57. Theatre of the Living Arts: The End

COPYRIGHT PETER SCHMITZ 2023. All Rights Reserved.

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome, welcome, once again, 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 your host, Peter Schmitz. Our sound engineering and original theme music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. In this episode we complete the story of the Theatre of the Living Arts on South Street during the 1960s - and in fact here we wrap our entire Season Two, that we started back in the autumn of 2022, and that we have been calling “Drama is Conflict.” Now we have not covered ALL possible narratives in Philly theater that include riots, lawsuits, censorship, arrests, screaming fights in the lobby, and so forth . . . Oh, there are plenty more of these! Buckets of them. Always something else like that turning up in the archives - it keeps the life of a Philly theater historian interesting, believe me. But when we eventually get to those other stories (and we will), we’ll frame them in a different context, that’s all.

If you haven’t heard our other two episodes about the Theatre of the Living Arts, the first one subtitled “A Beginning” and the second one “The Middle”, I would suggest you should go back and catch up, because it will help to make everything we’re discussing here in this show extra clear - but of course that’s up to you, we’re very happy to have you listening to us today.

We’re especially going to discuss in this episode the production of the Rochele Owens play Beclch at the TLA in late 1966 to early 1967, a play which brought to a head all the disputes that had slowly been brewing between the Board of Directors and the artistic director Andre Gregory. As you may remember from the end of our last episode, by the Spring of 1966, one of the co-founders of the Theatre of the Living Arts, Frederick Goldman was already accusing him and the Managing Director David Lunney of “fiscal incompetence and irresponsibility.” 

But even before that - even before the climactic events we’re looking at today, things were heating up in Philadelphia of the 1960s, as indeed they were all over America in that consequential decade. In August of 1964 there had been a riot all along Columbia Avenue in North Philadelphia (it’s now called Cecil B. Moore Avenue), sparked by a confrontation between a Black motorist and Philadelphia city police. Far away, thousands of the city’s young men were already fighting and dying in the jungles of Vietnam. And though Philadelphia was trying to showcase itself as a beacon of culture - becoming a sister city to Florence, Italy, no less, world events were pulling everyone’s attention to What Was Going On. The assassination of Malcolm X, rising crime rates, civil rights confrontations, changing mores about sex and drug use, growing awareness of environmental degradation and industrial pollution . . voices everywhere, shouting about disputes large and small, were rising and rising and ever rising.

Certainly by the time Andre Gregory actually left Philadelphia, rhetoric around the Theatre of the Living Arts had gotten plenty heated itself, from all parties. Many members of the board of directors were furious with each other, and with the staff of the theater. Many of the audience members were canceling their season subscriptions and writing angry letters to the local newspapers. And for his part, in a famous post-mortem essay he wrote for the Tulane Drama Review, Andre Gregory publicly accused a “Main Line Mafia” of making his position untenable. And to those who said that Philadelphia somehow wasn’t ‘not ready’ for the work he was doing at the TLA, Gregory wrote:

[04:21 - UNDERSCORING Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth Instrumental] “The theater is life and the waters outside the theater are troubled. We’re dropping bombs on children in Vietnam. But Philadelphia isn’t ready for plays with the theme of violence. Is Philadelphia ready for the violence in its own streets? Should we wait for the violence to subside, if it will, and do nothing meanwhile?  . . If we wait until communities are ‘ready,’ the regional theatre will disintegrate.”

He had just raised a huge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, gotten the attention of critics all over the country, and raised the tiny theater’s profile to enormous heights. But despite all that, said Gregroy, metaphorically the Board of Directors put a gun to his head and fired.

