DW: . . . What I find here is my stage manager's script of Johnny Johnson.
MK: So you did work on the production of Johnny Johnson?
DW: Oh, yes. And I was also stage manager on the Nativity plays and Ifind my work scripts of those. Sometime in the past I had a flockof 8 x 10 photos of various shows that I worked on with the FederalTheatre, but they seem to have disappeared. They exist somewhere.I haven't located them. What I did locate was a lot of shots ofrehearsals that I saw that I was making with my own camera. AndI have both the shots and the negatives if they are of any interestto you.
MK: All of this would be just great, of really great interest to us.Would you start out and tell me how you got involved with FederalTheatre and if it was with the Los Angeles unit through your wholeexperience with Federal Theatre.
DW: Well, I was living on rooftops in Los Angeles and had gotten involvedwith theatre through left-wing activities. And at the age of about18 or 19, I was working with various action theatre companies inLos Angeles. The Contemporary Theatre was one, the so-called RebelPlayers was another. It was real street theatre them. . . notso late an invention as people think. And when WPA (Works ProgressAdministration) came along, I, like a number of others who had workedon the fringes of theatre and tried to make a living at it but notreally succeeded, got into Federal Theatre. I think I was only 19;I may have been 18 at the time I got in there. I had a director'sclassification, I believe, but there were no shows for me. I wastoo young and I was unknown and certainly the truth is, not experiencedenough. Very cocky but inexperienced. . . So I worked as a stagemanager. I was assigned to shows as a stage manager there. I don'tthink I could name the list of shows that I worked on. It includedtwo O'Neill plays and a great extravaganza called The Teller of Talesbased on Arabian Nights, I think, which was rather curious becauseI'm in the midst of writing a movie on Scheherazade forUniversal at this moment, a very different, a very erotic one.Two very interesting things happened to me there. One, I was assignedto the Yiddish Theatre as stage manager. Well, that was a comedyas an assignment because I knew not a word of thelanguage and I had no background in the culture. However, it wasrather fun but it was harrowing insofar as I learned that writingdown cue lines and memorizing cue lines was almost useless. Theyrarely spoke the same line twice. But they did plays both inYiddish and English sometimes interchangeably. They did Awake and Sing that way, for instance, both languages.
MK: Did you have a part in Awake and Sing? Or were you stage manager?
DW: . . . I was stage manager of that. I also had played parts from timeto time but only very minor ones. I never had any real interest inacting. The other thing that happened to me in Federal Theatre, the beautifulopportunity that opened was really in lighting. I have a naturalinterest in lighting. It seemed to me the least exploited and themost fertile for development in theatre. I asked for an assignmentto Myra Kinchís dance company in terms of doing stage management andlighting, mostly because there was an opportunity to practice lighting.Then I got rather good at it. It was an opportunity to experimentwithout too harsh criticism and since there weren't many peoplethat knew much about it, it was a nice, exciting field to follow.And the reason for my specializing in lighting after the FederalTheatre was actually the training or the self-training that I gotwhile there.
MK: So that did became your special field in Federal Theatre?
DW: For several years. That's how I ended up with a dance company,how I ended up with Katherine Dunham for a number of years. Sheactually had, as I remember sought me out because she had heard that I could do dance lighting. And then with a number of other companies I did lighting. I think I got my first Tony on Broadway for lighting. Ialso worked for S. Hurok on quite a few of his exotic attractions,staging and lighting.
MK: And was that mainly his dance attractions? Were you doing the ballets?
DW: Not necessarily. I did do the ballets and I did do, oh, the Bali JavaDancers and I can't really remember. A Filipino company, I'm sure.But also I would take over a company like the Azuma Kabuki and whittletheir 16-hour show down to two and a half hours and relight it Westernstyle, something which Kabuki had never seen before. It's traditionallyperformed in flat white light.So it was a skill that I was able to develop on Federal Theatre and itbecame very useful later.
MK: Did you work with George Izenour any or were you your own person andGeorge Izenour was doing some other things?
DW: George, as I recall, was in general charge of that theatre on TreasureIsland in San Francisco during the Fair. I was there with the MyraKinch company and I think we did two performances a day.
MK: Was that American Exodus? Is that what you all were doing there?
MK: Does that sound like a title? (Laugh)
DW: Yes, it does. (Laugh) Was that a Myra Kinch?
DW: Very likely. I don't make a specific association, but the title isvery familiar. George did the experimental and very advanced designand installation at the theatre. It was a reactance electronicdinner system at a time that such a system was almost unheard of.It had bugs and troubles and so on, but it was in general an excitingand original design. George was quite brilliant.
MK: Well, recently he didn't talk to me but to someone else who waswanting to hear his memories of Federal Theatre. And he really saidthat gave him his chance and he would be on the assembly line inDetroit if it weren't for having had that good experience in lighting.I don't know. (Laugh)
DW: May I ask, where is George now?
MK: He's at Yale. He's in New Haven on the faculty at the Yale Drama School.
DW: Of course. I've heard that from Yale students and it rang a bell. Ishould have remembered.
MK: He's still doing research and lighting theatres. I think right nowhe's gonna light a theatre somewhere in South America and one in aMiddle Eastern country, I think.
DW: Well, George is an authentic pioneer in stage lighting. I'm not sosure in the lighting itself, that is in the artistic execution oflighting. But certainly in the means of control and of presettingand of handling complicated shows, he was pushing steadily towardsomething that simply didn't exist then, and that was computerizedlighting of shows, taking away the variability from individualand manual handling of lighting and giving it over to electroniccontrol. The materials didn't quite exist for him to do it perfectlythen.
MK: Because now what? There can be timed lighting?
DW: Now the lighting on Broadway shows, for instance, is truly computerized.There's a system called SAM and someone whom I knew in lighting very wellyears ago, Theron Musser, has developed it, I think, to something closeto perfection so that Broadway shows are entirely preset, allowing onlyfor variability of speed of cues because its performers will vary.Otherwise, the entire show is preset and really run by a computer.
MK: If you would talk about the Yiddish unit and what Adolph Freeman waslike, if he was the guiding light as the director of the Yiddish unitbecause he got it started under the Federal Theatre. Here's anotherone called Relatives.
DW: Yes. Many of these same questions about the Yiddish unit were askedme by George Medovoy who was, I think, getting his doctorate bydoing a thesis on the Yiddish Theatre, Federal Theatre unit. And Ihad the same trouble remembering then. I don't know why it was. Itwas just that productions became a blur since they were so continuous.
MK: You were working awfully speedily, weren't you? Productions werecoming?
DW: It was a stop-and-start affair. It would depend upon the budget and inner politics of the project and the why's of some things being done or canceled and so on is mysterious to me, and was never very interesting, as a matter of fact. Yes, Adolph Freeman was the director of the Jewish unit. I don't knowhis background before being director. I don't think it was quite asdistinguished as some of the more famous names in the Jewish theatre.He was a highly dictatorial and a very inflammable man. In fact,life with the Jewish unit on the Federal Theatre was like guerrillawarfare. It was very noisy; it was very exciting. There wereenormous passions being spent in all directions, the least of them on stage.
MK: (Laugh) Lots in the planning.
DW: Highly temperamental people.
MK: Who were some of the others beside Adolph Freeman? Was it like anensemble company?
DW: No, it really ran a range from very good to god-awful. There weresome people in it who were really amateurs, I think, with some baretheatre experience and others, such as Paula Walter I recall, forinstance, would have been a fine actress in any language. It wasa pretty motley assemblage. I think they were at their worst whenthey tried to do productions in English. The style overwhelmedthe production then. The acting style of the Yiddish Theatre isvery florid and noisy and wide and in its own language seems acceptable.In English it became at least a little phony.
MK: Well, were you doing some productions in English just to widen theaudience appeal in the hope that other people would come?
