eugene o’neill – Jefe's House

Theatre History Needs You

Plays & Players turns 100 years old this season. We’ve gotten a matching grant of $10,000 from the Wyncote Foundation. Matching grant means — you got it — we have to match it in order to get it. So we need to come up with $10K in a hurry. Rather than pulling an NPR and demanding “any amount, even as little as $50” during their elitist pledge drives, which makes you want to permanently switch to WYSP for your morning drive, we figure we’ll just ask 1000 people to each give us just 10 bucks, one time. That’s why this campaign is called 10 for 100. That’s not $10 a year for 100 years or anything like that. We just want $10 from you. You can easily and quickly donate your $10 by going to this donation page.

I loved Plays & Players Theatre in Philadelphia from the moment I walked into the 1911 lobby of this former acting school turned theatre back in fall, 2008. My first thought was, nice place but is there a ghost? Actors are highly superstitious people, and any good old theatre has a requisite benevolent ghost on staff. I was delighted to learn that Plays & Players is blessed with not just 1 ghost but 3 ghosts.

I also love history; especially US history and especially film and theatre history, so I was naturally drawn to this historic institution first as a fan, then as a board member and now as one of its 3 current playwrights-in-residence along with Jeremy Gable and Brian Grace-Duff. Plays & Players has an illustrious history, including bringing the first works of Susan Glaspell (Trifles) and one Eugene O’Neill (Before Breakfast) to Philadelphia back in the 19-teens. Bevan & Trzcinski’s Stalag 17, a comic drama set in a German POW camp, premiered here in 1949 before moving to Broadway and then becoming a hit Hollywood film, and then becoming the inspiration for 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes (yep). Philly native Kevin Bacon also performed one of his earliest roles on this stage back in the 1970s.

Today another facet of Plays & Players that I love is its commitment to producing 1 world-premiere by a Philadelphia playwright every season along with the classics and modern classics you’d expect. This current season features the hit Pardon My Invasion by local playwright Joy Cutler (it got raves) coupled with upcoming hits by August Wilson (Joe Turner’s Come and Gone) and Tom Stoppard (Travesties).

Where was I? Oh right, Plays & Players turns 100 years old this season. We’ve gotten a matching grant of $10,000 from the Wyncote Foundation. Matching grant means — you got it — we have to match it in order to get it. So we need to come up with $10K in a hurry. Rather than pulling an NPR and demanding “any amount, even as little as $50” like they do during their elitist pledge drives, which makes you want to permanently switch to the nearest corporate Top 40 station for your morning drive, we figure we’ll just ask 1000 people to each give us just 10 bucks, one time. That’s why this fundraising campaign is called 10 for 100. That’s not $10 a year for 100 years or anything like that. We just want $10 from you. Right now.

You can easily and quickly donate your $10 by going to this donation page.

Many thanks and Happy Thanksgiving,

Jeffrey Stanley

Drinks at Quig’s Are On Me

Fresh on the heels of a highly successful Philly Fringe show I am delighted, surprised, and thrilled to have been named one of Philadelphia’s three 2011-12 PDC@Plays & Players Playwrights-in-Residence.

Fresh on the heels of a highly successful Philly Fringe show I am delighted, surprised, and thrilled to have been named one of Philadelphia’s three 2011-12 PDC@Plays & Players Playwrights-in-Residence.

The Philadelphia Dramatists Center (PDC) is a membership community of playwrights, collaborating artists and audience members dedicated to creating and nurturing new work. PDC develops resources, stimulates creative partnerships and participates in the ongoing national dialogue about how and why theater is created.

The historic Plays & Players Theatre turns 100 this year. It began in 1911 as a private social club, similar to the Players Club in Manhattan, devoted to expanding and developing new theater experiences for and by its wealthy membership. The first President, actress Maud Skinner, was the wife of the famed American actor Otis Skinner. The Plays & Players Theatre building on 17th and Delancey, then called the “Little Theatre of Philadelphia,” first opened its shows to the public in 1913 with a mission to produce “American plays of ideas.” And they meant it. Plays & Players sought out and produced cutting edge work by America’s newest playwrights including Philadelphia premieres in 1916 and 1919 of some of the earliest plays by Eugene O’Neill (Before Breakfast) and Susan Glaspell (Suppressed Desires and Trifles), the world premiere in 1949 of Bevan & Trzcinski’s acclaimed Stalag 17 before it moved to Broadway, and an early performance by actor Kevin Bacon in 1974. Once an exclusive club, Plays & Players has grown over the years into a professional quality theatre devoted to supporting established and emerging Philadelphia artists in practicing and performing their crafts.

