Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Reviews by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Cindy Rosenthal. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. 198pp.
35th Edition.
It’s been 13 years since 2011, when Ellen Stewart, long the doyenne of the Lower East Side’s Off-Off-Broadway theater, passed away at 91. There are several histories of OOB, in which she—lovingly dubbed La MaMa —and her still-flourishing theater, formally known as Café LaMama E.T.C. (for Experimental Theatre Club), are discussed in depth. Stewart founded La MaMa in 1962, its earliest documented production being Tennessee Williams’ One Arm.
Apart from those studies, which also cover (among others) La MaMa’s three most prominent competitors—Caffe Cino, Theatre Genesis, and Judson Poets Theatre—only one book I know of has focused on its remarkable history, at least through the mid-2010s. That is Cindy Rosenthal’s Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of LaMama Experimental Theatre, a modest-sized, beautifully illustrated, well-indexed, coffee-table tome whose decade-by-decade chronological narrative is structured around the over 100 previously unpublished posters, many of eye-catching visual power, that advertised important shows done under La MaMa’s auspices, some in foreign countries. (The book also includes at least one excellent shot of Stewart, an attractive woman with a distinctive sense of style, in each chapter.)
Satellite La MaMa companies sprang up everywhere, from Bogota to Tel Aviv. Over the years, Stewart acquired property in Italy at Umbria and Spoleto to present shows and carry on workshops and the like.
A paean to Stewart, whose private life—including the unreported fact that she was married once and had a son—is barely mentioned (she told Rosenthal she didn’t want a biography), the book examines the unexpected producing/directing career of this sui generis black woman from Chicago who made her initial mark in New York as a ladies’ sportswear designer at Saks Fifth Avenue. In 1961, she rented a basement on East Ninth Street as a boutique to sell her creations, eventually turning it into a place for introducing new plays at night, when asked to do so by wannabe playwrights Fred Lights and Paul Foster; only the latter actually became a writer.
Rosenthal goes over the familiar story of Stewart’s early struggles, including the two Second Avenue loft spaces to which she transferred, in turn, after being forced by zoning laws and fire department harassment to vacate. Only the trick of turning her theater into a private club allowed it to survive within the web of regulations until it was able to sell tickets.
Finally, in 1967, Stewart purchased a 19th-century building at 74A East Fourth Street, between Second Avenue and the Bowery (which, at that crossing, is not Third Avenue, as Rosenthal calls it). Later, in 1974, she purchased the Annex, a much larger building down the block, which would be renamed the Ellen Stewart Theatre in the new millennium. At least four theater spaces, two in each building, could be operating simultaneously with this arrangement.
As background for understanding the purpose and importance of show posters, Rosenthal offers a lesson in the history of printing processes, and the modern, but ever-changing methods on which La MaMa depended. The arrival of internet advertising took some of the punch out of cardboard or paper posters, although certainly not eliminating them. She notes the importance posters had for Stewart as a means of luring audiences, especially during La MaMa’s early days, when lack of money and time, not to mention the lack of technical means, called on every ounce of improvisatory cleverness in conjuring up seductive images.
Rosenthal occasionally provides explanations from theater or dance creators, such as Meredith Monk, and poster designers themselves, like Mary Frank, on how their posters came to be. Stewart’s hands-off approach to the process inspired a wide spectrum of unusual posters, none fitting a particular house style.
Rosenthal held dozens of interviews with leading La MaMa theater artists, whom she quotes liberally, as she does Stewart, giving firsthand accounts of many productions over the more than fifty years covered. We meet not only numerous representative artists, but Ozzie Rodriguez, the longtime curator of La MaMa’s impressively large, well-maintained archives, himself a theater artist, and Mia Yoo, another theater artist, who succeeded Stewart as artistic director in 2009 when her health began to suffer.
Ellen Stewart Presents is not a comprehensive study of either Stewart or her theater—it could be considered La MaMa history light—but that is not its purpose. Until such time as someone undertakes what will surely be a doorstopper volume, Rosenthal’s selective survey of people, plays, and posters should serve very well as an introduction to an astonishing woman and the immensely significant institution she founded and nurtured, an institution unlike any other, not only in America but in the world.
Stewart, herself with no theatrical background, established a place where artists of every nationality could work, where the leading avant-garde companies from around the world could find a home, where experimentation in form, scenery, music, acting, and writing was welcomed, and where Stewart, for the most part, allowed artists the freedom to do their thing without undue interference. Stewart, who rarely read the scripts she produced, said, “You let yourself become one of them and you use whatever skills you have to enhance what they have, what they do. This is my philosophy.”
She often boasted of how she chose the artists she supported. These were people—within the family/community atmosphere she fostered—she called her “babies,” she chose not through auditions or reading their work, but by the impression they made on her. And, in most cases, they responded with gratitude, affection, respect, and quality output, counting their work at La Mama as among their most valuable professional experiences.
Stewart received many grants and honors (including a MacArthur “genius” award, whose generous cash prize was plowed into her work). I myself was privileged to present her, in 2004, with the Brooklyn College Theater Department’s Alfred Drake Award, for contributions to the American theater. Known for her introducing countless shows by ringing a little dinner bell and giving a set welcoming speech, she was long better known as a nurturing presence than a theatrical artist; that perspective, though, would change over time.
In 1975, Stewart began directing, over time achieving artistic recognition for, among others, SEVEN, a program of seven lavishly produced Greek tragedies (three having been realized many years before by her directing protégé, Andrei Serban). They were born under the auspices of La MaMa’s own Great Jones Repertory Company, for which Stewart eventually replaced Serban as artistic director.
The gallery of innovative writers, designers, musicians, actors, directors, choreographers, and companies who have worked at La Mama represents the crème de la crème of late 20th and early 21st-century artistic leaders. There are far too many to list. If a progressive artist of world renown, let’s say Tadeusz Kantor, Ping Chong, Peter Brook, or Richard Schechner, or a company, like Mabou Mines, Split Britches, or the Belarus Free Théâtre, was active sometime after 1960, they were likely to have been seen at La Mama. And if you were an ethnically underrepresented entity, be it Native American, Ukrainian, or Yoruba, you were likely to find a home under Ellen Stewarts’ roof.
As multidisciplinary artist Theodora Skipitares declares: “If you think of the amazingly high-end directors that go places to create stuff, you’ll never find somebody who has done what Ellen Stewart has done. She can find access, go into any kind of community, and make it work. No one has done what she’s done.”
A few corrections: Joel Zwick should not be called Joe Zwick; Marilyn Monroe had perfect, gapless teeth; Japanese avant-garde theater of the 1960s onward was angura, not angora; the same photo is repeated on pages 54 and 78; and Walter Kaufman is spelled both that way and as Kaufmann on the same page.
Coming up: Andrew Norlen, When the Lights Are Bright Again.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
