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O'Reilly Theater: Triumphant triumvirate One score and five years ago, Public's mothers (and father) brought forth a new professional theater Sunday, December 05, 1999 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Editor
That a city of a certain size, wealth and cultural self-esteem should have its own resident professional theater company seems self-evident.
But it didn't always seem so, not even to a proud old city clinging barely to a top 10 ranking, as Pittsburgh was in the 1970s. No history of the Pittsburgh Public Theater can make sense without acknowledging the pre-story: In 1974-75, when the founding triumvirate of Joan Apt, Margaret Rieck and Ben Shaktman was doing mind-by-mind, wallet-by-wallet proselytizing on its behalf, theater was considered a risk if not actual anathema by Pittsburgh's moneyed elite.
The immediate fault was the failure of an ambitious and expensive foray into professional theater at the Pittsburgh Playhouse less than a decade before. In 1965, after staging 12 plays in four months to great acclaim, William Ball's A.C.T. departed amid a blizzard of debt. In 1966-67, John Hancock was fired after directing a program with a harder edge, adding the sin of leftist avant-gardism to that of fiscal irresponsibility.
There was a lot of bailing out to do and lots of hurt feelings. Foundations swore off theater. Moneyed Pittsburgh kept getting its theatrical kick by going to New York. And Pittsburgh solidified a national reputation as a poor theater town.
But that was the dark before the dawn.
Enter The Founders -- the Founding Mothers, a dynamic duo of local, well-connected cultural activists, Joan Apt and Margaret Rieck, and their find, an ambitious young man of the theater, Ben Shaktman.
Apt recalls having returned from a long summer trip and going to the Playhouse. "I saw every show, some several times. That's when I realized what a resident theater could do. [After it folded] I was determined we were going to have professional theater here, for me. It was an emotional thing." But the succession of failures had left such a bleak theater scene, "we had to teach this community what resident theater meant, what was burgeoning elsewhere."
It was hard spreading the word, Apt stresses, "because people only thought of failure. They said there's no audience here, it's dead."
The first near victim of American Subsidy was William Ball, the finest director in America. By the time he began his American Conservatory Theater in 1965, Ball had already demonstrated a dazzling virtuosity. ... [But] why he accepted a temporary offer by Pittsburgh of two theaters makes no sense at all . ...
"Pittsburgh is a strange theater town and the Pittsburgh Playhouse a peculiar operation. The city has never been able to support any kind of theater and, in fact, could not even carry two performances of a bus-and-truck 'Half a Sixpence.' The Playhouse's two theaters, on the other hand, had been financially successful, offering semiprofessional productions of things like 'Mary, Mary' and 'Bye, Bye Birdie.' Much of its success was credited to a popular, private restaurant on the premises. I think that should give a fair idea of Pittsburgh's cultural tendencies.
"The Playhouse's board of trustees finally admitted that its theater was not presenting the sort of plays that would keep Their City in tune with the times, and so the offer was made to Ball. But the board, you see, was still of the 'Bye, Bye Birdie' mentality. Unable to understand serious theater and completely uninformed about new methods of administration, it watched ACT's audiences dwindle -- and perhaps even gloated over it. ... Within six months, [Ball] and his company were forced out and the experience of his successor John Hancock was almost identical."
-- Martin Gottfried, "A Theater Divided: The Postwar American Stage" (New York, 1967), pages 106-8.
Apt and Rieck sit reminiscing in Apt's handsome Shadyside living room, the same modern, expansive, art-rich space where much of the plotting and schmoozing went on in 1973, 1974 and 1975. Fittingly, it was this space that provided the setting for a photograph to represent the Public Theater in the 1975 edition of Stefan Lorant's "Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City." At that point, there wasn't yet a theater, but there had been plenty of action. (Lorant "had great faith that we'd actually open," says Margaret.) Oddly, the fifth edition of Lorant's book just appeared in 1999, completed before the Public's new Downtown home was finished, so this time it's represented by a photo of Anthony J.F. O'Reilly and an artist's rendition of the O'Reilly Theater.
The third person in that original Lorant picture is Shaktman -- bright-eyed, wiry, frenetic, talented.
But in this narrative, he isn't yet on the scene. To start, it was just Apt, Rieck, Pittsburgh's depressed theater scene -- and some of the duo's influential friends.
Rieck gives chief credit for inspiration and mentoring in cultural activism to "Drew" -- J. Drew Mathieson of the Mellon interests. "He spoke to me as someone who cared very much about Pittsburgh, who worried about the theater failures," she says. And then he surprised her by asking if she was doing anything about it. "So Drew and I met with Dick Cyert [then president of Carnegie Mellon University] to talk. I took my Martin Gottfried book, 'A Theater Divided,' with its devastating section on Pittsburgh. It was my bible."
