The Theatre Journal Auto Archive: Marvin Carlson

My hometown of Wichita, Kansas, was hardly a hotbed of theatrical activity, or indeed of much of any activity except farming and the building of airplanes in the 1940s and early 1950s when I was growing up there. Still, there was a modest amount of theatre at the local colleges and occasionally the road show of a recent Broadway production. It was such a touring show that gave me my first revelation of what theatre might be, the touring production of John Brown's Body, directed by Charles Laughton and starring Judith Anderson, Raymond Massey, and Tyrone Power, which I saw in Wichita in 1953, at the age of eighteen, and which left an indelible impression upon me. It was a staged reading, so scenic spectacle played little part in the effect, but the thrill of seeing those great actors at the top of their form was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I cannot say that from that time onward I was determined to have a career in theatre, but it is certainly true that from that time onward I knew that attending theatre was something I wanted to do as much of as possible, and it has been my passion, one might say my addiction ever since.

I began my studies at the University of Kansas as an English major but found myself more and more drawn to theatre, first as a spectator, then as an actor, and gradually in almost every other capacity as well. By the time I started work on my Ph.D., at Cornell, I was totally committed to theatre. I arrived at Cornell in 1959 as a graduate student, then joined the faculty and remained there for the next twenty years. Ithaca is not as handy to New York City as one might wish, especially in mid-winter, but that four to five hour drive became a very familiar one to me, especially since, in the early 1960s, the New York theatre was alive with activities such as the first plays of Albee, the work of the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre, the arrival of the new British drama, of Brecht, of the French absurdists, of the new black theatre. It was a period of intoxicating variety and promise, and I couldn't get enough of it. Every week I would devour the newest edition of the Village Voice, my primary resource for what I might see. Digging into my files for this column I came across programs from the spring of 1960 from The Fantasticks, with the original cast just a month after it opened (I still remember how dashing Jerry Orbach was as El Gallo) and Jose Quintero's American premiere of The Balcony (with Salome Jens as the horse girl, one of the sexiest things I have ever seen in the theatre) (see Fig. 1). New York was expensive, but if I drove in on a Saturday morning, I could see a matinee in the afternoon, two shows in the evening [Begin Page 209] (in those days most Off-Broadway theatres had an early and late Satur day show), and a Sunday matinee before driving back to Ithaca Sunday evening, with only a single overnight in the city. As long as I didn't try three heavy metaphysical dramas on a Saturday (which I did once or twice with depressing results), I loved these sessions of back to back theatre. Of course there were disappointments—productions of Brecht that interpreted the alienation effect as boring the audience and productions that thought "absurd" meant "incomprehensible." However, the general level of excitement and innovation was so high that for a young man just getting a sense of theatre's possibilities, the total experience could not have been more stimulating.

In 1986 I came to live and work in New York, where I am much more free to indulge my passion. During the season I often attend five or six shows a week. A typical week...