[UNDERSCORING OUT. Bring up “DRAMA IS CONFLICT” OPENING THEME]

Okay, let’s go back a bit. Rehearsals for the third Season of the Theatre of the Living Arts had begun on August 3rd, 1966, for a play called A Dream of Love, by the New Jersey physician/poet William Carlos Williams. This was to be the first play of Andre Gregory’s projected All-American season for the company, which had indeed expanded, as announced, to six shows this year, though Gregory’s plans for expanding rehearsal periods to an almost unheard-of six weeks had to be put aside, due to budgetary constraints. Now this did not mean that the Theatre of the Living Arts was living within its means. The archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania hold the projected budget plan for the ‘66-’67 TLA season, even before it started, I’ve seen it, and the figures just amaze me, even today. There were expected total expenditures of $560,000, and anticipated revenues of only $312,000 - leaving a deficit of almost $250,000!!! And this was after they were already carrying a deficit of $148,000 from the year before. Where was this money going to be made up? Especially with the pressing need to raise funds for a new building - because, let’s remember, there were still plans by the city of Philadelphia to raze the building, along with the rest of South Street to make room for a crosstown highway, that was still officially a live project!

Well, said this budget document - which was apparently generated for the information of the TLA Board of Directors: “We anticipate a direction of donated funds toward that project.” So, get ready to pony up, folks, I guess. Maybe the rest of the deficit’s funding would eventually come from the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Ford Foundation, or from some local Phladelphia Maecenas like the Haas Family Foundation, or . . who knows? There definitely seemed to be a blithe assurance that well, SOMEBODY would eventually come to the rescue. And, by the way, from what I can find out, this was not out of the ordinary for other American regional theaters at that time. Some places went belly up, true, but other theaters did manage to struggle on, year after year after year. Eventually, everyone felt, some checks would come in, some loans would be arranged, and the deficit got kicked down the road. Welcome to the world of non-profit American theater - the way it would be for the next fifty years, and indeed the way many people run things even today.

Meanwhile - back in ‘66 - groused original TLA founder Fred Goldman, he had been kicked off the board, and his charges of financial mismanagement against Gregory and Lunney had been dismissed. The board in fact had sued Goldman and the other founders to force them to sell the theater back - they still held the title to the actual building. The board had assented to increasing Gregory’s salary, charged Goldman, and he had then jaunted off for a summer in Portugal, not even sticking around to help fix that deficit.

Back at home, the TLA’s first production of the third season - Dream of Love - was clearly not going to induce anyone in Philadelphia to break out their checkbooks to cover that deficit. Dream of Love was at that point a twenty year old play, and it was a deeply personal depiction of William Carlos Williams’ own household - complete with his sexual longings, and marital infidelities. As directed by Lawrence Kornfeld, the show had its ‘difficulties’ as one reviewer put it, both with the actors and with the scenery, apparently. It did feature the performance of the first Black actors ever to be hired by the company - Gertrude Jeanette and Georgia Burke, in roles of the family domestic servant and her friend. Those two performers got the biggest applause of the evening when they sang a hymn together in the course of the action.

Now in the midst of all this, David Lunney and the TLA staff were nonetheless not just sitting back passively waiting for things to work out - they had competition, there was other theater going on in Philly that fall, and not just what you might expect - a touring production of Marat/Sade was being performed at the stodgy old Playhouse in the Park, for goodness sake! And for the more conventional theater goers, Ethel Merman was bringing a revival of Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun to the Forrest Theatre, and Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain were arriving in October to the Forrest with a new musical called Holly Golightly, based on Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s! The city’s period as a Try Out Town was not over after all.  In fact, Brian Friel’s Irish drama Philadelphia Here I Come! had successfully come through town (on its way to Broadway) at the Walnut Street Theatre earlier that very year. This is exactly the sort of thing we will get to discussing during our OWN third season, when we focus on Philly-The-Tryout-Town, I promise. But I only mention these plays just to tell you that the scrappy little non-profit theater company on South Street way off on the edges of town had to scramble to get folks’ attention as they competed with these commercial producers with large PR budgets.  

And you have to hand it to whoever was running the publicity for TLA - they worked hard and very inventively with the resources they had. All that fall, they played up the “Americana” theme, with newspaper ads and flyers that looked like political campaign posters, touting season subscriptions to the remaining five shows in the season. A campaign-style sound truck was even hired to tour up and down Philadelphia streets, driven by attractive young female staffers and cast members, with a huge poster on the side of the truck that read: “THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE! A LANDSLIDE VICTORY FOR PHILADELPHIA THEATRE!”

