JOHN HOUSEMAN THEATRE CENTER? HE’S EARNED IT
As he waited for his car on a Philadelphia street corner the other day, John Houseman was approached by a dozen passers-by, each of whom smiled in recognition and said, “Are you earning it?” or “D’you still do it the old-fashioned way?” or some other variant of the brokerage-house commercials in which he has been appearing in recent years.
“It’s gone into the language,” Houseman says with what can only be called pleased astonishment. In his Malibu house on a sunny Sunday morning, he whispers, “They earn it” and shakes his head.
“When Smith, Barney, which had been a major investment firm, decided they had to go into brokerage, and in a big way, they asked their ad agency to find the most credible voice in America.
“The agency investigated and reported that next to Walter Cronkite, I had more credibility than anyone else. The irony, of course, is that it’s not I who have the credibility, it’s Prof. Kingsfield of ‘The Paper Chase.’ All producers are crooks--that’s well known, and I’m a producer--and directors are only a little better. But Kingsfield. . . ! “
At the age of 84, Houseman sustains the exuberant pace of a man just hitting full stride, giving no hint that it is just on to a half-century since he and Orson Welles founded the Mercury Theatre in New York. And even then Houseman’s reputation as a triple-threat man of the theater was well established. Just now he has returned from a month in England where he was launching a book that Chatto & Windus is doing over there. He bounced in and out of his Malibu base over the weekend to do the Joan Rivers show, en route to San Diego and San Francisco in aid of another new book, a collection of his speeches and journalistic pieces called “Entertainers and the Entertained” (Simon & Schuster: $18.95).
In New York on Nov. 3 there will be an elaborate dedication of the John Houseman Theatre Center, a brand-new theater that for 16 weeks a year will be the performing home for the Acting Company, which Houseman helped to create in 1972 as, in his words, “the country’s only permanent touring classical repertory company.”
The company was an outgrowth of his years as founder-director of the drama school at Juilliard, and its members, who have included Kevin Kline and Patty Lupone, have largely come from Juilliard.
“There are only 15 or 16 in the Acting Company,” Houseman says. “There should be many more. The National Theatre in England has 120 in the company, the Royal Shakespeare more than that. We cover each other, but if anyone should fall sick, it would be a disaster. For some reason, no one has.”
Members stay in the company for two or three years these days. “It’s a hard life, and two or three years are about all you can take. It’s heroic work.” The company rehearses 10 weeks, tours for 36 weeks, taking classical repertory to smaller cities where it’s seldom if ever available.
As of last season, it had taken 59 plays to 295 American cities in 46 states and done a six-week Australian tour. For the actors it is a great credit. “We reckon that 80% of the alumni are working regularly in the theater, not as stars, necessarily, but working,” says Houseman.
Houseman as Prof. Kingsfield was begat the same year as the Acting Company, 1972, when Jim Bridges, a young writer-director who had worked as “a coffee-bearer and third assistant stage manager” (Houseman’s words) in the Theater Group at UCLA in the early ‘60s, asked Houseman to play the Harvard law professor in the movie version of John Osborn’s book.
“And you still can’t put it in the past tense,” Houseman says. “We’re now in 60 countries. We’re a big hit in Israel, where I’m told it cuts across all kinds of lines, left and right, Jews and Arabs. We’re also a success in Zimbabwe.
“We made 20 episodes for CBS and another 37 for Showtime. In another 18 months the rights revert to Fox, and there’s talk about doing something more. Whether I’ll be around to do it is obviously another matter.”
The most interesting piece in the new book is a 1949 article from Harper’s in which Houseman gave detailed financial breakdowns for the cost and the rewards, if any, of typical stage productions in New York in the ‘46-’47 season. It was a gloomy and foreboding look and Houseman notes, in sorrow and satisfaction, that his prophecies have come true.
“There is more theater now in Los Angeles, or in Chicago, than in New York,” he says. “The local audience in New York has been frightened away by the prices and by disappointment. All the costs I cited in 1949 now, we discovered, have to be multiplied by six or seven times to account for inflation. It’s that bad. The theater audience in New York is primarily composed of tourists, who only want to see hits they’ve read about in their local papers.”
The decentralization of the American theater was one of Houseman’s predictions and it has certainly come true. “Regional theater is the American theater today.” Even Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park can be seen as regional theater, Houseman thinks.
He also finds increasing cooperation among regional theaters. The Acting Company is, for example, collaborating with the Hartford theater on a large-scale mounting of Mark Twain’s first novel, “The Gilded Age.”
“Using two audiences, as in San Diego and Los Angeles, say, divides the costs and benefits everybody.”
Houseman’s keenest lament is for the disappearance of radio drama. “It’s a very high form of dramatic literature, and it’s gone. There have been some futile and pointless attempts to bring it back, but its demise is total here. In England, young playwrights are still cutting their teeth and learning their trade writing for radio, and people listen.
“There’s talk of playing the Mercury Theatre radio plays again. Not just ‘War of the Worlds,’ but some other things as well that were marvelous. We did a ‘Dracula’ that was hair-raising, very exciting.”
The idea of coloring films appalls Houseman, especially where the choice of black and white was deliberate. “When Joe Mankiewicz and I did ‘Julius Caesar’ we chose black and white for several reasons. It wouldn’t benefit from color. We wanted the audience to make the link with black-and-white newsreels of Mussolini on the balcony. We didn’t have much money and we could use the ‘Quo Vadis’ sets which everybody had seen in color but wouldn’t recognize in black and white. The studio fought us hard, but we won.”
Like Kingsfield, Houseman has a habit of winning arguments.
