She’s Captured the Fleeting, Temporary Nature of the Stage

Back in 1969, theater-lover Betty Corwin, concerned that so many great performances fade into mere memories when the show closes, came up with a plan to preserve them for posterity: Why not videotape them and create a permanent archive?

Approaching the head of what was then the New York Public Library’s performing arts research center, she got a less than resounding go-ahead. “He said you’ve got three months, a desk and a telephone,” Corwin recalled the other day. A salary? At the time, not a chance.

But 32 years and nearly 4,500 tapes and films later, Corwin is being honored in the highest currency of the theater world. On Sunday, she’ll receive a special Tony Award for excellence in theater as the founder and guiding--some might say relentless--spirit behind the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, a part of what is now the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

“The phone hasn’t stopped ringing” since word of the award got out, said Corwin, who retired as the archive’s director last September. She now is its director of special projects, a job that allows her to “look at the dogwoods” from her home office in Weston, Conn.

Just how well regarded is she in the theater?

“Betty Corwin is our resident heroine; she’s our Joan of Arc,” said Broadway director (and library trustee) Harold Prince, who was using the archive recently at its temporary quarters in Manhattan, while the performing arts library at Lincoln Center undergoes renovation.

Like Prince, more than 5,000 researchers--historians, journalists, scholars, students and theater people--from around the world use the archive each year. (But no, you can’t catch up there on the Broadway hit you missed; only specific, bona fide requests for viewing are honored.)

One of the more unusual visitors, Corwin recalled, was a priest who was giving a course at the University of Massachusetts on death and dying. “He watched a lot of things about AIDS, watched ‘Whose Life Is It Anyway?’ ” Corwin said.

A onetime theatrical production assistant and script reader, Corwin married a physician, moved to Connecticut, had three children. She engaged in human rights activities, volunteered in a hospital, and did “all those things you do when your kids are growing up.”

Finally, while applying for a hospital paraprofessional training program, Corwin came to the realization that “the most exciting time in my life was when I worked in the theater.”

About that time, she was discussing the theater’s evanescent nature with a theatrical agent, who replied that “Everybody talks about filming theater, and nobody does it.” With that, Corwin came up with a plan to document regular performances, “when everybody was already being paid for their work,” which would keep expenses down.

But the supposed three-month start-up turned into more than two years, as she negotiated with 10 leery theatrical guilds and unions. “Every union has its own concerns,” she said. “The musicians were concerned about piracy and misuse of audiotape. The Dramatists Guild was afraid of work being done without royalties to their members.”

The toughest were the stagehands, whose help would be needed to set up the equipment for tapings. With them, Corwin eventually negotiated a special pay arrangement that stands to this day.

Starting with off-Broadway, nonunion shows (the first, in 1970, was a Japanese rock musical called “The Golden Bat”), Corwin expanded to Broadway and regional theater over time. Professional video crews and equipment are used. But whether the show is recorded with one camera or more (a record five-camera crew was needed for “The Lion King”), the mission of the tapes is to document, rather than interpret--so no fancy dissolves, fades or other cinematic techniques are used.

And yes, she eventually got a salary, after the archive won a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Honors, too, have come her way, including an Obie and a Drama Desk Award, and now, the special Tony for excellence to her and the archive. (The award also goes to the New Dramatists playwright workshop and the annual reference book Theater World.)