54. Theatre of the Living Arts: A Beginning

Copyright 2023 Peter Schmitz - All Rights Reserved

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History! Here on this show we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m Peter Schmitz, and our sound engineering and original theme music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. On this episode we continue our series about the history of public controversy on the Philadelphia stage. In the overall storyline we have reached the 1960s - an era in which the cultural leadership of every major American city, it seemed, was suddenly leading a campaign to found a major non-profit repertory theater company - and that included Philadelphia. In Philly, the very first entry into the field was the Theatre of the Living Arts. Now that building is still there, on South Street, and most Philadelphians know it as a concert venue. If you’re of a certain age, you know it as the place where you saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show and dressed up to go see it, back in the 70s. But most people - even today - don’t know that for a brief moment it was home to one of the most exciting and promising theater companies in the United States. How that amazing phenomenon happened - and why everything went wrong, is what we aim to examine.

Now let me say two things right up front  - first that this is going to be a two-episode story. So Part one today will set the scene and talk about the creation of the Theater of the LIving Arts, and then I’ll probably have Part Two - which contains the climactic events - ready in about three weeks.

Here’s the other thing - as we enter into these more recent years of Philadelphia theater history - forgive me if I tread a little more lightly playing up the drama and the conflict angle of things. For these shows, we’re going to skip the “Drama is Conflict” into theme music - I just want to bring down the temperature a little bit.

After all, many of the major participants in the story we’re going to examine today are still alive - certainly a lot of their family members are. I know, because I’ve talked with quite a number of them recently. And I’m not here to settle scores or to pass some sort of overall judgment. Sure I have my thoughts about how things turned out. I have opinions, and I’ll talk about them. But I’m not going to open up old wounds or poke sore spots or bring back to life quietly smoldering embers of unfinished business. You’d be surprised how long the memories and how deeply rooted grudges in the theater world can be - or, if you’re already part of the local non-profit theater in your part of the world, maybe you’re not surprised at all. The fights in non-profit theater are so big because, as the old jokes goes, the stakes are so small. [03:23 - FADE IN MUSIC  West Side Story (Original Broadway Cast) : Act I: Prologue start at 0:54 in video ] Sometimes it feels like we’re all just battling over a tiny little piece of turf, you know, like those guys . . .  in that show . . .

Leonard Bernstein’s new musical West Side Story came to Philadelphia in September of 1957. Pre-show publicity had built up theatergoers' expectations, and the two-week tryout engagement was sold out even before the first performance. This was a big deal for Philadelphians, who followed Broadway news as avidly as everybody else in the country. Maybe even more so. Because they knew every major Broadway show came through Philly, it was sort of a local privilege. There was almost no major locally-produced high-quality professional shows, and for most “going to the theater” meant attending the large houses in the city which regularly hosted try-out runs: the Walnut, the Shubert, the Locust, the Forrest - or, in this case, the huge and sumptuous Erlanger at the corner of 21st and Market. 

As it had in its previous stop in Washington, DC, West Side Story received rapturous reviews from Philadelphia critics. “This is a grown up musical, topical in theme and classic in form,” wrote Henry Murdock of the Inquirer. “It matches grimness, irony, brutality, with tender love. It mixes gutter language with poetic speech; rock ‘n roll beats with symphonic surges.” However, the show reminded many of the Philadelphia audience members of crime and turmoil in their own struggling neighborhoods, and they proved to be a little leery of its story which depicted urban violence and racial tensions.

Some people - although they don’t want to admit it today - actually left West Side Story at intermission.  [05:33 - FADE OUT MUSIC] They didn’t see a classic musical in the making; they saw nothing but Trouble.

