a poor player

Dunkirk NY – This weekend is Curtain Up! weekend in Buffalo NY, which for the 30th year kicks of Buffalo’s theatre season. If you follow the link in the last sentence you’ll be able to see all that Buffalo Theatre is offering over the next few weeks, as well as some video featuring interviews and clips of the shows themselves.

But perhaps the finest video out there is this recent one by PagetFilms. It’s a short promotion film detailing why Buffalo NY is such a great theatre town. Take a look for yourself and see why I think so highly of the city and its theatre scene.

Dunkirk NY - They don’t make ‘em like Manny anymore.

Speak the name “Manny Fried” in the city of Buffalo NY, and you probably won’t find one union person or one theatre artist in the city who can’t tell you a story about Manny Fried. A gentleman, a scholar, a playwright, an actor, a union activist, a worker, a teacher, a husband, a father – Manny wore all these hats and more. He passed away at 97 years old, four days short of his 98th birthday. If ever I had to use the word “icon” to describe anybody, it would be Manny Fried.

Manny Fried

Manny was already into his late 70s when I first came to Buffalo in the late 80s. I did a few shows with him, and certainly can claim his acquaintance. I remember particularly working with him in the Irish Classical Theatre production of Three Sisters that opened the new space on Main Street. Manny played Ferapont, while I was playing Kulygin. The dressing room (the one dressing room) was quite crowded, and Manny and I found the area up by the shower to be a space where we could get away from the pressing crowd. Always ready to tell a story or share some reminiscence, Manny ofter regaled me with union stories or stories about the old days of Buffalo theatre. He was a marvelous character to behold; spry, homespun, down to earth, unpretentious, real. He was fiercely dedicated to the working class, always for the little guy, and his plays reflected the life and realities of living in Buffalo in the late 50s through the late 70s. Plays with titles like Boilermakers and Martinis, The Dodo Bird, and Elegy for Stanley Gorski just about tell you everything you’d need to know about the guy.

I admired most in him the fact that he was a man of deep, deep principles. Read his obituary as well as this article in ArtVoice by Tony Chase, and you will be struck by the the depth of principle and character of this man. When he first told me that he had been summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, you could have knocked me over with a feather. He had been blacklisted, even in Buffalo, and I was duly impressed. Perhaps the most fascinating tale he told me during the run of that show was how Karl Malden got the part that Elia Kazan first offered to him in the movie Boomerang! because Manny decided to stay in Buffalo and continue organizing unions (Tony Chase recounts this same story. He must have loved telling it!). I wanted very much in that moment, I recall, to ask him if he ever regretted that decision. I didn’t, because it didn’t feel right (and I felt I really didn’t know him well enough to ask), but the more I got to know him, the more I realized I didn’t need to ask the question anymore.

What particularly saddens me about Manny’s passing as I think of my own career as a theatre artist and as a teacher is that I don’t think my current students will ever “get” a guy like Manny. I am not sure most theatre people today will “get” a guy like Manny. They will find it very hard to comprehend why someone like Manny would actually choose to remain in a city like Buffalo; why he would choose to write the plays he wrote; why he would choose to combine a working man’s career with the life of a theatre artist; why he never went “pro.” I’m not sure I could adequately explain to anyone, let alone my students, why Manny is a man worth admiring and emulating. Perhaps he was a man of his time, and perhaps that time is over. But there is so much to admire about those times and the men and women who lived through them that you can’t help but wonder if we just can’t get a piece of that back every now and then. Manny belongs to the generation that I grew up watching, emulating, studying, and wanting to be a part of, but when my turn came to step into those shoes, the times had begun to change, rapidly, and the world had moved on to other things. It bear re-stating that for all his prominence in Buffalo, for all his connections with the Group Theatre generation, Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theatre, the now-defunct LORT B theatre in the city, never once did his one of his plays. They would have been better off to have done so.

