Illyria (TCG Edition) Read online

  ILLYRIA

  OTHER BOOKS BY RICHARD NELSON AVAILABLE FROM TCG

  The Apple Family: Scenes from Life in the Country

  INCLUDES:

  That Hopey Changey Thing

  Sweet and Sad

  Sorry

  Regular Singing

  Frank’s Home

  The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family

  INCLUDES:

  Hungry

  What Did You Expect?

  Women of a Certain Age

  Goodnight Children Everywhere and Other Plays

  ALSO INCLUDES:

  Franny’s Way

  New England

  Some Americans Abroad

  Two Shakespearean Actors

  Rodney’s Wife

  IN A TRANSLATION SERIES

  WITH RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY:

  The Cherry Orchard

  The Inspector

  Molière, or the Cabal of Hypocrites and Don Quixote

  A Month in the Country

  The Seagull

  Uncle Vanya

  ILLYRIA

  A Play in Three Scenes

  RICHARD NELSON

  THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

  NEW YORK

  2019

  Illyria is copyright © 2019 by Richard Nelson

  The Foreword is copyright © 2019 by Robert Marx

  Illyria is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc.,

  520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representative: Patrick Herold, ICM Partners, 730 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019, (212) 556-5600.

  The publication of Illyria by Richard Nelson, through TCG’s Book Program, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Lines from Within the Gates by Sean O’Casey are reprinted here with kind permission by the Sean O’Casey Estate. Within the Gates by Sean O’Casey is copyright © by the Sean O’Casey Estate.

  TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.

  Library of Congress Control Numbers:

  2019034368 (print) / 2019034369 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-55936-592-5 (paperback) / ISBN 978-1-55936-908-4 (ebook)

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  Book design and composition by Lisa Govan

  Cover design by Mark Melnick

  Cover photograph: Central Park, c. 1950s. Photographer unknown.

  Courtesy of TimeFreezePhotos.com

  First Edition, October 2019

  For Rob

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  By Robert Marx

  ILLYRIA

  Author’s Notes

  FOREWORD

  By Robert Marx

  THE OPENING NIGHT of Illyria at The Public Theater was a site-specific occasion.

  In the audience were many people old enough to have known nearly all the play’s real-life characters—most crucially Joseph Papp, founder of The Public Theater (which still operates legally with the name Papp gave it, “The New York Shakespeare Festival”). Peggy Papp, Bernard Gersten, and David Amram were there, watching themselves depicted as they were almost six decades earlier, in 1958. Miranda Papp, the daughter of Joe and Peggy and an offstage character in Illyria, was also at the performance, as actors portrayed her parents’ marriage just a year after her birth.

  Richard Nelson has always been a master of irony and character contradiction, but this performance (to echo the title of a very early Nelson drama) conjured an event. Seated on three sides around the same thrust stage that opened The Public Theater in 1967, the audience wasn’t always sure what to watch: the actor playing Bernie Gersten, or Bernie Gersten watching that actor play him. And then, cutting across so much of the opening night audience, were our individual memories of Joe and Bernie and Merle and Colleen and the building itself; our own time spent there; decades of experiences with Joe both searing and wonderful, on stage and off, with hirings and firings that shaped careers and lives. It was a complicated evening.

  Ironies were layered upon ironies, the greatest being that the scrappy, homeless, almost improvisational theater depicted in Illyria soon became (and still is) one of the institutional powerhouses of American theater. The other, more established, financially stable and prominent theaters of 1958 that are argued over in Illyria would all eventually close. It was Papp’s itinerant enterprise that took root—the one where there was no money for a second copy of Twelfth Night, or even a level stage on which to perform. Just four years after the events depicted in Illyria, New York City would build Papp a two-thousand-seat summer theater for free Shakespeare in Central Park, followed by the historic Astor Library’s conversion into The Public Theater as his multistage home for new plays. The rain did not raineth every day. The bricks-and-mortar of Illyria’s theater and its opening night audience were living proof of that.

  But Illyria is not an event-driven celebration of Papp and his legacy. It’s a play of anger and arguments that subtly raises questions about American theater today, in the early twenty-first century. Descending from this historic Illyria in Central Park, what makes a “real” theater, now, for us? Is a theater a building, or its people?

  The characters of Nelson’s New York Shakespeare Festival are full of painful doubt and insecurity, arguing about what makes that “real” theater: one that supports careers, or one that’s “not about anything but doing it,” as Peggy Papp says, somewhat forlornly, in the play’s final scene. Between those two extremes lie all the contradictions of young theater lives. How can the grinding need to earn a living and the idealist need to make a difference be reconciled? What is art and what is profit? And who is it all for?

