Eliana Willis

Gerald Freedman, who directed countless plays, operas and musicals, including the original “Hair” in 1967 and more than a dozen Broadway productions, and who influenced generations of actors in 21 years as dean of the drama school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, died on March 17 at his home in Winston-Salem, N.C. He was 92.Robert Beseda, who was assistant dean under Mr. Freedman and had been his caregiver for the past nine years, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Freedman was a pivotal though somewhat under-the-radar figure in New York theater for decades.He was a trusted assistant to Jerome Robbins when Mr. Robbins was directing the Broadway hits “Bells Are Ringing,” “West Side Story,” and “Gypsy” in the 1950s.He worked closely with Joseph Papp for years, serving as artistic director of Mr. Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival and inaugurating the performance space now known as the Public Theater with “Hair.” In the 1970s he directed productions by the Acting Company, the influential troupe founded in 1972 by John Houseman and Margot Harley, and from 1966 to 1989 he directed a number of New York City Opera productions.He had dozens of regional opera and theater credits as well, including 28 at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, where he was artistic director from 1985 to 1997.And as both a director and a teacher, he imparted an abiding appreciation of how to approach a text. Among those on whom he made a lasting impression was Debbie Allen, who played Anita in a critically acclaimed Broadway revival of “West Side Story” in 1980 that was jointly directed by Mr. Robbins and Mr. Freedman.“His approach was unique, didn’t even think about blocking or staging until we sat at a table for at least two weeks breaking down the dramatic narrative, the character, the need and the action,” Ms. Allen said by email. “He guided us to find multiple points of view. I have worked with those same principles ever since.”Mr. Freedman brought that approach to the classroom as well. He preached the basics to young students, like be on time for rehearsal, be prepared and take the work seriously. The actor Billy Magnussen was one such student at the School of the Arts, the University of North Carolina system’s arts conservatory in Winston-Salem.“He taught me to focus my life, my time and the precious moments we share with others; not to waste them,” Mr. Magnussen said by email. “And the fact that he gave up some of his time for a wiseass punk kid and demanded I ask more of myself — I am forever grateful to that gentleman.”Gerald Alan Freedman was born on June 25, 1927, in Lorain, Ohio. His father, Barnie, was a dentist, and his mother, Fannie (Sepsenwol) Freedman, was a teacher. Both were Jewish immigrants from czarist Russia. They steeped their home in art and music, he said, a foundation for his love of the arts.After graduating from Lorain High School he attended Northwestern University, earning a bachelor’s degree there in 1949 and a master’s degree the next year. In 1951 he took a train to New York with vague ideas about becoming a painter or singer or actor. An acquaintance told him that, with his high tenor singing voice, he could earn enough money to get by through singing at religious services.“On Friday nights, I could do two Jewish services at different temples,” he said in an interview for “The School of Doing: Lessons From Theater Master Gerald Freedman,” a 2017 book by Isaac Klein. “On Saturday morning, I could do another Jewish service. On Sunday, I could do usually two churches. An early Mass, Presbyterian or Episcopalian, and in late afternoon there would be another Mass. And with five services, I could live off that for the next week.”He was hired to design and paint scenery at a summer stock company in Massachusetts and then, in 1952, to direct “As You Like It” at Equity Library Theater in New York. Someone from Columbia Pictures saw it and gave him a contract that took him to Hollywood, where one of his first assignments was as dialogue director on “It Should Happen to You,” a George Cukor movie whose stars included Judy Holliday.She became a friend. In 1956 when Ms. Holliday was hired for the musical “Bells Are Ringing” on Broadway, Jerome Robbins, the director, who Mr. Freedman said was somewhat intimidated by the star, hired him to assist on the production.“It was either to placate Judy or as insurance,” Mr. Freedman said. “I never knew which.”The partnership was Mr. Freedman’s big break. He was Mr. Robbins’s assistant again the next year on “West Side Story,” and in 1959 on “Gypsy.” He not only played a significant role in directing those productions; he also served as a buffer between the actors and Mr. Robbins, who could be abrasive.“I went around repairing Jerry’s damage with actors,” Mr. Freedman said in an interview quoted in “Dancing With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins” (2001), by Greg Lawrence. “I don’t mean that in a negative way. It was just because he didn’t know how to talk with them.”By 1960 Mr. Freedman was also working with Mr. Papp. He directed “The Taming of the Shrew” that year for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.