Thoughts about West Side Story lingered in Philadelphians’ minds in November of that same year, when Meredith Wilson’s new show The Music Man came to the Shubert Theater on Broad Street on its tryout tour. This time both the critical and the audience’s response was overwhelmingly positive. Music Man, after all, was a show about the quirks and virtues of an entirely white small-town pre-First World War America, and was not set in a troubled, ethnically mixed city. “For those theatergoers who think twice about going to a modern musical these days, fearing the New York showmakers are going to offer them the Black Hole of Calcutta or perhaps Murder, Incorporated, in song and dance guise” wrote the Evening Bulletin’s Wayne Robinson, “The Music Man offers no stabbings, [and] no gang fights.” [06:43 BRING MUSIC UP and then OUT at 06:50] Note there the phrase “New York showmakers” - this was perhaps unnecessary, because nobody in Philadelphia expected that major commercial productions would have either been created or developed by theater professionals in their own city. 

As we’ve seen, in recent episodes, even the summer shows of the city-owned Playhouse in the Park largely drew its plays and its casts from New York. Audiences of Philadelphia suburbanites streamed in - and out - of the city to see the commercial Broadway productions that drove interest in the theater. 

Now, what about the artistic energy that was building Off-Broadway? The smaller edgier poetic and socially relevant shows? Well, even during the 50s, even artistically driven Off-Broadway plays were imported to Philly - for a year or so the fledgling Circle in the Square company came down from New York and built a thrust theater space in the foyer of the old Academy of Music. When they left the space, Jasper Deeter’s ensemble of actors at the small Hedgerow Theatre company out in [Delaware] County took over the Academy space, until that venture, too, went badly and it was abandoned. There just didn’t seem to be the ability to do serious theater in Philadelphia. There was a LOT of homegrown talent in town, as we know there had always been coming out of Philly's local high schools and theater training programs and its colleges. But young dancers, actors, directors, and playwrights from Philadelphia - they might get their initial start in their hometown - but would inevitably leave for New York or Los Angeles to make real professional careers for themselves. For a host of reasons, it seemed unlikely that Philadelphia would ever have a vibrant core of resident theater artists. Well, hold on, of course, there was SOME real cultural excitement in town,  everybody knew about South Street.

Even as early as the 1920s, the many bars, cabarets, nightclubs, and theaters along South Street had been known as a place where different races could meet and mix as they sought entertainment. As musicians of the time would say, it was a ‘hip’ neighborhood. In 1963 "South Street", a song by a black West Philadelphia doo-wop group named The Orlons, became a hit - and even reached the third spot on the Billboard Top Ten. By the way, this is the song that first used the term 'hippie' - a term that  would expand in meaning until it became one of the most consequential words of the decade.

And although the Black population of the city core was growing, and the entire metropolitan area was increasing, since the year 1950 the overall population of the City of Philadelphia itself had begun to flatten, and slowly decrease - and then rapidly decrease.  Eventually it would fall by almost 25%. And its old neighborhoods struggled to keep their residents - especially their white middle class residents. We can see from the reaction to shows like West Side Story  that crime - or rather the perception of crime, sometimes, and racial fears and resentments and prejudices often drove white people away to where the green lawns and affordable mortgage rates - for them, anyway - beckoned. And to a certain extent this went for the white working class, too. As the industrial base of the city's economy was leaving Philly, so were its skilled laborers. Few people actually lived in “Center City'', the principal business district, the old central core (we don’t call it ‘downtown’ in Philly, we call it Center City). 

Particularly hard hit by economic decline was the South Street area - the city blocks along the bottom of Philadelphia’s original city grid, stretching from the Delaware Riverfront on the east, to the Schuylkill River to the West. (If you remember all the way back to our Episode Two, this was the old Southwark Theatre had once stood, when it was called Cedar Street.) But the entire length of South Street had a particular problem.

