Beautiful Chaos. Carey Perloff
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ever more desirable (I have always found it amazing that Henry Kissinger was repeatedly named one of the world’s sexiest men), it tends to make women more vulnerable. Queen Elizabeth (played in my production by Caroline Lagerfelt) is in love with and longs to marry the dashing Earl of Leicester but is forced by political expediency to keep him at bay. Her rival, Mary Queen of Scots (Susan Gibney), on the other hand, forfeits her political power in order to pursue her heart’s desire. It broke my heart, during rehearsals, to watch Caroline learn to mask her desires, fears, and vulnerabilities in service of the power Elizabeth needed to exercise to keep her fractious government from erupting. The actress, let alone the character, acutely experienced the price she was forced to pay: audiences thrilled to the romantic and sexual Mary and were critical of the brilliant but controlling Elizabeth, a situation that mirrors exactly how our society views those female choices today. Elizabeth holds on to her throne and ushers in an unprecedented period of prosperity and stability in England, at the personal price of solitude and childlessness. What a cautionary tale! The choices confronted by those two women onstage were choices I had confronted myself, on a smaller scale, again and again, and I loved that Mary Stuart triggered lively debate in our audience about what happens when personal and professional lines are blurred and a woman is in charge, a theme that reemerged when I directed Racine’s Phèdre and one that I explored much later in my own play Kinship.
But in those early days, I wasn’t always aware that my own struggles would enrich my work; I just felt exhausted by the fight. I had no idea that my introduction to San Francisco would be so fraught and contentious, and I suppose it was lucky that Lexie was only three when I began at A.C.T., so she didn’t have to read the 750 hate letters I received during the course of my first season.
Chapter 6
Annus Terribilis
I decided to open the 1992–93 season with a rare Strindberg three-hander called Creditors, which I had directed to critical acclaim at CSC in a new translation by Paul Walsh, who would become our resident dramaturg at A.C.T. some years later. No one advised me that this taut little exercise in sexual warfare might not be the most celebratory way to begin one’s tenure at a new theater (“A seemingly perverse choice,” sniffed critic Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Chronicle), but at least it was a gem (and an inexpensive one at that), and I figured that I knew the script well enough to direct it while trying to solve the endless cascade of problems that were bound to present themselves during my first months at A.C.T. But the problems were worse than I’d anticipated, and as soon as I went into production, I realized that I was at a theater without a full-time casting director, a literary department, or a dramaturg, nor was there a resident stage manager who was on my team. Navigating Strindberg’s psychological complexity while learning to steer a rudderless institution was difficult at best. Nevertheless, Creditors opened on an incredibly hot evening in October 1992, and famed San Francisco columnist Herb Caen pronounced it “strong enough to keep the creditors from the door.” The production’s Pinteresque sexual tension, precise sculptural staging, and powerful cast (A.C.T. favorite Charles Lanyer along with newcomers Joan McMurtrey and William Converse-Roberts) intrigued our subscribers and introduced them to dramatic literature that was rich, resonant, and as yet unknown at A.C.T. Creditors was a gripping evening with vivid performances, and our audiences leaned forward and took notice.
Then the disasters began. It all started with Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, a play I had selected in the fraught few months after being hired, before I knew anything about A.C.T.’s internal dynamics. I chose Tenor in my eagerness to find a light comedy to balance the rigors of The Duchess of Malfi, Creditors, and Antigone. The plot of Ludwig’s play revolves around an ill-fated opera production that attempts to replace an ailing tenor with another singer disguised in blackface. On my first official day on the job, in June 1992, I began to hear rumbles from the conservatory about an M.F.A. acting class that had gone disastrously wrong. It was called Rock Stars, and its purpose was to train actors to work “from the outside in” by imitating in as precise a manner as possible the physical and vocal behavior of a chosen rock music performer. A well-intentioned but ultimately misguided white student, having decided to portray Grace Jones, appeared before her classmates in dark character makeup. This caused enormous upset in the school. At that time, there were few artists of color in positions of authority at A.C.T., and few safe avenues for the students to express discontent. Thus, in the wake of the Grace Jones episode, when the naïve new artistic director announced that for her first season she was programming a play that involved blackface, the place erupted. Benny Sato Ambush, the African American director who was associate artistic director at the time, explained to me that, in the context of the school, carrying on with Lend Me a Tenor was probably a very bad idea indeed.
To be honest, once I arrived at A.C.T. and had time to really consider the season, I was not sorry to replace Ludwig’s slim comedy with a more interesting play. But I had no idea how myopic I was being when I chose instead a new Dario Fo farce titled The Pope and the Witch. Again, the choice happened for seemingly sensible reasons. In addition to Benny Ambush, I had made the decision to bring on board a second associate artistic director, Richard Seyd. Richard was a highly respected local director with whom I had collaborated in New York; he was the longtime associate producing director of Eureka Theatre Company, a beloved acting teacher, and a font of knowledge about Bay Area alternative theater. But in all his years as a Bay Area director, Richard had never played a role in A.C.T.’s work. So naturally there was a certain outsider status that he brought to the job, along with a desire to crack open the club that A.C.T. had become and introduce some new elements. Among his many local friends and colleagues was Joan Holden, a principal playwright of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who had shared with him the untranslated Pope and the Witch, which depicts the upheavals caused when an eager Pope, in thrall to a drug-trafficking Witch, wakes up one morning suddenly believing in the right of women to obtain free abortions on demand. Richard and Joan were excited by the energy and invention of the piece and thought the role of the Pope would be a perfect fit for Geoff Hoyle, clown extraordinaire. Geoff was another Bay Area artist who had not been part of the A.C.T. circle; the Fo play offered a lively opportunity to introduce him to our audience, and his audience to ours. I knew how beloved Fo’s work had been among Mime Troupe fans across the Bay Area and was interested in encouraging that audience to begin coming to A.C.T.
So, with little time to spare and lots of internal debate and agonizing, we decided to replace the previously announced Lend Me a Tenor with The Pope and the Witch. In New York, I was accustomed to season schedules changing all the time, so I was taken aback that the substitution of one play for another was considered amateurish and unacceptable in San Francisco, particularly in the first year of a new regime. But substitute I did, making the additional mistake of trying to explain the switch by being honest about the incident in the school. At that point, the howls of reproach began in earnest. It was bad enough, I was told, to bow to the politically correct pressure of a few students and displace a farce that had run so successfully in New York. But it was sheer idiocy to replace that farce with an Italian comedy about the pope’s vision of free abortion, in a city as Catholic as San Francisco. Within days, I was receiving outraged letters from religious subscribers, from churchgoers, and from the Catholic hierarchy itself, particularly from a group that called itself Catholics for Truth and Justice. (I longed to locate the Catholics who were not for truth and justice, who might be on my side.) Long before we even went into rehearsal with the Fo play, the city was up in arms. There were numerous articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and dismissive editorials abounded (and this was in the days before this kind of crisis could get tweeted and reposted across the cyber-universe). No one could understand why the controversy in the school had been permitted to engender this particular change in programming. Years later, with more artists of color in our midst and a clearly written appeals policy in place in our conservatory, we have other ways to respond to such internal issues, but at the time, it felt necessary to me, as the new head of an organization that prided itself on training and education, to respect the students’ opinions and replace the Ludwig show. So it was devastating to be met with such derision and lack of comprehension. And it took me months to realize that tension between the Catholic and gay communities was particularly acute during that period, and that by my actions I had placed A.C.T. directly in a hostile crossfire.
Summoned to appear at the knees of one Monsignor