I was certainly going to the theatre, and to Broadway, by the 1980s, but I never did see a show in the Mark Hellinger Theatre on 51st Street before it was sold to the Times Square Church. I’ve often walked by the building, wondering about what lay inside its doors, where the original production of My Fair Lady played for six years. But I felt awkward about slipping inside as others gathered for prayer.

This weekend, when the church offered up a live radio play with free admission, I felt it wouldn’t be inappropriate to go inside, especially after I read every exterior sign to see if there was a proscription against pictures. Finding none, and with a good-sized camera around my neck, I entered with the audience, the vast majority of whom, if not all, were presumably entering for the event, not a glimpse of theatrical history. However, I was hardly the only person taking photos pre-show, and ushers smiled at me congenially as I walked around and snapped away. I left the auditorium ten minutes before the performance, and the building five minute before.

There’s no point in debating the wisdom of the theatre’s sale, or the possibly apocryphal stories about the onerous requirements that a prospective buyer would have to meet in order to reclaim the church as a performance venue. All I want to do is share some images of the theatre, which is stunning, and stunningly preserved.

THE LOBBY

THE THEATRE

Perhaps you knew it as a place to cool off, use the bathroom or grab some free wi-fi. You may have passed through it on your way to an office in the building known variously as 1560 Broadway, 165 West 46th Street, or the Equity Building, for which it has been a lobby while construction shut down the regular side street entrance. I’m referring to the Times Square Visitors Center, which closed its doors suddenly three weeks ago.

In recent years, it has hosted meetings and events, allowed tourists a close up look at one of the Waterford crystal New Year’s Eve balls, and had a small exhibition of Broadway memorabilia. But if you looked beyond that, you could see the vestiges of the intimate Embassy Theatre, a movie house which opened in the pre-sound era of 1925, a bit ahead of many of the grand movie palaces that were about to proliferate. Landmarked in 1987, it was the smallest of the more than 300 theatres designed by Arthur Lamb. Of particular note is that it was built as a high-end theatre for women, with an all-female staff.

Throughout its days as the Visitors Center, from 1998 to 2014, its exquisite details remained intact, if you looked beyond the tourism information booth, the endlessly replayed newsreel highlights clips, the faux peep show and the glowing ball in the center of the space. Given its landmark status, these features should remain preserved, even as the space is converted, reportedly, into a retail opportunity of some kind. Just in case some of the features are protected but obscured in the space’s newest incarnation, here’s a small selection of photos from this lovely gem, taken just after it was closed to the general public and sat in semi-darkness, while those of us who worked above passed through it for a few more days.

All photos copyright Howard Sherman

“I got into a brawl one night in a saloon in Greenwich Village. Elia Kazan, a great director, saw me put out a couple of hecklers and figures there was some Big Daddy in me, just lyin’ dormant. And out it came. ”

—Burl Ives, the original Big Daddy

Anton Troy & John Lacy in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof at Repertory East Playhouse

First, to state what I hope would be obvious to anyone who bothers to read me, I believe that hate speech is vile. But in reading the accounts of what took place this past weekend at the Repertory East Playhouse in Santa Clarita, California, while I am angered by the the comments that ended up halting a performance midway through, and ultimately pleased that the speaker was shut down, I am struck by the failure of the staff of the theatre to address the situation properly as it unfolded.

The short version of the story is that during a performance of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, an audience member, reportedly drunk, repeatedly and loudly hurled anti-gay slurs at the actor playing Brick. At a certain point, which I’m guessing to be somewhere during the play’s second of three acts, John Lacy, the actor playing Big Daddy, came off the stage to confront the despicable patron. The situation became threateningly physical, and two patrons, Tim Sullivan and Rob Vinton, interceded to remove the ugly patron. The performance, remarkably, continued.