I know what you’re wondering: is it haunted? Finding out will be my first order of business. I am told that many of the bar staff who work on the 3rd floor in the members-only Quig’s Pub have spotted the ghost of deceased longtime bartender Leon passing through the room on occasion, then there’s the oft-spotted ghost of a little boy standing on the mainstage, and others insist the ghost of Maud Skinner haunts one of the dressing rooms. We shall see…

Here too is a terrific video tour of Plays & Players made by mysterious stranger Lance Davis last month.

The Last Emperor

Now that the Cold War is over, maybe Paul Robeson can finally get a little respect

(Originally published in Time Out New York, 1/15/1998)

Jeffrey Stanley is the author of Joe Glory, a script about the Peekskill riots, written for director Barbara Kopple. “Paul Robeson, A Centennial Retrospective” runs January 16-27 at Film Forum.

If Bugs Bunny can have a stamp, why not Paul Robeson? One of the greatest entertainers of the century, Robeson was a Broadway legend (one of the first black Othellos), an opera singer, a movie star and an outspoken political gadfly at a time when so-called Sambo roles were the norm for mainstream black performers.

Blackballed for his politics, Robeson is only now–on the centennial anniversary of his birth–receiving a measure of the respect that was denied him during his lifetime. In addition to receiving a posthumous Grammy, he’ll be honored with special events in LA and Chicago, and beginning January 16, Film Forum will screen a retrospective of his films. But the stamp is just too much to ask: last month, the idea was rejected despite nearly 90,000 signatures on his behalf.

As Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones–a role for which the Columbia law-school graduate was handpicked by the playwright–Robeson became the first black actor on the white stage to portray a character who was not a stereotype. Possessed of a mesmerizing baritone purr, he sang in some 20 languages. And his commitment social justice would shame today’s most committed Hollywood celebs: in 1933, he gave all his earnings from the film All God’s Chillun Got Wings to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

Between 1924 and 1943, he starred in 11 pictures, including the screen version of The Emperor Jones and black auteur Oscar Michaeux’s silent Body and Soul. Many of these films were radically progressive at the time and remain so today. “Even in the bad films,” says Paul Robeson Jr., who will present two lectures during the series, “he changed the representation of black male from dehumanized to human.”

In Big Fella, a Diff’rent Strokes in reverse, Robeson stars as a poor dockworker who unofficially adopts a rich white kid. In Song of Freedom, Robeson plays another poor dockworker who parlays his singing ability into a trip to Africa after discovering his royal lineage. Robeson even managed to include a political message in his famous rendition of Show Boat‘s “Old Man River,” changing the lyric “I’m tired of livin’ and feared of dyin’” to “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.” No wonder most of his films were made in Britain.

Robeson’s struggle didn’t end at the movie house. Having visited the Soviet Union numerous times, he insisted that socialism would be a great antidote to American racism. He also purportedly declared that in a war with the Soviets, segregated black Americans would never “fight against their friends on behalf of their enemies.”

Coupled with what Robeson Jr. calls his father’s “cultural challenge” to white America, that sort of talk was enough to doom Robeson’s career. Soon his records were removed from music-store shelves, radio stations refused to play his songs, and he was placed under government surveillance. In 1949, he held two concerts in Peekskill, New York, both of which ended in riots between his fans and local veterans’ groups. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Robeson was asked why he didn’t just move to Russia. “Because my father was a slave,” he replied, “and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?” It was.

Robeson was not a member of the Communist Party or any other political party, but that didn’t stop the government from revoking his passport on suspicion that he was a Soviet spy. Nearly a decade later, he regained his passport and resumed his singing career in Europe with no regrets. He died in 1976, his extraordinary contributions all but forgotten. Fortunately, that could change. With the Cold War and Jim Crow behind us, the country may finally be ready to forgive and forget. Even if the Postal Service isn’t.

UPDATE: In January, 2004 the US Postal Service finally issued a Paul Robeson stamp: