Theatre of the Living Arts - The Remix

A re-edited, reduced and remixed account of the entire history of the Theatre of the Living Arts – the first major professional theater company in Philadelphia's modern era.

Photo of the company of The Line of Least Existence was taken by Bill Watkins.

Links to blog posts on our podcast's webpage, with other images and information about our sources, can be found here, here and here.

Transcript

© Peter Schmitz, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Hello and welcome to Adventures in Theater History, where we bring you the best stories about the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m your host Peter Schmitz, and our original theme music is my Christopher Mark Colucci.

Today we begin our journey detailing the modern history of Philadelphia theater, and to start off the whole of Season Four, we bring you a reprise of a series of shows that Chris and I created back in the summer of 2023 for the end of Season Two about the little-known but essential story of the Theatre of Living Arts. 

But I have recut, remixed and shortened them considerably from their original form, paring them down to the essential narrative. So it’s a long episode, but much shorter than it originally was! And this time stick around for the all new ending! Because in this version I am adding my recorded reading of a chapter from my book, Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia - which is releasing at the end of November 2024 - about the final days of the TLA. All right, so here we go! But join us now as we go back to the year 1963,  when everybody knew about South Street. 

Even as early as the 1920s, the many bars, cabarets, nightclubs, and theaters along South Street had been known as a place where different races could meet and mix as they sought entertainment. As musicians of the time would say, it was a ‘hip’ neighborhood. In 1963 "South Street", a song by a black West Philadelphia doo-wop group named The Orlons, became a hit - and even reached the third spot on the Billboard Top Ten. By the way, this is the song that first used the term 'hippie' - a term that  would expand in meaning until it became one of the most consequential words of the decade.

And although the Black population of the city core was growing, and the entire metropolitan area was increasing, since the year 1950 the overall population of the City of Philadelphia itself had begun to flatten, and slowly decrease. Eventually it would fall by almost 25%. Few people actually lived in “Center City'', the principal business district, the old central core (we don’t call it ‘downtown’ in Philly, we call it Center City). 

Particularly hard hit in the mid-century economic decline was the South Street area - the city blocks along the bottom of Philadelphia’s original city grid, stretching from the Delaware riverfront on the east, to the Schuylkill River to the West. But the entire length of South Street had a particular problem.

Growing dominance of automobiles and the spreading network of highways made large cities like Philadelphia eager to sacrifice such decaying portions of their urban fabric and offer them up to the dictates of Progress. Indeed, as the writer Adam Gopnik notes, in a recent piece I was just reading in The New Yorker magazine, since the very beginning of the century Philadelphia had extravagantly torn down neighborhoods to build parkways and boulevards and expressways, all to serve the needs of the automobile.

Following the advice of the city Planner Edmund Bacon, Mayor Dilworth allowed the construction of the Schuylkill Expressway right through West Fairmount Park, and Highway 95 was soon being built to the east. To join those two behemoth roads, two enormous parallel expressways had been announced that would bring auto and truck traffic from one side to the other. One would be called the Vine Street Expressway, on the northern edge of the old Tenderloin and Chinatown neighborhoods, requiring the demolition of all the buildings and houses in its path. Its counterpart, the proposed Crosstown Expressway, would obliterate South Street and all the blocks around it.

Real estate values plummeted. Many of South Street’s long-time neighborhood residents, faced with imminent destruction, just left the South Street area, selling their houses at a considerable loss. But others stayed and fought long and hard against the proposed project. As the dispute continued year after year, rents and real estate prices in the South Street area stayed low. This was hard on people who couldn’t get their money out of their buildings and had nowhere to go, but it did have the effect of making it an attractive haven for - well, bohemians, writers, and artists - people who were willing to live on less money if they could do their thing, follow their dreams, make their art. And because of them there were even the first green shoots of a new local theater scene, too. Deen and Jay Kogen, had started the mostly amateur group, the Society Hill Playhouse, in tiny old Garrick Hall on 8th Street- and the area welcomed them. In an era when other Philadelphia neighborhoods were experiencing these rising social and racial tensions, here they found a relaxed and inviting mixture of cultures. After all, it was where all the hippies meet.

And that was why four Philadelphians thought that this part of town would be the perfect place for a professional resident theater company.

These four Philadelphians were two married couples: Frederick and Jean Goldman, and Louis and Celia Silverman. Now when I say, Philadelphians - I mean that in the wider sense of the word, because they and their families did not live within the city limits, they lived in the city's gracious northern suburbs. The Silvermans lived in Wyncote and the Goldmans lived in Elkins Park. Neither were not from big money, not by any means, Fred Goldman ran a small advertising firm and Louis Silverman was a real estate investor. Their wives, Jean and Celia, had met ten years previously while acting in shows at the Cheltenham Playhouse, the local community theater, and they had quickly bonded over their mutual love of theater and because of their common former lives as serious students of acting. Celia (originally from Pittsburgh) had studied at the Hedgerow Theatre School with Jasper Deeter and Rose Schulman, and Jean (originally from Illinois) had spent time in New York in her younger days studying with Stella Adler and Herbert Berghof. They both were “Housewives and mothers” in the parlance of that time, but they longed to do consequential work for their community in their area of expertise. Of course, why wouldn’t they? In 1961 the two women produced Sartre’s No Exit at the Hedgerow Theatre. They followed the next season with Brecht’s The Private Life of the Master Race. Both shows were a success, and Golman and Silverman found they were really good at this. They liked it - but why stay at the amateur and semi-professional level, they thought. Why not take the next step and start a resident professional theater company in Philadelphia?

And in that era of American theater history, it really was women who were doing a LOT of the most consequential work getting new theaters started - outside of New York, at least, in what was then termed “the regions”. Nina Vance at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Margo Jones at Dallas Theatre Center, Mary Widrig John at the Milwaukee Rep they were early leaders in the field.  . . and closer by to Philly, there was the example Zelda Fichandler at Arena Stage in Washington DC - who along with her husband Tom had started a theater company in an abandoned movie theater back in 1950, and now in the early 60s, she was now one of the great shining examples of a serious theater artist and producer, directing plays by the giants of world literature, organizing her own company.  Zelda and all of these women had spent endless hours raising money, transforming older buildings into new and innovative thrust and in-the-round spaces, they were creating a stable base of subscribers. It was a heady time.

And because of changes to the US tax code, it no longer required wealthy benefactors to bankroll these ambitions. Now you could incorporate under rule 501(c)3, as a non-profit corporation. You could collect tax-deductible donations from donors small and large, and you didn’t have to turn a profit each year, you just had to break even and slowly (hopefully) expand. By 1961 the Ford Foundation had also helped to start TCG, the Theater Communications Group, to coordinate amongst all these new regional companies. At that point there were 23 “regional” theaters in the United States.

So, thought the Goldmans and the Silvermans, why not Philadelphia? The time was ripe. And instead of starting a theater company out in the suburbs, as happened in some cities, they wanted to do something central, right in the heart of town. Because after all, this, they knew, was where all the deep history of theater in Philly was. There was a lot of interest in the late 18th Century, because Philadelphia - rightly or wrongly, was clearing away a lot of 19th century buildings to better reveal the bones of the Federal period. A festival in 1960 had even organized a tour of all the places in the city where vibrant theater had once taken place - and maybe could take place again.

