A paradigm for new play development: the Albee-Barr-Wilder Playwrights Unit.

Albarwild Inc.'s Playwrights Unit would never have been successful without the unique partnership of its off- and on-Broadway producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder and playwright Edward Albee. The Unit was initially financially dependent on income from Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the Unit's fortunes were directly tied to Albee's success as a new American playwright and his own explorations of dramaturgical form and content. From 1962 through 1971, Albee had the rare opportunity to serve as a co-producer of his works on Broadway. This fact, coupled with Albee's remarkable early success as a new, young playwright on Broadway, supported and justified to Richard Barr his own central notion regarding the theatre--namely, that the playwright and the play are the unifying element of any theatrical production. (1) Because of the initiatory nature of much of Albee's work, and because Albee did this experimentation in full public view on Broadway with little or no apology, the idea that American playwrights deserved a forum in which to learn and take risks in full (but perhaps controlled) public view was central to the Albee-Barr-Wilder (ABW) producing philosophy. Add to that Barr's interest in the new absurdist work of European authors, including Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, and Arrabal, and it is clear that the ABW producing partnership evolved a remarkably fertile environment for new playwrights and their experimentation in the 1960s. The ABW Playwrights Unit was the jewel in the crown of that producing organization because its work represented the ABW producing philosophy at its most elemental and most important stage--at the point of discovery of new voices for the theatre. (2)

Albee's initial commercial success (in particular with his plays Zoo Story and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), the strong critical response to his work, and the free hand Albee experienced as a producing partner to Barr and Wilder captured the imagination of the New York theatre community and stimulated an atmosphere in which new plays and new playwrights were suddenly hot ticket items. The Playwrights Unit was a significant manifestation of Albee's influence, and Albee's success contributed to the much larger not-for-profit business of new play development, which grew out of the off-off-Broadway movement and became fully realized in the creation of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center. Ironically, Albee has forsworn the business of new play development, but his success as a young playwright and his enthusiasm for supporting new work himself was its springboard. (3) When it comes to the training of playwrights in the theatre, his guiding instruction, now and during the tenure of the Playwrights Unit, is, "Every time you write a play, try to fail ... do what you don't know you can do." (4) This mantra was the basis for the work at the Playwrights Unit, and Albee's words echoed those spoken by off-off-Broadway impresario Joe Cino to his playwrights at the Caffe Cino: "Do what you have to do."

In the 1960s, the Playwrights Unit provided a meeting place between the professional but somewhat moribund off-Broadway theatre and the freewheeling experimentation of the off-off-Broadway scene. For nearly ten years it provided a professional workshop situation for playwrights. From its ranks came Louis Auchincloss, Mart Crowley, Charles Dizenzo, Gene Feist, Paul Foster, Frank Gagliano, John Guare, A. R. Gurney, LeRoi Jones, Lee Kalcheim, Adrienne Kennedy, Terrence McNally, Leonard Melfi, Howard Moss, James Prideaux, Sam Shepard, Megan Terry, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Lanford Wilson, Doric Wilson, and Paul Zindel. The significance of this group extends far beyond its brief existence as a producing entity. As a playwrights' workshop, the Unit served as an early model for such organizations as Playwrights Horizons and the Center Theatre Group at the Mark Taper Forum (both organizations were founded by Playwrights Unit managers) and, to a certain extent, the playwrights' laboratories of organizations such as Circle Repertory Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Festival.

Albee's point of view regarding new play development was that a new play, if it is going to work, will work, and if it doesn't, it wasn't a very good play in the first place. This is a radical departure from the current model of new play development, which seeks to "fix" plays through incrementally more complex concert and staged readings, workshops, and minimal productions. Albee attacked this model of new play development in a September 1994 interview for American Theatre: "It is to de-ball the plays; to castrate them; to smooth down all the rough edges so they can't cut, can't hurt. It's to make them commercially tolerable to a smug audience. It's not to make plays any better. Most playwrights who write a good play write it from the beginning." (5) Working from this perspective, Albee, Barr, and Wilder tested plays at the Playwrights Unit, at the Cherry Lane, and on Broadway by the fire of full production. They were able to do this because their production budgets were tightly managed. (6) If the play worked and the critics were receptive, they kept it open; if it did not work and was losing money, they closed it as quickly as possible and went on to the next play (Albee later complained that Barr was perhaps too eager to close a play because of poor audience response). (7) The scripts were, in the opinion of Albee, Barr, and Wilder, as finished as they needed to be for production, as Barr insisted when he was interviewed for an article in Theatre Arts in 1961:

That's the first thing we've learned, or relearned: We are not going into rehearsal until the script we plan to open with, on Broadway, is in our hands. There will be changes made in that script, of course, but they'll be minor changes, not the terrible, frightening business of trying to create a whole new second or third act between New Haven and New York. Which brings us right up to the second point. If you start out with a finished play, there is no need for the week in Wilmington or wherever, and the two weeks in Philadelphia or Boston, where you're bound to lose a substantial amount of money. (8)

Barr and Wilder were certainly interested in the experimentation of the off-off Broadway, but as professionals their focus was always on the development of scripts for the commercial theatre. In that sense, they "invented" play development as it is practiced today, moving scripts from workshop to professional production. Their form of development, however, was focused on full (albeit inexpensive) productions rather than on a series of incrementally more sophisticated readings.

Their reasoning was simple: they were trying to avoid what was then the standard practice of bringing a new play to Broadway--the out-of-town tryout. Plays were tested for critical reception in places like Hartford, New Haven, or Boston to determine what additional changes needed to be made to the script before the all-important New York production. According to Barr and Wilder, the out-of-town tryout was not terribly useful as a means of developing a finished script: "And so you go into production and suffer through the ridiculous agony of having the author--and the director and the actors and various friends, enemies and people you meet in hotel lobbies--rewrite a three-act play in New Haven or Boston or Philadelphia. It's absolutely insane--and it's not really necessary." (9) For Barr, the place to test new plays was off Broadway at his Cherry Lane Theatre and at the Playwrights Unit; he also initiated the preview performance process on Broadway, providing audiences with an opportunity to judge a play on its own merits before a review changed their minds. A successful off-Broadway production provided a far better indication of what New York audiences would accept and support. Barr was convinced that if he liked a script enough to produce it in New York, it was as finished as it needed to be.

