The Collaborators

It was the inaugural gala and they were all there, from a pride of Rockefellers to Mrs. Fred Eberstadt in her Yves St. Laurent black mink-and-vinyl coat. And loving it. "Beautiful," exclaimed Saks Fifth Avenue President Adam Gimbel. "Glorious," said onetime White House Arts Adviser August Heckscher. "The most beautiful theater," exclaimed Hollywood Producer Otto Preminger. "Marvelous and effective," said Playwright Alan Jay Lerner. So, last week, with a popping of flashbulbs and champagne corks, the Vivian Beaumont Theater, latest unit to join Manhattan's Lincoln Center, swung into orbit with its opening production, Georg Buechner's 130-year-old Danton's Death.

Some of the celebrities had come to see the play--3-D electronic music, cast of 43, four beheadings--but most had come to glory in the building, the first new legitimate theater to rise in Manhattan for 38 years. There was nothing automatic about its success; no theater has had a more troubled past or has required more midwives to officiate at its birth. In the first place, the $9,600,000 structure is not one building, but two. The theater core and lobby were designed by the late Eero Saarinen; the exterior, which serves as a library, is the work of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Gordon Bunshaft. "This is the least likely marriage I have envisioned," Saarinen wrote his staff. "But it might be very interesting. We can at least call it an affair."

Sets Overhead. The end of the affair did not come until Saarinen's premature death in 1961, but by then final plans were all but complete. Bunshaft, as Mr. Outside, had given the theater a mighty proscenium entrance with a towering concrete truss that spans 150 ft., yet rests on only two columns. Fronting it is a shimmering reflecting pool, set off by British Sculptor Henry Moore's Reclining Figure (see color).

As Mr. Inside, Eero Saarinen teamed up with Broadway Set Designer Jo Mielziner; the two men set out to design the most modern and flexible theater that they could conceive of, including an automated console programmed to control the saturation lighting for a three-hour show, a stage containing a motorized turntable, 36 ft. in diameter, large enough to handle an entire production, with an independently rotating 5-ft. outer ring left over. And tucked away overhead was space for the sets of five shows.

Actors from the Audience. To see how the ideas would work out, Saarinen took over an abandoned movie theater in Pontiac, Mich., built a full-scale mockup. To find out what was needed, Mielziner plotted out 150 plays that he had designed (among them Death of a Salesman, The King and I, South Pacific), discovered that the main action in almost every play took place in a triangle whose base rested on the footlights. Mielziner and Saarinen boldly flipped the triangle so that it was pointing out into the audience, thus doubling the prime acting area available. When the extra thrust stage is not wanted, it can be lowered into the pit so that the theater reverts to traditional form.

To ensure the proper dramatic alchemy of darkness and illumination, the walls are painted a somber brown, seats have been given soft red covers. To keep the theater intimate, the audience is wrapped around the stage on three sides, and none of the theater's 1,140 seats is more than 65 ft. away from the stage. Actors have the maximum of freedom; they can make their entrances from before and behind the wings and from two "vomitoriums"--runways 6 ft. from the lip of the stage. In Danton's Death, the actors seem to emerge from the audience itself.

Who Is Irving Blew? For all the spirit of collaboration that hovered over the inception of Lincoln Center's Beaumont Theater, there was a question last spring as to whether there would be any repertory company left to take it over. After a disastrous 1964 season in temporary quarters, Producer Robert Whitehead, Director Elia Kazan and Author Arthur Miller had all been either dismissed or had left. It was, as one critic put it, "the death of the Group Theater of the '30s." To replace them, the Lincoln Center management reached more than 3,000 miles across America--over the heads of some of Broadway's greatest names--to tap two comparative unknowns, Herbert Blau, 38, and Jules Irving, 39, collaborating directors of San Francisco's highly touted Actor's Workshop.

News of the appointment caught New York by surprise. "Who is Irving Blau?" asked the Times. Ironically, "Irving Blau" turned out to be two native-born New Yorkers, both graduates of Manhattan's own N.Y.U. Soon after graduation they went West, taught full-time at San Francisco State College and, on the side, obtained Ford and Guggenheim fellowships and created the experimental theater that won them their new jobs.

American Firsts. For their Manhattan debut, they have brought east 14 of the San Francisco company (including their actress wives). The rest of the New York company is almost equally divided between the Kazan cadre and new recruits. They will all see action. Following Danton, Blau and Irving have scheduled three more productions for their 1965-66 season: Wycherley's The Country Wife, Sartre's The Condemned of Altona and Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, all plays sounding the themes of violence and chicanery from the 17th to the 20th century.

Last season half the Lincoln Center Repertory's plays were American products. This season there are none. Why? The co-producers, who like to Think Big and have used their entire company for Danton, explain: "There was no American play readily available with the breadth we need." American firsts will come next year, when Blau and Irving plan to go back to their San Francisco policy of introducing new American playwrights and reviving big-cast American classics.

Hopefully they will fare better at the hands of the critics than Danton, which was guillotined by the reviewers (see THEATER). If they fail, it will not be for lack of money. The company is the most heavily subsidized repertory in the U.S., and the first season is already 93% subscribed.

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