To their credit, the two women’s husbands - Louis and Frererick - were completely on board and supportive of the idea, and though they didn’t have a lot of money, they had some. Louis Silverman with his real estate expertise, quickly located an abandoned old movie theater - the Model Theatre, it was called - at 334 South Street. Sure there was no stage in it, and there were holes in the roof and toadstools growing out of its moldy carpets. But there was a high roof, some salvageable film projectors in the balcony, and there was room to build offices and backstage facilities. In December 1963 the deal was made for a down payment of $5000 - the Goldmans and the Silvermans used their own money, along with small contributions from their friends, the musician Anthony Checcia and the accountant Howard Berkowitz. Later they also bought a small storefront next door for future additional lobby space, as well as an adjoining warehouse to the rear for more backstage facilities. Local architect Frank Weiss volunteered his services in creating a 430-seat auditorium with a thrust stage. Now eventually, when all the remodeling was done, eventually they had all invested almost $60,000. The Goldmans put a mortgage on their own house to raise the needed funds. But they had it - they had a space.

And now came the even more challenging part - building public support, and finding the staff and the artists. And most of all, they had to convince Philadelphians to come down to dowdy old East South Street, where there was no parking and no stops for trains or subways. It was a long way from the established theater district. There was plenty of skepticism. “We were told it couldn’t be done,” recalled Celia Silverman, “that Philadelphia was a tryout town which wouldn’t support a permanent theatrical company. But we went ahead.” They even had a new name for the place - it would be an institution where deadwood and detritus of the past would be cleared out, and where in the old rich ground of historic Philadelphia, a brand new theater, for dance, music and cinema could all flourish and grow. They would call it “The Theatre of the Living Arts.

To run the theater, by March of 1964 the foursome had founded a new non-profit arts umbrella organization called the “Philadelphia Council for Performing Arts.” A board of Trustees was assembled for it. They staged a “community dialogue” at a hotel in Center City, which brought a lot of publicity - not to solicit funds but to gather ideas and create buzz and excitement.  Four hundred of the leading cultural and business folk of the city turned up. It was all coming together, amazingly. “The response was so enthusiastic,” said Joan Goldman later, “that we felt like Balboa when he first gazed upon Darien. Still we had to go out and sell.”

And sell they did. They followed up on that big meeting with hundreds of daily smaller meetings, coffee parties, organizational conferences, and cocktail parties. They spoke on TV and radio  - they went to New York to gather the rights for the plays and the playwrights that they wanted to produce: Brecht, Moliere, Eugene O’Neill.

The next step was that they needed artistic leadership, some great theater director - someone who would be the public face of the organization, who was charming and sociable and could help with fundraising and long-term planning. And quickly, there was an answer to that question, too: a Harvard graduate in his early thirties - who had, significantly, a deep education and experience in modern theater. He had worked at the Berliner Ensemble in Germany itself, and member of the Actors Studio in New York, and he was just coming from a stint helping to start the first year of Seattle Rep. Even though he had no particular ties to Philadelphia, Andre Gregory seemed like a great match for the Theatre of the Living Arts. His resume was sparking, and so was his smile.

Really he was, by all measures, quite a find. Dapper, sociable, brilliant, compassionate - Andre Gregory was, and is, amazingly handsome and eloquent and photogenic. Just watch him in the famous movie My Dinner with Andre, and you can see what I mean. In a newspaper photo of the public announcement of his appointment at the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia on May 10, 1964, we can see Gregory at the podium, smiling that great smile of his. 

He soon moved his family to Philadelphia, and took the reins at the Theater of the Living Arts. On the whole he approved of the choice of repertoire that had already been decided on, but he did suggest that maybe while Galileo and The Misanthrope and Tiger at the Gate were great, fine, maybe they should round the season off with Becketts’ Endgame - which was agreed to by all, and now the assembling of the acting company - and the audience - could begin.

Throughout that summer of 1964 and into the fall, there was much work to be done on selling subscriptions and fundraising. There were no blockbuster donors for the theater - nobody parachuting in with half a million dollars. But there was pleasing variety to their sources - the Pew family of the Sun Oil fortune gave 500 dollars, but so did Sam Auspitz, owner of the nearby delicatessen at Fourth and Bainbridge. Mostly there were endless letters to be typed up by volunteers to get these donations, asking for their support - one by one, amazingly, in that age before mail merge programs or email blasts existed. And they were all sent off in envelope after envelope. The congregation lists of synagogues, the mailing list of the Devon Horse Show, the members of the Philadelphia Art Museum, all got letters. Fundraising parties were held at which Anthony Checchia would bring along young musicians from the Curtis School of Music to perform for prospective subscribers and members. It was all part of the gestalt of this new theater, this home for Living Arts. Indeed a series of concerts, called “Music from Marlboro,” was built right into the season, it was announced. Then at these parties Andre Gregory would come out with his soft sell: Isn’t it amazing, he would ask, that Oklahoma City has a resident theater, but Philadelphia doesn’t? Can we let this be? Fred Goldman would then follow up with the hard pitch: Subscribe now! Become a member! Here’s the form. And slowly but surely this worked, the money came in. 1000 Memberships were pledged, and over 7,000 season subscriptions were sold. A support staff and crew of 18 was hired, and a budget of $250,000 was made by their new business manager David Lunney. Celia Silverman and Jean Goldman, working tirelessly, all the time were the theater’s joint producers, but they took no salary.

Meanwhile a resident cast of ten actors was hired, after a long series of auditions in New York and Philadelphia. Andre Gregory was always very respectful of actors, very interested in their process, and was clear that he wanted a true resident company, one that would develop a group ethos, but nonetheless composed of eloquent individuals with strong improvisation skills. Of the people that were engaged, perhaps inevitably many came from the Actors Studio in New York. Now, these were real major actors with good credits  and promising futures like Lois Smith, Ron Leibman, Tom Brannum, Anthony Zerbe and David Hurst. There were a few Philadelphians in the mix - a beautiful young Sally Kirkland in fact was from a very well established old Quaker City family. Mirriam Phillips was from the Hedgerow Theatrel. The initial salary, under the contract negotiated with Actors Equity was pretty paltry, even for then, just 150 bucks a week, with a promise of eventually becoming 300 dollars a week. But the work in the shows promised to be exciting, and the possibilities for a more prosperous future seemed bright. They could even earn extra from teaching in the theater’s new training school, which began accepting eager students from around the community. The actors even called themselves “The Southwark Company” - after the original theater that had once stood just a block away in the 18th century, that was where President George Washington would come to see plays presented by Thomas Wignell.

Actual rehearsals for the Theater of the LIving Arts company did not start until December of 1964, and the company was joined by eight year-old Adam Gopnik. Adam Gopnik was the son of two local Philadelphia academics. And little Adam, of course, would later grow up to become the acclaimed staff writer on the New Yorker Magazine, author of that article about cars and highways that I mentioned earlier - and so, so much else. Just an amazing fact, isn’t it? I was pretty much bowled over when I first learned that. Let’s claim all his amazing talent and erudition as a result of his early exposure to theater in Philadelphia, shall we? Surely that must be it, absolutely.

The opening night of Brecht’s Galileo, was scheduled for the first week in January 1965. As might be expected, though much preparation work had been done, some things were still a little chaotic. The stagehands union, for example, threatened to picket the opening night, demanding that union members be put on the crew, and they called off the labor action only a few hours before curtain. And at the last minute the city fire inspector pointed out there were no fire extinguishers in the building, and so Fred Goldman had to rush out to buy some fire extinguishers in his evening clothes. Finishing touches to the theater’s marquee were being made by workers on ladders as the audience walked in the lobby underneath them.  It turned out that due the rather short rehearsal period, and Andre Gregory’s direction, which worked so hard to replicate the work of the Berliner Ensemble on the same text that he knew so well, had brought the show’s run time stretched to astounding length - the first preview ran four hours - one hour more than everyone expected. And, on top of everything else, there were no mirrors in the dressing room for everyone to make their numerous costume changes.

