This was the end-of-season cast-and-crew photo at Eaglesmere Summer Repertory Theatre. The fellow peeking through the trellis at the left is Jerry Zeismer, who became a notable assistant director in Hollywood. Standing at the end in front of him is Russell Lunday, who was from Billings, MT. To the right is Dave Pressman and David (Tony) Roberts, who have both had stellar careers on stage and screen. In front of them is Sarajane Levy, the first of us to die (cancer). Down low next to her is Rod Nash and then Marshall Mason, holding a cigarette. AK is in the middle of the back and I’m leaning my elbow on the other trellis. Directly below me in a white shirt, also holding a cigarette, is Laird Williamson who has stayed in touch with me through an outstanding career as actor and director, especially in Ashland, Oregon, at the Shakespearean Festival.
Sue, in Calgary, one of my most faithful readers and responders (Her husband Clyde McConnell has scanned and upgraded all the photos for my bio of Bob Scriver -- he’s a professor of photography at the University of Calgary) suggests that I’m very fond of synchronicity -- not that she objects to that. One might also call it “harmonic convergence.” It does seem as though once in a while there are hints from the universe, arrows pointing at something just as the means arrive to deal with it. I generally take this seriously.
I’ve always said that when I really got my writing skills in hand, I would tackle the Northwestern University School of Speech years (1957 - 1961). It was a fertile time to be in college: Ivan Doig (who graduated from Valier High School) and Paul Winter were both there the same years though I didn’t know them because they were in different “Schools.” Marshall W. Mason was someone I DID know. His book about what he has learned in the theatre, has just been published by Heinnemann. His author photo on the back shows a person I hardly recognize, though I know that he’d only have to say one sentence for me to know who he was, even if he’s lost his Texas accent by now.
Marshall and I both had attachments to two groups: a competitive circle of theatre people devoted to Alvina Krause and a small intellectual trio of men: Marshall, Dwayne Thorpe and Bill Shaw -- I think they were roommates or something. They were brilliant, knew it, but couldn’t quite understand how to shape themselves yet. I was intensely connected to Bill, who was originally my biology lab partner. We spent many happpy hours auditing AK's advanced acting classes in the little Swift Theatre. (He became a distinguished professor of education law but died young of a brain tumor.) Dwayne was on the editorial board of the Northwestern Tri-Quarterly, which accepted one of my short stories for publication, but I don’t know whether he was in favor or against -- I was not particularly close to him.
Marshall, after a brilliant career directing off-off-Broadway as founding artistic director for the Circle Repertory Company. He is considered “one of the most innovative and influential directors of the twentieth century.” He points to Alvina Krause as his key inspiration. His book, “Creating Life on Stage: A Director’s Appoach to Working with Actors” just arrived in my post office box today. So far I’ve read the Foreword by William Hurt, the Introduction, the Table of Contents, and the Index and have looked at all the photos. I’m not in any of them, so I supply the photo at the top which is from Eagles Mere, PA, the summer of 1960, I think.
AK, as we called Alvina Krause, began her adult life teaching Speech and English in Seaside, Oregon, where her siblings lived. That would have been before I was born, but it accounted for some of her affection for me in spite of my blunders and inadequacies. That summer at Eaglesmere, a resort town high in the mountains where the acting company lived in a big decrepit boarding house, I was useful ballast. Technically I was the costumer. I didn’t drink or smoke, I was sort of pre-sexual, my inner emotional turmoil was muted while I watched the others “act out” theirs. I helped Lucy McCammon stir the compost, I tried to back up the rather strange cooks, and if someone passed out on the floor, I put a blanket over them. Some objected on grounds that they wanted to suffer and they didn’t welcome interference, especially if it suggested mothering.
Not changing the subject, which is the roots of artistic achievement, after I watched “The Raj Quartet” on DVD recently, I ordered the book(s), and also a biography of Paul Scott by Hilary Spurling. Scott was wrestling with the same demons (or Daemon, the dark knot of destruction and anguish that some feel powers real artistic depth and forces its expression) as we were. The revelation of the Scott biography is that after a near lifetime of something wrong that couldn’t be diagnosed and was only eased slightly by huge amounts of gin, he turned out to have amebiasis (infected by amoebas living in the intestinal lining), a tropical disease with effects rather like AIDS. It was when a specialist used drastic measures to cure Scott that he had the clarity and energy to write “The Raj Quartet.”
The Netflix DVD that came in the same mail as Marshall’s book is “Angels in America,” an amazing production combining AIDS with fear of the Millennium of 2000, a spectacular combining of religious and health issues -- in societies as much as in individuals. It’s far more extravagant and challenging than “The Raj Quartet,” but no less an exploration of class, sensibility, and environment -- if you can accept the gay world of New York City as a kind of India. It’s the kind of writing that Adrian Louis, Louis Owens and James Welch brought to bear on their reservations. I don’t know whether Marshall ever directed a production of “Angels in America” on the stage, but it was part of his world. I suspect it was coming to terms with a culture that forces everyone into stereotypes that freed him to direct with real depth.
I don’t quite have the skills yet to begin a novel about those years at NU and EaglesMere, but I’m on the way, writing about the rez. Diagnosing diabetes was rather like discovering amebiasis, releasing me from gray lassitude. Retirement gives me a certain economic floor so I don’t have to fight so hard to earn a living.
Marshall is retired, too. He’s in Mexico with his longtime partner, Danny. (I choose solitude.) All this is prelude as I begin to explore this book. It is the base of my writing as much as it is his directing. AK taught a cross-humanities, moral, life-preserving sort of mimesis. Scott’s “Sister Ludmilla” in the first book of “The Raj Quartet” had some of the same qualities. The arts can be a devotion. That’s disabling in a way, which I’ll address later.
Right now the synchronicity of the Universe is saying, “Keep going. You’re on the right track.” Sometimes that means more than anything friends can say.
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