrey, who reappears as an unseen figure in Two Trainsand in whose house Gem is set) so that Citizen can get right with himself. Citizen had stolen a bucket of nails from the iron mill and another man had been blamed for the theft and died rather than take the blame for a crime he didn’t commit. After the hallucinogenic experience, Citizen sets out with Solly Two Kings (Joseph Marcell) to return to Alabama where Solly’s sister is under such oppression that she cannot even leave the state to come north to escape the privation under which she and other blacks are forced to live. The two men are going to function as a sort of latter-day Underground Railway (Solly is one of the two characters who had served the Railway during slavery), but when Solly is killed leaving Pittsburgh, Citizen sets out again on his own—a kind of penance for his part in the death of the accused thief and a symbolic connection to the slave past he is too young to have experienced himself.

Ironically, though Gem suffers from many of the same dramaturgical faults of Wilson’s other plays—extreme length, meandering structure, extraneous scenes and ones that go on too long—there is more of a plot here than in most other Wilson scripts. It’s rudimentary, to be sure, but it’s there. But this asset is, unhappily, balanced by the nature of Wilson’s language in this script: it is less poetic and lofty than his past writing and there isn’t the thrill of hearing his words roll out of the mouths of the street poets who are his characters. The characters, though, are every bit as evocative as those that populate his other plays: Citizen, the young newcomer (he still wears “clodhoppers”) caught in the disheartening cycle of economic disenfranchisement that keeps blacks in an underclass from which they can’t escape; Solly, the local philosopher (there’s almost always one in Wilsonland—an American griot); Aunt Ester, the ancient seer and healer; Black Mary (Pascale Armand), the young woman who holds a promise of the future; Caesar Wilkes (LeLand Gantt), Mary’s brother and the local lawman appointed by the white authorities to keep the black ward under control (a kind of reverse scalawag).

It’s all just too set-up, I think, though; Wilson seems to have contrived this play more to lead into the other nine than to stand on its own as a portrait of an actual time and place. The circumstances he creates here are much less special and unique than in the other plays I’ve seen. (After King Hedley II, which I’m booked to see at the end of March—if all goes according to plan—I will have seen all but two of the series: Jitney and Radio Golf. [As readers will know by now, I saw Jitney in 2017; see my report on 24 February. King Hedley ispart of the first section of this series, posted on 16 March.]) That truly extraordinary sense that you are peeking back at a moment in time, like that episode from Star Trek where the crew watches bits of history unfolding—except that Wilson’s bits are tied to specific people of that time, not just “historical figures”—is missing in Gem, in addition to its more pedestrian language. It’s as if Wilson was less inspired to write this play, to tell this special story, than that he felt obligated to create an introductory play to get the series started—as if he were not so much moved to write it as duty-bound.

The acting and Paulette Randall’s directing are fine in the Arena production. The use of the Fichandler, while not inspired, is not a detriment in any way. (I have seen one other Wilson play at the Arena, Ma Rainey [2002; no report], but it was staged at the Kreeger, the proscenium space.) The space represents the main room of Aunt Ester’s house, designed by Scott Bradley, encompassing the kitchen, dining area, and sitting room, and the lack of complete realistic detail—it’s a fragmentary set, though what set pieces are present are realistic—doesn’t seem to have any effect on the play in comparison to, say, the totally naturalistic restaurant box of Two Trains or the realistically-rendered backyard setting of Seven Guitars, both at New York City’s Signature Theatre Company.

Wilson’s plays, like those of Tennessee Williams or Chekhov, authors to whom I’ve heard Wilson compared, are not truly realistic anyway—they’re a heightened, lyrical form of that genre, I think: they look (and sound) like Realism until you examine them a little. They don’t require realistic trappings to work. (The only drawback to using the arena space is that the voms, whose floors are built up to be down-ramps into the room—instead of the up-ramps they are normally—make entrances and exits longer than the quick comings and goings of a proscenium box set. The actors and director have to do a little surreptitious covering to justify the longer crosses in and out of the room. I’m guessing no one but me and my ilk probably noticed this, however.) In all other respects (well, that one, too—since the design of the theater isn’t her fault), director Randall, who has mounted several Wilson plays in London (including Gem) does a fine job.

The cast, led by Jimonn Cole as Citizen Barlow and Lynnie Godfrey as Aunt Ester, is very good, if not as exquisite as the Signature casts I’ve been seeing this season. (In a coincidence, one cast member, Clayton LeBouef, who plays Eli, Aunt Ester’s caretaker, has also appeared in HBO’s The Wire, in which several actors from both the New York Wilson productions I’ve seen recently have been featured cast members. LeBouef’s main TV role was Colonel Barnfather, the careerist police commander in the Homicideseries.) If I had to name a standout in the cast, it would have to be Joseph Marcell as Solly Two Kings, the sort of conscience of the Hill District. Without being flashy or idiosyncratic, Marcell seems to draw attention to Solly, who is always ready to take action in behalf of the community—from guiding slaves to freedom on the Underground Railway, to helping southern blacks escape north when the state authorities prevent it, to setting fire to the mill where the mostly black workers are striking in protest to the new kind of economic slavery they are subjected to now. A close second, however, is the performance of Pascale Armand as Black Mary, Aunt Ester’s cook and housekeeper. Armand (and Wilson) have created what must be the progenitor of the modern black woman, the pre-feminist, pre-civil rights independent woman who even stands up to Aunt Ester to do things her own way. (Aunt Ester’s response: “What took you so long!”)

The single acting fault I saw is Godfrey’s habit of speaking awfully fast as Aunt Ester. She didn’t overact the age (how do you act 235, anyway?) or, in my opinion, overdo the Southern accent (though Mom complained about that), but she spoke so fast that I had to concentrate on her dialogue just in order to hear the words. No one else had this difficulty so it wasn’t the fault of the acoustics or the direction I don’t think. That Aunt Ester is such a central role in Gem means that this is more of a problem than it might otherwise be.

Obviously, for all its problems and deficiencies, Gem of the Ocean still has its Wilsonian pleasures. It isn’t the gem its title suggests (that Gemis the name of the slave ship that symbolically carries Citizen to his redemption), but it’s still August Wilson. As I’ve said of other major playwrights, most notably Stephen Sondheim, even bad August Wilson—and this wasn’t remotely that—is still better than 90 per cent of everything else that’s out there at its best. And even if his dramaturgy is flawed, this is still a writer with something on his mind, something provocative, interesting, and worthy. God knows, not every playwright can claim that these days.

[For those interested, at the end of my 24 February report on Jitney, I appended a list of the 10 plays in Wilson’s Century Cycle with pertinent dates--setting, première, and Broadway début. There’s also a brief discussion in the report on the decalogue as a theatrical and literary accomplishment.]

A dying man making an appearance in a theater? Whoaaa! That might well be your reaction—it was mine—when you twig to what Will Eno’s come up with in his new play Wakey, Wakey, having its world première at the Signature Theatre Company’s Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row. But don’t be put off by my very skeletal characterization: though it did seem to affect some spectators—a few, like the woman sitting in front of me, even profoundly—it’s not morbid or depressing. Think Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape with humor.

Wakey, Wakey, Eno’s final production in his five-year, three-play stint as STC’s first graduating Residency Five playwright, started preview performances on 7 February in the company’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, the small, 191-seat proscenium house, and opened on 27 February; after two extensions (from 19 and 26 March, respectively), the play’s scheduled to close now on 2 April. My subscription partner, Diana, and I met at the Signature Center on Friday evening, 17 March, to see the 7:30 performance.

Eno, who also makes his stage-directing début with this production, has been represented at STC with Title and Deed, his freshman outing in his residency in 2012, and The Open House in 2014 (see my report on the latter play, 16 March 2014, which also includes a brief bio of the writer). 2014’s The Realistic Joneses was Eno’s Broadway début; his breakout play was 2005’s Thom Pain (based on nothing), a film version of which, co-directed by Eno, is currently in post-production. A Helen Merrill Playwriting Fellow, Eno has also received many other accolades for his writing: he’s a 1996 Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellow and a 2004 Marian Seldes/Garson Kanin and Guggenheim Fellow; he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2004; Thom Pain was nominated for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; and he’s the recipient of the 2012 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award. In addition to the Pulitzer nomination, his plays have won numerous honors as well: Middletown won the Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play in 2010, Title and Deed received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for Outstanding Solo Show in 2013, and The Open House won both the Lortel for Outstanding Play and the OBIE Award for Playwriting in 2014; also in 2014, the Drama Desk gave Eno a Special Award “For two extraordinary casts and one impressively inventive playwright” for The Open House (Off-Broadway) and The Realistic Joneses (Broadway).