But, you know, everything turned out okay, in the way that things do in the theater - it’s a mystery, as we all know, but there it is. One week later, at the official press opening, the running time of the show was down to three and a half hours. And afterwards the audiences were enthusiastic and the local reviewers really intrigued and full of praise - a little guarded, true, they didn’t know what they had here yet - but still quite heartfelt and definite optimism at what was suddenly on their assignment docket for the foreseeable future.

Proclaimed Ernest Sheier in the Bulletin: “Philadlepia’s newest adventure in theater has begun auspiciously.” He also praised Wolfgang Roth’s lighting and design. The Inquirer’s Henry Murdock especially marveled at the large and talented band of actors suddenly resident in the community.

He also deeply admired in his review what he called Andre Gregory's “free wheeling stagecraft” as the action took place in side stage, lofts and up and down the aisles. “For this production The Theater of  LIving Arts escapes proscenium limitations and obeys the modern concept . . that for the best communication, the players are in the lap of the audience and vice versa.”

Even Adam Gopnik, when interviewed years later, could remember clearly Gregory’s staging  - because evidently the entire Gopnik clan of kids got enlisted in the show as well.

“He was doing Brechtian theater with an American sense of spectacle that was astonishing for people to see . . .Galileo was meant by Brecht to be a teaching piece, highly intellectual. That’s the sense of his epic theater. Andre did that, but his natural bent was for the spectacular so that in Scene 10 of the play he felt it was weak in ‘life’ and so he had all of my brothers and sisters come in to be ragamuffins on stage.  . .  He liked the sense of the extreme, the melodramatic.”

And even TLA founder Fred Goldman, who would later turn into a dedicated and remorseless foe of Andre Gregory (spoiler alert) - for the moment, he was pleased: “Critical and audience response was excellent. Single ticket sales accelerated for the following weeks and the following plays. Laudatory articles appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, Saturday Review, and numerous theater journals. The inaugural season was lauded, and fiscally sound.”

Now, even though Galileo was a rather long and intellectually challenging night of the theater, there was much goodwill left behind for the TLA’s next show, which were both modern translations of old French plays, interestingly. First there was Tiger at the Gates, Christopher Fry’s adaptation of Jean Giradoux play which in English translates to The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, and then there was a production of Moliere’s The Misanthrope, a show that really showed the newly formed resident Southwark Acting Company - as they called themselves - at its best. 

The director was Gregory L. Sherman, who by all accounts was a delight to work with, and really got everybody relaxed about performing in verse. He had chosen Richard Wilbur’s then brand-new translation, which kept the rhyming couplets of the original French but used a modern American vocabulary and locutions. Sherman and designer Robert Darling employed modern clothing and furniture too, with the men wearing sport coats and the women wearing high-style 1960s fashions. Ron Leibman, as Alceste, the title character who insists on virtue and candor from everyone, no matter the social cost, drew enormous praise from local critics, as did Lois Smith who played his lover Celimene. And also in the company were Jerry Dempsey, Sally Kirkland, and Estelle Parsons - who had come in from New York just for this show.

The Inquirer’s Henry Murdoch wrote that The Misanthrope’s “intrinsic wit and humor were well-served by Sherman’s light and fast-paced direction,” and the Daily News’ Jerry Gaghan said it could be considered “the highlight of the entire Philadelphia theatrical season.” The production got national attention, too, as the influential magazine The Saturday Review sent critic Henry Crewes, who wrote that it was “fascinatingly adventurous.” Andre Gregory, for his part, was so pleased that he invited Sherman to join the company as Associate Artistic Director for the next season, which Sherman agreed to do.

Everything was going very well. The Board of the Theatre of the Living Arts was pleased and gave Andre Gregory a three-year extension on his initial contract. And Gregory moved his family from a rental on Delancey Street near Rittenhouse Square to a new home in Society Hill, so that he could be closer to the theater at all times. At a cocktail party he hosted before he moved to the other side of town, he declared that looking back on the past few months, it had been a “difficult but a marvelous year.” And he boasted that there were now 7000 regular subscribers for the theater, and that he expected it to double the next year.

“They told us at first Philadelphia wouldn’t back good plays, and would never go to South Street to look at them,” he told the assembled guests. But soon enough, he predicted, the theater would grow, would have a new and even larger home, and would someday rival the Philadelphia Orchestra itself as the premier performing arts institution in town. 

For the final offering of the season, Gregory took the directing reins again himself with a production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. David Hurst, who had earlier starred in Galileo, was playing Hamm, and Ron Liebman was Clov, both men dressed as clowns. Jerry Dempsey and Mirriam Phillips played the parents, Nag and Nell, cruelly crammed into barrels for most of the evening, as Beckett had instructed. Now Endgame is a famously difficult text, its allusions to the end of the world and the Book of Revelations require a lot of erudition to fully comprehend, and although by 1965 people were beginning to accept the demanding conventions of Absurdist drama - it was nothing new - If any play was going to drive Philadelphians screaming out of the theater, this was it. Gregory was going all out.

This was the first production that Gregory collaborated on with the designer Eugene Lee. They created a set in which a steel and mesh cube was constructed onstage, and it was lit from within. There was a thin screen in front of the cube which slightly obscured the view of the stage from the audience, and certainly kept actors from seeing out into the house. David Hurst as the blind and crippled Hamm had blacked out glasses on, so literally he couldn’t see anything anyway. Liebman, as Clov, was never allowed to sit down, which was a real physical trial given the discomfort of metal grating that Eugene Lee placed on the floor. But Andre Gregory gave both actors free rein to find all the mordant comedy they could in Beckett’s bleak lines and the two actors ran with it - they responded with a flurry of impressions and voices, from Betty Davis, to Bert Lahr, to Cyril Richard to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy. It was a real tour de force performance and, again, there was wide praise from the larger American theater world. But although many in the Philadelphia audience had been left rather bewildered by Endgame, nobody walked out - well, they couldn’t - because during the two hour show, as Gregory directed it, there was no intermission.

By the fall of 1965, the second Theatre of the Living Arts season was underway. The repertoire again was again mostly of European playwrights, but very in line with what other American regional theaters were doing in that era: Chekhov, Sheridan, Strindberg, Anouilh. Most encouragingly, by this time the resident acting company had really gelled into a cohesive unit with a common vocabulary and a way of working.

There were some changes. George Sherman, as we mentioned, was now the associate artistic director, and he was a warm and gregarious presence in rehearsals and at social events. Though extremely respected, of course, Andre Gregroy was somewhat more distant and intellectual in his affect, and he himself later recalled it felt like sometimes he was the father and George Sheerman was the mother figure in the company.

Fred Goldman, one of the four initial founders of the whole enterprise, had come back, and he had stepped in to become the Chair of the TLA Board, in fact he was acting as its financial adviser, as well as running the PCPA, the organization which still held title to the theater itself, and sponsored the concerts, the films and the dance recitals which took place in the space during times plays were not being staged there. 

