Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . . .
Marshall W. Mason, The Transcendent Years: Circle Repertory Company & the 1960s (n.p.: Goodreads, Pres 2022). 708pp.
11th Edition.
One indisputable fact emerges from The Transcendent Years, Marshall W. Mason’s impressively thorough tome about the Circle Repertory Company (originally the Circle Theater Company), the non-profit Off-Broadway institution he co-founded with playwright Lanford Wilson, actor/director Rob Thirkield, and actress Tanya Berezin in 1969: Mason is the only one surviving. (Reportedly he is losing his vision.)
Given the parade of leading American playwrights the company fostered (most notably Wilson), the critically approved and popularly accepted plays it produced (including moves from Off-Off-Broadway to Broadway, and Off-Off to Off), the A-list actors it discovered, the acclaimed designers it spawned, the aesthetic it represented, and the important producers and Off-Broadway companies it inspired, it’s no exaggeration to say that the Circle Rep accomplished more than its most important predecessor (and its foremost inspiration), the Group Theatre of the 1930s. Only one other New York non-profit, Joe Papp’s Public Theater, can be said to have gone further in creating a similarly indelible artistic presence and instituting an even longer history of discoveries and success, one that continues unabated today. But the Public is more an institution than a company; in a sense, it embraces companies rather than being one itself.
The Transcendent Years serves as both a history of the Circle Rep (for which Mason served as artistic director until 1986) and a personal memoir, although Mason never goes into detail about his private life; just enough is presented to fill in the picture and answer the usual questions. His homosexuality is taken for granted and no big deal is made of his marriage to Daniel Irvine. He often mentions who, among his many colleagues, also was gay, including Wilson. The pair were close friends, linked professionally for decades, but they weren’t lovers. No American director has ever collaborated so long and so successfully with a playwright as Mason did with Wilson, who died in 2011 at 74.
Mason, born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1940, five months before your humble columnist, takes us from his youth in Texas through his college years at Northwestern University, where, under a full scholarship, he studied under legendary acting teacher Alvina Krause. Northwestern was home to many future outstanding theater artists who eventually were welcomed at the Circle Rep. Substantial space is devoted to Krause’s classes, during which Mason realized that he wasn’t destined to be a great actor and thus turned his interests to directing (although he sometimes did act again, including as Malvolio in a Circle Rep Twelfth Night). Along with other Northwestern students, he gained his considerable acting experience under Krause’s supervision during summers spent at her Eagles Mere Playhouse, in Pennsylvania, before traveling to New York City and getting involved there in the flourishing Off-Off scene at little breakthrough theaters like Caffe Cino, to which he pays considerable homage.
Mason takes us on a year-by-year journey through the world of mid-to-late 1960s OOB, his co-founding in 1969 of the Circle Theatre Company, his struggles to earn a living as his company floundered, fighting to survive, and the shows he and his colleagues presented, most of them given in considerable detail. As he moves through the years, he periodically reminds us of the principal socio-historical events happening in the world outside, often tying them to developments in the theater. He reminds us over and over of the company’s commitment to the idea of an ensemble, one in which artists could seek to expand their artistic identities as actors, directors, playwrights, or designers. Collaboration was the eternal flame.
Soon after they arrived in NYC, Mason met Lanford Wilson, an ambitious young playwright from Lebanon, Missouri, habituating the same OOB venues. It was not long before their forged artistic visions found success in Mason’s revelatory 1965 staging of Wilson’s Balm in Gilead at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. Subsequently, after the Circle was founded, Mason directed almost every significant Wilson play for it, among them The Hot L Baltimore, The Mound Builders, Serenading Louie, Fifth of July (also seen on TV), the three Talley family plays (most notably Talley’s Folly), Angels Fall, and so on.
He also staged or produced such important American dramas as Jules Feiffer’s Knock Knock, Edward J. Moore’s The Sea Horse, Romulus Linney’s Childe Byron, William Mastrosimone’s The Woolgather (directed by John Bettenbender), Milan Stitt’s The Runner Stumbles (directed by Austin Pendleton), and too many others to list. A long list of leading dramatists’ names—including John Bishop and Sam Shepard—whose works premiered at the Circle could easily be appended.