On the opposite extreme from the out-of-town tryout is the current model of the play development process with its endless cycle of play readings. The primary difference between how plays were developed in the past and how they are developed now is the difference between the closed professional readings of the past, which led to full production, and the current model of public readings of new work followed by endless discussions and criticism leading to more readings. The open reading or workshop production is not terribly popular among playwrights, as David Kahn and Donna Breed, authors of Scriptwork: A Director's Guide to New Play Development, explain:

Any playwright, director, actor, designer, or audience member will prefer a full production to a workshop. Workshops are a means to that end, or at least they should be. Too often, workshops or other development "processes" are excuses to avoid the difficult and risky business of producing new plays. Consequently, there is frequently cited backlash against play development workshops conducted without the prospect of future production, or workshopping a play unnecessarily so that it becomes "developed to death." (10)

Play readings often involve post-reading discussions with the audience, a process many playwrights abhor. Douglas Anderson, in his Drama Review article "The American Dream Machine: Thirty Years of New Play Development in America" argues that the new play development process of play readings led to plays that are wordy, untheatrical, and designed primarily to appeal to dramaturgy by committee. Plays that enter into that process as challenging, nonrealistic, nonlinear works that experiment with form and content become realistic, linear works that follow along traditional dramaturgical techniques. (11)

In contrast to this current model of play development, Albarwild's Playwrights Unit was run more as a miniature of its other venue, the Cherry Lane Theatre, than as a workshop per se. Although there were certainly readings at the Unit (they occurred primarily toward the end of its existence), the focus was on production. Each play received a full production on a minimal budget with professional directors and actors. While the production values were certainly not at the level of plays produced in ABW's off-Broadway venue, the plays received very nearly full scenic values, including lighting, sound cues, properties, costuming, and scenic elements. There was little interference from either the producers or the managers of the Unit. As many of the playwrights who were interviewed for this study could attest, the primary relationship was one between playwright and director. While there is evidence of mimeographed handouts for discussion purposes, there were rarely the post-production discussions that have since become a familiar part of the new play development process.

The Unit was the brainchild of Richard Barr, and it was Barr's skill as a producer and his fundamental belief in the playwright that provided the impetus for the Unit's creation. Barf's idealism as a producer grew out of his initial theatrical experiences with Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre. "I used to carry Orson's lunch from Longchamps up to the theatre," he once recalled. Barr took part in Welles's radio broadcast "The War of the Worlds" and went with Welles to Hollywood, where he was executive assistant on the filming of Citizen Kane. (12) Barr actually appeared in Citizen Kane and caused a continuity problem; in the film he played a reporter but was caught in separate frames with and without his hat (perhaps ending an important career in film). (13) Barr's quixotic quest to produce the absurdists on Broadway and develop risky new work off- and off-off-Broadway were definitely influenced by Welles's mentorship. (14)

During World War II, Barr served as a captain in the Air Force from 1941 to 1946, heading its Motion Picture Unit in California. (15) After the war he served as dialogue director on several films. Thereafter he decided to give up an acting career and went into directing and producing. From 1946 to 1948 he staged various summer stock productions. He directed Jose Ferret in Volpone, Richard Whorf in Richard III, and Francis Lederer in Arms and the Man. In the 1950s his Broadway productions, none particularly successful, included Hotel Paradiso, starring Bert Lahr; Fallen Angels, starring Nancy Walker; and a triple bill titled All in One that consisted of Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, a Paul Draper dance program, and Tennessee Williams's Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton.

Barr left the Broadway theatrical firm of Bowden, Barr, and Bullock in 1959 to found Theatre 1960 off Broadway with H. B. Lutz and Harry Joe Brown Jr. (16) Their first production was an evening of two one-act plays, Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Albee's first play, The Zoo Story, at the Provincetown Playhouse on January 14,1960. The choice of one-act plays, particularly those of new writers, was calculated. Barr elaborates: "Take men like Williams and Inge ... they wrote dozens of one-act plays. We want to capture the possibilities of such men while they are still in the one-act stage, to speed the gestation period to Broadway." (17) The decision to premiere Albee's first play was Barr's most inspired. In it he confirmed to himself and the critics that it was indeed possible to use off-Broadway as a springboard for important new playwrights. Several times over the years he stated that his continued support of new plays was part of a search for another Albee.

Clinton Wilder, Barr's partner for much of his producing career, was, according to Albee, "a dilettante, in the very best sense of the word." While certainly the financial heavyweight in the ABW partnership, Wilder was also an experienced Broadway producer. He was born Clinton Eugene Wilder Jr. on July 7,1920, the son of Clinton Eugene and Frances (Kornreich) Wilder. Wilder's father was a successful engineer and manufacturer. Wilder attended Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and spent three years at Princeton. Serving in the U.S. Army, he manned antiaircraft artillery during 194z and 1943 and served in the Army Air Force from 1943 to 1945, appearing in its production of Winged Victory (1943-44) during World War II. Wilder was a member of the Actor's Equity Association, the League of New York Theatres, the League of Off-Broadway Theatres, and the Theatre Development Fund (he was both a founder and director of the latter). (18)

