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On Stage: A look back at a century of theatrical Pittsburghers and their feats
Wednesday, December 29, 1999 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
For the last theater column of the year, a look backward is a natural; for the last column of the century, it's a kind of duty.
And don't tell me the 20th century still has a year to run. This is the 1900s I'm chronicling, and anyway, the judgments I'm about to make wouldn't be altered if I had to wait another year.
So who, I asked myself, are the century's 10 most significant theatrical Pittsburghers? With every expectation of having missed someone important, especially in the first half of the century when I wasn't around, here are my choices, listed in chronological order of birth, along with a group of near-misses.
Ben Iden Payne, 1881-1976. A British actor, director and educator, he taught at CMU (then Tech) from 1919-34 and again just after the war, when he led the drama program. All the while he was also directing professionally. Most of all he is associated with the American rediscovery of the simple Shakespearean thrust stage. Payne was the father of Shakespeare at CMU and was also instrumental in the early years of the Old Globe Shakespeare theater in San Diego and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His autobiography is fittingly called, "A Life in a Wooden O."
George S. Kaufman, 1889-1961. The East Liberty native wrote, co-wrote, produced and/or directed some 40 Broadway hits, including, most memorably, "You Can't Take It with You" (written with favorite collaborator Moss Hart), the greatest American comedy of the century.
Ford Curtis, c.1895-1979. A longtime English professor at Pitt (where he started in 1922), Curtis makes this list because of his indefatigable and essential collecting of theatrical memorabilia, concentrating on Pittsburgh and New York City. Before he died, he and his wife had established the Ford E. and Harriet R. Curtis Theatre Collection in the Rare Books Department at Pitt's Hillman Library, complete with a supporting endowment, and he continued to add to it throughout retirement. Given CMU's reputation, you might expect the premier Pittsburgh theater collection to be there, but it is at Pitt, thanks to Ford Curtis, and it continues to get stronger, attracting significant additions.
Edith Skinner, 1904-81. She was the greatest American voice teacher for the stage and reigned at Carnegie Tech from 1937-74. When John Houseman founded New York's Juilliard School in 1971, she was his "first and most important hire ... it gave the school instant credibility," he said. Like Henry Higgins, she habitually identified students' origins by their speech, but she went Higgins one better when she was told she had misidentified Eugene Lee (later a famous designer) and immediately deduced that he must be an identical twin -- as he was. Her memory and discipline are fresh in the minds of thousands of successful actors, and her voice and speech textbook ("Speak with Distinction"), first published in 1942, is still definitive.
Frederick Burleigh, 1906-1977. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Richard S. Rauh led in the creation of the Pittsburgh Playhouse in 1934, and his wife Helen Wayne Rauh ("the first lady of the Pittsburgh stage") shone there until 1970. But it was Burleigh who led the Playhouse through its years of greatness. He began here as a director in 1937, became producer shortly thereafter and, except for four years in the Army in World War II, ran Pittsburgh's premier theater until he resigned in 1965. During those 28 years, he produced (and often directed) 254 of 292 shows as the Playhouse grew from one theater to three and added its famous school and the invaluable Playhouse Jr. (led by Bill Leech). Ranking in its day with the Pasadena Playhouse and Cleveland Playhouse, Burleigh's Pittsburgh Playhouse represented the apotheosis of popular theater -- giving audiences what they wanted "instead of making them want what he gave them," as a 1946 Press article insisted.
Harold V. Cohen, 1907-69. The dean of Pittsburgh theater critics, he reviewed plays (and movies and supper clubs and everything show biz) for the Post-Gazette from the '30s to the '60s. Others (Kap Monahan for the Pittsburgh Press, George Anderson for the PG) were influential, but Cohen's is the name you still hear, again and again. Reading his columns and reviews was a liberal education, providing a continually inspiring window on the world of art and ideas.
Gene Kelly, 1912-96. He wanted to grow up to be shortstop for the Pirates, but he had to settle for being the quintessential song and dance man in the brassy American style -- masculine, feisty, gloriously optimistic, a dancer with working-class charisma, an actor with a heart as big as his smile, and a director and choreographer to boot.
Will Disney, 1913- . Disney had a 20-year career as actor, director, teacher and staff member at the Playhouse, and he worked off and on as a TV commentator on the arts. But he is most fully and justly celebrated for founding the Little Lake Theater in 1949 and running it until his daughter and son-in-law took over in the 1990s. He played his last role there in 1996. In the process, Disney set what must be all-time Pittsburgh records, acting in 344 plays and directing 306, while producing hundreds more.
Vernell Lillie, 1931- . For 25 years the Kuntu Repertory Theater she and playwright Rob Penny founded at Pitt has carried the torch for African-American theater in Pittsburgh. As artistic director, stage director and energetic hub, Lillie has personally kept Kuntu afloat, teaching Pittsburgh about the works of many a playwright -- international, national and local -- it might otherwise have ignored. But more important, she has nurtured and galvanized students, helping some to discover a lifetime vocation and many more to tap their creativity on the way to lives as artistically committed citizens.
August Wilson, 1945- . Two plays more and Wilson will have completed his audacious Pittsburgh Cycle of 10 plays tracking the struggle for African-American identity and freedom through each decade of the 20th century. The plays completed, including "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "The Piano Lesson" and "Fences," have already secured Wilson a position with the best of American playwrights.
And how's this for a second ten? Actress Helen Wayne Rauh, Playhouse Jr.'s Bill Leech, McKeesport playwright Marc Connelly, showman and talent incubator Don Brockett, visionary arts funder Ted Hazlett, City Theatre's Marc Masterson, the Shakespeare Festival's Buck Favorini, CMU's Elmer Kenyon (founder of the Pittsburgh Drama League and advocate of the Theatre Guild), Margot Lovelace of marionette theater fame and the Public Theater's Ben Shaktman.
Stretch our gaze just slightly farther afield and we'd include the Stoughton Family of the Mountain Playhouse in Jennerstown. There are also the many performers who began in Pittsburgh, including Shirley Jones, William Powell, Adolphe Menjou, Oscar Levant, Charles Grodin and Lena Horne, not to mention the many more who studied here at (mainly) CMU. In that category are also the designers, among them two of the century's greatest lighting geniuses, Abe Feder and Jules Fisher. And in related arts there are the great dancers (Martha Graham, Paul Taylor), motion picture pioneers and more.
Of course, this is also my last column of this millennium -- the way I reckon millennia. But aside from registering my agreement with the British vote that named Shakespeare the Man of the Millennium, I'll just stick by my earlier guess that the play of the millennium is either "Everyman" or "King Lear."
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