HIV and Me

    I've always had gay men in my life. In high school in Phoenix in the early sixties I was friends with just about the only openly gay student. As far as I know he never made a pass at me, or perhaps he just wasn't attracted to me. In any case he never seemed to have much trouble getting dates, most often with older guys from the local community college or the university in the next city over. He and I hung out together, much to my stepfather's chagrin. We double dated a few times, me with a high school girl and him with a college guy. One such date I remember distinctly; we went to a club in Scottsdale to see a relatively unknown country singer named Waylon Jennings. He even had more success with high school girls than I did, although not overtlty sexually. He was, among other artistic pursuits, a painter, and he had nude paintings of a number of our classmates. I never knew if they had posed for him or if he simply used his powerful imagination, but it pleased me to assume I had seen good representations of more of the boobs of my classmates than most of the boys our age. Ted graduated in 1965, went on to college, had a moderately successful career as a painter and printmaker, and died of AIDS in the early nineties. I didn't find out about it until many years later.

    In college as a theatre major I knew more than my share of gay men. Many if not most of them made passes at me, and I became quite skilled at turning them down gently. This was the late sixties and there was a sexual revolution going on. I was for the most part a noncombatant, although not for want of trying. There were lots of young women who would have been available but I wasn't interested in them at the time. And the women I was interested in either weren't interested in me or had other things going on in their lives. Still, though, I wasn't interested in men. Some of the gay men I knew in those days died uncommonly young, and in retrospect the cause must have been HIV/AIDS in many cases. The lifestyle many if not most of them lived during the sixties continued into the seventies and even the eighties, and for so many that was the end of things.

    In graduate school there were fewer gay men than might have been expected given the numbers we all knew as undergraduates. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me even now, more gay men than straight men tried for professional acting careers right out of college, and more of them were successful, especially in musical theatre. But graduate students in theatre continued to have contact with undergraduates, both gay and straight, primarily because of our involvement in theatre productions. Many of us were directors, and the actors we worked with were primarily undergraduates. Then, too, the gay male grad students tended to find partners more readily among the undergrads, if for no other reason than there were so many of them. So while we didn't have classes with them we would interact with them in rehearsals and socially. So it was that I came to know a couple of young gay men who were outstanding actors (one playing Hamlet opposite my Horatio), who became a bonded pair way before gay marriage was ever thought of, and who nonetheless died of AIDS in the early 2000s.

    It was as a professor, though, that my heart was irrevocably broken time and time again. I started teaching full-time after completing my PhD in 1973 and from the start I had much more and more intimate contact with my students than any non-theatre professor ever would. This was primarily due to rehearsing plays with them, usually five nights and one weekend day per week for five weeks. Just the amount of time we spent together was unusual, but the quality of the time was also unique. I was never Dr. Stevens or Professor Stevens but always David, and we spent a good deal of time in physical contact. Our rehearsal discussions were often aimed at opening them emotionally so they could play their characters more effectively. Very little is left to the imagination as this process unfolds, and I can truthfully say I became closer emotionally to these young men (and women) than with almost anyone else in my life, at that time or this. The fact that they were gay usually had little if anything to do with it, but it wasn't a secret either, even with those still in the closet. The other way I got particularly close to these young men was in the teaching of acting, stage movement, and voice for the stage classes. These classes were most often taught in informal clothing (often sweatshirts and pants) rather than suit and tie, and they often involved "the laying on of hands". I was of course careful not to invade their personal spaces, but it is difficult if not impossible to teach tumbling (often part of a beginning acting class) without touching them. This emotional and physical intimacy led to good relationships for the most part, but I must admit that it very occasionally confused the students about the nature of those relationships. 

    During the seventies I taught at three colleges and directed an average of two productions per year. Except for one production that featured an all-female cast I had at least one gay actor in every production, and sometimes several. I particularly remember the young man who played Alan Strang in Equus in about 1978; he had to appear onstage nude with a quite lovely young woman, also nude. The scene would have been ruined had he developed an erection at any time, but as a gay man he wasn't attracted to women and so the issue never came up. He, too, died of AIDS in the nineties.