Wakey, Wakey is inspired in part by Eno’s friendship with James Houghton, Signature’s late founder and a mentor to the playwright who died in August 2016 at age 57, and also the September 2016 death of playwright Edward Albee, a former writer-in-residence at STC who remained a loyal friend and supporter. (“I was thinking of Jim and Edward a lot as I worked on the play,” Eno acknowledged to Theater Pizzazz cyber journalist Carol Rocamora.) As Eno tells it, his third residency play “was supposed to be something else,” as his main character says of his presentation. About a year before Houghton’s death, he and the playwright began texting back and forth about ideas for Eno’s last STC script. “So, we started working on that play,” Eno relates in an interview, “and he was going to direct it and that was really exciting to me.” But then Houghton went into the hospice where Eno spent a lot of time talking with his mentor while he was dying. “And then Jim died on August 2nd,” said the dramatist, and he put aside “Jim’s play.” “I started writing this thing a little while after,” Eno explained.

The writer was thinking a lot about his friend and mentor while he wrote Wakey, Wakey, but, he insists, “it’s not a play about Jim.” Eno adds, however, “I hope it’s a little bit with him, somehow.”

He’s a guy who, I don’t know how to say this, but, he lived with such clarity and integrity and directness, and so you always knew where he stood, and if I’m thinking about something now, I feel like I have a good idea where Jim would stand on it, so it feels like the conversation continues. I really hope this will feel like a thing that happened, not a play you went to.

What the playwright took from this experience was how Houghton “lived with more reality, on one hand, and more lightness, on the other,” even “in the last week of his life.” Eno summed up his vision for Wakey, Wakey: “So all these things are qualities I hope—and again it’s not a play about Jim in a biographical way, at all—but I hope the play might have some of his personality.” As the main character in Wakey, Wakey says,“It’s important to honor the people whose shoulders we stood upon.”

At preset, while the audience filters into the Griffin, Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro” is playing. After the usual announcement about turning off phones and checking listening devices, the music switches to the theme music for the 1960’s-’70s TV show The Dating Game. A recorded voice, the playwright-director’s I believe, comes up and repeats the customary announcement about cell phones and so on, and there’s a kind of rumination about children, accompanied by the voice of a little girl, possibly Eno’s own daughter (who’s just shy of 3), and a reference to eating a banana. When the lights go down and come back up, a man in pajamas is sprawled face-down on the floor. He lifts his head and asks, “Is it now? I thought I had more time.” Was he passed out? Did he just wake up from a nap on the carpet? The lights dim again. A lighted sign admonishes: “NO APPLAUSE.”

When the lights return, the 60-ish man (Michael Emerson; TV’s Lost and Person of Interest, Off-Broadway’s Gross Indecency: The Trials of Oscar Wilde) is sitting in a wheelchair, a suit jacket over his pajama shirt, and, referring to note cards, offers his insights in a casual, gentle, humorous stream of consciousness about life and death. The man, whom the program calls “Guy” (though that may not be his name—he doesn’t have one in the script—just his label), is in a characterless room with no furniture, possibly at his home, surrounded by packing boxes and a pile of clothes (the set is by Christine Jones), and is apparently dying. There’s a door up left, never used as all entrances and exits are made up right: death’s door, do you suppose? The play’s decidedly Beckettian (to connect to Krapp’s Last Tape, there’s that allusion to a banana!) as Guy meanders through various and sundry topics. There are slides (starting with two of a toddler who looks remarkably like he could be Emerson as a child—and one of a little girl eating an ice cream cone that might be Eno’s daughter) and home movies, YouTube videos, word puzzles, distant sound effects—a siren (police or an ambulance, he wonders), a cell phone ringing, crickets chirping—and Guy always acknowledges the audience (unlike Krapp and his tape recorder).

About three-quarters of an hour into the 75-minute performance, Guy’s caregiver, Lisa (January LaVoy), an attractive, stylish younger woman, enters. (Costumes are by Michael Krass.) Carrying a small picnic cooler—and her own chair—Lisa patiently attends to Guy’s needs and even anticipates some—she brings a kit for making soap bubbles, which Guy admits he loves, and a bag of fortune cookies. Little by little, Guy loses the thread of his recollections, shows signs of physical weakening, and loses focus as he quietly passes away.

Then the theater erupts in a montage of slides and videos, disco lighting and strobe effects, rock music, bubbles, and balloons (projections designed by Peter Nigrini, lighting by David Lander, and sound by Nevin Steinberg). Stage hands bring out baskets of fortune cookies which they place on the edge of the stage, signs inviting us to help ourselves, and the audience goes out into the Griffin’s lobby for refreshments in what can only be called a wake.

(Going in, I assumed that Eno’s title, Wakey, Wakey, referred to waking from a sleep, but this final bit makes me realize the playwright’s evoking a wake for the dead as well. In his STC interview, he confirms this: “I wanted something that sort of has that sense of ‘time to get up’ in it, and also of a ‘wake’—as in an Irish wake, but also has a silly, nursery rhyme thing to it.”)

I enjoyed Wakey, Wakey, and even Diana seemed to have liked it even though it’s an idiosyncratic play. It’s also slightly metatheatrical—Guy not only addresses us directly but seems to acknowledge that we’re in a theater. It’s a very quirky play—Eno’s a very quirky writer, and it seems he comes by that naturally (as opposed to putting it on from the outside, like a suit of motley). He’s clearly not everyone’s cuppa; I don’t say he’s an acquired taste—I don’t think you acquire a taste for Will Eno—but rather you either take to his idiosyncrasies or you don’t, as can be surmised from disparate responses from two reviewers. “Wakey, Wakey never manages to quite transcend [its ‘seemingly insignificant’] moments; as lovingly as they are described, they just don’t build into a play,” wrote Elizabeth Wollman on Show Showdown, characterizing the performance as “a bit half-baked.” On the other hand, Lindsay Timmington acknowledged, “The beauty of Will Eno’s work is that there is always so much more to what you’ve seen and that something will linger with you long after you leave,” on OnStage. Timmington summed up by reporting, “I leave his shows feeling a tiny bit befuddled, a little exhausted by the marathon of experienced emotions and totally in love with his work.” I wouldn’t wax as hyperbolic as Timmington, but I fall closer to that end of the continuum of Eno appreciation. (I enjoy his quirks—they’re like the bubbles in champagne.)

I said I liked the play, but this is another case of my not being certain what the writer’s trying to say. Eno’s writing about “life and death” (really, the process of dying), obviously, but I haven’t decided what he’s saying on the subject. (This is my second play in a row at Signature whose subject is passing from one plane of existence to another. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everymanadaptation, Everybody, treated the same idea in an entirely difference style. See my report on 6 March.) I found it intriguing both theatrically and thematically. (I can tell Eno’s saying something, perhaps very personal, even if I haven’t figured out exactly what that is yet. Does that make sense?)

The theater’s promo puts it this way:

What are we here for? Is time a friend or an enemy? Do we all eventually end up in the same place, but take different routes to get there? ‘Wakey, Wakey’ challenges the notion of what really matters and recognizes the importance of life’s simple pleasures. (All of which might sound dreary, but there’s a chance this will be a really good experience.)

In the interview with Signature Literary Manager Jenna Clark Embrey, the author gives a clue to what he’s thinking about:

It’s a play that is kind of about . . . people you love and people dying and how do you think about that and what is, uh, what is a person’s—what remains of a person. Things like that. And how do we think about our own death and all that—not to be glum because all these things are things you ask yourself or you ask about other people for the purpose of trying to live a more grand and a meaningful, helpful life.

We’ll see if I can figure out Eno’s point by the time I finish this report! It’ll be interesting to see how close I can get. (I don’t think Eno, or whoever penned the blurb above, was intentionally echoing Tennessee Williams, but his 1959 play Sweet Bird of Youth started out as a one-act entitled The Enemy—Time. Guy, and probably Eno, is ambivalent about our relationship to time—that is, aging—but Williams was adamant that time was not man’s friend, leading inexorably to decay and diminishment.)

Michael Emerson’s performance is remarkable, too. (He was Oscar Wilde in Gross Indecency Off-Broadway in 1997-98; earning an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination.) I believe he should at least get an OBIE nomination for this work. He’s so completely natural and organic in a very odd circumstance, he made me think it was entirely reasonable—despite all the evidence to the contrary. Astounding work. (His partner, January LaVoy, is equally good, but in a much less tasking role; she’s only on stage for half an hour of a 75-minute play.)

The acting of the character of Guy here is immensely important, more than for most other lead characters, because handled badly or misguidedly, the play will slip into maudlinness or pretentiousness. With Eno himself at the helm, the guidance is clearly in good hands—he knows exactly what the part needs to make the play work. (The tyro director either learned from observation how to work effectively with an actor, or was fortuitous/discerning in his casting.) As writer, Eno wanted to capture some of James Houghton’s spirit, especially in his last days, and as director, he seems to have guided Emerson toward the same goal. “If Emerson is not playing Houghton, per se, he is certainly channeling his spirit and perhaps some of the wisdom he left behind,” suggested Hayley Levitt on TheaterMania.