  As in many of Nelson’s dramas, class issues slice through his characters. In Illyria, Joe Papp has jealous contempt for his well-funded rivals, the Phoenix Theatre (based in a refurbished Yiddish playhouse on Second Avenue), the large-scale summer Shakespeare festivals in Stratford (both Connecticut and Canada), and the not-yet-built “culture palace” that will become Lincoln Center. Papp’s artistic director, Stuart Vaughan, jumps to the Phoenix, setting off a crisis among friends, a group under constant pressure not only to abandon “Free Shakespeare,” but their basic working lives and beliefs amid the McCarthy blacklisting era.

  At Illyria’s core, the raging argument about the New York Shakespeare Festival that breaks out between Papp and Vaughan is a quintessential Richard Nelson dialogue. Complex truths and contradictions converge from both sides. Uncertainties don’t resolve, but expand. Individual choices affect everyone, and those choices define lives. Amid their fury over opportunity and obligation, where is the moral compass, not just for theater people, but for theaters
?

  Lurking beneath the arguments fought by Illyria’s young theater crowd is a potent historical observation. In 1958, there was still a strong connection between New York City’s working-class population and its theaters—not just the audience, but the people who work in theater. Theater tickets were comparatively cheap. A rear balcony seat in a Broadway house was the price of a movie. Off-Broadway tickets were even less. And Papp (inspired by the New York Public Library) took the next step, making tickets free. There was a marketing line in vogue then, “The Times sells the orchestra, but the Daily News sells the balcony.” The economic diversity that was still so much a part of theater audiences in 1958 is gone today. In many ways, those early park audiences for Papp were the backbone of all New York theater, but by the 1980s, economic forces and profit-taking would exclude them, to be replaced largely by tourist dollars. Taking stock of that retrenchment, Illyria turns away from the high-end institutional assumptions that control American theater now. It points toward “the doing of it” in the mission-based terms of a young Joe Papp, who at the time of this play was not all that far from the dire poverty of his Brooklyn childhood.

  It’s often said that we can’t re-create Joe Papp, because the American society he emerged from is gone. Certainly, that’s true. And in contemporary terms it’s hard to convey the kind of forceful, strong-armed leader Papp became in the 1960s and 1970s; a man who absolutely dominated New York theater, becoming a virtually unchallenged national symbol.

  New York theater is a different place without him and his kind. Where today are dedicated producers of scorching public nerve and authority who push the art of theater on their own terms? Producers who out of dedication and commitment set productions before the public for no reason other than their unshakable belief in a play or performance? Where are producers who truly lead the profession, defying self-authorized censors and politicians in the faith that theater should be new and uncomfortable and just possibly free, and absolutely without borders or blacklists? Who among today’s producers would stand before bulldozers rather than see even one more theater building fall to “progress”?

  There were others at the time, people Papp often viewed as rivals, but who were as passionate in their commitments to playwrights, actors, directors, and stage designers. (Lucille Lortel and T. Edward Hambleton used their personal fortunes not only to produce plays, but help people’s lives offstage, including many blacklisted artists. Ellen Stewart of La MaMa, who rose from poverty and oppression even greater than what Papp faced, became a sui generis world figure supporting American experimental theater.) In all, they defined the best of a community run by individuals, made by hand, and ruled by loyalty and devotion. Looking back, they were a group of supreme theater people who in different ways did their jobs well, who showed us how the work could be done. They were producers motivated by art and its role in society, never greed, and always with a conviction that theater is important. Fundamentally so.

  The theater world of Joe Papp may seem very distant now, but one of Illyria’s virtues is that it makes us look back at a time when theater was bursting in unprecedented directions, reinventing itself in what was still the postwar landscape. Aside from the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Phoenix, there was La MaMa, Caffe Cino, the Living Theatre, the Judson Poets Theater, Circle in the Square, Theatre Genesis, and so many more stages exploding inherited assumptions about new plays and classics. The American regional theater movement was just taking off. Zelda Fichandler was already hurling radical manifestos at her audiences in Washington. In London, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre would soon be launched with intense rivalry. After that came the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris and the Schaubühne in Berlin—all young theaters, and totally distinct from each other. Theater was hot, and stayed that way for decades.

  Ultimately, Illyria looks forward, not back, suggesting that the questions asked by Nelson’s struggling characters in Central Park must be repeated today, and with greater force. In our time, there is a need to reinvent the assumptions and goals of theater producing, just as Papp did. His own generation fled commercial theater to create not-for-profits, and now, a half-century later, a new crowd may have to escape from those often-hidebound institutions for something as radical in contemporary terms as what Papp and co. envisioned in the 1950s.