DW: It was an experimental attempt to alternate and I don't know precisely why, since the very notion of having the Yiddish Theatre hadseemed to me tied in with preserving a culture and a language thatis really only ó I don't think the language has existed for morethan 70 or 80 years. And there's evidence that it's dying out nowso why the Yiddish Theatre would be asked to work alternately inEnglish and Yiddish, I have no idea. It did not seem like a goodidea; it still doesn't.
MK: When you had a part, like you're on the playbill of Uriel Acosta,for example, were you doing the performances in English or did youlearn some Yiddish?
DW: Both. I learned the lines phonetically in Yiddish, which I did notspeak, and I'm sure I couldn't have had very many lines or Icould never have gotten away with it. (Laugh)
MK: (Laugh) So maybe that's why you were never a lead actor in the YiddishTheatre.
DW: I was never interested in being an actor at all. Theatre interestedme for many things but curiously acting was the one aspect of itthat has not interested me. I think the reason I stopped being adirector is that I really don't like actors and I don't have greatempathetic feelings for them.
MK: Well, how did you happen to become a stage manager? Was lighting abig part of the stage manager's job?
DW: It was the technical and mechanical control of the stage whichinterested me first. The stage as a machine interested me, thetechnical possibilities. So on my own, I began studying stagedesign, the technical means, the machinery and then graduallynarrowed down to lighting as being the most interesting of allpossibly exploitable aspects of operating that stage machine,
MK: Did you find that you had good free range and you could experiment as stage manager, say if you wanted to monkey around with the stage shape and things like that?
DW: Yes. The degree of inefficiency actually made lovely openings forexperimentation and for intrusion into territories that normallyone would have been kicked out of. The theatre is generally highlydisciplined and departments are kept pretty much unto themselves.But no, I remember working with an O'Neill play, for instance, whenthe lighting was poor. The director said to me, "Have a whack at it."And when the running of a production simply didn't mesh, didn't work,I was called in as a trouble shooter several times to wield the whipand get it operating. And I did have a flair for that. I was verygood at the disciplinary and organizational end of theatre. In fact,I was so good at it that I think it retarded a major career for meuntil I saw that it was not a good thing to be good at.
MK: (Laugh) Well, tell me about some of your friends that were in thatL.A. Federal Theatre. Did you get the letter I wrote you when I saidI would love to know what happened to Mary Virginia Farmer who workedwith the Southwest Unit? Well, here we are 40 years later and I'mvery interested in who were the women getting chances, just as apersonal interest. And she ó from what I've found, she was a veryoriginal, experimental sort of person. And yet I don't know whathappened to her.
DW: I'm afraid I don't either. Nothing very prominent happened to heror I would have known it. The only people, particularly women, inthe Federal Theatre that have recurred in my life, that I have clockedactivity on, mostly went into the academic field. You must realizethat my knowledge of them is pretty much limited to the FederalTheatre in Los Angeles. It may not have been true of the people inNew York and Chicago but most of those that I did keep track of downthe years went into academic fields and turned up in universities. . .active in drama departments or English and speech.
MK: Who were some of those? Can you think of anyone especially?
DW: I'm afraid I don't have that good a memory. Yes, Marcella Cisney, for instance, is a name you would know and is an old friend of mine. And she was with Federal Theatre, not in Los Angeles, I don't think.
MK: I don't think so. Maybe in New York.
DW: It would have been Chicago or New York, I believe. And typically,Marcella turned up in a very good and inportant post at the Universityof Michigan and at other educational institutions. But very few ofthese women ó Mary Hunter was with Federal Theatre, wasn't she?
MK: I don't know of her though.
DW: And she subsequently became something of a producer and a littlemore of a director but without any solid or sustained success either.I do not recall many women except performers who went on as forces inthe theatre.
MK: Did you know Marcella Cisney after she married Bob Schnitzer? I mean,it makes me ó
MK: I realize that Bob Schnitzer was in California, got to ó
DW: Bob was. Yes, I know them both quite well and for many years.
MK: Did you know him when he came out to Los Angeles? Although I thinkhe got sent to Treasure Island to work on the Exposition more than to ó
DW: I knew him but I never worked with him directly. Federal Theatre wascuriously compartmented. Often we were concerned with our own showsand hundreds of other people drifted in and out of the ó on theperiphery, and we knew that they were there, but we didn't reallyknow or work with each other.
MK: Before you found your niche with the dance unit, what other units didyou work with besides the Yiddish unit?
DW: I worked with individual plays. I was simply sent from ó assigned toa production at the will of the production manager, whose name was onthat list you saw. It's gone out of my mind at the moment. He wasin charge of assigning stage managers.
MK: Would it be someone like Gilmor Brown or Ralph Freud or someone likethat?
DW: I knew Ralph Freud very well. Gilmor Brown is somebody I associateonly with the Pasadena Playhouse. Jerome Coray was moredirectly a supervisor of mine.
MK: What is Jerome Coray like? A colleague of mine has talked to him,but his wife had just died recently and so he said wait and come tosee him later on. But was he actually a director of plays or asupervisor?
DW: No, he was not a director of plays. He was an administrativesupervisor. I don't recall the exact title but he was most closelyin touch with the production management.
MK: And would that be the level that artistic decisions were made on the,say, what units we'll have or ó
DW: Those decisions were more in the hands of Ole Ness in Los Angelesalthough Jerome Coray certainly was involved with them and laterRalph Freud was and also later ó
DW: George Gerwing, yes. And later Alex Leftwich also came in.
MK: Well, I was looking through Arena this afternoon and according toHallie Flanagan, Alex Leftwich was the person who destroyed FederalTheatre in California.
DW: We had the notion that he was sent out there to deliver the coup degrace and I don't know how true this was. It may have been thatthat ax was ready to fall in Washington anyway. I'm sure thatnothing happened locally in Los Angeles that had any bearing on thepolitical situation.
MK: Well, she first mentioned that in early 1938 a note came thatJudgment Day was going to be postponed and then the word thatGilmor Brown was going to be fired and no longer be part of FederalTheatre. Do you remember that as an event? That Judgment Day was,became a censorship trial case and then the word came out, "No,Judgment Day can go on stage" and it did go on.
MK: It's a play by Conrad Seiler, I believe. But I don't knowmuch about it.
DW: No, I do not recall anything about that at all.
MK: But then I think that was maybe a year before Alex Leftwich, or atleast six months.
DW: There was much hostility. The political lines within the theatreproject were drawn very sharply and there was much hostility andantagonism among people. For instance, Mary Virginia Farmer's unitwas generally disliked strongly and very actively by the older pro-fessional people who considered that it was made up of radical andcommunist upstarts who had strange notions of how a theatre mightbe created in a communal way. And as a consequence, that unitbecame rather precious and incestuous and was rather ostracized bythe rest of the project. This happened with several units though.The Myra Kinch Dance Unit fortunately, because nobody knew anythingabout dance, was left pretty much to itself. So we had a ratherhappy time of it, all of us with that unit.
MK: Well, I was just reading a book recently that made me think that adance unit could become a very political vehicle. That was RobertVaughan's book called Only Victim, and I never thought of dance asa political weapon. Do you think Myra Kinch was thinking in thoseterms?
DW: No. Myra, whom I know very well, is absolutely apolitical. I havebeen and worked with dance companies that were strongly political.I did work with Lester Horton, for instance, and that was a politicalized group. And I worked with several other dance companies thatconcentrated on what were loosely called "social themes," but werein actuality propaganda of one sort or another, generally operatedto the detriment of the choreography, may I say.
MK: When Federal Theatre ended, did Myra Kinch's unit just end or didshe try to have a private dance unit?
DW: No, like many other units that came into existence under FederalTheatre, they made a very strong attempt to perpetuate themselves.A very few did so, in one form or another, but I notice that theyonly did so if there was a strong, talented individual who wouldhave maintained a continuity regardless. No, I even remained withthe Kinch Unit after the Federal Theatre, working at other things,too, of course. But any time that she had performances or tours,I would come in and handle than and do the lighting and so on.Then I moved from that to two or three other things and actuallythere wasn't much of a gap before Katherine Dunham asked if I wouldjoin with her, go on the road.
