88. Season Four: Intro

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History, where we bring you the best stories about the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m your host Peter Schmitz, and I am so happy and honored to inaugurate this  first episode of Season Four of the podcast!

In fact, to suit the occasion we’ve been doing a little redecorating and revamping here in our multistory studios high atop the Tower of Theater History, And so: here you go, direct from the digital pen of Christopher Mark Colucci, the house composer and conductor of the talented Adventures in Theater History house band, for the first time ever in the podcasting universe . . . our brand new Season Four Theme Music! Take it away, boys!

Awesome! Thank you Chris. As you good people out there listening to us can tell just from that music, Season Four sounds very funky and hip and modern, which is quite fitting . . .  because in Season Four we here at the podcast propose to cover the last sixty years or so of Philadelphia theater, basically the era when the non-profit theater movement came to the region, and the many dozens of theater companies and ensembles began to blossom all over the metropolitan area.

This will take us from the mid 1960s up to - well, the present day. As far as I know this will be the final season of the podcast - but you know, hey, don’t hold me to that. When I started off on this whole podcasting project, back in Episode One as I recall, I stated that it would probably only take me about 50 episodes or so to cover the whole topic - and here we are well beyond that number. The finish line is in SIGHT. But we are not there yet.

Of course, it may be that there will be one more season after this - I’ve got some ideas. . I might just go back and cover some great stories and characters that we missed along the way, and maybe I’ll do more dramatic readings of historical texts and theatrical memoirs. But hey, guess what, that extra season is already going on, over on the podcast’s Patreon page -  our supporters and followers there are already enjoying these bonus episodes filled with music and the strangely pleasing nostalgia for bygone theatrical folks in a city which we never knew, but still exists in our imagination. There’s a new bonus episode on Patreon every month - all for what is really just a nominal fee. Please check it out if you’d like to support our ongoing work and get yourself all sorts of extra membership benefits. Check it out at patreon.com/AITHpodcast.

Isn’t that music nice, too? Chris sent me about half a dozen little sound licks and I willl be using them as transitions throughout this episode and in many future episodes as well - although here’s something I want to say right from the start. Season Four is going to be somewhat different that seasons One, Two and Three because there are going to be less intensely researched and scripted narrative episodes, and instead there will be a lot more interviews - I mean, a lot more. We are going to talk to the people - directors, actors, administrators, designers, musicians, teachers, historians, journalists - anyone who has helped to create and shape and embody and report on Philadelphia theater over the past half century. Because we are fortunate that so many of them are still around, still working, still thinking about what they have done and what they want to do next.

Because if I can do this right, that is going to be the real purpose of Season Four. It is both research and also documentation of the historical record - told in what I hope will be an engaging and informative way. On various occasions over the past three years we’ve brought you interviews with people such as Penny Reed, Jerrell Henderson, Barry Witham, Mary Robinson and Bernard Havard - and have gone on audio tours backstage at such historic locations as the Walnut Street Theatre and the Hedgerow Theatre. I’m gonna do much more stuff like that for the next year or so.

For instance, already over the past few weeks I’ve been conducting interviews with some of the leading participants of the earliest non-profit theaters in the Philly area, including Robert Hedley of Villanova Theater the Philadelphia Company, Gregory Poggi of the Philadelphia Drama Guild, and others. And I’m hoping to talk to more in the upcoming months, including Blanka Zizka one of the founders of the Wilma Theater, Pat Adams the longtime stage manager at the Wilma, and Sara Garonzik, the Emeritus Producing Artistic Director of the Philadelphia Theater Company, and Joe Canuso the founder of Theatre Exile in South Philly. And here’s fair warning for all of you listening whom I didn’t just mention, actors and technicians and administrators at the Arden and the Lantern and People’s Light and the FringeArts Festival - I’m coming for you, I promise, I just haven’t gotten there yet.

I have also been searching through the archives to find historic sound files and interviews that will you the voices and viewpoints of those who are no longer with us - for instance, through the kindness and generosity of Professor Paula Cohen of Drexel University, I have an interview with the other co-founder of the Wilma Theater, Jiri Zizka. I’m also looking for archival recordings about the Freedom Theater in North Philadelphia, the history of the Temple University Theater Department, the Pig Iron Theatre, and many others.

Which brings me to one particular worry - are you all still with me? Do those names of theater companies and names that I just listed mean anything to you? Telling the story of the modern years of Philadelphia often means getting really deep into the weeds, and discussing plays and experimental performances that were only seen by perhaps a few thousand people, maybe even just a few dozen, and maybe they took place several decades ago, and mem. Maybe you’re a Philadelphian yourself, and are big fan of philly theater, and you’ve been attending plays and concerts and workshops all your life. If so - great, this is going to be right up your alley.

But, I’m more than a little concerned that others of my listeners  - and I know you’re out there, god bless all you dear people - in such far-flung places as Australia, Germany, England, Thailand, Canada - even those in slightly more nearby places like Washington DC and New York City, you may just lose interest during the course of Season Four. And you know, fair enough - I imagine that hearing someone describe a theater performance from 50 years ago in a small downtown space in the NOT largest city in America - it’s kind of like listening to a coworker tell the story of their amazingly weird dream last night - you can tell it was really vivid and emotional to THEM, but it’s just never quite going to mean quite the same to you. And you’re just kinda glad when the coffee break’s over and you can get back to your own life.

But still, this is the task I have set for myself - for whatever it’s worth. I hope you all - even those of you students and scholars of theater and Philadelphia history in the unknowable distant future who are taking advantage of these interviews and this documentation, will appreciate this. If I do it right, it should be a fun ride for everybody.

Okay so that’s our intro to Season Four - and here’s what we're going to do next time. I’m going to go back to material I’ve already covered in Season Two, the founding, flourishing, and the demise of the The Theatre of the Living Arts back in the 1960s - because really that’s where this whole narrative really starts. So I want to revisit that. It was the first real major non-profit theater company in the Philadelphia area, and it presaged so much that was about to happen, and inspired and challenged so many of the people we will meet over the course of Season Four. In fact, what I plan to do is to take those original three episodes that we spent on the TLA, and recut, remix and condense them into one single grand episode - but instead of cutting off the story at the point when Andre Gregory leaves town, I’m going to keep going, and tell the part I never got to . . . ending the whole thing with some brand new and never before released material - a reading of an entire chapter from my upcoming book Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia, entitled “The Line of Least Existence - the last days of the TLA”. The book’s releasing November 30th, after all, and can be ordered online or at a bookstore near you.

It’s going to be very exciting, and a great way to launch both the book and the new season of the podcast! It should show up on your podcast feeds in just a couple of weeks. 

All right. Let me end with this. . . . It’s been quite a year here in America - Philadelphia and Pennsylvania have been in the news quite a lot lately, sometimes for reasons that I’m proud about but sometimes for reasons that I don’t really care to think about at all. I’m here, as much as I can, to lift my spirits and your spirits and delight you and intrigue your curiosity and bring you even more of what I think is a really important and consequential story. 

Because if Philadelphia is the place where - as we like to remind everyone over and over again - was where the nation was founded. If it is to remain a vital and wonderful place to live, if we are to remain The Best Version of Ourselves - as a vibrant city, full of wonderful and complex and often maddening human beings -a  place where that original grand experiment is to continue, well then we need to tell the whole story of the place and of the community of artists and audiences that are brought together every day in theaters and and rehearsal rooms and performances space - here and all over the world 

And we will. And we shall. It’s something worth doing. Thank you for coming along with me, as we begin another exciting series of Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia.