Precious Memories Inspired from One Play

the power of theater, unexpected connections, and creativity

the joy of live theater

The annual Tony awards will be presented this coming Sunday. One nominee is a revival of Waiting for Godot starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. I’ve written previously about that show, the first live drama I ever attended at a world premiere in Miami when I was thirteen, and the hilarious confusion that ensued.

Living in and around New York City for almost forty years, and living in London for awhile, I’ve been exposed to the very best theater possible. I consider that one of the blessings of my life.

My Aunt Hilda took me to blockbuster musicals during the Golden Age of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter. When I was part of a couple in my first marriage we subscribed to small theater productions, off Broadway. And during my solo years I often rushed last-minute to the TKTS booth on Broadway and nabbed a seat to just about any show.

The Playbills I kept in boxes are filled with glorious talents appearing in superb shows — Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Redford, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, and so many more. On the way up or down. And the one-play wonders, as well. And some stinkers, too.

I was lucky to see musicals including The King and I with Yul Brynner, The Music Man with Robert Preston, the original cast in West Side Story, Camelot with Richard Burton, Gypsy with Ethel Merman, A Chorus Line when it was still at the Public Theater with the cast that inspired the story, Pippin. Hamilton, of course. And many of Stephen Sondheim’s works.

I’ve attended comedies and dramas by brilliant playwrights including Noel Coward, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Neil Simon. I’ve enjoyed the intimacy of one-person shows in tiny spaces, and experimental off, and off-off Broadway shows. And splashy wonders too, like the Harold Prince version of Candide, which restructured an entire Broadway theater.

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But more than just the enjoyment of great theater itself is the way that it can connect you, like most great art, to long forgotten experiences and feelings when you let your mind wander.

Let’s just look at one production to see how it exposed details of my life, long forgotten.

In 2010 I enjoyed the drama Red, awarded six Tonys, including one for best play, about the abstract-expressionist artist Mark Rothko, and starring Alfred Molina as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as his assistant.

a scene from Red

The play is set in 1959, when Rothko is flooded with thoughts about art, life and change. He competes with the younger artist, Jackson Pollock. This brought to mind a press trip to Pollock’s house on Long Island. I had arrived early, and the curator let me stand alone in Pollock’s studio while she answered the phone. The floor was a swirl of drips, a creation never seen by the public. Seeing the play stirred that precious memory.

Also in the play, Rothko speaks of the younger artist Andy Warhol. I remembered that Warhol was a guest, accompanied by an actress named Sylvia Miles. at a party I attended in the 1970s at a New York City restaurant called Maxwell’s Plum. He was the palest man I had ever seen, moving around the room like an animated ghost.

That party was in honor of the playwright, Mark Medoff, who had just premiered a play called When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?. I had just interviewed him for a piece about a hometown boy making it big in New York, for The Miami Herald.

Mark had been two years ahead of me at Beach High, a handsome basketball star back then who gave no clue that he would become the playwright who wrote Children of a Lesser God. I accompanied him to Rhode Island on one trip where he met Phyllis Freilich the deaf actress who was the inspiration for that play, and she became the lead in the award-winning Broadway production.

As my mind wandered a bit more I recalled that at another party for Mark I met Anthony Perkins, the actor who played a psycho in the classic Hitchcock film of that name. He sat at a small table with his wife, a photographer named Berri Berenson, and I remember clearly her pretty face and blond hair. She would later die in one of the planes flying into the World Trade Center.

Such vivid, varied memories, all inspired by seeing Red. And here are more.

Rothko paintings are displayed at the Museum of Modern Art along with Pollocks and Warhols. The great architect Louis Kahn was once honored there with an exhibit of his models and drawings. Admiring a mockup of one of Kahn’s buildings, I briefly talked with Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas, who happened to be standing next to me.

Years later I attended an event hosted by her daughter Cecile at her Austin home. She later became president of Planned Parenthood, which I’ve supported through the years. As I’m not a Texan, what are the odds of meeting both the mother and daughter? A coincidence forgotten until I saw the play.

More unexpected connections: Louis Kahn designed the temple in Chappaqua New York where my late husband, Chaim Stern was the senior rabbi. Chaim in fact suggested changes in the design of the temple to make it less austere, and Kahn agreed to one of them.

Chaim performed a wedding at the temple for a local woman who married Dustin Hoffman, who had been in the movie Midnight Cowboy. Sylvia Miles, the actress accompanying Warhol at the party for Mark Medoff was in that movie too, in perhaps her most famous role.

So we’re back to the actress Sylvia Miles, the party goer who accompanied Andy Warhol, the artist who was mentioned by Mark Rothko in Red.

Pretty cool. Round and round.

Memories, long forgotten. People briefly encountered. Unexpected connections. Gifts emerging from the past, because I saw a play.

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My love of theater led me to dabble in midlife, taking courses and eventually writing words and music myself. I even had two musicals produced: one for a local show in Westchester County, and one in Miami Beach. I didn’t pursue that dream further, and I’m not sure whether I should have. I’ll probably write more about that later.

And to keep the tradition going, my older son Randall, who has a pretty responsible day job, has just written the book and lyrics for a rock musical about Ben Franklin, premiering in Philadelphia in July, to help celebrate America’s birthday. Go Rand.

Memories to come. New artistic expression. And so it goes when you open yourself to the arts and let your mind fly high in this convoluted world.

Hooray and glory be, for the joys and enrichment of theater!