Salzburg of the Southwest

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Santa Fe adds a theater to its opera and art galleries

The peaks and deep-cut valleys of Salzburg helped stimulate one of the world's great music festivals. The jagged rise of Edinburgh Castle, at the summit of a hill that bursts up from the city, served as a symbol of its remarkable theater festival. In New Mexico, the dark Sangre de Cristo mountains, falling away to boundless plains, have inspired two generations of transplanted New Yorkers to envision a summertime American Salzburg or Edinburgh in 371-year-old Santa Fe.

John Crosby was 31 when in 1957 he founded the Santa Fe Opera in the Indian and colonial Spanish countryside where he had recuperated from asthma as a child. Today the troupe is internationally respected for imaginative productions and varied repertory. Pianist Alicia Schachter and her film producer husband Sheldon Rich went to Santa Fe for a vacation in 1972. A year later they started the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Renowned players and composers now cherish its sustained intimacy and stay together for brief postseason tours in Seattle and New York.

Santa Fe (pop. 50,000) has become an even more sophisticated haven than in the early decades of the century, when D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe and other writers and artists settled in its environs. They were outsiders, and Santa Fe has since become, with some disgruntlement, a city full of outsiders--many of them cosmopolitan and gifted. Neil Simon and his actress wife Marsha Mason have taken a house. So has Movie Actress Amy Irving. Watergate Figure John Ehrlichman, now a writer, frequents the bar of the fashionable, crowded Pink Adobe restaurant. According to the weekly Santa Fe Reporter, the town supports 25 to 30 fast-food restaurants and an astonishing 70 art galleries. The coyly named shops (Senor Murphy Candymaker) could be in Winter Park, Fla., or La Jolla, Calif., or a handful of other Sunbelt centers of the good life. But those towns lack Santa Fe's appealing, if uneasy, jumble of races and cultures.

The newest artistic venture, the Santa Fe Festival Theater, opened last week. Set in a deftly remodeled former armory, the theater was conceived as "part of an American Salzburg" by Producing Director Thomas Kahn Gardner, 30, Executive Director Christopher Beach, 30, and Associate Director Robert Wojewodski, 31. The three met in 1975, when they were working backstage at the Santa Fe Opera.

Their nine-week debut season led off with a rumbustious, top-of-the-lungs revival of The Front Page, that cynical fairy tale of newsmen with contempt for the truth who nonetheless embrace newspapering with a passion that crushes all other loves. Next week the theater will present Ted Tally's 1977 Terra Nova, a poetic, emotional drama about Robert Falcon Scott's second-place finish in the race to reach the South Pole--and his team's anguished way back, with the last of them dying only a few miles from base camp. While those productions continue in rotation, Michael York will open on July 27 in the lead of the third play, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.

The traditional disorder prevailed as last week's debut neared. Even the number of seats in the theater, reported as either 344 or 380, was anyone's guess. "I never counted them," said Beach airily. But if the producers were vague about budgets and commercial details, The Front Page showed that the company can be lively and at times rousing onstage. A lot has changed since Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote the play in 1928. No American city is lucky enough to have eight competing newspapers any more, and probably no modern managing editor would ignore an earthquake in which a million Chinese died to preserve a human interest story about a rooster. Yet the play still works as media criticism and, even more, as a psychological portrait of newspapermen: brawling boys in love with spectacle and hubbub, literally snapping towels at each other in a courthouse pressroom flanked by lockers.

The production features a bravura portrayal of Managing Editor Walter Burns by Veteran Actor John Randolph (who as a real-life Bronx correspondent for the New York Post once reported the burning-down of his family home--"and rewrite got the facts wrong"). Alas, though the pay ($300 a week) is relatively generous, the Santa Fe Festival Theater can attract few middle-aged supporting actors. Thus timeworn newsroom veterans are played by men mostly in their 30s who appear to be in their 20s. That casting undoes a work as grubbily detailed as The Front Page.

In the play's biggest role, Reporter Hildy Johnson, David Garrison is brash, self-possessed, life-of-the-party, winning and entirely wrong. Hildy is nearing middle age. He sees one last chance to break free, give up the tabloid follies of youth and settle down with wife, pipe, slippers and mother-in-law. Garrison's Hildy instead sees endless tomorrows. The girl he loves enough to leave the Examiner for, moreover, ought to be so enticing as to make any man question his values. At Santa Fe she comes across as a drip and a nag.

Perhaps the Festival Theater's chief accomplishment, in this era of desperation for almost everyone in the arts, is amassing nearly $600,000 toward a first-year budget of $750,000. The bulk of the money, surprisingly, came from New Mexicans, including $150,000 in construction aid from the state legislature. The festival producers won an early--and substantial--contribution from O'Keeffe, 93, the region's arbiter of artistic merit. The opening-night audience included U.S. Senator Harrison Schmitt and former Governor Jerry Apodaca.

Originally, Gardner wanted to reach out to the Hispanic half of the community by opening with Garcia Lorca's revenge tragedy of rural Spain, Blood Wedding, with five performances in Spanish. He planned to follow with John O'Keeffe's 1791 English comedy, Wild Oats. "Those thoughts," says Gardner, "came from sitting in west Greenwich Village apartments, not New Mexico. I assumed that because of the opera and the chamber festival, the audience would be sophisticated. When I talked to people about what they wanted to see, everybody, but absolutely everybody, said Neil Simon. I found we had an audience that knew about Hindemith and Stockhausen but nothing about the theater. The Front Page was as close to Neil Simon as we could get with an American classic."

Gardner and his colleagues may have been right to start with something safe. But they may also have established audience expectations of straightforward revelry that Terra Nova will confound. If the Festival Theater is eventually to stand with the opera and the chamber festival, it must play even farces for their fullest meaning--and surely must lift its audience beyond farce. --By William A. Henry III. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Santa Fe

With reporting by Martha Smilgis

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