REFLECTIONS ON TLP’S 50TH SEASON:

The Second Decade

By Andrew Bro

OVERVIEW

Fifty years. Years and seasons don’t exactly match; technically our fiftieth anniversary comes in 2012. During the 2011 summer we will be honoring 50 seasons. Either way the record pushes us past any of the great Elizabethan or Jacobean theaters of the 16th and 17th Centuries, and of the stage traditions that gave us Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson.

Marketers and others sometimes describe 15- to 20-year social patterns as “generations.” Right now we’re passing through “Gen Y,” otherwise called “Millenial.” I belong to the Depression or Silent Generation, later transformed as the Greatest Generation, as the result of military heroism and aggressive economic undertaking. (“Greatest” had been earlier applied to the WWI era, but seemed to carry over.) The WWII folks went to college, started businesses, made money, and most of all, had babies. Thus, 1945-1965: the Boomers. That generation extended the dreams of the previous one, and perhaps most of all, its members were consummate consumers. Discretionary and life-style spending boomed for the Boomers, especially as they grasped higher education and cultural options. In the great span of the 20th Century what better time to start a summer theater than 1962?

For those who embrace the entire 50-year arc of playgoing in rural Carroll County, my own captions for the five decades—with a nod to the social historians mentioned earlier—will probably seem arbitrary and confusing, especially in applying play titles for each decade. The plays I select are purely symbolic, and have little to do with intrinsic theatrical value. Most published theater histories and biographies stress relative artistic achievement as opposed to business or commercial venturing, and I will follow that practice. But business does matter, and takes many forms. The great majority of both small and prominent playhouses worldwide operates in a subsidized mode, sustained by means well beyond turnstile ones. Certain markets, such as what we call “Broadway,” and what Londoners might term “West End,” take the risks of for-profit investments. Every leader in this industry would readily attest to the riskiness. Investment return typically entails a long period of post-production revenue, from tours, from movie, TV, recording and publishing rights, from brand marketing. The important American playwright Robert Anderson once noted that Broadway was a wonderful place to make a killing, a terrible place to make a living.

TLP was non-profit from the start, literally and figuratively. Even if we could operate at break-even, we still had a capital debt. And we did not become officially an IRS-approved charitable venture until our third season. Within the roughly $500,000 annual budget TLP’s operations today require about a 15% subsidy from generous individuals, firms and foundations, including State agencies. (New York’s famous Metropolitan Opera attracts nearly a 60% operating subsidy, the $400 seats notwithstanding.) Generosity pertains also to the loyal engagement of volunteers: critical personnel whose services could never be afforded as staffing. Performing arts enterprises, such as live theater, have very few ways to effect cost-cutting measures. New technologies do not cut overhead, and indeed, they expand it, as audiences come to want more spectacles and more services. Live theater by its nature is just plain labor-intensive.

The real question is what drives patrons to pay, volunteer, and give? Ah, that’s where the art comes in.

DECADE ONE, 1962-1970. The Rhinocerous Decade. “We want to be different.”

Theater of the Absurd, as it was called, had become a significant part of the theater world in the 1960s. Ionesco’s play, selected for our first season, was statistically our worst attended production ever. Why was it chosen?

• We didn’t want TLP to look, taste, or smell like any community or school theater nearby. Our seasons would be a mix of theatrical fare, always including titles unlikely to be found elsewhere.
• Our actors were seriously underpaid. So were our directors. New or important works helped us attract talent more interested in the craft than in money. These folks then spread the word that TLP was not your typical “Melody Top” seasonal theater.
• We were located near a college town, and several members of our first board reflected that affiliation. Within our larger audience might be a segment seeking the sort of social satire Rhinocerous represented.
• We were doing one-week stock, for each show five performances only. We could absorb a loss.

A review of first decade titles reveals Miller, Williams, O’Neill, Inge, Shaw, Fry, Albee, Moliere among others. This kind of play selection actually seemed natural, and many in our audience expressed appreciation. The practice drew a line in the sand that protected both art and entertainment, or at least sustained an important hinge.

DECADE TWO, 1971-1980

Pre-Fire: The OLIVER! Years “We want ‘more’.”

Post-Fire: The SHOWBOAT Years “We see a mission.”

This is the decade I will be discussing primarily. For eight of the ten years I was the artistic director. I staged 16 productions, helped launch a children’s theater, and played roles in both the fundraising for and the design of the theater we now occupy. More later.

DECADE THREE, 1981-1990 The OKLAHOMA Decade “We finally make money.”

DECADE FOUR, 1991-2000 The FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Decade “We fine tune.”

DECADE FIVE, 2001-2010 The RAGTIME/CHICGO Decade “We know what could be.”

Within the captions for these decades not everything fits uniformly or precisely. The characterizations have mainly to do with trends.

So, DECADE TWO

Let’s start with this decade’s trauma. Mid-season, 1974, a few hours after the Sunday evening performance of Under the Gaslight, lightning from a thunderstorm struck the wooden playhouse. Rain buffered the sounds of burning from those sleeping in cabins nearby. Not ‘til early daylight did an aroused company member notice. Volunteer fire squads responded quickly, but except for the box office on the front porch, all was gone. Included in the loss were loaned antique furnishings and properties worth many thousands of dollars.

My family and I were staying in a Shimer College dormitory in Mt. Carroll. Around 6:30 AM came loud window-rapping and an anxious message, “The theater’s burning!” Thus started a grim day. Somewhere I have a photo of myself standing with Sheldon Frank, glumly viewing a gaping, charred hole filled with only the metal portions of theater seats, hundreds of them, ghostly sentinels from what had been a hall of joy. I suspect Shel and I may have mumbled things like, “Well, that’s it.” Then a car stopped, and a local physician, Dr. Colli, walked up to hand us a $100 check. “We build it again,” he said. Throughout the day as news spread, others called or appeared with the same encouragement.