The growing dominance of automobiles and the spreading network of highways made large cities like Philadelphia eager to sacrifice such decaying portions of their urban fabric and offer them up to the dictates of Progress. Indeed, as the writer Adam Gopnik notes, in a recent piece in The New Yorker magazine, since the very beginning of the century Philadelphia had extravagantly torn down neighborhoods to build parkways and boulevards and expressways, all to serve the needs of the automobile. Many of the city’s theaters had been torn down and replaced by parking lots

Even though the city was still well served by commuter rail lines, after World War Two its trolley lines were mostly dismantled and suddenly there were passels of federal highway money available. It’s a well known story by now - in the post war years, American mayors hastened to use that money to “clear slums” and create “urban renewal” by building even more highways and highrises. Following the advice of the city Planner Edmund Bacon, Mayor Dilworth allowed the construction of the Schuylkill Expressway right through West Fairmount Park, and Highway 95 was soon being built between the city and the Delaware River to the east. To join those two behemoth roads, two enormous parallel expressways had been announced that would bring auto and truck traffic from one side to the other. One would be called the Vine Street Expressway, on the northern edge of the old Tenderloin and Chinatown neighborhoods, requiring the demolition of all the buildings and houses in its path. Its counterpart, the proposed Crosstown Expressway project, would obliterate South Street and all the blocks around it. I’ll put maps of what I’m describing here on the podcast’s website - look for the link in the show notes, or if you yourself are driving right now, as you possibly are, wait till you get home.

Real estate values plummeted. Many of South Street’s long-time neighborhood residents, faced with imminent destruction, just left the South Street area, selling their houses at a considerable loss. But others stayed and fought long and hard against the proposed project in the courts and in other public forums. As the dispute continued year after year, rents and real estate prices in the South Street area stayed low. This was hard on people who couldn’t get out of their buildings and had nowhere to go, but it did have the effect of making it an attractive haven for bohemians, writers, and artists - people who were willing to live on less money if they could do their thing, follow their dreams. And because of them there were even the first green shoots of a new local theater scene too. Deen and Jay Kogen, had started the mostly amateur group, the Society Hill Playhouse, in tiny old Garrick Hall on 8th Street. And the area welcomed them. In an era when other Philadelphia neighborhoods were experiencing these rising social and racial tensions, here they found a relaxed and inviting mixture of cultures. After all, it was where all the hippies meet.

And that was why four Philadelphians thought it would be the perfect place for a professional resident theater company.

These four Philadelphians were two married couples: Frederick and Jean Goldman, and Louis and Celia Silverman. Now when I say, Philadelphians - I mean that in the wider sense of the word, because they and their families lived in the city's gracious northern suburbs. The Silvermans lived in Wyncote and the Goldmans lived in Elkins Park. Neither were not from big money, not by any means, Fred Goldman ran a small advertising firm and Louis Silverman was a real estate investor.  Their wives, Jean and Celia, had met ten years previously while acting in shows at the Cheltenham Playhouse, the local community theater, and they had quickly bonded over their mutual love of theater and because of their common former lives as serious students of acting. Celia (originally from Pittsburgh) had studied at the Hedgerow Theatre School with Jasper Deeter and Rose Schulman, and Jean (originally from Illinois) had spent time in New York studying with Stella Adler and Herbert Berghof. They both were “Housewives and mothers” in the parlance of that time, but they longed to do consequential work for the community in their area of expertise. So, why not produce shows? In 1961 the two women produced Sartre’s No Exit at the Hedgerow Theatre. They followed the next season with Brecht’s The Private Life of the Master Race. Both shows were a success, and Golman and Silverman found they were really good at this. They liked it - but why stay at the amateur and semi-professional level? Why not take the next step and start a resident professional theater company in Philadelphia?

And in that era of American theater history, it really was women who were doing a LOT of the most consequential work getting new theaters started - outside of New York, at least, in what was then termed “the regions”. Nina Vance at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Margo Jones at Dallas Theatre Center, Mary Widrig John at the Milwaukee Rep they were early leaders in the field.  . . and closer by to Philly, there was the example Zelda Fichandler at Arena Stage in Washington DC - who along with her husband Tom had started a theater company in an abandoned movie theater back in 1950, and now in the early 60s, she was now one of the great shining examples of a serious theater artist, directing plays by the giants of world literature. All of these women had spent endless hours raising money, transforming older buildings into new and innovative thrust and in-the-round spaces, they were creating a stable base of subscribers. It was a heady time.

