The Theatre of the Living Arts seems to have the ideal ingredients. An 8,000 subscription audience is contracted to support it through the failures that must occur. And a responsible board of directors understands that the maintenance of high professional standards will always require subsidy from them. But what lifts this theatre's potential above that of most is its clearly visible commitment to arrive at a point of view about its work. Saturday Review

If the present production of Sheridan's "The Critic" is typical of the quality maintained by the Theatre of the Living Arts, then this company in the Philadelphia slums is serving its audience and its art - extremely well. At the Theatre of the Living Arts, the actors seem to share very largely the same level of artistic attainment - and that level is gratifyingly high. The Seattle Times

In Philadelphia, at the Theatre of the Living Arts, I saw a production by André Gregory of Anouilh's "Poor Bitos" which was infinitely more interesting than the productions in London and New York. The New York Times

It isn't necessary to wait to hail the accomplishments of the Theatre of the Living Arts. It has given this city something it badly lacked, a center for serious drama performed at a high level of excellence. In an astonishingly short period, Living Arts has leap-frogged into national prominence. The achievements of the theatre and its company make it the equal of any (and the superior of most) similarly constituted companies in America.

The big difference is that it has taken other regional theatres many more years to reach the maturity Living Arts is already expressing. The Theatre of the Living Arts is already a permanent and valued part of our cultural life. The Sunday Bulletin

The Theatre started with zeal and on the note of quality , the enthusiasm has increased and the quality has followed an ascending graph. The Philadelphia Inquirer

What the future holds none of us can say but the Theatre of the Living Arts was the most important and most significant event of the theatre year and, perhaps, of the decade ahead. The Philadelphia Bulletin

GREGORY AGREES TO FINISH SEASON

André Gregory, artistic director of Philadelphia's Theatre of the Living Arts, who suspended his activities Friday as a result of differences with the board, said yesterday that he would resume his duties, but only until the end of this season.

Originally, Mr. Gregory, whose three-year contract expired in the spring of 1968, said, "My decision is not based on personalities, but on my lack of faith in the existence of a free, artistic atmosphere in which to work. And a lack of faith in the ability of the board's leadership to function effectively and efficiently in support of the theatre- artistically and economically."

Replying to Mr. Gregory's charges, Thomas Fleming, the board's president, said: "I don't feel there is any merit to Mr. Gregory's allegations. The facts will not bear him out."

According to Mr. Gregory, the central issue is money. He pointed out that the board was low in funds and that it did not feel able to sustain the theatre on the standard that had been set by him.

A campaign to raise $300,000 is under way. The sum of $60,000 is required to finish this season, $150,000 to wipe out past debts, and $90,000 to be applied to the season ahead.

Only two plays of this seasons program of six remain to be done. They are a revival of the play, "U.S.A.", to be staged by Harold Stone, and Robert Lowell's version of "Phaedra." The latter will be directed by Mr. Gregory with a cast headed by Diana Sands. The current attraction, staged by Mr. Stone, is "The Time of Your Life."

David Lunney, managing director, resigned on Feb. 10. His duties have been temporarily assumed by John Bos, public-relations director.

There's a sick, sad joke going around the country: regional theatre directors are pouring into New York looking for a little security on Broadway. I'm writing this in Los Angeles, three thousand miles from my theatre, and I'm feeling sorry for myself. I feel sorry for myself because after starting the Theatre of the Living Arts in a Philadelphia slum which the burghers assured me no self-respecting Philadelphian (white, not black) would enter, after working in that theatre for three years, after seeing our subscription audience climb to 9,000, after putting $6,000 of my own salary back into productions (for what I considered artistic necessities), after keeping a basic company together for three years, after presenting 15 productions of which 13 were box-office successes and seven artistic successes, after the theatre gained national recognition and a large grant from the National Endowment- after all that my Board of Directors put the gun to my head and fired.

And I'm furious. Howard Taubman, with the best intentions I'm sure, wrote that perhaps it would have been better for me to wait before producing plays like Rochelle Owen's Beclch ( a new American play which raised a furor in Philadelphia). Wait until the Board was ready, until the community was ready.

Well listen, Mr. Taubman, and listen, Board across the country: the theatre is about life and the waters outside the theatres are troubled. We're dropping bombs on children in Vietnam.