Next to “break a leg” the oldest message in theater is “the show must go on.” And on that Monday the old message gradually unfolded. Ralph Hough, then TLP’s board president, finagled the use of the college’s theater. Shel set about recovering records and reservations, and instructing the box office staff. The company gathered with surprising we-can-do-it energy. Nels Anderson schemed a flexible, four-play stage design for the much smaller space we were going to. Bambi Stoll rallied a crew to find and fit 19th Century costumes; Lynn Brakemen recruited electricians, scrounged for and then set lighting instruments; pianos were moved; Lavacek and Laczko trained everyone else to become carpenters/actors. Veteran TLP leading guy Steve Shaffer was in his métier; for him doing theater had always meant both grunt and glory. Normally the theater is dark on Mondays, and the company has a day off. That year in three days, with Gaslight re-blocked, only one performance was missed. We re-opened on Wednesday evening! Happily, all the area media sent signals that the show was indeed going on.

Two messages became clear. We could finish the season as scheduled, even though the smaller space meant financial loss. And we had only 7-weeks to make a case for rebuilding. Randy Smith, husband of board member Mary Jo, came up with an idea for a “radiothon.” His station in Savanna would join with stations in Clinton and Sterling for simultaneous broadcasting and appeals. Board member and banker Gene Teeter offered space for a campaign central office, and second-VP Dorothea Rahn stepped in as full-time fund coordinator. The goal was set roughly at $30,000, a match, we hoped, for what our insurance might net. Broadcasting works only if there’s plenty of media attention, and a number of pledges pre-secured. Dorothea built lists of sponsors and patrons, made calls, dozens of them every day. Finally, on a Sunday afternoon in early August, TLP friends and company alumni gathered at the lakefront site where all the original planning had begun in 1961. Three hours of memories, readings and music were broadcast simultaneously. Pledges came in, including offers for other local fund raisers. For example, local attorney Loren Golden and company member Bob Grossman packaged an evening of piano and guitar jazz at Highland College in Freeport.

And there were gifts-in-kind. I recall the day trucks, graders, and end-loaders showed up in a stream, and the remains of the playhouse were removed, including, I think, my old Fiat, now suitably cremated. One day I put on my fund raising clothes and visited Pete Dillon in Sterling. Pete was CEO of the largest manufacturing firm nearby, a steel mill. I knew he might help because in the theater’s initial season he and his wife, Bobbi, had their first date at a play. Pete’s office was out on the floor of the mill. Wearing hard-hats, we talked. He knew why I was there. Very quickly he offered TLP any steel product the mill made, whatever we needed.

Dorothea’s husband, Max, commandeered a cattle truck headed for Milwaukee, arranged that the return might detour to Sheboygan, where a movie house owner was ready to donate used theater seats, exactly as the first TLP building had negotiated with the Web cinema in Savanna. Max could decide whether we wanted what was being offered. Deciding was the simple part. Everything had to be taken apart, then loaded, then eventually unloaded for storage nearby. Knowing he would be the volunteer engineer to maintain those old seats, I guess he decided the dismantling was training. For years thereafter Max would arrive early for plays with wrenches in his sport coat pockets in case a paying customer might complain.

Eventually we opted for a larger pre-fabricated steel building. The interior design began at meetings between Nels Anderson and myself. We wanted a semi-thrust stage with a large revolve. We wanted light angles at proper shadow-free heights. We wanted wide wing and upstage space. Nels went to work and designed virtually everything now seen at TLP. The revolve was courtesy of Northwestern Steel as conceived and drawn by engineer board member Bob Hess, later Mayor of Stockton. The table turns in both directions and at variable speeds. The gifted steel throughout the theater is abundant, but largely hidden in things like re-rods below and angle framing overhead.

Perhaps too casually Nels and I missed developing a model placement for “pit” orchestras. We knew the acoustics of the structure would never equal the first house with all its wood. But that could be remedied with more time and investment. (Never was, alas. Electronic sound gradually took over.) Altogether, the Second Decade trauma became a triumph. And the best was our knowing we had a very generous, loyal audience.

What happened artistically? The pre-fire first portion of the Second Decade, the OLIVER! Years, was largely a continuity with the First Decade but with a few notable changes and advancements. The 1960s were formationaI years, and only some of what was formed was intentional. To begin with, TLP’s artistic model was largely derived from university and college theater programs. Graduate and undergraduate schools were the fuel for stage talent and for setting standards. The dominant working models were driven by finding ways to mix high performance expectations with severe constraints.

• Our initial production schedule, one that persisted for several years, was one week stock. Streamlined low-budget, fast-turnaround stage readiness ruled: two days for movement blocking, one more day to get “off-book” (all lines memorized), then one more day before the first tech rehearsal. Each show came down following the Sunday evening performance, the next opened on Wednesday. No time for dramaturgic discussions, or for scene and beat analysis, or for building the rich emotional memory connections for character development. Almost no time for pacing the “takes,” for discovering meaningful sub-texts, or for virtually anything the company had been learning in their study elsewhere. The trick lay in finding talent with inherent flexibility, a bent for improvisation, and a willingness to learn from each other. In other words, ensemble ripe. I was often chided for spending too much time talking with actors at auditions. I simply wanted to know who was actually living inside the brief prepared pieces I had witnessed. Had I seen the full potential, or was there capacity to grow?

• Because each season was planned well after the previous one had closed, and the retaining of an artistic director often happened even after actors and staff had been auditioned and hired, TLP sustained its ensemble process in large measure by luring back a corps of “regulars,” those who charmed audiences and never stopped learning from each other. A kind of architecture lay behind this practice, something I called “total theater.” Few company members were specialists, no one a diva or star. All chores—even the daily cleaning of the auditorium—distributed themselves through rotating work calls. The idea behind total theater reinforced an old theater dictum (“No small parts, only small actors”), and called to mind the long history of traveling troupes. But mainly I hoped the practice might inspire ensemble members with confidence and knowledge to go forth and start their own theaters. Invariably, most members were aiming for New York or for prominent teaching posts. But some, a few, just might ensemble and total theater their way into forming regional art houses or seasonal venues, whatever, and keep live theater flourishing.