Emerson approaches the role with a quiet sincerity, but not without humor—a light touch that never leaks over into preachy or pedantic. (“Jim . . . had a way with being funny that—since it didn’t seem like it was his first priority—it just made things funnier.” recounts Eno. “I don’t know how a person can be an incredible leader and a sort of class clown and prankster, but he was a little bit that.”) He keeps the monologues conversational, as if he were really talking to us and making up his spiel as he goes along, taking cues from the visuals or his memories—or occasionally his notes, which seem to have mostly become irrelevant after he assembled them. While LaVoy is a tad more actorly as Lisa, Emerson never seems anything but natural, as if he were improvising the whole performance. (What might look like improvisations or accidents aren’t, as proved by the published reviewers—which I’ll get to at the end of this report as usual—who all comment on the same moments that drew my own attention even though we each will have seen different performances.)

Furthermore, the actor strikes just the right tone—not quite diffident and not quite in command—to make Guy not only sympathetic as a character, but the regular guy his label identifies him as. Like the title character in Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody, Eno’s—and Emerson’s—Guy is all of us. (I don’t know if Eno would have objections, but I think Guy could easily be played by a woman; there’s nothing really gender-specific in the part—aside from its designation in the program.) Maintaining this balance convincingly—and I found it totally convincing—is why I assert Emerson is earning an OBIE nod. It looks simple, but it’s far from it—as actors and acting students will immediately recognize. (Given Emerson’s past roles, we can also know that this is work, not just his natural behavior. He just does it in a way that looks like his normal demeanor.) Let me just add that this is one of those rare occurrences in theater: the perfect alignment of role and actor. Kudos to both Eno (for casting Emerson) and Emerson for his stage work!

By the way, one additional remark: this is a play that should appeal to small companies and college theaters—it has the most minimal of sets, two actors, and easy tech (slides, recorded music, and a few simple light and sound FX)—plus it’s very short, a good student-directing candidate if the student can handle the acting style. (Apparently it’s already in press by Oberon Books for publication on 30 March; the Drama Book Shop is advertizing it now.)

On Show-Score, Wakey, Wakey accumulated an average rating of 72 based on a survey of 34 notices. The site tallied 68% positive reviews, 12% negative, and 20% mixed. Show-Score's highest rating was 95, of which there were two, with five 90’s; the lowest score was a single 35, with one 41. (I’ll be reviewing 19 notices for my round-up.)

In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz characterized Wakey, Wakeyas an “odd but gently urgent play” in which “the going gets curious.” Guy’s reminiscence “tends to be elliptical, cryptic and trails off into dead ends,” added the Newsman. “No matter,” wrote Dziemianowicz: Emerson plays Guy “with a magnetic open-hearted humor, so we stay connected.” For the suburban Bergen County, New Jersey, Record, Robert Feldberg asserted that Wakey, Wakey“isn’t really a play. It’s an accounting of the things that matter in life.” Wrote Feldberg, “Presented with quiet authority and a soft, ironic humor by the remarkable Michael Emerson . . ., observations that might otherwise seem random, and sentimental, coalesce into a painful but brave last embrace of ordinary pleasures.”

“Though the man telling the jokes is sitting down (he’s in a wheelchair), dying is a stand-up routine in ‘Wakey, Wakey,’” observed Ben Brantley in the New York Times, dubbing ita “glowingly dark, profoundly moving new play” and a “short, resonant tragicomedy.” Comparing Eno’s work to Albee’s, Brantley also asserted, “‘Wakey, Wakey’ retains a Beckettian sense of human existence as an absurdist vaudeville, a slapstick of failing and falling, despite all aspirations to dignity.” The Timesman continued, “But Mr. Eno’s play is warmer and less magisterial than most of Mr. Albee’s work. You could even call it cozy, which is not to say it doesn’t chill.” The playwright and Michael Emerson “together tap into the show business in the business of breathing your last,” reported Brantley, praising the actor’s portrayal “with a master’s blend of pretty much every emotion there is.” The Times reviewer declared, “The astonishment of Mr. Emerson’s performance is how universal and particular it is,” characterizing him as a “magnetic presence” and “the show’s most dazzling special effect.”

The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” reviewer described Wakey, Wakey as “theatrical games” and pronounced that the “script’s perfect unpredictability” is “for a long while . . . thrilling. But, as the protagonist’s energy flags, so does the show’s.” Emerson, though, “makes for engaging and funny company.” In the Village Voice, after characterizing the play as “chatting desultorily about life,” Michael Feingold asserted, “It all sounds absurdly trivial and random, which is part of writer-director Eno’s intention,” and then added, “But Wakey Wakey’s sharp writing, heightened by the easygoing asperity of Emerson’s performance, stirs deeper feelings. Granted, the truth it conveys is small, rarefied, and overly hedged with decorative distractions. Even so, it’s genuine.”

Opening his notice in New York magazine with the statement, “The first half of . . . Wakey, Wakey . . . is a neat summary of everything theatergoers either love or hate about Will Eno. I will write from the latter perspective,” Jesse Green described the play as “a rambling monologue of no apparent consequence.” After presenting a list of the play’s deficiencies, all emblematic of Green’s complaints about Eno’s dramaturgy, the man from New York concluded, “The topics, however absurd on the surface, all collapse into meditations on mortality; to bring home the point Eno even gives us a YouTube video of animals screaming. I may have been among them.” Then LaVoy’s Lisa, “so radiantly warm onstage,” enters and Green reported, “The struggle between insincerity and urgency that Guy has been enacting gives way, under Lisa’s gentleness, to something more direct and beautiful.” He acknowledged, “I felt my hostility toward the first half of Wakey, Wakey, with all its dull cuteness, beginning to melt.” Emerson, said Green (in contrast to most other reviewers),”though technically excellent, cannot get so far with his character.” (The New York review-writer suggested that Eno’s direction is in part to blame for this failure.) Acknowledging that “the physical production . . . is ideal,” the New York reviewer caviled that “the play as a whole does not yet reward so much care.”

Comparing Wakey, Wakey with that other Signature production about death and dying, Frank Rizzo labels Eno’s play “a work of humor, humanity and grace that makes you want to hug your lover, your neighbor and maybe an usher on the way out” in Variety. Emerson “offers a captivating, playful and deeply moving performance” as the dying man, “a loving transition, theatrically told in a sui generis style that is Eno’s own. As Guy would say, ‘Wowee.’” Dubbing the play “quietly beautiful,” Time Out New York’s David Cote explained that Eno “makes a spectacle of vamping and false starts, awkward yet deeply felt pauses, as the keen, funny, transfixing Emerson reads from index cards, gets his slides confused and bathes the audience in his gentle, beatific fussiness.”

In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney, calling Wakey, Wakey the writer’s “typically idiosyncratic little play” and his “latest existential inquiry,” asserted, “Will Eno’s plays tend to live more in his characters’ minds than in any experiences we witness them going through.” The HR reviewer reported, “The hook that reels us into this abstruse, tricky, stream-of-consciousness contemplation of mortality is a beautiful performance from Michael Emerson.” In “this unexpectedly affecting (almost) two-character piece,” Eno and Emerson create “also a sense of playfulness.” There are moments, said Rooney, when “you wonder whether this is more of an inspirational seminar or a play. In fact it's a little of both and neither.” He noted, “While the thematic richness of Wakey, Wakey creeps up on you . . ., few will make the claim that this is a major addition to Eno's distinctive body of work.” Rooney concluded, however, “Eno's unique voice—quizzical, perceptive, assertively compassionate—is one to be celebrated.”

In the cyber press, Hayley Levitt on TheaterManiaquipped, “Only Will Eno could find the playfulness in a dying man’s end-of-life ruminations.” Levitt observed that Eno ends his Residency Five term “not so much with a bang, but with a wink and a knowing smile that patrons willing to listen intently will receive with warmhearted joy.” The TM reviewer explained that “Eno’s dialogue remains stilted and aloof. It serves the play’s purposes—and could not be given a more naturalistic performance than the one Emerson is delivering.” She warned, however, that “if you require peaks and valleys of drama to keep you engaged in a story, you may get sleepy within Wakey, Wakey’s microscopic modulations and extended silences.” On CurtainUp, Simon Saltzman dubbed the play “contemplative” and reported, “Never morbid, it is surprisingly illuminating and insightful, even revelatory.” Of all Eno’s plays, Saltzman said, Wakey, Wakey, “sensitively directed by the playwright,” is “his most easily embraced and most deliberately accessible.” In the end, she concluded, “The press release has this hopeful line: ‘. . . there’s a chance this will be a really good experience.’ It was . . . and more.”