Wilder began his career in the theatre as the stage manager for the 1947 tour of Heartsong and for A Streetcar Named Desire at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway (December 3,1947). He then became associated with Cheryl Crawford in the production of Regina, Marc Blitzstein's musical adaptation of Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes, produced at the Forty-sixth Street Theatre in 1949. (19) He then produced Max Shulman and Robert Paul Smith's The Tender Trap at the Longacre Theatre and (with George Axelrod as co-producer) Gore Vidal's Visit to a Small Planet at the Booth Theatre. He produced, with Norris Houghton and T. Edward Hambleton, their Phoenix Theatre production of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1955. In 1957, in concert with Donald Albery, Wilder presented The World of Suzie Wong at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London. In 1961 he joined with Richard Barr to found Theatre 1961, and thereafter, until the founding of the Playwrights Unit, he co-produced with Barr until 1968. (20)

The third partner in the producing partnership was, of course, Edward Albee. The inclusion of a playwright in a major producing team was, and remains, very rare. One of Albee's more famous predecessors in this regard was Eugene O'Neill, who contributed greatly to the producing decisions made at the Provincetown Playhouse in the 1920s. (21) Albee's first play, The Zoo Story, was produced in Berlin at the Schiller Theatre Werkstatt on September 28,1959. Shortly thereafter, Richard Barr produced The Zoo Story at the Provincetown Playhouse on January 14, 1960, and in London at the Arts Theatre on August 25, 1960. Albee's The Death of Bessie Smith also had its premiere in Berlin, at the Schlosspark Theatre, and was later produced by Barr at the York Playhouse. The Sandbox premiered with four one-act plays titled Four in One at the Jazz Gallery. Albee's Faro and Yarn was produced at the White Barn at Westport, Connecticut, that summer. Albee's The American Dream was paired with William Flanagan's musical Bartleby at the York Playhouse in 1961. Albee's first full-length work was the three-act Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was produced on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theatre on October 13, 1962, and subsequently on tour in the United States and in London. Albee began his producing career with Barr and Wilder with Ugo Betti's Corruption in the Palace of Justice at the Cherry Lane Theatre under the aegis of Barr and Wilder's Theatre 1964. Albee shortly thereafter participated in the organization of the Playwrights Unit. (22)

The Unit was founded on September 29, 1963, the year the Ford Foundation established its funding program for playwrights. Albee, Barr, and Wilder had been producing new works at the Cherry Lane Theatre before this time, but in 1963 the Village South Theatre on Vandam Street became the home of the Playwrights Unit and was leased exclusively for the development of new plays. The initial funding did not come from a foundation but rather from the profits of Albee's Broadway production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Later Albee and Barr did seek and receive funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, (23) but initially the Unit was funded privately through Albee's generosity. Free of the financial constraints that plague such workshops today, the Unit reflected the idealism and genuine support for writers at the outset of what could be considered a "golden age" of American drama from the early 1960s through the late 1980s.

Of the dramatists mentioned above whose first plays were produced by the Unit, more than fifteen have sustained important careers writing in the theatre and have garnered the highest accolades and critical acclaim the American theatre has to offer. While not every play that came out of the Unit was significant, it certainly provided fertile ground for the stimulation of playwriting talent. If the measure of success for a play development group is the sustained and significant careers of the writers it develops, then the Playwrights Unit was an unmitigated success. If one adds to that achievement the production of two of America's seminal works of alternative theatre, LeRoi Jones's Dutchman and Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, then the Playwrights Unit and the producing philosophy of Albee, Barr, and Wilder remain unparalleled in recent theatrical history. For not only was the Albarwild producing team providing a laboratory for new work; they were also producing that work professionally at the Cherry Lane Theatre and other theatre spaces--work, it must be added, that could only be termed explosively experimental for its time.

The Playwrights Unit had its beginnings well before the initial meeting of playwrights on Sunday, September 29, 1963. The producing organization, Theatre 1960-1971 (the name changed each year), began with Barr's production of Albee's Zoo Story in 1959, which was paired with Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Provincetown Playhouse. Later, in addition to producing new plays by lesser-known playwrights, Albee, Barr, and Wilder underwrote a series of Monday-evening productions. John Keating describes this enterprise in his 1963 New York Times article "Action Speaks Louder ...":

Broadening their search for the avant-garde playwrights they felt the theatre was ignoring, Barr and Wilder also put on occasional, admission-free Monday night performances of works by unknowns whose talents they admired but felt were not yet ready for regular production before a paying audience. Over the last two seasons, they have underwritten four of these "Monday Nights." The Playwrights Unit is a direct outgrowth of this project. Last month, they issued invitations to 35 young playwrights. Twenty-three writers answered the call, bringing a total of 20 scripts with them. (24)

Plays produced in this early period include A Toy for the Clowns by Gene Feist (founder of the Roundabout Theatre in New York City), Chit Chat on a Rat by C. Skrivanek Atherton, Prometheus Rebound by Lawrence Wunderlich, Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills by Megan Terry, This Side of the Doorby Terrence McNally, and Like Other People by Jack Owen. However, as Theatre 1964, the triumvirate of Albee, Barr, and Wilder procured the Village South Theatre at 15 Vandam Street, a small, 199-seat off-off-Broadway house that still exists as a working off-Broadway theatre space, and with the managerial skills of director/ literary agent Edward Parone they began the first season of the Playwrights Unit. Young playwrights culled from Barf's enormous script collection and from his visits to the off-off-Broadway theatres and cafes were invited to participate. Twenty-four plays were performed in the Unit's initial year. The first successful production, LeRoi Jones's Dutchman, directed by Parone, transferred off Broadway to the Cherry Lane Theatre with phenomenal success. The Unit produced Jean-Claude van Itallie's first play, War, also with great success, although it did not move immediately to another production. Other plays of the Unit's 1963-64 season that were later produced by Albee, Barr, and Wilder include Lee Kalcheim's A Party for Divorce and Match Play (produced at the Provincetown Playhouse October 11, 1966), Lawrence Osgood's Pigeons, and Frank Gagliano's Conerico Was Here to Stay (produced as part of the series Ten New American Plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre on March 3, 1965).