And there was reason to crow, after all. The second production of the season, a high-spirited fast-paced 1937 farce Room Service was meticulously and successfully directed by Harold Stone, and the entire Southwark Theatre Company really shone in it. A zany play about the wacky goings on in commercial American show biz, set in a hotel room, that had inspired a Marx Brothers movie, it was a big hit with Philadelphia theatergoers and critics alike. For a supposedly cutting edge and Off-Broadway style company like the TLA, this was a love letter to old-style Broadway, and folks ate it up. The tiny theater on South Street was suddenly buzzing again.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

And now, at last, we come to the play that - more than any other single production - had come to represent the Andre Gregory tenure in Philadelphia. This is the play with the rather dauntingly unpronounceable and unspellable name of BECLCH - B E C L C H - “Beck-leck”. This show was directed by Andre Gregory himself, and was written by the young New York poet Rochelle Owens - she was part of the Sixties Downtown scene at Judson Poets’ Theatre on Washington Square and La MaMa ETC in the East Village. Owen’s work Futz, a play which featured copious bestiality, had recently created quite a stir in New York, and Andre Gregory had sought her out to write her next play Beclch for a world premiere in Philadelphia.

Beclch was a work in the vein of the Theater of Cruelty (a la Antonin Artaud). It was an Absurdist play - set in a mythical version of Africa, an “Africa of the Mind,” in which Beclch, a bored white American housewife who somehow had become a conquering Queen, cruelly and selfishly destroyed everything she could while fulfilling her deepest lusts. It is full of violent imagery, frank language and episodes of seemingly random capriciousness. There’s a cock fight, a man who walks around with a leg swollen with elephantiasis, and then is ordered off to strangle himself to death. Queen Beclch smears honey on her subjects' bellies, then licks them off, and then she sacrifices a goat onstage and gleefully dips her hands in its guts. By the end of the play, once Queen Beclch has laid waste to almost everyone and everything and indulged her every lust and whim, it is implied that the natives are about to overthrow and destroy their wanton oppressor as the drums sound. It was kind of like if Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi and Jean Genet’s The Blacks were shook up in a bag with Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. Indeed I was not at all surprised to learn that Rochelle Owens had apparently read Eugene O’Neill’s works deeply at a young age. But however you might describe it, it was a far cry from Room Service, that’s for sure.

The script, like everything else that season, had needed the approval of the theater’s board, and frankly almost everyone on the board thought that Beclch was a hideous text, unacceptable to produce. But after actors from the company had come in and read it out loud at a board meeting, Gregory had apparently held a two hour long session with the board, explaining passionately and precisely why this was the play to do NOW, this is what he needed as an artist to produce, and with the world the way it was going. According to company member Jerry Dempsey, who was there:

[UNDERSCORING ]

“Andre gave his ‘Rites of Spring’ speech which is: there is no right time to perform the Rites of Spring . . . He described the first time they performed Rites of Spring in Paris . . and the riot. He said ‘Who are we to stay above the conflict and the battle. This is a show we feel strongly about.’  . . I told them why I thought it was a moral play to do as well as warning against indulgence. We went away a while and came back 15 minutes later. They said: . . We think you’re right, and we’re wrong.  . . just give us the best production you can, Andre.”

One board member, not quite believing she had just approved what she thought was the worst play she had ever read, looked at Andre Gregory and said admiringly: “You could talk the Virgin Mary into it.”

