Stages on Life's Way

...So during quiet spells they pester their contacts, keep the message machine turned on, pounce on announcements in Variety and other trade journals, wheedle invitations to parties...

...I was hoping he would proffer revised evaluations of his stagings—tell us the elements that were rightly or wrongly praised and damned...

...Luckily, Film survives...

...Perhaps that will prove more reflective and comprehensive than the autobiography...

...In the 21 productions of his that I saw—admittedly a small proportion of the total and all mounted in New York—he either declined or failed to put into play the imagination and analytical acuity shown by directors like Hall, Guthrie, Peter Brook, Andrei Ser-ban, Judith Malina, and Joseph Chai-kin...

...One has only to think back with the aid of treacherous memory to any of his stagings of Pinter, and then to director Peter Hall's equally faithful versions of The Homecoming, Old Times, an&NoMan 'sLand, to be aware that Schneider held back something vital...

...Once the promise is accepted, the director actually has to step up his eloquence during rehearsals...

...Actors pose many questions about motivation, movement and appearance, yet don't always heed the replies...

...Well, mostly they look for work...

...the changing prospects of regional theater...

...Yet this conscientious artist did not have an easier life (or living) than a traveling salesman...

...Names tend to rush by unsupported by faces, much less personalities...

...In passing Schneider settles a few scores, albeit never too spitefully, with various actors and producers who tangled with him...

...The rest of his Broadway assignments reaped little benefit for Schneider, the realtors who finance plays, the American theater, or its American Express patrons...

...Any career in the theater records a litany of dashed hopes...

...Judgments that are all too often unsustained by knowledge, insight, or a reliable sense of comparison cause much unjust discouragement among people in the theater...

...Albee, in his appreciative Preface, makes wry reference to Schneider's recollectivepowers: "Alanremembers things in our professional relationship that I do not, no matter how hard I try...

...These included revivals, repeats and road shows, the bulk of them done out of town, Off-Broadway and on campuses...

...It was once said of Guthrie that, given a commodious stage and a tiny balcony over it, he would put a single actor on the stage and cram a chorus into the balcony...

...Yet his directorial self-effacement had its disadvantages...

...But I'm glad that a cutting reply did not occur to me...

...You went to see a Guthrie production—at least I certainly did— to witness manipulations of the script, the actors and the settings that no one else could contrive...

...Regrettably, the narrative covering the early years sometimes goes bland...

...In 1966 I met Schneider for the first time at an academic conference in Chicago...

...One of Schneider's heroes was Tyrone Guthrie, the outstanding English director of the period 1945-60...

...Their principal craftsman's tool is the mouth...

...Further on, there are many fascinating details about rehearsals and sus-penseful paragraphs on the outcomes— that is, the reviews—of various productions...

...As with any artist, Schneider liked the critics who liked him when they liked him...

...But eloquence may falter at any stage of the game .Those competing directors have mouths too...

...Some producers prove to be skeptics or ignoramuses...

...I waited in vain, however, for observations of a general nature—on, say, the feasibility of a national theater...

...He presides over a clapped-together family of strangers—actors, designers, technicians, hungry producers, and a jittery playwright...

...Penny packer, an unremarkable work that ran for more than 12 months...

...We hear much about the unemployment rate for actors—it is sometimes said to exceed 90 per cent, especially in New York...

...After living in various parts of the Northeast, they finally settled in Baltimore, where Spiro T. Agnew ("very scrawny, very sad") was one of Alan's classmates at Forest Park High School...

...Cooing and wooing from the media...

...There is much fairness both in this swipe and in those Schneider takes in Entrances at the "so-called highbrows" who act as theater critics...

...Indeed, in retracing Schneider's "journey" through Washington, New York, Minneapolis, Chicago, the West Coast (north and south), Houston, Cleveland, Boston, Florida, Paris, Tel Aviv, London, and Edinburgh, it is important to remember that he was an independent entrepreneur, usually getting by on slim commissions...

...He did make that one movie in 1964, Beckett's Film...

...The French pioneer Jacques Copeau, who preached and practiced "reverence for the text," would seem a more likely model...

...A midtown condo...

...There is no discussion either of the Off-Of f-Broad way insurgency of the 1960s, the decade's most valuable theatrical shake-up...

...Following several forays into New York theater, he gained a solid Broadway footing in 1953 with Liam O'Brien's The Remarkable Mr...

...He happens to have been amply qualified to do this: Longtime readers of this magazine will recall that he was my predecessor in the role of NL theater critic...

...and who presided over the Theater Communications Group, the heart of an alliance of our nationwide nonprofit theater companies...

...He also pays tribute to his three angels—his mother, his wife Jean and Samuel Beckett—and expresses great warmth for his father, as well as for Robert Whitehead (his first Broadway producer), Harold Pinter and Albee...

...we particularly admired the performance of a salesman who did credit to the bravura role of Nat Goldberg...

...Schneider, by contrast, was a playwright's director...

...Even on those rare opening nights when the prospects look hot, tepid reviews can come as a cold douche...

...Schneider suddenly turned to me and said, "You critics will buy any shit done away from Broadway...

