Theater News / FRANK EPISALE
The Sky Is Falling
Proposed Razing of Provincetown Playhouse Inflames Theater Community
The theatre world has been abuzz for the past couple of weeks over NYU’s proposed plans to demolish the Provincetown Playhouse. The Playhouse, built in 1918, is viewed by some as the birthplace of Off Broadway. It was founded by the Provincetown Players, a group of writers, performers and designers who began as a vacation-time endeavor in Massachusetts but moved to New York (where most of the members lived) when they began to attract attention.
At various times, members of the Players included Susan Glaspell, Robert Edmund Jones, Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Paul Robeson. The company was particularly important to O’Neill’s career and is thus also considered the testing grounds of America’s first canonical playwright. Work by O’Neill and Millay and, later, ee cummings, along with productions of August Strindberg’s plays, among others, have led some to consider the Provincetown Playhouse the birthplace of experimental and alternative theatre in the United States, and a distinctly American iteration of the small theatre movement.
After the dissolution of the Players, the Playhouse continued to host important premieres, ranging from Edward Albee’s Zoo Story to Charles Bush’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, with work from Lanford Wilson, John Guare, and David Mamet along the way.
NYU has owned the Playhouse since the early 1980s, initially renting it to outside producing companies but more recently using it primarily for its own Educational Theatre program. Recently announced plans to demolish a block-length row of buildings on MacDougal street, including the Playhouse, in order to construct a large building for use primarily by their law school have, unsurprisingly, attracted a great deal of negative publicity.
Opponents of the proposal point out that NYU is one of the city’s largest landowners and that they must surely have other places to build new facilities for the Law School. NYU responds with projections that it will need millions of square feet of new space in coming years in order to meet projected growth, and that MacDougal Street is smack in the middle of their “core” campus.
NYU architects assert that the modest building has been renovated and altered a number of times over the decades and that it has little architectural merit or integrity. Opponents respond that its very modesty is a tribute to what was accomplished there. GC PhD candidate Garrett Eisler writes in his Playgoer blog that:
“these lacking qualities almost make it more urgent that we preserve it. To step inside this humble, cozy 170-seater, and to realize that The Emperor Jones was originally staged here — on this tiny stage! — is to be reminded how down to earth and basic much of our great theatre has always been. As unimpressive as the old house is to some, it still can inspire future generations, though its living historical memory.
“Once you take down the building — no matter what memorial is put in its place — part of that memory goes with it.”
Articles in Playbill, The Villager, the New York Sun and the New York Times along with posts on blogs from Gothamist to Curbed to The Playgoer have tracked the controversy. Public statements and open letters from critic Leonard Jacobs, theatre luminary Robert Brustein, the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, the Susan Glaspell Society and others have called for community letter-writing campaigns, protests, petitions, and participation at community board meetings.
Jacobs’s letter focuses NYU’s self-proclaimed mandate as a “private university in the public service.”
“Demolishing this site would be seen as a hostile, devastating act to historians, preservationists, and theater advocates, not to mention Greenwich Village residents. It would abrogate NYU’s commitment to “prioritize re-use before new development” in its plans for a “campus core.” It would also abrogate NYU’s public support for the proposed South Village Historic District, of which the Playhouse is an integral part.”
Brustein’s letter takes a somewhat more personal tone:
“Tearing down this historic and important off Broadway playhouse would be a scandal and a disgrace. It has housed innumerable important shows, beginning with O’Neill’s one-act plays, demonstrating that a postage stage can still be hospitable to great art.
“I performed on this stage myself in the summer of 1949 when a group I helped to form, named Studio 7, spent two season there, doing Lorca, Strindberg, and others.”
Representatives of NYU do not seem to be surprised by the controversy. In public statements they have made clear that they did not expect this to be an entirely smooth process.
Various versions of NYU’s vision for MacDougal Street have emerged in rapid succession. The most recent as of this writing would preserve the façade and some elements of the interior of the theatre, though the majority of the original building would still be destroyed. Eisler writes that these concessions are “apparently … the result of much pushback, and so the protests may be paying off,” citing information from Curbed about the history of the proposed plans and previous meetings between NYU and the Community Planning Board.
Given the time it takes for architectural plans to be drawn up and revised, it seems clear that NYU had a number of alternative options prepared in advance, and that they likely expected their initial proposals to the community to be resisted. One can’t help but wonder what plans they have waiting in a drawer if the current version is rejected. One might also wonder whether they ever intended to completely demolish the block in the first place, or whether the relatively drastic plans were the first step in an inevitable bargaining practice: ask for more than you can get so your opponents feel like they have won when you reach the compromise that is really what you intended all along.
Myself, I hope that as much as possible of the original building is preserved; it would indeed be sad to see the Provincetown Playhouse reduced to a shiny new plaque on a shiny new building. A walking tour of New York’s historical theatres is a tour of absences: this bank used to be an important vaudeville house. This Starbucks was the site of the Astor Place riots. A part of what theatre folks find magical about their form is that the ephemeral moment of performance occurs within solid walls, and leaves behind physical traces in archives and architecture.
I am nevertheless aware of how many urban planning crises and controversies are taking place in this city at the moment. From the Atlantic Yards to the Hudson Yards to Morningside Heights, star architects, politicians, community organizers, business moguls and, yes, universities are grappling with what happens next on this most expensive slice of real estate. The city’s valuable green space is being lost; thousands of residents are being displaced; views are being obstructed. At the same time, construction workers are being hired, New York is finally attracting world-class architects, and most of these projects are making considerable effort to provide value to the larger community as well their clients.
I have not heard many of my colleagues in theatre circles weigh in on the 5,000 people who are losing their homes to accommodate Columbia’s expansion, or on the abandonment of what could have been one of the city’s most beautiful park and residential areas on the Hudson yards in favor of warring plans for office parks to house companies like NewsCorp and Condé Nast. Theatre is embedded in the larger community, is a product of the larger community, and has a responsibility to the larger community. If we only pay attention when the danger is to our own cherished relics, we run the danger of marginalizing ourselves even further than we already have.
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Mike Daisey’s new monologue, How Theater Failed America, which runs at Joe’s Pub through May 11 and then moves to the Barrow Street Theatre for a six-week engagement, focuses not on the collapse of theatre’s physical infrastructure but on that of its ability to attract an audience, and the quality, daring, and relevance of the work produced.
The strongest segments of the piece are centered around the rise of gleaming new theatre buildings around the country and how these structures coincide with the collapse of regional theatre’s ostensible mission and purpose which was, as Daisey puts it
to establish theaters around the country to house repertory companies of artists, giving them job security, an honorable wage, and health insurance. In return, the theaters would receive the continuity of their work year after year — the building blocks of community. The regional theater movement tried to create great work and make a vibrant American theater tradition flourish.
But, Daisey continues, “The dream is dead.”
What has replaced this vision of community-building and community-derived theatre? A series of gleaming new buildings that stand empty most of the time, monuments to their own continued existence rather than to the work they will produce. The cost of the buildings reinforces the already prominent strategy of choosing plays not to build a new generation of theatre-goers but to timidly try to appease the dwindling audience we already have. Actors and directors are flown in for individual shows and then move on to other theatres around the country. Good work results not infrequently but successful shows are a triumph over the system rather than the result of it.
Daisey is very good at what he does and the audience at Joe’s Pub on the night I attended was enthusiastic. This particular show is very much inside baseball and the audience was made up largely of theatre practitioners and scholars. An “outsider” might have been puzzled at the belly-laughs that exploded out of the crowd when, for example, the monologist claimed that, conveniently, any show requires exactly three-and-a-half weeks to be rehearsed and then is perfect. Clearly, though, most of the audience knew very well that this is the standard rehearsal period for many shows, both because of union rules and the self-reinforcing rhythm of theatre seasons.
The middle of the show is a little slack, devolving into a more typical confessional monologue that serves as much as therapy for the performer as anything else, but it is an encouraging sight nevertheless to see a skilled and gifted performer railing at the system that feeds him for focusing more on the buildings that house our theatres than on theatre itself.
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