“I’d love to tell you what Wakey, Wakey . . . is about, but it ain’t easy,” admitted Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray in the opening of his review. He offered an explanation of what he says Eno thinks the play is about, then cautions, “But as with so many of Eno’s plays, what makes sense on paper makes nonsense in practice, with whatever points it might have the potential to make crushed beneath the weight of its creator’s enforced artifice.” Murray then declared, “That it’s his best play since his New York breakthrough . . . is all but irrelevant: How much should any artist be praised for fulfilling the bare minimum of the challenges he sets for himself?” The TB reviewer asserted, “Emerson does everything he can with” Eno’s script, but “[t]he shtick gets tiresome quickly.” He continued, “Around its edges, however, Wakey, Wakey evinces more discipline than Eno has displayed in years. . . . Your reaction to what happens will depend entirely on whether you buy what he’s selling and how he’s selling it.” On TheaterScene, Joel Benjamin asserted, “Wakey, Wakey is Will Eno at his surreal, troubling, beautiful best, a play both challenging and easily absorbed.

Theater Pizzazz’s Carol Rocamora opens her review by asking, “What’s this? A stand-up comedy routine?” adding that the actor in the wheelchair is “not making sense.” Determining that Wakey, Wakey is “initially mysterious and ultimately deeplymoving,” and that Emerson delivers “a mesmerizing monologue that plays with your mind and ultimately with your heart.” On Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter described Eno’s play as “an idiosyncratic, essentially plotless, seriocomic, elliptical, but heartfelt rumination on mortality.” Yet Leiter warned that Eno “has a gift for unusual situations and quirkily delightful dialogue, and he knows how to get laughs with verbal surprises, but in Wakey, Wakey, he offers little new or revelatory about the human condition.” Nonetheless, Emerson’s performance “makes you hang on every word, even if you don’t always know precisely what he means.” Leiter’s concluding thoughts are:

As Wakey, Wakey moves inexorably toward its anticipated conclusion (climax is too animated a word), its unhurried pace slows . . . to . . . a . . . crawl, making its title seem a misreading for Wake Me, Wake Me. Its acting and production elements score highly, but while some visitors will certainly be touched others are likely to find Wakey, Wakey too wishy-washy for their tastes.

Emily Gawlak of StageBuddy labeled Wakey, Wakey“overwhelmingly joyous, moving, and unpredictable” and declared, “With Wakey, Wakey, Eno and Emerson achieve a stunning feat, compelling an audience of strangers to deeply mourn the loss of a man who is not only a stranger but a fiction.” Gawlak concluded, “Wakey, Wakey is a truly great play, one that reasserts the unique power of theatre to create a space for catharsis and community building. You’ll want to recapture the heart-bursting, life-affirming feeling again and again.” On Broadway World, Michael Dale acknowledged, “Emerson makes for appealing company and Eno’s meandering text has its cute and funny moments.” He then added, “But there’s also a redundant meta quality that gets tiresome.” Echoing one of Guy’s lines, Dale finished up quipping, “As for any further descriptions, I don’t know exactly what to say to you.”

Tulis McCall started off by praising Emerson’s performance in Wakey, Wakey on New York Theatre Guide, then continued, “Would that the material itself held up as well.” Emerson, McCall asserted, “is apparently very funny if you were to judge from the reactions of the audience the night I attended. I found his work intriguing and introspective, but not funny in the least.” The NYTG reviewer observed, “Eno writes with sly winks and nods and intellectual forays thither and yon. It can be a pleasure to listen to, especially in the hands of Emerson who is both deft and grounded . . . .” Then she lamented, “In the end, however, there is not enough ‘there’ there on which you can hang your hat.” McCall’s conclusion? “Wakey Wakey is an event that falls short of becoming a piece that hits you where you live, or, in this case, expire.” On New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell, dubbing Wakey, Wakey“the latest ethereal, esoteric play by Will Eno,” referred to a line of Guy’s—“They say practicing gratitude can physically change the shape of the brain, in a good way”—which he actually looks up on the ‘Net. (It turns out to be true.) Then he added, “I doubt my brain is going to be changed very much by ‘Wakey, Wakey,’ but I did like it better than anything else I’ve seen by Eno, whose comic, cosmic, cryptic approach to playwriting has consistently charmed other people.” Mandell went on to admit, “Too often, I’ve found his impish sensibility grating.” Though the NY Theaterreview-writer found, “With gentle humor and a lack of fussiness, Michael Emerson manages to woo us through the deliberate vagueness, starts-and-stops, meta interruptions, of his monologue,” in the final analysis, he felt, “Much of what Eno’s script is trying to induce about the celebration and uncertainty of life and death has been done better and with more clarity elsewhere.”

Okay, so what did I learn—about Eno’s point, I mean? Leaving aside the tribute and homage to James Houghton, the playwright’s private message embedded in his play, I’m going to have to say that Wakey, Wakey is Eno’s lesson in saying goodbye. “There’s always someone or something to say goodbye to,” says Guy, and Eno’s told us how much he learned from Houghton’s last days. It’s not portentous last words that matter, Eno says, but first words. Learning to say goodbye might help us learn to say hello better, says Guy. Then we can talk about all the trivial small things that make up a life—our own and other people’s. We don’t learn much about Guy’s circumstances—but we do learn something about his . . . well, what should I call it? His soul. Eno just called it “what remains of a person.” Eno’s obviously not a subscriber to Dylan Thomas’s view on dying, for Guy chats with us, shares his thoughts and feelings, and then goes gentle into that good night. What Eno wants us to understand, then, is how to do that with class. What d’ya think? How’d I do in the end?

[This is the second-to-last installment of my “Berlin Memoir,” the chronicle of my 2½ years in military intelligence in Cold War Berlin in the 1970s. Part 7 covers some of the trips I took out of Berlin (after my two-part stint at the German military intelligence school in 1972, which I wrote about in Part 6), both for leave and for temporary duty. There are also a couple of operational screw-ups at the end of this section. Once again, I have to suggest that readers who are just being introduced to “Berlin Memoir” go back and read Parts 1 through 6 to catch up not just with the narrative (which to be truthful is fairly haphazard anyway), but the definitions and explanations of terms, concepts, and other references I toss around once they’ve been introduced. (The earlier parts of “Berlin Memoir” were posted on 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, and 6 March 2017.)]

The MAD-Schule I attended in the summer and fall of 1972 wasn’t the only course I had to take while in Berlin. I got designated the Station NBC Officer—that has nothing to do with radio or TV broadcasting; it’s Nuclear-Biological-Chemical, what used to be called CBR—and I had to go down to Oberammergau for a class at the U.S. Army School, Europe. O’gau, as it was known to us GI’s, is a small Alpine town near the Austrian border in Bavaria not far from Munich, and the Army had a school there for various courses. 66th MI, whose HQ was just up in Munich you recall, had several programs there. The course itself was unremarkable—just like any Army course you can imagine—but it lasted two weeks, and we got some time off now and then. Since I didn’t have my car—I took the train there and back—I palled around with a couple of my classmates from other units, and we drove up to Munich one afternoon and poked around. I remember we drove out to the Olympic Village—the one where the 1972 games were held (26 August-11 September) and where the Israeli athletes were kidnapped on 5 September and later murdered, later the subject of Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich.

I don’t remember exactly when I was in O’gau, sometime in ’72, but considering when I was in Bad Ems, it must have been a couple of months or so before the Olympics. I recall that the place was pretty empty—not a big tourist draw. (I had been in Berlin when the kidnapping occurred. I went to bed that night thinking that the athletes had all been saved—remember that the erroneous report was issued before the truth was revealed—but when I woke up the next morning, I found out that they had all been murdered and that the German police had killed all the kidnappers.)

Aside from skiing, O’gau is also famous for its woodcarvers. The most popular souvenirs from O’gau are little figurines carved from wood in the distinctive style of the town and painted (sometimes they’re left unpainted). They’re usually figures of people in various Bavarian dress—and they’re all over town in every size imaginable. (There are also a whole range of religious figurines available, including crèches. Remember that Bavaria, like Austria, is very Catholic.) However, the USARSCHEUR PX, which also carried a line of the O’gau figures, had commissioned a special version of the traditional carvings. It was a “Spook”—a man in a black cloak and a big, black slouch hat, holding a silver-bladed dagger. Think “Spy vs. Spy.” (The band on the hat is “oriental” blue, the primary color of MI Branch.) Well, of course, I had to have one of those! What a hoot. I have it still, on the bookshelf in my study—one of my best souvenirs of Germany and the Army.

(I also bought a “real” O’gau carving. My grandmother had made a trip to Bavaria—I don’t know if she actually went to O’gau, but she probably did—and had given me a little figurine, which I also still have on the other end of that shelf, so I decided to get something slightly less traditional. I shopped around all over town and saw that the artisans also made other kinds of carvings, including reliefs, which were much less common. I got an unpainted high-relief panel of four men around a tavern table, slightly impressionistic in style and about 15”L x 12”H. It hangs over the inside of the door to my study. It’s one of my favorite pieces.)