In the first dozen years TLP welcomed a new artistic director each year, and one season, 1968, saw an improvised management triumvirate when the expected AD failed to show. Fortunately, for two successive years, 1963-64, a first company member, Gary Vitale, held sway. A superb actor—our first resident Equity actor—Gary by his intelligence and exuberance understood total theater and ensemble building. From my standpoint as founder, board president, and sometime stage director, Gary was the first of a notable small group of directors whose work both nourished and protected actors. Vaughn McBride, Bill Raffeld, Libby Appel, Ron Duffy, and a few more saw to it that the summer stock experience itself did not teach bad habits, encourage exaggeration, indulge the kind of self-expression that defeats re-acting, the genius of ensemble work. These directors were rarely dictatorial or removed from the mutual learning process, and they overcame the inherent shortcomings of summer stock by capturing growth capacities and building safety nets. Not infrequently TLP might hire stage directors of some note who regarded their first task (possibly because they were unhappy with the company their play was stuck with) as one of remedial instruction. Way too much time was given during rehearsals to teaching, way too little to the construction of a production. They cheated both the actors and the audience. Happily, I often saw during a run that the ensemble would find its own balancing.

Midway In the 1960s I suspended my teaching at Shimer College to pursue doctoral work at the University of Iowa. The university kindly let me engineer a program combining American intellectual history and theater arts. I hoped to fashion a thesis project around the development of the documentary in film and in its reflections on stage. Along the way I took courses in playwriting, and my focus did shift. Ultimately I was led to New York, to agents and the Dramatists Guild, to Broadway options, the whole heady enterprise. In my gut, however, I missed ensemble and total theater. I also happened on a very early backstage encounter with the folks creating the Steppenwolf Theater in Highland Park. Theirs, I rather grandly decided, was the kind of theater I would like to write for.

While in graduate school and during the triumvirate season (1968), I helped TLP with auditions and then came back to stage The Lady’s not for Burning. A young actor had attended the auditions, later taking a part in the Fry play. Michael Gross was still studying at the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle. He was also headed for the Yale School of Drama. His journey reflected for me the broader changes going on. Theater majors at liberal arts colleges were entering into a range of what became known as professional acting training schools. Universities flew their BFA and MFA banners, and some simply embedded unique two- or three-year programs, no degree attached.

The new crop of very disciplined schools was often disdainful of summer stock. Their young enrollees might succumb to bad stage habits, slapdash direction, and frivolous scripts that their training couldn’t later overcome. Such schools were often wary when I came calling with summer jobs. Occasionally my only way through was to lure a professor with a directing shot. So, when I stepped in as TLP’s artistic director in 1971, I decided our company would occasionally gather to try some acting exercises on listening and on trust, using mostly ones Peter Brook had devised. Because the season included three surefire musicals (The Fantasticks, Fiddler on the Roof, Hello Dolly!), the bills would be paid; therefore, I thought, let’s stretch. Furthermore, I had met and hired the first of a notable group that would come from Oakland University in Michigan. The president of that school had imported intact the complete faculty of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Phil Mallet was an early product. He and his wife acted in most of the 1971 shows, then Phil stayed on as artistic director for the 1972 season, the only TLP season to feature a Shakespeare production. Phil ended the long and probably unfortunate history of not pre-casting. The subsequent trail of RADA actors he helped me find included Robert Grossman, Jayne Houdyshell, and Jim Richards, plus a gifted costume designer, Martha Ferrara. I began to sense that our ensemble companies were in fact priming for professional careers. Indeed, a new mission statement formed during my subsequent audition processes. (The old one about providing live theater for rural audiences was purely marketing, and not very defining.) Now, “For theater artists we are the best stage experience between advanced study and professional launch.” Something to shoot for, and in fact deliver.

During the year before the 1972 season I had been approached by a senior VP of the Deere Company in Moline. He had a vision for using the outstanding stage space at the Deere headquarters as platform for starting a professional regional theater. LORT (League of Regional Theaters) companies had been planted in many cities, and he himself had been instrumental in founding the Seattle Rep. He felt the Quad Cities needed more cultural depth to keep attracting top business talent. He agreed to fund a study process. I enlisted a small team of citizens, and together we visited nine regional theaters, from St. Louis to Louisville to New England. I chartered aircraft, we met at length with staffs, attended rehearsals and performances. By mid-summer, 1972, we drafted and submitted a report and a plan, one that also embraced the senior theater faculty in Iowa City. The VP thought he had a lock on major venture funding. Alas, the donor’s sudden death dashed the project, and the VP moved on. But I learned a great deal.

Among other things I had met with masters of subscription sales. We knew how to build performance ensembles, but our audiences still thought summer stock meant they could pick one or two shows, that was plenty. For TLP to work we had to find ways for locking in steady committed attendance, not whim attendance. Two options: pick funny, not-to-miss hit shows, or sell the whole package within which a couple of hits could be included. This essential sales dance continued for many years. Continues still.

The symbolic pre-fire play for me was Oliver!, 1973. We were now air-conditioned, the restaurant across the way was expanding, and through industry connections we had greatly improved our lighting capability. I began thinking like Oliver Twist pleading with the Beadle, “Please, sir, I want some more.” Wanting more is hubris, of course. But the potentiality I felt about TLP was growing. Best of all, with Oliver! we took a chance: a three-week run! And it worked! Bill Raffeld had done his magic, Jim Sherman (that’s right, the later Beau Jeste author) artfully Dodged, Bob Grossman put a Sykes scare into a large gaggle of orphan kids, Don Stribling pick-pocketed all around. With three weeks we could begin the deeper crafting we rarely ever had time for. The ’73 season seemed to have a fit. I got to stage the Brian Friel play Philadelphia, Here I Come with Steve Shaffer (about whom I will say much more later) cast in a winning tragi-comic role. Steve was stretching, even though the hijinks came back buoyantly as Richard Lee in 1776.

