On the National Critic's Institute
How a Month at the O'Neill Theatre Center Changed My Life Forever
One of my subscribers has suggested that it might be helpful to give y’all a bit more information about my background, and while I think most of my subscribers know me personally, I figure what the heck, I’ll do it. She specifically asked me to describe the month I spent at the National Critics Institute (NCI) at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center.
How did I end up at the NCI?
At the time (1988), I was getting my masters degree at Illinois State University. After having worked as freelance director in Minneapolis for five years or so, I had been accepted into the MFA Program for Directing, but soon began to question whether directing was what I wanted to do. I had an assistantship in which I was co-managing the box office, but I had volunteered to teach as well, and found that I really loved being in the classroom much more than I liked being in rehearsal. That was an earthquake.
ISU was actively involved in the American College Theatre Festival, and the department chair, Dr. Alvin Goldfarb, suggested that I might enjoy participating the in theater criticism competition. If you’ve never been to an ACTF event, it is basically a convention for students that includes workshops and two performances a day by schools whose productions had been chosen for the festival by ACTF officials. The participants in the Criticism Competition attended both productions, and then choose one to write a review about. The finished review was to be submitted to Tony Adler, the theater critic for the Chicago Reader, early the next morning. He’d read them all, and choose two to discuss (sort of like my understanding of how a creative writing class is run). He would offer suggestions about how to improve our writing, focus our thoughts, and break out of the idea that the purpose of a review was to offer notes for improvement to the members of the production. He’d also allow participants to critique the work as well.
My Breakthrough
That year, there was a production of Michael Brady’s 1984 domestic drama To Gillian on her 37th Birthday that had been produced, ironically, by the university from my hometown in Wisconsin. It was a good production of a play that I found less-than-compelling, to say the least. “Zen philosophers say,” I began, “that if you intensely study a minute part of the world—a drop of water, say, or a single molecule—you can see the universe. David, the central character in Michael Brady’s drama To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, has the unique distinction of having intensely studied the universe and seen only himself. Standing in the midst of a grand set that alternates slices of a realistic island landscape landscape with a map of the heavens, David peers through a telescope at the stars above him and resolutely focuses on his own navel.” I then went on to praise all aspects of the production, and concluded with this:
“Ah, what a waste: a beautiful cast, a beautiful set, beautiful costumes, beautiful lighting all combined to give birth to a play with the soul of a game of Trivial Pursuit. Pass one of those pink wedges, will you?
Ahem.
My fellow student-critics were appalled. How could I be so mean?, they demanded of me. Those people had put a lot of work into making that show, and you just trashed it. Adler let them talk for a while, and eventually came to my defense. Your job as a reviewer, he told us, is to provide a clear description of what you’ve seen, and evaluate it without blinking. You need to write with a vividness that allows the reader to visualize what you saw, so that they can decide whether it sounds like something they’d want to see. Your responsibility, I remember him telling us, is to the reader and not to the members of the production.
A week later, I found out that my review had been chosen to advance from the regional level to the final, where the best reviews from the eight ACTF regions would be evaluated by Ernest Schier, the crusty long-time theater critic for Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, and one chosen as winner. The author of the winning review would attend the National Critic’s Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center with tuition, transportation, and expenses paid. The other NCI Fellows would all be professional critics themselves, usually at small newspapers or weeklies—the ACTF winner would be the only student.
A Crossroads Moment
On March 30, I received a letter from an ACTF intern saying, “This is just to let you know that your submission to the National Critic’s Institute has been selected as the winning critique.” (Looking at that sentence now, I laugh at the weird casual style that only an intern would use—it was almost as if it started, “Oh, by the way, FYI you won — yay, you!”) I was astonished. I took the letter to Alvin Goldfarb’s office, sat down, and mumbled, “I won,” and I handed him the letter. He was thrilled. Until I told him that I would would have to turn it down. “Why?,” he asked incredulously. I then explained that I had already signed a contract to be the House Manager for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival (Alvin was the Managing Director), and that I needed that money for the upcoming year of grad school—I couldn’t afford to go to the O’Neill. He nodded, and told me to come back later. He then went to Calvin Pritner, the founder and Artistic Director of ISF, and explained the situation, and the two of them came up with a way to pay me my full summer salary even though I would be gone for a month. Had they not done this, I’m not certain how my life would have been changed, because my experience at NCI was lifechanging.