But Philadelphia isn't ready for a play with the theme of violence. Is Philadelphia ready for the violence in its own streets? Should we wait for violence to subside, if it will, and do nothing meanwhile? Wait to do the new plays until the writers have become so discouraged from not having their plays done that they are no longer playrights? If we wait until communities are "ready", the regional theatre will disintegrate; it is already so badly compromised that most theatres have lost their integrity and their contact with the world around them.

The real causes of my dismissal were artistic policy, money, and communication problems, in that order. The Board and I were both working to create a theatre in Philadelphia. The difficulty was that we were trying to create two different kinds of theatre.

Two years ago I directed Endgame . It was on of our finest productions. When it was revived at Yale this year it was a tremendous success both at the box-office and critically. But when it first played in Philadelphia the critics disliked it and the main line hated it; 60% of our subscription audience walked out each night. Last year I directed Poor Bitos . In one scene a naked breast was exposed. The Board President was nervous, but sanctioned the scene; the police came every night. The audience loved the production and the police loved the breast. This year, after consulting with the Board President, who disliked the play but liked my production ideas, I optioned Beclch , our first now full-length American play. And the shit the fan.

The play is a violent, sexual, political piece set in Africa. The main line conservatives were up in arms. Some moved to have the production stopped. I was attacked at a Board meeting for wanting "to make the theatre into a theatre of sex and violence," as one who wanted to "fill the theatre with homosexuals, drug addicts, and college students." The conservatives said that I wasn't doing plays which represented the tastes of the community. I pointed out, perhaps undiplomatically, that there wasn't a Negro on the Board (in a city with 600,000 negroes), that the main line couldn't possibly represent the community. They went out and got a Negro for the Board. The furor over Beclch grew. Contractually the Board had the right to veto any play but could not veto one new American play of my choice each season. However, since there was such a furor, I decided to hold a meeting with the Board to discuss Beclch . I spoke for two hours and thought the meeting was a success. I was wrong. I hadn't read the signals correctly.

On the opening night of Beclch two leading numbers of the Board were appalled. Several days later a Board member with a large, local foundation in his pocket resigned. (A year ago, one of the most influential Board members, revolted by Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis , walked out of the show and reneged on a $20,000 pledge. This year he resigned from the Board because of Beclch .) A play reading committee was reactivated by the Board for next season.

The local reviews for Beclch were bad and the box-office was dead. But then reviews from New Jersey, New Haven, Wilmington, and New York began to turn the tide. The audience began to build. In the fifth week of the run, Beclch did nearly as well as Room Service , our most popular play. The capper was the Time review, a rave. Ten days after receiving this good-housekeeping seal of approval, I was fired.

What does all this mean? Artistic Directors and Boards of Directors have to get along. An artistic director has to be diplomatic. It was no accident that Beclch was squeezed in between Room Service and The Time of Your Life . At the same time, Artistic Directors must have the right to touch the nerve of their communities, to deal with social and political issues, to go all the way with production styles. Boards of directors have to be reorganized. They can no longer be main liners only; the poor, the intellectuals, the politicians, the artists, the students should also be on the Board. Repertories should be developed that stretch tastes, that span many interests in the community.

Ideally, Philadelphia should have five permanent theatres, each one with a specific point of view relating to a specific audience supported by a Board which strongly underwrites that point of view. But this is clearly impossible today. Therefore, there must be a lot of give-and-take. The Time of Your Life for one part of the audience; Beclch for another. Too often our regional theatres are dominated by the taste of the Board and this taste, though it represents money and a certain social milieu, is in no way representative of the entire community. Most of the community stays away from the theatre simply because it does not like what is done there.

A permanent professional theatre is the only place where good artistic work is possible. And no permanent theatre is without its troubles. But all of us (artists, boards, foundations) must stop jumping blindly at the bait. We must re-examine the structure and goals of the regional theatre. We must wonder whether subscription audiences maintain or strangle a theatre. What does each of us want and what is the best way for each to get it? There must be great patience and great logic if the regional theatre is to survive. And if it does not survive, and there are no more permanent theatres, there will be no theatres at all.

The June TDR came yesterday. I'm sorry you never found pictures for my piece, but then I suppose you're sorry I never did. But that's not the point of this letter.

It's André Gregory's "comment." You certainly have a simplistic view of life if you accept that account as the account. Perhaps an incipient regional theatre movement has to have villains (Boards, an apathetic public, local critics) and heroes (committed directors), but I doubt really if much good comes from viewing the complicated world of regional theatre in blacks and whites. It was, after all, the burghers, not Gregory, who went into the slum and found the theatre (he came after it was chosen), although the particular burghers who found it were later moved out. I find the image somewhat ludicrous in any case -Gregory on the barricades of artistic freedom, asking us to look at his favorable review in Time magazine.