Running underneath the producing decisions made by Albee, Barr, and Wilder was the conviction that the playwright was the single most important artist in the theatre, and its corollary, that the production of plays ought to revolve around the playwright's vision. In her 1968 New York Times Magazine article "Triple Threat On, Off, and Off-Off Broadway" Barbara La Fontaine quoted Barr on this subject:

Barr says crisply, "A play needs a firm hand. Sometimes it is in the wrong place."--i.e., when the playwright's is tentative, being new or perhaps spectacularly poor, the hand may be that of a famous director, a star or a backer's wife. But isn't a production a cooperative effort? "Indeed it is," Barr says, "but so is war, and I would like to see the individual in a war speak up and say, 'I'm going to go this way" There is a hierarchy of command, and it should stem from the playwright's intention." (25)

Given this statement, the guidance of the Unit was hands-off, with the playwright in charge of his or her own production. The day-to-day management of the Unit was left to its managing directors: Edward Parone, Charles (Chuck) Gnys, Robert Moss, and Bruce Hoover. All four were energetic theatre practitioners, primarily directors, who shared with the ABW producing team the conviction that the playwright provided the guiding vision in producing the play.

Edward Parone was the first manager of the Unit, guiding its first season from September 1963 to May 1964. An experienced theatre professional, Parone had served as production supervisor of special projects at the Phoenix Theatre and as an assistant to the producers--T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton--for their production of Strindberg's Miss Julie and The Stronger. Parone then joined the staff of William Liebling and Audrey Wood as a play reader, and later he became an agent at the William Morris Agency. While at William Morris he brought Albee's Zoo Story to the attention of Richard Barr and started Barr off on his cycle of Albee productions.

Parone then moved to California, where he directed all of Albee's short plays. Following this he was invited by Barr and Albee to serve as managing director for the Playwrights Unit. Parone was the original director of Jones's Dutchman at the Playwrights Unit and at the Cherry Lane. (26) He also directed Lawrence Osgood's Pigeons at the Playwrights Unit. After Parone left the Unit, he founded the playwrights workshop of Mark Taper Forum, initially producing an evening of plays from the Playwrights Unit titled Collision Course, which he later published as an anthology of plays under that same title.

Chuck Gnys, the manager of the Playwrights Unit from September 1964 through May 1970, was its longest-term and most important influence outside Albee, Barr, and Wilder. A native of Central Falls, Rhode Island, Gnys served as the company manager of the Broadway productions of Camelot and Kwamina and was a production assistant for The Perfect Setup, Viva Madison Avenue, and The Poker Game. He directed Ann Jellicoe's The Knack at Dinner Theatres of America and served as the administrative producer of Jerome Robbins's American Theatre Laboratory. Gnys directed more productions at the Playwrights Unit than any other director involved in its productions, including Up to Thursday and 4-H Club by Sam Shepard, Hunting the lingo Bird by Kenneth Pressman, The Rape of Bunny Stuntz by A. R. Gurney Jr., A Great Career by Charles Dizenzo, The Club Bedroom by Louis Auchincloss, The Palace at 4 AM by Howard Moss, and Watercolor and Criss-Crossing by Philip Magdalany. Gnys also staged both Up to Thursday and Hunting the lingo Bird at the Cherry Lane Theatre for Theatre 1965's New Playwrights Series. He produced Emanuel Peluso's Good Day and The Exhaustion of Our Son's Love in a double bill at the Cherry Lane. In 1970 Gnys directed Philip Magdalany's Watercolor and Criss-Crossing on Broadway at the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) as a production of the Playwright's Unit.

Following Gnys in 1970 was Robert Moss, the indefatigable director and producer who ran the Unit with Bruce Hoover, a director and professional stage manager, until its end in 1971. Moss spent four years as the production manager of the Association of Producing Artists Repertory Company. In 1966 he directed Cliff Arquette in a summer tour of You Can't Take It with You. In 1967 he staged Two Gentlemen of Verona for the Los Angeles Theatre in the Parks program. He directed Stephen Jacobsen's Needs and Kenneth Pressman's For Breakfast, Mr. Sachs at the Playwrights Unit. Moss directed Louis Auchincloss's The Club Bedroom for the ANTA Matinee Series, Summertime for the American Academy of Dramatic Art, Room Service for the Comedy Club, The Marriage of Figaro for the McCarter Repertory Company, Tunnel of Love for Dinner Theatres of America, and As You Like It for Equity Library Theatre.

With a mailing list borrowed from the Playwrights Unit, Moss then founded Playwrights Horizons at the Clark Center for the Performing Arts. In a very real sense, Playwrights Horizons sprang forth directly from the Unit's mailing list, which Moss took as his final payment as the Unit's last manager. According to Edward Cohen, the former associate artistic director of Jewish Repertory Theatre and a playwright at the Playwrights Unit, Moss carried with him from the Unit the conviction that "if a new play had a page of talent, he would produce it." (27) It was perhaps this guiding principle that later led one reporter to call the Unit "surely the most generous and effective theatre workshop in the country." (28)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Speaking of Gnys's management, Richard Lipsett, a production assistant and script reader at the Unit, reinforced the notion that Albee, Barr, and Wilder left Gnys and his playwrights to their own devices. (29) While the "carte blanche" attitude of the producers with regard to both the playwright's work and Gnys's management provided a certain degree of freedom, the producers were not entirely absent from the Unit's activities. Barr directed several productions at the Unit, all three producers attended many of its performances, and Albee, noticing a lack of member playwrights at performances at the Unit, wrote a general letter to the Unit playwrights exhorting them to read each other's scripts and attend performances. In an interview, Albee offered the reasoning behind his letter:

A very important thing was the fact that I wanted each of the playwrights to involve themselves in the work of the other playwrights. On the understanding that you learn not only from what happens to your work but from following through what happens to another playwright's work--you might learn something constructive and useful about revision or lack of revision or digging your heels in. I wanted them to be helpful to one another, not only to themselves. (30)

Despite Albee's best hopes that the writers at his Unit would grow into a genuine community of writers, this was not happening. And Albee had growing concerns about internal operations of the Unit, the quality of the work, and the decisions regarding which plays were being produced. This led him to submit his own short play Box to the Unit under the assumed name of Rayne Endars. Gnys's subsequent rejection of this script, while later dismissed as unimportant in a New York Times article about the Unit's activities, was the primary reason for Albee's decision to remove Gnys from his position. (31) In 1970 Gnys left to direct a rock musical, The Survival of Saint Joan, which had its beginnings at the Playwrights Unit, and went on to a successful career managing actors, musicians, and other performers under the aegis of Curtis Brown Management.

Despite the decision to fire Gnys, interference from the ABW producing management was minimal over the course of the Unit's existence. In fact, the producers' decision to keep a low profile was a conscious one. Albee stresses this in Keating's article for the New York Times:

"We hope the playwrights themselves will dictate the operation," he [Albee] said. "What we're going to do is to provide a theatre to work in, a stage, actors, a director, whatever we can do to be helpful. We are not going to say anything about the kind of work that should be done. If a man wants to do something that seems completely incomprehensible to us, fine." Mr. Albee stressed the fact that the unit will not be a course in playwriting--"You can't teach that," he said--but he will be on hand to discuss, analyze and advise any writer who wants his help. "It will be a workshop operation," he said. (32)

The absence of Albee, Barr, or Wilder was of course a double-edged sword, for on the one hand there were none of the pressures associated with producing under the aegis of a famous producing group, while on the other hand there was little of the hoped-for advice, good or otherwise, that was expected or desired from the playwrights.

Of the three producing partners, Albee was perhaps the least available for consultation. Playwright and screenwriter James Prideaux offers this remembrance, caught at a moment after a successful production of his play Postcards at the Playwrights Unit, a moment when Prideaux was particularly hungry for a response from Albee himself:

On the way home, walking through Greenwich Village, I glanced into the window of a dusty old bookstore and there he [Albee] was, sitting in the back, bent over a book. For a moment he looked up and our eyes met. I was dying to go in, to tell him how much I admired his work, but he gave no sign of recognition and looked right down again. I walked on, a little saddened. Surely he must have thought something of me and my play or I wouldn't be a part of his Playwrights Unit. Later Richard told me he hadn't read Postcards. It was unusual that he had stopped into the Cherry Lane at all. In the years to come, I was never to forget that it was through Edward's Playwrights Unit that my career as a playwright was made possible. How could I not be grateful to him for that? (33)

It must be added that while other writers at the Unit had similar stories of only seeing Albee in the back of darkened theatres or catching a rare glimpse of him as he entered or left with brief business, others, such as Kenneth Pressman, remember Albee as a motivating force in playwriting at that time. (34) Playwright John Guare, whose To Wally Pantoni We Leave a Credenza was produced at the Unit, considered Albee a sort of playwright-hero who had battled the forces of Broadway and won. (35) Guare went so far as to state that Albee figured even more importantly than Barr as the motivating force behind the Unit, for even though his was a fleeting presence, it gave the Unit its notoriety and importance in the milieu of the off-off-Broadway movement.

In 1970, after Gnys's departure, the Unit's management was handed to Robert Moss, who had previously directed several productions at the Unit, and to his partner, Bruce Hoover, a director and Broadway stage manager. Moss managed the Unit until May 1971, producing the plays of Michael Carton, Edward M. Cohen, David Trainer, Steven Jacobsen, Doric Wilson, Michael Wilkes, and Kenneth Pressman. The Unit closed shortly after the critical and financial failure of Albee's All Over, which was directed by John Gielgud on Broadway. The critical failure of All Over was an immediate financial cause for the Unit's closure, but the very nature of producing in New York City had changed since the heady days of the early 1960s. By 1966 the three producers had already made a major outlay of over $120,000 to run the Unit in its three years of existence. The budget of the Unit grew from its initial outlay of $23,232.88 in 1964 to $29,045.33 in 1967, with a 25 percent increase in the cost of its operation in three years. In the summer of 1968, Albarwild Theatre Arts, Inc. received $197,000 in funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, $65,000 of which was to be matched. Of those funds, $32,000 was used to maintain the Playwrights Unit, while $165,000 was to be used to cover operations at the Cherry Lane Theatre. (36) Thus by 1968 the cost of running the Unit had increased by at least 38 percent. By 1971, the year the Unit closed, the costs of operation had reached $1,000 a week, or $52,000 a year, by Albee's own estimates. (37)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

In another sense, the very success the Unit achieved may have sown the seeds of its own demise. In the interviews conducted for this study, the playwrights frequently commented that no reviews were written of the productions of the Unit--in general the critical eye of the New York theatre was not upon off-off Broadway. However, with the phenomenal success of The Boys in the Band in 1968, off-off Broadway was suddenly seen in a different light. John Guare, in a discussion about the Unit's production of his play To Wall), Pantoni We Leave a Credenza, suggested that the success of The Boys in the Band somehow ended experimentation of off-off Broadway:

One of the great things about it was that they [the off-off-Broadway productions] weren't reviewed ... and then bit by bit, they got to be reviewed. One of the other things that was great was that they were sort of just done, I mean you just felt very safe and free.... There wasn't anyone there to move it or buy it. And then they suddenly got to be reviewed, brutally or extravagantly ... off-off Broadway had become something that fed commercial theatre rather than being experimental. (38)

In addition to the burgeoning critical consideration of off-off Broadway, another reason for the closing of the Playwrights Unit and the demise of the importance of the off-off-Broadway scene was the growth of competing not-for-profit theatres such as Circle Repertory and the New York Shakespeare Festival, which rendered the Unit somewhat redundant in its mission to develop new playwrights.

