The Innovators: Ellen Stewart
Posted September 26, 2011 at 2:28 pm
by Wickham Boyle, Dramatics Magazine
Sometimes when telling the story of a life, it helps to begin at the end.
Ellen Stewart, the founder and longtime artistic director of La MaMa E.T.C., perhaps the most important experimental theatre in the world, died last January 13. As her casket was wheeled down the center aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, members of the original cast from La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company chanted and beat drums while throngs of theatre artists and others whose lives Stewart touched all jumped to their feet, clapping and hooting wildly. A standing ovation—Stewart’s final theatrical moment.
In full disclosure, let me say that Stewart was my first boss, and I was later the executive director of La MaMa for a decade from the early 1980s to the ’90s. She was the surrogate grandmother to my children, just as for generations of artists who worked in Off Off-Broadway or world theatre, she was our mother, la mama.
Before the rise of Off Off-Broadway, a term coined in 1960 by Village Voice critic Jerry Tallmer, most theatre—certainly most of what got produced in New York—was what Stewart used to call “straight, speech-making plays.” There were places for music concerts, and other places for dance performances, plays, or musicals; museums were for art shows. Those boundaries evaporated in the ’60s, as writers, composers, dancers, designers, filmmakers, painters, and actors worked together forging new works for new audiences (or sometimes for no audience beyond themselves). Three downtown theatres were in the vanguard: Caffe Cino (Joe Cino’s Greenwich Village coffeehouse-turned-performance venue), the Public Theater (created by Joseph Papp, the subject of a Dramatics Innovators series profile in January 2010), and of course, Café La MaMa, as it was first known.
Ellen Stewart opened each show by ringing her famous bell and crooning that La MaMa was “dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theatre”—and she really did mean all aspects. Stewart and her cohorts allowed artists to cross boundaries and pull from any discipline, any culture, any language in order to create beauty on a stage. It was a radical philosophy back then, though today we see the multimedia results on stages everywhere, from Broadway shows like Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark to the integration of video and dramatic text by modern dance troupes such as Bill T. Jones.
Among the groundbreaking hits that had early stagings at La MaMa were the musical Godspell, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, andBlue Man Group’s Tubes. La MaMa was also a home to many rising talents who went on to major careers—actors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Olympia Dukakis, Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler, F. Murray Abraham, and Diane Lane; playwrights such as Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Maria Irene Fornes, and Adrienne Kennedy; and, among the many pioneering musicians and composers who passed through, Elizabeth Swados, Meredith Monk, and Philip Glass. La MaMa directors included Robert Wilson, Hairdirector Tom O’Horgan, Ontological-Hysteric Theater Company founder Richard Foreman, Joseph Chaikin of the Open Theatre, and Joseph Papp, who directed and acted at La MaMa before the Public Theater was born.
‘I just know’
How did something that started as a little dream and a way for Stewart to help out some of her struggling theatre friends become the birthplace of many of the seminal writers, directors, actors, designers, and other artistic thinkers of our time? It happened because Stewart had an uncanny, uneducated, intuitive ability to recognize talent and to allow that talent the space to grow.
Stewart famously said that she never read scripts. “If a script ‘beeps’ to me, I do it,” she told an interviewer for The New York Times. “Audiences may hate these plays, but I believe in them. The only way I can explain my ‘beeps’ is that I’m no intellectual, but my instincts tell me automatically when a playwright has something.”
As the executive director of La MaMa, I witnessed first-hand the power of the beeps. I saw Stewart sit with playwrights and direct them to certain pages that needed clarity or exposition. “Now take this down,” she would advise forcefully. “Pages 26, 39, and 72—that’s where the trouble is.” And then the meeting would be over.
Initially, I was incredulous, and I would ask, “Ellen did you read that script?”
“Baby,” she’d say, “you know mama doesn’t read scripts, ’cause I hate that speechifying. I just know.”