Goldman was determined to keep a firm hand on the TLA’s finances, not really trusting the managing director David Lunney, whom he felt was too deferential to Gregory’s free spending and artistically freewheeling ways. Lunney was running an apprentice program - bringing in young people from the Philadelphia community - and he was even hiring new personnel, including carpenters, technicians and prop masters. One of the apprentices who was soon working for TLA at the time was a young Philadelphian named Stuart Finkelstein. A graduate of Central High School, Finkelstein had left Temple University theater program after his first semester in order to get real theater experience working backstage at the TLA with this exciting new group. And there he met Mary Kaye Bernardo, who had just been recruited from Cleveland, Ohio to run the prop department at TLA at what she regarded as a gratifyingly generous salary. “I was probably the highest paid prop person in the country” she later admitted.

Andre Gregory was developing the reputation of spending what he needed to spend, and worrying about the consequences later. Fred Goldman’s proposed solution was to give each of the five plays in the TLA season exactly one fifth of the annual budget and only releasing the money exactly when each of the five plays was scheduled to begin rehearsals. As you might expect, this led to increasing tension with Gregory, who felt that he needed flexibility in order to pursue his artistic ends. And increasingly the Board president - who had more operational control - Thomas Fleming, was taking Gregory’s side in these disputes, and not Goldman’s. 

I should also mention that during this second season of TLA Jean Goldman and Celia Silverman were no longer listed as “producers” of each play in the program credits, nor do their names pop up in any more newspaper articles about the institution - at least not that I can find. Though for the moment the two women remained on the board and there had some say in the selection of repertoire, these two women who did so much to get TLA started seemed in fact, to have been mostly sidelined by Gregory in any other active role in the running of the place.

As far as the season itself, it’s perhaps significant to note that Gregory opened with directing Uncle Vanya - a text he would return to famously many years later on 42nd Street in New York. Sherman followed with a delightfully zany production of Sheridan’s The Critic, a well-loved spoof on 18th Century theater practices, much in the style as it used to be done in the long-ago Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia’s colonial days, just up the street. Actor Ron Leibman, by now well established as the young leading man of the company, got the plum role of Mr. Puff. 

The most famous show of that second season, however, in Philadelphia theater lore, was Andre Gregory’s production of Jean Anouilh’s play Poor Bitos. This play had been mounted both in Paris and London a few years earlier - and subsequently on Broadway in 1964 - but nowhere had it been a commercial success. It takes place at a dinner party in post-World War II France. The title character, Bitos, is a remorseless prosecutor charged with investigating collaborators with the Nazis during the recent war. Half way through the action of the play Bitos is shot by one of the guests (or at least everyone thinks he is shot), and the rest of the play is mostly a hallucinatory vision by Bitos in which he imagines himself transformed back into the 18th Century and is contending with historical characters from the French Revolution. It was a scathing dark comedy about the hypocrisies of the ruling classes of the world as well as the heartless sanctimony of powerful people who regard themselves as being on the cutting edge of history, it was exactly the sort of thing that was in Andre Gregory’s wheelhouse. During rehearsals, Gregory played jazz and rock music to accompany movement and improvisation exercises, and a lot of this material made it into the final product - including an orgy scene in which actors writhed together passionately on the floor.

The biggest technical challenge made by Anhouilh’s script is that transformation moment after the shooting. A modern upper-class French dining room must change into a bare 18th Century council chamber, in almost a cinematic quick cut. But because after all, the TLA space was one of those new-fangled thrust stages, there were no curtains to cover a set change, unlike all previous productions of the play. Furthermore Gregory, once again working with Eugene Lee, had created a set with a drastic rake on the floor, so that it angled steeply towards the audience, nothing could be rolled off into the wings (which were almost non-existent, anyway). The two men instead engineered an inventive coup de theatre. At the moment the gun went off, a bank of photographer’s flash bulbs along the edge of the stage all exploded right in the audience's eyes, momentarily blinding everyone. The tabletop in the middle of the stage was rigged to flip over, during that moment, whisking away all the plates and food from Act One, and leaving behind only a bare surface. And during those same few seconds all the actors slipped offstage. And when the audience looked up, suddenly the world was transformed.

Now, during intermission, this effect was all the audience could talk about - at least until the second act started. Because in this part of Poor Bitos, the actors returned and now they were all dressed as famous historical personages from the infamous Committee of Public Safety, during the French Revolution. Bitos, played by George Bartenieff, was now Robespierre. Other actors were Desmoulins, Tallien, Mirabeau and St. Juste. Sally Kirkland was Queen Marie Antoinette and Madame Tallien was played by Flora Elkins. This character was based on a historical person, who was known for publicly wearing revealing clothing that freed her body - and a note to that effect was inserted in the program. The latter woman’s costume, designed by Adam Sage, was rather modeled after the famous painting of Marianne the Spirit of France in “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugene Delacroix. And though in that painting, Marianne is fully topless, in this costume Elkins had one breast showing, fully exposed.

Well, now you can guess pretty much what everybody in the audience was talking about after Act Two. To this day in Philadelphia if anyone remembers anything about Andre Gregory’s tenure at the Theatre of the Living Arts, they mention that one exposed body part. Every time. Apparently the theater management did have notify the Philadelphia police about it, and every night during the second act of Poor Bitos a couple of officers would show up at the back of the house and observe, just to make sure the single naked female bosom was not being part of a truly “artistic production, and not displayed for lewd or lascivious purposes.” Apparently the Philly PD officers were altogether delighted with their nightly assignment, and were rather disappointed when Poor Bitos finally ended its run.

Now this show attracted huge amounts of national critical attention to Philadelphia. Though I can note that almost NOBODY, in any of their reviews, mentions that exposed breast - all the critics were trying to be sophisticated - the Swinging Sixties were well underway, it would just not be cool. Even when Stanley Kauffmann himself, then the leading critic for the New York Times came down to Philly just to see that show, he did not write a word about it in his review, except elliptically referencing Gregory’s fondness for what he called “startling effects.” Kauffmann published his thoughts in a major article in the Sunday edition of the Times, in April of 1966, along with his round-up of other recent plays he had seen in other American regional theaters. Kauffmann declared that the TLA production of Poor Bitos was “infinitely more interesting” than the ones he had seen in London and New York, and that overall the abilities of the Southwark Acting Company was actually higher than the other professional companies he had seen.

One thing that Kauffmann advised Gregory and other talented directors at American regional theaters if they wanted to refresh their artistry, and keep their audiences moving along with them in their efforts to create a new American theater. He said: Do not just mount prestigious European works, like Poor Bitos. Stage new American plays. “Theaters don’t want to be museums of drama, no matter how fine their repertories are. They know that their health depends in some measure on sharp, contemporary American pertinence.” And further, Kauffmann asserted that there ought to be less people coming into New York to see shows, and more trains and buses going out of New York and coming to see what was going on in places like Philadelphia. Every week.

The TLA’s second season concluded in May 1966 with a production of The Last Analysis, by novelist Saul Bellow - an American writer this time, it was a restaging of a work that had previously failed on Broadway. The reviews for the show in the local papers again were generally complementary.

Elated by the success of the entire season, Andre Gregory announced to the press that next year he was planning to expand the season from five shows running five weeks each to six shows running six weeks each. And he was going to give the acting company six weeks of rehearsals. And he was going to expand the permanent acting company from its now 12 to 17 members, and he was going to give them what amounted to almost year-round work. Gregory also announced was about to take the TLA’s production of Endgame from the previous year to New Haven, Connecticut at the invitation of Robert Brustein, the new dean of the Yale Drama School to launch the season of its new repertory company. And, perhaps influenced by Stanley Kauffman’s advice in the New York Times, he was already planning the third season, which would consist entirely of American plays and playwrights.

