Excerpts from To Repair the World

Foreword by Jane Alexander

Table of Contents

Prologue

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Excerpt from…

FOREWORD by Jane Alexander

While researching an item for this foreword to Mary Robinson’s splendid oral history of Zelda Fichandler, I thumbed through a lengthy opus written by a graduate student in 1989 about my late husband Edwin Sherin. Out fluttered a small note praising the dissertation as “impressive” and adding “you’re the first person I know about whom someone wrote one!” It was not unlike Zelda to make an appearance from beyond the grave — she has come to me in backstage dressing rooms unbidden or when I wrestled with understanding a role — but the note to Ed was just one of many thousands she wrote to people who came into her long life. She cared. She cared enough to let you know what your work meant to her, that you brought something unique to an endeavor, that in the schematic of theater you mattered. Her handwritten letters were the ones you kept. She changed many lives. Mine was one of them.

Theater as it existed in the USA 70 years ago is not the theater of today nor will it be the theater of tomorrow. Its ephemeral nature is marked by the culture of the times in which it lives and then it fades, taking on another persona just as we actors inhabit new roles. We spin lives out of stardust. It has always been that way and as long as two people are left on earth theater will never die. We tell our tales.

I grew up in the post war 1940s anticipating my parents’ rapturous nights watching Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne or Katherine Cornell at Boston’s Colonial Theater. Later on in the ‘50s, it was Julie Harris in The Lark which they adored. I did too, vicariously. I wanted to be those great ladies of the theater. At 16 I made a list of a dozen plays I wanted to do in my life, all classics, starting with Shaw’s Saint Joan and ending with Ibsen’s Ghosts. I would play them on Broadway and then take them on tour just as they did.

By the time I moved to New York in 1961 that mode of theater was in decline. Broadway was joined by Off Broadway and even Off-Off Broadway where I found my first home in a production of Congreve’s Love for Love, a 17th century classic, with another newcomer named Frank Langella. It was a lot of fun, but I couldn’t make a living that way, nor in community theater or summer stock which I’d also tried.

Off Broadway was alive with exciting new plays but outside New York in the vast landscape of America were a handful of not-for-profit theaters born in the 1950s from the sweat, blood, and tears of visionary women such as Nina Vance in Houston, Margo Jones in Dallas, and Zelda Fichandler in Washington DC.

It was an exciting time to be launching into a life on stage. A perfect convergence in the early ‘60s of will, money, labor, politics, and talent suddenly created a revolution in theater. It was no longer “Broadway and the Road,” as Zelda succinctly put it, but the seeding of theaters across the country which in just a few years employed more artists than Broadway and the Road combined. All of this came about because the Ford Foundation allocated 9 million dollars in 1961 to strengthen the presence of resident theaters in the United States. The remarkable McNeil Lowry was in charge of dispensing the funds which grew to be $287 million before he was done. He, Peter Zeisler of the newly formed Theatre Communications Group (TCG), an alliance of resident theaters, and producer/real estate magnate Roger Stevens who would become the first chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, were the backbone of the movement to decentralize theater in America. It worked. Within five years there were 26 resident /regional theaters and many experimental theater groups flourishing off Broadway. It was a heady time in our history, and I counted myself lucky to be part of it. 

I was performing at one of those regional theaters in 1965, the Charles Playhouse in Boston, having a grand time taking on classic Shaw heroines, poignant Sean O’Casey dramas, and Pinter’s minimalist plays, when a call came from one of the staff at TCG urging me to audition for Saint Joan for Arena Stage’s coming season. Joan was on top of my play list, number one in fact, because I wanted to play her before I was too much older. At 24 I had a good eight years on the real Joan who led armies at 16, but I still felt I understood the mindset of a teenager, even if there were five centuries between us. I too had a strong faith in God, a faith in forces that led me in directions I couldn’t fathom on my own. How had the man at TCG known I wanted to play Joan so much, for example? Fate was always tracking a path.

My audition for Zelda and the associate director Ed Sherin went well. I got the part and was overwhelmed with excitement that I would be a company member of Arena Stage. It was pivotal to Arena’s future that the theater was in Washington DC. Roger Stevens had the ear of President Johnson who in 1965 signed into law the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, appointing Roger as its first chairman; Peter Zeisler was a huge supporter of Zelda and Tom Fichandler and the gorgeous new theater in the round that Harry Weese designed; and Mac Lowry listened with rapt attention to the plans for a company of 30 playing in rotating repertory like the National Theater of Great Britain. The Ford Foundation, joined by the Rockefeller Foundation to decentralize theater across the country, made it possible for Zelda, Tom, and Ed to have the company they had dreamed of complete with instruction in voice, Alexander technique, as well as fencing and swordplay if needed.

My years at Arena were the most thrilling theater experiences I had in my life. Zelda was inspirational in everything she did and said, as you will read in the oral history. Her greatest gift was with words, language, and meaning: her own and others. She changed the face of regional theaters, committing months and sometimes years working with writers, especially Howard Sackler. 

The National Endowment for the Arts gave a $25,000 grant for the production of The Great White Hope at Arena Stage in the mid ‘60s, $5000 of which went to Howard. Zelda worked tirelessly with him, as did Ed who was to direct it. James Earl Jones was cast from outside the company to play the leading role. It was an enormous theatrical endeavor in every way, coming as it did at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in 1968 when Washington DC was often under curfew at night because of unrest. The play was epic at almost four hours long, it employed 63 actors to play over 200 roles, the majority of them Black, and the company rehearsed it while playing other roles at night.

The play was a huge hit, transferring to Broadway later in the year and winning top awards including the Pulitzer Prize. But for Zelda the play’s success meant the loss of a number of us in the company who went with it to Broadway, the loss of her associate director Ed, the loss of the dream they had shared. You will read more about this in the interviews Mary Robinson has compiled in this book, so no spoiler alert.

Suffice it to say that The Great White Hope, the first regional theater play to transfer to Broadway, changed the thinking of regional theaters and Broadway producers forever. They were not only seeding America with theater; they were incubating the blooms for Broadway’s future.

Zelda continued her dream for Arena, for actors and audiences, and later for hundreds of students at New York University. She and I remained friends for life, and I am indebted to her for giving me the opportunity to fulfill my dreams. This book is an important window into one of the most visionary people in theater history. I salute Mary Robinson for giving us Zelda through these pages.