“The Festival group,” Arthur Gelb wrote in reviewing that show in The New York Times, “poor in funds but rich in everything that makes for stimulating theater, has, in this production, achieved a vitality, authority, clarity, pace and style that can’t be touched.”In 1964 Mr. Papp named Mr. Freedman artistic director of the Shakespeare Festival and announced his intention to broaden the group’s offerings to include contemporary fare. One of the results was “Hair,” the rock musical with a book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado and music by Galt MacDermot. Mr. Freedman got the assignment of directing the premiere, which was to open inMr. Papp’s new space on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. It was a rocky trip to opening night.“We recognized its great energy and exuberance of spirit,” Mr. Freedman said in a 2008 talk at the Kennedy Center in Washington. “The challenge was to give it structure without destroying its energy and originality and to give it a semblance of a beginning, middle and end.”His efforts were at least partly successful.“The director, Gerald Freedman, has not been able to impose any unity on the show — this hair is strictly untrimmed — but he has helped to bring out the natural vitality of both the piece and the very young performers,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The Times. But the birthing process had created rifts with the book writers; when the show went to Broadway the next year, Tom O’Horgan was the director.Mr. Freedman’s opera work included the world premiere of “Beatrix Cenci” by Alberto Ginastera, with a libretto by William Shand, at the Kennedy Center in 1961, part of the opening festivities for that complex. He directed the same work in 1973 at City Opera.Mr. Freedman brought a number of stars to the productions he directed for the Great Lakes Theater Festival, including Piper Laurie, Olympia Dukakis and Hal Holbrook. He continued to direct after taking the North Carolina post, staging more than 30 productions there.He leaves no immediate survivors.For a 2017 podcast for WFDD, a public radio station in Winston-Salem, Mr. Freedman was asked about his legacy.“I’m most proud of the way I’ve opened up so many actors to what acting really is,” he said. “They have talent, they have intelligence, they have imagination, but they have to add a reality. That’s the essence of anything they do. And that’s it, really. Reality.“It sounds very simple, but it’s very difficult.” More

Theater, at its simplest, requires an actor and an audience. And in this strange moment, that’s a very tall order. Scripts are available, of course, and filmed performance, too. But if you are missing not only plays themselves, but the ephemera that surrounds them — the cramped seats and the rustling wrappers, the marquee lights and the scrum at the stage door — you might lose yourself in a novel of the theater, instead.In this period of suspension, novels set in the theater are portals into a realm that in real life has temporarily gone dark. Immersive by nature, staged inside our minds, they can sit us down in a buzzing audience or slip us into a darkened wing, sneak us inside a tense rehearsal room or pop us onto a bar stool at an after-party.In our heads, inside these books, we’re free to do what right now is forbidden — to arrive in Edinburgh, say, and roam the streets in a festival throng where social distancing is not required, or to gather with friends and put on a play of our own.There’s poignancy in that, but it’s soothing, too, a calming act of imagination. And it’s a distraction that can be stretched long past a play’s typical running time, with as many intermissions as you like.We’ve made a chronological list of some of our favorites. The concession stand is all you.‘Mansfield Park,’ by Jane AustenThis 1814 novel has never enjoyed the obsessive fandom other Austen books attract. Blame its inhibited heroine, Fanny Price. But I love “Mansfield Park,” because it makes theater dangerous. In the book’s first half, the estate’s young people decide to stage a private production of August von Kotzebue’s “Lover’s Vows,” a racy romantic drama about illegitimacy and sexual desire. (Because Fanny is no fun, Fanny disapproves.) In fleet scenes, Austen captures the excitement of rehearsal, the frisson of “showmance” and the paradox of theater as both liberating and distorting. ALEXIS SOLOSKI‘Theatre,’ by W. Somerset MaughamElegant and bitchy, this acid Maugham comedy, published in 1937, describes a London diva threatened by a young rival who covets both her young lover and her career. Some will know this story from Istvan Szabo’s 2004 movie, “Being Julia,” starring a splendid Annette Bening, but the novel has its own considerable charms, particularly a late scene in which Julia outclasses her adversary by means of the perfect dress. And then celebrates by eating carbs. Julia’s son complains that his parents have warped him by