A hundred thousand dollars had just come in for the TLA from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was going to begin a 2 million dollar fundraising drive to create an entirely new theater space within the next six years. And - maybe soon, he thought - they would have the personnel and facilities to become a true repertory company with a changing bill of performances every night, just like the old Moscow Art Theatre. It was just mind-boggling, but maybe it was possible. The Inquirer editorial board wrote an editorial praising what the Theatre of the Living Arts had accomplished in just a short time of two years, and they urged Phialdelphians to support that effort with their money and with their patronage. . . Everything was going so well, right? 

In the midst of all this good news, I am going to report that there were also several troubling indications that not all was well at the little Theater that Could on South Street. First, Associate Artistic Director George Sherman, who usually handled the comic side of the season, and who was the gregarious and comforting ‘Mother’ of the company, suddenly announced he was leaving, for ‘artistic reasons’, and he would not say anything more definite. It was all very strange.

And although this sudden departure was handled rather deftly and quietly in public at least, backstage - well the knives were suddenly out. Boardroom politics got quite ugly. First, in a pure power play, Andre Gregory persuaded his allies on the Board to expand the number of voting members, admitting all sorts of new people. And when he had done so, one of the first things he did was to use this new majority to vote to remove anyone who had consistently been opposing his ideas about his repertoire for the upcoming All-American season; And guess who recalcitrant stick-in-muds were? Well it was the Silvermans and the Goldmans, the two couples who had founded the theater in the first place two years before. 

Striking back, Fred Goldman issued a formal report that he had evidently been working on for months, in case something like this should happen. And in this report he charged Andre Gregory and David Lunney with gross fiscal incompetence and mismanagement. Due to extravagant spending, Goldman said, the TLAs deficit from the first season was not being made up at all, it was expanding, despite all these new grants and gift revenues. 

Now the new Board was just a rubber stamp for Gregory and couldn’t see the danger ahead, said Goldman, they were so dazzled by Gregory’s aura. In fact, accused Goldman, Gregory was exhibiting “dictatorial tendencies.” With all his recent success, he intimated, nobody was going to be allowed to stand in his way.

Andre Gregory wanted to take the theater in a different direction entirely, Goldman said. He was going to attack the smug pieties of the Philadelphia audience, who were going to be exposed to an Artaudian “Theater of Cruelty.” Gregory wanted to do plays of sex and violence and rather than cater to the old crowd, he wanted to attract “a new kind of audience, . . homosexuals, drug addicts, and would-be suicides”!

Rehearsals for the third Season of the Theatre of the Living Arts had begun on August 3rd, 1966, for a play called A Dream of Love, by the New Jersey physician/poet William Carlos Williams. This was to be the first play of Andre Gregory’s projected All-American season for the company, which had indeed expanded, as announced, to six shows this year, though Gregory’s plans for expanding rehearsal periods to an almost unheard-of six weeks had to be put aside, due to budgetary constraints. Now this did not mean that the Theatre of the Living Arts was living within its means. The archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania hold the projected budget plan for the ‘66-’67 TLA season, even before it started. I’ve seen it, and the figures on it just amaze me, even today. There were expected total expenditures of $560,000, and anticipated revenues of only $312,000 - leaving a deficit of almost $250,000!!! And this was after they were already carrying a deficit of $148,000 from the year before. Where was this money going to be made up? Especially with the pressing need to raise funds for a new building - because, let’s remember, there were still plans by the city of Philadelphia to raze the theater’s building, along with the rest of South Street to make room for a crosstown highway, that was still officially a live project!

Well, said this budget document - which was apparently generated for the information of the TLA Board of Directors: “We anticipate a direction of donated funds toward that project.” So, get ready to pony up, folks, I guess. Maybe the rest of the deficit’s funding would eventually come from the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Ford Foundation, or from some local Phladelphia Maecenas like the Haas Family Foundation, or . . who knows?

Meanwhile, groused original TLA founder Fred Goldman: He had been kicked off the board, and his charges of financial mismanagement against Gregory and Lunney had been dismissed. The board in fact had sued Goldman and the other founders to force them to sell the theater back - they still held the title to the actual building. The board had assented to increasing Gregory’s salary, and he had then jaunted off for a summer in Portugal, not even sticking around to help fix that deficit.

Back at home, the TLA’s first production of the third season - Dream of Love - was clearly not going to induce anyone in Philadelphia to break out their checkbooks to cover that deficit. Dream of Love was at that point a twenty year old play, and it was a deeply personal depiction of William Carlos Williams’ own household - complete with his sexual longings, and marital infidelities. As directed by Lawrence Kornfeld, the show had its ‘difficulties’ as one Philly reviewer put it, both with the actors and with the scenery, apparently. It did feature the performance of the first Black actors ever to be hired by the company - Gertrude Jeanette and Georgia Burke, in roles of the family domestic servant and her friend. Those two performers got the biggest applause of the evening when they sang a hymn together in the course of the action.

Now in the midst of all this, David Lunney and the TLA staff were nonetheless not just sitting back passively waiting for things to work out - they had competition, there was other theater going on in Philly that fall, and not just what you might expect - a touring production of Marat/Sade was being performed at the stodgy old Playhouse in the Park, for goodness sake! And for the more conventional theater goers, Ethel Merman was bringing a revival of Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun to the Forrest Theatre, and Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain were arriving in October to the Forrest with a new musical called Holly Golightly, based on Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s! The city’s period as a Try Out Town was not over after all.  In fact, Brian Friel’s Irish drama Philadelphia Here I Come! had successfully come through town (on its way to Broadway) at the Walnut Street Theatre earlier that very year. But I only mention these plays just to tell you that the scrappy little non-profit theater company on South Street way off on the edges of town had to scramble to get folks’ attention as they competed with these commercial productions with large PR budgets.  

And you have to hand it to whoever was running the publicity for TLA - they worked hard and very inventively with the resources that they had. All that fall, they played up the “Americana” theme, with newspaper ads and flyers that looked like political campaign posters, touting season subscriptions to the remaining five shows in the season. A campaign-style sound truck was even hired to tour up and down Philadelphia streets, driven by attractive young female staffers and cast members, with a huge poster on the side of the truck that read: “THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE! A LANDSLIDE VICTORY FOR PHILADELPHIA THEATRE!”

And there was reason to crow, after all. The second production of the season, a high-spirited fast-paced 1937 farce Room Service was meticulously and successfully directed by Harold Stone, and the entire Southwark Theatre Company really shone in it. A zany play about the wacky goings on in commercial American show biz, set in a hotel room, that had inspired a Marx Brothers movie, it was a big hit with Philadelphia theatergoers and critics alike. For a supposedly cutting edge and Off-Broadway style company like the TLA, this was a love letter to the old-style Broadway, and folks just ate it up. The tiny theater on South Street was suddenly buzzing again.

And now, at last, we come to the play that - more than any other single production - had come to represent the Andre Gregory tenure in Philadelphia. This is the play with the rather dauntingly unpronounceable and unspellable name of BECLCH - B E C L C H - “Beck-leck”. This show was directed by Andre Gregory himself, and it was written by the young New York poet Rochelle Owens - she was part of the Sixties Downtown scene at Judson Poets’ Theatre on Washington Square and La MaMa ETC in the East Village. Owens’ work Futz, a play which featured copious bestiality, had recently created quite a stir in New York, and Andre Gregory had sought her out to write her next play Beclch for a world premiere in Philadelphia.

