Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy (review)

{ 201 } BOOK REV IEWS Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy. Edited and with an introduction by Robert A. Schanke. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2007. xiv + 314 pp. $35.00 paper. As Robert Schanke points out early in his introduction to this engaging collection of essays, “research and writing on the history of arts philanthropy is meager and of fairly recent practice” (1). Angels in the American Theater serves as a corrective, or at least the strong foundation of a corrective, to this gap in theatre history scholarship. The sixteen artfully edited essays provide a panoramic view of American arts philanthropy from the turn of the century up to the current landscape of contemporary, corporatized Broadway. The mix of biographical, statistical, and historical“business”data provides a context for examining American theatre from a fresh and fascinating perspective that underscores the complex relationship of art and commerce in this country. Schanke opens with an introduction that provides a quick overview of theatre patronage in America as well as the bedrock information that provides context for the essays to follow. Many of us rarely stop to consider, for example, how the establishment of the federal income tax changed American theatre in unfathomable ways, as the wealthy sought to lower their tax burden, or how the Rockefellers saw, in the mid-1960s, how business and art benefited each other, establishing the Business Committee for the Arts. Because of size limitations of the volume, Schanke explains his decision to exclude essays that cover more familiar aspects of American theatre patronage, such as the Federal Theatre Project and the National Endowment for the Arts, and to include those that “reflect a wide range of styles of philanthropy” (11). To provide order to this “wide range,” he divides the selected essays into two sections of “angels”: those that examine individuals and those that center on institutions. { 202 } BOOK REV IEWS The range of individuals covered in part 1, the larger section of the book with nine essays, is quite remarkable. Opening the section is Teresa Collins’s essay on Otto Kahn, followed by Melanie Blood’s essay on the Lewisohn sisters, the copper heiresses indelibly connected with the Neighborhood Playhouse. Providing a contemporary bookend against those historical essays is Barry Witham ’s look at Seattle arts advocate and fund-raiser Peter Donnelly, who “created a conduit between wealth and the arts” (153). Between those seeming extremes are essays covering a fascinating array of angels. We learn that many of these angels centered their prodigious support on individual artists, such as Richard B. and Jeanne Donovan Fisher’s support of playwright Charles Mee (Jennifer Schlueter), Alice De Lamar and Mary Curtis Bok’s patronage of Eva Le Gallienne (Robert A. Schanke), and Grant Goodman’s support of Paul Stephen Lim and his English Alternative Theatre at the University of Kansas (David A. Crespy). Other essays focus on better-known and commercially influential angels , such as Alexis Greene’s essay on the titular “Queen of Off-Broadway,” Lucille Lortel, and John R. Poole’s look at David Geffen and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, which Poole identifies as a “model for regional theatres” (148) based upon its diversity of programming and community outreach. Finally , Dan Friedman reflects upon a different permutation of patronage as well as the blurred boundaries between art and political advocacy in his essay on the unique, grassroots fund-raising of the Castillo Theatre. What is interesting to note is the tangled tapestry woven from these life stories as old-world altruism and modern capitalism collide with personal ego and selfless generosity in a historical web of the Great Depression, the New Frontier, and the complications of rapid-growth technology and competing media. Part 2 includes six essays centered on significant institutions in American theatre, beginning with Sheila McNerney Anderson’s essay on W. McNeil Lowry and the behemoth Ford Foundation. The names of most of the institutions or corporations covered in this section are familiar to readers, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, discussed in Stephen D. Berwind’s essay, but the essays themselves have more organizational variation than those in part 1. This is not to suggest a weakness in...