Washington Theater’s Father Hartke Dies

Father Gilbert Hartke, the venerated grand old man of drama in the nation’s capital, died Friday at Washington’s Providence Hospital.

Hartke, who kept the legitimate theater alive in Washington in the decades preceding the opening of the Kennedy Center in the 1970s, was 79, and his death was attributed to a long-term heart ailment.

Hartke--a powerfully built college football player--officially was the founding head of the drama department at Catholic University. But in reality he was the heart of the Washington theatrical movement, an actor who became a teacher who became a director.

On his stages and in his classes since the 1930s had been critic Walter Kerr; actresses Helen Hayes and Grace Kelly; playwright Mart Crowley, and actors George Grizzard, John McGiver and Jon Voight.

‘Kept the Theater Alive’

At his 50th anniversary party last year, former student Ed McMahon of NBC-TV’s “Tonight” show introduced him with a hearty “And heeeere’s Hartke!” And longtime friend Hayes declared: “It was the church that kept the theater alive in the Dark Ages, so I’m all for more Father Hartkes in the world.”

He numbered American Presidents among his close friends, and for Harry S. Truman, his personal favorite, he took the university players to Korea in 1951, staging performances near the hostilities.

At Dwight D. Eisenhower’s request, he sent his actors, writers and directors to Latin America to expose those audiences to American theater, and for Lyndon B. Johnson, Catholic University players went to Israel and six European countries.

Hartke’s entire life was spent bisecting the pious world of theology and the sometimes profane horizons of Thespis.

Acted in Silent Films

Before he was 7, he was acting in his native Chicago in two-reel silent films for Essanay productions. He liked to tell of selling boxes of Epsom salts from his father’s drugstore to Charlie Chaplin and of 17-year-old Gloria Swanson and her then-husband, Wallace Beery, driving around the neighborhood in their Dusenberg.

“The Chicago film colony was our neighborhood,” he told the Washington Post on his 75th birthday in 1982. “Everyone went to the same church, St. Edith’s. We altar boys would watch cross-eyed (silent film comedian) Ben Turpin work his way up the side aisle. I grew up with all that.”

At age 22 he thought he had chosen the church over the theater and entered the Dominican religious community. But he came to Catholic University in 1937 to take a graduate degree in English and, while still a student, helped launch the school’s speech and drama department.

A year later he talked the Abbey Theater into loaning the school the fabled actress Sara Allgood for a guest performance.

From that grew other guest appearances--Cyril Ritchard, Hayes and the future princess of Monaco, Miss Kelly.

Range of Productions

Over the years his productions ranged from Shakespeare to Chekhov to Samuel Beckett.

His campus productions kept theater alive in Washington during the years that the National Theater was closed because Actors Equity refused to let its members perform before segregated audiences.