Beclch was a work in the vein of the Theater of Cruelty. It was an Absurdist play - set in a mythical version of Africa, an “Africa of the Mind,” in which Beclch, a bored white American housewife who somehow had become a conquering Queen, cruelly and selfishly destroyed everything she could while fulfilling her deepest lusts. The script is full of violent imagery, frank language and episodes of seemingly random capriciousness. There’s a cock fight, a man who walks around with a leg swollen with elephantiasis (and then is ordered off to strangle himself to death). Queen Beclch smears honey on her subjects' bellies, then licks them off, and then she sacrifices a goat onstage and gleefully dips her hands in its guts. By the end of the play, once Queen Beclch has laid waste to almost everyone and everything and indulged her every lust and whim, it is implied that the natives are about to overthrow and destroy their wanton oppressor as the drums sound. It was kind of like if Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi and Jean Genet’s The Blacks were shook up in a bag with Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. Indeed I was not at all surprised to learn that Rochelle Owens had apparently read Eugene O’Neill’s works deeply at a young age. But however you might describe it, it was a far cry from Room Service, that’s for sure.

The script, like everything else that season, had needed the approval of the theater’s Board, and frankly almost everyone on the Board thought that Beclch was a hideous text, unacceptable to produce. But after actors from the company had come in and read it out loud at a board meeting, Gregory had apparently held a two-hour-long session with the board, explaining passionately and precisely why this was the play to do NOW, this is what he needed as an artist to produce, and with the world the way it was going. According to company member Jerry Dempsey, who was interviewed later:

“Andre gave his ‘Rites of Spring’ speech which is: there is no right time to perform The Rites of Spring . . . He described the first time they performed Rites of Spring in Paris . . and the riot. He said ‘Who are we to stay above the conflict and the battle. This is a show we feel strongly about.’  . . I told them why I thought it was a moral play to do as well as warning against indulgence. We went away a while and came back 15 minutes later. They said: . . We think you’re right, and we’re wrong.  . . just give us the best production you can, Andre.”

One board member, not quite believing she had just approved what she thought was the worst play she had ever read, looked at Andre Gregory and said admiringly: “You could talk the Virgin Mary into it.”

The rehearsals for Beclch started in November 1966, and right from the start it was clear to everyone that this was going to be an ambitious production. To begin with, it drew from a much different cultural well than anything else the TLA had done up to that point. John Conklin, Richard Nelson and Eugene Lee were the designers, but Gregory had commissioned Japanese composer Teiji Ito to do the music, and Ralph Lee to provide masks and special properties - including that swollen elephantiasis leg and the goat. Most especially he was also collaborating with a local African dance troupe - The Arthur Hall Dance Ensemble. This was the first time that Black Philadelphia performers had really gotten involved with the TLA - and Arthur Hall, who had been working on creating and sharing African dance and culture in the city for over a decade by that point, long before it had become a cool thing to do, had even contributed a lot of authentic African masks and sculptures to the project, which Andre Gregory hung all around the rehearsal room to help inspire the actors.

The TLA’s regular company were playing most of the roles in Beclch, with the Arthur Hall dancers playing other roles and doing startling and vivid movement work. The New York actress Sharon Gans was brought in to play Queen Beclch herself. And young Adam Gopnik, who had earlier played the boy in Galileo for the theater - back in its first season - was brought back again to play a boy in this work, as well. This was not a simple role, and it must have been a little daunting for Gopnik’s parents, because the boy in Beclch had to be murdered during the course of the play - quite violently - and company member Lois Smith (who played a role called the Preacher Woman) had to carry off his body before being flayed alive herself.

The musicians for the Arthur Hall company provided drumming throughout the process, and even during the rehearsals the floor was covered with padding and mattresses, just as the eventual stage would be. Gregory wanted to create a world where everything was unstable and slightly nauseating to walk through. Speaking of nauseating, the props department of the TLA was dispatched to a local Philadelphia chemistry lab to get a canister of authentic goat smell. Though when this canister was unwisely released a bit too generously for the first time in the theater, and made its way through the ventilation system, almost everybody ran out, retching, but reportedly Andre Gregory stayed behind in the theater, yelling “I LOVE IT!”

As Gregory himself writes in his recently published memoir (entitled This Is Not My Memoir), he was having the time of his life, but he admits that he didn’t necessarily go about things in the best way. “The quiet-spoken, polite-seeming, gentleman Andre transformed himself into a wolf-man, raging through his own theater world, vengeful and angry, shooting fire out of his ears. Still angry at my parents, I was bent on destruction. I couldn’t battle my parents directly, so instead I was determined to drive my boring, bourgeois subscription audience screaming out of the theater. I was also a young director saying, ‘Look what I can do! Look what the theater can do!’”

There was also, in this show, by several accounts, an interracial couple miming sex in the aisle, as well as a lot of nudity and near nudity throughout. It was at least not a live goat being sacrificed onstage in the end, although there was a goat smell, the goat was played by a little stuffed animal from which a package of meat was removed from a little door in the side. To me, one of the most astounding facts about Beclch was that Gregory had scheduled it to open on December 20th (Merry Christmas, everyone!), and it was to play throughout January! No Christmas Carol cash cow for the TLA, no sir! 

In his memoir Gregory also recalls that the audience hated it, and they walked out in droves every night, and that local critics hated it too. And this is mostly true - I can attest to that because I’ve read those reviews. Though the critic for the Camden Courier Press actually said that the play was “exactly the sort of thing that the Theater should be doing.” Other critics - not only from Philadelphia but from elsewhere in the country. They came from far and wide just to pan the play - including Martin Gottfried in Women’s Wear Daily (did you KNOW that Women’s Wear Daily used to have a drama critic?). Gottfried called the whole experience disgusting and “amateur to the core.”

But Andre Gregroy also wrote in his memoir that after a few weeks people started to come back to check it out - once a glowing review by Ted Kalem was printed in Time Magazine. But looking into it, I gotta say, that’s not quite right, as that particular review (though it was very approving) was not actually published until the play was almost closed. Kalem noted in his Time Magazine review that the play was violently opposed by some in Philadelphia. “If this kind of play remained in the repertory, wrote two lady trustees, ‘the theater would shortly be filled only with ‘junkies, delinquents, and some college kids.’” Both Gregory and Rochelle Owens would later boast of the fuss they caused. This was actually a bit of a badge of honor for a cutting edge theater artist of the 1960s. It proved that their work was hitting the mark, that it was upsetting the bourgeoisie (which NEEDED upsetting). That the work they were doing mattered.

One thing that everybody who saw or worked on Beclch agreed upon was that the African dancing in it was startlingly wonderful, the best thing about the show. And during the run, Hall and his company gave a concert at the TLA on a January night when the play was not being performed. The Philadelphia Tribune reported, “Backed by a virtual orchestra of drummers,the dancers put on a show guaranteed to pulse the joy of life into the veins of the most indifferent spectator, and deeply impress some of the magic and splendor of African culture into all.”

But there’s no denying that for the institution it was a disaster. I’ve even seen the daily TLA box office reports for Beclch in the archives. Although attendance numbers actually peaked in late December as many New York theater folks came down to Philly to check out what all the fuss was about (Christmas Eve they actually sold out the house), by the end of January Beclch was playing to houses that were only halfway filled - and often even less. 