Tellingly, Gottfried praises CMU, and CMU had actually tried to be a player in Pittsburgh's theater wars. It had made common cause with the Playhouse in bringing A.C.T. here, serving as a conduit for contributed funds, although the university connection never proved as close as had been anticipated. Cyert suggested Rieck and Mathieson meet with Earle Gister, head of CMU drama, who had recently been turned down by the city on his application to start a professional company in its Allegheny Community Theater (eventual home of the Public). "To my shock," Rieck recalls, "they were saying, 'Maybe you could do something.' "
For Apt, the parallel inspirational figure was "one of the most genteel people who ever lived," "Murph" -- Arthur M. Doty, head of the Alcoa foundation. "He encouraged me. He said, 'Whenever you're ready Joan, come see me.'" Later, it was Doty who advised them that to get the backing of the funding community, they should keep the initial budget "under four" -- $400,000.
"Drew was my spark," Rieck sums up. Apt agrees: "They gave us the courage and the background to do the work."
Apt is Pittsburgh born -- Joan Frank, a graduate of Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she directed a production of "Our Town." Rieck was born Margaret Glenn in Baltimore, then went to Wellesley and Northwestern. She did some acting in school and remembers being turned on to Shakespeare.
Each had been active on the cultural scene before the Public. Apt had helped to raise money for the Symphony and then to organize its move from Oakland to Downtown. Then "when Bill Ball was forced out of the Playhouse, I raised money to keep the company going. That's how they survived." She did that even though they were leaving and ended up in San Francisco, where they are now one of the great American regional theaters. Since then, Apt had worked with Ted Hazlett, legendary Pittsburgh arts funder as head of the A.W. Mellon Foundation, who'd helped fund children's theater.
Rieck had been involved in children's theater herself, especially the Performing Arts Project, which staged live theater for school children. She also recalls trying to get a tour of "Godspell" to come to Pittsburgh, "its home," since it was created by CMU students John Michael Tebelak and Stephen Schwartz. "No," she was told, "because Pittsburgh's a third-rate theater town." But her nudging helped; the national tour opened at the (new) Nixon and it was a huge success.
Some time in 1973, their common purpose jelled and the duo started working together toward the creation of a professional resident theater for Pittsburgh. Which brings us at last to Shaktman.
As he remembered it in 1995 for a 20th anniversary retrospective in the Post-Gazette, he and Apt met over a poker game at the New York apartment of their mutual friend, Herb Grossman, former associate conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony. As Apt tells it, she and husband Jerry met Shaktman while he and Grossman were rehearsing "Voices" by Charles Strouse ("Annie"). Gradually they came to know him. Their dreams seemed to mesh.
Apt brought Shaktman to Pittsburgh in January 1974, but not without searching to see who else might be right for the job. "I talked to friends all over the country," she says. Gister looked, too -- Rieck remembers "he approached a couple of people and they said no, no one wanted to touch Pittsburgh," because of its recent debacles. Still, she says "there was skepticism about Ben, who was so bright, verbal, driven and young. Could anyone do this after what had happened? ... We kept looking at other people until we were sure Ben had the dedication as well as the talent."
Though young, Shaktman had a track record. As Apt and Rieck remember it, he had directed in Boston and New York. Apt saw his "King Lear" in Beverly, Mass. He'd won an Obie Award; he'd directed Leonard Nimoy; he'd directed a New York production of an Arnold Wesker play that some of the Pittsburgh funding community went to see, returning suitably impressed. Gordon Davidson of Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum sent a recommendation. The testimonials piled up.
Their eventual judgment is summed up in the capsule description coined by Rieck that became key to their selling of the new theater, which also meant selling Shaktman: He was, they said, "a rare combination of artist and businessman." It's a question how much of a businessman he really was, but more immediately material was his persistence: "His drive is why we succeeded," says Apt.
Having showed his commitment by frequent visits to brainstorm and explore, Shaktman committed to a year of further groundwork. From fall 1974 through spring 1975, he basically set up house at the Apts, often working in bed, as she recalls, with papers scattered all around.
After long preparation, they were ready to take Ben on the rounds of the foundations. "He had this expensive leather purse," Apt recalls. "We said, 'Ben, if you want to come to Pittsburgh, you've got to get rid of the purse!' "
The first fateful meeting was with Doty at the Alcoa Foundation -- right on the spot where the old Nixon Theater had been torn down. It went well. There's a post-meeting vignette that sums it up and suggests Shaktman's passion: "All the way down in the elevator, Ben was whooping and kissing the sides of the elevator," Apt says. "All the way down to the floor," agrees Rieck.
With a grant from Alcoa assured, they had some momentum and credibility. The second gift came from Paul Jenkins at the Benedum Foundation. Soon, Burr Wishart of the Heinz foundations was on board. All along, Hazlett, who had been so burned by the Playhouse failure, had promised "final money."
The trio took their time in going public. "We did not want to produce by publicity," Apt says. "We kept it very quiet," says Rieck, "because if it didn't go, we didn't want another black mark on Pittsburgh's record."