MK: Would you tell me some stories you remember about being withKatherine Dunham? Because she had hepatitis when I met her theother day, she is in very poor health and really couldn't talk verymuch and was mainly there as a figurehead because the day was inhonor of her. And Ruth Beckford was acting sort of as a cushionto keep Katherine Dunham from talking much.
DW: That's too bad because she is an astonishingly articulate woman.She speaks beautifully. She is frighteningly intelligent. She isan exceptional person in many ways, both as a woman and as a creativeartist. I was with that company, oh, really from starvation onupward, and frequently back to starvation again. It was, you know,the pendulum kept swinging. Eventually we began to do quite wellthough after Sol Hurok took over the management of it.I joined Katherine in Los Angeles. We played petty tours up and downthe coast and scattered dates trying to stay alive, trying to keepthe integrity of the company. Because Katherine without the companywould be like a pianist without a piano. The company was theinstrument on which she played and through which she created, so ithad to be kept together. It had to be kept in constant training andthe financial aspects of that were horrifying.
DW: It would vary. At its smallest, it was perhaps 16. At its largest,it would go to 40. A full show, when we were on the road, I think hadabout between 32 and 40 people in it.MK; Had she gone from Chicago straight to the West Coast and tried touringon the West Coast as a good spot?
DW: No, she went from Chicago to New York actually and to a show calledCabin in the Sky, which you may remember. At the time I met her, shehad come to the coast with Cabin in the Sky. Most of her company wasin the show although not employed directly by her, and she was in theshow playing a role, Georgia Brown. The first time I saw her was inthat show. Then she divorced herself and company from the show onthe Coast and decided to set up her own tours, try to keep thecontinuity of the company. I really don't like to speak for Katherinebecause she ó if you are able to speak with her ó will speak sobeautifully for herself. And her view of things is very, very dif-ferent from mine. Katherine was a pioneer in the presentation ofauthentic Negro culture, theatricalized but still with authentic rootson stage in America and really should be treated as a separatephenomenon. . . Katherine and I sometimes were very good collaborators and sometimes we were very antagonistic,competitive actually in a way. I controlled or tried to controlgenerally the presentation of the show. . . the look ofit to the audience, the lighting, the routining of it so that itmoved at high speed and was no longer a dance company presentingsegmented numbers but was truly a show with its own dynamics and noreal dead stops in it.
MK: Did that also happen when you worked with Myra Kinch? Did she havea good sense of making a dance program a show instead of segments?
DW: No. Myra was an excellent choreographer, particularly in the fieldsof humor and. . . . . .No, Myra Kinch was basically a modem dancer with an unusual emphasison humor and satire. And what she presented was dance concerts. With Katherine Dunham we pushed steadily from the beginning toward thecombination of major choreography and ethnic material into real shewform. And eventually it became Broadway show form and eventually thesame critics that said that we were magnificent and marvelous and un-paralleled, said, "Well, you're getting awfully commercial." That'san open question as to whether anything was lost by being commercial.I don't think so. I think being commercial, in a sense, merely broughtus an audience of several million instead of several hundreds.
MK: And was that when Sol Hurok decided to take Katherine Dunham's troupeunder his wing?
DW: That happened actually sometime during the war. I had been in theArmy briefly and then back out of it and had been directing showsin Chicago and rejoined Katherine when I found the Army wasn'tgoing to need me any longer. Hurok ó we were playing the ChezParee in Chicago, a night club, one of those desperation bookingsagain. And Hurok sent his right-hand, May Frohman, to look at thecompany. She thought it might be worth a three-day booking inNew York and we got that booking at the Martin Beck Theatre.But Hurok didn't really know what he had. I'm not sure he had everseen it himself. At any rate, when we opened for our three-daybooking, we stayed, as I remember, about 14 weeks, and then we werereally rolling as a show.Katherine was very prominent in Federal Theatre, of course, but shewas in Chicago.
MK: Yes. Well, that's what I hope, that she'll feel strong enough in afew months to be able to talk about that and remember ó
DW: I hope so because there's an absolutely invaluable piece of historythat has much to do, both with Negroes in theatre and how thosecultural roots were nurtured at times and almost died of starvationat others.
MK: Well, do you think that Federal Theatre was a time when they did getnurtured?
DW: Yes, oh, yes, definitely. Federal Theatre was a wonderful lucky thingbecause it kept alive possibilities in people who would never have madeit otherwise, who would never have ended up in theatre at all. I myselfmight be one of them; I'm not sure. I'm not absolutely sure. I wasgetting along, barely, but living on about $10.00 a week while tryingto practice one's art is ó you may not survive that too long. SoFederal Theatre gave me two excellent opportunities. One was tostay alive, which was rather nice, and the other was a chance tolearn arts that I didn't know, that I was primitively ignorant about.
MK: So it was a good training school?
DW: It certainly was. It was very important for me and it was fortuitousand a beautiful piece of luck when it happened.
MK: Would you tell me about some of the types of people who were in theLos Angeles Federal Theatre? Were there lots of young people whohad come to be in the movies and couldn't get a job?
DW: It was the most heterogeneous collection of people ever seen. Idon't think that anybody could define the kind of people there becausein type they ran the gamut from old, hard-shelled commercial theatrepeople to young, would-be theatre people who, rather like myself,suddenly had a chance to find out whether they could make it or not.I would say. . . 99 percent or more did not make it and did dropout of theatre subsequently but it didn't really matter. There wasthe 1 percent that was saved by Federal Theatre.
MK: Well, was there a large, sort of pathetic group of the older actorswho were not being hired to be in movies any more or vaudevillians,that type of ó
DW: Yes. There were many of the older actors and there was a dividingline also between them and the younger ones. They had a rather fierceresentment of the younger people who were struggling to begin intheatre when they felt that they had been cheated out of theirnatural livelihood and that their abilities were precious and unique.Frequently they weren't; frequently they were just rotten. It tookme a while to understand how bad an experienced actor or an exper-ienced person in the theatre could be, that experience did notnecessarily point to excellence at all. I was rather young then andI think it took me two or three years before I understood it. I wasrather in awe of experience at first.
MK: Well, that was a valuable thing to learn, too.
DW: Yes, it was. It was learned at forced draft, high speed, and everyday.
MK: How was the vaudeville unit that Eda Edson ran? Did they do somegood things?
DW: I have very little recollection of it. I do recall that we used toborrow people from it for other shows whenever we needed specialties,but I recall very little of it otherwise. And I don't remember thatit ever worked doing full shows. They seemed to do little units thatwent around town performing this and that.
MK: Like the hospitals and that kind of ó
DW: Yes, and schools on holidays and so on. But I remember borrowingtumblers and fire eaters for a show when I needed them. But otherwise I knew Very little of that unit. I think it was a rather sadunit as such because in its ó it was passe already at the time andthere were not many places for those people to go.
MK: Did you know Yasha Frank very well?
DW: I knew Yasha extremely well. He was a very close friend of mine allthrough his life, right up to his suicide.
MK: Was that in the fifties? Do you know when it was that JacquelineDickson died?
DW: My impression ó I saw him in New York frequently when I beganwriting for television. Yasha was still directing in television;he was really a pioneer at directing in television. He was directingwhen you couldn't move cameras. Then he married and withdrew fromthe business, I think rather bleakly and in disappointment. Myimpression was that his death was in the middle fifties or a littlepast that.
MK: Have you at all kept up with the woman he was married to? I'vejust been real interested in finding out more about Yasha Frankbecause he seemed like a genius. And yet people don't really,the ones I've met don't know much about him.