Then, hubris hit hard in 1974. If Oliver! could do three weeks, why not Damn Yankees? We vended popcorn in the aisles, Jane Weissmiller sang a reverberated “Star Spangled Banner,” a pre-show dugout interview segment had local merchants sponsoring--all the baseball hoopla we could conjure, building toward husky guys harmonizing “You Gotta Have Heart,” it should have worked. It came close. The audience thinned badly in the third week.

More hubris for the next show, the 19th Century sentimental who’ll-pay-the-mortgage melodrama, Under the Gaslight. Large cast, complicated scene changes, expensive costumes. Then midway, an electrical storm.

Surely the greatest theater of the post-fire portion of the 1974 season was the animus of the company reclaiming its stage. Shimer College’s Karyn Kupcinet Theater was small and not air conditioned. But everyone rallied for the three-and-a-half remaining productions. The houses were packed, as if the community was telling us we want you. Were there enough saying those words that we might finally have a carry-through audience, one that turned out for a season, not just select shows?

Stephen Sondheim’s Company was ensemble work at its best. The final show would have seen an average draw in the now-burnt theater. But Libby Appel returned to stage And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, Jayne Houdyshell glowed, and the place was packed. TLP had one more summer of Libby Appel direction, before she went on to become the artistic director of the renowned Oregon Shakespeare. And Jayne, bless her heart, had fallen in love with Steve Shaffer.

Fortunately, during the off-season, 1974-75, Sheldon Frank also glowed. Shel found the pre-fabricated metal building firm near Freeport that fashioned the new structure we needed. Shel also settled the insurance claims, and cornered the credit lines to absorb the revenue losses of the fire season. Everyone shifted to a fund-raising mode. What surprises me in retrospect is that after twelve seasons and a monster fire, TLP’s ticket prices remained at $3.25, only a dollar more than they were in 1962.

From my standpoint the best part of preparing for the 1975 season was landing as tech director an early (and local) TLP hand, LeRoy Stoner, fresh from his MA program at Indiana University. Like Steve Shaffer and Nels Anderson, LeRoy was total theater to his bone. He could build, design, manage everything backstage and everything in the various contracting orbits, and then bring a tenor voice to an occasional character role. And as a Chadwick native, he knew where local resources were.

Birthing a new theater felt like birthing a new TLP. The space and the accoutrements seemed to say bigger-and-better. Indeed, actors had to project bigger and better, the acoustics were very damping. To my surprise we were able to install a woodland rehearsal pad that replicated in scale the new stage. With the exception of The Mikado we slated an all-American season, if one overlooked that the opening show was based by Rodgers and Hammerstein on a Hungarian original. Okay, America itself is mixed. As word went out about the new playhouse, a broader theater community took notice. Three times in 1975 representatives from the Actors Equity union in Chicago came to talk with me. It was tempting to try modeling a plan, but at $3.25 a seat we were a long way from opting.

Carousel. Because we understood that opening a new theater on time just might mean pressured moments on- and off-stage, we asked Nels for a set design that could capture the large sweep of our new stage, yet keep the economy of a New England village in tone. Nels put the new turntable to use, and the balletic, fantasy moments had space to unfold. Martha Dodds, later LeRoy’s wife, brought her huge operatic voice to “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” And an actor I discovered while conducting a workshop at the University of Iowa played Billy Bigelow. Terry Quinn’s baritone was not operatic, but he was very much a leading man. Terry spent parts of three seasons with us, then went on to be featured in film and television as Terry O’Quinn.

My first chance at our thrust stage was with the 1929 sardonic newspaper comedy The Front Page. Large male cast, multi-layered set (one that could launch a terrified actress into a 12-foot drop), and the famous roll-top desk--Nels both acted and designed. The sight lines were perfect. And I began to muse upon a season-within-a-season. Why not two plays in repertory for four weeks? We could bill it as a celebration of the Golden Age of American Theater, everything pre-1950. Some LORT theaters were doing rep. Ours would be mini-rep. The trick had to be a correlated design armature, and I could see that Nels had found it, with or without our turntable.

I learned recently that Ko-Ko in The Mikado was the last role Nels ever tackled in his long career as designer and university professor. Perhaps we burned him out. Fortunately we had yet a few more design seasons for viewing his sculpted use of the TLP space.

The final 1975 musical was the theater tribute, Gypsy. While a fine showcase for young actors/dancers, it is essentially a study for the mature actress doing Rose. Libby Appel returned to direct Patricia Ryan, the college instructor from Ohio about to move to Stanford. Pat gave an extremely nuanced performance, one many in our audiences may not have caught. Her character was a mother at work, not just a frustrated performer/impresario/”stage mother.” Alas, about the only audience to cheer a mother are her children, and if her job is done right, they have to leave. Vaudeville was a metaphor for here today, gone tomorrow. Vaudeville was also a symbol for Rose’s failed marriage, as well as her moment in the sun.

Steve Shaffer and Jayne Houdyshell had married and found summer work elsewhere, but did return for what was originally TLP’s final 1975 show, a romantic comedy. Twice more in the 1970s they would close seasons with a kind of Lunt/Fontanne aplomb. My directing times with them were always jewel days. Some playwrights and fiction authors say they really don’t have to write, their characters do the work. That’s Steve and Jayne.

But wait, there’s more. Back in 1968, again the triumvirate season, I asked an Iowa graduate school buddy to direct the first musical of that season, Brigadoon. After receiving his Iowa degree Ed Berkeley returned to his native New York City, and very quickly became a favorite of Joe Papp. Ed was directing Shakespeare in Central Park, directing at Lincoln Center, directing on Broadway and off-, and working also at noted summer stock theaters. In 1975 he and I were invited to be guest critics for the annual Iowa Playwrights’ Festival. On that occasion we both became acquainted with Terry Quinn. I had roles for Terry at TLP, but mid-summer Ed called from the Williamstown Theater in Massachusetts, he needed Terry, and working at Williamstown would garner an Equity card for Terry. Apparently Ed and Terry felt they owed me one, and called to say that if we could add one more show to our season, they were ready to team with Steve Shaffer in a production of Sleuth. We could, and they did.

