As Mother's Day approaches, I've been thinking quite a bit about the importance of family. My heritage as a descendant of French and German immigrants, as a woman and as an American has a significant influence on my development as a playwright. More directly, the places I've lived and worked have shaped my craft in ways I may never fully understand. With the power of origins and geography in mind, I'd like to talk a bit about theatrical heritage on the American stage.
I believe there's something transformative about a person's first real job experience. No matter how much we're taught or trained, it's that first experience of actually completing a task that cements into our minds the lesson of how (or how not) to do it in the future. For most actors and playwrights that first real job is usually in a small local theater, and when that theater is woven into the fabric of a dynamic acting community it can make the difference between success and failure for a new artist. In my current hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, such a community has been the origin of more than a few important people in the theatre world.
The Shubert Theater, for example, is a historic house that boasts an impressive roster of actors who've made names for themselves in the history books. Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and Gene Kelly are listed among the Shubert's earlier alumni, while Robert Redford, Shirley MacLaine, Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, Liza Minnelli, and John Travolta can also trace their careers to Shubert productions. Right in the center of downtown New Haven, the Shubert was the early 20th Century's premier pre-Broadway production house for every major play and musical.
The younger and more ambitious Long Wharf Theatre contributes to New Haven's theater scene by producing a wide variety of limited-run shows from solo artist musical cabarets to Shakesperean revivals. In its short history, Long Wharf has already received many of the industry's highest accolades and proudly calls Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit its own native production.
Then, of course, there's the Yale Repertory Theatre. Committed, in its own words, to creating "bold new works that astonish the mind, challenge the heart, and delight the senses", the Rep is the Yale School of Drama's mainstream production house. World premieres, Pulitzers, Tony Awards and critical acclaim are part and parcel of the Yale Rep's teaching experience.
Finally, there's the Yale School of Drama's underground dinner theater, the Yale Cabaret. It's entirely student-run and always puts on the most experimental, hit-or-miss, wonderfully inventive, wildly varied, sometimes astonishingly brilliant jam-packed season of any theatre on the East Coast. Unlike the aforementioned houses, the Yale Cabaret is the only theater in New Haven that is closed to outside actors. Among the storied alums of Yale who made it to the big-time, the best will say they learned their art at the Cabaret. Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett and Tony Shaloub, among others, point to it as their starting point.
So how do these four theaters impact the broader scope of American theatrics?
Simply by virtue of their existence within the same space and time, New Haven's local theaters have built a synergy between one another that challenges and reinvents the way the New Haven community thinks about the stage. In this environment, great actors are born, great playwrights are inspired and great directors take their ideas to the stage before audiences who appreciate them.
Happily, this is not a unique example. Hundreds of little cities across the nation have embraced performing arts as a form of community interaction. In rural states the community takes a more regional shape. In Iowa for instance, networks of actors, directors and playwrights bounce between Cedar Rapids, Sioux City and Davenport in pursuit of... whatever it is that we as artists pursue.
These local and regional communities necessarily develop their own dialects, local specialties and artistic preferences. Much like the Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne regions of France steer that nation's wine culture, small local theaters enrich the national (and one might even go so far as to say international) artistic dialogue with their individual flavors. They leave their marks on the actors, writers and directors who come of age within their borders and then send them off into the world with all the defining experiences they could offer.
If Broadway boasts the best theatre in the world, it is only because the many fine artists who bring life to New York City's stages are from communities that prepare them for greatness. This Mother's Day, I think fondly of my mother who, as she often says, "gave me roots so I could find my wings." I'm lucky to have such proud family origins and doubly lucky to say that my professional heritage is equally as robust.