DW: The question as to whether he was a genius: no, I don't think so.I think Yasha was a compendium of many fine talents and they werelimited. He was a pretty fair writer, and he was a pretty gooddirector, perhaps a little better than pretty good. He had amarvelous magnetism with people. He was kind of a pop-eyed gnomeof a man, a very peculiar little man and seemed to be very attractiveto peculiar little women. He was very good with children's showswhich was, of course, what he did chiefly. He did an excellentHansel and Gretel I recall and a Pinocchio and a number of otherthings. I think Yasha's problem it sounds as though I'm pontificatingon somebody else's life here, but I knew him really very wellówasthat he had no talent major enough. He had too many small talentsand none that was overwhelmingly strong. He was a highly intelligentand a very charming and vivacious man.
MK: And was it directing of children's programs that he mainly did intelevision or all kinds of directing?
DW: I recall it was almost entirely children's theatre that he did there.There may have been other things. I simply don't remember them. Hewas also up at the theatre on Treasure Island in San Francisco when Iwas, but his were children's shows.
MK: Some of the other units were the classical unit with Jerome Coray ówell, that would mean that he was doing a little directing but as yourecall, he was mainly an administrator.
DW: He may well have directed but I recall almost all my contacts with him óand occasionally that was being called on the carpet for some outrageousthing I had done ó was as an administrator.
MK: And what were Gareth Hughes and Maude Fealy doing?
DW: I worked very closely with Gareth Hughes. In fact, the script on thetable there is actually where I met Gareth, the nativity plays. And Imet Gareth again many years later. Gareth was a charming man and anexcellent director with a very unfortunate personal life in some ways. Ishouldn't say anything like that, should I?
MK: Oh, I think you should. I don't think that that's not relevant. (Laugh)
DW: The truth is I'm not sure whether Gareth is still alive.
MK: Well, I'm not sure either. I really don't know that.
DW: But I can tell you where I last saw him and it was typically bizarre.I was with Katherine Dunham; our unit was playing the Mapes Hotel inReno. I got a mysterious call to come to some other room in the hoteland I went and the door opened and I was confronted by a very handsomepriest. And it took me a while to realize that it was Gareth and hetold me that his ó it was a new incarnation and he was Brother David.I even went to look at his charges. He worked with the Indians upnear Pyramid Lake in Nevada. He simply dropped out of the whole life he had known of theatre and movies. Gareth had actually been quite wealthyat a time. I think part of Odin Street and the land where theHollywood Bowl is was owned by Gareth in his heyday in the movies.But that was the last I saw of him in the new incarnation as BrotherDavid, missionary to the Indians at Pyramid Lake. Iíve lost tracksince and that was many years ago.
MK: Because when did you stop working with Katherine Dunham, in thelate forties?
DW: No, I would go back intermittently. We would have strong differencesand I would go off and do my own shows. I became a producer andopened my own production office in New York in 1945. But periodically,as Katherine was doing a new show, we would compose our differences andI would go back and perform the same functions in the new shows.And then I simply got too busy and developed too much of a life andcareer of my own to continue doing that. I was with the company inHaiti and I lived in Haiti with the company when it was our head-quarters. We built and rehearsed our shows there and that was afascinating life. Itís very nice to have a resident voodoo priestin your rehearsal headquarters.
MK: (Laugh) Makes you feel more secure?
DW: (Laugh) It did. Yes, we needed it.
MK: Did she buy Habitation Le Clerque?
DW: Yes. At the time we leased it. Later she did buy it. And it's nowbeen turned into an enormously expensive hotel, I understand. Ithink she retains an ownership of part of the property there, butI'm not really sure. With the exception of letters very far apart,I'm not that closely in touch with Katherine any more.
MK: Because he was also part of Federal Theatre, would you tell me alittle about John Pratt, her husband.
DW: Yeah. John was, is a very dear friend of mine. We've simply losttouch now. John is a truly brilliant man, a fantastically talentedman. I would say that his talents, unlike Yasha Frank's, were majortalents but that his nature, unlike Yasha Frank's, had no drive oraggression in it and that he never brought any of his talents tomaximum potential, nor did he give a damn about it. When he met andbecame allied with Katherine, that became his life; designing forthat company and living in the rather bizarre way that company livedbecame John's life. And he never desired another. . .
MK: I know that they're still married. So that he has never done anythingseparately on his own?
DW: Perhaps never or so rarely that it really doesn't count. He couldhave. He could have had a very major career. He was. . . a majorartist.
MK: Well, to go back to Gareth Hughes and what you did with him, tell meabout the religious cycle of plays.
DW: Yes, that was quite fascinating. We did the Nativity plays and weplayed than in cathedrals and churches large enough to take it. AndWe would invade. . . a cathedral with our company of actors. . . our load of lighting and so on and try very softly to convert it to a theatre. We felt somewhere between a theatre and religious experience with those plays done quite beautifully, directed exquisitely. Gareth was very talented, and his knowledge of medieval mysteries, religion plays was superb.
MK: What makes me wonder if any plays were put on film. Were there any that you know of?
DW: Never, never to my knowledge, no. I think it was talked about from time to time, but I personally donít know of anything being put on film.
MK: Had Gareth been a commercial director before Federal Theatre? Someone who. . .?
DW: He had been a very prominent and wealthy, or comparatively wealthy, actor long before. Various scandals came into his life, and continued coming in, and they rather broke his career. And he had come on hard times at the time of Federal Theatre. He was much better known as an actor, I think, than as a director, although he directed very well. He brought a sort of an English precision and elegance to what he did.
MK: Because was he English-born, or was he California-born?
DW: Iím not. . . Heís Welsh. Yes. Rather proud of his Welsh-ness, and believing in its druidic mysteries. He carried some aura of that about him.
MK: Was he around middle-40s or something like that when you worked with him?
DW: I think so. Yes. That, at least, or perhaps more. And when I last saw him, which would have been, oh, I guess middle-50s or so. . .
MK: When he was Brother David?
DW: Yes. I think he was in his sixties and upwards at that time. Thatwas a long time ago.
MK: Was there this sort of openness to ideas so that Ole Ness would beamenable if Gareth Hughes was real interested in mystery plays,then Gareth would suggest having a mystery?
DW: Well, only within reason and only insofar as the material wasinnocuous. I think that the dead hand that lay on the Federal TheatreProject was politics. And it was mysterious because there were somany possible ways of offending that it led people to do much lessthan they could do because of the fear of offending and of beingfired or of being excommunicated.
MK: Was it sort of the shadow of Colonel Connolly himself or any specialperson? (Laugh)
DW: I do not know who Colonel Connolly was.
MK: He was the WPA person for Southern California.
DW: Oh, really? Well, I only know that there was some right-wing, faintlyFascist force out there that was hovering over us and /that/crippled thinking and best efforts because of the danger of givingpolitical offense. On the Project I was known, perfectly justifiablyas a radical,and consequently there were a number of things I was notallowed to do. I was met with a lot of frowns, including some frompeople who could have been helpful to me or from when I might havelearned.
MK: But it was just their own little fear of radicals?
DW: Groups antagonistic to each other sprang up and they were fueled bythese incoherent fears, political fears coming from outside. Andall of them, I think, really had their roots in economic fear becausemost of these were people who had been hungry or afraid or homelessand they could be frightened very, very easily and were.
MK: That reminds me of ó I talked to a woman the other day. She hadworked with Ralph Chesse on the marionettes in San Francisco. Shehad spent her whole time with the San Francisco unit. What wasBlanding Sloan like? Did he run his marionettes for Los Angeles?Did you have any ó
DW: I only have a faint memory of the name. I'm afraid I don't know.There was a marionette unit and I remember seeing some of their workbut I really don't recall the personnel.
MK: She talked about Ralph Chesse in those terms, as a person who hadbeen boneless and radicalized by ó
DW: Yes, and the name rings a bell, too, but I can't recall specifics.I think there were many like that,
MK: Does Edward Gering sound familiar? Because I read his name as thehead of the Experimental Unit and I thought he would be tied in withMary Virginia Fanner.