This wasn’t our first post-season offering. Actors are always looking for work, and in 1971 Phil Mallet had suggested two additional weeks for Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. It was almost October before all of us departed the playhouse. We would repeat the practice again in 1978.

We come now to the Bi-Centennial Season, 1976. Our only salute directly to the American Revolution was Shaw’s play, The Devil’s Disciple, perhaps most notable for introducing actor Jim Viront to TLP audiences. Jim was what some of us might call a classic journeyman character actor, someone who can always fill secondary roles. Indeed, Jim continues today working a trail of California theaters, doing TV, commercials, an occasional bit role in film, making a living. However, at TLP in 1976 Jim was the consummate social director.

One night during the run of the opening show, Godspell, theatergoers heard fire sirens, and emerged at intermission with instruction to move their parked cars immediately. The cause became evident immediately; the Timber Lake restaurant across the street was ablaze. That restaurant had become a popular dining site, and also provided our theater company with its meals. In short order we relocated our food service to the Shimer College dining hall in Mt. Carroll, at the time serving a small group of summer school students. Almost immediately Jim Viront discovered a volleyball arrangement in the quadrangle, and therein began two decades of dedicated company diversion, mostly as exercise following our early dinners. I wheedled a ball and a net from a school principal on our board, and soon Jim had teams, jerseys, tournaments. This was not exactly the ensemble I was seeking, but it was good exercise and it built coed fun that combined the “techies” and the actors. In our new theater specialization had been slowly replacing total theater.

The downside of volleyball was the occasional injury, plus the impression that summer theater was actually summer camp and all the actors campers. Jim Viront didn’t let up. He fashioned Computer Date Night around a complicated and silly algorithm at a time when most folks had never seen a computer. He instigated Mister Timber Lake, a faux personality and beauty contest, week-long, funny, but ultimately honoring a gentleman whose company presence was admired. That min-festival persisted about a dozen seasons. Randy Rogers was the first Mister Timber Lake. Actor and choreographer, Randy died way prematurely in the 1980s, leaving instructions that his ashes be spread at Timber Lake. They were.

1976 had several stage highlights. Steve Shaffer fashioned a totally sincere and physically fluid con man as Harold Hill in The Music Man. More Bing Crosby than Robert Preston, Steve’s character really liked selling, liked his product, liked his hide-bound Iowa customers. The on-stage brass band worked, and the barbershop quartet had three tenors!

I hired as actor and stage director a college professor I knew to be at his core committed to the Stanislavsky “method acting” approach. John Calhoun worked with us two seasons, coming back in 1978. I frankly wanted to see what could be done in a two-week rehearsal period, with actors also performing in the evenings. The perfect showcase for John’s skills would be William Inge’s Picnic.

Picnic is a play with characters driven by ambivalences and by a general desire to escape, either away or into their past. I asked one of our board members, Dorothea Rahn, to play a neighbor to the central family, to be the young middle-aged woman who alerted the mother of two daughters that trouble was brewing because a virile young man had entered the scene. Dorothea studied acting in college, she had appeared in several TLP musical productions. She always seemed to find her character in context, by hearing what other actors were giving her and what the director seemed to be after. Now she had to find her character inside herself. And she did! Over the years Dorothea undertook many official TLP board roles, but I still feel Picnic was the transforming one, more important than the others in her career.

The 1976 season was made complete for me by offering a first, the original staging of a new work, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. The playwright, Lee Blessing, came from dual degrees at Iowa’s famed Writers Workshop and from the university’s playwriting program. The play eventually won top honors at the American College Theater Festival at the Kennedy Center, and launched Lee into a distinguished career. A Broadway production of A Walk in the Woods received a Tony nomination. Lee joined our company for much of the 1977 season, and later plays of his were slated in the 1980s.

In the fall of 1976 I spent a few weeks in England, seeing theater and visiting drama schools. I could tell my interest was being drawn increasingly toward professional options, but not sure whether union models could ever work at TLP. Gradually, jobbing would replace ensemble. Actors would be brought in for key roles, rarely stay more than a show or two. Biggest issue for TLP was cost. Again, Actors Equity came calling. We talked about forming a company within a company, but issues were complex. And the next season was looming.

1977 was highlighted by a new arrival, a near tragic loss, and the continued luminosity of Jayne Houdyshell. Also included the large Don Mackay barn, moved in and retrofitted as our dining hall and flex Green Room.

I added a spring audition in Des Moines, not far from where I lived. Several actors showed, none impressed, until the last fellow, who came with his accompanist. Richard Choate needed all the musical help he could get. His acting audition was indifferent, but the interview afterwards blew me away. A bright guy, infinitely personable, quick wit, brilliant at improvisation, I scribbled on his resume “gifted utility infielder.”

Final casting for each season usually came down to a scene where piles of resumes were strewn about a floor, that year at Dorothea Rahn’s home. Bill Raffeld was present, advocating one or two of his students, and no doubt hoping to cover the casting for the shows he would be directing. Richard Choate’s face moved from pile to pile. “No,” I said, “he can’t dance or sing, but his delivery and timing are impeccable.” Bill wondered whether he might come on board even if not originally cast in anything. “Let’s try,” I said. “Besides, his accompanist is terrific.”

Richard wound up being cast in every show of the season, including the lead in My Three Angels. His opportunities were helped by a line-up of plays needing men. But we all came to know that he would be one of our “regulars.” I cherished his writing instincts, and was determined to get him into the playwriting program at the University of Iowa. I also knew he would interact well with Steve Shaffer, whom we would have that summer in the lead for a single show only, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Not to be. A week before Cuckoo’s Nest rehearsals were to start, Steve was nearly killed in an auto accident. Late at night he had to crawl several hundred feet from where his car was thrown into a stream ditch. I saw him the next day in a hospital. He was stitched, cast bound, intravenously fed, and probably pain-drugged as well. Somehow a sly smile greeted me. I kept thinking, if Babe Ruth made Yankee Stadium, here’s the guy who made TLP. Thank God we would get more of him.