According to these figures - and again these are the actual numbers recorded by the house manager, overall only about 1300 people saw the show each week of its six week run. For a non-profit theater company that was already struggling with a huge deficit, this was not good. As Fred Goldman, Andre Gregory's remorseless enemy, hastened to point out in many post-mortem articles that he was to write over the subsequent years, this was a disaster. And many in the TLA audience that had once eagerly come to South Street would never return.

Even the sudden drop off in ticket sales and the plunge in revenues were not the straws that broke the camel’s back. And it wasn’t even the fact that some of the ambitious season, as it was planned, was being suddenly changed - a production of William Saroyan’s lovely play The Time of Your Life was hastily inserted into the season, to mollify all those patrons who had been so offended by Beclch. No, it seems the breaking point happened in late January 1967, when managing director David Lunney in the midst of all this asked for a raise, so that his salary would be equal to Andre Gregory’s, and he would be recompensed for all the work that he had been putting in all this time. After this request, there was a super-contentious Board meeting, where a lot of financial issues that had previously been swept under the rug were now hauled out and thrown in David Lunney’s face - the yawning deficit, it became clear to many on the board, was something they might have to pay personally - and it became clear that Lunney had not been handing over the withholding taxes on employee’s payrolls properly and it was being pursued for them by the IRS. After this meeting, Lunney was fired. Andre Gregory resigned in protest, and then changed his mind and unresigned and said that his contract was still in force, and then, in February 1967, Andre Gregory was fired as well. 

I’m not at all clear exactly how it happened - and maybe it’s not important. I do see that there was a PBS TV crew coming down to Philly to interview Gregory about all the exciting work he was doing at the TLA, and according to some accounts, and even as he was walking around the theater and talking to them and taping this show, the Board president was demanding he leave the building. And according to an interview that Gregory did with the comedian John Mulaney just a few years ago, eventually the Philadelphia police were called in and escorted him off the premises. They drove him over the bridge to New Jersey, he said, and told him not to come back to Philly, ever again. He did sneak back to the city to come home and pack a few things, he admitted, but he soon left again. 

In a famous post-mortem essay he wrote for the Tulane Drama Review, Andre Gregory publicly accused a “Main Line Mafia” of making his position untenable. And to those who said that Philadelphia somehow wasn’t ‘not ready’ for the work he was doing at the TLA, Gregory wrote:

“The theater is life and the waters outside the theater are troubled. We’re dropping bombs on children in Vietnam. But Philadelphia isn’t ready for plays with the theme of violence. Is Philadelphia ready for the violence in its own streets? Should we wait for the violence to subside, if it will, and do nothing meanwhile?  . . If we wait until communities are ‘ready,’ the regional theatre will disintegrate.”

He had just raised a huge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, gotten the attention of critics all over the country, and raised the tiny theater’s profile to enormous heights. But despite all that, said Gregroy, metaphorically the Board of Directors put a gun to his head and fired.

Andre Gregory did sue the board for wrongful dismissal however, and eventually he won a financial settlement in court. Both he and David Lunney were immediately hired to run a new theater company in Los Angeles, staging classic plays for audiences that chiefly consisted of high school students - they got a big grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to do that. That theater quickly went out of business, too, after its productions ran into fervent opposition from yet another scandalized board of directors. And a couple of months later Andre Gregory also wrote: “The real causes of my dismissal were artistic policy, money, and communication problems, in that order. The Board and I were both working to create a theater in Philadelphia. The difficulty was that we were trying to create two different kinds of theater.”

It’s important to point out that the Theatre of the Living Arts did not immediately go out of business after Gregory left. Though some folks suggested temporarily halting productions until the fundraising deficit was filled, the TLA kept doing regular shows, kept its school going, kept selling subscriptions, indeed the TLA was to last two more complete seasons on South Street.

Interestingly, the PCPA,  the Philadelphia Council for the Performing Arts - which means the Goldmans and the Silvermans - eventually re-established control over the building on South Street once the theater went bust, but after a short period of managing it again, they sold it off to someone else. It just wasn’t worth it. Over the years the TLA has been used as a theater, but mostly as a concert hall and a movie venue. It’s still there, though most folks in Philly don’t even remember why they call it the “TLA” or that it once was one of the most exciting and controversial theaters in America.

Now, I’m going to give Andre Gregory the last word here, again, I’m quoting from that essay he wrote in the TDR. Gregory has since repudiated some of the harsh things he put in that essay. And, over the years, a lot of things don’t look quite so urgent or dire as they used to. Many folks (pace Fred Goldman) who worked at the TLA during its brief life still say it was one of the best experiences of their career, it really shaped everything for them. Andre Gregory correctly saw that in the future, Philadelphia did no need just one big central nonprofit theater company, it needed many

So that’s the end of the re-edited and remixed material about the Theater of the Living Arts, as it originally appeared in our Episodes 54, 56 and 57 - But now we come to the BONUS PORTION of THIS episode.

Because, as we said, the TLA did not immediately perish as a non-profit theater organization after Andre Gregory left, although sometimes in the popular lore around here, you would think it did. Instead, under the leadership of John Bos [BOS], the new Producing Director of the TLA, and as wealthy members of Philadelphia society rallied around it, the company was able to recover from the debacle of Bechlch, and the theater quickly staged - as Gregory intimated - the classic American play William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life.

For the 68-69 season, during what was a very tumultuous period of American history, the TLA did quite well, presenting such productions of Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris, Little Murders by Jules Feiffer, La Turista by Sam Shepard, and The Hostage by Brendan Behan. They also booked runs of shows produced by Off-Broadway companies coming in from New York and continued to hold classical music concerts and summer movie series.

All were critically well received, but audiences were still much more sparse than they needed for long-term financial health. John Bos and the Board decided the organization needed to make progress - and so they hired Tom Bissinger, a then 30-year-old director from California who had been doing interesting work in the downtown New York Off-Broadway and Off-off-Broadway scene of the late 1960s. 

Bissinger showed up on South Street in the late summer of ‘69 - as he later described it in his book The Fun House, like Peter Fonda riding into town in Easy Rider, “wearing striped bell bottoms, a loose bloused paisley shirt and safari jacket, gold rimmed glasses, beads around my neck and sporting an Afro.” With Bos, Bissiner quickly set to work hiring new members of the company, including Judd Hirsch, Morgan Freeman, and Larry Bloch - as well as rehiring some old TLA veterans like Sally Kirkland and Mike Procaccino (later to be known as the writer Michael Cristofer).

On November 4th, 1969: The Theater of the Living Arts opened its fifth season with a production of George Farquar's Restoration-era comedy The Recruiting Officer. But it wasn't a reverent version of a classic play. Tom Bissinger employed rock music, nudity, and lots of audience interaction instead.

Notable today to us was the presence of actors like Kirkland, Procaccino, Hirsch and Freeman in the cast, as well as the music of Michael Bacon (son of Philly city planner Ed Bacon, and brother of Kevin Bacon) and his group called The Good News.

Also in the company were David Rounds in the role of Captain Brazen, and Marion KIllinger as Captain Plume.

Now, some of the reviewers on opening night were horrified by the production, frankly ("Vulgar" was the verdict of the Wilmington Morning Herald. "Muddled and confused," wrote the Philadelphia Daily News).

In the Inquirer, however, the new young critic William Collins was ecstatic, and was clear that the Vietnam War Era context to an old play about an army recruiting campaign had hit home with him.

