Lloyd Richards, Man in Charge : Yale drama dean is among the most influential figures in American theater

Soon after Lloyd Richards settled into his new jobs as Dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1979, he got a call from his old acting buddy, James Earl Jones. “He congratulated me on my appointment,” recalls Richards, “but I said, ‘It doesn’t end there. If I go to Yale, you go, too. As do a few other people.’ ”

Richards wasn’t joking. Jones played in Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens,” put Richards in touch with Athol Fugard, then appeared in Yale’s American premiere of Fugard’s “A Lesson From Aloes.” And when Richards helped launch the career of a new playwright named August Wilson a few years later, Jones was back to star in Wilson’s play “Fences.”

This networking is part of what Richards does best. He has spent 40 years in the business--on stage as an actor, backstage as a director and off stage as a producer, administrator and educator. But it is Richards’ unique talent of finding and nurturing talent that has made him one of the most influential, although not one of the most visible, figures in current American theater.

While other regional theater producers also send new plays and playwrights spinning to the top, Richards seems to put a special spin on his finds. As Shubert Organization chairman Gerald Schoenfeld says, “Lloyd is there at conception.”

For the last 22 years, Richards has been artistic director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference--perhaps the most important new play forum in the country. He has kicked off the career of not just 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner Wilson but also 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner Wendy Wasserstein. Playwrights like David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”), Lanford Wilson (“Burn This”), Christopher Durang and John Guare have all spent summers with him.

Nobody else can work a play like Richards does. In the Richards’ creative loop now is Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” opening at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre on Thursday and a candidate for the coming Ahmanson Theatre season at the James A. Doolittle Theatre. The play, which traces the Charles family through slavery to 1936 Pittsburgh, began at the O’Neill, was launched at Yale and played both Boston’s Huntington Theatre and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre before landing on the West Coast.

“To me,” says Richards, “that’s the American National Theater: the exchange of work and artists among the regions. Regional theaters have brought together communities of people and I want those communities to experience and understand August Wilson’s work, what he has to say, what he thinks about, and what he is projecting on the stage. Now August Wilson is known throughout the country and his work is done everywhere, but that wasn’t always so.”

You could say the same thing about Richards, a short, solid, gentle man who first came to prominence as the director of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” in 1959. From his work with 29-year-old Hansberry so many years ago to his work today with artists like Wilson, Richards has spent a life in the theater maximizing the creativity of others.

Richards was delighted when he won a Tony award in 1987 for directing “Fences,” says New Yorker theater critic Edith Oliver, long an O’Neill resident dramaturge, “but he was probably four times as delighted that August won. Nobody I can think of is more interested in new talent or nurtures it with more consideration.”

But others have similar qualities. What is it that sets Richards apart? “There are people who have one or another of Lloyd’s facets--equally good directors, equally good people with his dramaturgical skills, with his theatrical statesmanship, his ability as a teacher in the broadest sense,” says O’Neill founder George White. “But nobody else puts them all together. I thought if anything happened to Lloyd, where would I go. And I have to tell you, I don’t know.”

Command central is a rumpled office in the Yale School of Drama, a block from the Yale Repertory Theatre and a two-hour ride to Broadway. Richards is just back today from New York meetings about next summer’s Playwrights Conference, and scripts are stacked up on the sofa behind him.

It was in a stack of O’Neill submissions seven years ago that Richards first came upon the work of August Wilson, a Minneapolis-based poet whose earlier submissions to the O’Neill had all been rejected.

Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” caught Richards’ eye. It wasn’t yet a play , says the director, “but the things that made him attractive as a potential writer for the theater were there. The characters lifted off the page. I’m not looking for a play to produce; I’m looking for a talent to support. I am looking for a unique voice for the theater, to which the theater should pay attention.”

Wilson came to the conference, worked on “Ma Rainey” and when the session ended, “I really wanted to direct this play, and to work on this play with him,” says Richards. “ I felt such a kinship to that play, and through the play to the playwright.”

Wilson, 44, has publicly referred to Richards as a surrogate father, and both men talk of how they think alike, rhythmically as well as politically. “I understood where he was at, because it touched where I was at,” says Richards, who is in his late 60s, but refuses to reveal his exact age--a holdover from his acting days. “I think he accepts what I bring to his work as a part of the work. It isn’t something that’s foreign to his thinking or feeling.”

So began an incredible working relationship that has resulted in some of the most acclaimed plays in American theater history. Wilson’s three plays, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Fences,” and “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” all began at the O’Neill, were premiered at Yale and went on to Broadway. All three won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. “Fences” won not only the 1987 Pulitzer but four Tony awards--for Wilson, Richards, actor Jones and actress Mary Alice.

On each of these plays, Richards’ task was different. On “Ma Rainey,” he helped Wilson merge what were essentially two plays, and with “Fences,” which was nearly 4 1/2 hours long at the O’Neill, he helped Wilson find his play. “Piano Lesson,” which came in as a much earlier draft, needed filling out.