[MUSIC UNDER]

The rehearsals for Beclch started in November 1966, and right from the start it was clear to everyone that this was going to be an ambitious production. To begin with, it drew from a much different cultural well than anything else the TLA had done up to that point. John Conklin, Richard Nelson and Eugene Lee were the designers, but Gregory had commissioned Japanese composer Teiji Ito to do the music, and Ralph Lee to provide masks and special properties - including that swollen elephantiasis leg and the goat. Most especially he was also collaborating with a local African dance troupe - The Arthur Hall Dance Ensemble. This was the first time that Black Philadelphia performers had really gotten involved with the TLA - and Arthur Hall, who had been working on creating and sharing African dance and culture in the city for over a decade by that point, long before it had become a cool thing to do, had even contributed a lot of authentic African masks and sculptures to the project, which Andre Gregory hung all around the rehearsal room to help inspire the actors.

The TLA’s regular company were playing most of the roles in Beclch, with the Arthur Hall dancers playing other roles and doing startling and vivid movement work. The New York actress Sharon Gans was brought in to play Queen Beclch herself. And young Adam Gopnik, who had earlier played the boy in Galileo for the theater - back in its first season - was brought back again to play a boy in this work, as well. This was not a simple role, and it must have been a little daunting for Gopnik’s parents, because the boy in Beclch had to be murdered during the course of the play - quite violently - and company member Lois Smith who played a role called the Preacher Woman, had to carry off his body before being flayed alive herself.

The musicians for the Arthur Hall company provided drumming throughout the process, and even during the rehearsals the floor was covered with padding and mattresses, just as the eventual stage would be. Gregory wanted to create a world where everything was unstable and slightly nauseating to walk through. Speaking of nauseating, the props department of the TLA was dispatched to a local Philadelphia chemistry lab to get a canister of authentic goat smell. Though when this canister was unwisely released a bit too generously for the first time in the theater, and made its way through the ventilation system, almost everybody ran out, retching, but reportedly Andre Gregory stayed behind, yelling “I LOVE IT!”

As Gregory himself writes in his recently published memoir (entitled This Is Not My Memoir), he was having the time of his life, but he admits that he didn’t necessarily go about things in the best way. “The quiet-spoken, polite-seeming, gentleman Andre transformed himself into a wolf-man, raging through his own theater world, vengeful and angry, shooting fire out of his ears. Still angry at my parents, I was bent on destruction. I couldn’t battle my parents directly, so instead I was determined to drive my boring, bourgeois subscription audience screaming out of the theater. I was also a young director saying, ‘Look what I can do! Look what the theater can do!’”

There was also, in this show, by several accounts, an interracial couple miming sex in the aisle, as well as a lot of nudity and near nudity throughout. It was at least not a live goat being sacrificed onstage in the end, though there was a goat smell, it was a little stuffed animal with a package of meat popping out of a little door in the side. To me, one of the most astounding facts about Beclch was that Gregory had scheduled it to open on December 20th (Merry Christmas, everyone!), and it was to play throughout January! No Christmas Carol cash cow for the TLA, no sir! In his memoir Gregory also recalls that the audience hated it, and they walked out in droves every night, and that local critics hated it too. And this is mostly true, and I can attest to that because I’ve read those reviews. Though the critic for the Camden Courier Press actually said that the play was “exactly the sort of thing that the Theater should be doing.” Other critics came from far and wide just to pan the play - including Martin Gottfried in Women’s Wear Daily (did you KNOW that Women’s Wear Daily used to have a drama critic?). Gottfried called the whole experience disgusting and “amateur to the core.” But Andre Gregroy also wrote in his memoir that after a few weeks people started to come back to check it out - once a glowing review by Ted Kalem was printed in Time Magazine. But looking into it, I gotta say, that’s not quite right, as that particular review (though it was very approving) was not actually published until the play was almost closed. Kalem noted in his Time review that the play was violently opposed by some in Philadelphia. “If this kind of play remained in the repertory, wrote two lady trustees, ‘the theater would shortly be filled only with ‘junkies, delinquents, and some college kids.’” Both Gregory and Rochelle Owens would later boast of the fuss they caused. This was actually a bit of a badge of honor for a cutting edge theater artist of the 1960s. It proved that their work was hitting the mark, that it was upsetting the bourgeoisie (which NEEDED upsetting). That the work they were doing mattered.