In theater circles somebody always knows somebody, and the play was successfully re-cast and performed. And when we lost release rights for the show originally slated for the final slot, I turned a Steve-sympathy call from Terry Quinn into an opportunity. Would he come back for the lead in A Thousand Clowns, a play we decided to reprise from an earlier production in 1968? Yes, he would. Now, could I get Steve healthy enough to direct that production? With crutches and careful moves, yes. And who could I get to play Chuckles the Clown? Who else: Richard Choate.

Jayne sparkled in two very diverse musical leads: Miss Tweed (Agatha Christie) in Something’s Afoot and Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. No one could ever rain on her parade. Jayne was a classically-trained actress, very hard working, and maybe the most ensemble-tuned talent I would encounter. In every show of hers I saw, and many I directed, her acting always released the gestalt of whatever scene she was in, the big picture everyone rushed to help build. She never made intellectual or emotional demands, she simply unfolded to the next level. When she had a solo or signature scene, actors from backstage or from out-of-doors came to watch. A Master Class. Years later, after she and Steve were divorced and she was out on the LORT circuit, I would meet performers who had worked with Jayne. Invariably I would hear, “She taught me more about acting than anyone.” And I knew she hadn’t said a word.

During the run of Camelot that summer a New York producer friend of my former agent called to see whether TLP might be a way-out-of-town showcase for a new small musical being readied. I invited his team to come take a look. They were hoping to mount a production of a spoof melodrama loosely based on the play Deadwood Dick. They auditioned their plot and sang numbers using Dorothea’s piano and living room. I don’t think the company they saw in 1977 was the one they wanted. But a nice favor did result. More later.

Could be that 1978 was for me the most completely satisfying season of the Second Decade. To begin with, my wife, Lu, and I elected to park a 35 ft. RV trailer near the Don Mackay barn, and Don agreed to provide both LeRoy and myself with full hook-up capacities. Our units sat side-by-side, and we had cocktail signals when appropriate. Don even slid a cabin into the woods nearby as a studio for Lu to use.

Early on Richard Choate’s accompanist came aboard. Ross Lowe was born to make musical theater. For years we had to rely on volunteer instrumentalists for our pit orchestras. They needed to be recruited, rehearsed, made to feel special, helped to overcome score challenges. Ross was a teacher and all-around good guy. He also worked with choruses, often with members recruited locally, dealing with stage fright as well as pitch. He could quietly transpose numbers for soloists, also get them to lock their characters inside the lyrics. And, when needed, he could be a straight man to Richard Choate’s Abbott-and-Costello “Who’s on First?” routine, making everyone relax. Somehow Ross could sit at a piano in the pit (usually backstage) yet simultaneously be out front hearing the whole thing.

A Danny Kaye musical started us off, Two by Two, about Noah and his family. Strong voices were heard immediately, including the return (from 1976) of operatic tenor Robert Smith. We were stacking the deck for what would be coming in Showboat. Little did we know then that for 3 years in the 1980s Bob would be El Gallo in the New York production of The Fantasticks.

Another highly trained tenor, and a Bill Raffeld student, John Fabian was numbered among Noah’s sons. Dawn Luchese, a dramatic soprano from Indiana University’s voice program, joined the cast. A Goodman School actor, Jeff Steele, played Noah, then took off for an Equity theater in Michigan.

John Calhoun came back to direct the next show, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolias, a perfect play for John’s sub-text method instincts. And surprise, we had in the cast TLP’s first trained African-American actor, Harold Eley. We had needed Black actors in earlier seasons, especially the first one, when we slated Finian’s Rainbow. But we settled then for blackface, and that only a year before Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “Dream” speech. But this summer we were featuring “Ol’ Man River,” and Harold was perfect.

Reluctantly, I had cast a new actor with a strong voice to tackle some of the parts a Steve Shaffer might play. My memory is that Steve was trying to make money in a non-theater capacity elsewhere, while Jayne stepped into TLP roles. But when my new guy became ill, a call to Steve worked. He was the quintessential Cap’n Andy, especially in the riff where he played several characters simultaneously. Show by show that summer we were able to rebuild Steve’s presence, including a directing role for The Sunshine Boys. Steve knew I had contractual issues, but he flexed. I felt Showboat was our coming-of-age, post-fire production, symbolic of our location near the Great River and the great city only a hundred miles east. It was another of the American Golden Age shows.

I posed a big challenge for John Calhoun. I asked him to direct Vanities, a show about three young women, all cheerleaders in the first act. I had cast three women who had never been cheerleaders, had never been to a slumber party. I didn’t tell John that the playwright once said he wrote the play without any character subtexts, the actresses could be nothing but themselves. They would either make their way into each other’s lives, or they wouldn’t. I think the performances worked in spite of John’s struggle, or perhaps because of it. Not long before the show’s opening our propsmistress, whom I adored, took me aside for two hours to counsel and then demand the firing of this director, who was belittling his cast. I told her that for taking me on she would always have a job at TLP, and that John might never return. But for now John was free to deliver the artistic goods. I felt the principle was right, yet I couldn’t tell her I had given him a task largely impossible in his MO. At one point he had asked me for advice, and my answers must have seemed trivial, largely about blocking.

Summer stock can be relentless in its pace and pressures. So, when two weeks of Neil Simon came along, Steve Shaffer directing, Richard Choate and David Kwiat playing aged Jewish vaudevillians, the world finally seemed settled, even though at the same time the Magic Owl was in soaring, literally. Peter Pan, our daytime children’s offering, entailed flight rigging over the part of the stage available when the revolve would conceal the set for The Sunshine Boys. A couple of actors from Colorado came in to engineer a brave Barrie production, all the while occupying support roles in other shows.