And because of changes to the US tax code, it no longer required wealthy benefactors to bankroll these ambitions. Now you could incorporate under rule 501(c)3, as a non-profit corporation, you could collect tax-deductible donations from donors small and large, and you didn’t have to turn a profit each year, you just had to break even and slowly, hopefully, expand. By 1961 the Ford Foundation had also helped to start TCG, the Theater Communications Group, to coordinate amongst all these new regional companies. At that point there were 23 “regional” theaters in the United States.

So, thought the Goldmans and the Silvermans, why not Philadelphia? The time was ripe. And instead of starting a theater company out in the suburbs, as happened in some cities, they wanted to do something central, right in the heart of town. Because after all, that was where all the deep history of theater in Philly was. There was a lot of interest in the late 18th Century, because Philadelphia - rightly or wrongly (I think wrongly, but let’s leave that aside) was clearing away a lot of 19th century buildings to better reveal the bones of the Federal period. A festival in 1960 had even organized a tour of all the places in the city where vibrant theater had once taken place - and maybe could take place again.

To their credit, the two women’s husbands - Louis and Frererick - were completely on board and supportive of the idea, and though they didn’t have a lot of money, they had some. Louis Silverman with his real estate expertise, quickly located an abandoned old movie theater - the Model Theatre, it was called - at 334 South Street. Sure there was no stage, and there were holes in the roof and toadstools growing out of the moldy carpets. But there was a high roof, some salvageable film projectors in the balcony, and room to build offices and backstage facilities. In December 1963 the deal was made for a down payment of $5000 - the Goldmans and the Silvermans used their own money, along with small contributions from their friends, the musician Anthony Checcia and the accountant Howard Berkowitz. Later they also bought a small storefront next door for additional lobby space, as well as an adjoining warehouse to the rear for more backstage facilities. Local architect Frank Weiss volunteered his services in creating a 430-seat auditorium and a thrust stage. Now eventually, when all the remodeling was done, eventually they had all invested almost $60,000. The Goldmans put a mortgage on their own house to raise the needed funds. But they had it - they had a space.

And now came the even more challenging part - building public support, and finding the staff and the artists. And most of all, they had to convince Philadelphians to come down to dowdy old East South Street, where there was no parking and no stops for trains or subways. It was a long way from the established theater district. There was plenty of skepticism. “We were told it couldn’t be done,” recalled Celia Silverman, “that Philadelphia was a tryout town which wouldn’t support a permanent theatrical company. But we went ahead.” They even had a new name for the place - it would be an institution where deadwood and detritus of the past would be cleared out, and where in the old rich ground of historic Philadelphia, a brand new theater, for dance, music and cinema could all flourish and grow: The Theatre of the Living Arts.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

To run the theater, by March of 1964 the fearless foursome had founded a new non-profit arts umbrella organization called the Philadelphia Council for Performing Arts. A board of Trustees was assembled for it. They staged a “community dialogue” at a hotel in Center City, not to solicit funds but to gather ideas and create buzz and excitement.  Four hundred of the leading cultural and business folk of the city turned up. It was all coming together, amazingly. “The response was so enthusiastic,” said Joan Goldman, “that we felt like Balboa when he first gazed upon Darien. Still we had to go out and sell.”

And sell, they did. They followed up on that big meeting with hundreds of smaller meetings, coffee parties, organizational conferences, and cocktail parties. They spoke on TV and radio  - they went to New York to gather the rights for the playwrights that they wanted to produce: Brecht, Molier, Eugene O’Neill.