One thing that everybody who saw or worked on Beclch agreed upon was that the African dancing in it was startlingly wonderful, the best thing about the show. And during the run, Hall and his company gave a concert at the TLA on a January night when the play was not being performed. The Philadelphia Tribune reported, “Backed by a virtual orchestra of drummers,the dancers put on a show guaranteed to pulse the joy of life into the veins of the most indifferent spectator, and deeply impress some of the magic and splendor of African culture into all.”

[FADE OUT AFRICAN DRUM UNDERSCORING]

But there’s no denying that for the institution it was a disaster. I’ve even seen the daily TLA box office reports for Beclch in the archives at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Though attendance numbers actually peaked in late December as many New York theater folks came down to Philly to check out what all the fuss was about (Christmas Eve they actually sold out the house), by the end of January Beclch was playing to houses that were only halfway filled - and often even less. 

According to these figures - and again these are the actual numbers recorded by the house manager, about 1000 to 1300 people saw the show each week of its six week run and this was a figure that would not even fill up the balcony for one night at Oscar Hammerstein’s opera house on North Broad Street, where they had packed them in to see Salome in the year 1909. True, like Salome, it was a success d’estime for many in the theater world of the time, but for a non-profit theater company that was already struggling with a huge deficit, this was not good. As Fred Goldman, Andre Gregory's remorseless enemy, hastened to point out in many post-mortem articles that he was to write over the subsequent years, this was a disaster. And many in the TLA audience that had once eagerly come to South Street would never return. 

[25:25 - TRANSITION MUSIC UNDER]

So let’s address the issue of why Philadelphia audiences never fully came back - even after Gregory had left - to support the Theatre of the Living Arts, and why this whole topic relates to issues and themes that we’ve been examining throughout this entire season of the podcast - indeed throughout almost the entire podcast so far. This subject also has implications for the current historical moment, the situation that American theater finds itself in right now - when many nonprofit theaters all over the country are struggling and struggling, and some are failing,  and many are closing.

Indeed although no one seems to have mentioned it at the time, I’m almost immediately reminded of the story of Oscar Hammerstein and his Philadelphia Opera House - which took place in this city sixty years previously. In that case, as with Andre Gregory and the Theatre of the Living Arts, we see a charismatic visionary person arriving from out of town and shaping a dynamic and exciting performing arts institution in a previously unexplored area of the city. This dynamic outsider has both enormous gifts and inherent challenges for everyone who has to deal with them. Around them they create an exciting atmosphere in which other artists find scope and expression. Audiences begin to flock to be a part of the experience. Even if they don’t completely enjoy everything about what they find at this institution on one night, they return again, knowing they will find it on another. A tremendous sense of Occasion is built up, both locally and elsewhere. Suddenly What Is Happening in Philadelphia is Important again. Media and critical attention from around the nation is drawn to the spectacle. Everyone who is drawn into the orbit, who is part of the enterprise feels This Is Special, We are Part of something really good and interesting and Consequential. Sure, scandal and controversy occasionally erupt - Salome removes her veils onstage to Strauss’ lascivious music, a Playboy of the Western World boasts of killing his father, an actress walks around with one breast exposed - but these aren’t deal breakers, in fact they add to feeling that we’re in the midst of immediate sensation, and cultural relevance. We’re not living and working in a provincial backwater after all. This Matters.

So, as I say, we have been looking at this sort of phenomenon ever since the very beginnings of Philadelphia’s theater history, ever since European-style dramas began to be performed along the banks of the Delaware in the 18th Century, on what was the very edge of the English-speaking world. Philadelphia audiences seemed to feel that they were part of a very specific cultural tension experienced even if they were not at the cultural center of a civilization - there was always the question in the back of everyone’s minds: Is this play that we are watching, you know, good? Or is what we get here in Philly just a cheap knock-off, and the real art, the stuff that really matters, can that only really be found in London, or Paris or New York?