Next, Bill Raffeld put together the complex layering of A Little Night Music. The show has a chorus quartet, requiring all good voices. I recalled the actor who had been ill earlier, suggesting he might have a shot for a lead role in the following play. Darlene Williams, Bill’s Chicago student with the great voice, wanted a different role in the musical. I assured her she had made her case as an actress, and we would try for a casting line in the next season. But we needed her in the quartet. Bob Smith and Jayne Houdyshell played the leads, sang “Send in the Clowns,” a fine production, but once more Stephen Sondheim seemed largely to mystify our audiences.

We moved on to something not at all mysterious, The Man Who Came to Dinner. Finally, I was getting a directing shot in this all-star summer, and again doing an American Golden Age classic by Kaufman and Hart. A big cast, populated mostly by character analogues to the members of the Algonquin Roundtable, the show gave nearly everyone in the company a role. My effort to use the actor from the Sondheim chorus quartet failed. Telling him he was going overboard in caricaturing the lead character, he simply would not evince comic intelligence, and I couldn’t cover for him. In the background I could see Bill Raffeld praying, please, Andy, don’t lose him for the quartet. The actor was gracious, he stayed. At an opening night party he hugged everyone, including Steve Shaffer, who had returned to play the Alexander Wolcott role.

Others returned. The actress from 1977 who played Guinevere in Camelot came back for a small role. Noah—Jeff Steele, from Michigan—returned to do a version, with song, of Noel Coward. Tom Beall gave me a set to die for, though never understood why I wanted a prominent old Philco radio console. And Choate capped the final act with a zany but reasonable approximation of Harpo Marx. The Man Who Came to Dinner was to have been our final show, just before a closing on Labor Day with what had become an annual retire-the-mortgage one-night variety show. But remember Deadwood Dick? From 1977?

Turned out that for courtesies to that New York producer we had been given advance area rights to a very popular two-character romantic comedy, Same Time, Next Year. We had Steve and Jayne, and we added a three-week Thursday through Sunday run. Directing the show helped make that the happiest September of my TLP life. I should have stopped there.

1979: probably the most difficult season of the decade. The core difficulty lay in not having LeRoy. He had an opportunity to earn more money and live at his home near where he was teaching at Indiana State University. Four great summers of shared management with him, relying on his tech skills, incorporating as much as possible his lighting specialization, capturing now and then his trained tenor voice for a role, talking about a theater somewhere we might someday devise, I was loath to let all that go.

Sorry also that I could get Bill Raffeld only briefly that summer. He did, however, hold my hand in the rough early going. I have mentioned Bill several times, and I should say more. LeRoy and I remarked many times that if we could get our theater, if we could get any theater, Bill would be the first hire whatever the cost. This is a generous, charming, hugely theater-savvy man. And he could see my anguish when the new tech director I thought was hired for 1979 failed to materialize. Such guys, we knew, could get well-paying, eight-hour-day jobs in construction, and that guy did.

Carolyn Beck, from my alma mater, Denison University, our director of Godspell from 1976, returned to do another Steven Schwartz opening musical, Pippin. A tough opener. The large rehearsal pad was not covered in those days, and late spring rains bedeviled. I began to feel we were right back to the total theater context where we had started in 1962. Everyone had to do everything. Three or four surprising personalities pitched in.

First, the board had decided to retain a resident general manager, a philosopher and former Shimer College instructor, Bob Richardson. He was on hand every day to manage cash flow, and to keep the front-of-house activity sane. He had a PhD in aesthetics from Yale, and I cherished every conversation we could fit in. Best of all, he came backstage just when we needed an extra back backstage, and he stayed late for take-down and tech rehearsal.

Secondly, John Auten, a teacher and school counselor from Wisconsin, had successfully auditioned for Charlemagne in Pippin. John was an all-around father figure for the company. I have no doubt a good many morale problems were solved without my ever hearing of them.

Next, a volunteer design apprentice showed up. I had always resisted the idea of summer theater apprentices. Remember total theater? Well, I’m talking now about the oldest daughter of our board treasurer, Sheldon Frank. A University of Wisconsin graduate, Lisa Frank came to work every day with passion. Whenever I spotted her, I thought, hey, we’re gonna make it. Lisa wanted to learn scenic arts from our staff, and she wasn’t alarmed by all the hidden mess that makes theaters work. Why had it taken us so long to capture her?

Finally, Sheila Brunner. This is the Girl Friday from central casting, the one that keeps a front office humming. She and Kris Rahn in the box office gradually became the “face” of the theater for much of our public.

By the time we reached Annie Get Your Gun, our third show, I think the company was exhausted. Perhaps it was the pairing of the leads that rejuvenated. A six foot three inch Brooks Gardener as Frank and a five foot three inch Cassie Swanson as Annie. (Actually about the sizes of the real Annie Oakley and Frank Butler, her eventual husband.) Bill had mastered the necessary early tension between them, and we cheered for them to close the space. I felt the company was heartfelt in singing “No Business Like Show Business.”

My directing turn was next, a kind of tribute show for me. Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution had been the college offering from early 1960, the one where I met Don Mackay and began discussing summer theater. I wanted to structure this three act play as two acts, fearing suspense for the identity trick wouldn’t hold for an intermission. But the change forced me to press a fine Texas actor, Brian Hinson, into making character climaxes I’m sure he would have preferred to develop more slowly. I was deeply grateful he caught the spirit.

Perhaps the best payoff was the backdoor selection of our durable choreographer to direct Anything Goes. My initial choice had to cancel late in the game, next choice was eager to work, but demanded too much money. I became aware that Randy Rogers advocates were stopping frequently at my trailer. I didn’t have Bill around to reassure me, but after talking with Ross Lowe, our music director, I finally thought, why not? And Randy didn’t let me down. Happily, Richard Choate returned to play Moonface Martin. Darleen Williams from the 1978 company had her star turn as Reno Sweeney. The stage rocked with tap dancing. I think Cole Porter would have giggled.

