I wish I had had Ms. Fichandler there to remind me of this truth during the ordeal of my first season. It was a lonely time. The nadir came when I discovered that a telemarketer for a local theater was using the Malfi debacle as bait to lure our subscribers away at the same time that Lexie came down with scarlet fever.
Debacle Number Three came in the form of Sophocles’ Antigone, which we produced after Malfi in a nearby smaller theater, The Stage Door (now a nightclub called Ruby Skye). Once again, best-laid plans went awry, and the subscribers were angry before they even walked into the theater. I had announced and fully intended to produce a new production of Euripides’ Hecuba to feature my longtime colleague and mentor Olympia Dukakis in the title role. I commissioned the visionary playwright/translator Timberlake Wertenbaker to create a new version of Hecuba, and she agreed with alacrity, but by the time we dove into the project, we realized it was a massive undertaking, requiring extensive music and choral work that could best be developed in a workshop. Having been forced to announce the work long before it was ready to be presented, I had to take a deep breath and admit that to do it justice, the production needed time to develop. So we substituted Antigone for Hecuba, promising that the latter would emerge in a subsequent season. Indeed, when we finally produced Hecuba in 1995, with an original score by the now Pulitzer Prize–winning composer David Lang sung by Balkan-inspired Bay Area vocal group Kitka and starring a ferocious Olympia, it was one of the triumphs of my tenure at A.C.T.
But at the time, an already shaken audience felt betrayed. Where was Ms. Dukakis when they needed her? Why was Antigone being done instead? A.C.T. had rarely been in the business of commissioning new translations and adaptations of classics, a practice we had employed regularly at CSC, so the audience was less privy to the developmental steps it takes to ready a new version of a classical play for large-scale production and just assumed that we were simply too incompetent to complete the task. I began receiving more mail, this time with the comment, “We don’t like Greek tragedy anyway and don’t wish to see it at A.C.T.” This truly baffled me, because, as far as I could tell, the theater had almost never produced a Greek play. How did our audiences know they would hate what they had rarely seen?
I suspected that their anxiety was tied to their expectation of seeing a declamatory drama performed by people dressed in white sheets, and I was sure that when they saw how immediate and visceral the Greeks could be they would change their minds. To lead my production I cast Elizabeth Peña, a Hispanic actress from Los Angeles, as Antigone; Wendell Pierce, a remarkable African American actor, as Haimon; and Ken Ruta, a powerful A.C.T. veteran, as Kreon. Lang scored the play for Rova Saxophone Quartet, who played it live from the balcony. I set the play in the rubble of a ruined theater and gathered real detritus from the damaged Geary to decorate the stage. One of the most poignant moments of rehearsal happened when Ruta bent down and picked up a piece of one of the gold rosettes that had broken off the damaged proscenium, and memories of all his years at The Geary came flooding back to him. Everything about the set was resonant for those of us who had grown accustomed to the tragic sight of that ruined playhouse: we even had a row of red seats onstage that were crumpled and bent like the seats that had buckled during the quake. We imagined that the chorus of old men, led by the inimitable Gerald Hiken, were aged subscribers whose primary hope was a desire to return to the status quo before the destruction.
Rehearsals for Antigone were a welcome escape from the horrors of the public relations machine that continued to spin out of control in the wake of the Malfi debacle. I relished the complexity of argument in Antigone and the passion of the characters to defend their conflicting views of history. I loved listening to Berkeley Law Professor Robert Post educate the cast and the audience about the difference between natural law (the law of kinship and family) and positive law (the law of government and the machine of justice) and felt that I was finally able to give to my audience something of myself, my own passions and predilections. But once again, when the production opened, a furor erupted. I had always practiced what was then called “nontraditional casting,” and particularly with material as metaphorical as the Greeks, it seemed critical to cast the best talent regardless of race. In the early days, A.C.T.’s actors had been primarily white, but this was an area Ed Hastings worked hard to change, hiring actors of color such as Steven Anthony Jones, Judy Moreland, and Luis Oropeza. So it was with great surprise that I discovered that some of my audience did not seem eager to watch a multiracial cast perform Antigone. To be fair, if the Lend Me a Tenor debacle had not occurred, sensitivities might not have run so high. But in the wake of my decision about Tenor, the casting of Antigone smacked of political correctness to this bewildered and bruised audience, and the letters began to pour in again.
This time, the issue was “authenticity.” It seemed that I was violating the authentic spirit of the play by forcing the audience to see it through the eyes of this very diverse cast. The response led to lengthy discussions about the nature of ancient Greek texts. I pulled out my dog-eared copy of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and argued that even if authenticity were a desirable requirement in the staging of ancient plays, there was nothing to say that the population of fifth-century BCE Athens was all blond and blue-eyed; I showed vase paintings and discussed the enslavement of Persians and the trade presence of Egyptians to bolster my case for an ancient Athens that looked something like the cast of my Antigone. But again, sadly, the production itself was overshadowed by a controversy it was never intended to incite. Years later, after seeing numerous productions of Greek tragedy produced to great success at A.C.T., our audience has come to enjoy them so much that many of them traveled to Los Angeles to see my production of Sophocles’ Elektra (also with Olympia Dukakis) at the Getty Villa in the summer of 2010. But Antigone angered the audience at the time, and drove an even deeper wedge between them and the artists.
It was lucky that the spring of my first season brought some lighter comedies to the fore, or our subscribers would most likely have voted to abandon A.C.T. and leave The Geary ruined forever. March brought Albert Takazauckas’s production of Dinner at Eight, a play I had been intrigued by for many years and thought would beautifully suit what was left of the A.C.T. company. To follow this particular leg of the journey, it is important to understand what had happened to the notion of company in the years following Bill Ball’s demise. The band of forty-plus actors who had been lucky enough to receive seasonal contracts at A.C.T. had diminished over the years as actors left for Los Angeles and New York, and A.C.T.’s ability to sustain long-term contracts waned. By the time of the earthquake, none of the actors had guaranteed contracts anymore, although the attempt was still being made to give many of them as much work per season as possible. Associate Artistic Director Dennis Powers had endless sheets of graph paper on which he charted the needs of the repertoire and the availability of actors, but a strategic attempt to reimagine the company had not yet been made. A few of the truly great actors from A.C.T.’s early days, including Sydney Walker, William Paterson, and Ken Ruta, were still in town and prepared to do the occasional show, but, unsurprisingly, there was a paucity of leading men and women, along with a plethora of less-tested actors who lined up outside my office during my first months on the job to tell me they were ready to play Hamlet and Henry V. Meanwhile, many interesting Bay Area actors such as James Carpenter, Lorri Holt, and Charles Dean had not worked at A.C.T. and were eager to participate, and of course I had my own stable of favorites from New York whom I was interested in including in the mix.
I knew that A.C.T.’s audience had been weaned on great acting, and that it would mean a lot to them if some of their favorites were part of my programming. But I have to admit that in watching Dinner at Eight night after night, I began to feel that the prevailing style of A.C.T. acting was not always going to gel well with my own aesthetic, and I was anxious to inject new blood. The work of the great Sydney Walker, however, was an inspiration: by the time we