Welcome to Big Play Country

When the Alley Theater celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, this city’s premier theatrical venue was largely hailed as one of the preeminent resident theaters in America. The year before it had even won a special Tony Award to celebrate just that distinction. But there was lingering criticism that the theater had failed to introduce new plays by promising young playwrights either on its large 824-seat main stage or on the smaller 296-seat experimental space. Sure, the Alley has showcased cutting-edge works by the likes of Robert Wilson, Tony Kushner and Edward Albee and has startled some of its more conservative subscribers with edgy, button-pushing interpretations of classics, including a 1989 “Measure for Measure” that one critic claimed was inpired by “rock videos, kabuki theater, S&M; fantasies and circuses.” It had even helped to develop the Frank Wildhorn musical “Jekyll & Hyde,” which eventually reached Broadway, albeit in a radically different form. And in 1995, two of its works--Wilson’s “Hamlet” and a new production of Kushner’s “Angels in America”--were featured at Italy’s Venice Biennale. But where was the nurturing of new American drama that has long been the purview of regional theaters?

Well, last month the Alley finally rounded out its presence by presenting a new play by a very promising 28-year-old playwright. The American premiere of “Not About Nightingales,” a searing prison drama set in the 1930s, was something of a coup for the theater. A co-production with Britain’s Royal National Theatre (where the show premiered last March) and London’s Moving Theatre (headed by Vanessa Redgrave and her brother, Corin), the play was directed by National artistic director Trevor Nunn and received strong notices from both local and national press and in all likelihood will be heading to Broadway next season.

Even so, the Alley’s high-profile success with “Not About Nightingales” is unlikely to still criticism of its lack of risk-taking on behalf of unknown dramatists--after all, the “promising” 28-year-old playwright is Tennessee Williams and the play was a newly rediscovered, never-before-produced work that Vanessa Redgrave brought to the attention of Gregory Boyd, the Alley’s artistic director.

Boyd says that while he’s certainly not averse to developing new plays, the reputation of the theater he has headed since 1989 does not lie in that direction. What he hopes typifies the Alley and its choice of plays is what immediately struck him about Williams’ work when Redgrave tossed an envelope on his desk in 1996, shortly after she had finished appearing, in repertory, in “Antony and Cleopatra” (which she also directed) and “Julius Caesar,” a co-production of the Alley and the Moving Theatre Company. Inside the envelope was a manuscript of one of Williams’ first full-length plays, written in 1938, seven years before the Broadway production of “The Glass Menagerie” would catapult him to the front ranks.

“Vanessa was watching me like a hawk as I read it,” recalls Boyd, sitting in his cool, austere, windowless office at the Alley while outside Houston baked in steamy summer heat. “By Page 3, I got excited. It embraced a huge, visceral theatricality, which is something you don’t see a lot of from a man who is writing in his late 20s. Tennessee Williams wasn’t afraid to write this big play with a big cast about a big subject. I knew immediately that we would have to do it.” Producing the “theater theatrical” is how Boyd describes the Alley’s mandate, borrowing the phrase from Bill Ball, the late, flamboyant one-time artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, whom he describes as a mentor.

“When I arrived here, I knew I wanted to create theater that could exist only on the stage, theater that wasn’t trying to do what movies and television do better, perhaps,” recalls the 46-year-old artistic director. “I wanted a theater that would get up people’s noses.”

Founded in 1947 by Nina Vance in a downtown dance studio, the Alley steadily gained a reputation over the years for producing serious theater--classics as well as American dramas by the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Lillian Hellman. The theater, which moved into its current fortress-like home of glass and concrete in the 1960s, also had the distinction of helping to develop such plays as Paul Zindel’s “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” which went on to win a Pulitzer in 1971, and for presenting the American premiere of British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s “Seasons Greetings” in 1984. But by the late ‘80s, the Alley had fallen into an artistic fallow period and was saddled with a crushing $2.5 million deficit. The board fired Pat Brown, Vance’s successor, and successfully wooed Boyd away from StageWest in Massachusetts, where he found himself after stints as both actor and director at San Francisco’s ACT, the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts and the University of North Carolina.

“They had been doing what [set designer] Boris Aronson calls ‘plays about relatives’ and it’s not that I don’t like them, but I just don’t do them very often,” says Boyd. “So the first thing I wanted to do was to expand the repertoire. Personally and selfishly, I’m blessed with a catholicity of taste. I like all different kinds of theater, and that’s what we set out to do from the beginning.”

Indeed, Boyd has expressed such eclecticism in seasonal offerings that range from Agatha Christie mysteries and annual productions of “A Christmas Carol” to radical reinterpretations of Brecht’s “In the Jungle of Cities” and a cycle of Greek tragedies, as well as Kushner’s “Slavs!” and “Angels in America” and Terrence McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!”