Proselytizing and fund raising was only part of it. There also was a theater to organize. The Founding Mothers weren't just catalysts -- they had enlisted for the long haul and weren't afraid to work. As they talk, they keep remembering the many others who joined their growing crusade, people like Leo Carlin, who had run both Nixon theaters and who helped design their box-office operation, and Symphony staffers who taught them professional methods of subscription tracking.
Shaktman had some learning to do, too. He was articulate and he wrote well, but he wrote so much. "We taught him how to outline, to do paragraphs and use Roman numerals," Apt says.
Initially, they worked out of the Apt house, then out of the office of Jerry Apt's engineering firm on Centre Avenue. There they gradually co-opted the help of Cynthia Tutera. It must have been a good fit -- Cindy Tutera is still there more than 25 years later, now Public Theater general manager of administration and finance.
Apt and Rieck remember many volunteers throughout the community, in every age group. The stream of helpers was part of a series of incremental triumphs, weaving a chain of acquaintance, gathering momentum and critical mass. Soon they were considering possible locations, including the Freight House on the South Side, before it became part of the Station Square development. Eventually then-Mayor Pete Flaherty committed the Allegheny Community Theater on the North Side for a first year season of four months.
By spring 1975 it was time to go public and broaden the base of support. Apt says, "I had been talking about a backers party. Ben said no, he wouldn't let us do it. Then we finally brought in a consultant, who told him, 'Ben, say thank you!' "
That first party was at the Apts' house, featuring a volunteer music combo made up of Art Cowles of Koppers (piano), Burr Wishart of the Heinz and Pittsburgh Foundations (bass) and John McKean of Mc-Kean Oldsmobile (horn). The party raised $25,000 and the Public was now public.
From that April party and the announcements in the newspapers it was just one mad rush to the opening on Sept. 17 of "The Glass Menagerie." All the very visible work that late spring and summer were the top of the iceberg -- but it all rested on those long days of dream, nurture and preparation.
"It was a gritty choice to open with 'Glass Menagerie,'" says Apt, "not at all a girly-girly entertainment." She remembers one possible funder who had told them, "I only like shows where the skirts are up to here." She also remembers the play's famous "jonquil scene" as if it were yesterday, and "I can still hear the incidental music."
The Public really hit its stride with the next show, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," starring home-town hero Tom Atkins -- and there weren't any short skirts in that one, either, or in the "Twelfth Night" with Leonard Nimoy that concluded the first season.
And then they faced an unforeseen problem: A surplus. "'How do we give this money back?,'" Apt remembers Shaktman saying, starting to plan pro-rated refunds. The duo smiles at the memory of Shaktman's financial innocence. "He refused our offered raise for year two," says Rieck, "and he stood by that." But he was soon dissuaded from the folly of refunds, since there was a second season to look forward to, and a third ... and suddenly it's the 25th.
But first there were those torturous seats. Peter Wexler had designed the Public's original courtyard-style acting space as a labor of love, taking very little money, and there hadn't been much to spend on seating. They recall a letter to the editor praising the Public's first season but complaining that "the seats appear to have been designed by a madman." Raising money to replace them was perhaps the easiest thing they ever did.
As the afternoon lengthens in the Apt living room, stories multiply.
"When we were doing ' 'night, Mother,' Bill Gardner drove to New York to pick up Sylvia Sidney and her dog," Rieck remembers. But since she was coming out of retirement, "during rehearsals she got scared and tried to back out of the show. So Bill contracted with an actress from the Guthrie Theater to stand by for her. Then Sylvia began to relax -- she needed that security."
They recall some of the glorious bumps in the road -- the productions or details that caused controversy, like Sam Shepard's "Buried Child" or the dog so astonishingly played by a naked actor in "Mad Forest." Of the later play, a coup for the Public so soon after its creation, Apt says, "Margaret got us that play, basically."
They praise current Public head Eddie Gilbert's contributions to the design of the Cultural Trust's new theater: "Every inch of that performance space is his work, every step of the way." They say Gilbert had also worked with the original proscenium design that he inherited from Bill Gardner: "He perfected the seats -- every one with a perfect view."
They could go on and on, because they aren't just founders -- they've stayed active. Rieck left the board for a while: "I didn't want to be a hovering founder," she says. But she was back to chair the search committee that located Gilbert. Apt has stayed active continuously, now more, now less: "We've also been called The Mothers," she says with a touch of irony.
And what have they learned? Surprisingly, pretty much what they knew to start, which goes to prove they weren't such amateurs as they thought.
"We prepared the entreé," says Apt of that preparatory year; "we did the pre- and post-phoning, but Ben was the salesman." "And he made the theater," says Rieck. "It was really the artist at the helm. He chose the plays and hired the guest directors. It was going to rise or fall on his shoulders."
That was as it should be. The duo's founding principles were two: No interference on artistic matters and never to become an albatross to the funding community -- i.e., trust your artistic director and practice strict fiscal responsibility ("in the early years, we always raised the money before the season").
Those principles continue. So does the theater and with it, its founding mothers.
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