Stagecraft

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Alan Schneider died in London in 1984 as a result of injuries sustained in a traffic accident, the American theater lost a director who had staged the U.S. or world premieres of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tennessee Williams' Slapstick Tragedy. Schneider personified the central virtue, and failing, of serious American stage artists: he so prized his integrity that he generally disdained Broadway and mistrusted popular success. He spent most of his later years directing novices at regional or university theaters, rather than have to contend with commercial pressures. Schneider spoke often of the need for a unified American theater, yet his vision left little room for the kinds of productions that average citizens remember with pleasure. While others were bemoaning the economic decline of Broadway, Schneider seemed to look forward to its demise.

Given his intellectual ferocity, any book by Schneider might well have turned into a manifesto. Yet this posthumous memoir, completed nine days before its author's death, is distinguished more by self-criticism and generosity toward actors than by its hostility to the theater establishment of producers, critics and other spokesmen for popular tastes. Like Schneider's productions, his autobiography displays an earnest search for truth at whatever cost to the seeker.

As Albee notes in the foreword, "Alan's prose does not change its tone no matter the event, and if you are rushing through the inconsequential you may very well miss the momentous." There is plenty of both. The opening chapters are acutely felt remembrances of childhood as a Jewish outsider, the son of two physicians, in revolutionary Russia and then in rural America. Other children mockingly asked whether he had had pencils in "Rooshia"; a teacher sneered that he of all people should know the meaning of "usury." Arresting as these cherished grievances are, Schneider does little to explain how they shaped his artistic vision.

Next, his young manhood is retailed at too great length, in a mournful chronicle of false starts, wrong turnings, jobs he did not get, jobs he regretted taking. Schneider alludes too briefly to two fundamental debates: between devotees of an external, technical approach to acting and believers in the Actors Studio "method" of fusing a character with one's own psyche; between "realist" writers who seek to simulate life and "theatricalists" who emphasize that they are staging an artifice, a show. He unflatteringly evokes such figures as Walter Kerr and Mary Martin, and demonstrates by his own example that success in the theater is neither enduring nor necessarily lucrative.

The second half of the book is a captivating record of 1956 to 1966, when the director's collaborations with Beckett and Albee brought all three to the pinnacle of esteem. Schneider, a born pessimist, details the missteps and agonies of doubt that led up to each landmark production and makes every victory seem as surprising in retrospect as it was to him at the time. Few books have so vividly portrayed the initial fragility of what now seem eternal works of dramatic writing. Schneider specifies some literate imbeciles who offhandedly dismissed the talents of Beckett, Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco. He recalls how Bert Lahr willfully misread Godot, trying to recast it as one of his old vaudeville routines. He depicts runaway egotism among the stars of Virginia Woolf, one conniving to get her husband hired in place of her leading man, another threatening to quit because everyone else in the cast was taller, and he therefore felt emasculated. And Schneider cites Williams as one among many admiring collaborators whose affections dissipated with the first negative review.

The manuscript is marred by fragmented sentences and unanswered questions. It ends nearly two decades before Schneider's career did; his widow Jean writes that he left the makings of another volume, but does not explain how anyone could authentically complete it. Still, Entrances has so much to say that it underlines the loss caused by Schneider's brutal exit. It also provides what the ephemeral work of stagecraft cannot: a director's lasting legacy. --By William A. Henry III