  The New York Shakespeare Festival of Illyria is a standin for all ambitious, defiant and obsessed young theaters. It’s an invention of confusion, anger, doubt, and talent set long ago, but meant to challenge everyone who comes after not to dream and do as well as, but better—to defy and improve and rejoice on their own living stage.

  New York City

  October 2019

  ROBERT MARX is president of the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation in New York City. Since the 1970s, he has worked throughout the United States and abroad as an essayist, producer and consultant in theater and opera.

  ILLYRIA

  PRODUCTION HISTORY

  Illyria was originally developed and produced by The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Patrick Willingham, Executive Director) in New York, on October 29, 2017. It was directed by Richard Nelson. The scenic design was by Susan Hilferty and Jason Ardizzone-West, the costume design was by Susan Hilferty, the lighting design was by Jennifer Tipton and the sound design was by Scott Lehrer. The production stage manager was Jared Oberholtzer and the production manager was Jeff Harris. The cast was:

  JOE PAPP

  John Magaro

  PEGGY PAPP

  Kristen Connolly

  MERLE DEBUSKEY

  Fran Kranz

  STUART VAUGHAN

  John Sanders

  GLADYS VAUGHAN

  Emma Duncan

  DAVID AMRAM

  Blake DeLong

  JOHN ROBERTSON

  Max Woertendyke

  BERNIE GERSTEN

  Will Brill

  MARY BENNETT

  Naian González Norvind

  COLLEEN DEWHURST

  Rosie Benton

  CHARACTERS

  JOE PAPP, producer, the Shakespeare Festival, thirty-seven

  PEGGY PAPP, his wife, an actress, thirty-five

  MERLE DEBUSKEY, press agent for the festival, thirty-eight

  STUART VAUGHAN, director for the festival, thirty-three

  GLADYS VAUGHAN, his wife, Joe’s assistant, thirty

  DAVID AMRAM, musician and composer, twenty-eight

  JOHN ROBERTSON, stage manager, twenty-six

  BERNIE GERSTEN, Joe’s friend, a stage manager, thirty-five

  MARY BENNETT, an actress, twenty-four

  COLLEEN DEWHURST, an actress, thirty-four

  TIME AND PLACE

  The play takes place between April and August, 1958; New York City.

  Scene 1:

  April; Greenroom, Heckscher Auditorium, Fifth Avenue and 104th Street. 1:30 P.M.

  Scene 2:

  June 22; Colleen’s apartment, Upper West Side. Early afternoon.

  Scene 3:

  August; temporary stage, Belvedere lawn, Central Park. Night.

  PUNCTUATION

  Double quotation marks are used when someone is reading from something or directly quoting. Single quotation marks are used when someone is paraphrasing or generalizing.

  Dialogue in brackets is unspoken.

  Scene 1

  Greenroom. Heckscher Auditorium, Fifth Avenue and 104th Street. April, 1958. A large table; a few wooden chairs and folding chairs, a side table with an electric coffee percolator and mugs; a couple of stained, maybe broken, armchairs; rugs, a piano, coffee table. A typical greenroom. It is after a student matinee.

  Mary and Stuart have been waiting; she holds a paperback copy of Twelfth Night; he has been looking through his mail. John has just entered and is pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  MARY: He tells you to start the play?

  JOHN: Joe orders me to start the goddamn play. “Jacques isn’t on for a while,” he says, and he’s s
ure Scott will be here any second now.

  MARY: You don’t have understudies?

  STUART (Of course not): No.

  (David enters with his guitar.)

  JOHN: I’m telling them about our fun morning, David.

  DAVID: Fucking George Scott.

  STUART: Gladys already told me some of it.

  JOHN: We’d already held for maybe twenty-five minutes.

  DAVID: Felt like three hours.

  JOHN: And the kids were going crazy. David, my hero, went out onstage alone, and played songs for the kids.

  DAVID: No one listened. They were screaming. They’re kids at a student matinee.

  (John hands David a coffee.)

  Thanks.

  JOHN: I do what I’m told and call ‘places,’ with no Jacques. We finish the first act: no Jacques. We get all the way into the second act: no Jacques. We’re two pages before his entrance, I look to Joe who’s with me in the wings, and Joe just walks away. We have no Jacques. When suddenly Scott comes running through the stage door. And I don’t think he’d slept.

  STUART: Gladys said hungover.

  JOHN: Or still drunk. That’s what Gladys said to me. She got close to him. She smelled him. (To Mary) He’s growling … Growling at everyone.

  STUART (To David): Or is that his ‘acting’?

  DAVID: You directed him.

  STUART: No one directs him.

  JOHN: Scott grabs half his costume—He’s still in one of his street shoes …

  DAVID: He’s still got his watch on. He’s fucking Jacques. Jacques with a goddamn Timex.