...Beckett and Pinter, whose spare dialogue and exact (and exacting) stage directions have often been tampered with, were always happy to entrust their dramas to Schneider's close handling...

...He belonged to that unusual and discreet breed who derive their ideas and methods from a play, rather than use it for excursions into self-celebration...

...At the time I didn't know—and I'm not sure Schneider knew—that he would be directing The Birthday Party on Broadway the following summer...

...All of this is, by the way, accomplished in sentences that are unfailingly civilized...

...In addition, he took on a few that simply lacked fire and lost money...

...who succeeded John Houseman as head of the Juilliard School's Acting Company...

...From such an average no director grows rich...

...After a day of listening and contributing to addresses on the deplorable state of the arts (see The Arts and the Public, Chicago, 1967), we gratefully accepted Studs Terkel's suggestion that we accompany him to an amateur production of Pinter's The Birthday Party at the Hull House settlement...

...who presented Edward Albee to New York...

...Sloane...

...He was the man who introduced us to enactments of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter...

...In flight from a pogrom conducted by either the Whites or the Reds (he isn't sure which), the family came to the United States...

...Two days after Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...He generally drew first-class solo interpretations from his actors, but did not kindle enough intensity in the dramatic interplay among them...

...Schneider dwells admiringly on Guthrie's outrageous theatricality, and recounts how thrilled he was to receive an invitation from the great man to direct The Glass Menagerie at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis...

...Moreover, his standards were too uncompromising for the good of his shrunken pocket...

...He was unforgiving toward himself for once continuing with a show when the producer insisted on dropping a blacklisted actress...

...Jean Schneider, in her Foreword, tells us that her husband "left a great many notes and materials" for a second, companion volume...

...Schneider's early life, passed over quickly here, was marked by hard circumstances of a different sort...

...Still, there were plenty of lean years to come...

...He was born in Kharkov, a couple of months after the Russian Revolution, to Jewish parents who were both doctors...

...These effusions seem strange, even baffling...

...And that success is at hand...

...Entering the University of Wisconsin, he switched from physics to j ournalism before feeling his first, earnest "theatrical stirrings.' In 1940, on the recommendation of playwright and drama critic Walter Kerr, Schneider was hired by Catholic University in Washington to teach and direct...

...Anything but financially rewarding, it was a solid artistic achievement that brought Buster Kea-ton back to the screen...

...Three or four shows lasted for a while, but only Guy Bolton's adaptation of Marcelle Maurette's A na-stasia and Albee's Virginia Woolf could be called hits...

...if it is old, they can give it new vigor by bringing out previously overlooked or understated themes...

...Gold...

...Determined not to dwindle into a hit-struck winner, a "poor man's Josh Logan," he turned down many surefire, money-in-the-bank plays...

...Off-Broadway Schneider did have some sustained runs...

...They must strain their eloquence in the face of potential employers: If the script is new, they understand it better than their competitors...

...He later staged a musical by Kerr and directed his television adaptation of Oedipus Rex...

...If Schneider had his shortcomings as a director, he remained an honorable man...

...Checking against the published screenplay, we are reminded by the movie's unremitting faithfulness that sometimes we look for too much, that there are virtues in artistic modesty and dedication...

...Strolling back to the hotel, Terkel and I paid the production some compliments...

...Quick fame, at least among those in the know...

...For directors the rate may well be higher...

...We are talking about one of our best-known, most versatile directors ofboth classics and new plays...

...Over that span of 46 years he averaged slightly under four shows a year...

...professor of theater, City University of New York Graduate Center But what, you ask, do directors do...

...He then proceeds to pick out nuggets from complimentary reviews of his work and reprint them in all their banality, as unabashedly as a press agent might...

...Alan Schneider's professional life coincided with this country's postwar theater...

...At the end of Alan Schneider's autobiography there is a list of 181 theater productions he directed, plus eight television shows and one film, from 1938 until his accidental death in 1984...

...or the flourishing of on-campus theater conservatory groups...

...All require parental love in the form of constant reassurances that such-and-such "works," that selfless collaboration has its rewards, that their talent is blazing, unequaled...

...BIG offers...

...opened in October, 1962, as he watched the line gathering outside the Billy Rose Theater, Schneider realized: ''I was 44 years old, almost 45, and I was finally going to make a living in the theater...

...In Entrances he claims to have learned early on not to believe reviews, especially favorable ones...

...And he stuck to his vocation while others fell away or slid into the slough of Hollywood compromise...

...Good enough...

...You don't appreciate real craftsmanship...

...Thus his personal chronicle, for the most part preoccupied with day-today showbiz events, is of more than personal interest...

...Off-Broadway financial rewards, though, never covered the rent...

...In both cases, they promise a hit...

...Ah, success...

...He introduced the Main Stem to two plays of distinction it didn't deserve, Shimon Wincelberg's Kata-ki and Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr...

...who helped launch the Arena Stage in Washington...

...During the next 27 years Schneider did 23 new plays on Broadway, six of them by Albee...

...the postwar evolution of dramatic literature and directorial styles...