“Lloyd has a sense of the overall purpose of the work, the reason I’m writing and the statements I’m trying to make through my art,” says Wilson. “He understands it very well and it seems to be in concert with what he’s has been saying in his art all his life. So that makes for a real nice way of relating.”

It’s been that way since the beginning, adds Wilson. When they first went into rehearsals on “Ma Rainey,” for instance, “the actors had questions about their characters which I was prepared to answer in case Lloyd didn’t know. And when he began to answer their questions, I discovered he knew the characters as well as I did. Actually, through his answers he gave me some insights into the characters.”

Both men say they rarely even need to talk much anymore. When Wilson sent Richards a rewrite of “The Piano Lesson,” for instance, “he called me up, said he got the rewrite and (found) one too many scenes. Period. So I said I’d take a look (and) I found a scene that I thought was expendable. I told him I took it out, he said ‘good,’ and to this day, I don’t know if we were both talking about the same scene.”

As early as “Raisin in the Sun,” Richards has been helping writers make good plays better. On that play, he and Hansberry met on and off for a year before even starting rehearsals, and by the time rehearsals ended, it was lighter by 45 minutes and one character.

“Raisin,” says Richards, was one of the first times he’d worked with “a real live playwright and encountered territory that had never been tried before. It’s an act of saying I know better than anyone else in the world what’ll make this play work. That’s a very arrogant thing to say, but you have to say it.”

He plays the same role at the Playwrights Conference. “When I think of mentor figures of mine, I always think of Lloyd,” says playwright Wasserstein. When her play “Uncommon Women and Others” was accepted for the O’Neill and first read aloud at a pre-conference weekend, “Lloyd said ‘your characters can be ambiguous, but you can’t be ambiguous.’ That’s when it struck me that he took both me and the play seriously and he wanted me to take it as seriously as he did.”

He similarly prodded Lee Blessing, another Minneapolis-based poet, whom Richards refers to as “a very excellent craftsman, a very bright, perceptive and concerned man--all things which attract me to him.” In Blessing’s first two visits to the O’Neill, Richards says slowly and deliberately, Blessing was “sometimes catching the surface of some things that were important to him and I just wanted him to go a little deeper.”

Blessing has publicly credited Richards with pushing him toward writing “A Walk in the Woods,” a play about a Russian arms negotiator and his American counterpart during Geneva arms talks. That play went from the O’Neill, to Yale, to La Jolla and on to Broadway and London; it opens May 19 in Moscow.

But when the play was ready for production at Yale, Richards was committed to work on Wilson’s play, “Joe Turner,” and didn’t feel “A Walk in the Woods” could wait. So instead of directing it himself, he brought in Des McAnuff from the La Jolla Playhouse.

“It was such an important play to be seen at that time (in early 1987, just after U.S.-Soviet arms talks had started up again) that I thought I had to forgo my directing it in favor of it being done,” Richards say almost wistfully. “It was another occasion of something you care a great deal about and watch other people do.”

Blessing’s new play “Cobb,” about Detroit Tigers hitter Ty Cobb, just closed at Yale Rep--directed by Richards--but the director’s strong relationships are not limited to playwrights he nurtures early in their careers. The circle of writers to whom he is closely bound both professionally and philosophically also includes South African playwright Athol Fugard.

When James Earl Jones was preparing for “Timon of Athens” at Yale, he got hold of a copy of Fugard’s “A Lesson From Aloes,” and told Richards he wanted to do it. Richards called Fugard, the writer came here to direct it, and the play launched a longtime collaboration that has since led to world premieres of both “‘Master Harold’ . . . and the Boys” and “The Road to Mecca.” Fugard, who now divides his time between South Africa and New Haven, once told the New York Times that “Lloyd’s words have given me the courage to go on.”

Richards, whose father died when he was 9, is not unaware of his role as nurturer: “As a director I found I had to be the person who brought the food to the edge of the nest and fed the bird and ultimately brought the bird to the point where he could fly. As the actor you got your pleasure from soaring and as the director you got your pleasure from watching the bird soar.”

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Born in Toronto and raised in Detroit, Richards finished college, worked as a disc jockey for a while and headed off to New York where he soon established himself as an actor and acting teacher. James Earl Jones was once his understudy, director George Roy Hill built sets with him, and Sidney Poitier shared a hot dog with him when neither of the two men could afford an entire one.

Then, in the late ‘50s, Poitier brought him together with Hansberry on “Raisin.” Richards had worked for a while as a waiter in Paramount’s executive dining room--a very useful job, he recalls, which he could do in the middle of making actor rounds--and tells how he once heard that Paramount founder Adolph Zukor remarked: “You know that waiter that used to be around here? He went off and directed a Broadway play.”