    It was during the eighties that the HIV epidemic reared its ugly head. I spent most of that time at a major university at first as the Chair and later as a tenured professor. One of my duties as Chair was to appoint graduate assistants for our MFA and PhD programs, and to hire actors and technicians for our professional summer playhouse. I also hired faculty members and civil service employees. This personnel aspect of my job proved to be the most difficult. Beginning in 1984 and continuing through 1993, when I resigned my tenured position to become an attorney, I hired more than three dozen gay men. Some were aware of the problem and took great care; I am pleased to say they are alive and well today. Others were either unaware or didn't care, and I regret to say that most of them are dead. This toll includes a visiting professor whom I fired for harassing young men; several guest actors who continued throughout the eighties as if they were immune; two costume technicians; our costume shop supervisor; a visiting professor who was among the best university directors I have ever worked with; and two or three playwriting graduate students. I will never forget the day that one of our PhD grad assistants came in to resign his position for the following semester. When he told me that he had tested positive for HIV I spontaneously hugged him. He seemed shocked, as if he didn't know that HIV could not be spread by such casual contact. I also got that feeling from a temporary faculty member, who came into my office to ask if she could catch AIDS from a toilet seat. I'm not sure she believed me when I told her emphatically that she could not.

    After I resigned as Chair in 1988 I enrolled part-time in law school, graduating with my JD and passing the bar exam in 1993. My first legal publication, in 1991 in The Journal of Legal Medicine, dealt with negligence liability for transfusion-associated AIDS transmission. I sent offprints of the article all over the world in response to requests from doctors, hospitals, and attorneys. I could have had a second career as a law professor, especially after I published another half-dozen articles in The Illinois State Bar Journal, but I had a different agenda. I finished my career as a trial and appellate attorney in Mattoon, retiring 15 years ago and living (I hope) happily ever after.

    My contact with HIV was entirely peripheral, but I think it's fair to say it changed my life forever. I'm not sure why it bubbled to the surface now, but the truth is that it's never far from top of mind. There but for the grace of god go I, or any of us.

Grad School Daze

           I was due to start grad school in theatre in the summer of 1969 at Indiana State University. I had been accepted into their summer stock company as an actor/director without even an audition, and they had given me one of three graduate assistantships. This was a pretty big deal, since most company members were paid $25.00 a week for eight weeks, and graduate assistants were paid five times that. Unfortunately I ended up a few credits short of graduation, and I couldn't accept a graduate assistantship when I hadn't graduated. So I prepared to borrow a ton of money and stay the summer at Michigan State University in order to finish up my last few credits. When the Artistic Director at Indiana State found out about it, though, he arranged for credits from the first half of the summer to be undergraduate credits to be transferred to Michigan State, and for an undergraduate scholarship in the same amount to be credited to my account. I later found out why--they had cast me in leading roles in a commedia dell'arte production and a Shakespeare, plus a couple of other roles, and they didn't have anybody to replace me. So I ended up at Indiana State after all.

          Part of our compensation was free room and board in the Hulman Center in downtown Terre Haute. Not coincidentally this was also where the theatre was. We were given by the university a floor of the former dormitory, plus a ballroom and all adjacent rooms for the theatre. We set up an arena theatre, with which I'd had lots of experience, in the ballroom. My job was to hang the lighting instruments and execute the lighting designs prepared by the faculty designers. I also was allowed to design lighting for one of the productions. They had obviously read my resume very carefully; I had done all of these things as an undergraduate and in other summer stock playhouses. As a student, though, I also had to enroll in several courses connected to the summer theatre. So I signed up for six semester hours of theatre practicum and seminars in theatre management and directing. The seminars met once a week with various faculty members and also included practical assignments. For mine I wrote press releases for the newspapers and directed a production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. The latter was one of the best productions I ever directed, in part because my two-person cast were both professionals, and in part because I was anxious to impress my colleagues and professors. Several company members singled out our production as the best of the summer.

          I have written elsewhere about the events of that summer; suffice it to say here that I played Iago in Othello Truffaldino in The Servant of Two Masters, both to high acclaim, as well as directing a production. At the end of the summer the Artistic Director offered me a full assistantship for the coming academic year, but I had already accepted a position at Kent State University for 1969-70. I chose Kent State because it had a Ph.D. program I could transfer into after completing my M.A. and because I had friends who had recommended the program highly. So I arrived in Kent, Ohio, in September of 1969, found a place to live, and settled in to graduate school in earnest.

          I had transferred 9 quarter hours of graduate credit from Indiana State so I had a head-start on my M.A., which required 45 hours. The first term I enrolled in theatre history, theory and criticism, and oral interpretation. I also auditioned for the touring repertory theatre company, one of the major draws of the program, and was cast in the two productions, The Three Cuckolds and Colours in the Dark. The former was another commedia dell'arte farce and the former the American premiere of a recent Canadian drama. Another member of the company was John de Lancie, later well-known for playing Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation. At least two of us ended up as university professors; a third later became the artistic director of a children's theatre company; and at least two others became professional actors. It was a pretty good group of folks.

