Barrie Stavis, American Original
(June 16, 2007 – February 2, 2007)
by Christopher Martin
BACK IN 1978, I was approached in the lobby of CSC Repertory where I was then Artistic Director, and asked if I knew the work of Barrie Stavis. "Lamp at Midnight,” “Harpers Ferry”…sure,” I said, remembering the plays, and that I’d read somewhere he’d been born in 1906. "He’s not still alive is he?"
“Very much so,” the man laughed. “He’s right over there. He’d like to meet you.”
Born three weeks before Clifford Odets and nine years before Arthur Miller, I was fond of introducing Barrie as “America’s oldest living playwright.” But he was a good deal more than that. At the age of 85, he’d still take on anyone who dared arm-wrestle (and beat them), sail his beloved wooden sailboat across Great South Bay at the height of a thunderstorm, and bound up the stairs two or three at a time.
Many of his early works saw New York productions, among them, “The Sun and I” at the Federal Theatre Project in 1937. But returning from covering the Spanish Civil War in 1939, he made up his mind to scrap them all (a dozen plays by his count), trading the “imitation of life” naturalism he previously favored, for the sweeping epic “play of ideas,” created for a new “time/space stage.” He embarked upon a tetrology on men "of their time and yet in advance of their time, who have ushered in new and frequently drastic changes…the precise moment in history when society, ripe for change, gives birth to the catalyst who sets the dynamics of change into accelerated motion.
“Lamp at Midnight” (1942, about Galileo) lit up off-Broadway in 1947, two weeks behind the Charles Laughton version of Brecht's “Galileo” uptown. Barrie's play impressed the New York critics, the Brecht did not, and outran it by two years. Televised by Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1966 with Melvyn Douglas as Galileo, Tyrone Guthrie directed a major national tour in 1969 with Morris Carnovsky. When the Hallmark version was re-broadcast on A&E twenty-five years later, it was seen by 52 million viewers.
“The Man Who Never Died,” on labor leader Joe Hill (1951), and “Coat of Many Colors, Joseph in Egypt” (1961), followed. The final play in the series, “Harpers Ferry,” was the first new American work to be produced at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and staged by Tyrone Guthrie himself, with Edward Binns as Brown, in 1967.
The plays have been translated into at least 28 languages, and staged from Scandinavia to Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe to the former Soviet Union and South America, where he remains extremely popular. He was tireless in seeing his plays through the rehearsal process and traveled extensively, always ready to re-write and adapt to the demands of the society and theatrical venue in which they were played. At the remarkable age of 100, he was at work on a second tetrology dealing with major world leaders. Only his Washington play, “The Raw Edge of Victory,” saw completion. “House of Shadows,” about the Spanish Civil War (1992), remains unproduced.
His passion gave birth to a pair of successful operas: “Galileo Galilei” (1975), based on “Lamp at Midnight” with composer Lee Hoiby, commissioned by the Werner Von Braun Center at Huntsville, Alabama, and “Joe Hill” (1970), on “The Man Who Never Died” with composer Alan Bush, for the Staats Oper, East Berlin, subsequently broadcast on the BBC.
Barrie served forty-odd years as a delegate to the International Theatre Institute World Congress and its Playwrights' Committee, eager to aid and abet the next generation by establishing the Barry and Bernice Stavis Award for Emerging Playwrights, given annually by the National Theatre Conference. Since 1988, recipients have included: Nilo Cruz, Carson Kreitzer, Ezra Goldstein, Barbara Cassidy, Dennis Covington, Naomi Lizuka, Edwin Sanchez, Keith Glover, and Thomas Gibbons.
At 100 years, seven months, he still had all his mental faculties intact, although he'd stopped daring me to arm-wrestle. This past June, at the Clearwater Revival, Barrie celebrated his centenary onstage with Pete Seeger, who sang him “Happy Birthday” to a standing ovation. He lived so long, that those of us who knew him simply assumed he'd just continue on as ever.
I met him for lunch in January, and watched him polish off a sesame bagel stacked with lox and cream cheese in record time. Idly, I asked if he was working on anything. He glared at me in that irascible fashion, and answered: "Am I breathing?"
Very much so, Barrie. •2008
Written exclusively for “The Soul of the American Actor.”
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN was founding Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company, and founding president of Alliance of Resident Theatres/NY. He works as a freelance director/designer and composer for National and State Theatres abroad. xrismartin@aol.com |