The upshot? Lacy was fired for physically engaging with a member of the audience and actor Anton Troy, who played Brick, quit in support. The production has been canceled as a result of the loss of two central cast members. For fuller accounts, I refer you to The Wrap, which appeared to be first with the story, and to the L.A. Weekly, which did an enlightening follow-up, including addressing details that had emerged in comments on the first post. I suspect we will see more.

For anyone involved in running a performing arts venue, the Repertory East scenario should become a training case study for any member of your staff who might potentially interact with the audience. It is a superb case study because, it seems, not a single person at the theatre that night did anything correctly. It was an awful situation, badly handled. The best that can come out of it now is that it becomes a teaching tool.

Let’s start with the patron. Free speech does not give anyone the freedom to shout fire in a crowded theatre, any more than it gives someone the right to announce sexist, racist or homophobic slurs in a theatre. Frankly, it doesn’t give them the right to interject anything they might care to say during a live or filmed performance. Even if the drunk at Repertory East had been bellowing in sympathy with Brick’s emotional trauma or vociferously condemning Big Daddy’s own failure to understand his son, the patron should have been warned once and then removed if the behavior persisted.

So where was the house staff during this incident? Was there not one usher, let alone an assistant house manager or house manager, in the auditorium itself to witness this at the very start? I even have to wonder why, at least according to the statement given by the theatre’s management, no one supervisory was aware this was happening. Did any patron exit and seek a staffer and, if so, why didn’t they do anything? If the shouting was loud enough for the actors to hear, why didn’t the stage manager or deck crew contact house management? Could no one hear this on house monitors? If house management felt frightened by the bellowing patron, why didn’t they call a senior staffer for backup, or for that matter, the police? Why didn’t the actors simply stop performing and walk off stage to seek redress?

I don’t know this theatre and I daresay the attention that’s flooding their way swamps any prior national attention they’ve received. But whether they’re professional or amateur, Equity or non-AEA, have just begun operating or have been around for years, if they undertook to bring in an audience for a performance, they should have had systems in place for common scenarios, including disruptions. If they did, the systems failed; if they didn’t, then the management failed. This should have never escalated to the point where an actor should have even had to contemplate coming off the stage to handle it personally, let alone have done so.

If you run a venue, circulate the stories from The Wrap and the L.A Weekly to your staff, and talk about them at your next staff meeting. If you’re an actor, know that when audience behavior goes beyond the pale, your best course of action is to pause and ask for help, not to become an enforcer. If you’re a patron and other attendees are getting out of hand, seek out the theatre’s staff, even if you have to miss a bit of the show.

Oh, and one final note, for those who run venues as producers. If you undertake to fire your actors for handling a situation that you or your staff should have nipped in the bud long before it became explosive, don’t issue mealymouthed statements like this, from Repertory East:

Due to unforseen circumstances, the run of the Tennessee Williams’ drama “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” at the Repertory East Playhouse in Newhall has been suspended and the show will not be completing its projected performance schedule. The show was originally scheduled to end June 14, however, an incident during the May 31 performance has resulted in cast members leaving the show with no time to adequately re-cast their parts and provide the quality theater experience patrons have come to expect from the REP.

During that evening’s performance, an unruly patron allegedly made discriminatory comments that distracted audience members and a confrontation occurred between a member of the cast and the disturbing party. The management of the REP regrets that this situation was not brought to their attention sooner and would like to assure future audiences that disruptive behavior, including disparaging remarks from the audience, incidents of bullying or hate speech, and racial, discriminatory or homophobic utterances, will not be tolerated and offending parties will be asked to leave the theater.

“We are committed to provide groundbreaking subject matter and professional performances to our audiences,” said Ovington Michael Owston, Executive Director of the REP. “We are extremely sorry that our patrons experienced this disruption and will do our best to make it up to those holding reservations for cancelled performances.”

