Ellis Rabb; Stage Actor, Director Started National Theater Company

Ellis Rabb, the eclectic, multitalented stage actor and director who founded the influential Assn. of Producing Artists repertory company as a pioneering national theater in the 1960s, has died. He was 67.

Rabb, whose company summered at Los Angeles’ Huntington Hartford (now Doolittle) Theatre, died Sunday of heart failure in a hospital in his native Memphis, Tenn.

Well established in New York, Rabb took his troupe coast to coast and was a fixture in California theater as well.

In addition to staging his revival Broadway hit “You Can’t Take It With You” and many other plays at the Huntington Hartford, Rabb also offered his extravagant “War and Peace” at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre.

As actor, director and playwright, Rabb graced San Diego’s Old Globe for nearly three decades. He appeared there as Prospero in “The Tempest,” Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” and Jacques in “As You Like It.” He also directed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “The Tempest” and “Anthony and Cleopatra.”

“Clap Your Hands,” a play Rabb wrote about Peter Pan undergoing a midlife crisis, was performed at the Old Globe in 1983. He said he started writing the play to deal with his own midlife crisis--turning 40, a divorce, the end of his APA.

Born in Memphis, Rabb attended the Carnegie Tech drama school in Pittsburgh and soon was working steadily in off-Broadway theaters.

“I started out to be an actor. I became a director out of self-defense, out of frustration with the direction I found,” he told The Times in 1966.

Also out of frustration with American theater of that day, Rabb, his then-wife, British actress Rosemary Harris, and about 70 theatrical friends met in 1960 to organize a workshop that became the APA. They were an itinerant group, performing Shakespeare in Bermuda, Boston, Princeton and Milwaukee--inadvertently pioneering a sort of national theater.

Within a couple of years, they were in New York, performing “The School for Scandal,” “The Seagull” and “The Tavern” off-Broadway. Based in Ann Arbor, Mich., and eventually combining with the Phoenix Theater, the APA had many seasons in New York, particularly after staging “You Can’t Take It With You,” a Broadway smash that filled its coffers.

Despite its artistic and financial success, the repertory group disbanded in 1969 after its final production of “Hamlet.”

Among Rabb’s awards were two Tonys, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the OBIE and the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

In recent years, Rabb had been working on his autobiography, titled “Spilt Milk.”