When you’re in the center of things - and you know it - you don’t really feel that tension. What you are doing in the center is almost by definition important. But out in the regions it's different. You may be working on the exact same texts as the people in the center, using the exact same artistic techniques, you may have the same technical capabilities in your theater. But the little niggling doubt remains - yeah this is good, but does it matter? Of course every once in a while what you are doing catches fire, it gets attention, and the local crowd is present and with you - you feel like this really does matter! This really has an impact. And that feeling permeates the entire institution you are working at. People are excited that the center seems to have come to them - it’s like the whole gravitational field of the universe shifts, and everything is pulling towards you.

But if that narrative changes, if that center of gravity shifts back again, and suddenly the consensus develops that - nah, this art is not good, it’s not top quality, then you feel like you are being mocked, condescended to, purposefully baited - and not even by good art - you’re just being treated like a rube who doesn’t know any better. And if that’s the feeling that suddenly happens around any institution. Well, then, folks don’t tend to stick around and come to check it out. I would argue a little bit with Andre Gregory of 1966 - It’s not just a question of “When is the right time to do the Rites of Spring - but also Where and for Whom is the right time. Where and for whom do you perform the Rites of Spring? Is this the Ballet Russe in Paris with wealthy industrialists and bankers as your patrons? Or are you Oscar Hammerstein with Otto Kahn ready to buy you out when you falter? Or are you a struggling small theater on South Street in Philadelphia? Maybe people won’t riot, or maybe they will - but maybe they will just walk away. And leave you holding the bill. [31:26 - UNDERSCORING OUT]

But it seems that even all the controversy over Beclch, and even the sudden drop off in ticket sales and the plunge in revenues were not the straws that broke the camel’s back. And it wasn’t even the fact that some of the ambitious season was being suddenly changed - a production of William Saroyan’s lovely play The Time of Your Life was hastily inserted into the season, to mollify all those patrons who had been so offended by Beclch. No, it seems the breaking point happened in late January 1967, was that managing director David Lunney in the midst of all this asked for a raise, so that his salary would be equal to Andre Gregory’s, and he would be recompensed for all the work that he had been putting in all this time. After this request, there was a super contentious board meeting, where a lot of financial issues that had previously been swept under the rug were now hauled out and thrown in David Lunney’s face - the yawning deficit, it became clear to many on the board, was something they might have to pay personally - and it became clear that the TLA was not handing over the withholding taxes on employee’s payrolls properly and it was being pursued for them by the IRS. After this meeting, Lunney was fired. Gregory resigned in protest, and first made his crack about the Main Line Mafia in the Philly newspapers, and then changed his mind and unresigned, and then, in February 1967, Andre Gregory was fired as well. 

I’m not at all clear exactly how it happened, there was a PBS TV crew coming down to Philly to interview Gregory about all the exciting work he was doing at TLA, and according to some accounts, and even as he was walking around the theater and talking to them and taping this show, the board president was demanding he leave the building. And according to an interview that Gregory did with the comedian John Mulaney a few years ago, eventually the Philadelphia police were called in to escort him off the premises. They drove him over the bridge to New Jersey, he said, and told him not to come back to Philly, ever again. He did sneak back to the city to pack a few things, he admitted, but he soon left again. 

Andre Gregory did sue the board for wrongful dismissal however, and eventually he won a financial settlement in court. Both he and David Lunney were immediately hired to run a new theater company in Los Angeles, staging classic plays for audiences that chiefly consisted of high school students - they got a big grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to do that. That theater quickly went out of business, too, after its productions ran into fervent opposition from yet another scandalized board of directors. And a couple of months later Andre Gregory also wrote a famously scathing article about his time at the TLA in the Tulane Drama Review, which we’ve already quoted and in which he also said “The real causes of my dismissal were artistic policy, money, and communication problems, in that order. The Board and I were both working to create a theater in Philadelphia. The difficulty was that we were trying to create two different kinds of theater.”