In many of these plays Mason’s staging created a style called “lyrical realism,” an approach that sought to overlay a foundation of naturalistic behavior with poetic overtones, much as Mason detected as the soul of plays by his idol, Tennessee Williams, with whom he had a friendship noted in the book. Wilson’s style, which many considered “Chekhovian,” was perfect for such stage artistry. But the company was really very eclectic, many of its notable works being avant-garde, often from the European repertory.
Mason also freelanced elsewhere, and, for a brief time, switched at the Circle from new American plays to the classics, including Hamlet and Mary Stuart. During those transcendent years of the 70s and 80s, you could not be a serious theatergoer without paying attention to what was going on down at the Circle Repertory Theatre, ensconced at the Sheridan Square Playhouse at 99 Seventh Avenue South. (It had begun life as an Off-Off company in a 100-seat loft theater on West 83rd Street and Broadway.)
There you could see such thrilling young actors as William Hurt, Lindsay Crouse, Tanya Berezin, Conchatta Ferrell, Trish Hawkins, Stephanie Gordon, Jeff Daniels, Jonathan Hogan, Judd Hirsch, and Christopher Reeve, to name just a handful; while John Lee Beatty earned his laurels at the start of his career with sets that embodied the essence of lyrical realism, often lit by Dennis Parichy, and filled out with costumes by Laura Crow or Jennifer von Mayrhauser, and sound designed by Chuck London.
The Transcendent Years, written clearly, yet with depth and feeling, is filled with marvelous anecdotes that bring the people and plays to life. It has excellent commentary on the arts of acting and directing, and Mason is not ashamed to admit his own flaws and mistakes. Perhaps the book’s greatest gift is his unusually well-crafted recreations of almost every significant production for which he was somehow responsible, including their writing, design, acting, and staging.
Each account is followed, according to the relative significance of the show, by anywhere from one to nearly a dozen edited review excerpts, good, bad, and ugly, brief or expansive, as the case may be. Mason also remains so enamored of the people he worked with that he gives all the credits for each show, sometimes including multiple stage managers. Such inclusion is heartwarming and good for the record keepers but it’s a sign that the book is often guilty of overkill and could use a ruthless editor, who might have suggested moving much of this to appendices, which are notably absent.
A less misleading subtitle would be in order, as well. Despite Mason’s providing exposition on the birth of the Off-Off-Broadway movement (Caffe Cino, La Mama, etc.) and the period’s social background, The Transcendent Years is only briefly about the 1960s, much more of its space being devoted to the decades that followed. What Mason contributes, though, provides his valuable personal take on a subject thoroughly treated in two books by Stephen J. Scott-Bottoms and David Crespy, recently covered here.
More frustrating is the lack of an index. This is an encyclopedic tome based on Mason’s remembrances and research into countless productions; the number of names and titles mentioned is huge. Often, including while writing this account, I was flummoxed by my inability to check names and titles when I needed to.
Sadly, it has only two photos. One (on the paperback version) is a cover photo of Mason and Wilson in their salad days, the other being a frontispiece photo of the company in 1970. This is a shame since Mason spends so many words offering descriptions of the company’s numerous productions. One often has to go to other sources for photos, one being Mary S. Ryzuk’s The Circle Repertory Company: The First Fifteen Years (1989), itself relatively limited in this area. I plan to discuss it here next week. I’ve included a few of her photos in this essay. (There’s also a valuable third study of the Circle, A Comfortable House: Lanford Wilson, Marshall W. Mason and the Circle Repertory Theatre, by Philip Middleton Williams, 1993).
There’s also the question of what we may, perhaps, call provenance. From what I could piece together on the internet, the book was first published in hardcover in 2016 by Playsmith, Inc., a company about which I can find nothing, followed by a Kindle edition and paperback in 2018. My paperback, which has the same cover as those most prevalent online, has a date on the very last page saying 2022. Otherwise, the book completely lacks any publication data, not even an ISBN (which can be found online); even the name Goodreads Press, on the spine, is a blind alley. I can find no connection between it and the global book recommender Goodreads, which is not to say they’re not somehow related. I’ve written to Mason for clarification, but I haven’t heard back.
These cavils, however, can’t suppress the importance of the text Marshall W. Mason provides. Like the years it chronicles, his book is a transcendent recollection of a theater company and its leader that deserve to be remembered by being part of every theater library’s acquisitions.
Coming up: Mary S. Ryzuk, The Circle Repertory Company: The First Fifteen Years
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