The next step was that they needed artistic leadership, some great theater director who would be the public face of the organization, who was charming and sociable and could help with fundraising and long-term planning. And quickly, there was an answer to that question, too: a Harvard graduate in his early thirties,who had, significantly, a deep education and experience in modern theater. He had worked at the Berliner Ensemble in Germany itself, and member of the Actors Studio in New York, and he was just coming from a successful stint helping to start the first year of another resident regional theater, Seattle Rep. Even though he had no particular ties to Philadelphia, Andre Gregory seemed like a great match for the Theatre of the Living Arts.

Now, how exactly did Theatre of the Living Arts and Gregory find each other?  [pause]  I’m not sure! In his recently published book, written with Todd London, entitled This is Not My Memoir, cheekily, Andre Gregory’s a little cagey about the whole thing. Now I personally find this book - which is of course, in fact, a memoir, just delightful. I’m fascinated by his whole life story, and his description of his work in the theater over the years. You should take a look at it, I highly recommend it. But as is the case with many memoirs, I gotta say, we should be careful of relying on it for factual accuracy. According to the book, Andre Gregory asked the famous director Alan Schneider for advice on how he could also become a great director. Schneider told him to create his own theater, one outside of New York - quote:

“At that time [wrote Gregory] there were very few regional theaters across the country. I bought myself a large map of America, put it up on the wall, pinned a red flag in each good city that already had a theater, a blue flag in lousy cities, and a gold flag in excellent cities with no theater. I came up with Philadelphia.”

Gregory then states that he then called his friend Malcolm Eisenberg, a socially well-connected Philadelphia interior designer, and got him to throw parties and to invite important Philadelphians, and let him show up and talk about his ideas for a new theater. “Over two years, I talked at nearly 200 events . . I managed to line up 8,000 subscribers to support a theater that did not exist. Thus, the Theatre of Living Arts was born.” Well, the theater did already exist, we’ve established that. A few other obvious factual errors stand out in this account, too, as the book mixes up the repertoires of the first and second season of that theater. But putting that aside. . ..

Most glaringly, Gregory and London entirely leave out any mention of the Goldmans and the Silvermans when describing the creation of TLA. So, I don’t know what to say, except - well, we all have a narrative of our life story that maybe favors ourselves a little, especially 60 years on. And clearly, in the book he doesn’t want to dwell too long on this Philly period of his life - he’s got a lot more in his fascinating life story still to go, nobody really cares too much what happened in Philadelphia in the 60s anyway, so maybe he cuts a few corners in this part of his narrative, just to speed things along. 

I might speculate that the truth may likely be that Gregory did decide in early 1964 that he wanted to go to Philadelphia, to make a theater. But he quickly learned there was a great local project that was already up and running, and was looking for an artistic director, amazingly - and through his connections got himself mentioned as the obvious candidate - and he met people and he was in the right place at the right time. The board of PCPA did approach other people - at first they tried to recruit huge name directors like Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman, but when those eminences proved not to be interested in going to Philly, the board realized they had to go with someone earlier in their career. And so why not turn to this young phenom, this guy who was wildly signaling that he wanted the job? His resume was sparking, and so was his smile.

Really he was, by all measures, quite a find. Dapper, sociable, brilliant, compassionate - Andre Gregory was, and is, amazingly handsome and eloquent and photogenic. Just watch him in the famous movie My Dinner with Andre, and you can see what I mean. In a newspaper photo of the public announcement of his appointment at the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia on May 10, 1964, we can see a photo of Gregory at the podium, smiling that great smile of his. And to his side to the left is our old friend, Philadelphia Mayor James Tate, looking up at Gregory approvingly. Clearly Tate was thrilled about this new independently run resident theater project. This was not the gritty details of a little summer theater run by the Fairmount Park Commission, this was the sort of prestige project that every local politician wants to boast about in his city - if it goes well, of course. But in the end, doesn’t have to take responsibility for, if it does not.