When I read about all the various ideas and issues that surround American theatre these days, I think today I can boil my thoughts about these issues down to one sentence – American theatre needs more Manny Frieds. His life was that of a common man doing uncommon things for common people. And we loved him for it.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Here it is, New Year’s Eve, and it has been a long, long time between posts. I have been busy, and there is really no other way to put it. When I put it that way, though, it feels more like an excuse than a reason. I think what truly happened is that I became involved with so many things that, at the end of the day, the thought of writing a blog post just felt like “one more thing” to do after a busy day. Since no one would ever accuse me of being a major league blogging presence, I decided it would be best to let the blog go fallow for a bit rather than beating myself up about not writing in it.

To some degree, that worked. I really never felt too guilty after about 10 days of not writing. As the weeks passed, I found that my desire to write did wane a great deal, and it gave me some pause. You really do get to learn how insignificant all that information and writing is. The world of theatre moves on with or without you, and in the larger scheme of things there is very little chance of having any major impact. I discovered that paying attention to my own slice of the theatre world was about the best I could hope for, so as I began to do more of that, I began to feel less guilty about writing.

What have I been up to, then? Most of my time has been spent in what I would call the “usual manner” – teaching classes, directing a production of The Altruists, and chairing my department. I took on an extra honors course this past semester, looking at Greek plays for their relevance to modern culture, so that added a bit to my workload. And I was also on the “visioning committee” for the creation of our upcoming College of Visual and Performing Arts, to be inaugurated in Fall 2012. I am also on the steering committee for the planning of a new addition to our arts center, which they say will break ground in as little as two years. October-November was particularly intense. I took a quick trip in NYC the weekend before Thanksgiving, but did not see any shows, concerning myself rather with meeting with alumni and other family matters. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – It’s going to be a very nice day here in western NY. Temperatures will climb to the upper 70s, the sun is out, and the humidity is low. Last night I sat on my back porch, listened to the Yankees drop a game to Tampa Bay, played with a new stargazing app on my iPad, and then went to bed. It’s these kinds of situations that keep me from getting on my computer and writing on this blog. But hey, I don’t do this for a living, and I really don’t have any deadlines to meet, so I figure perhaps you don’t mind so much. Besides, at least in my neck of the woods, nothing much is happening.

Last week, though, while I was on vacation visiting family in Massachusetts, I did manage to squeeze in two days taking in the three Shakespeare offerings at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox MA. In fact, I got to do a fairly quick buzz around the Berkshires, from Lenox down to Stockbridge, then up to North Adams, across to Williamstown and back down through Pittsfield to Lenox. It was interesting. I liked Pittsfield the best, because it seemed to preserve most if its working-class history, and there was much more diversity visible in the community.

Having completed my own Shakespearian stint at my hometown Shakespeare Festival, it was quite interesting to compare the two and see what a difference money and location can make. When we talk about class, culture and the arts in this country, to me it becomes readily apparent that theatre has become the domain of the white and the wealthy. Comparing the way the two festivals go about producing Shakespeare, as well as looking at the eventual product, makes this pretty clear. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – Well, with eight months of writing lost, I figured it might be a good idea to get back on track just a little bit. Adding a post tonight, which is my night off, seemed to be a good project. And to be honest, I did the post-a-day thing back in November, and the loss of most of those posts are nothing to get upset about. The world will not be a worse place for the lack of a post or two of mine.

I came to the realization the other day that I let a lot of theatrical events go by without comment, most noticeably the Tonys (if there is one post I regret losing it was the recent one I wrote on the Arties in Buffalo). I am also not finding much of interest to write about. I attribute this to the fact that most of what I had been reading about isn’t particularly pertinent to me personally. It may be pertinent to my students, and I do feel a need to stay relatively on top of things so that I can address issues with some modicum of intelligence. But I am coming to realize that my interest in things theatrical, at the most deeply personal level, is beginning to fade. Continue Reading »