          During that term I had to begin applying for Ph.D. programs in theatre. It seemed rather early to me, but since I was planning to complete my M.A. in one year rather than the usual two I had no choice. It was actually a blessing in disguise, since I had five graduate courses with only A grades, and letters of recommendation from three universities and three summer stock companies. I also had excellent GRE scores, since I had always been good at taking standardized tests. I was apparently a hot commodity, and acceptances and offers of scholarships, fellowships, and assistantships began to flow in. 

          In the end I had offers from Kent State, Bowling Green, Georgia, Florida, Florida State, Iowa, Utah, and Pittsburg. Left to my own devices I probably would have gone to Florida State, since they offered the best fellowship and I liked their program the best. As it happened, my college roommate Joe Alfred ended up doing his Ph.D. there, in French literature. He was a year behind me, having taken two years for his M.A., so we wouldn't have been exact contemporaries. His wife Carol served on the Gainesville Eight jury while they were there. The best university was probably Pittsburg, but their offer came in too late. Besides, my then-fiance was also applying to Ph.D. programs, and we had to find a school where we both had offers and where we both liked the program. That turned out to be Bowling Green, so we decided to accept their offers and move there for the start of the 1970-71 academic year.

          Meanwhile I still had the rest of 1969-70 to get through. In the second term I took the second theatre history course in the sequence I had started; Intro to Grad Studies; and Speech and Society, to fulfill the requirement of three courses outside of theatre. I also earned some credits for the touring repertory theatre company. In Intro to Grad Study I settled in on as thesis topic and drafted a prospectus. I would write about "The Teaching Aspect of the Kent State University Theatre Touring Repertory Company, 1968-70." Since I was touring with the group I would kill two birds with one stone, and get a thesis out of it. In the third term I took the final course in the theatre history sequence; theatre management; and Restoration Drama in the English Department. I planned to complete my thesis during the summer, which meant turning down an offer I had received to write press releases for the summer stock company the department was running. It was just as well, since I had turned down their offer of a Ph.D. assistantship for the fall. I have written elsewhere of the May 4 disturbances on the Kent State campus, and have no need to reiterate anything here, but I was able to complete my thesis earlier than expected.

          One of the reasons we chose Bowling Green for our doctoral work was that we both liked the program and the faculty, Carol in English and me in theatre. I jumped right in, taking a theatre history seminar, a theory and criticism survey, and a directing seminar in my first term. I continued in this same vein for two years, ending up with major concentrations in theatre history and directing and a minor concentration in dramatic theory and criticism. I took survey courses and seminars in Greek theatre history, Elizabethan theatre history, eighteenth and nineteenth century English theatre history, French and Italian Renaissance theatre history, and contemporary theatre history. I also took directing courses in expressionism, Moliere, Shakespeare, Greek, readers' theatre, and teaching acting. I studied dramatic theory and criticism with a survey from Aristotle to the present, seminars in forms of tragedy and comedy, aesthetics, and contemporary theory. I rounded out my coursework with my one required course in technical theatre and design in lighting design. Throughout my program I taught the undergraduate course in oral interpretation.

          After two years of course work I had to take my comprehensive examinations in order to admitted into candidacy for the Ph.D. I had twelve hours of exams in theatre history, twelve hours in directing, eight hours in dramatic theory and criticism, and four hours in design and technical theatre. Earlier in my program I had passed an exam in Spanish, with a dictionary allowed. I passed the comprehensive exam with flying colors and was ready to present my dissertation prospectus. This was relatively easy to do, since I had prepared it some months earlier in order to apply for a fellowship for my dissertation year. I had already received and accepted an offer for a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship, so I was pretty sure my prospectus was acceptable. So it proved to be, and I was admitted into candidacy in June of 1972. All that was left was the completion of my dissertation. The School of Speech Director took me aside and told me in no uncertain terms that I would complete that dissertation or I would answer to him; it was the first Woodrow Wilson Fellowship the University had received and it would be too embarrassing if I did not finish.

          Before starting work on the dissertation in earnest I accepted an opportunity to direct a production in the department's summer stock theatre. Each year two doctoral students with experience and expertise in directing were offered this opportunity, and it had proven useful in finding teaching jobs after graduation. I had already directed a children's play, Alice in Wonderland, in the mainstage season, and the chance to direct Never Too Late was just too good to pass up. Even though it meant losing three months of dissertation research I jumped at the chance. 