My trip to Oberammergau wasn’t a vacation, of course, nor was Bad Ems—though I did take advantage of being away from Berlin to do some recreating. O’gau, in the Bavarian Alps, was like Garmisch-Partenkirchen nearby—an Army recreation center for skiing in the winter. There were Special Services hotels in both towns; my family’d even done a ski vacation in Garmisch when I was a kid. I wasn’t in O’gau during ski season, of course, but it’s still a cute little Alpine town, very picturesque, with lots of Stuben and little restaurants where you could sit and nurse a beer or glass of wine and people-watch or nibble on some cheese or a pastry. And Bad Ems, frequented by the Kaiser and the Tsar, among other European dignitaries of the 19th century, was a former Imperial spa. Germans were very devoted to their “cures” and doctors often prescribed spa cures and the patients took this very seriously. In other words, both towns, though small, were substantial in terms of basic amenities because of the visitors they attracted. I mean, they weren’t Muldraugh, Kentucky!

I did get to go on vacations occasionally, too. As hard as it could be to navigate the paper maze that was necessary to get out of Berlin, I did manage a few times. There was that Christmas-New Years trip to my friends in France, for one—the one where I took the Train Militaire to Strasbourg. (I don’t know how I managed to get leave for both holidays—I found out after I got back that SOP was to give personnel one or the other holiday off, but not both. Just got lucky—someone was asleep at the switch.) I spent Christmas 1971 with the Humiliens, our French friends from the days in Koblenz, in Villefranche-de-Lauragais, their little town in the Haute-Garonne near Toulouse, and took the train to Paris for New Years 1972 with their son, Marc, who was my age, for a party by the daughter of his godparents. (I guess that made her his god-sister!) On Christmas morning, I cooked French toast for my hosts—we had to do a little shopping around to find appropriate bread; I was afraid to try regular French bread. This was a great astonishment for the Humiliens on two counts: first, the idea that I would (or, I suppose, could) cook for them was a surprise; second . . . well, French toast isn’t French! They’d never heard of such a thing. (That’s not so strange: the French, like most Continentals, don’t eat a big breakfast—just coffee and a roll. That’s why it’s called a continental breakfast, don’cha know.) Anyway, they were so thrilled, they talked about this event for years to come. (I have photos of that visit, including one of me at the stove with Ninon Humilien, la mère de famille, kibitzing over my shoulder!) I also remember that the Humiliens’ housekeeper, an old family retainer who’d worked for Mme. Humilien’s family for years, was incensed that not only a man, but a stranger would be invading her kitchen! (The housekeeper was pretty old and nearly toothless, and spoke the local langue d’oc patois, so not only I but also Ninon and her family could barely understand her.)

(The trip to Paris wasn’t particularly remarkable, except for one anecdote. Marc and I stayed at a pension near his godparents’ house, and after we had arrived and were having some dinner in the pensionrestaurant, he decided he ought to call his parents. That’s not so strange, of course, but it’s what he said that still tickles me. We were at the table and he said matter-of-factly, “Je dois téléphoner en France.” “I have to call France,” he said—as if Paris were not France, but his hometown was. In his head—this had not been an intentional joke, but a disingenuous utterance which I had to point out to him after he said it—Paris was a strange foreign land. Of course, he wasn’t totally off base on that.)

Strasbourg (where the French military train from Berlin terminated), by the way, is an odd place in its own right. It’s the capital of Alsace, which is a French province that was previously German (called Elsass), and has changed hands so many times it’s impossible to untangle the cultural history of the area. Today, it’s solidly and staunchly French politically. (During WWII, you may know, when Strasbourg was under German occupation, the display of the Tricolor was forbidden. The Strasbourgeois, however, knew a way to get around that. Beds in most European homes were covered not with blankets or bedspreads as we do in the States, but a kind of quilt the Germans call a Steppdecke and the French, a duvet. It was common practice to air these out every morning by hanging them from the balconies and windows of the houses. The Strasbourgeois just made sure their brightly-colored quilts were all hung out to air in the right order: blue-white-red.)

In their cultural identity, however, the Strasbourgeois suffer from MPD. They make and sell pastry that’s as French as anyone’s (German pastry looks terrific, but is tasteless). But they make a wonderful wine that not only tastes German, but is sold in bottles that look like German wine bottles. Even its label is schizophrenic: the name is Gewürztraminer, which sounds German (because it is), but it’s designated vin d’Alsace. When I went into a shop there—I had a layover between trains—all the shopkeepers, many of whom have German names, spoke French. (I understand that they will refuse to speak German with customers—presumably even tourists from Germany.) But on the street and among themselves, they speak German! (In a Beckettian scene, if you order something in French at a counter, the counterman will turn and shout the order to the back in German!)

I must tell you about the Humiliens’ house in Villefranche-de-Lauragais. It’s amazing. It was actually Mme. Humilien’s family home and it’s the third oldest building in the little town—about 3,000 inhabitants. (Villefranche is an old designation for a town that has been declared tax-exempt for services rendered to the king. There are scores of Villefranches in France—though I suspect they all pay taxes these days.) Only the Hôtel de France, a few yards up the Rue de la République (and which serves a renowned cassoulet, the regional specialty), and the mairie are older. The house—what we’d call a townhouse today—was 700 years old in the 1960s. That’s seven centuries—can you dig it? That house was already two centuries old when Columbus sailed for the New World! Much of the house had been redone over the centuries, of course, but there were lots of very old bits here and there: a Louis XII (reigned 1498-1515) banister on the stairs (the stairs were newer, thankfully), Directoire (1795-1799) and Empire (flourished 1800-1815) furniture. (I’m not positive, but I believe the basement was part of the 13th-century foundation.) There was a sedan chair, the age of which I’m not sure though it looked to be 17th- or 18th-century or so, that sat in a nook at the foot of the stairs in the vestibule and which the Humiliens used as a sort of closet/cabinet for their stash of cigarettes and candy and such. None of these objects had been bought as “antiques,” of course; they had been new when Ninon Humilien’s family got them.

The Humiliens were carefully restoring things, all in the styles of their original periods. I don’t know exactly when Mme. Humilien’s family acquired the house—they may have been the original owners—but they had it for at least several generations. On the second-floor stair landing, there was two glass-enclosed étagères displaying family heirlooms. Over the cases hung two portraits from the Napoleonic era—Mme. Humilien’s great (or great-great) -grandmother and -grandfather. Her portrait depicted a cameo broach and his a Légion d’honneur—and those same objects were in the étagère below the paintings. Neat! When we first visited the Humiliens, right after Dr. Humilien retired from the army and they had just moved back, they had barely begun the restorations. In one room, when they stripped off the Victorian-era (early Third Republic in France) wallpaper to refurbish the walls and repaper them, they discovered a small closet that had been papered over. Inside were old family documents from Napoleon’s day. Can you imagine having a family history that you can not only trace back that far—not just the early 19th century, but even earlier—but which is all still around you where you live? Stuff like that just gets me.

I went back to Villefranche in September 1972 to attend Marc’s (first) wedding. Weddings, actually. Most French couples get married twice. This is not just some weird cultural tradition—it’s a national necessity born of the French Revolution. The First Republic (1792-1804) was so anti-clerical, a tradition that remains till this day, that priests were forbidden to perform legal marriages. The only legal marriage in France is a civil ceremony. But most French are still Catholic, so couples get married in a church with all the trappings, then rush off to the mairieor the hôtel de ville (both terms for the town hall) for a civil wedding. (Sometimes they do it in reverse—either way, it’s the same deal.) Anyway, I went back for the “event” (and wore my army dress blues to the ceremonies: boy, were they impressed—though mostly with my big, red American car!).

I also took two trips where I met my parents someplace. They also came to Berlin a couple of times—once on their way to Eastern Europe. My dad was a little concerned, first because of his former status as a diplomat and his name having been published in an East German book, Who’s Who in CIA; and second because of my position in Berlin. It was a little hypersensitive, I guess, but when Dad was at the embassy, a secretary had taken a trip to the East and had written a postcard home joking that she had seen the light in the workers’ paradise and wanted to join the party. She got pulled off a tour bus somewhere! Sometimes paranoia has a basis in reality. You never knew with those guys.

(When it was published in East Germany in 1968, Who’s Who in CIA created quite a stir in the circles of official Washington, especially among foreign service officers. Who’s Who in CIApurported to name everyone who worked for the spy agency—but it ended up naming almost everyone who ever served overseas, even privately. In fact, it left out actual CIA people: Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence in those days, is in there, but the woman who was the embassy spook in Bonn isn’t. If you were anybody, you were in the book. In fact, if you weren’t in the book—you weren’t anybody. There was a rush on copies to see if your name was listed—and my dad is in it. Believe me—or don’t: it’s really too late now, anyway—my dad was not in the CIA. Though until the day his father died, he thought his son was a spy. Because my dad’s employer had been the U.S. Information Agency, and Grandpa Jack was born in Europe where, in most languages, ‘information’ and ‘intelligence’ are the same word—Nachrichten in German, for instance—the information service was the intelligence service. The ‘information’/’intelligence’ overlap was probably part of the reason that the book listed my dad. Not entirely, though: he had served in the CIC during the Occupation of Germany and, in the Soviet Bloc, all diplomats were "spies" at some level or another—they just assumed all of ours were, too.)