He didn’t direct just any Broadway play either. A landmark play depicting black domestic life, “Raisin” foreshadowed the theater of substance which has become Richards’ trademark. His playwrights are often writing works where box office success is as surprising as it is pleasing. Even Carole Shorenstein Hays, the San Francisco producer who financed “Fences,” admits her surprise at its financial success.

After all these years in the business, Richards still clearly reveres the man or woman who can turn language into magic. “A major playwright is a genius. Playwrighting is one of the most--if not the most--difficult art forms. It is exacting, demanding, unforgiving, unyielding. You have a compressed period of time--approximately two hours or less--and you have to hold attention, engage, and involve (your audience) in what you have created. It’s got to engage continually. But that’s not all--you’ve got to say something worth saying.”

It was both his passion for playwrighting and his administrative skill which led O’Neill founder White to tap Richards as artistic director in 1967. Richards added his Yale assignments in 1979 when then Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti (now commissioner of baseball) invited him to succeed Robert Brustein. There, says White, “he had a forum, a platform, a context that all of us who admired him forever had wanted him to have. All of that wisdom now has a context in which to be articulated to the theatrical community. He has a bigger playing field.”

But it all still starts at the O’Neill. While at least a dozen plays in the last eight or nine years have moved from the O’Neill to Yale, says Richards, he guesses there were almost as many he wanted that other producers got to first. (Producers, including Richards, can’t make deals with playwrights until after the conference ends.) “ ‘The theater’ is interested in new work, never know where they’ll find it and know we go to a lot of pain to find it. So they come and see what we’ve got.”

Shubert executives go to both the O’Neill and Yale regularly, says chairman Schoenfeld, as do other potential producers from both the nonprofit and commercial sectors. Past president of both the Theatre Development Fund and Theatre Communications Group (two major nonprofit theater support groups), Richards probably knows most of the audience.

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What is happening here at Yale is largely an extension of what’s been happening all over the country in recent years. The old Philadelphia/New Haven tryout system to Broadway has been largely replaced by plays begun and nurtured in regional theater.

But don’t peg Yale or its counterparts around the country as tryout houses for Broadway. “When we start on this, we have no idea if there will ever be a commercial production,” says Yale Rep managing director Benjamin Mordecai. “Nor do any of the hosts we work with. That isn’t the goal. The goal is to see how much we can do on this temporal production, this play. The commercial theater is about product, which it should be, but what we’re discussing is process.”

Call it “production sharing,” suggests Mordecai, referring to the process by which Wilson’s plays have matured not just in rehearsal rooms but on stage as well. Instead of losing interest in plays that originated elsewhere, regional theaters in several cities have been willing to restage Wilson’s work in order to help it evolve. They’ve learned, says Mordecai, “that it takes nothing away from the host theater to provide an opportunity for distinguished artists like August and Lloyd.”

The advantages to the play are obvious. “Everyone gets in deeper,” says Mordecai. “One of the things so noticeable in August’s plays and the way Lloyd develops them is that Lloyd brings the actor and role into tremendous synchronization. People say it is as if the roles were exactly written for the actors playing them. That’s a direct function of the actor and director working over time.”

Actor Delroy Lindo, nominated for a Tony for his work in “Joe Turner,” calls production sharing “invaluable.” His work, for example, “was always developing--what you got in New York was the culmination of the process. It was just a godsend to take this play around and rebuild it without the pressure of a New York production.”

San Diego’s O’Brien found the Old Globe’s experience with “Joe Turner” so rewarding, he immediately checked with Yale Rep when an unexpected spot opened in this year’s lineup. Says O’Brien: “All of us know that Lloyd has a slow and loyal trajectory and that, like those wines that are not sold before their time, he is not going to release a show before it is ready.”

“Piano Lesson,” for instance, is expected to have another run in regional theater, whether at the Doolittle or elsewhere, then go on to Broadway eventually, but nobody’s confirming anything. “I don’t think Lloyd has a master plan in terms of how long it will take them to finish their work,” says O’Brien. “He and August look at it, judge it, then decide what the next step is going to be.”

If timing works out like it did in San Diego, that’s great. But it doesn’t always happen that way. The Mark Taper Forum had hoped to do “The Piano Lesson” two seasons ago, says artistic director/producer Gordon Davidson, but it wasn’t the right time in the play’s development to try restaging it on the Taper’s thrust stage.

There will no doubt be other chances. Besides his work on a screenplay of “Fences,” playwright Wilson is writing another play in his cycle dealing with black America decade by decade through the 20th Century. Called “Two Trains Running,” it is set in Pittsburgh in 1968, and explores, among other things, the ideas of cultural separatism and assimilation.

It had been submitted to this year’s O’Neill conference, says Richards, but was withdrawn when Wilson didn’t have time to finish it.

But nobody’s rushing Wilson or Richards either. ‘We feel that we (are) nurturing a whole library of work that is deserving of sharing,” says O’Brien. “And it’s this remarkable journey of Lloyd and August that has begun to show us how this can work for all of us.”