Today we celebrate The Queen whose birthday it was yesterday. No, not the one here in London although she had her 97th birthday yesterday. I am talking about Patti LuPone who turned 73.
I first discovered Patti during my third month in NYC in 1975. I moved to the city in August. Started Juilliard in the Drama Division in September. And, in October, that school's The Acting Company took up residence at the Harkness Theatre for a month and did four plays in repertory. It was the beginning of our education at Juilliard to see the company which was mostly made up of the school's Group 1. I was in Group 8. The stars of the company were Mary-Joan Negro and Norman Snow and their "Mertz"s were Kevin Kline and Patti. Adding to that narrative was that Mary-Joan and Norman were a couple at the time and so were Kevin and Patti.
In the photo above, Patti was visiting Kevin backstage in his dressing room at Circle in Square when he was later starring in Michael Weller’s Loose Ends along with Roxanne Hart. It was directed by Alan Schneider, who also was the Director of the Theatre Program at Juilliard from 1975 - when I arrived there - until 1979, which was the year this production of Loose Ends opened. I will always be grateful for Schneider’s acknowledging my own talent as an actor and giving me encouragement even though I had no idea really who he was. I just thought he was the rather quaint, quite nice old guy in a jaunty cap that matched his own jauntiness. I was in many ways a country bumpkin bumping along on my long-haired exotic Nureyev-like allure. I have not always owned my talent, but back then I certainly owned, as so many young people do, my confusing allure to myself and others. Causing a wondrous confusion in the loins - and sometimes the lives - of others was alas a kind of calling card for me.
Schneider’s calling card was not really Juilliard, I was to discover, but his being the foremost director of Samuel Becket plays. He directed the American premiere in 1956 of Waiting for Godot, among many other productions. He also directed the premiere of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and many plays by Harold Pinter. He could take the wondrous confusion of Beckett or Pinter and pinpoint their wonder in clarifying ways that did not deny the confusing labyrinth of language punctuated with the patter of pauses. In 1984, Schneider had just directed a trilogy of Pinter plays in New York titled Other Voices. He decided to take a break and took a trip here to London. He was killed when he was crossing the street to mail a letter to Beckett in Paris. He had looked the wrong way and a motorcycle hit him. In some way, a wondrous confusion killed him. I have sometimes wondered if he were going over the language of that letter he was about to mail - if he’d gotten the sentences right he was sending to Sam - which caused him to forget that the labyrinth of London streets are filled with a different kind of traffic. I like to think his last thought was of a Samuel Beckett.
(Above, Beckett and Schneider.)
I fell for Patti LuPone immediately back in 1975 seeing The Acting Company at the Harkness. I felt a kind of wondrous confusion myself caused by her own allure - that Patti pull that other theatre-goes have felt ever since. I saw her as Irina in Three Sisters directed by Boris Tumarin. As Rosamund in The Robber Bridegroom directed by Gerald Freedman. As Kitty Duval in The Time of Your Life directed by Jack O'Brien. And, most memorably to me at the time, in the male role of Prince Edward in Edward II directed by Ellis Rabb. That was really confusing to me was I sat in wonder at her talent. I was, in fact, being rather turned on by the actor playing Prince Edward until I realized it was the same actress who had played Rosamund in The Robber Bridegroom. I had been sitting in the second row of the mezzanine behind two third year students from Group 6 - Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve - who giggled through Edward II’s infamous scene that involves a hot red poker until they ceased to do so and sat transfixed by it all. I was especially transfixed by the love that Marlowe - who wrote the play in 1594 - uncompromisingly presented between Edward II and Gaveston. It was all, yes, an education. But I'll always remember that month in 1975 as the one when I first discovered Patti LuPone and fell for her as such singular actress and singer.
I talked about that 1975 season at the Harkness with Patti a couple of trips ago to London when I visited her in her dressing room at the Gielgud Theatre where she was appearing as Joanne in Company, a role she is currently playing on Broadway in a slightly reconfigured version of that London production. Here is an excerpt of that conversation:
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