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4 On Directing Beckett An Interview (What I~m saying here about Beckett~ and the circumstances in which I first directed his plays~ was extracted by Lois Oppenheim from a longer interview in my Paris apartment~ in July I992. The questions she posed were not included but are implied by the section titles.) The Actor's Workshop of San Francisco (1952-1965) How did it start? There were a lot of little theaters in those days. The little theater tradition had come out of the 1920S. The Bay area was polka-dotted with them-not much, however, that was very memorable in the quality of performance. Actually, there was some adventurous or experimental work (e.g., the Hillbarn Theater in San Mateo or the Interplayers in San Francisco ) but, overall, the actors were not very good. Jules Irving and I-Jules, my former partner, now dead-knew a group of actors in San Francisco, some with professional experience (including our wives), who were restive working in the local theaters, because of the acting level. They became the nucleus of The Actor's Workshop. There was no great ethic in our beginning, except to provide good roles in a studio setting for each of the actors. Nothing like Beckett was on our agenda then. We started in a shabby 10ft above a judo academy on Divisadero Street, and in due time the Workshop became the major theater in San Francisco. We had at times three or more theaters playing simultaneously -at one dizzy moment there were five productions going on at various sites around the city. The Workshop became known for several things over the years. First of all, its durability, if always on the edge of bankruptcy. It was one of the early, exemplary "regional theaters"-exemplary in its insistence on sur- On Directing Beckett / 57 viva!. A few such theaters were spread over the continent, but without much contact at first and without being acknowledged as a movement until the pump-priming advent of the Ford Foundation, which showed up in a period when there were no such things as grants or subsidies of any kind. At the outset Ford sponsored four theaters as its "backfield": the Seattle Repertory Theater, the Arena in Washington, the Alley in Houston, and the Workshop. There was the old legacy of decentralization from the days of "Tributary Theater" (i.e., paying tribute to New York, which was also the "source" from which the tributaries flowed), but it's unlikely that the newer mode of regional theater would have been authenticated-nor the work that these theaters had been doing for some years-if Sir Tyrone Guthrie had not come to Stratford and then to Minneapolis. Just when American painting, say, was starting to dominate the world, taking over from Paris, the theater's inferiority complex had to be given a boost by English knighthood . The Workshop was, from the perspective of the Ford program, the most bizarre or anomalous of these theaters, because, for one thing, Jules and I were still teaching at San Francisco State College, and we were by then doing avant-garde plays. We were more outspoken on social issues than the other theaters, gravitating toward questions of style, certainly more innovative in our play selection. We became known, too, for developing the concept of a company, with an emphasis on continuity. That was spurred on by my first experience in Europe, where I was very impressed with the state theaters in Germany, where the actors had a certain dignity in the guarantee of longevity-a guarantee that can, of course, wear out its benefits when the actors age into predictability. At the time, however, given the humiliating circumstances of the American actor, the continuity of European theaters seemed like a utopian blessing. Then there was also the prevailing notion-to which even famous actors, like Gerard Philipe, were committed-of theatre papulaire. This was the period of Jean Vilar and the exhilarating years of the Festival at Avignon. The man who was sort of my patron when I first came to France was one of the legendary figures behind this tradition: Michel Saint-Denis, Copeau's nephew, and founder of the Compagnie de Quinze. During the occupation he was head of the Old Vic Theater School in England. Michel had come to the United States when he was consultant to the prospective theater program at Juilliard. He visited San Francisco and saw our work just about the time we...

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