Though Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States, with an increasingly cosmopolitan population of about 4 million, it might not be considered a place receptive to the leftist politics of “Angels” or to McNally’s play about gay life, which features full nudity. In fact, in 1990, when the Alley chose to produce Arthur Kopit’s “Road to Nirvana,” a parody of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-plow” with a plethora of obscene words and situations, the posters for the show carried the warning, “Caution: This play contains nudity, profanity, blasphemy, sexual activity and situations. Not recommended for people easily offended.” The show immediately sold out.

“Houston has an audience with a very much let’s-try-it-on attitude,” says Boyd. “For all the idea out there that it’s a very conservative place, I don’t think it is at all in its relationship to the performing arts or the arts in general. I think David Gockley [artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera] trail-blazed that in the ‘70s, doing these radical productions of new opera. And then there’s the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel, which has brought challenging contemporary art to Houston. So I think the audiences here are very open.”

Still, Boyd said that his first two seasons at the Alley were intended to be “diagnostic,” to see what Houston “could take and could not take.” His calling card was what he describes as a “wild ass” rock-’n’-roll production of “Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare’s mordant tale of a sexually repressive leader who hypocritically tries to legislate morality in his duchy while seducing a beautiful young nun.

The director’s contemporary conceit for the play, which opened with partially nude, leather-clad men in prison, was inspired by the police crackdown on bathhouses in Boyd’s native San Francisco. Indeed, the production won the distinction of being named “the kinkiest Shakespeare of the season” by USA Today and drew a respectful notice from the Houston Chronicle for its “emotional validity.”

It also threw a lot of noses out of joint, particularly in a community in which, as Boyd points out, a Southern-style politeness tends to mask people’s true feelings about hot issues. When he first arrived, he received many letters of complaint, mostly concerning the fact that teens in the audience were wearing jeans and tennis shoes. He later learned that people also would get more upset about strong, well-articulated political points of view, such as those in Kushner’s plays, than about the full frontal nudity in “Love! Valour!”

Boyd obviously relishes making traditionalists bristle and cultivating his “bad boy” image. After all, this is a guy who, in directing the 1996 cycle of ancient Greek plays, cast himself as the Sun God Apollo and made his entrance wearing shades and a pin-striped suit and affecting the sneering arrogance of a Mafioso chieftain. Occasionally the more outrageous gimmicks have led some critics to charge Boyd with a “vulgarization” of the classics, saying he uses cheap, manipulative effects for the sake of shock value.

“I think it’s fine to jazz up a Shakespeare script if the production is done convincingly, if the core of the story remains more important than the embellishments,” says Everett Evans, lead critic for the Houston Chronicle. “But some of those elements have gotten out of control, too over the top, and swamped the productions. Actually, one of the best classics which Boyd directed was Chekhov’s ‘The Three Sisters’ and that was done straight, without jazzing it up.”

Boyd defends his more unorthodox choices as an attempt, at least in part, to make theater, particularly the classics, more accessible to the mainstream public. While he counts among his heroes such avant-garde theater directors as Peter Brook, Tyrone Guthrie and Ariane Mnouchkine, he also says that he has been just as influenced by film directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. “They are able to meld experimental, very avant-garde ideas and techniques into a popular piece of art,” he says.

“Look, we grew up on movies and television; we know technology is changing entertainment and performance, and the theater has to get hip to that if it’s not to atrophy into some toothless, genteel dinosaur.”

Puffing on an ever-present cigarette, the ash occasionally falling on his all-black outfit, the silver-haired, blue-eyed Boyd adds, “I’m a firm believer that everyone should go to the theater--the PhD in comparative literature and the people who normally go to tractor pulls. We think of our audience as the same people who go to the movies. But you have to make it appealing for them to come. The productions have to be relevant and surprising and well done.” Certainly, the sound financial health of the theater seems to indicate that Boyd has been doing something right. Due largely to the efforts of Paul R. Tetreault, the Alley’s young managing director who came to the theater four years ago after working at the Berkeley Rep and Madison Square Garden, the theater has reduced its one-time formidable deficit to zero two years ahead of schedule. Its endowment stands at an impressive $22 million (“It ranks among the top five of resident theaters,” says Tetreault--by comparison, the L.A.’s Center Theatre Group, which encompasses both the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre, has an endowment of $24.5 million, while the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis has more than $43 million) and 51% of its annual budget is accounted for through box-office revenues.

Though some subscribers bailed out when Boyd took over, the tally of subscriptions now stands at 17,000 (the Taper has a subscription base of 22,000, the Guthrie has 21,800). “The theater is the healthiest it has ever been in its history,” says Tetreault, giving a lot of credit to the civic-mindedness of Houston society and their Texas-sized ambition to have the “best of everything--but in their own way.”

Such largess has given the theater a lot of clout in inviting high-caliber associate artists to work there, in part because the Alley is one of the few companies in the country to maintain a dozen actors on year-round contracts that pay, on average, about $1,000 per week. Among those actors is James Black, a 39-year-old Houstonian who has been with the company for more than 10 years and who has played such diverse roles as Schlink in Brecht’s “In the Jungle of the Cities,” Jack in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and the combative super-con Butch in “Not About Nightingales.”