One more play closed the season. By then I had announced my departure, a sabbatical, or whatever. The company gave me a super going-to-England gift during the one-night variety show. I felt certain the board would hire Bill Raffeld to be the next artistic director, and they did, for two seasons. I had a brief teaching post waiting for me in England, and I also had a fund counsel job that would eventually get me to Milwaukee, where LeRoy and I could further scheme our Equity dinner theater, something along the model of what first company member Gary Gisselman had achieved near Minneapolis. Little did I know that my new career would become museums, not performing arts.

Let me close here by saying a few more words about Steve Shaffer, who continues to work steadily in the Minneapolis area. Steve came unauditioned to TLP in 1965 fresh from a Cedar Rapids high school. For room and board he hung around. Before the summer was out, he played a lead. Steve returned for a few more summers and several major roles, until joining the Navy and then starting college at the University of Northern Iowa. He completed his BA, and kept participating in TLP seasons.

What kind of actor is he? Most theater-goers who have seen him would say, “Instantly and brilliantly comedic.” That simply doesn’t do justice to his range, only to his reputation. In 1971 I was directing the comedy Any Wednesday. I had an important but small scene indicated for a bar. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of the setting; TLP designers who know me know how much I dislike a stage with wagon platforms and such. I decided that lighting and a properly costumed bartender pushing in a well-stocked cart would do. Steve wasn’t cast otherwise, so I asked him to try a vest and a bow tie. Everything stopped. None in the cast would proceed knowing Steve was upstage of them. “I’ll turn him around,” Steve offered, “have him face upstage.” No way, they insisted, even his behind is funny.

Now Steve could do physical comedy, and on occasion slipped into it. TLP’s wide stage forces kinetic acting, and the generally lighter fare encourages mugging, grimacing and what is called “over-acting.” But for Steve all comedy came from character. Over the years I learned that his heroes were guys like Tim Conway and Steve Landesberg, deadpans. As a young guy Steve was athletic, could move and dance, and was possessed of a fine baritone voice. He tried to find the “likeable” in every character he played, and doing “heavies” was not easy for him. He had a kind of third ear, could hear an audience breathe. But mainly he listened to other actors, he connected.

Now all that said, we come to 1986, what I regard as a pivotal season for TLP. After Raffeld’s two summers in that decade, TLP began again to have annual turnover in artistic management. In 1986 Sheldon Frank, board president, asked whether I thought Steve could manage the playhouse. I don’t know, I‘ll go talk with him. By then Steve was an Equity actor with the Old Creamery company in Iowa. Remarried, father of a son, expecting another child, Steve was intrigued. He seemed already in touch with his network of theater buddies.

The season Steve put together was almost pure comedy, some with music. His production of Oklahoma, our second version, is my symbolic pick for the Third Decade. (Should be clear by now how much I admire America’s pre-1950 Golden Age.) I think for Steve the magic of theater resided in exuberantly transporting an audience into incongruity, into surprise-upon-surprise, into the plot forms with guaranteed eventual resolutions driven by comedic energy, into honestly derived laughter—character-built, that was the point of summer stock. Perhaps it’s no surprise, for the first time in 26 seasons TLP produced a $10,000 operations surplus.

For that season Steve hired an actor from the fire-fated 1974 season, Jim Zvanut. I suspect the board very much wanted Steve back for another year, but when he demurred, Jim was available. At the time Jim was teaching theater at Denison University, same place where all my earliest notions of summer stock started. For eight seasons Jim put Steve’s formulas to work, here and there interspersing more serious theater, but demanding character-focus throughout. (Thoughtfully, at some point he introduced TLP audiences to one of his students, Jennifer Garner.)

I’m not sure what was the watershed production of the Fourth Decade. I picked Fiddler, but I never saw it. Maybe it was Love Letters, the show Michael Gross came back to share with us.

In the Fifth Decade two shows stood out: Ragtime and Chicago. Both said that for a small fraction of the Chicago price, you could attend great musical theater. We began to see what could be. Mature casting, strong voices, and in Chicago’s case, super technical and lighting achievement. That TLP is now largely a showcase for musical production is unmistakable. At times I ponder whether I’m aboard a cruise ship or in a theme park, and I do groan over the electronic sound. But some high level values are in play, and clearly the actors enjoy being where they are.

Jim Beaudry, current artistic director, keeps an inventive choreography at work, and he elicits a rich visual embrace of the deep sculptural space. Best of all, he can craft a season, like unfolding all the movements of a symphony. Any seasonal theater should be an unfolding, and not just here and there a hit play. The experience should be more of a beckoning, watching a company grow. Jim will need the board’s willingness to grow, so that an artistic achievement drives the venture. Right now, for example, the non-musicals have a ways to go.

The children’s theater appears to thrive, as do the various youth and playwriting workshops Brad Lyons fashioned.

A big step was taken when the board hired year-around general management, and staffers like today’s Melissa Parsons can slowly wean board members from long-standing micro-managing practices. Audiences, perhaps budget-conscious, are giving signs of finally distributing their theater-going across a season. Another 50 years seem plausible. My guess today is that actors will become the 4-D features within a 3-D electronic production environment. Who will write the scripts? Poets and musicians, and narrative structures will surely change. We’ll be well past even Generation Z .

Indeed, narrative theater, that is, plays adapted from other sources, such as fiction, is where I tried to go when LeRoy and I couldn’t gather the forces for our dinner theater in Milwaukee. This form would have extended my documentary scholarship of years ago. Perhaps I will get to start one more theater. Pursuing that dream now would be unlikely, especially while I’m committed to building a major museum devoted to language. Instead of walking out singing the hit tunes, I’d like museum-goers to exit speaking in a second tongue. Stay tuned.


Meanwhile, please let me know all the theaters you know that have been started by TLP alumni.

Andy Bro
February, 2011