DW: I don't know. I don't know specifically what he did, Mary VirginiaFanner was very specifically a unit called the Theatre of the Southwest,or it became that. And Edward Gering, I knew the name very well, but Inever had any contact and I don't know what he did.
MK: Then you didn't work with him on specific plays or anything?
DW: No. There was this odd compartmentalizing of units and people in thetheatre and often many of us had very little or no contact.
MK: Who did you work with on Johnny Johnson? Or if you have any specificmemories of that?
MK: Johnny Johnson was written by Paul Green and it's ó
DW: And the score by Kurt Weill, yes.
MK: And it's about the young soldier who doesn't want to go to World War I.
DW: And I notice that the billing here gives Paul Green 50 percent billingand Kurt Weill 25 percent. Well, time, I think, has changed that, ifI may be malicious.
MK: The scales have shifted, haven't they?
DW: Yes. No, I don't even recall who directed it. I do recall that itwas a very difficult and a very elaborate production though.
MK: I want to ask you about some different names that came up.Did you ever work with Max Pollock on productions?
DW: Yes, I remember Max quite well and I really can't recall if we workedtogether or not. But I rather assume we did because I remember him soclearly.
MK: Because I see he directed Six Characters in Search of an Author.
MK: Oh, and James Light who was connected with the New York part ofFederal Theatre mainly is listed here as directing Chalk Dust. Wereyou part of that production?
DW: I didn't work on that. I knew about it but didn't work on it.
DW: No, I don't think I worked on that.
MK: Did you work on the production of It Can't Happen Here that ó
DW: I worked on the Yiddish production of it. I think we also performedthat in English.
MK: Yes, there were two Los Angeles productions.Someone who seems to have done a lot of the sets for Los Angeles isFrederick Stover. Do you know about him, if he's alive?
DW: No, I haven't heard his name in a long time and I don't know if he'sactive. I've not run across him at all.
MK: Were you at all involved with Clarence Muse's production of Run LittleChillun'?
DW: Yes, I came in and helped out on that because I had a great manyfriends involved in it and I knew Clarence Muse slightly. I don'trecall exactly what I did, probably some lighting or technicalthings because I remember the production very precisely from momentto moment. It was one of those that . . . was . . . fun to work withbecause of the vitality that was being poured out on that stage.
MK: Were there a lot of black people in the Los Angeles unit?
DW: Yes, there were a great many and, as I recall, in general they werekept rathe?segregated and did their own material.
MK: That's what I wondered, if they had to do a separate unit or if theywere just part of*the regular staff.
DW: I think ostensibly they were part of the general pool but in actualitythey didn't get very much work unless a production was being puttogether that was a Negro production. I do know that we could borrowthem. I recall being stage manager of a big extravaganza at the GreekTheatre,for instance, in which we used Jester Hairston and his choirand a number of other people from the Negro unit. But they were, ingeneral, kept as segregated as the Yiddish Unit.
MK: And was the French Unit also all by itself? Did you have anythingto do with the French-speaking plays?
DW: No. We used a great many of those people. I'd forgotten there wassuch a unit until you mentioned it, but there was, and we used anumber of them in Johnny Johnson. And it turned out to be a greathandicap because their accents were all but impermeable.
MK: (Laugh) Do you know how they happened to be the French-speaking group?Was there a group of French immigrants in Los Angeles?
DW: No, I have no idea. I consider that a real oddity, you know. Itmight as easily have been a Bulgarian group.
MK: You would think in Southern California, maybe there would have beena Spanish-speaking unit but there wasn't, was there?
MK: Were there sane good classical productions? Iím looking at a GarethHughes Everyman and that just reminded me that Maude Fealy and GarethHughes were listed sometimes starring in some of the Shakespeareanplays.
MK: I think. So I thought that he had a chance to act sometimes.
DW: Well, they were both people of authority, I didnít see many of them.The things I was involved with rather kept me away from them. I hadno background in classical theatre whatsoever so that material seemedalien to me. I think I really must make the point that I came intoFederal Theatre, theatre generally without education.I' d only had a high schooleducation so that scholastic or academic background I lacked entirely.
MK: And had you come into theatre in Los Angeles as a teenager justthrough interest in hanging around and saying, "Let roe help work ondoing whatever there is to do."
DW: Prior to Federal Theatre, you mean? Yes, completely accidentally.I was one of a mob of young people living on rooftops in downtownLos Angeles in the depths of the Depression. And it was an activitythat suddenly became available and I had no particular interest orpredilections toward it before. But it was there and it seemed likefun, so I started doing it. And the deeper I got into it, the rrorefascinating it became to me. So before Federal Theatre actually Iwas sketchily making a living at theatre.
MK: What were some of those groups called?
DW: The Contemporary Theatre was one; the Rebel Players was another;Stage West was still another. But they were groups that were usuallyrather ephemeral. They would organize and do a production or two andthen vanish. We did good plays though. In fact, I directed thefirst production of Waiting for Lefty actually opening a day beforeNew York. I began actually as a director and then started slidingback.
MK: Were there any connections between New York and West Coast theatressay, Group Theatre having an interest or parallel in a group inLos Angeles?
DW: Not really. There were exchanges of information and rights and so onbut no, the theatre people were so individualistic. No matter thatthey were radicalized, their egos were still so outsized that theyrather denied this sort of connection or of real collaboration. Onewould think that what the Group Theatre did in the East would bereproduced here in a commensurate way in the West, but it wasn'ttrue. . . . There were quite a few people of that radical theatre,which was the only theatre of vitality prior to Federal Theatrethat existed in Los Angeles, that did go on into the Federal Theatre.And you've named a number of them actually already.
MK: So would that be people who had worked like with Mary Virginia Farmerin the Southwest Unit? Some of those?
DW: Yes, the old radical group tended to collect there.
MK: Well, were there people earning money doing commercial things andhaving fun coming and working with groups like your pre-FederalTheatre groups? You know, like someone who would like to direct butto earn money was doing something else with the unit?
DW: Oh, yes, almost invariably. With movies if they were lucky but generallyit was with pick and shovel if they weren't. One really couldnít make aliving at theatre in Los Angeles and the only true commercial theatrewere the occasional New York road shows. I used to go and look atthose and they had, you know, a great air of mystery to me becausethey seemed so beautifully polished on the outside and so utterlyempty and trivial inside.
DW: . . . of a certain period and of a certain time and generally, withthe exception of a few classics like The Dybbuk and The Golem,neither of which are very old, by the way, they're folk things andthey come out of a folk culture. And they have to do with the stressof the Jew, either in his home town or emigrating. And of those writers who might have been writing for Yiddish theatre you can takeClifford Odets and translate him beautifully into Yiddish, forinstance-because they are really writing in the same idiom in Englishand they're writing about the problems of Jewish families. And thereare many writers, I think, that. . . can do that.But the Yiddish Theatre, with the exception perhaps of the FederalTheatre, didn't do that. It stuck by its classical material and whenthey didn't play that, they played a particularly trashy form ofmusical entertainment. And there was nothing in between and it reallybegan to die of malnutrition some time ago. New material was notbeing written for it.
MK: I was afraid that it didn't do very well commercially because in someof these lists of Federal Theatre productions, there are some of thebig names of regular Yiddish theatres so that I felt like they weren'tmaking much money if Thomashefsky could cone and work for the FederalTheatre when he was one of the fathers of Yiddish theatre in America.
DW: Yes, big name. I don't think they ever did. They couldnít playsteadily, you know, the theatres on Second Avenue in New York whichI got to know many years subsequent to this. I found that they neverplayed steadily. They didn't really have runs of things. They couldonly announce like four performances of a certain play. And afterthat, it would be five performances of something else and so on.But they couldn't do sustained runs. Consequently the economics werebad and if you can't amortize costs over a fairly long period of time. . . you're. . . in trouble in theatre.
