Beautiful Chaos. Carey Perloff
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trustee, Pat Flannery, to accompany me while I sat on a low stool and was castigated by the outraged priest, who had just written to the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts demanding that “the NEA should seriously reconsider future grants to A.C.T. in light of their callous treatment of a significant portion of the local population.” In response to my letter of explanation, San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn replied, “It is ironic that you extol Dario Fo’s concern about social welfare when the Popes of the twentieth century have been the most significant supporters of social justice among all the leaders of the world,” and declared it totally unacceptable that we were “performing a play in which the Holy Father is portrayed assaulting homeless children and as supporting the drug trade.” My attempts to contextualize the piece in the broader context of political satire, and to talk about the deep humanity of Dario Fo, failed miserably. Soon the Wall Street Journal decided to make a meal out of this naïve young artistic director who had tried to avoid offending blacks only to succeed in offending everybody else instead. There were threats by the Knights of Malta and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre to pressure donors with Catholic backgrounds and corporations with Catholic board members to withdraw funding from A.C.T.
When the production finally opened, it became clear that the play itself was rather pallid in comparison to the scale of outrage it had engendered. This minor piece of Italian political provocation couldn’t begin to stand up to the scrutiny visited upon it by press and audience alike, despite brilliant central performances by the antic Hoyle and his sidekick, Sharon Lockwood. In the end, there were two silver linings to the Pope and the Witch debacle. One was the arrival on the scene of Alan Jones, the wise and gracious dean of Grace Cathedral, who descended from Cathedral Hill in his finest robes during the preview process and told the picketing crowds that, while dissent was honorable, censorship was not. Jones eventually moderated a town hall meeting in which those who were willing to show up (which didn’t include most of the church protesters) got to have their say. He was passionate about the right and indeed the necessity of artists to freely articulate their world view, and he immediately became a treasured friend and later trustee of A.C.T., eventually presiding over a beautiful blessing on the reopening of The Geary.
The second silver lining came in 1997, when out of the blue Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the statement accompanying the prize, the Nobel Committee described Fo as a visionary writer “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.” When I was asked to appear on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer the evening the award was announced to comment on the significance of Fo’s work, I felt a sweet moment of vindication.
But the Pope fracas was only the beginning. A couple of months later, as I began visiting rehearsals of The Duchess of Malfi (which were held in our scene shop due to the enormity of George Tsypin’s set), I slowly began to discover what it was that director Robert Woodruff loved so much about the play. He had been reading Camille Paglia and Susan Faludi at the time and wanted to put onstage the graphic degradation of women that he felt was fundamental both to our own culture and to Jacobean drama. His was an eminently fair reading of the text, although there was nothing subtle about his conception: his brilliant set designer had created a giant metal scaffold filled with office cubicles and bisected by a huge tube through which viscous liquid could gush on demand. San Francisco Chronicle writer Steven Winn described the mise-en-scène (in an article written for the New York Times in June 1993 about my controversial first season) as follows:
The Duchess stood centerstage in a punishing white light, bloodied, naked from the waist down, and bound in gray duct tape from knees to neck. Behind her, in a bank of cramped metal cells, images of masochism and misogyny formed a hellish living frieze. A woman squirmed inside a man’s steel grip. Another sat in a glassy-eyed stupor, ropes of her long hair knotted to the cell’s frame and clawlike pincers locked on her bare breasts.
By the time the actress Randy Danson had endured her tortuous death, dozens of patrons had fled.
Indeed, Woodruff’s production was a bold, graphic, shocking, rather heavy-handed reading of an admittedly violent and sexually aggressive play. And many A.C.T. subscribers, who had received no warning and were apparently used to their classics being somewhat more decorously presented, were appalled. One of my favorite trustees, an elegant and intelligent elderly gentleman who died shortly thereafter, said to me mournfully after witnessing Malfi, “And I thought you were such a nice girl.” I will always regret his disappointment in me.
Their horror began at the first preview, when the intermission lasted a full forty-eight minutes because Woodruff had decided at the last moment to put the set on wheels, and the desperate stage crew risked hernias trying to move two tons of metal to a post-intermission position. The length of the interval gave the six-hundred-plus-person audience nearly an hour to line up and accost me with angry accusations about how I was rapidly desecrating the theater they knew and loved. The Pope and the Witch had been bad enough, but this “in-your-face” approach to a classic was the last straw. It didn’t help that Woodruff’s work needs a lot of rehearsal time to gel, and the four weeks allotted to stage this large and complex play was not remotely enough for him to refine his vision. The spectacle that greeted audiences during the preview and opening-night process was unfinished and still somewhat inchoate. By the time Woodruff led the Prologue (an audience discussion that happens on the Tuesday before opening night for each of A.C.T.’s subscription productions), he was mordantly predicting that the Little Man (a cartoon figure that accompanies every theater review in the San Francisco Chronicle and whose demeanor is meant to be a snapshot of the reviewer’s reaction to the work) would have an axe in his back.
A quick sidebar about the Little Man, the icon that has tormented Bay Area theater artists for more than seventy years. There are few serious newspapers in America that apply a visual rating system to theater reviews, but the Chronicle has always found its Little Man illustration indispensable. he is seated in a theater chair beside every review, ready to dispense his verdict on the show by one of five positions: he is either 1) leaping out of his chair in ecstasy, 2) sitting and clapping politely, 3) sitting and staring straight ahead, 4) sleeping in disgust, or 5) most damningly, absent from the chair altogether, having fled the offending production. It is difficult to get past the icon long enough to read reviews in the Chronicle; typically, a potential audience member will simply ask, “What is the Little Man doing?” This is such a disservice to artists and critics alike that it hardly bears mentioning, except to say that Woodruff’s fantasy of the Little Man with an axe in his back has remained with me for my entire tenure at A.C.T. Ironically, when the play was finally reviewed, the Little Man was actually applauding politely, an assessment that baffled the enraged crowds who couldn’t wait to get home and write me hate letters about the production. I received 750 letters in all, which I preserved in two large black binders that I leave in a prominent place on my office bookshelf, as a reminder, I suppose, of those bitter early days.
Woodruff had to depart the day after opening, so I was left to respond to every complaint myself. This was in the days before email, so it was an arduous process, but, surprisingly, in the long run it was also somewhat rewarding. In preparation for writing this book, I reread the entire collection of mail, and in spite of the pain of revisiting that tsunami of criticism, what strikes me twenty years down the road is the passion and intelligence expressed by A.C.T.’s audience. Despite the level of anger, it was clear that these were not philistines who were arguing for a season of easy listening; they were engaged theatergoers who desperately wanted to understand what was going on at a theater they had nurtured for years. I realized that I was no longer at the helm of a small organization in the vast cultural landscape of New York; I was running the flagship and everything I did was going to be highly visible and closely scrutinized. In responding one by one to all the charges against the casting, concept, and design of Malfi, I began to forge a relationship with an audience that I came to admire as one of the most open-minded and engaged theater audiences in the country. I tried as hard as I could to stay open to their criticism. Maybe because they saw my extreme vulnerability, they, too, became more open. Years later, in her brilliant essay “Whither (or Wither) Art?” Zelda Fichandler articulated better than I ever could why it is so important for artistic leadership to acknowledge mistakes, no matter how humiliating:
The creative courage of the artistic director