The first time I met my parents for vacation was in England. We toured the Lake District and the Cotswolds, and it was fun and interesting, but not worth reliving here. We did stay in an inn in Salisbury or someplace like that which had hosted Charles I (reigned 1625-1649). Like I said, stuff like that gets me. We visited Stonehenge on that same trip—you could still walk among the megaliths then—and I was so flabbergasted because that place was already ancient when the Romans occupied Britain. And no one knew then any more than now what the circle was really for or how it was built. (I had a similar feeling when I was at Jericho—the overpowering sense of being in the presence of ancientness.)

The other trip like that was to Greece. My folks were booked on an Aegean cruise, and we met in Athens a week earlier to tour the mainland. That was the trip for which I used the Air Force hop out of Berlin—Athenai airport is also an airbase—and on the return flight, which included a leg from Ramstein to Berlin, Gail Halvorsen, the Candy Bomber, piloted the plane. We had been chatting in the waiting area, walked out to the plane together, boarded, sat down, and buckled ourselves in. The plane took off, and then Colonel Halvorsen turned to me and said, “Excuse me. I’m going to fly the plane now.” I thought he was joking at first—till he got up and walked into the cockpit. My little brush with actual history.

The tour of Greece was great fun and very interesting—we hit all the main spots like Delphi and Epidauros, and so on—and we had some wonderful Greek food (acquiring a taste for ouzo and taramasalata along the way), but there’s not a lot to retell otherwise. I did see Mycenae, Agamemnon’s city, and stood on the ruin of the Lion Gate and looked out over the Plain of Argos toward the sea—the view the watchman in Aeschylus’ Agamemnonsees when he spots the signal fires from Troy telling the Greeks that the war was over. Two years later, when I was at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I was assigned to do that monologue—and I pictured that view as I had seen it on this trip and imagined it at night with the signal fires appearing in the distance. That was a trip—if you know what I mean.

The thing about this trip at the time—as opposed to later resonances—was that it was in the fall of 1973. After I went back to Berlin, my parents boarded a Greek ship for an island-hopping cruise in the Aegean. The Arab League attacked Israel on 6 October to start the Yom Kippur War and there were reports of attacks on ships in the Mediterranean and Aegean. I was nervous, of course, and then I heard a report of a Greek cruise ship attacked in the Aegean. Now, I knew the name of my parents’ ship, Epirotiki Lines’ MTS Argonaut, but I didn’t know its itinerary or the name of the attacked ship, so I immediately started calling the American Embassy in Athens to find out what ship was attacked and who had been on board. Of course, no one knew anything yet, so I kept calling every day, even several times a day—all U.S. facilities in Europe where there were also military bases were on the same phone system; calling the embassy in Athens was no different from calling Frankfurt or Ramstein—until I finally learned that the ship in the attack was not the one my folks had been on. Of course, my ’rents had no idea I was panicking—and their ship’s route was diverted to avoid the trouble area.

I’ve related some of the incidental things that were part of working intel in Berlin—many of them routine occurrences. The walk-ins and phone-ins, records-checks on acquaintances, surveillances and demo coverage, SAEDA briefings, and so on. I told you we kept a low profile, somewhere between clandestine and overt. But we did have to do some standard spook things—like keep our phone numbers unlisted (both in the Berlin Brigade phonebook and the regular Berlin directory). Of course, we had regular military ID’s, which we used to get on the post and into the ’X, and so on, and we had our MI creds—the “box tops”—for official duty. But we had to have other ID, too—with fake names. Each of us had at least two cover names, one of which was backstopped with some simple ID docs. (We couldn’t get fake military ID’s or passports—except for an operation—but we had things like a fake Army driver’s license and some German papers.) When I arrived at the Station, one of the first things I had to do was submit a list of a few names for potential cover ID’s from which Munich would select two, one of which would be on those low-level docs. The idea was to choose names with the same initials as our own real names—so anything we carried with a monogram like a key ring or a billfold wouldn’t give us away. I made up my list; I don’t remember all the names I submitted, though I do remember wanting dearly to put down Rudyard Kipling—but I didn’t. I can’t remember both names I was assigned—I never used but one and that only once or twice, and never with any papers—but my cover name was Robert Klein. An homage to the comedian—I guess the Army didn’t recognize his name. (I think the other name I had, the one I never used, was the name of a high school classmate who had had the same initials as I did—but I can’t remember his name now.) Anyway, cover ID’s weren’t something you needed for doing background investigations or as a glorified accountant, so most of the time I was in Berlin, I had no need for this. It’s just part of the spook world I inhabited once for a while.

Sometimes, no matter how well trained you are or how carefully you plan, things go haywire. The best-laid plans and all. (And sometimes people are just incompetent.) We had a phrase to describe the little mess-ups and unplanned distractions that occurred with sporadic regularity: The Five-To-Five Friday Flap—because they always seemed to occur at 4:55 on Friday afternoon, just as we were all leaving to go home for the weekend. While I was in Berlin this happened a few times, at least once to major effect on the city and the Forces as you now know. I’ve already recounted the big one; the other two incidents were related to each other because they happened during the same operation—though the incidents themselves weren’t connected.

One of my colleagues was running a CE investigation of an American civilian who was known to be buying popular and rationed items from the PX and selling them on the black market. This was illegal for numerous reasons, not the least was that PX merchandise is sold tax- and duty-free. Reselling them to Germans or others not entitled to shop at the government-subsidized stores was against both U.S. and German law, not to mention Army regs. Illegality, however, wouldn’t have made this case one of interest to Military Intelligence; there had to be some other aspect to it. The black-marketeer under investigation was also suspected of using the same contacts he made for his merchandise enterprise to sell sensitive and classified documents and information to anyone who’d pay for it.

The investigation, in which I had had no part, had proceeded to the point where the agent in charge decided it was time to set up a stationary surveillance of the subject’s apartment in Kreuzberg. The agent had arranged to rent a vacant apartment in a walk-up across the street and a few doors down from the subject’s, and Tech Support set up a whole slew of electronic surveillance equipment: video camera, monitors, VCR’s, microphones—whatever was state of the art in the early 1970s. Then the Ops Officer recruited all available agents to man the surveillance 24/7, each pair of us taking an eight-hour shift. My partner and I had the red-eye shift—midnight to 8 a.m.

Kreuzberg isn’t close to the Dahlem district where our office and residences were located, so we drove to the surveillance location. However, since an American car (especially my candy-apple red Torino) or even a German car with green POV plates would be immediately recognizable and draw attention to our presence in the area, we drove to the HQ compound where we signed out one of the Station’s indigenous GOV’s—German Fords or VW’s—and a set of German license plates (the cars all had dual registrations—one for a POV and one for an indigenous vehicle; the plates were quickly exchangeable depending on our need). We drove the GOV to a spot a few blocks away and around the corner from the apartment and walked to our post. Our POV’s were parked back at the HQ area, of course, and it was common to park in the auxiliary PX lot across Clayallee from the compound. There was insufficient space for POV parking on the compound grounds, and the POV lot was at the far rear of the compound, a distance from our offices at the front of the main HQ building. During the day, leaving our cars in the PX lot was no problem, but in this instance there were complicating circumstances.

As I said, I had the midnight-8 a.m. shift, so I parked my POV at about 11 p.m. or so. The ’X was closed at that hour, of course, and the lot was empty—except now for my big, red Torino. Now, because of the spate of bombings and sabotage attacks by the likes of the RAF, some of which, as I’ve noted, had been fatal, the U.S. Forces had increased their security procedures and vigilance. Cars entering the HQ compound, for instance, were thoroughly inspected, including using a giant mirror on a dolly to inspect the undercarriage. A car left unattended in the PX parking lot well after hours attracted suspicious attention from the MP’s, and they attempted to identify the registered owner and find out why it was sitting there after midnight. As I’ve noted, for security reasons, Berlin Station’s POV’s were all registered in Munich, not in Berlin, so the MP’s weren’t able to identify the car from the local records. There were no computerized records available in the early ’70s, so determining after hours that the car apparently abandoned across from the U.S. HQ in Berlin was registered in Munich and then finding out to whom it was registered was a slow process, and it was taking too long for the MP’s sense of urgency. They decided they had to blow up the car on site rather than take a chance it might be loaded with explosives.

I don’t know how it happened, but the DA at the Station got wind of this impending action. Because the 66th MI offices were right at the front of the building and compound, and the DA’s office was potentially vulnerable if the explosion was a large one—no one knew what was in the car—perhaps he was warned by the MP’s what was about to happen. In any case, the DA knew the car in question was mine and got the MP’s to abort their plans. Of course, due to the security measures in place for the surveillance operation, there was no way the DA could get in touch with me to tell me what had almost happened, so I never learned that I almost lost my car big time until after I returned to the Station after 8 in the morning to sign the GOV and the German plates back in. I was mightily relieved that things had turned out the way they did instead of the way they might have. (The Torino had been a college-graduation present from my parents—and Road and Track declared it their 1970 Car of the Year. I really loved that car.)