The milieu of the off-off-Broadway theatre of the 1960s and its coffeehouse theatres--Caffe Cino, Care La Mama, the Judson Poets Theatre--provided a fertile ground for the sort of experimental theatre that Albee, Barr, and Wilder were trying to develop. There is a sense, however, that Barr in particular felt that these playwrights were not being served in the cards, that their talents were being dissipated in less-than-professional surroundings. (39) In addition, the ABW Playwrights Unit was specifically geared toward the playwright's work, unlike the Playwrights Unit of the Actors Studio, which at that time was controlled by actors and directors. James Prideaux offered this brief statement about the work at the Actors Studio:

We met on Mondays at 5:00 PM, about 200 of us, all budding playwrights. Generally we would see a one-act or a scene from a play one of us had written, followed by an open discussion. These were savage. They all hacked away at what they had seen with a kind of vengeance. It was as if were one to succeed, others must be made to fail. I had entered the group in the hope of presenting some of my work there, but I soon saw that my self-confidence, tough as it was, couldn't withstand the kind of attacks they made on each other's work. I could never show them anything of mine. And many times, at the end of these discussions, I would swear to leave and never return. (40)

To this memory of the Playwrights Unit of the Actors Studio, Edward Parone, manager of the ABW Playwrights Unit, in his preface to his collection of plays from the Unit, New Theatre in America, adds this description:

The Actor's Studio formed its Playwrights Unit a few years ago. Plays or scenes from plays by the members are performed usually, though not always, by Studio actors. The unit is run by a committee; meetings are held. Discussions take place after the performances. The unit is supported by the Studio, with foundation money for a specific number of projects. But the Studio, it seems from my observation, is in theory and practice an actor's studio, not a playwright's or even director's. And perhaps the following true story may be pertinent, though it may not be typical. A young actress, a member of the Studio, came to read for the part of the girl in LeRoi Jones's Dutchman. She mounted the stage and riffling the script in her hands and looking somewhere between the playwright and the director, said, "Uh, you don't care if I don't bother to use the lines, do you?" (41) Terrence McNally had a similar complaint about the Actors Studio: "The Actors Studio, for all the good work that was done there, was always Lee's building somehow. Even though there was a playwrights unit there, you felt that you were talking about acting as much as the play. It was so hard to escape Lee's presence." (42) Given the growing fascination with the performer and director, the ABW Playwrights Unit seemed a safe haven for playwrights learning their craft.

The ABW Playwrights Unit also offered a somewhat more upscale venue--staffed as it was by theatre professionals. Experienced directors and well-known actors such as Frank Langella, Viveca Lindfors, James Coco, Margaret Hamilton, and Nancy Marchand were available for performances at the Unit because of the short runs and because of the influence and connections of Albee and Barr. What the Unit offered, then, was a professional production in a theatre with talented actors, an experienced director, and a mailing list of patrons who could be expected to support the work and perhaps provide the connections to move the plays or the playwright to another level of production.

The Playwrights Unit came to be a stepping stone, in that sense, from the experimentation and freedom of the cafes and coffeehouse theatres to a new level of professionalism. If a play was successful in the Playwrights Unit, the eyes of Albarwild were certainly upon it, although the plays were produced without options or obligations. (43) In the spring of 1965 a New Playwrights Series was produced by Theatre 1965 at the Cherry Lane Theatre; it consisted of ten plays, including Giant's Dance by Otis Bigelow, Up to Thursday by Sam Shepard, Home Free by Lanford Wilson, Balls by Paul Foster, Conerico Was Here to Stay by Frank Gagliano, Pigeons by Lawrence Osgood, Lovey by Joseph Morgenstern, Hunting the lingo Bird by Kenneth Pressman, A Lesson in a Dead Language by Adrienne Kennedy, and Do Not Pass Go by Charles Nolte.

In addition, Lanford Wilson's full-length The Rimers of Eldrich was first professionally produced by Theatre 1968 at the Cherry Lane. Wilson speaks of the experience of having an earlier work, Home Free, produced professionally:

Home Free [at the Cherry Lane] was the first professional thing I had ever had done ... had been done at La Mama earlier but [at the Cherry Lane] it was for money! I got a percentage of the house, it was fabulous! Who had ever heard of such a thing--what a concept! ... It certainly made you feel professional.., it was your first professional recognition also. I mean we were reviewed for crying out loud ... at the Cherry Lane. Most of them had never been reviewed before. At the Cherry Lane it was for real--it was for a limited run--but it was for real. (44)

As Wilson explains, the Playwrights Unit and the productions given at the Cherry Lane were a validation of the artistic experimentation these playwrights were attempting. It is hard to imagine any major Broadway producers today--let alone any single American playwright who would invest, for example, in an off-Broadway production of Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. There was a certain heroism tied to this kind of producing and sponsorship of playwrights.

The positive reaction from most of the playwrights interviewed in the course of my research was somewhat deflated by one note of discord. Lawrence Wunderlich, whose plays Nine-to-Five-to-Zero, parts one and two, and Prometheus Rebound were performed at the Unit in 1964 and 1965, respectively, wrote of this experience:

I don't want to belabor the whole first year's operation of the Playwrights Unit. But if Albee's "guess" is "that the theatre in the United States will always hew more closely to the post-Ibsen/Chekhov tradition" because "it is our nature as a country, a society," he was quite right when it came to this group; a good majority of the playwrights were hewing very closely indeed, so closely, in fact, that a quaint, nostalgic air of the past hung over most of their work; so closely that I could see very little in their work that had much if anything to do with us, here, and now, in the final third of the twentieth century. (45)

Wunderlich's primary criticism of the Unit concerns its lack of consistent support for work that was experimental. And from the above excerpt it is clear that he did not feel the Unit was producing scripts that represented the most avantgarde or most challenging work available (with the exception of several plays, including his own).