At the National Critic’s Institute and the O’Neill Theatre Center
The NCI, at that time, was a month long (it is now two weeks shorter), and it coincided with O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, which had a staged “reading” (carrying scripts, but mostly memorized nonetheless) of a new play almost every night of the week. George Wolfe, then head of the Yale School of Drama, was the O’Neill’s Artistic Director, and he greeted the critic fellows upon their arrival with a story about the time a playwright brought a gun to the post-show critique of his play. I viewed this as less funny than did Wolfe, although it did seem to reflect his own suspicion of critics.
Many of those who formed the O’Neill acting company were quite well-known or on the verge of being so: Linda Hunt, Polly Draper, John Tarturro are just a few of the ones I remember. Many of the directors were also well-known, nationally and internationally, and a few were also on the Yale faculty.
Playwrights whose work was being presented that year included Douglas Wright, Thomas Babe, Jeffrey Wanshel, Anne Commire, and Douglas Post.
NCI critic-teachers who were there in 1988 were an impressive group: Irving Wardle, Dan Sullivan, Jules Novick, and Holly Hill are a few of the names I remember—there were several more. I was assigned to assist as dramaturg for longtime New Yorker Off-Broadway theater critic Edith Oliver, who at the time was 75 years old, still writing, and still chain smoking (she did have a tendency to fall asleep at rehearsals, which I now totally understand and fully appreciate). August Wilson, who workshopped many of his plays at the O’Neill, showed up for an inspiring session with the critics (he recited a lot of dialogue from his plays from memory), and one lunchtime I found myself engaged in a wonderful conversation with a man who I later discovered was Broadway and film director Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man). He spoke to me like an equal, was interested in my thoughts, and didn’t seem at all bothered by my ignorance of who he was. In other words, you never knew who was going to be at your lunch table when you sat down.
The teachers who worked at NCI were mainly helping us to find our writing voice, and also giving guidance about review structure (e.g., finding a central idea or image around which to organize the rest of the review). One interesting assignment was to write a rave review about a production or performance we had loved in the past. I wrote about director Richard Foreman’s amazing production of Moliere’s Don Juan that I had seen at the Guthrie, and I was thrilled that the actor who’d played the title role, John Seitz, was part of the O’Neill acting company. I gave him a xerox copy of my review, which he seemed to be touched by.
By the end of the month, I had discovered a couple things. First, how much liked writing. Even though I would get up at 5:30am or 6:00am to write my review (late nights are not my thing, then or now), once I started writing, I’d find myself in a flow and time disappeared. Usually before I went to bed I would jot a few ideas about what the focus of my review would be—what particular image or line or idea I would center the review on—and I would find that my subconscious mind would work overnight so that when I awoke I’d often have a large part of the review mapped out. I’d then write the review by hand, editing as I went, after which I’d catch the bus from the college dorm where everyone was staying (my vague memory is that it was Connecticut College, but I could be wrong) and go directly to the O’Neill office where I was allowed to use a typewriter to type up my review (the other fellows all seemed to have brought portables with them). Then I’d have breakfast with whatever actors, directors, and playwrights had arrived, and around 10:00 the fellows would head outside for the wooden picnic table under a huge oak tree that had been designated for NCI.
It was exhausting, but inspiring.
The O’Neill Development Process
I mentioned that I was assigned to assist Edith Oliver in her role as dramaturg for Jeff Stetson’s family drama, And the Men Shall Gather. Stetson is now probably best known for his play The Meeting, about an imagined meeting between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, which had won eight NAACP awards the previous year, and in 1989 was produced on American Playhouse. I remember having a sense that Stetson was being groomed to be the next August Wilson.