raising him in a world of make-believe. But make-believe, Julia argues, “is the only reality.” SOLOSKI‘The Swish of the Curtain,’ by Pamela BrownIn 1938, a 14-year-old Pamela Brown began writing this book, the first of the Blue Door series. Three years later, as a wartime evacuee, she published it and used the proceeds to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. One of the loveliest children’s books about young actors (alongside Noel Streatfeild’s Gemma series), it follows a group of seven children in the English town of Fenchester who discover an abandoned theater. After fixing up the place, they begin to invent and rehearse their own theatricals, discovering various talents — writing, costuming, stage design. The adventures are gentle and the children’s personalities — sometimes generous, sometimes bratty — appealingly real. SOLOSKI‘Next Season,’ by Michael BlakemoreThe acting job pays a paltry 16 pounds a week, but Sam Beresford accepts it eagerly, heading north from London to spend the 1959 season in a seaside repertory company, where ambition, duplicity and jealousy are far more plentiful than juicy roles. Blakemore, the director who won Tony Awards for “Copenhagen” and “Kiss Me, Kate,” writes with marvelous insight and delicious ease, chronicling the soaring joys and petty miseries of a little-known actor’s life. But this isn’t an insiders-only book — and the roman à clef gossip it sparked when it came out in 1968 still adds to our pleasure in it. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES‘Wise Children,’ by Angela CarterLike her equally wondrous “Nights at the Circus,” Carter’s 1991 magical realist comedy is both a cracking picaresque and a meditation on what it means when art and life commingle. Narrated by Dora Chance, a twin who has lived 75 years as a trifling theater and film star, it details the adventures of the Chance and Hazard families, clans given to twins, theatricality and convoluted paternity claims. The plot, which tips its hat to Shakespeare’s comedies, is largely impenetrable, but Carter delivers its zany twists and turns with sweet-bitter affection. Dora’s fervent motto: “What a joy it is to dance and sing.” SOLOSKI‘Tipping the Velvet,’ by Sarah WatersA shrewd and sexy work of historical fiction, Waters’s debut novel excavates a forgotten mode of music hall performance, embedded within a queer love story. In Victorian England, Nan, a teenage oyster slinger, falls for the glamorous Kitty, a “masher” who performs popular songs dressed as man. Nan follows Kitty, first to London and then onto the stage. Through disguise and performance and adventures in the sex trade, Nan comes to understand who she is and what she wants. The characterizations are rich and the evocation of the limelit music halls dazzling. SOLOSKI‘Remainder,’ by Tom McCarthyThis mindbender, originally published in France in 2005, has nothing to do with the theater proper, but its action is consumed with a bizarre theatrical immersion; when I first read it, I couldn’t wait to urge it on a bookish actor friend. In the aftermath of an accident, the central character receives a hefty settlement — then uses it to surround himself with people hired to re-enact real-world events for him. The novel was McCarthy’s debut, and it shares some DNA with Charlie Kaufman’s grimly obsessive 2008 movie, “Synecdoche, New York,” as well as with every drama student who has ever insisted that life itself is a performance. COLLINS-HUGHES‘One Good Turn,’ by Kate AtkinsonLined up outside, waiting to get into a fringe festival performance in Edinburgh, the spectators aren’t sure at first whether the clash they witness between two passing drivers is entertainment or genuine combat. But characters often question their own sense of reality in this fast-paced 2006 detective novel, which uses the festival-frenzied city as the backdrop to its many-layered intrigue. For Atkinson’s restlessly retired investigator, Jackson Brodie, the dangerous case proves more consistent company than his actress girlfriend, who surely is cheating on him even as he finances the obscure existentialist play that brought them both to town. COLLINS-HUGHES‘At Night We Walk in Circles,’ by Daniel AlarcónThough most of my favorite theater novels provide an abundance of comfort, the literary equivalent of family-size concessions candy, Alarcón’s 2013 book, set in a nameless South American country, offers a less reassuring read. Its entwined stories, narrated by a journalist, follow Nelson, a young actor cast in “The Idiot President,” a guerrilla theater company’s touring show, and Henry, the company’s leader and a former political prisoner. If the form sometimes falters, the novel searchingly explores how life demands its own performance and its own peculiar participation. SOLOSKI‘Hag-Seed,’ by Margaret AtwoodFelix Phillips, an esteemed artistic director abruptly exiled from his Canadian theater company in a cunning coup, is the stand-in for the magical Prospero in Atwood’s delightfully inspired, wonderfully wrought 2016 retelling of “The