Randall’s Dream Comes True : National Theatre Caps Lifetime Goal

It was the first public performance of the National Actors Theatre. Martin Sheen was ready. Michael York was ready. But Fritz Weaver had laryngitis and couldn’t go on.

Just before “The Crucible” was to begin on Tuesday evening, Tony Randall went onstage to tell the packed Belasco Theatre audience about Weaver’s unexpected illness. And when Weaver’s character, Deputy Gov. Danforth, made his appearance in the second act, Randall was playing the part.

So what if the understudy was bypassed this time and Randall read from a script. After all, it was the first preview of Randall’s theater company. After decades of talk about starting a national theater troupe, the TV, film and stage actor had actually pulled it off.

Arthur Miller’s Tony-winning 1953 play about the Salem witch hunt kicks off the National Actors Theatre’s three-play inaugural season. Sheen, who considers Miller one of his “all-time heroes,” chose the play, and First Lady Barbara Bush is honorary chairwoman of tonight’s Founders’ Night premiere.

Sheen, who plays doomed farmer John Proctor, says “The Crucible” is “the one play I should have done 15 years ago,” and Randall has been waiting even longer to launch his theater company. The 71-year-old actor swears he’s been thinking about it since he left the Neighborhood Playhouse School 50 years ago, and few people who know Randall can remember a time he wasn’t talking about a national theater.

“A lot of people think I’m just a talker,” says Randall, founder and artistic director of the new company. “It took millions of dollars and I had to go out and raise it. The longer it took, the more people thought I was a flake.”

National theaters don’t just happen, after all. Randall envisions an American company along the lines of France’s Comedie-Francaise, the Moscow Art Theatre and Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company--no small undertaking.

“Our mission is to build a great acting company and present great plays at a price that families can afford,” Randall says. “People ask if there’s an audience for it, and my argument is we imported the Royal Shakespeare Company 35 times. We always walk out saying, ‘Gee, they’re good. Why aren’t we doing that?’ ”

Plenty of other people have asked--and answered--that same question. An act of Congress established the American National Theatre and Academy in 1935, and such organizations as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Washington’s Kennedy Center have tried to sustain world-class repertory companies presenting classic theater.

Nor is Randall the first American actor who has tried to organize his colleagues. New York’s APA/Phoenix sponsored a Broadway repertory company in the ‘60s, for instance, while in the ‘70s came SOLAR--the Society of Loose Actors Revolving--which brought such actors as Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Maureen Stapleton and Weaver together in what Weaver describes as “hot little rooms to discuss how we were going to revolutionize the theater.”

With the regional theater movement in the ‘60s came a different sort of “national” theater, a tapestry of not-for-profit producing centers from New York and Washington to Minneapolis, Dallas and Los Angeles. People and productions travel among those theaters, which, over time, have become prime providers of Broadway fare as well.

Despite all this, Randall kept plugging his dream, trying to put together the people, plays, theater and cash that would create a sort-of super-repertory company presenting season after season of classic literature.

Activity accelerated a few years ago when Randall brought in a theatrical production and management firm to figure out feasibility, budgets and such. Then, earlier this year, the Shubert Organization came through with the frequently dark, 1,032-seat Belasco Theatre, offering it to Randall “practically for nothing.”

Randall has also drawn together some of the most recognizable names in show business, ranging from this year’s Sheen and York, to promised future appearances by Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Lauren Bacall and others. Rob Lowe, Lynn Redgrave and Randall will headline the season’s second play, Georges Feydeau’s farce “A Little Hotel on the Side,” directed by Tom Moore. Earle Hyman stars in the third play, Henrik Ibsen’s “The Master Builder,” which Randall will direct. (Israeli director Yossi Yzraely makes his New York theater debut with “The Crucible.”)

Last summer, the fledgling institution took over the Belasco one evening for a benefit performance featuring Randall and Jack Klugman reprising their TV success in Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.” The play was followed by a party at the Pierre Hotel where Bill Cosby entertained and, says Randall, the event took in $1.2 million, netted $750,000 and “was a big help in getting it rolling.”

As rehearsals for “The Crucible” came to a close earlier this month, a contented-looking Randall roamed the sixth floor of a mid-town office building, talking to a reporter in one room, checking on rehearsals in another, schmoozing with production staff and actors up and down the halls. Readily available to print and TV journalists, actors and staff people have fed a marketing frenzy that netted an amazing 28,000 subscribers in just five weeks.

There are 27 actors (including six understudies) in “The Crucible” and even more will appear in the Feydeau farce. A dozen core actors--including Maryann Plunkett, Madeline Potter and George Martin--will appear in all three productions.

“I don’t think anybody connected with the theater can wish him anything less than 2,000% of good fortune,” says Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg. Broadway’s theatrical lineup these days is a shadow of its former self, and Azenberg concedes that “the biggest fear we have is that it will fail. Are those projects attractive enough to draw audiences to sustain that kind of theater? One can only hope that he’s successful, because a national theater is at least one way of resuscitating the American theater.”

The company’s first season is no showstopper, after all. “The Crucible” is a great play but a frequently produced one. Film and TV stars have long played Broadway, and this season alone, other producers have assembled such blockbuster packages as Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Yet Randall has some impressive aspirations. He won’t take on Shakespeare for six or seven years, he says--”Shakespeare is difficult. You have to build a company equal to that--”but next year’s candidates include works by 17th-Century Spanish playwright Calderon and 19th-Century Russian dramatist Ostrovsky as well as “another American classic I’m not going to tell you about--I don’t want anybody else to do it.”

When subscriptions went on sale in early September, Randall hoped to sell 10,000 but sold 28,000--half the 56,000 seats available for each run. Executive producer Manny Kladitis puts the National Actors Theatre average ticket price at $28, compared with Broadway averages today of $40 to $45, and student seats are $10 at every performance.

Subscription income represents about $2.3 million of their first-year $6.8-million budget, says Kladitis, with another $300,000 attributable to individual ticket sales. The remainder comes from private gifts, which include $1 million from Randall, $1 million from New York’s Pels Foundation, assorted corporate gifts and hundreds of individual gifts ranging from $10 to $25,000. (After its first season, says Kladitis, the company will qualify for many government grants.)

Randall plans to do Los Angeles fund-raising next spring, he says, after the season closes. He is also considering a repeat of “The Odd Couple” benefit on the West Coast, perhaps next summer. “I’ve asked heads of studios and haven’t gotten one penny,” Randall says when asked about Hollywood givers. “I’ll have to go to every office, like I’ve done in New York, and shame them into giving the money.”

Kladitis says they’ve already been asked about taking the company to theaters in Dublin and Amsterdam and notes inquiries from arts organizations in St. Louis, Philadelphia and Cleveland. “We’re attempting to do something (about touring) this season,” he says, “ but I don’t know if we can do it quickly enough.”

Sheen, meanwhile, is hoping to direct a play for the company next season, and Randall is thinking even further ahead. Besides hoping to extend next year’s season to five plays over an eight-month season, the actor-turned-impresario looks forward to a year-round company with two theaters. And, he continues, “we must have a school and a playwrighting program.”

The idea of a national theater is a “very exciting notion,” says Weaver. “I’ve lived long enough to see a lot of them rise and fall. But Tony is a fanatic and that’s what it takes to get it going. I have hopes for this one.”