Over time, I realized that for whatever reason—actual magic, which Ellen, although she was a practicing Catholic, believed in; or a wonderful innate theatrical sensibility—her beeps were often spot-on. When the MacArthur Foundation awarded her its “genius grant” in 1985 (just one of Stewart’s many august honors, in addition to a 1996 special Tony Award and countless Obies), those folks weren’t kidding.
Stewart was also brave, persistent, and never shied away from hard work. When I interviewed to be the executive director of the theatre back in 1984, she asked me if I would clean the toilets if it meant that the show would go on. Well, I had worked for Stewart as a stage manager and general techie back in the 1970s and had seen her sweep the floors and the sidewalk in front of the theatre, and yes—clean toilets. When La MaMa had to be moved from Second Avenue over to the current space on East Fourth Street, Ellen rang her bell again after the final show and asked if the entire audience would mind carrying some chairs a few blocks to help out. I wasn’t there, but longtime business manager Jim Moore loved to make La MaMa newcomers laugh with what he called “The Ellen as Tom Sawyer story.” It was true: if Ellen asked, you probably would say yes. I know I did.
Stewart was always strong, always in your face for better or worse. And she could be brutally frank. In the summer of 1985, she and I went to France to see Peter Brook’s Indian epic Mahabharata at the Avignon Festival. I had my six-month-old daughter with me in a straw basket. We boarded a boat to the amphitheatre site, found our seats, and then the play stretched out for nine hours, beyond dusk and into dark. At one particularly quiet moment, Stewart, watching my sleeping infant with envy, blurted out, “I wish I had one of those baskets!” I had to say, “Oh hush.” But we stayed, and she helped Brook’s company come to New York—not to her own theatre, but to the newly formed Brooklyn Academy of Music annex, now the BAM Harvey Theater, where Mahabharata was a sensation. When she was fiercely on your side, she stayed there.
‘It was only theatre’
Much of Stewart’s life is swathed in mystery and wonder. Even The New York Times listed three possible birth dates, ranging from 1917 to 1919. Her passport, however, specified November 7, 1919; her birthplace was Chicago. Stewart was known for her accent, which morphed from a drawling Louisiana geechie (which Stewart credited to her father), to Parisian perfect, to the grittiest street-corner banter. She spoke differently to the press than she did to her adoring audiences or to her bad “theatre babies.” Like the theatrical form she spawned—global, multicultural, cross-disciplinary, interactive, and just undeniably La MaMa—Ellen Stewart herself was a hybrid before anyone else envisioned that possibility.
Stewart didn’t like to talk about her early life, and she sometimes gave contradictory accounts. We can gather from lore and published narrative that Stewart’s father was a tailor, her mother a schoolteacher, that the couple divorced when Stewart was young, and that Stewart herself had a son named Larry who predeceased her. According to Jerry Tallmer in a January, 2007 THRIVEnyc profile, when pressed about her son’s father, Stewart might identify him as a waiter somewhere and then change the subject. But Stewart loved to regale listeners and journalists with her story of arriving in New York City in the early 1960s with a carpetbag full of dreams of becoming a fashion designer. She was going to study at Parsons, but a lack of funding had her settling for work as a porter at Saks Fifth Avenue.
“The coloreds—for back then that is what we were, coloreds—wore blue smocks and carted the goods everywhere in the store,” Stewart would say. “One day as I was leaving for lunch, wearing one of my own creations, sewn in my little garret, a fancy patron stopped me and inquired where I had bought my dress. When I told her honestly that I myself had made it, she marched me to my boss to be dressed down for insubordination.” Instead, the wise head of Saks gave Stewart her own line of dresses called Miss Ellen.
When Stewart showed up for work to create her eponymous line, she said, none of the other seamstresses or cutters wanted to work with her. “No one wanted to have a black woman as their boss—no one, that was, except some of the Polish workers who had been saved from the Holocaust. And so we became an unlikely group creating fashion in a corner of Saks.”