I was sorry to see Gregory go because he was lively and pugnacious (professionally-I do not know him personally) and his presence assured a certain amount of fireworks from South Street. I was even sorrier to see George Sherman go (he had directed the best production to date-The Last Analysis ) and David Hurst go (he was the best actor in the company), and presumably their going had a great deal more to do with Gregory than it did with the Board. Show folks (as the scripts to old cowboy movies used to call them) are notoriously impossible and I would not dare to guess who was right and who was wrong in the riffs downtown, but I do know that a Board is not the only disruptive element in a theatre. As for Beclch being the cause for AG's going, I would look closer. As so often happens in regional theatres, it is more likely to be money rather than the program that sends a director flying.

Money is tied up with programming, and the whole concept of regional theatre, it is true, but the immediate cause of Gregory's going was a management crisis during which he took a really very weasly-wordy stand and had his bluff called. He does make it sound as if he came home with Beclch in his arms, and the Board pointed to the snow, saying "never darken my door again!"

As for the three shockers. Endgame . I didn't like the production myself (which is not surprising since I had directed it a few years earlier at Pen and so I was hung up on my reading of the play), although Hurst's performance was a tour de force. Audiences did walk out on it. There was much whining about Philistine audiences, but the only thing that can be done about them is to keep giving them good productions of good plays until they come around or until they are replaced by new audiences. No one has ever won an audience by shouting j'accuse .

Poor Bitos . That famous booby was an indulgence of Gregory's, a chi-chi touch which had nothing to do with the play. The production was good and the audience response showed it. In fact, at the end of 1965-66, with Bitos and Analysis , it looked as though the company would settle into a good one doing good plays.

Beclch . I gather there was a deal of opposition to the play, but the play was done, presumably with Board approval. It was not a very good play, a would-be shocker that was garrulous and soft-centered. The production (except for a guest dance company) was also bad. It opened with photo-and-light gimmicks, very total theatre-y, that reminded me of the kind of grass-hutty nightclub you used to get in Topeka and places like that (I've never been to Topeka but you know what I mean). I don't want to go into the production in detail (I understand you had accepted and then decided against a review from one of the students at Penn), but two points. One of the key scenes, a conversation in the bar between Beclch and the young man, was killed in Gregory's directing by being pushed to a little platform to make room for the dancers. The scene that might have been shocking - the sting of the raw bleeding flesh of it, as Arnold Weinstein might say. The people I know - my students, my colleagues - found the play ludicrous. An eminent poet, who came to see it on business (she's with some of the money- giving people) asked me at the first break: "Is it going to be this same, sadomasochistic crap all the way through?" I had read the script and so could answer yes.

Since Gregory was artistic director it was certainly, and justly, his job to do the plays he thought were worth doing. Still, I can't really take his view of things as the real one. The famous Beclch controversy (a good part of which was manufactured for publicity) looks this way to me: on one side, the conservative members of the Board complained: and on the other Gregory defended. The bone of contention, a mediocre play. What we then but an avant-garde Philistine confronting traditional Philistines, and who is caught in the middle? Those people who wanted good theatre.
Gerald Weales, Philadelphia

In T36, you introduced André Gregory's version of his expulsion from the theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia with the prediction that it would lead to "a long and difficult public colloquy."

For openers, let's correct a few factual errors. André Gregory was not founder of the Theatre of the living Arts. Louis Silverman and I purchased a derelict movie house in January, 1964, rehabilitated and equipped it with our own money and credit, organized a non-profit civic corporation as operating entity and leased the theatre to it at cost. Our wives personally supervised reconstruction, negotiated the Equity contract, called auditions in Philadelphia and New York, selected the five plays for out first season and cleared rights for production. Thirty-five community leaders formed the first Board of Directors, helped to fund the first season and elected me President.

We hired André Gregory originally to direct one play and assist in the fund-raising; he is an inspiring speaker. He is also a very ambitious young man. Very soon, the Board of Directors became factionalized, and the four founders of TLA withdrew from day-to-day supervision of the front office and ceded to Mr. Gregory complete power (not just artistic freedom, which we had already given him contractually).

The pose of Beleaguered Artist Persecuted By the Hostile astablishment ill suits Mr. Gregory: he created his own frankenstein's monster.

The Board of Directors which operated during my administration was broadly representative of all walks of life in our community. On it were knowledgable theatre professionals and Social Register matrons and Business executives and representatives of the professions and of various ethnic groups and the plumber and electrician who had contributed months of labor to create the theatre. After the coup in March, 1965, many of these people were ousted and replaced by Mr. Gregory's new Main Line Friends. From that point on, the Board provided unswerving, unquestioning, absolute support for Mr. Gregory despite mounting evidence of what I and the other founders thought erratic and irresponsible judgment.

Now this is the real issue, and the reason I believe serious theatre people should study what happened at TLA.

I argue that the cult of personality represented by the Artistic Director concept in regional theatres is dangerous at best, disastrous at worst. We have mourned the demise of theatres in Pittsburgh, Seattle, San Francisco (twice!) and Lincoln Center. Years ago, Ted Hoffman observed that "artistic directors of theatres do not develop sufficiently to meet the possibilities that the economic status of their theatre invites; they hesitate to make use of guest artists of greater ability than their own, they tend to lose actors who are critical of them for good reasons, and wind up associating the loyalty of mediocre actors with quality." (The most talented members of our original company left Mr. Gregory long before the blow-up: David Hurst, Ron Liebman, George Sherman, Wolfgang Roth. Not one of those who were loyal to Mr. Gregory have returned this season.) Hoffman also said: "Directors in resident theatre must recognize the need to be successful in meeting audience demand."

Well, Philadelphia does not demand Beclch or Dream of Love or other refuges from Judson Poets' Theatre in New York. Less than half of the 8,000 subscribers we painfully built up in two years of parlor parties have rejoined this year.

Mr. Gregory says: "Too often our regional theatres are dominated by the taste of the Board and this taste, though it represents money and a certain social milieu, is in no way representative of the entire community. We must re-examine the structure and goals of the regional theatre. What does each of us want and what is the best way to get it?"

Mr. Gregory told our Board that he wanted to create a new kind of theatre, featuring plays of sex and violence and attracting a new kind of audience-homosexuals, drug addicts, and would be suicides. (As there were many witnesses to this similar expression of artistic philosophy, I doubt if Mr. Gregory will contradict me, though in his TDR piece he skillfully implied that theme, his own words, were an attack by an unsympathetic Board member.)

I objected strenuously to production of Beclch , not only because I thought it was sick, decadent, shock-for-shock's sake, (and dull) but because I knew it would alienate most of our subscribers into withdrawing their support. The Board backed Mr. Gregory.

When the play opened, every local critic panned it. Audiences walked out in disgust. But Mr. Gregory was not fired for these reasons. He was not fired even when influential members of the Board quit after they saw Beclch . No, Mr. Gregory was fired because he challenged the Board's authority to discharge David Lunney, the Managing Director, who had ignored all budgetary controls during his tenure, amassing a $250,000 debt despite grants totalling nearly $300,000 from Otto Haas and the National Endowment of the Arts. (Withholding taxes were diverted to subsidize lavish production budgets, leaving TLA with Federal tax liens exceeding $40,000 while Gregory and Lunney pursue their careers in Los Angeles..)

In a Chin-to-chin showdown over ultimate authority, Mr. Gregory quit. He was then fired after he blasted his late friends in the press as a "Main Line Mafia." It is a smokescreen, nothing more, to assert, as he did in TDR, That he was fired because of Beclch .

So what lessons can be learned from TLA? To my mind the only hope for regional theatre is in strong and wide community support - and that means a representative, knowledgeable Board of Directors, actively shaping policy, not just raising money. Opposed to this is the theory that an artistic director must be a philosopher-king. TLA provided the crucible in which to test this theory. In Mr. Gregory's TDR letter, he refers to the Theatre of the Living Arts as "my theatre." in this city, we are proud of the Philadelphia Orchestra, not Ormandy's boys...

The audience devoted to good theatre is already small enough, without deliberately outraging and alienating it. Goethe said: "..a great public is entitled to our respect, and should not be treated like children from whom one wishes merely to extract money. By accustoming them to what is good, we may lead them gradually to feel and appreciate what is excellent, and they will pay their money with double satisfaction when their reason and understanding approve the outlay." In broad audience subscription-support lies regional theatre's only security.

I agree with Mr. Gregory that regional theatre is in trouble but I say the fault lies with the theatre people, not the communities' Boards or audiences.

Robert Brustein summed up the dilemna nicely in 1965: "must we choose between a discredited Establishment and a careerist avant garde? Are the only alternatives to be between the collapsed idealism of the old and the secret cynicism of the new?