While I was in college (a ten year
stint for me) two of my brothers,
Andy and Greg had written a play
The Wailing Mist, derived form an
earlier one-act Andy had written in
high school. They asked me if I
would take on the role of producer
and it went pretty well. Around that
time my brother Steve had
developed a relationship with Vasek
Simek at the Perry Street Theatre.
(Some of the pictures on this page
are of his wonderful clown troup).
My life in the Thee-a-tah
After about ten years it didn't seem to be
getting any easier and Greg and I decided to
shut down the company, but our passion for
plays, new plays in particular, has remained
undimmed. Greg went on to found a theatre in
the San Francisco area and I became active
with Centastage Performance Group in
Boston, which concentrates on new plays by
New England area writers. For eight years I
have been a reader/evaluator of scripts for
New Fest the annual festival of new plays at
Emerson College.
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I challenged the popular concept of a producer. I told them what a real producer was, that his task
was not only to raise money, but as Oscar Hammerstein once said, a producer has to be a "rare
paradoxical genius, hard-headed, soft-hearted, cautious, reckless, a hopeful innocent in fair
weather, a stern pilot in stormy weather, a mathematician who prefers to ignore the laws of
mathematics and trust intuition, an idealist, a realist, a practical dreamer, a sophisticated
gambler, a stage-struck child."
(Max Gordon describes his address at Brown University, 1961)
In the mid 1970's I managed movie
houses, worked as a press agent
and attempted to produce a play.
The pay wasn't much but I worked
in some of the most beautiful
theatres in the country, and doing
so instilled a great appreciation of
theatrical architecture. One of
several that I worked at was the
Gary Theater on Stuart Street in
Boston. Alas, it was torn down to
make way for the state
transportation building.
Eventually we formed the PACT theatre company and over ten years we presented
sixty-seven plays, the whole spectrum from staged readings to full blown productions, mostly
at the Perry Street but also uptown on Theatre Row and other places. Most of the plays were
new plays and we got a kick out of working with the playwrights and helping them perfect
and realize their vision. It was always feast or famine (mostly famine), and we supported our
theatre habit with other jobs. We also fostered investment in a couple of Broadway shows,
thereby earning ourselves a share of them.
In life's endless informal competition for the most misguided venture, try this combination: a first-time
playwright; a cast of relative unknowns; a depressing and largely forgotten incident of history; and a director
born in France and trained in Britain making his U.S. debut with a show about a quintessentially American
subject, baseball. The result would seem foreordained to be disaster. But Out!, the story of eight Chicago
White Sox players who deliberately lost the 1919 World Series for a few thousand dollars a man, is instead an
off-Broadway joy. Poignant, intelligent, funny and morally alert, it shows what the theater can do far better
than TV or movies in dealing with historical material: bring characters alive by letting them explain their
dilemmas directly to the audience.
The lead of William A. Henry III's review of Out! for Time magazine captured in three
sentences what we were trying to accomplish for ten years at the Perry Street:
from Two-Realers
from Waxworks
from Out!