          In the Fall of 1972, then, I began work on my dissertation. It was frustratingly slow work, and it wasn't until January of 1973 that I had anything on paper to show my advisor. He wanted to see second draft, but in handwritten form. So I brought him a bundle of note cards, which was not what he had in mind. A month later I had a draft of a chapter, and every month after that another chapter. At that rate the whole thing was done in draft form in June, and another draft with his notes and corrections added in went to the committee in July. There was a public defense, but honestly I don't remember much about it. All I know for sure is that it passed and I had just two weeks to get it professionally typed (this was before personal computers) and submitted to the graduate school in multiple copies. Somehow that got done (on the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's dime) and I received the Ph.D. in August, 1973.

          Fast forward to 1988. I had cycled through a variety of teaching jobs and was no longer happy in academic life. I had just resigned as Chair of a Ph.D.-granting department at Southern Illinois University, and I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I decided I wanted to make myself portable and become a lawyer. So I applied for admission to the SIU School of Law and spent the next four years teaching full-time while going to law school part-time. I must admit to neglecting my teaching duties somewhat, much to the chagrin of my department, but I was determined to have the entire law school experience. That included writing and editing for law review, a national moot court team, and representing one of the law review companies in selling law review courses (for which I received a free course). I received the J.D. degree in 1993 and after passing the bar exam was admitted to the practice of law later that year. I did that until I retired 14 years later.

          All together, then, I spent eight years in four different graduate schools and received three degrees. I wish there had been some way to add an M.D. in there, but I had to earn a living along the way. Now that I'm retired, of course, I have the time but I no longer have the energy. I could have enrolled in the joint J.D.-M.D. degree program at SIU, but then I wouldn't have been able to continue teaching and I would have had to take out massive loans. It also would have taken another year or two. I thought about it but decided in the end I didn't want to do it. I suppose I could have done it when I first retired in 2009, but by then it wasn't as important any more, and besides we wanted to travel. So it looks like my graduate school daze are over with.

Directing Memories, from "The Little Yiddish I Know I Learned From My Grandmother, A Memoir"

Over the years I’ve directed more than 40 plays, including musicals. Some were quite successful, others less so, but all were worth seeing. I like to think that any audience member who invested the time into viewing one of my productions got out of the experience more than he or she put into it. I’ve detailed elsewhere my theory of art as a vehicle for communicating emotional experience to life experience, and how theatre in particular communicates emotion through empathy and identification. As I think back over my productions, it is the communication of emotion to the audience that stands out in my mind, but sometimes the process was more memorable than the product.

My earliest productions were as an undergraduate at Michigan State University. My very first was a one-act play by George Bernard Shaw, Augustus Does His Bit. I had an excellent student actor in the main role, and he ran with it. The female lead was less strong, but she was pressed hard to keep up. Ultimately I developed a “doting mother-spoiled child” relationship between them that worked well and served the play. The weakest thing about the production was the floor plan; I simply did not know enough about design to create one that served the production, and the actors were not experienced enough to compensate.

My first full-length production was Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. It was a much more complex script, focusing on the relationship between a mother and daughter in sixties England. I didn’t know enough about female psychology, and I didn’t know enough about the new wave drama movement in England. It’s probably true that I didn’t understand the play entirely, and since the main job of the director is to communicate his or her understanding of the author’s intentions to the audience through the creation of an emotional subtext I couldn’t possibly have succeeded. While there was enough there for an audience to digest, in my mind at least A Taste of Honey was the least successful production I ever directed.

It never crossed my mind to stop directing after this bad experience, though; I simply changed my focus. Since I failed because I didn’t understand the play, I resolved to direct something I was absolutely certain I understood completely. I turned to an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I also assembled one of the best student casts that had been seen at Michigan State in many years. The main character, Professor Van Helsing, was played by a graduate student in acting. Dracula was played by the outstanding undergraduate actor who I had used the previous year in the Shaw play. The crazy, fly-eating Renfield was played by perhaps the best freshman actor from the previous year. The other roles were cast  at open and  highly competitive auditions. Because most of the cast members were involved in other productions, as was I, finding time to rehearse was awkward. We ended up rehearsing about five days a week from 11:00 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. for five weeks.

The set was also a quantum leap forward for me. I was able to design a dynamic floor plan with multiple levels, which no one had ever done before in the Studio Theatre where we performed. The lighting and special effects (a bat flying in through the window, and Dracula appearing unseen from behind a sofa) worked exceedingly well. We actually got some screams from the audience, and standing ovations, the first student production in recent memory to do so. Faculty and students alike acknowledged Dracula as the best student production, and perhaps even the best production overall, of the year.