Stewart often used the image of a pushcart to exemplify her thinking about making a life, whether it be in the theatre, fashion, or any other field. Stewart’s idea of a pushcart came from a man she called her Papa Diamond. Mr. Diamond was a purveyor of fine cloth on New York City’s Lower East Side, still a hub of immigrant business in the 1950s (though in recent years the neighborhood has become hip). On her day off Stewart would wander Orchard Street, as the Jewish-owned shops were open on Sunday, and closed on their Sabbath, Saturday.
On one of her walks, Stewart stumbled into Diamond’s fabric store, and the two talked for a long time about her ambitions to be a designer and her foster brother Freddy Lights’s desire to be in the theatre. Diamond took a liking to the vivacious Stewart, whose sparkle and charm would later win over numerous donors, city officials, and theatregoers. Stewart left with a small package of luxurious silk under her arm, and she returned the next Sunday wearing what she created from Diamond’s gift.
Diamond encouraged her to have her own pushcart, as in bygone days when merchants plied their wares in carts literally pushed along the streets of cities in the old country and downtown in their adopted homelands. Stewart decided she had to find her pushcart and never let it go. In 1961 she rented a small basement space. As she told it, to the Village Voice’s Michael Feingold and many others, “And that, baby, is how Mama made good on a promise to my brother Freddy and his friend Paul (Foster) to make a little playhouse for them.”
In the early years the police constantly raided Stewart and La MaMa because, as Stewart said (quoting Feingold’s piece again), “The police saw a Negress in a basement and lots of white men traipsing down the stairs, and they thought, ‘Ahhhhh, brothel.’ Well, baby, it was only theatre.”
As the seasons passed, La MaMa’s artists performed among the ruins in Baalbeck, Iran; in rubble-tossed amphitheatres in Italy or Greece; and in formerly abandoned Lower East Side buildings. Some shows came from around the world and were in unknown languages, but the message was always clear: We are here to tantalize your spirit and open your hearts.
The legacy of La MaMa
Now in its fiftieth season, La MaMa boasts an artistic empire based in the popular East Village neighborhood it helped create. Two buildings on East 4th Street house a 199-seat theatre, a cabaret space, offices, an apartment where Stewart lived, and an enormous and flexible annex now called the Ellen Stewart Theatre. There is also an extensive archive—Stewart was prescient in keeping early scripts with authors’ corrections, as well as every mask, piece of Mylar, check stub, video, and photograph ever to emanate from the halls of La MaMa—which artists, students, and educators may access by appointment.
Stewart used her MacArthur award to purchase a former monastery in Umbria, Italy, in the shadows of the famous Spoleto Festival. Here, Stewart and La MaMa created a summer institute for international artists of stature and their acolytes. When Stewart first proposed this idea to her business manager at the time, James Moore, the rest of the staff heard him exclaim, “Oh my god, what will she do with that pile of rocks?” But since then the center’s activities have included more than thirty productions, as well as workshops, exhibitions, and conferences. Stewart’s alchemy turned those old stones into artistic gold.
Ozzie Rodriguez, curator of the theatrical memorabilia in the La Mama archives, compiled a short film to serve as an introduction for students and scholars who trek to East 4th Street. In this film, Stewart says, “I am who I am because of the artists. Every person who comes through is helping and shaping our legacy, the legacy of La MaMa.”
One of those people was actor Harvey Keitel, now famous for playing tough guys, who recently shared with me a reminiscence about his first job at La MaMa, in 1967.
“I was in a show called Spring Play, by Billy Hoffman, and I was a nervous young actor. Right before curtain I lost a button on my shirt and Ellen Stewart came up and stood in front of me and sewed the button on, with me in the shirt. I thought she was so, so beautiful, and here was this woman who was changing the face of theatre right here so close to me with no ego, sewing on my button and soothing me with that wonderful voice, saying, ‘Baby, you are gonna be fabulous.’ And that memory is what La MaMa has always been for me.”