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Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . . .
Mary S. Ryzuk. The Circle Repertory Company: The First Fifteen Years (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1989). 313pp.
12th Edition.
In last week’s column I covered The Transcendent Years, Marshall W. Mason’s monumental survey of the Circle Repertory Company (CRC) during the years he was most closely associated with it. This week I turn to an earlier, more objective overview of the CRC by the late Mary S. Ryzuk (1932-2017), The Circle Repertory Company: The First Fifteen Years, which originated as her PhD dissertation at CUNY in 1986.
There’s yet a third historical survey of the CRC’s accomplishments available, A Comfortable House: Lanford Wilson, Marshall W. Mason and the Circle Repertory Theatre, which takes us through 1993, three years before the company folded. I believe, however, that I, as well as you, will have imbibed as much about the CRC as we need for now, so upcoming reports will settle on other matters. One day, someone may put the CRC’s entire history together, from 1969-1996, but for now these three books can be assumed to have done the job.
Unlike Mason’s tome, which lacks photos, documentation, appendices, and even an index, Ryzuk, thankfully, supplies all such necessary addenda to her admirable study, which she wraps up shortly before Mason abandoned his artistic directorship of the CRC. He handed the task over to cofounder Tanya Berezin, the same year that another cofounder, Rob Thirkield, Berezin’s deep-pocketed former spouse, whose money sustained the CRC for years, killed himself. Ryzuk devotes much attention to Thirkield’s disappointing final seasons with the CRC.
There would be important contributions to the American stage by CRC in the years after 1984; Mason himself (in the manner of his later book) offers a detailed “Afterword” to fill in what he accomplished from 1984-1986. By then, however, the CRC’s days were numbered, as Ryzuk makes clear, even though the company still had another decade to go.
Much of what Ryzuk writes about—like her recounting of Off-Off-Broadway’s evolution in the 1960s (Caffe Cino, La Mama, etc.), the CRC’s founding in a loft on Broadway and West 83rd Street, and her bios of the four founders (Mason, Lanford Wilson, Thirkield, and Berezin)—is also contained in Mason’s book; but her research includes a great deal Mason doesn’t cover, or not in the same way. His writing—even when well-researched and self-negating—assumes the hue of personal recollections, while hers are an outsider’s observations, albeit with considerable input from both written material and interviews. Throughout, she cites these interviews via lengthy extracts.
Mason’s major contributions are his show-by-show descriptions, allowing us to experience both the best and worst of the CRC’s abundant programming, from mainstage productions to workshops and the various low-budget programs built into each season for new play development. Ryzuk generally gives only a limited idea of what was shown on stage, providing a brief idea of content while letting us know what succeeded or failed, and focusing on the overall principles that sustained the company. She explains the internal and external pressures it experienced and analyzes its financial problems as a non-profit Off-Off Broadway theater increasingly dependent on grants. Naturally, a lack of sufficient funding would become the biggest danger not only to the theater’s artistic integrity but to its very existence.
Ryzuk often compares the CRC with the other leading New York nonprofits (not to mention regional companies like Chicago’s Steppenwolf), among them Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, and the Public Theater. She emphasizes CRC’s uniqueness as an institution that not only produced important new American plays but also was an acting company devoted to the development of ensemble performance, including repertory seasons, something of which no other similar company could boast. In fact, one theme of Ryzuk’s work is the conflict within the company about which goals it was serving, although each, of course, fed the other.
A great many words are spilled in the service of discussing the troupe’s reputation for “lyric realism,” a style most closely associated with the plays of Lanford Wilson, on whose success the CRC most often depended. Ryzuk’s treatment of such matters is one of her book’s greatest strengths. On the other hand, she doesn’t delve as deeply into the company’s training programs as does Mason, who was himself a master teacher of both acting and directing.
But the difficulties of sustaining a company of actors devoted to the same ideals, year in and year out, were constantly being manifested as some actors, like William Hurt and Christopher Reeve, went on to fame while others, no matter their talent, made little reputational progress; this eventually created an unspoken sense of inequity when it came to casting, sometimes evoking internal dissatisfaction.
Ryzuk’s description of these problems and many similar ones related to survival in the competitive rat race, balancing commercial success with not-for-profit ideals, makes her work just as valuable now as when it first was published. In other words, even beyond its description of the internal dynamics of the CRC as it pursued its season-by-season goals, the book offers invaluable discussions of the internal problems faced by most nonprofit theater companies in the American theater. Generally, these revolved around the difficulties of remaining true to established ideals while needing to bow to commercial pressures in order to survive.
There are many things to appreciate here, like Ryzuk’s explanation of the CRC’s humanistic but essentially apolitical play choices, in opposition to the Group Theatre of the 1930s, its chief inspiration; the place of the classics in the company’s repertoire; the CRC’s relationship with Broadway; Wilson’s emergence as one of the best, most prolific dramatists of his generation; the CRC’s connection to writers outside its company whose work it sometimes presented, like Sam Shepard and David Mamet; the company’s Midwestern inclinations; and the countless theatrical adventures, artists, and behind-the-scenes forces that went into crafting the great American theater company known as the Circle Repertory Company.
Up next: SITI Company: THIS IS NOT A HANDBOOK
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