So Andre Gregory was booked, and he soon moved his family to Philadelphia, and took the reins at the Theater of the Living Arts. On the whole he approved of the choice of repertoire that had already been decided on, but he did suggest that while Galileo and The Misanthrope and Tiger at the Gate were great, fine, maybe they should round the season off with Becketts’ Endgame. Which was agreed to by all, and now the assembling of the acting company - and the audience - could begin.

[ TRANSITION MUSIC]

Throughout that summer of 1964 and into the fall, there was much work to be done on selling subscriptions and fundraising. There were no blockbusters donors for the theater - nobody parachuting in with half a million dollars, but there was pleasing variety to their sources - the Pew family of the Sun Oil fortune gave 500 dollars, but so did Sam Auspitz, owner of the nearby delicatessen at Fourth and Bainbridge. Mostly there were endless letters to be typed up by volunteers, asking for their support - one by one, amazingly, in that age before mail merge programs or email blasts existed. The congregation lists of synagogues, the mailing list of the Devon Horse Show, the members of the Philadelphia Art Museum, all got letters. Fundraising parties were held at which Anthony Checchia would bring along young musicians from the Curtis School of Music to perform for prospective subscribers and members.. It was all part of the gestalt of this new theater, this home for Living Arts. Indeed a series of concerts, called Music from Marlboro, was built right into the season, it was announced. Then at these parties Andre Gregory would come out with his soft sell: Isn’t it amazing, he would ask, that Oklahoma City had a resident theater, but Philadelphia doesn’t? Can we let this be? Fred Goldman would follow up with the hard pitch: Subscribe now! Become a member! Here’s the form. And slowly but surely this worked, the money came in. 1000 Memberships were pledged, over 7,000 season subscriptions were sold. A support staff and crew of 18 was hired, and a budget of $250,000 was made by their new business manager David Lunney. Celia Silverman and Jean Goldman, working tirelessly, all the time were the theater’s joint producers, but they took no salary.

Meanwhile a resident cast of ten actors was hired, after a long series of auditions in New York and Philadelphia. Gregory was always very respectful of actors, very interested in their process, and was clear that he wanted a true resident company, one that would develop a group ethos, but nonetheless composed of eloquent individuals with strong improvisation skills. Of the people that were engaged, perhaps inevitably many came from the Actors Studio in New York, real major actors with good credits  and promising futures like Lois Smith, Ron Leibman, Tom Brannum, Anthony Zerbe and David Hurst. There were a few Philadelphians in the mix - the beautiful young Sally Kirkland in fact was from a very well established old Quaker City family. New York. Mirriam Phillips was from the Hedgerow School. The initial salary, under the contract negotiated with Actors Equity was pretty paltry, even for then, just 150 bucks a week, with a promise of eventually becoming 300 a week. But the work in the shows promised to be exciting, and the possibilities for a more prosperous future seemed bright. They could even earn extra from teaching in the theater’s own training school, which began accepting eager students from around the community. The actors even called themselves the Southwark Company - after the original theater that had once stood just a block away in the 18th century, that was where President George Washington would come to see plays presented by Thomas Wignell. (That was our very first story of our very first episode, remember? I’m suddenly a little nostalgic, and I’m going to tear up a little bit . . okay, moving on.)

Actual rehearsals for the Theater of the LIving Arts company didn’t start until December 1964, and the company was joined by eight year-old Adam Gopnik in the role of the Boy. The son of two local Philadelphia academics. And little Adam, of course, would later grow up to become the acclaimed staff writer on the New Yorker Magazine, author of that article about cars and highways that I mentioned earlier - and so, so much else. Just an amazing fact, isn’t it? I was pretty much bowled over when I first learned that. Let’s claim all his amazing talent and erudition as a result of his early exposure to Andre Gregory and to theater in Philadelphia, shall we? Surely that must be it, absolutely.

