Wynn Place Show
"In thisoverdue biographyof an outstanding teacher and an adventurous company,Mr. Gerard, a former Broadway reporter for The New York Times, engagingly recountsMr. Handman's long and storied career `as a force against mediocrity and complacency.'" --The New York Times, 2/21/2014"In thisoverdue biographyof an outstanding teacher and an adventurous company,Mr. Gerard, a former Broadway reporter for The New York Times, engagingly recountsMr. Handman's long and storied career `as a force against mediocrity and complacency.'" --The New York Times, 2/21/2014If this were a biased history of The American Place Theatre and Wynn Handman, as Jeremy Gerard claims in the title, Wynn Place Show would be only half as good as it actually is. But the world of drama as conceived by Wynn gets its full due in this devoted and observant report, absent the least bit of bias. The students Wynn trained a good many of those who directed them havethree things uniting them: their chosen careers, their unique talents, and the man who nurtured those talents and helped braid the humanity, attitude, and eccentricity into the life force each of them became. --NORMAN LEAR, film and television producer, founder, People for the American WayJeremy Gerard's Wynn Place Show is a robust account of Wynn Handman, the big-hearted and big-visioned acting teacher turned theatrical impresario who founded The American Place Theatre and fought the good fight for a more dynamic, literate, and progressive American theatre. Lively and well-informed, Gerard's book bears fascinating witness to theatrical times gone by andsheds long overdue light on Handman's grace and his gift. --JOHN LAHR, The New Yorker magazineIS WYNN HANDMAN THE ONLY PRODUCER TOhave ever fired Hal Prince? Did his singular vision for theAmerican Place Theatre ultimately limit its success? Has henonetheless earned a place in the American theatre pantheon,alongside his colleague and sometime competitor Joseph Papp?In Wynn Place Show, critic Jeremy Gerard makes acompelling case for all of the above. Any serious theatrejunkie in New York from the late 1960s until the 90s knowsthe American Place Theatre was one of the first artistic homesfor writers, as well as a theatre that discovered some of themost important actors of our time.When Handman sat down to write his manifesto in 1961,he was an acting student at Sanford Meisner s NeighborhoodPlayhouse School of Theatre, where he so impressed hismaster that he was invited to begin directing there. Handmanconceived the American Place Theatre as a reaction againstwhat he considered the bland, mindless entertainment thatpredominated at the time. His theatre, he wrote, would restorehigh literary content to the stage. Lest anyone question theseriousness of his mission, he wrote it entirely in capital letters.While this slim volume chronicles Handman s theatreon an almost year-to-year basis, its history seems neitherrollicking nor especially extreme, and but for a briefmention of a few formative early experiences, its subject spersonal life is largely missing. It may be that for Handman,like many who have run theatres, his work was his life.Gerard makes much of the fact that New York critics oftenspoke more admiringly of the idea of American Place Theatrethan about its more than 250 productions. But that doesn t meanit wasn t successful. During its early subscriptions-only era, ithad more than 10,000 subscribers, while remaining focused onnew works with an intellectual pedigree or ambition. As oftenas not, these came from poets and novelists (Robert Lowell,Anne Sexton, James Agee, Joyce Carol Oates) as much as fromplaywrights (Sam Shepard, Ed Bullins, María Irene Fornés,Ronald Ribman, Emily Mann). Handman also had a keen eyefor monologists, like Eric Bogosian and John Leguizamo (whosupplies the brief foreword to this book).Handman had the great good fortune of securing a30-year rent-free location in one of the first high-rise midtowndevelopments incented by the city to include a theatre, on West46th Street near Sixth Avenue, offering him a low-risk platformfor his vision. And his genius at casting from the constantstream of new talent coming through the NeighborhoodPlayhouse meant that his audiences could count on compellingperformances even when the material ranging from theturgid to the surreal to the satirical gave them whiplash.(That roster of talent included the likes of Dustin Hoffman,Richard Gere, Marian Seldes, Lois Smith, Morgan Freeman,Olympia Dukakis, Rip Torn, and so on.)Eventually, though, external trends caught up withHandman s operation, particularly the flight of majorfoundations from supporting the arts, and the growth andsuccess of competing nonprofit subscription theatres in NewYork companies whose missions gave them the latitude toventure into territory more commercial, and hence morelucrative, than Handman s bailiwick. The final blow came whenhis landlord opted not to renew the theatre s lease.To his credit, Handman never abandoned his mission orcompromised on his belief that America needed a place for hisbrand of theatre. Today, at 92, he continues to teach; rescuedfrom the ashes of APT was its acclaimed Literature to Lifeeducational program, which has continued at Young AudiencesNew York. Though he labored in the shadow of the flamboyantPapp for a good part of his career, Handman never covetedthe limelight. --RICHARD STEIN, American Theatre MagazineA significant figure in Off Broadway theater in the 1960s is the subject of Jeremy Gerard s Wynn Place Show: A Biased History of the Rollicking Life and Extreme Times of Wynn Handman and the American Place Theater (Smith and Kraus). These were artists who may never have given much thought to working in the theater until prodded to do so by a fevered coalition of Manhattan literati, left-leaning religious and political agitators and, especially, disaffected theater partisans, all of whom had come under the spell of an unlikely breaker of molds named Wynn Handman, Mr. Gerard writes.Mr. Handman nurtured budding playwrights and trained fledgling actors, like John Leguizamo and Frank Langella. In this overdue biography of an outstanding teacher and an adventurous company, Mr. Gerard, a former Broadway reporter for The New York Times, engagingly recounts Mr. Handman s long and storied career as a force against mediocrity and complacency. --SAM ROBERTS, New York Times