That was a close one—but the next slip-up went over the line into disaster. I was still on the red-eye shift at the surveillance, and we’d been at it for a week or so. As I said, I was just a recruit on this gig, so I didn’t know anything about any of the arrangements that had been made—or hadn’t been made. I just reported for duty at midnight and went home at 8 the next morning to get some sleep. One night, after parking the GOV around the corner from the apartment, I had no sooner entered the room when someone out on the sidewalk started shouting and screaming. The previous shift hadn’t even left yet, so there were four agents in the apartment still. (That, actually, turned out to be part of the problem, as we were about to learn.) Now, the tech set-up in the surveillance apartment included video cameras aimed at the subject’s apartment across the street so we could watch on monitors without posing in the window. But this yelling was coming from right below our apartment on the sidewalk out front so we rushed to the window to see what the commotion at such an hour was all about. It was the landlady of the building, screaming and pointing up at the surveillance apartment, gathering a crowd and, pretty quickly, a couple of Berlin cops. We immediately radioed into the Station and got our police liaison officer to come out and help us handle whatever the matter was. Whatever was going on, it was obvious we were in some kind of bind—the attention on our apartment alone was certainly a bad development, aside from whatever else might be happening.

It turned out that the landlady had begun to suspect something nefarious and probably illegal was going on in her apartment. Her clue was that though the apartment had been rented by one young man—the special agent in charge of this operation—she had been watching as a parade of different men kept coming and going at all hours of the day and night. She never saw the guy who had rented the place, but she noticed that there were half a dozen other men, and no women, who entered and left the apartment and no one seemed to be living there. She concluded that there was a brothel operating in the apartment, or maybe a smuggling ring, and she wanted it out of her building. Well, we managed to keep the cops at bay for a while until the liaison officer arrived, and then we pretty much had to let them in.

As soon as they looked inside, they all knew what had been going on: all that high-tech equipment and the lack of any other furniture or other amenities—no fridge, no stove, no food except for thermoses and bags of food brought from home—told these savvy cops that they’d spoiled an intel operation of some kind. (Berlin’s being spy central, the local cops were fairly cognizant of what was happening around them. Besides, as I’ve said before, these guys were pretty competent anyway.) Everyone pretty much laughed—there wasn’t much else we could do. We knew we had gotten caught—the Army expression is very vulgar, but very apt: stepping on our dicks. It hadn’t helped that the SAIC had neglected to inform the police liaison what he was setting up so the cops could be briefed if it became necessary. As I said, I was just a hired hand on this one, so, after the SNAFU, I just went on home after returning the GOV and the local plates. End of operation. (I don’t remember if we ever caught the guy, or even if we even proved he was passing info. He certainly would have discovered he was under surveillance after this public exposure of our little spook operation on his block. As I said, it wasn’t my gig.)

(Berlin Station had had one female agent when I arrived, but she’d left Berlin by this time. Women were only in the process of being integrated into Army operations in the early ’70s and female MI agents were rare—and highly prized. The Women’s Army Corps, the WAC’s, to which most female soldiers were assigned, didn’t disband until 1978, after which women were assigned to the same branches as men. If MI took only the best of the available talent, you can imagine the level of the women in its ranks because the pool was so much smaller to start with. The agent at Berlin Station, an NCO, was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and one of the top agents I ever served with. While she was still at the Station and I was just starting there, she acted as an unofficial mentor to me for the practical aspects of the job, the part you only learn OTJ.)

[In a few weeks, I’ll post the final section of “Berlin Memoir.” In it, I write mostly about the theater group we started at the air base and some of the events, not just the performances, that grew out of that. I hope you’ll come back to read Part 8.]

[Back on 16 March, I posted the first of two parts of “From My August Wilson Archive,” a collection of old reports on Wilson plays I’d seen before I started Rick On Theater. (In fact, I posted Part 1 on the blog’s eighth birthday.) In that post, I made passing mention of a production of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! that I’d recently seen at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage because the production of the Wilson play, Seven Guitars at the Signature Theatre Company, contrasted with the Arena production in one very significant aspect. I said of Awake“that the cast didn’t seem to be living in the play’s world.” I’ve decided to post the Awake and Sing! report, written on13 February 2006, to illuminate that remark.

[The original pre-ROT report contained discussions of several events from around the time I saw Awake and Sing!, and I’ve elected to leave the additional material in this post—all except the evaluation of another Arena production I saw then, the staging of Damn Yankees, which I used in Part 2 of “Faust Clones,” posted on 18 January 2016. I’ve left the other discussions in this post for the curiosity value.].

There have been a couple of things on stage worth noting that I missed, but for the most part, the 2005-06 season in New York City doesn’t seem to have offered much of interest. The Brooklyn Academy of Music didn’t even have enough things I wanted to see to warrant a subscription. (You need four “events” to constitute a subscription; otherwise, you have to buy individual seats, which are often hard to score.)

I’ve had to be in D.C. twice this winter, however, and I did catch a show at Arena each time. Arena used to be a pretty exciting place, presenting new plays that went on to become important additions to American theater (Moonchildren, Indians) or productions that bordered on the experimental (Andrei Serban’s Leonce and Lena—one of his first gigs in the States, Yuri Lyubimov’s CrimeandPunishment). Since Zelda Fichandler left to take over the graduate acting program at NYU in 1984 and after Doug Wager, her successor, was replaced by Molly Smith in 1998, it can still be a pretty good regional company, but its selection of material is often more on the side of audience-pleasers than experience-stretchers. (My mother, a long-time subscriber to Arena, has complained about Smith’s choices since she took over and has threatened to drop her subscription altogether. Mother has cut back and no longer subscribes to the company’s entire season—there’s a four-play subscription available, instead of the whole six-play bill.) So, along with several movies during the holidays (Syriana, Pride & Prejudice, and Munich), we went to the Arena on New Year’s Eve to see Damn Yankees. (As noted, see Part 2 of my article “Faust Clones,” 18 January 2016.)

(By the way, I don’t normally do film commentary on ROT, but I’ll say now that I found Syriana, despite all its good reviews and Oscar buzz, to be confusing, disjointed, and unintelligible. Maybe a reel was missing. Munichwas pretty good as a film—as opposed to history—if a little simplistic. The scene in Brooklyn, near the end of the movie, that put the World Trade Center in the background across New York Harbor, was a tad obvious. Though I do wonder how that was filmed—computer-generated imagery, I guess.)

I did a few other things of interest in D.C. over the holidays. I finally got to the new National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall and we went to a somewhat related exhibit at the Renwick Gallery (part of the Smithsonian devoted to American art and crafts) of the Indian portraits of George Catlin (1796-1872). The Corcoran (which used to be housed in what is now the Renwick—William Wilson Corcoran built the building originally to display his art collection) had a retrospective of the D.C. artist Sam Gilliam who is a friend of my mother’s and several of whose works we own (I have one; my mother has three). My mother had been to the openingSam Gilliam: A Retrospective on 15 October 2005, but I hadn’t seen the show yet. (We also paid a visit to G Fine Art, the new gallery Gilliam’s wife, Annie Gawlak, has just opened on 14th Street in the Logan Circle neighborhood, a newly-gentrifying section of the city—but she happened to be out that day.) Oddly, Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective didn’t include any works that resembled any of ours. (The one I have is a mate to one my mother has, but her other two are vastly different from each other and from the third piece. Gilliam is very prolific and innovative. He experiments with lots of media and varies his application as the medium demonstrates its properties. [I have a later post that discusses Gilliam’s art in more detail: “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011.]) I maintain that a show can’t really be a true retrospective if it omits several examples of the artist’s stylistic experiments. (There were other kinds of works I know Gilliam did that weren’t represented as well.) Still, it was a very interesting show, with lots of works that I didn’t know about.

The NMAI, which I’ve mentioned before (I saw an exhibit, The First American Art, in May 2004 in New York City at what is now a satellite museum of the one on the Mall but was the original—and originally private—Museum of the American Indian before the Smithsonian took it over and then built its new facility), is a fascinating but difficult place. As many of the critiques have suggested, the building and its surroundings are perhaps the most interesting part of the museum, but the exhibits are oddly organized and laid out. I understand from reports I’ve read that there are continuing disagreements about how to display and even select what is exhibited about native cultures—different tribes and different representatives have dichotomous agendas—but the result is that there are a lot of things displayed and lots of text that make following a strain very hard in any kind of limited time. It’s obviously the kind place that demands several visits to get even a handle on the material. On the other hand, if you just wander through the place, looking at the items not so much as artifacts with explanations but as art, taking in the aesthetics of whatever catches your eye, there are lots of things that are truly beautiful.