“I can’t imagine anywhere else an actor could have the variety of experiences I’ve had, including working with Trevor Nunn and the Royal National Theatre at the Cottlesoe in London on ‘Nightingales,’ ” says the actor. “So much about being an actor in America is defining an image and cultivating that image. But being in a modified rep company is all about metamorphosis and re-inventing yourself every six or eight weeks.”

With its deep pockets, the theater has been successful in attracting writers and directors like Albee, Wilson, the Redgraves and Wildhorn, among others, to work with the company. Of course, few other resident theaters could invest the $500,000 it took to fund Wilson’s “Hamlet: A Monologue,” giving the mercurial perfectionist director the luxury of time, real estate and pressure-less environment afforded few theater artists. “We’re in the middle of the country, so we have to bring our influences to us as opposed to finding them on the next block,” says Boyd.

While expressing some dissatisfaction with the homogeneity of the Alley’s mostly “upper-economic, upper-middle-class, upper-middle-aged, mostly white audiences,” Albee praises the theater for providing him with the opportunity to direct and develop productions of his plays as well as some by Beckett--and staying out of his way. (He will direct his “American Dream” and “Zoo Story” at the Alley in February 1999.)

“They don’t celebrate my birthday or invite me to reunions, but it is an artistic home, I suppose,” says Albee, adding that he is still waiting for a long-promised commission for a new work. “I’ve probably had more plays done there over the past 15 years than anywhere else, so I get a lot of exposure in Houston, which is very nice, and since I teach at the University of Houston each spring, I don’t have to travel, which is even nicer. I wish they had younger audiences, but then no theater has a younger audience.”

In 1990, the theater took some hits from critics when it undertook to develop in workshop its first musical, the bombastic Wildhorn melodrama “Jekyll & Hyde,” starring Linda Eder and Bob Cuccioli. Many questioned whether any serious nonprofit theater should be producing a show that was clearly intended for a commercial run. But Boyd defended the decision, saying that he was eager to see if the physical theater could respond to the needs of a new musical, and besides, many Broadway-bound musicals had first been developed in regional theater. The show, directed by Boyd, was a big hit with the Alley audience and the show toured nationally for two years, gaining fans even as it was drubbed by the critics. But just before it was to open in New York, Boyd was replaced by Robin Phillips. “The decision was made, and I was part of that decision, to make it more palatable to what is customarily thought of as Broadway,” says the director, somewhat diplomatically.

Boyd will direct some of the touring productions of the musical, and he isn’t shy about saying that he believes the initial workshop production at the Alley was the best of the many versions of “Jekyll & Hyde.” He says it had a “sexy rawness and rock-n-roll energy and theatricality” that has never been recaptured in subsequent productions. Wildhorn, who had never before set foot in a theater rehearsal room before coming to the Alley, agrees.

“To this day, that experience [at the Alley] remains my happiest time in the theater,” says the popular composer of Top 40 hits who since has opened “Scarlet Pimpernel” on Broadway. “As a young guy learning the craft, it gave me invaluable feedback,” says Wildhorn. “I learned that it was about the audience and how to convey your passions to them that mattered, and nothing else.” In fact, Wildhorn says, he wished that he could have developed “Scarlet Pimpernel” at the Alley rather than opening cold on Broadway. “If I had to do it over again, I would go there. It gives you a place away from so many agendas and prying eyes, and that’s really important.”

Boyd and Wildhorn followed “Jekyll & Hyde” with “Svengali,” which was not successful, but in September the team will premiere the composer’s newest show, “The Civil War,” billed as “an epic musical theater event.” Staged by Nick Corley and George Faison, the musical’s book by Boyd and Jack Murphy is culled from documents, letters, poems and other period ephemera. “It’s an attempt to express something that is very visceral, very soulful about this traumatic event in American history,” says Boyd. “It has a lot of that raw energy and exciting creative juice which was in that first production of ‘Jekyll & Hyde.’ ”

In other words, it’s another example of “the theater theatrical”--a term that equally applies to other offerings in the upcoming season, including new productions of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive,” Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” Moises Kaufman’s “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” Shaw’s “Misalliance” and, of course, that old chestnut “A Christmas Carol.” But still no new drama?

Boyd grimaces. “I think to do a new play just to do a new play means that nine times out of 10, you do a bad play,” he says. “But, yes, I think we have to commission new works from new playwrights and give it the cultivation time that it needs. I think if you embrace the idea of a company, then you embrace the idea of new playwrighting, creating roles specifically for that group of actors.”

Pointing out that the Alley has hosted the American premieres of a dozen works since 1989--though mostly by relatively established playwrights--Boyd adds, “I used to have a sign in my office a few years ago that said, ‘It’s good plays, stupid.’ It still is about that, and the artists who work here and the variety of what we offer.

“Houston is a city in which 74 different languages are spoken. How do you get that kind of representation in your audience? It’s tough. But I believed when I came here--and I still believe it--if the plays are good, if they have something to say about how we live in a provocative and surprising way, then the people will keep coming back for more.”