an excerpt of
Being Out Front at American Theater:
An Interview with Gerald Weales*
—October 2010
Stephen Corey (SC): When and how did you first become interested in theater? Has your career included acting, directing, and/or production work, or have you always been on the viewing and considering side of things?
Gerald Weales (GW): I acted in high school plays and took pride and pleasure in getting my laughs. When I was studying at Columbia in the late 1940s, back before you had to have an agent to get your head inside a producer’s door, I peddled a play about innocence—social, not sexual—and somewhere in my muddled files are encouraging letters from Broadway types assuring me that the work was just right for off-Broadway, and from off-Broadway types insisting that it was really a Broadway play. In the end, it was neither; it was simply a desk-drawer play.
When I first went to teach at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958, I directed two plays—one of the very early productions of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and one of the very rare productions of Bernard Shaw’s The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles. This confessional passage may suggest that I became a critic because I was a failed actor, a failed playwright, a failed director—a biographical state from which actors, playwrights, and directors like to think that all critics come. That is not my case. Although I was not immune to the siren call of the theater, it was not being on stage or behind the scenes that fed my passion. It was being out front that fascinated me. I learned early on that not all evenings in the theater are artistic triumphs, but whether things went right or wrong, I wanted to be there.
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Not much theater was available in Connersville, Indiana, in the 1930s. My older sister Louise, who acted with the amateur theater there, took me to my first professional production. We went to Indianapolis—by Greyhound, of course—for my fourteenth birthday. After lunch at the Bamboo Inn—Chinese restaurants were not as ubiquitous then as they are now—we went to the old English Theatre (long since burned down) to see Bill Robinson in The Hot Mikado. We were in the second balcony, of course, but there were other birthday children in the audience—two little girls, twins, in a lower box on the right. Robinson came over to their box and tapped on its rim, first with his right foot and then with his left—a birthday present for each of the girls. I was hooked. I managed to get back to the English Theatre several more times during my high school years—which were glory years for seeing stars on the road: Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Erich von Stroheim in Arsenic and Old Lace, Olsen and Johnson in Helzapoppin, and Clifton Webb in The Man Who Came to Dinner.
At about this time, my younger brother Fred and I visited our Uncle Gerald in Chicago and found our way to Chicago theaters to see less respectable fare—notably Ladies’ Night in a Turkish Bath with Skeets Gallagher and Buddy Ebsen. From then on, wherever I was, whatever language those around me were speaking, I headed for the theater. Finally, by the 1950s, I discovered that publications would pay me to comment on what I was seeing. . . .
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*Gerald Weales’s “American Theater Watch” which appeared annually without fail in The Georgia Review from the year of Jimmy Carter’s inauguration as president until the final installment in our Fall 2010 issue, was almost certainly unique in our nation’s publishing world for its longevity and breadth. A retrospective of that work appears on pages 646–74.
