Handicapping the Beaumont Stakes

backtalk Handicapping the Beaumont Stakes Saraleigh Carney In 1965, the New York Concrete Industry Board cited the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center as the best concrete structure built in New York that year. This was the last unqualified good thing anyone had to say about this building, and its future as a physical structure and as the constituent for drama at Lincoln Center is the source of an ugly landlord-tenant dispute. Lincoln Center, as landlord, negotiated a subtenant agreement with producer Alexander Cohen for Peter Brook's production of Carmen, for which Brook has tinkered with the acoustics, "reconstructed the stage in a way that would make it as intimate as possible," and pronounced it "a highly workable instrument." Articulating the landlord position, Brook maintains "The Beaumont is a perfectly valid theater with its strengths and weaknesses and difficulties. One simply has to work with them-and work through them."' Initially, it seemed that Richmond Crinkley, Executive Director of the Beaumont , agreed with that assessment. As he was about to open his first season there in November 1980, he objected to the frequent characterization of the theatre as having failed. "The theater that produced Ellis Rabb's and Jules Irving's productions of 'Streetcar' or 'Enemies,' or Mike Nichols' 'Little Foxes,' or Andrei Serban's 'The Cherry Orchard' or Richard Foreman's 'Threepenny Opera' .. . I don't see how one can say that theater failed. In two previous instances, it did fail economically, and that is a great burden. But ... we look back not to a history of failures, but to some very great hours." 59 However, a projected renovation of the space was already on Crinkley's agenda. With Lincoln Center contributing $200,000 for the renovation of the lobby and the construction of a rehearsal hall, Crinkley planned to gut the seating area and rerake it, in order to transform what is "an imperfect thrust and imperfect proscenium into a very good proscenium theater." Some forty additional seats would be added, and 200 bad seats would become good ones. For this, the architect's estimate was $800,000, but Crinkley anticipated that inflation would bring the figure closer to $1,000,000. By November 1982, the figure was some $8,000,000. With the theatre dark since June 1981, the Beaumont's projected renovation has become the focal point of dissatisfaction with Crinkley's leadership. Best known as the commercial producer of the Broadway hit, The Elephant Man, Crinkley had been a producer of the Folger Theater and of the bicentennial season at the Kennedy Center, prior to coming to New York as the Executive Director of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), under whose auspices he produced both The Elephant Man and Tintypes . At its October 17th meeting, the Lincoln Center Board appointed three of its members to meet with representatives of the Beaumont Board, but in the meantime the resolutions adopted on August 24th remain in effect. The present management was stripped of the right to use Lincoln Center's name and of a share in the proceeds from the Consolidated Corporate Fund Drive and from the underground parking garage. Last year, the theatre received $489,000 from these sources. These sanctions are the culmination of Lincoln Center's unhappiness over the lack of progress toward establishing a strong organization devoted to drama and a proposed renovation which would keep the building out of service for perhaps two more seasons. Martin E. Segal, Chairman of Lincoln Center, maintains that the first priority of the management should be the production of plays. The emphasis on renovation, according to Segal, came "after a single season that was less than stellar, which directed critical attention away from the theater's artistic purposes" and how well or ill they had been realized. Some of Crinkley's reported actions have also been less than prudent. A letter from him on Lincoln Center Theater Company stationery was sent to all former Beaumont subscribers, urging that they purchase tickets for "major productions of important classical plays [being] presented this season on Broadway," by the Elizabeth Theater Group. This was seen by some as the promotion of a commercial endeavor and...