All of which is to say that this was not an inexperienced playwright, but you couldn’t have known it from the way the script was developed. At the O’Neill, every time a playwright rewrote pages, they would be copied on a different colored paper and inserted into the script so that everyone would be sure to be working from the same draft. When I’d attend the performances, the actors were required to carry their scripts, and as a result you could see how much rewriting had occurred during rehearsals. Some seemed to mostly have the white paper of the original; by the time And the Men Shall Gather came to the stage, the scripts looked like an LGBTQ sticker. Every color of the rainbow was represented. Every day, Stetson would arrive at rehearsal with the rewrites he had done overnight. He looked tired, harried, and frustrated. I have no idea he was able to hold on to the integrity of his play, and I hope when he published it he went back to the original. I didn’t think the changes were helpful.
I was shocked. As a director and as an actor, I had always regarded the script as sacrosanct, and my job was to discover how best to bring those words to life. Not at the O’Neill. Actors had suggestions, directors had suggestions, Edith Oliver had suggestions. I did not have suggestions, because what the hell did I know? Except at the post-performance critique (each show had one to which the entire O’Neill participants were invited), I made the very last comment. I could not have made it during the rehearsals—I realized it in performance—but I pointed out that the climax of the play was emotionally satisfying, but it didn’t really resolve the central conflict that we’d been following throughout the play. Had I known the language then, I’d have said that the Climax wasn’t related to the Major Dramatic Question. I offered my observation, and the critique ended. But as we all filed out of the theater, Edith Oliver sidled up to me, looked up into my face (she was quite short), cocked her eyebrow and said, “Brilliant. You’re exactly right. I don’t know why we didn’t see that.” I floated on air for the rest of the day.
A Lifechanging Occurrence
For all of the important things I learned and important people I met, the thing that had the biggest impact happened outside of class. As I mentioned above, I had decided not to pursue an MFA in directing, but I hadn’t quite decided whether I wanted to pursue a doctorate and teach or what. In my off time at the O’Neill, I was spending a lot of time pondering and journaling and generally dithering.
One warm afternoon after lunch, I wandered outside and sat at a picnic bench under a tent set up on the grounds where there was a full table of people who were engaged in an intense discussion. I don’t know who they were, except that one of them was Gitta Honneger, who was then Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama. I didn’t join their table, but I was close enough to hear what they were saying. My memory is that they were talking about the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Muller, but the conversation ranged widely without a break, ideas tripping over ideas, references to playwrights I didn’t recognize and theorists I’d never heard of.
By the time they wrapped up their conversation, two things were crystal clear to me: 1) I was woefully uninformed about theater, and needed to learn a lot more; and 2) this was my tribe. I knew then that I wanted to get my doctorate and spend the rest of my life learning as much as I could so I could participate in many, many conversations with smart people just like these. In many respects, I began blogging in order to have more opportunities to have such conversations, and to have more opportunities to share what I have learned.
A year later, I was accepted into the doctoral program in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center, then located across the street from the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, where I had the opportunity to learn from amazing professors like Daniel Gerould, Jonathan Kalb, Edwin Wilson, and Stanley Kauffmann. I also had the good fortune to be hired as Editorial Assistant at PAJ Publications/Performing Arts Journal, where I learned a great deal about the international avant garde theater scene (our offices were right down the hall from Robert Wilson’s, and I once spent a lowkey evening with Richard Foreman) from Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, the founders of Performing Arts Journal, and the only other people working there aside from me. Watching Bonnie edit and rewrite and craft her essays was an education all its own.
And at the age of 65, I’m still writing, still reading, still thinking and still on the lookout for the next brilliant conversation and inspiring idea.
"She" was right. I am so glad you spent the time to fill in some blanks. The background explains a lot about your interests, your writing and frames your pursuits. Not that it will garner any more respect from me (you have plenty already.) An entertaining read too.
Scott, wonderful piece here on the O'Neill in a distinctly different time. Just before the major tech revolution in perpetual connectivity, when people talked and listened more--and learned more! At least that's how I remember it from '84. I love the notion of just how long it takes anyone to actually figure out why a play does or doesn't quite work--sometimes it takes a production, or a second look at a second-night staged reading. Happy to be member of your Rarig alumni tribe.