MK: Well, that makes me think of another thing which is the people whowere hired to be playwrights for Federal Theatre. Were youinterested in writing at that time?
DW: No. No, I wasn't. It was interesting to me in a way but remotely,and it was absolutely alien ground. Actually, I did not become awriter until I was about 34 or 35 and then I did it abruptly. Andby that time I had a very good ó you know, I was making a very goodliving in theatre and there were some things I could do very well.But I was very dissatisfied. I was particularly dissatisfied withdirecting, first of all because I don't like actors. That's obviouslybad for a director. And then -- I got to a certainpoint and everything I was doing in theatre was the interpretation ofsomebody else's intention. There was only one creative person intheatre ó I don't know why it took me so long to see it ó and that'sthe writer. Everybody else exists to interpret and express. So Ithought, "Well, to hell with that." This, I think, was the only reallybrave thing I ever did in my life. I quit in the middle of a showactually, in the middle of directing a Broadway musical and went homeand said, "From now on I'm a writer." It took a while, yet it wasn't allthat difficult. But first I wrote short stories and features and so onso I could simply learn syntax and the rules of grammar.Then when I shifted to writing what I_knew best, which was theatre,I shifted to television not to theatre itself and began writing for live television and there was no struggle. Everything sold from thebeginning. As a matter of fact, my very first play won the awardas best of the year.
MK: Oh, really? What was that?
DW: A television play called Elisha and the Long Knives, the first one Iwrote. It was in 1954 -... I was so ignorantóId never seen a play on televisionóI wrote it in one set because that's the way one does it in theatre. You donít use two where one will do. And they thought that was nice. That was the tour de force. (Laugh) I kept my mouth shut.But I had no struggle with it. It wasn't that I was a verygood writer; I wasn't. But I knew my theatre so well by that timethat instinctively I wrote in theatrical terms and with theatricalideas in my construction. Other writers come at it completely theother way. They have educations and they generally...havean aptitude and can write well. But they have to learn theatre andit takes a long time to really learn theatre. It's a very subtlething to learn and I found out that it's very difficult to teach,too, because I've been invited from time to time, you know, to teachit or conduct workshop courses and so on. Itís quite difficult.
MK: So do you go to those and say to the people, "Well, first you needto be a stage manager and need to learn lighting." (Laugh)
DW: No. (Laugh) No, because it isn't practical to say that. What I dosay to them is that "Until you can express the scene in every wayexcept through words, you don't_know anything about theatre. Wordsare your last resort". . . I try to get that thought through theirheads, and usually I can't right away. They just don't understandthat, that you have all kinds of tools available to you in theatreor movie. I write movies and television. I just consider themforms of theatre. You have all these tools available to you, andspeech is only one of than. But everyone starting, you know,thinks that itís all in the word.
MK: When you shoot from medium to medium, is it just a matter oflearning the ó well, syntax isn't quite it, but just the tools ofthat, like to go into television?
DW: It's techniques. The techniques are different. They are markedlydifferent; they're not just a little bit different. Televisionlies in some middle ground between theatre and movies. You can bemore articulate in television than you can in movies, but not nearlyas articulate as you can in stage. Also, what happens is diminishingabstraction. Theatre is very abstract; that's its power. I thinka demonstration is Man of La Mancha, which I could write for theatreand with almost nothing on stage; the audience believed that theywere seeing all those things, you know. They think they saw castlesand moats and inns and this and that, and there was nothing there.Have you ever seen it?
MK: I've seen it and loved it.
MK: We saw it once in a production in San Diego.
MK: Well, we've maybe seen it several times. (Laugh) I saw it once inHawaii, in Honolulu.
DW: Yes, itís played there two or three times. But abstraction is a reason thatit never made the transition from theatre to movies, the reason it'sa rotten movie.
MK: Was a movie even made of it? I didn't realize that.
DW: Oh, yes. I'll show you a giant poster in there. Most of my thingsare in Spain, but there are some here that might interest you. You see, it was absolutely abstract and there was no way to bridge the gap. That was a secret I knew and the bidding was going up and up for the movierights. I was laughing to myself because I knew that would besomewhere between impossible and very difficult to make a movie of it.
MK: Has it been on television?
DW: I wrote it originally for television. It was on television firstunder the title, I, Don Quixote. It was a two-hour special and Lee J. Cobb played Quixote and Eli Wallach was Sancho and Colleen Dewhurst played Aldonza. It was her first big role. Yes, it was after doing it on TV that I realized that somehow I was writing it in the wrong form or for the wrong medium. Yes. that's when I realized I had written it for the wrong medium. I don't know, they ended up with like two casts on television. There was a castof prisoners and a cast of people in the Quixote story. And I said,"That's all wrong." But I couldn't look at ó television's too realand movies are much more real than television. But those shifts óno, they're not just easy or automatic to make. I mean, you have tolearn the techniques and the tools of the other media.
MK: But when you already understand lighting very well, then you cantranslate your lighting knowledge from theatre to ó
DW: Yes, when you understand the machinery. I did understand themachinery because I learned that first. It's curious . ...It's absolutely backwards, of course.
MK: Well, for you it's been very successful, hasn't it? (Laugh)
DW: Well, it worked. But I still write with . . . much sweat andpain. But I'm very sure of myself in certainthings. I am very good at a couple of things and I know it. Oneis construction. I can construct theatricallymuch better than most people. But I don't consider myself a verygood writer as such.
MK: Is it something you can verbalize well, how you construct theatrically?DW; No. No, I don't think I would know how to verbalize it. It's anabsolute intuitive sense. . . If there's something wrong,I hear an alarm bell go off and often I don't know the reason but Istop right there.
MK: Did you come to Man of La Mancha from thinking about Cervantes' lifeor from reading Don Quixote?
DW: Well, you really want to know? Because it's silly. You want to knowhow things start?
MK: To me it's been intriguing ever since I've first known of Man of LaMancha.
DW: I did it because some silly press agent put an item in the newspaperwhen I was in Madrid and said that I was there researching to do adramatization of Don Quixote. Well, I wasn't there for that reasonat all and I had never read Don Quixote and neither has hardly anyoneelse, may I say. All those people who know Don Quixote haven't read it.
MK: They just say, "Oh, yes, I know Don Quixote?"
DW: They just say, "Of course I know it." And then you pin 'em down andyou say, "Have you really read it?" And if they say Yes, ask, "Howmany pages is it?" And they say, "Oh, it's long, 600 or 800." Well,it isn't; it's 1600 and most of it is a bore. I've never finishedreading it, never to this day.But at any rate, I began thinking about it and I tried readingDon Quixote and I couldn't. I've read in it extensively, but I'venever read all of it. But I got interested in Cervantes and I lovehistory and I love researching. I get carried away by it. And soI began studying up on Cervantes and the more I found out about him,the more I began to think, "Well, if there is a story, if there isa piece of theatre here, it isn't in Don Quixote which has beentried four hundred times, literally four hundred. It's in Cervantes."So I began brooding about how the story of Cervantes could be toldand finally the idea just struck me that if I could somehow interweavethe identities so that they emerge as fundamentally the same man, I'dhave a play. And I wrote that idea out on one page and showed it toDavid Susskind and he commissioned it instantly for television. Afterthat, it was just a matter of modifying it for theatre. It shouldhave been theatre to begin with. It was too complex for television.
MK: So did you see it happen on television and then say, "I've got towork on it some more?"
DW: I did. I almost immediately began rewriting it as a straight playfor Broadway. I did it and the play was optioned twice and I wasglad it wasn't done because I realized I hadn't gone far enough, thatstylistically it wasn't high enough yet. And about the same time,six different people realized that it had to be a musical. Soeventually we just got together.My original lyricist for it was W.H. Auden. I still have in my files,secretly, 16 stunning lyrics. The problem with them is that they arenot lyrics really, they're poems. So believe it or not, we had tofire W.H. Auden. That's not a nice thing to do. (Laugh)
MK: (Laugh) Well, how did you ever ccme to Auden as a lyricist?