Tempest,” part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series of adaptations by contemporary novelists. As Felix broods in wounded solitude, the ghost of his dead daughter, Miranda, keeps him company. Only when he is coaxed into teaching drama at a correctional center does he get a chance at retribution — by way of an interactive “Tempest” and a cast of inmates who feel deep sympathy for Caliban and his witchy mother, too. COLLINS-HUGHES‘Trust Exercise,’ by Susan ChoiThe drawback to literary laurels, like the National Book Award that this stunner rightly won last fall, is that they can make honorees seem less like must-reads than should-reads. But Choi’s shrewd, funny, wholly absorbing #MeToo theater takedown — set in the 1980s in an arts high school’s drama program, and later among its alumni as damaged adults — is the farthest thing from an intellectual chore. A gasp-making achievement of construction, observation and emotional synthesis, it takes exquisite aim at what Choi calls “the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts,” and at a toxic system of training and practice that worships gurus as gods. COLLINS-HUGHES‘Temper,’ by Layne FargoAdventurous provocation that bruises actors’ bodies and minds is the theatrical brand at Indifferent Honest, a scruffy-chic Chicago storefront theater whose sadistic artistic director, Malcolm, is its much deferred-to perennial star. He’s the kind of charismatic drama-world tough guy who wants real violence, not fight choreography, on his non-Equity stage. A tightly plotted, enjoyably pulpy psychological thriller from 2019, this is a portrait of an artist as a malevolent force. Told by dueling female narrators, it is also as much a fantasy of violent revenge as the new play that Malcolm is readying, perhaps unwisely, for production. COLLINS-HUGHES More

PARIS — The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote: “The sole cause of people’s unhappiness is that they do not know how to stay quietly in their rooms.” Yet at a time when much of the world has been forced to hunker down, French theater-makers are fighting to fill the void by making noise online.They’re producing so much alternative content, in fact, that it is nearly impossible to keep up. Since France imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 17, each day has brought new announcements from prominent theaters. In addition to releasing archive recordings, some are making podcasts and videos; others are offering direct interaction with performers through one-on-one phone calls. The country’s oldest troupe, the Comédie-Française, has even started an online channel, “The Comédie Continues,” offering several hours of programming each day beginning at 4 p.m.Under the circumstances, it would be churlish to complain about artists’ desire to connect with audiences in some fashion. Theater, which depends on crowds gathering to watch performers at close quarters, is experiencing significant loss and upheaval, with many stagings either delayed indefinitely or canceled outright. But a sampling of stopgap offerings often left me underwhelmed.Many institutions are going beyond stepping out of their comfort zone by experimenting with formats that are firmly outside their area of expertise. Standards are high for audio and video productions these days, and onscreen improvising requires a different skill set than performing existing plays onstage, as the Comédie-Française’s first day of streaming suggested.The company has a busy schedule, offering new content from 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. and then two archive recordings — a mix of talks and house productions. A different actor serves as host every day: Serge Bagdassarian opened the run by lifting a tiny red curtain in front of the camera to start, mimicking a stage performance. His colleagues then presented scheduled segments like poetry readings, literary commentary for high school students and interviews. More

They took their new jobs less than two years ago: a diverse group of ambitious arts administrators eager to see how their ideas and dreams might influence theaters around the country.Now they find themselves confronting a situation they never could have imagined: leading their theaters through a global pandemic.On Wednesday, the new arts administrators from four important American regional theaters, joined by the Public Theater in New York, said they would commission a set of short plays from writers whose financial lives have been upended by the shutdown of arts organizations as people stay home to contain the coronavirus. The theaters said they had two major goals: to steer a bit of money to struggling artists and to inspire new work at a tough time.“As soon as the writing was on the wall, and everybody was canceling and going to streaming, it seemed important to not just share our content virtually, but to engage people in the act of making theater and participating in the art form in a different way,” said Stephanie Ybarra, the artistic director of Baltimore Center Stage. Ybarra has a running group text with three other new artistic directors — Jacob G. Padrón at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Hana Sharif at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis, and Maria Manuela Goyanes at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington — and they jumped on the phone.