What is fascinating about Wunderlich's article is the discussion of several details. Wunderlich was not only a playreader for the ABW workshop but also the manager of the Village South Theatre, where the Unit was located in its first seven years. He chronologizes the first four years of the Unit through September 1967, discussing the initial meetings, the correspondence between the producers and the Unit playwrights, the various management techniques that Parone and Gnys used to organize and inform the playwrights, and the sources of funding for the Unit. He ends his article with an excellent chronology of productions through spring of 1967.

At several points Wunderlich seems to question the very nature of a playwrights workshop, wondering if a workshop as such can actually produce fine playwrights:

We find ourselves face to face with a hodgepodge of romantics, cynics, realists, stoics, naturalists, nihilists, absurdists, Philistines, and incompetents. And while we dimly suspect that such a "group" may contain the raw materials for the making of a democracy, we know that it contains little of the select material for the makings of a playwrights workshop. It is, and it remains, a pastiche. And to paraphrase a statement attributed to Voltaire, I disapprove of a pastiche but I will defend to the death the right of the individual parts of the pastiche to operate autonomously. (46)

What Wunderlich offers, then, is a contrarian's view of the achievements of the Unit, which, even if it is not terribly successful in its criticism, at least provides a fairly detailed and well-supported argument for the Unit's eclecticism.

Certainly Wunderlich's reaction is a minority opinion. Almost all the playwrights interviewed had positive responses to their productions at the Unit, with James Prideaux articulating what seemed to be the "prototypical" experience:

When finally Richard forced me into the theatre, there were no seats left and so we had to sit on the steps next to the exit. The lights came down. The curtain went up. And the audience began to laugh. And clap. And laugh. And clap some more. Postcards is hardly more than thirty minutes long, but they were the greatest thirty minutes of my life. My heart soared, literally soared as I listened to the audience. At the end they wouldn't stop applauding and Richard pushed me to my feet, saying, "Jimmy, you'd better go up." So I ran up on stage and took a bow with my beaming actors. I suppose I went someplace after that. I assume I got home. But I have no recollection of it. I was in another world. (47)

Prideaux, in his interview for this study, confessed that in his career as a playwright and screenwriter no other moment was quite as stupendous or as memorable as this successful evening at the Unit. (48)

Mart Crowley, author of The Boys in the Band (produced at the Playwrights Unit in January 1968), spoke of the Unit's audience in quite dramatic terms. Looking out at the huge line of people waiting to get into the theatre on a rainy January evening, he imagined it was "like the third act of Wilder's Our Town--there were all these umbrellas." (49) Crowley later discussed the experience in an article in San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter: "Boys might have ended in that five-day workshop, except for one small miracle--audiences were wild about the play. 'The first night,' Crowley says, 'I don't think anybody was there. But the second night, there was a line around the block. The New York intelligentsia [began to] descend on the play. And suddenly it was famous.'" (50) The audience at the Playwrights Unit was invited and attended the performances free of charge. They were the product of a very carefully prepared mailing list that had been nurtured over many years by Gnys and the other managers. Jean-Claude Van Itallie speaks about the houses being "packed, simply packed to the rafters," and other playwrights also refer to the responsive audiences. (51) Parone spoke of the way the audience talked directly to actors in Jones's Dutchman, in particular remembering Leontyne Price, "who lived in the neighborhood, suddenly bursting out with 'Right on!' and 'Say it!' several times." (52)

The Unit's success was directly tied to the Broadway professionals who sponsored its activities. Ironically, even though Barr and Wilder rejected the worst of the commercial tastes of the Great White Way, they retained all the rigorous demands of professional production standards in the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway milieu at their Playwrights Unit. It was also the connection with Broadway theatre professionals--actors, directors, designers, stage managers, and administrative staff that allowed Barr and Wilder to provide an extraordinary nurturing experience to each new play they chose to produce. However, the Playwrights Unit existed within the milieu of the off-off-Broadway theatre of the 1960s, which provided a fertile environment for the Unit's success. Most of the playwrights who came to the Unit, though not all, had been produced earlier at venues such as Cafe La Mama or Caffe Cino, and most continued to produce work at other off-off-Broadway venues during and after their productions at the Unit. However, the Unit and the Cherry Lane Theatre gave most of these playwrights their first experience working within the world of New York's professional theatre, an experience, for better or worse, that was very different from the cafes and storefront theatres of off-off Broadway, and one that brought them into the critical focus of the New York theatre community.

Notes

(1.) Stuart Little, Off-Broadway: The Prophetic Theater (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972), 216.

(2.) Since 1995, I have done extensive interviews with participants in the ABW Playwrights Unit, including its playwrights Edward Albee, John Guare, Lanford Wilson, A. R. Gurney, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Ursule Molinaro, Terrence McNally, Doric Wilson, Mart Crowley, Robert Heide, James Prideau, Frank Gagliano, Stephen Jacobsen, and Lee Kalcheim, among many others. In addition, I interviewed many of the ABW staff, including Unit managers Edward Parone (the first manager) and Bob Moss (the last manager), as well as Barry Plaxen, Lynn Prather, Joseph Carl, and Richard Lipsett, all of whom worked in ABW productions at the Cherry Lane Theatre and the Unit. I spent a great deal of time examining Playwrights Unit scripts, production notes, and financial papers, all of which are preserved in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library. I have also spent a great deal of time examining the extensive Richard Barr-Clinton Wilder Papers, which include a substantial amount of material on the Playwrights Unit (grant applications, correspondence, programs), as well as Barr's unpublished biography, "You Have to Hock Your House" I also explored other theatre collections, including the privately held papers of Chuck Gnys, the primary manager of the Playwrights Unit, at Curtis Brown, Ltd.; the Michael Kasdan Collection at the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Institute at Ohio State University; and the La MaMa Theatre Collection at La MaMa, E.T.C. in Lower Manhattan.