"The company assembled by Tom Bissinger for his first production as artistic director at the South Street establishment radiated a joyful   energy as they tackled the classic with everything from gunpowder to rock."

"There was an air of celebration to the event, something in the nature of a shipboard party at a midnight sailing, which with Bissinger's promise to pilot us into uncharted seas of theatrical pleasure. . . It was an evening for throwing confetti, beating the drum and singing a few songs and never mind if no one seemed to know exactly where they were going. . . . "

"The success of the various comic effects  . .  keeps the audience asking itself 'What will they do next?' instead of thinking about what they have just done."

So - here’s what they did next:

[NB the following text is from the book Adventures in Theater History Philadelphia by Peter Schmitz. ©2024. All Rights Reserved]
___________________________
January 24th, 1970: The Line of Least Existence, a rock opera with a book by painter and novelist (and former professional wrestler) Rosalyn Drexler, and music by 21 year-old John Hall, opened at the Theatre of the Living Arts.

John Bissinger, the Artistic Director of the TLA, helmed the project, for which he had received a $22,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It had also received a pilot production at the Judson Poets Theatre in New York the preceding year. Rosalyn Drexler stated to an interviewer that The Line of Least Existence was inspired by a story she had once heard about "a half-crazy, paranoiac old man who hung around the court area of Manhattan, giving out handbills about his missing daughter.”

Notably, the actor Judd Hirsch, who had starred in several other recent TLA shows (including Harry, Noon and Night and The Recruiting Officer) led the cast in the role of a “lunatic doctor” named Toloon Fraak. Other cast members included the playwright's daughter Rachel Drexler, who along with Patti Perkins and Stacy Jones played the chorus known collectively as “Plastic Masters.” Amy Taubin was the key role of Ibolya, the runaway chick about to experience the world.

By all accounts\ the most endearing member of the company was a young New York actor named Danny DeVito, who played a talking lapdog named Andy, a sort of a hippie puppy who wore sneakers, gloves, and sunglasses. The dog had a strange affinity for his owner, Mrs. Toloon Fraak, played by Gretel Cummings. One of Andy’s crowd-pleasing songs went: “I’m not mutt/ In a rut/ ‘Cause I’ve learned a few tricks in my day!/ It’s not smut/ If some slut/ Want to throw some affection my way!”

Like other avant-garde 1960’s shows, Line of Least Existence had a loose plot structure and a highly colloquial and explicit dialogue. Drexler was a well-regarded writer and her show had recently made waves in a downtown New York workshop production. So if its creators' open ambitions was that it could be “the next Hair,” that was not a crazy idea. Like Hair, “Least Existence” had once belonged to the Public Theater’s Joe Papp, Now that it was his project, Bissinger clearly hoped that the musical might save the TLA’s fortunes. He was willing to try, anyway, and everyone at TLA did their best to raise local interest in the show. Like Hair, there might be on stage nudity, the theater’s pre-show publicity hinted slyly.

The stage of the TLA was covered with Eugene Lee's set, which included lighted boxes, a catwalk, projection screens, a psychiatrist's couch, a doghouse, and a ramp extending into the house on which the rock band musicians were seated. It was very reminiscent, in fact, of Lee’s previous work (along with John Conklin) on the set of Rochelle Owens’ Beclch, which two years earlier had attempted to radically transform the TLA’s thrust stage and traditional rows of audience seating.

In the five years since its founding, the TLA had staged plays by such authors as Samuel Beckett and Jean Anouilh. But, according to Philadelphia Daily News reviewer Charles Petzold, the organization was now “rapidly moving away from the Theater of the Absurd towards the Theater of the Ridiculous.” He declared The Line of Least Existence was “an abortive escape from reality.” The TLA space, before being converted in the mid-1960s, was a local movie theater, and still had a working projector. At the top of the show a rapidly-scrolled film sequence of credits for the play was projected across a screen. At the end of the first act, a huge inflatable erect penis spewed foam all over the stage. Actual paper programs were not handed out until the show was over.

Petzold described his visit to South Street on the opening night of “Least Existence” for his Philadelphia readers: “Entrance to the fantasyland is single file through a revolving wooden door which serves no apparent purpose other than instantaneous introduction to the total environment within. Seating, for the most part, is on wooden bleachers erected over the regular seats. They are about as comfortable as the cheapest seats at Connie Mack Stadium.”

“There is a plot, of sorts. It concerns a Hungarian refugee trying to find his daughter. He later locates her in the company of a lunatic doctor. And that’s about it.”

It all called to mind the recent RSC production of Marat/Sade to Petzold. “The actors seem more like the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton than performers in a play. The asylum feeling is particularly evident during the climactic ‘Wow Me Now’ number in which the performers wear white gowns, cavort in a hospital-like setting and dance in a sea of foam. The nudity hinted at in the pre-show publicity fails to come off.” 

Overall, declared Petzold, the show was a two-hour long cartoon which could have ended after the first act. Other reviewers were just as harsh, and not just in the stodgy big publications. The headline in the weekly free paper Philadelphia After Dark was: “A Poor Excuse For a Musical.” (Everybody admitted they liked Andy the Dog, though.)

The Line of Least Existence also met with little favor from other reviewers and Philadelphia audiences. Even Bissinger would admit he saw how badly it was going. “The script that was funny when I first read it now came across as obvious as puerile . . . There was no way to stop the impending crash. I got stone just to come to rehearsals. It didn’t improve anything.”

Critically, the show was the last straw for theTLA’s Board of Directors, who had ejected former artistic director Andre Gregory over similar excesses in 1967. Box office returns for Line of Least Existence were meager, and there was clearly going to be no repeat of the commercial success of Hair. The hope that the show would save the theater, that it would go on to have a New York run - it popped like a soap bubble on opening night.

Despite many last-ditch efforts, including selling off parts of the musical’s expensive set at a fundraising auction, the nonprofit’s funders pulled the plug, and canceled the rest of the season. Later that summer the company filed for Bankruptcy. The Theatre of the Living Arts – the first real candidate for Philadelphia’s ambitions to have its own thriving nonprofit regional theater company – had found its own line of non-existence.

However, eight years later, Judd Hirsch and Danny DeVito found themselves together again: in the cast of the hit TV sitcom Taxi (which also featured a bunch of eccentric characters). The success of the show would quickly serve to propel both men to greater stardom. And several decades after that, DeVito (who can be seen elbow-to-elbow with Tom Bissinger in one of the last cast photos ever taken at the Theatre of the Living Arts, lying on his back and wearing sunglasses, would learn that no matter what happens, it's always sunny in Philadelphia.
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So that was an excerpt from my book Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia published by Brookline Books in November of 2024 - I snuck in a little excerpt of Danny DeVito when he appeared on The Jimmy Kimmel Show in 2023 and told stories about working at the TLA and sang from his song in The Line of Least Existence - I hope he, and they, don’t mind my snagging that little snippet. I should also add that the writer of the show, Rosalyn Drexlyer, is still with us! I spoke to her earlier this year and had a lovely conversation and she approved my quoting her lyrics. Anyway, I hope hearing that chapter intrigues you enough to go out and find a copy of Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia and read it - and then once you - let me know what you think of it! I would love to hear your thoughts. Write to me at aithpodcast@gmail.com. I’ll write you back, I promise.

That’s our show for today. We’ll see you again next time as we begin the story of Philly theater in the 1970s. 

Until then, thanks for joining us here - on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.