Of course, you understand that Indian art, especially the art of the Pacific Northwest, has always appealed to me tremendously, so I’m prejudiced going in. But when I go to a museum, I like to read the panels and try to put the exhibits into a context—even if it’s not a PC one—and that’s hard at NMAI because there are so many individual items and so much text, and the texts are often multi-topical. (The major exhibits are separated into themes, but to me they are hard to distinguish and isolate which makes finding a through-line difficult and, ultimately for me, unsuccessful. What, for instance, distinguishes “Our Universes: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World” from “Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories” from “Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities”—the three permanent exhibits when I was there? Not only do they seem to overlap a great deal, but each section of the exhibit, devoted to one tribe or people, interpreted the theme differently from the others. If you ignored the exhibit title/theme, and just looked at each display separately and learned what was interesting about that part of one tribe’s world, it was really interesting, though.) This doesn’t mean, however, that the museum isn’t a really interesting addition to the Smithsonian complex and well worth spending time in. I think it’s worth acknowledging that the American natives want a chance to tell their own story instead of turning it over to a bunch of Anglo anthropologists to do it for them. [My brief report on The First American Art predates ROT, but I’ve posted one other pertaining to NMAI: “Fritz Scholder” (30 March 2011), which covers an exhibit that spanned both the New York branch and the now-main museum in Washington.]

GeorgeCatlin’s Indian Gallery at the Renwick, opened on 24 November 2005 for permanent display, is the bulk of his original collection of Indian portraits and western scenes from the early 19th century. Determined to record the “manners and customs” of Native Americans, Catlin, a lawyer-turned-painter, traveled thousands of miles from 1830 to 1836 following the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I don’t believe he had any formal art training, and his paintings are all a little on the “naïve” side—although some of that impression may be due to the style of the period, which wasn’t long on perspective or proportion, as I recall. Catlin was convinced that westward expansion spelled certain disaster for native peoples, so he viewed his Indian Gallery, as he called his portraits, as a way “to rescue from oblivion their primitive looks and customs.” He visited 50 tribes living west of the Mississippi River from present-day North Dakota to Oklahoma.

Caitlin displayed his Gallery as what we’d call an “anthropological” exhibit today or as a kind of educational entertainment (P. T. Barnum was a promoter at one time), and he hoped that the federal government would buy the portraits as a collection and preserve them for posterity. After Catlin went into debt (he was actually imprisoned), he sold the collection to a businessman who donated the Gallery to the Smithsonian after the artist died. The Renwick exhibition included Native American artifacts collected by the artist that have not been shown with the paintings in more than a century. I guess it’s no surprise that the pictures are better as artifacts than as art, and there are hundreds of paintings arrayed along all four walls of one gallery at the Renwick, four rows on each wall, reaching all the way up to the ceiling, so it was hard really to look at each frame as a painting anyway. It was more like examining a “rogues’ gallery”—it got enervating after a short while. Let’s just put it this way: I was glad to have seen the exhibit, but I don’t feel the need to see it again. The NMAI is a different story—I would like to go back when I can take more time in each section, maybe doing one section on one day, and then returning some other time for another part of the exhibit. [I have, in fact, been back to the Heye Collection, as the New York City branch of NMAI is called, numerous times since 2004.]

Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing!, directed in the Kreeger (the proscenium theater) by Zelda Fichandler in her first return visit in many years, was another play I’d never seen, though I’d read it. It presents a couple of basic acting problems which Fichandler didn’t get her cast to overcome entirely. First is the time-and-place milieu—the Bronx of the Depression ’30s—and the second, intricately tied to that, is the immigrant-and-first-generation Jewishness of the play’s atmosphere and characters. I’d have thought that Fichandler would be the director to get these underlying dynamics into her company, since she lived in that world herself as she notes in her essay in the program. We saw the show on 1 February [2006], and maybe the cast hadn’t had enough time to really absorb the whole milieu since the production opened on 20 January, but they all seemed to be playing at it rather than init. It wasn’t really part of what the characters were living—it was like a costume they had put on, as opposed to clothes they wore every day. Old hand Robert Prosky, also making a return visit to Arena to play family patriarch Jacob, came closest—but he was more like an old-world East European than an old-world East European Jew. (His socialism was more convincing than his Jewishness. I don’t know if Prosky’s Jewish—I recall that he’s not—but if he is, he’s like me: a secularized, totally assimilated Jew. I was once fired from an acting job because I wasn’t Jewish enough! Oy.) [Both Fichandler and Prosky have died since I wrote this report: Fichandler in 2016 at 91 and Prosky in 2008, just shy of 78.]

My response to the play as a whole was that it was nice to get to see it on stage, but that the theatrical experience was less satisfying than the socio-historical one. I got to see an Odets/Group Theatre classic from 1935, but I didn’t get to see a vibrant evocation of a particular 1935 Bronx world that has disappeared. It’s the difference between going to the Thorne Rooms at the Chicago Art Institute or the Period Rooms at the Met and traveling back in time. It wasn’t that the actors weren’t trying, or even that they didn’t understand—at least I don’t think so. These were all good actors, even excellent ones. They just didn’t get it. It wasn’t inside them, somehow—and it needed to be. That’s what actors do in period plays. The cast has to find what Uta Hagen called a “substitution,” which is a pretty standard acting technique for most Stanislavsky-based training. Of course, it isn’t the “era” itself that the actor absorbs, but the adjustments people make, the individual choices they make, for which each actor must find personal and contemporary substitutes, that come together to give the audience the impression the cast has “recreated” a milieu. But you have to understand the period and place in order to find those adjustments. I think the cast of Awake and Sing! did the first—they understood the time and place—but they hadn’t found the individual adjustments that made the behavior real. That’s my take anyway.

I was reminded of a scene I remember an acting-school classmate doing in one scene study class. I don’t remember the play, but it was a contemporary piece back in the mid-’70s, and the character the actor was working on was a college student in the late ‘60s. One of his concerns was the impending draft—the Vietnam war. Now, I was older than most of these guys, and I’d gone through that era. I knew that for us, the draft was a Damoclean sword, hanging over us all every day. Especially for us guys, it was ever-present and colored every thought, every move, every decision. This actor, barely into his 20’s, didn’t get that. In his head, he understood, but not in his gut. That’s what was missing in Awake and Sing!. It wasn’t a bad production, or off center or misdirected. It was just a little more Epcot Center than Old Europe. As some publicist used to say in another context: It wasn’t real, but an incredible simulation.

Before I left New York City the second time, however, I did see the latest work of a young director, Erin Woodward, I’ve been watching. She’s the daughter of my college friend Kirk (who’s contributed hugely to ROT) and I’ve said I always make it a practice to see shows by people I know. I also think Erin’s shaping up to be an interesting director, so I want to watch her progress. In this case, Secondary Education was the first production of a new company Erin assembled back in October 2005, DramaticAmbush. She said back then that “DA will focus on cultural and social questions in our communities” and she developed the troupe’s first piece with New York City public high school kids—as the title suggests. It was an assemblage of short scenes all evoking moments out of their school lives—some funny, some Kafkaesque—including a biographical monologue each cast member delivered. (The actors all played multiple characters in the various scenes, even crossing genders, but the monologues—called “Confessionals” and using the actors real names in the titles in the program—were apparently based on their actual experiences, each one focusing on a specific impact the episode engendered.)

Secondary Educationhas obviously been developed by improvisation and ensemble play, but it is rehearsed and choreographed in performance. The performance, though, maintained a sense of improvisation. I was especially taken with the ensemble physical work in several largely-wordless scenes, especially “Overcrowded” (about . . . well, just what the title says it’s about) which looked like a mélée, with each actor doing whatever came to his or her mind, but was actually carefully choreographed or it would have been total chaos. It had to be choreographed or the actors wouldn’t have been able to do the intricate work with each other so smoothly otherwise, though it still looked like “accidents” and unplanned contacts were going on. (Individually, an actor who did a bit with a shoulder bag that seemed to have a mind of its own, Missaelle Morales, accomplished an inspired physical comedy gag—in the vaudeville tradition.)

As a début effort, Secondary Educationwas a wonderful theater experience. It had a roughness (à la Peter Brook) that was genuine and exciting—as if it was all happening right in front of us. I assume the company didn’t know each other from before, so the creation of such a cast that worked together so well and seemed to feed off one another was a great coup. I liked that none of the characters were “types,” that this wasn’t just the “Sweat Hogs Live On Stage.” Neither was the perspective on the world of high school clichéd even though some common encounters were portrayed. Perhaps some of the actors could have differentiated some of the characters they play a little more—but not if that means they become “stagy.”

Berlin Memoir, Part 2

'Falsettos'

'How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth'

Stage Rat & Doll Baby

Berlin Memoir, Part 3

Nominalization!

Stage Managers

Mac Wellman

Berlin Memoir, Part 4

Horsman Dolls

Berlin Memoir, Part 5

'Jitney'

Evaluating A Director

'Everybody'

Berlin Memoir, Part 6

From My August Wilson Archive, Part 1

From My August Wilson Archive, Part 2

'Wakey, Wakey'

Berlin Memoir, Part 7

'Awake and Sing!,' et al.