(3.) For a discussion of play development and its discontents see Michael Bloom, "The Post-Play Discussion Fallacy," American Theatre 5, no. 9 (1988): 31; Edward Clinton, "The Literary Manager: Vanguard of a Frustrating System," Dramatists Guild Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1988): 17-19; Amy Davis, "Development of New Play Often a Rocky Road" Variety, March 16, 1988, 105; Shelly Frome, "Fault-finding Can Be Fun for All Except the Paranoid Playwright," Dramatists Guild Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1987): 27-28; Marsha Norman and Jeffrey Sweet, "The Plight of the Playwright in Regional Theater, 1986-87," Dramatists Guild Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1987): 18-33; Louis Phillips, "Why Shakespeare Might Not Succeed in Today's Theater," Dramatists Guild Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1993): 31-33; Dale Ramsey and Thomas G. Dunn, "Speaking of Dramaturgs and Literary Managers," Dramatists Guild Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1987): 12-17; Peregrine Whittlessey, "Developed to Death? Here's a Possible Antidote," Dramatists Guild Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1988): 21-22; Peregrine Whittlessey, "Is There Life after Literary Management?" Dramatists Guild Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1988): 18-19.

(4.) Edward Albee, interview by author, tape recording, New York City, June 19, 1996.

(5.) Stephen Samuels, "Yes Is Better Than No: An Interview with Edward Albee" American Theatre 11, no. 7 (1994): 38.

(6.) John Keating, "A Producer Should 'Produce,'" Theatre Arts, September 1961, 76.

(7.) Albee, interview.

(8.) Keating, "A Producer Should 'Produce,'" 75.

(9.) Ibid.

(10.) David Kahn and Donna Breed, Scriptwork: A Director's Approach to New Play Development (Carbondale: Southern Ilhnois University Press, 1995), 79.

(11.) Douglas Anderson, "The Dream Machine: Thirty Years of New Play Development in America," Drama Review 32, no. 3 (1988): 55-84.

(12.) Mervyn Rothstein, "Richard Barr, 71, Stage Producer and Theater League Head, Dies," New York Times, January 10, 1989.

(13.) Barry Plaxen, interview by author, tape recording, Bloomingsburg, N.Y., May 4, 1996.

(14.) Richard Barr, "You Have to Hock Your House," pp. 69-111, unpublished MS, Richard Barr-Clinton Wilder Papers, Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

(15.) Walter Rigdon, ed., Notable Names in the American Theatre (Clifton, N.J.: J. T. White, 1976), 542-43.

(16.) Little, Off-Broadway, 219.

(17.) Faye Hammel, "Three for the Play: Theatre '64 says the Writer Must Be King," New York Times, March 3, 1966, 10.

(18.) Rigdon, Notable Names, 1226.

(19.) Thomas Morgan, "Clinton Wilder Is Dead at 65; Helped Develop Playwrights," New York Times, February 15, 1986, 33.

(20.) Rigdon, Notable Names, 1226.

(21.) Barnard Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A. 1665 to 1957 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 360-65.

(22.) Rigdon, Notable Names, 500.

(23.) Sam Zolotow, "Playwrights Unit Receives Subsidy for Staging," New York Times, June 1, 1968.

(24.) John Keating, "Action Speaks Louder ...," New York Times, October 20, 1963, X3.

(25.) Barbara La Fontaine, "Triple Threat On, Off and Off-Off Broadway," New York Times Magazine, February 25, 1968, 36-46.

(26.) Edward Parone, interview by author, New York City, March 14, 1995; contact sheet from Merle Debuskey from the Edward Parone Clippings Folder, Billy Rose Theater Collection.

(27.) Edward M. Cohen, interview by author, New York City, May 3, 1995.

(28.) La Fontaine, "Triple Threat" 37.

(29.) Richard Lipsett, interview by author, Bloomfield, N.J., February 27, 1995.

(30.) Albee, interview.

(31.) Ibid.

(32.) Keating, "Action Speaks Louder ...," X3.

(33.) James Prideaux, "Memoirs" unpublished, May 1995, 212-13.

(34.) Kenneth Pressman, interview by author, tape recording, New York City, November 19, 1994.

(35.) John Guare, interview by author, tape recording, New York City, March 28, 1995.

(36.) Zolotow, "Playwrights Unit Receives Subsidy."

(37.) Patricia Bosworth, "Will They All Be Albees?" New York Times, July 18, 1971, D1, 3.

(38.) Guare, interview.

(39.) Barr, "You Have to Hock Your House," 263-70.

(40.) Prideaux, "Memoirs" 232-33.

(41.) Edward Parone, ed., New Theatre in America (New York: Dell, 1965), 11.

(42.) Terrence McNally, "In Conversation with Terrence McNally: Edward Albee," Dramatists Guild Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1985): 17.

(43.) Albee, interview.

(44.) Lanford Wilson, interview by author, tape recording, New York City, March 27, 1995.

(45.) Lawrence Wunderlich, "Playwrights at Cross Purposes," Works 1, no. 2 (1968): 23.

(46.) Ibid., 35.

(47.) Prideaux, "Memoirs" 214.

(48.) James Prideaux, interview by author, tape recording, New York City, March 27, 1995.

(49.) Mart Crowley, interview by author, tape recording, New York City, February 19, 1995.

(50.) Wendell Ricketts, "Talking Truth: Boys in the Band Author Mart Crowley on His 'Gorgeous Little Monster,'" Bay Area Reporter, February 8, 1990, 35.

(51.) Jean-Claude Van Itallie, interview by author, New York City, February 16, 1995.

(52.) Parone, interview.