“We were all in various states of organizational crisis,” Ybarra said. “But we got buy-in on a general, ‘Let’s do something together.’”The result, which is being called “Play at Home,” is a website (playathome.org) featuring new plays, intended to take no more than 10 minutes to read, that are free so that anyone can read or perform them at home or by video conferencing. The commissioning theaters are providing a $500 stipend to the playwrights they select to write the works.The four regional theaters and the Public have been joined by Playwrights Realm in New York and the Old Globe in San Diego, and are hoping other theaters will join, too. Each theater is separately choosing playwrights and paying commissions.Among the first group of writers participating are Jaclyn Backhaus, Jordan E. Cooper, Aleshea Harris, Michael R. Jackson and Lauren Yee. Many are less well known, and were chosen because they had productions that were canceled and for whom the money might be meaningful.Ybarra noted that, because the plays are not intended to be professionally produced, the writers do not need to worry about the cast size (often a limiting factor at regional theaters with tight budgets) or practicality (no need to figure out how a special effect or magic trick could actually be accomplished onstage). “We’ve been able to unleash quite a bit of imagination within these considerations,” she said.“We’re asking playwrights to consider writing something incredibly joyful, something that can be read intergenerationally, something that could be fun for young people to read with families,” Ybarra said. “The subject is decidedly not the pandemic.” More

LONDON — The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase for the best of world theater, dance and music that has been held in the Scottish city every year since 1947, has been canceled because of the coronavirus.So has the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a scrappier event devoted to comedy and theater, which bills itself as the world’s largest arts event.The Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Edinburgh Art Festival and the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an event involving armed forces bands from around the world, won’t take place this year either.The cancellations, announced on Wednesday in a news release, are the latest sign that the pandemic’s impact on the world’s cultural calendar will last at least into summer.The International Festival was first held in 1947, with the aim of uniting people through culture in the aftermath of World War II. The other festivals and events sprung up around it, establishing Edinburgh as a popular August tourist destination.“Since their inception in 1947, the Edinburgh festivals have existed to champion the flowering of the human spirit, and in the face of their truly unprecedented global emergency, we believe that this spirit is needed now more than ever,” Shona McCarthy, the chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, said in a statement.“Having taken advice and considered all the options,” she said, “we collectively believe this is the only appropriate response.”According to the release, the 2019 Fringe involved over 30,000 performers, from school groups to star comedians, who took part in 3,841 shows. Ms. McCarthy said the festival’s organizers would do all they could to support “the thousands of artists and participants directly affected by today’s decisions.”The Edinburgh International Book Festival’s organizers said they would “program a series of online events” to run in place of this year’s events.Since mid-March, the coronavirus has been bringing the shutters down on Britain’s cultural life. On Mar. 23, the country was put on a virtual lockdown, with people urged to go outside only for essential trips, such as for buying food or for one session of exercise a day. The police have been using drones to enforce the measures and shaming some transgressors on social media.Some major summer cultural events, including the Glastonbury music festival, held each June, had already announced they would not go ahead, but the Edinburgh cancellations will come as a major blow to people who had hoped that later events would be unaffected.Their cancellation was not the only sign this week that cultural events in Britain will feel the virus’s impact later than many hoped. The Barbican arts center in London said on Wednesday it would remain closed until at least July.“Looking at how long social distancing measures are likely to be in place, we feel we’re very unlikely to be open until at least the end of June,” Nicholas Kenyon, the venue’s managing director, said in a news release.“We therefore felt the best approach,” he said, “was to inform audiences, as well as the artists and organizations we work with, as soon as we could.” More