DW: Because he had been the librettist of many operas and because he wasas expert on Don Quixote as I was not. And I thought that the ratherliterary quality of the whole thing would be sustained by using Auden.I was wrong; he and I differed very strongly because Man of La Manchais not Don Quixote. It's very untrue to Don Quixote as a matter offact. And Auden was the scholar, who kept saying to me, "You can'tdo that," And I'd say, "Yes, I can." And he'd say, "But that is aviolation of Cervantes." And I'd say, "I really don't care." And wecouldn't go on that way. I knew what I wanted to say and do and hewanted to be true to Don Quixote. So we had to part.
MK: Would you tell me what you think the importance of Federal Theatre wassay, in dramatic history, if it was an important chapter in the 20thcentury?
DW: I think it is a much less important chapter than it should have been.I think it's much less important than people thought it was. I thinkthat its real importance lay not in giving birth to any new body ofliterature, theatrical literature, nor in granting some sort of astimulus to the theatrical art, but simply in allowing a certainnumber of people to survive and continue their theatrical careerswho otherwise might have been wiped out. And its importance, Ithink, has to be measured in terms of those individuals who didcontinue from Federal Theatre and saw some blossoming of theirtalents in theatre-related fields afterwards. I wish that it hadbeen some kind of a formidable release of energy in theatre, butI really do not believe that it was. I think that it was strangledby the weight of politics and all the fears engendered by politicalstresses.
MK: Would it be possible for that kind of thing to happen today, do youthink? I mean that type of federal theatre? I think we're a littleless afraid than we were then, and maybea little more sophisticated.
DW: Well, we're assuming a government-subsidized theatre which is substantially what the Federal Theatre was. I find it hard to believein its possibility in America. We have no tradition of it. Americansdon't even regard theatre in the same way peoples elsewhere in theworld do. To us it's an entertainment and a luxury. Elsewhere inthe world it's a cultural necessity. It's typical of Vienna, forinstance, that after the war the first thing they rebuilt was theiropera house, but that would not be conceivable in America. And sincethe cultural roots don't exist for such an attitude, I find it hardto believe that a federally subsidized theatre could happen inAmerica or that it would be workable.
DW: Not precisely today but tomorrow, yes. It could exist tomorrow and itcould exist in a much more vicious form. I wouldn't doubt it for amoment.
MK: But you think we're just as susceptible to talent here and state ofmind? (Laugh)
DW: That we are, you say? Well, yes, I think, you know, we are ó oneof the great inherent flaws of democracy is this diffusion whichallows almost anything to happen, which allows almost any strong,forceful, purposeful leadership to make tremendous impact, even ifit happens to be to a rotten purpose. And I think it can happenagain. I think it can and it will. We can't foresee the exactcircumstances now, but they surely will exist again. Some time ofstress, sane time of division, sane time of economic problems, youknow, deep economic trouble, and it will all exist again. It's aneasy prediction because that was not the only time it existed in thatform. It's been absolutely cyclical in American history.
MK: So many people say that Federal Theatre, if it had been divorcedfrom relief, if it had just been based on talent or if that switchhad happened at a point like midway through and you'd gotten therelief aspect out-of the way, then it would have flourished and beenthe basis for a national theatre. But I don't think you really agreewith that.
DW: No. I think that is the purest pie-in-the-sky thinking and I don'tagree with it for a moment. Not as a theory ó it's a lovely theory óbut as a possibility of actually happening, not a chance; not then,not even now. Maybe sometime in the future, but I strongly doubt thatbecause America simply has no brick in its foundation that supportsthat particular attitude.
MK: And they were only willing to support it as long as it was helpingpeople keep from starving. It was an emergency that brought itinto being.
DW: That's right, yes, it was an alternative. As a matter of fact, Ithink the existence of the Federal Theatre was a great annoyanceto the whole WPA. No matter that it was rather small numerically,it was very noisy. It was very public. It was out on display andsince it was being funded by tax money, everybody had something tosay about it, usually bad.
MK: It was everybody's taxes paying for it, so if you didn't live inNew York where a lot was going on, then you felt like you werenítgetting your money's worth?
DW: Yes, exactly, with some point, too.
MK: Can you think of anyone you haven't mentioned to me that you couldgive me any little memory of, Mr. Wasserman? Anyone who is reallylike an outstanding person or someone who really impressed you?
DW: . There were a number of interesting people around. Have you runacross Blackie O'Neal, Charles O'Neal?
MK: No, I don't know of Blackie OíNeal.
DW: Well, he was ó his name was Charles O'Neal. He was very much on theProject. He was up in San Francisco with us, with that detachmentthat was sent up there.
DW: Colorful character, colorful actor, subsequently became quite a goodwriter. He was the author of Three Wishes of Jamie Mc Ruin whichbecame a stage musical called Three Wishes for Jamie, several novels.Married an actress on the Project and as I say, his son is RyanO'Neal. And Blackie is a bright, colorful man and he lives down here,I think around Malibu, but I'm not sure. Charles O'Neal.Peter Brocco was one of our mob, still active, still acting.
MK: I was going to ask you about him. He appears in so many things.
DW: Yes, a good character actor. He was part of Mary Virginia Farmer'sTheatre of the Southwest.
MK: Did you know an actor named Ray Bailey who played ó I know he wasthe fox in Pinocchio. I'm not sure what else he was in.DW; Yes. I have an impression he also played in Charley's Aunt and anumber of things. But yes, I used to know Ray Bailey.
MK: Frances Warde is a lady who's still around. I don't know what hername was.
DW: Frances Warde. I don't remember that. The old lady I pointed outto you who does so many television commercials was one of our mostmusical actresses, Marjorie Bennett.
MK: And she was in Federal Theatre?
DW: Oh, yes, the whole course of it. And she lives in Hollywood and shemakes commercials, a delightful lady.
MK: In those days was Charles OíNeal an actor or what was he?
DW: He was an actor and he subsequently became a writer.
MK: Because I got the writing part down and then I realized that Iwasn't sure what he did on Federal Theatre. He was in some of theproductions then?
DW: Was there a writers' unit in the Los Angeles Federal Theatre?
MK: Well, not one that I know much about.
DW: I don't believe there was. I thought maybe I ó
MK: Well, I know, say, someone like Arnold Sundgaard worked for theChicago Unit.
DW: Arnold's one of my closest friends, by the way. We collaborate andI've directed several of his folk operas.
MK: He was being paid to write plays for the Chicago Unit, and he wroteone of the Living Newspapers that was produced.DW; Yes. He wrote more than one, didn't he? I think Spirochete was his,wasn't it?
MK: Spirochete is the one that I was really thinking of, but I think hedid write some others. But maybe Spirochete is the one that wasproduced, and the others weren't.
DW: Perhaps they weren't produced, yes.
MK: But the way it worked in New York and Chicago is that if you werea playwright, they got you to read plays to earn your money so thatyour plays could be your own property and not the property of theGovernment. So that, say, once a week you would come in and givea report on five plays and just give your synopsis. And then whatyou were really supposedly doing all week was busy working on yourown plays. And I know that that was going on around the country,but I'm not sure about who was doing that in Los Angeles or whowas in charge of that playwriting unit.
DW: I don't recall. There may have been such a unit. It must havebeen of very low potency though because I just don't remanber itand I don't remember any of its works being done. We put togethera pageant type sort of thing that would be locally written now andthen, but no real plays.
MK: Like that Southwest Unit. Do you think they were trying to writetheir own material if it was regional?
DW: I think they intended to, yes. And they may have even experimentallydone so. I don't really know but certainly nothing much has survived.They did Night Over Taos but that's Maxwell Anderson.
MK: And was The Sun Rises in the West written out here? I don't know.