Now many folks back in Philly saw this article and immediately disputed Gregory’s narrative of events. One, a theater patron named Gerald Weales wrote in to the TDR, saying: “Since Gregory was artistic director it was certainly, it was his job to do the plays he thought were worth doing. Still I can’t really take his view of things as the real one. The famous Beclch controversy (a good part of which was manufactured for publicity) looks this way to me: On one side, the conservative members of the board complaining and on the other, Gregory defending. What have we then but an avant-garde Philistine confronting traditional Philistines, and who is caught in the middle? Those people who want good theater.”

It’s important to point out that the Theatre of the Living Arts did not immediately go out of business after Gregory left. Though some suggested temporarily halting productions until the fundraising deficit was filled, the TLA kept doing regular shows, kept its school going, kept selling subscriptions, and it was to last two more seasons on South Street. But the attendance numbers never came back up, and people from out of town certainly stopped coming down to Philadelphia’s South Street to see what was exciting in American theater, that buzz was gone. After the 1968-69 season - its fifth season - the Theatre of the Living Arts went bankrupt, leaving many on its board to pick up its debts. This is a famous case study in nonprofit management, by the way, and I’m informed by those in the business now that it is now the usual practice to take out an insurance policy to avoid having board members being personally responsible. But still, a cautionary tale. I’m never quite sure why people sit on nonprofit theater boards, myself, but I’m very glad that they do. God bless them.

Interestingly, the PCPA,  the Philadelphia Council for the Performing Arts - which means the Goldmans and the Silvermans - eventually re-established control of the building on South Street once the theater went bust, but after a short period of managing it again, they sold it to someone else. It just wasn’t worth it. Over the years the TLA has been used as a theater, a concert hall and a movie venue. It’s still there, though most folks in Philly don’t even remember why they call it the TLA or that it once was one of the most exciting and controversial theaters in America.

Now, I know it will annoy some folks, but I’m going to give Andre Gregory the last word here, again, quoting from that essay he wrote in the Tulane Review. He has since repudiated some of the harsh things he put in that essay. Over the years a lot of things don’t look quite so urgent or dire as they used to. Many folks (pace Fred Goldman) who worked at the TLA during its brief life still say it was one of the best experiences of their career, it really shaped everything for them. Andre Gregory saw that in the future, Philly needed not just one big central nonprofit theater, it needed many. [UNDERSCORING ]

[NOTE: ANDRE GREGORY'S LETTER NOT TRANSCRIBED]

[“DRAMA IS CONFLICT” CLOSING THEME]

Well, that’s not the end of theater but that’s the end of our three-part exploration of the story of the Theatre of the Living Arts. I'm so glad we’ve been able to bring it to everyone’s attention, because although a few folks around here remember the details, it’s beginning to dim a bit as that generation passes on. And I think it’s an important story.

This is also the end of our Season Two, and that just then was the last time we’ll play Chris’ “Drama Is Conflict “Theme Music. When we come back with Season Three, which is going to be about Philadelphia’s experience as a tryout town for Broadway shows in the 20th Century we’ll have a whole new sound texture for you, I promise. Over the summer we’ll continue to put out shows, but we need a bit of a break, frankly, from doing all these deep history dives - some of these summer episodes will be interviews, and maybe I’ll bring back some encore episodes from Season One. If things go according to plan, we’ll be back in the Fall with Season Three - but don’t quote me on that, by the way, there’s a lot going on here at Adventures in Theater History World Headquarters, exciting things, and I will certainly keep all of you lovely people informed about them as they develop. Thank you in advance for your understanding, for your patience, and for your support.

Once again, if you’re enjoying our work here, and you have just a few extra minutes, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this show. It means so much for our work getting bigger exposure. Everything is logarithms these days. Plus, and I really MEAN this, write to us, let us know what you’re thinking. 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, and to a blog post on our website - FREE, for everybody! - there’s all sorts of extra information and additional material in both places. We appreciate your attention and we appreciate your support.

Thank you, thank you, everyone, for listening today, for your attention throughout this season, and for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]