Next I tackled an adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamlin, which I helped to write. I was assisting in the teaching of the children’s theatre class which I had taken the year before, and part of my job was to direct this production. The cast was composed of members of the class; they also served as designers and crew. We used the Arena Theatre, with an audience bused in from local elementary schools. The main innovation of the production was the addition of an environmental theme to the story; the rats came in part because the city was dirty, and the Pied Piper taught the people to clean things up. We spent an interesting Saturday before we opened painting various pieces of trash to spread all over the floor. We played to over 600 kids aged 8-10, and they became actively involved. It was a great experience.

My first paid directing job came in summer stock, where I directed Edward Albee’s “Zoo Story,” a two-man theatre of the absurd piece. Both of my actors were paid, and I had a reasonable although brief rehearsal period. We performed in the round, and the only set piece was a bench. The play ends with the main character impaling himself on a knife he has forced the other character to hold, and there was not a sound in the audience for the last five minutes. It was thrilling to watch.

In graduate school I was paid for directing two productions, a touring children’s theatre production of an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and a summer stock production of Never Too Late. For the children’s theatre production I was blessed with a highly qualified and experienced faculty member scene designer and by far the best costume designer I have ever had, a graduate student who was designing Alice as her MA thesis. She is currently a tenured associate professor of costume design at SUNY Brockport. The concept for the production was a company creating Wonderland for Alice, and we used changeable periaktoi for the scenery and a base costume plus oversized heads and hats as add-ons for the company members. I had original music composed and recorded, and was especially happy with the movement in the production. My commitment to children’s theatre was reinforced; there is no better feeling than making hundreds of kids happy.

In Never Too Late I was required to cast some actors who didn’t have much to do in the other six productions of the season. So I surrounded them with stronger people where I could and concentrated on coaching the weaker performers in their first major roles. We had only two weeks to rehearse, as is typical in summer stock, and although by absolute standards they were still weak I was delighted with the progress they made. The entire run was sold out, and the audience certainly enjoyed themselves.

I directed two productions at Ohio Northern University in my first full-time teaching job following the PhD, The Glass Menagerie and Twelfth Night. Again I had professional scene and costume designers, and both shows were lovely to look at. The actors were inexperienced and weak, but I taught three-term sequences in voice for the stage, stage movement, and acting, and by the time of Twelfth Night I had trained enough actors so that the production was more than competent. My Malvolio was also my costume designer, and his experience anchored the cast. I also used three actors from The Glass Menagerie the previous quarter, and they were able to help the rest of the cast adapt to my directorial style. Incidentally, I have recently reconnected with the woman who played Laura and Maria on Facebook (she is now 60, amazingly enough), and was delighted to learn she married The Gentleman Caller. My costume designer/Malvolio is still designing in the San Francisco area.

If I thought that the student actors at Ohio Northern University were weak, inexperienced, and untrained, however, imagine my surprise when I joined the faculty of Beaver College (now Arcadia University) in suburban Philadelphia. I was technically a member of the English Department, and I ran a theatre program all by myself. Fortunately I inherited a part-time scene designer/technical director from another college, so I wasn’t entirely alone. The situation was complicated by the twin facts that I was replacing a well-loved faculty member who had been denied tenure, and that the school was a former women’s college that had only recently begun admitting men. I had to find shows to direct that featured women primarily.

With this in mind, during the first year I directed Paul Zindel’s And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little. The production from my point of view was little better than a disaster; the set was horrible, the lighting very poor, and during rehearsals I did little more than bump heads with the actors. They resented me because I was not the previous faculty director, and I resented them because they would not work and expected to be told how well they were doing. They at least knew all their lines and didn’t fall off the stage, but that was about all I could say about the production. Amazingly enough, my supervisors were pleased. Alltheyexpectedfromatheatredirectorwastobeababysitter for some underachieving rich girls. I started applying for other teaching jobs.

First, though, I had to expand the acting pool. The best way to do this was to direct a musical. This is more complicated than it looks, since you have to coordinate music along with everything else. I found a music faculty member willing to help, though, and we agreed on Brecht/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. At auditions, actor/singers came out of the woodwork, and I was able to cast the production fairly well. Unfortunately, the woman who played Jenny was one of the holdovers with a bad attitude and the young black man I cast as Tiger Brown only wanted to come to rehearsals when he felt like it. I threw him out of the cast and played the role myself. After that I got more cooperation. The production was only adequate, but it was the first musical ever done at the college and everyone was delighted. They say time heals all wounds, and in this case every year more and more of the leftovers left. I was able to do things my way, and attitudes were adjusted. The remaining productions I directed there were considerably improved. For example, during my second year there I did A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Harold Pinter’s Old Times, and a touring children’s theatre production entitled Golliwhoppers! For Midsummer I designed a removable thrust stage that could be reused, and it formed the basis for the set for Old Times when moved on stage, reversed, and raked. Midsummer got sustained laughter for about five minutes during the play-within-a-play when Thisbe poked out an orange that was serving as a falsie when he/she stabbed herself, and Old Times stirred discussion all over campus. I had arrived, but I still wanted to leave; I needed to stretch my wings with more experienced actors, better facilities, and most of all some talented colleagues.