Repertory East (presumably Ovington Michael Owston and Mikee Schwinn, the executive director and artistic director), you reference the specific, reprehensible language of the disruption in an effort to mask both your company’s inaction the night of the incident and your subsequent actions towards John Lacy, which are deeply questionable. You failed to eject the homophobic lout, but then eject the only person who sought to address his behavior. What transpired at Repertory East Playhouse is already known far beyond your theatre and your community, so why pretend you can control the story with obfuscation and gain sympathy with your declaration of support for essential decency? Your statement is mendacity indeed.

Thanks to Meg McSweeney for the Burl Ives anecdote

The August Wilson Cultural Center

If Trip Gabriel, the New York Times reporter who wrote yesterday’s story about the dire straits of the August Wilson Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, were steeped in Wilson’s writing, he might have noted a sad irony. In August’s final play of his ten-play Century Cycle, Radio Golf, the plot turns on the fate of a decrepit house in the Hill District, the setting for almost all of the Cycle plays. The home of the great Aunt Ester, a seer and guide who reputedly lived for centuries, is standing in the way of urban redevelopment, until one of the men spearheading the project begins to regret the loss of this historic home and fights, at great personal cost, to save it.

That tale was August’s creation. But now two Wilson homes in Pittsburgh are on the precipice. The first is August’s actual boyhood home on the Hill, owned by one of his nephews but long boarded up; the other is the gleaming new downtown cultural center, opened only in 2009, on the verge of being taken by the bank to which it owes the money which funded its construction. It sits without programming and no visitors, used primarily by a megachurch that rents it on Sundays for its predominantly white congregation.

The August Wilson Theatre

With arts organizations like the Minneapolis Orchestra and the New York City Opera all but finished and already buried, respectively, it’s not difficult to understand how a new arts facility that opened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis has failed to succeed, but of course there are countless reasons that contributed both to its construction and its downfall. The story has been followed in detail in the Pittsburgh press; the Times story makes it a matter for national attention at a time when it may already be too far gone. It is nonetheless quite sad, since there deserves to be a commemoration of one of America’s greatest playwrights beyond the Broadway theatre that bears his name, long the home to Jersey Boys, though that honor is not unwelcome in the least.

Radio Golf At Yale Rep (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

In Radio Golf, Harmond Wilks risks his career and faces possible indictment, largely self-inflicted, in order to preserve history and the soul of a lost neighborhood. No doubt many people have made sacrifices and given support in the effort to create the August Wilson Cultural Center and it must be painful to see it failing so very publicly. I cannot help but wonder what his widow and his children must feel to see what was surely a source of emotional support and civic love rise and fall in just a few years time. That this happens just as reports of the precarious state of many of America’s black theatre companies have also gained national attention makes the story even sadder.

I have never believed in the “if you build it, they will come” school of arts promotion; I don’t know the people who led the Center or their specific plans and where they went awry. As no doubt some of them have, I would like to think that at the last minute some deus ex machina, or more specifically some deep pocketed individual or group, might rescue the Center, but that is the heart of a theatregoer speaking, not the mind of an administrator. Yet the administrator dreams that if by some miracle it happens, the Center is put in the hands of people with the commitment and skill to successfully and creatively run it.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at Yale Rep
(Photo: William B. Carter)

I came of age in the theatre just as August burst onto the national scene. I saw Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in a pre-Broadway engagement on the campus of my college, I saw the premiere of Joe Turner’s Come And Gone at Yale Rep; I saw The Piano Lesson in its first reading in the barn at The O’Neill Theatre Center as well as its final dress rehearsal at Yale; I attended the Broadway openings of Two Trains Running, Gem of The Ocean, and Radio Golf. I have seen many other productions of his work.  Though I knew August only casually, I was to have been a guest on a 60^th birthday barge trip on the Nile that he and his producing partner Ben Mordecai had planned together, because my wife worked with Ben, and therefore August; she was ultimately a producer of August’s final Cycle play. The trip never happened because the birthdays fell in 2005, the year that Ben’s cancer recurred, leading to his death in May, followed by August’s passing only months later.