Opening night, of Brecht’s Galileo, was scheduled for the first week in January 1965. As might be expected, though much preparation work had been done, some things were still a little chaotic. The stagehands union, for example, threatened to picket the opening night, demanding that union members be put on the crew, only calling off the labor action a few hours before curtain. And at the last minute the city fire inspector pointed out there were no fire extinguishers in the building, and so Fred Goldman had to rush out to buy some fire extinguishers in his evening clothes. Finishing touches to the theater’s marquee were being made by workers on ladders as the audience walked in the lobby underneath.  It turned out that due the short rehearsal period, and Andre Gregory’s direction, which worked so hard to replicate the work of the Berliner Ensemble on the same text, had brought the show’s run time stretched to astounding length - the first preview ran four hours, one hour more than expected. And, on top of everything else, there were no mirrors in the dressing room.

But, you know, everything turned out okay, in the way that things do in the theater - it’s a mystery, as we all know, but there it is. One week later, at the official press opening, the running time of the show was down to 3 and a half hours. And afterwards the audiences were enthusiastic and the local reviewers really intrigued and full of praise, a little guarded, true, but still quite heartfelt and definite optimism at what was suddenly on their assignment docket for the foreseeable future.

Proclaimed Ernest Sheier in the Bulletin: “Philadelpia’s newest adventure in theater has begun auspiciously.” (And yup, when I read that, a few years ago - that’s where I got the name for this whole podcast) He also praised Wolfgang Roth’s lighting and design. The Inquirer’s Henry Murdock especially marveled at the large and talented band of actors suddenly resident in the community.

He also deeply admired what he called Andre Gregory's “free wheeling stagecraft” as the action took place in side stage, lofts and up and down the aisles. “For this production The Theater of the LIving Arts escapes proscenium limitations and obeys the modern concept . . that for the best communication, the players are in the lap of the audience and vice versa.”

Even Adam Gopnik when interviewed years later, could remember clearly Gregory’s staging  - because evidently the entire Gopnik clan of kids got enlisted as well:

“He was doing Brechtian theater with an American sense of spectacle that was astonishing for people to see . . .Galileo was meant by Brecht to be a teaching piece, highly intellectual. That’s the sense of his epic theater. Andre did that, but his natural bent was for the spectacular so that in Scene 10 of the play he felt it was weak in “life’ and so he had all of my brothers and sisters come in to be ragamuffins on stage.  . .  He liked the sense of the extreme, the melodramatic.”

And even TLA founder Fred Goldman, who would later turn into a dedicated and remorseless foe of Andre Gregory (spoiler alert) - for the moment, he was pleased. “Critical and audience response was excellent. Single ticket sales accelerated for the following weeks and the following plays. Laudatory articles appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, Saturday Review, and numerous theater journals. The inaugural season was lauded, and fiscally sound.”

[‘DRAMA IS CONFLICT’ CLOSING THEME MUSIC]

And so we’ll leave it there, with this venture lauded and fiscally sound and well and truly launched. We’ll be back next time with the second half of this story, when things start to take a decidedly different turn, culminating in the infamous production of the play Beclch. Much excitement to come, ladies and gentlemen! It wouldn’t be a Philadelphia theater story without it. No riots this time, true, but I can promise you magnificent African dancers, exposed body parts, goats being sacrificed on stage, cockfights, lawsuits, boardroom battles, firings, police intervention . . and lots, lots more.

That’s our show. I want to thank the librarians and staff of the Special Research Collection at the Temple University Library and the Pennsylvania Historical Society for all their professional assistance in uncovering documents and archival material for these episodes. Special thanks to Karin Suni at the Theater Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia - really she’s just amazingly helpful.

Please everyone else, write to us, our email is aithpodcast@gmail.com. Or you can contact us right on our website www.aithpodcast.com. In the show notes to this episode you can find the link to our Patreon account. In return for just a little support from you, there’s all sorts of extra information and additional material there. So, sign up, and find out all about it! We appreciate your support.

Thank you, everyone, for listening today, and for coming along on yet another Adventure in Theater History Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]