During my last year in Philadelphia I did another musical (Jacques Brel) and a Neil Simon. I also had a couple of students who directed productions for their senior projects, the first time that had been done. Under my leadership we received a grant to update the lighting system with a new computerized dimmer board and a bunch of new instruments. I taught a course in stagecraft, including scenery and lighting, and designed sets and lights for Jacques Brel using the thrust stage we had built the previous year and the new light board. The students learned by example what could be achieved with such limited resources. The orchestra was onstage behind scrim, on which we rear- projected appropriate images for each song. While one of the men and one of the women were singing beyond their ranges, the show was really quite lovely.

Fortunately the next fall I left Beaver College for a new job at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. It was a relatively new campus (started in the fifties as a branch of Michigan State) without an academic theatre department. Instead they had a professional actor- training program without a degree, and what was called the Student Enterprise Theatre (SET), which produced in a barn on campus. The Department of Music produced musicals. There was also an LORT-C company on campus, which had no connection to the academic program at all. So there were four producing organizations, with no connection to academic theatre. They eliminated the actor-training program as too expensive, and hired me to create an academic program that would coordinate with the other producing organizations on campus. In this I partly succeeded and partly failed during the next seven years.

I started by organizing an academic theatre curriculum, and staffing it with existing faculty, an actor from the LORT theatre, the director of the SET, and a designer/TD that we hired the next year. That young man, incidentally, turned into an excellent director and went on to chair several departments. He is currently chair of theatre at Cal State LA. I directed one production per year, including Moliere’s The Miser; Peter Shaffer’s Equus; Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds; The Importance of Being Earnest; Romeo and Juliet; Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; and the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Along the way we formed a new Department of Theatre and Dance, which I chaired, and merged the SET into it. I paved the way for that by directing three joint productions, one of which was also jointly produced by the Department of Music.

The memories I have of these productions vary in intensity and content. For example, when I decided to do Equus I had an agreement with an English professor that he would play Dysart. Two days before auditions he informed me that he couldn’t do it and I had to choose between canceling the production, casting a student, or playing the role myself. I chose to cast a student, and he did as well as a twenty-year- old could playing one of the most complicated roles for a middle-aged man that was ever written (recall that Richard Burton played it on Broadway and in the film). But he just was not up to it. The production was interesting nonetheless, not least because the young actor who played Alan Strang walked in off the streets to audition and was wonderful. It turned out he had just finished his BFA in acting at an Iowa university and saw the audition announcement in the newspaper.

We also made unusual arrangements to rehearse the nude scene. I figured that it wouldn’t work to wait until dress rehearsal for the actors to get naked on stage, so I scheduled nude rehearsals for them starting as soon as they were off book. My wife graciously agreed to chaperone, since otherwise the 17-year-old daughter of a minister I had cast as the young girl would have been naked in a room full of men, two of whom were old enough to be her father. These rehearsals were closed, but by the time we got to tech rehearsals I insisted that they had to get used to strangers seeing them naked so I required the cast and crew to remain in the theatre during the nude scene. It worked well enough; by performance time they were quite comfortable.

One problem I anticipated turned out not to be a problem at all. It would have been entirely inappropriate for the young man to have an erection during the scene, and yet I was afraid that almost any young man would do exactly that when working with an attractive naked young woman. I forgot that there is exactly one group of young men—namely, gay young men—who would probably not have that problem. And my young actor, it turned out, was gay. Also, before each performance he disappeared into the shower alone, and nobody ever asked what he did in there. Needless to say, it never came up.

My production of Earnest was pretty routine for a college production, but I almost caused a controversy. At auditions I asked a young man to audition for the role of Lady Bracknell and he was brilliant, capturing exactly the dry humor that makes the role so memorable. I wanted to cast him, and I should have cast him, but in the end I bowed to conventional wisdom and cast a woman instead. To this day I feel I owe that young man an apology.

I did Romeo and Juliet the year after I participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in Shakespeare at the University of Iowa. A dozen of us from all over the country studied for eight weeks with Professor Miriam Gilbert, a leading Shakespeare in performance scholar. When I got back to campus I was bursting with ideas, and with R&J I got a chance to try them out. The production was seriously flawed because of the limited acting pool, but I was very pleased with my Romeo, Juliet, and Mercutio, all three of whom later became professional actors. I was very pleased that my Romeo had played one of the horses in Equus three years earlier; there is something to this idea of developing actors through training and experience. Something had gone right since my colleagues in the English Department acknowledged that the language was handled well. I don’t think even the Shakespeare professor realized, though, that I used the so-called Bad Quarto text (Q1) as the basis for my script, supplemented by lines from Q2 and F1, the First Folio. This version cut some 600 lines, and ended up indeed as “the two hours traffic of our stage.”

One of the stupidest things I have ever done as a director was to layer an additional level of ambiguity onto my production of Waiting for Godot. As if the play wasn’t complex enough already, I made it even more difficult for the audience to follow by casting Estragon and Lucky as women. I’m sure I had something in mind about the role of women in modern society, but whatever it was it failed utterly. And the production was not aided by the set. Instead of the bare stage with a tree specified by the playwright, I allowed the set designer to foist a series of interconnected platforms on me, including a couple of tubs filled with water. Naturally, since the water was there I had to use it. The actor was a good sport, getting drenched on stage every night, but I doubt if even he had any idea what was going on. I’m sure the audience didn’t. I had a good time, and the production was interesting, but it was neither an artistic nor a financial success.

During the final dress rehearsal for Fiddler, the inexperienced and frightened actor playing Lazar Wolf forgot his lines massively during his scene with Tevya. The entire joke about him wanting the daughter and Tevya thinking he wanted a cow was lost, and instead Tevya improvised something about wanting his daughter. It was very confusing, and quite funny in a weird sort of way. Unfortunately that is the version preserved on videotape and immortalized on DVD, so every few years when I review it I get to live the experience all over again. The actor’s wife, by the way, who was in the chorus, made sure it never happened during performance by drilling him in his lines daily after that. One of my favorite memories from that production is the bottle dance at the wedding, which was done straight without the fake hats and bottle often used. Incidentally, the woman I cast as Tzeitl was the same young woman who had played Tillie in Marigolds three years earlier. What goes around comes around, I guess.

The only coordination I ever achieved with the LORT company was taking my large Intro to Theatre classes (100+ students per semester) to productions there. They were very happy for the increased  business, but it never occurred to any of them to come to any of our productions, or even to audition any of our students. I suspect that if I had stayed longer that might have changed, but I was ready to take the next step in my career. I became the Chair of a PhD and MFA-granting department at Southern Illinois University.

While in Carbondale I directed only five productions: The Member of the Wedding; Brigadoon; Amadeus; Life With Father; and Children of a Lesser God. We had no fewer than five faculty directors, and as Chair I had far too many other responsibilities to direct more frequently. After four years I started law school and never directed again. Nonetheless, these five productions included the three best I ever directed.

The Member of the Wedding featured the best cast I ever had from top to bottom, including the child actor. I had a total of seven graduate students in the production, including six MFA candidates and one PhD candidate. One of the women used the role as her MFA thesis. I think she thought she was playing the main character, but in my judgment the main character of the play is Berenice and not Frankie. Be that as it may, the audience loved the production and I loved directing it. It was a great pleasure to work with so many fine professionals in training. Six of those actors have gone on to satisfying careers, and the seventh became an educational administrator. May God have mercy on his soul.

That production contained my absolute favorite moment in any show I have directed. At the end of Act II Berenice sings a spiritual, with Frankie and John Henry joining in. I gave the actress her head to improvise as she saw fit, and she supplemented the song with lovely grace notes and additional lyrics. At the end she had both “children” on her lap in a rocking chair, and she stopped singing just before the end of the song. All the audience heard was the loud and off-key singing of the children, followed by the subdued Sadie stating, “Lord, you children have sharp bones.” The curtain followed immediately. I still get goose bumps when I watch that moment on video.

The following summer I directed Brigadoon in our semi-professional Summer Playhouse. We hired both undergraduate and graduate actor/singers, paid them moderately well, and gave them 6 semester hours of credit. At that time we did two musicals and two straight plays, and I decided to be the swing man and direct a musical one summer and a straight play the next. That way the other directors could also get somewhat broader experiences. We went to regional auditions in St. Louis and also held auditions on campus, and for the second year in a  row we had serious trouble finding a baritone. I finally hired a 19-year-old from on campus for the leading male role in Brigadoon and he did well enough, but he got blown away by both the lead soprano he played opposite and the tenor. There was simply nothing to be done about it. My best experience with Brigadoon, though, was working with the professional staff. The choreographer was brilliant, the scene designer was from Czechoslovakia and a leading European scenographer, and the conductor, rehearsal pianist, and vocal coach were seasoned professionals. I was as happy as a pig in shit, and the production was well-received.

The next summer I was due to direct a straight play, and I picked one that had intrigued me for years: Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Everyone was worried because this wasn’t a farce, a murder mystery, or a Neil Simon, but I was convinced that our audience was willing to accept something more substantial. I knew I was ready for it. I was able to cast one of our MFA acting candidates (with whom I had worked previously in both The Member of the Wedding and Brigadoon) as Mozart and find a Salieri at regional auditions. The rest of the cast was filled out with other members of the company. We opened after two weeks of rehearsal and sold the place out. Our audience, and our actors, were indeed ready for something more substantial. I was pleased and proud. Incidentally, one of the undergraduates we hired from off campus (he played the Cook in Amadeus) was later a two-time Tony winner.

During the following summer I participated in another National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in Shakespeare, this time at Northwestern University with world-class scholar John Styan. Before leaving for eight weeks, though, I directed a run-of-the- mill production of Life With Father. Again a visiting actress blew away a local actor in the leading roles, but the overall level of performance was satisfactory. I was happy to use the same child actor I had previously worked with, plus the son of a professor and future Chair of the Department of Speech Communication. I left the day after opening night. That season our Summer Playhouse lost a significant amount of money, which was my responsibility even though I was out of town and there was an Acting Chair for the summer. I wanted to resign and the Dean wanted me to stay, and he and I finally agreed that I would serve one more year, make up the deficit, and then resign. That’s exactly what I did, although the rest of the Department never knew about our little tiff. Fortunately there was another qualified person to serve as Chair, even though the Department and the Dean had passed him over to hire me three years before.

That meant that the next summer I was scheduled to direct a musical, and we settled on The Sound of Music. I had little interest in it at that point, however, and fortunately for me one of the junior but very good directors in the Department (Liz Carlin) offered to direct it instead. I agreed to her proposal with alacrity, and instead of a tired old musical I had no interest in chose Children of a Lesser God for my last production. I suspect that the choreographer put her up to it, knowing I wasn’t interested in a musical, but I never questioned her motives. I went into casting and rehearsals in a highly enthusiastic mood.

The first problem was casting, and here again I lucked out. We had a woman undergraduate who was hearing but raised by deaf parents. Consequently she was a native speaker of ASL. Her audition blew me away; it was the role she was born to play. I was able to hire the wife of one of our PhD candidates as an ASL coach, and we were off and running. My scene designer (I had fired the Czech and replaced him with one of our PhD students who also had an MFA in design) came up with a beautiful thrust stage for me that put the action in the center of the audience, and he designed at my behest a set of “acting blocks” that could be reconfigured in a dozen different ways by the actors to change locations. All but two of the actors were our own students, and one of those two was an incoming faculty member. From the beginning it was a close-knit group, and it developed into the best ensemble cast I ever worked with.

This was the eighties, and we ran into a problem with the local deaf community. They were going to picket us because we cast hearing actors in deaf roles. I explained to the leadership what we were doing, and invited them to attend a rehearsal. Once they did, and saw the beauty and accuracy of the signing, they didn’t have a problem. I did suggest the use of simultaneous sign translation for the part of the show that was not signed, and they agreed it would be helpful for the deaf members of the audience. We were able to do this without much difficulty, even hiring translators suggested by the deaf community.

Children of a Lesser God was a moving experience for the audience, the cast, the crew, and, not least, me. I have never been happier with the selection of a script. To this day those emotions come back when I review the video. It was without question the most moving and best overall production I ever directed.

And that was just as well, since it turned out to be the last. I took a year off to find out what I wanted to be when I grew up, and decided that the answer was not a professor and director, despite having done just that for twenty years. Instead I went to law school and the rest, as they say, is history.

Since I retired four years ago I have begun acting again, and am pleasantly surprised every time it turns out to be a good experience. I think too much to be a good actor, which is in large part why I became a director instead. I have found, though, that I can set that all aside and rely on my skills, experience, and age. It has been 25 years since I last directed, although lately I have begun considering the possibility again. Whether it happens or not, though, I will always have my memories. I might not have admitted it at the time, but they are all good.