August Wilson in 2004 (Photo: David Cooper)

So my most direct connection to August is one of a great opportunity missed, and I feel the same sense of lost opportunity as I read about the troubles of the Center in Pittsburgh. I wish I could rush out there and lend whatever help I can, but I don’t have the financial resources and it seems as if I would be much too late regardless. Even if Pittsburgh will lose what could have been an extraordinary cultural and community asset, at least America and the world will always have August’s Pittsburgh (and one fateful night in Chicago) through his writing . As I write this, Ruben Santiago-Hudson is sustaining August’s living legacy by enacting August’s words at the opening night of How I Learned What I Learned, a monologue Wilson originally wrote for himself to perform.

There is one bit of positive news that the Times missed. Wilson’s boarded up childhood home may yet see life again, as a plan to reopen it as a coffee shop was announced just over a week ago. Since August was well known for writing in coffee shops, perhaps that will be the truest memorial, rather than the $42 million edifice that never really become anyone’s home.

I wanted to title this particular post, “Theatres: Hotbeds of Disease,” but that seemed, after due consideration, to be a bit alarmist and a potential deterrent to attendance. That is not my wish. However, it is extremely apt that just as I prepared to write this, I retrieved a message from my friend Mark, who referred to coming into New York as ‘entering a giant petri dish.’ Not a quote for the tourism posters, to say the least.

We are, as the news has been alerting us hourly, in the midst of a significant outbreak of the flu, which, when it was called influenza in the books we read as young adults, seemed more appropriately alarming. The contagion has blanketed the country and wherever you go, you hear people talking about feeling like they’re getting sick or how sick they were, accompanied by tweets and posts from people in the throes of illness.

Any place where people gather carries enormous risk for the uninfected and residual risk for the uninoculated: theatres certainly fit the bill, but so do schools, offices, mass transportation, stores and, worst of all, doctors’ waiting rooms and hospital ER’s. Anyone remember the rather horrifying scenes of microscopic droplets entering the noses and mouths of a movie theatre audience in the film Outbreak? Maybe it should be required viewing just about now.

We’re told, again and again, that the best deterrent is frequent hand-washing with soap and warm water. But while countless public places offer touchless Purell dispensers, I have been struck in the past couple of weeks by how many theatres, live and movie both, seem to have taken the Victorian workhouse approach to manual hygiene. Put more simply: why don’t they have, now or ever, warm water in rest room sinks?

In my highly unscientific study, not one venue restroom offers sink water above a temperature that might be politely called frigid. Dual faucets seem to simply mock us, each producing the same icy stream; the increasingly prevalent motion sensor faucets offer us no thermal options and dispense water somewhat arbitrarily.  This strikes me as a major break in the chain of public health and personal hygiene.

Mind you, I understand that people are unwilling to stay home when they have tickets for a live performance, especially when no exchange or refund is offered. I can’t hit the, “if you don’t feel well, stay home” note very strongly, as it falls on deaf ears (though we can dream). However, in my more controlling moments, I do wish we could require anyone who coughs or sneezes more than once during a performance or screening to wear a surgical mask; if we go masked at Sleep No More, why should there be any stigma about obscuring one’s nose and mouth in public for the benefit of others (I once saw a show which passed medical masks out to the audience, but for effect, not prophylaxis). And while we all wish the coughers in particular would stay home, as they disturb both the audience and performers in live theatres, I recall in years past Ricola sponsoring bins of cough drops at classical concert venues; perhaps that effort could be renewed or expanded in an effort to silence those around us.

But let’s start with the basics. Even though the production of hot water has a real expense, I think theatre owners and operators might push the thermostat on the hot water heater up to a minimally therapeutic level (whatever that may be) during a national epidemic, at least. Aside from helping to stem disease, which is no small matter, you’ll please your patrons and keep theatres busier because, as someone surely said at some point: warm hands, warm hearts. And I imagine we’d all rather be producing hits instead of illness.