DW: The Sun Rises in the West? Is that the title?
MK: And it was a Southwest Unit production that I thought was the startof trying to document the history of the Southwest, maybe during theGold Rush.
DW: I don't know. It rings no bell at all.
MK: But when you mentioned Clifford Odetsí idiom being so easily trans-lated into Yiddish, Arthur Miller's first job was writing on theNew York project. He and a man named Norman Rosten who's done some ó
MK: ó both were those playwrights who would read plays all week and thenturn in ó and we've got some early Arthur Miller scripts in whichhe's much more addressing his Jewish background which later is sort of óyou know, in Death of Salesman that's all left out.
DW: Yes. I know almost nothing about that whole New York thing. I never gotto New York until about 1943 or 1944 with Katherine Dunham. When Icame then, it was my first look at New York.
MK: As far as Federal Theatre goes, the big hits back there weren'tnecessarily brought out,so you never saw them. Is that right?
MK: Say, some of the Living Newspapers?
DW: No. I think a couple were done in Los Angeles.
MK: Was One-Third of a Nation done in Los Angeles?
DW: I believe so. I believe it was.
MK: Was the San Francisco Exposition a big success? Was that a high point?
DW: I don't think financially it was. It ran for two years. I don'treally know. While I was working at the Federal Theatre, I was alsomoonlighting right across the street for the Shuberts working onthe Folies Bergere. So what I had to do was run from one backstageto the other. I wasn't supposed to be doing that, of course.
MK: You were only supposed to work for Federal Theatre?
MK: Were the different theatres in Los Angeles used just for one unit or werethey interchangeable?
DW: They were pretty much interchangeable.
MK: The Beaux Arts and the Musart and the Figueroa and all of those?
DW: That's right because I think I worked at practically every one of them.No, they were not assigned to any specific unit. There was someattempt, I think, with the Yiddish Theatre to use the Beaux Arts, whichseemed about the right size house, as their home. But I rememberwe played in six different theatres at least, so it couldn't haveworked very well.
MK: Well, I can't think of any more questions to ask you. I'm justappreciating everything you've told me.
DW: Well, the truth it I don't think I know much more about it becauseit was odd. I felt an outsider with it. I think maybe feeling anoutsider with things is something that you live with all your life.You're always feeling an outsider. But I did particularly therebecause at first I assumed that everybody knew much more than I didand that they were professionals who earned their living in theatreand so bn, and I was ready to be very inferior. . . Later I learnedthat that was nonsense, that most of them in any time would havebeen incompetent and there were only a chosen few who really hadsparks of talent and could shed light around. But because of that,I tended to keep myself aside and had very little contact with thebody of the Federal Theatre. And that was possible. For instance,by getting myself assigned to the Myra Kinch company, I never evenhad to go physically to the Federal Theatre itself. We operated inour own rehearsal headquarters way out in Melrose somewhere.
MK: Was the Federal Theatre headquarters in a certain spot?
DW: Yes, they began in a dreadful area of Los Angeles, just south ofSkid Row. I can't even remember the name of the street but it'san old industrial, . . . shabby area. And there was a giantconcrete warehouse building of some kind with great open spaces init because we were constantly putting up partitions and trying tofigure out how to cut out the sound from there, you know, to keeprehearsals from mingling and so on. That was the headquarters fora long time.Then much later in its career it moved up to an ex-boys' school atthe comer of Western Avenue and, I think, Pico, and it died itsdeath there.
MK: So that's what you meant about not having to go to the FederalTheatre itself, not go over to that location.
DW: Not going to the headquarters itself. The more one could stay awayfrom that, the better. And I learned techniques of staying faraway from it so my contact was not nearly as deep and wide as manyother peopleís might have been. (interruption)The O'Neill is about years old now, but it has multiple programs and it runs a National Theatre Institute, which collects exemplary students from all over the country. . . . . . those who intend to be theatre professionals. It bringsthem in for a long somester at the O'Neill mansion in Waterford,Connecticut, where they work under and with theatre professionals andthey put in 12- and 14-hour days. But when they get out of there,they're pretty damned good. And it has the playwrights' conferencewhich happens in summer, which is a subsidized presentation of playsby new playwrights selected absolutely without regard to who theplaywright is or previous experience or ó picked blind by thecommittee of professionals.
MK: So people send in their scripts and get picked?
DW: Yes. And they will get a professional production there with a fineEquity company of actors and they live with that production. Andthey rewrite it as it goes and it goes before an audience. Almostall of our new premising playwrights have come from the O'Neill. Andthese are the kind of things that are going on that are lively andinteresting and progressive in theatre. But nobody looks to theGovernment, and I'm not sure that we should. I'm not sure that anything,any concept that says we're going to use federal tax money for a theatreis a viable concept in this country or a desirable one. I think it maybe very undesirable. Theatre is a community affair. Every place bigenough to create and maintain a theatre, which means people,not realestate, should do so... There's an amazing number of fine community and regional theatres in this country now. There didn't used to be.
MK: Well, do you think that Federal Theatre may have helped change the consciousness of the country about theatre?
DW: Perhaps to the degree that because of its extremely low prices, itbrought a great many people into the theatre that otherwise wouldnot have seen live shows. And maybe there is some wave of influencefrom that. Somehow I have to be rather cynical about that too. Ireally doubt it. I don't think that any theatre audience wascreated, you know, and continued in existence, not really. I don'tthink it exists today as a matter of fact. Theatre is still a ratherspecial form of cultural entertainment.
MK: When I was in San Francisco I met quite a few people who are involvedwith community theatres up there, and they said the same thing aboutthe scrambling for grants is that they tend to try to push each otherdown so that it isn't all the community theatres of San Franciscohelping each other. They're fighting each other to get whatever moneythe National Endowment might give or someone might give.
DW: Right. But that's a big city and when I think of regional communitytheatres, I don't think of Los Angeles or San Francisco which arepretty professional cities. You know, I think of places like Dallasor Wichita, Kansas, or Minneapolis.
DW: Atlanta? Yes, it does. I was just in Atlanta a week ago and lookingat the paper, I was surprised to see what was going on there. Yes,I'm thinking of the cities, you know, not the giant metropolitancenters, not the great magnets that draw people as San Francisco does,but the cities that are more truly communities.
MK: What do you think about Preston Jones's trilogy caning to the KennedyCenter? Have you read any of it?
MK: It did seem exciting that someone who had spent all of his life inDallas was getting a big national showcase for his work though oneof his plays had come to Arena Stage last year and was reallysuccessful.
DW: It also played in Los Angeles. It played here and there. But he'sa regional. He really is a regional playwright. He tells hispeople and their rhythms and their speech and so on. Very good; therearen't many of those any more. We're all getting homogenized.
MK: How about Eugene O'Neill and the plays of his you did in FederalTheatre? Wasn't he living in California then?
DW: I think he was. Yes, he was living at Tao House up north inthe Bay area. I can't remember the name of the town.
MK: So he didn't get to come down and ó
DW: No. I don't recall that he ever did. I doubt that he ever left thathouse actually. I worked with The Great God Brown and Days WithoutEnd. ... I lighted both of those and I think, stage-managedthan. And that's an induction into perhaps the worst O'Neill, youknow, the murkiest O'Neill, the most religious. It bored me prettybadly.
MK: What do you think is the best O'Neill?
DW: Oh, the plays of passion, the plays of direct emotional raw confrontations, not the ones of the murky mysticism and the lapsed Catholic anguish.
MK: More Long Day's Journey and that type?
DW: Long Day's Journey is a good example of, yes, a direct confrontationof raw selves.
MK: Well, thank you very much.
DW: A pleasure. I'm probably not a typical interviewee but as I say, itwas an interesting but an oddly detached thing. While being with it,I tried to keep firm being intimately part of it as it seemed to bedangerous to become so.
MK: Well, I would think time bore you out in the wisdom of your notbeing too. . .(End of Interview)