Tom Toner, left, and Leslie Cass in Long Wharf Theatre’s inaugural production of The Crucible.
Charles Kingsley remembers Long Wharf Theatre’s first production, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, as being “awfully well done.” The show — and the theater — opened on July 4, 1965.
It was the heyday of the regional theater movement in the United States. This year the theater — which has grown into a regional powerhouse — is celebrating its 50th year.
According to Long Wharf Theatre artistic director Gordon Edelstein, for many decades before the 1960s, the only way people in cities outside New York could see top-quality professional theater was to attend performances by touring productions. The regional theater movement, which was in full swing from the late 1950s until about a decade later, was born of the notion “that cities of America deserved an active culture that was locally created.”
“The arts were in ascendancy at the time,” Edelstein said. “Everybody was breathing the same air.” Even the Ford Foundation had opted in and was helping regional theaters get started.
In New Haven, which at the time was ripe for the establishment of a regional theater, two idealistic young Yale University students, Jon Jory and Harlan Kleiman, found a group of people who made that happen. Reached in New Mexico, where he’s on the faculty of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Jory said the mid-1960s were “the golden age of starting regional professional companies.” The son of actor Victor Jory, Jon grew up in California in and around the Pasadena Playhouse.
“I was already sort of regional-theater oriented,” he said.
Jory enrolled in the Yale School of Drama having left the University of Utah to work at the Cleveland Play House and after a stint in the army. At Yale, Jory got to know fellow graduate student Kleiman, who was studying industrial administration and had always had an interest in theater. After gaining some experience running a summer-stock theater in Clinton, Connecticut, in the summer of 1964, Jory and Kleiman looked around for help and money to start a resident company in New Haven.
“We started reading the society pages of the New Haven Register,” Jory said, and they started cold-calling people in the community to ask if they’d be interested in serving on a steering committee. Kleiman focused on the business side of things while Jory focused on all things artistic. Armed with a business plan, they began to pitch the idea at cocktail parties.
“Gradually,” Jory said, “we found a bunch of people who were interested.”
That bunch included Elizabeth Kubler, Ruth Lord, and Charles Newton “Newt” Schenck III. They became the organization’s founding trustees — Lord as the board’s first president and Schenck as the board’s first chairman — along with Virginia Hepler. In a piece for the winter 1966 Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Kubler wrote: “In November [1964] friends were found who offered the use of a large ballroom for an initial meeting, to which about 80 people of varying persuasions and interests were invited. Fifty or more came, and the two future directors began the first of a long series of spiels that became known as the ‘Gallagher and Sheehan Act,’ telling of their hopes for a theatre where good plays well produced would be available at modest prices.”
Schenck, who longtime local arts champion Frances “Bitsie” Clark said was “very, very interested in the whole aspect of the [postwar] development of the city,” was an attorney at Wiggin and Dana. Schenck was “fascinated” with the idea of starting a regional theater in New Haven, Kleiman said. “Newt’s enthusiasm for the theater was contagious,” said Charles Kingsley, a former board chairman at Long Wharf Theatre and an attorney at Wiggin and Dana since 1962. Today, the performance space bears Schenck’s name.
While Long Wharf Theatre was established on paper at Wiggin and Dana, it took physical shape in the nascent New Haven Food Terminal. Through longtime Democratic Party official Arthur Barbieri, Kleiman had met Jim Lamberti, owner of the Lamberti Sausage Co., which made its home at Long Wharf.
“He was the guy in the New Haven Food Terminal that got us the bays that allowed us to build the theater,” Kleiman explained.
Schenck had suggested locating the theater at the Food Terminal, where he had clients. The location, Jory said, “had a space we could afford” and plenty of parking. It wasn’t lost on anyone involved that Covent Garden, in London, is located in a food district.
What Jory and Kleiman needed at that point were actors. Some they knew. William Swetland, who Jory remembered from his days at the Cleveland Play House, played the role of John Proctor. Others they found at Yale or in New York. Because the theater, still under renovation, didn’t yet have running electricity, they rehearsed by the light of battery-powered lamps.
Figuratively speaking, it’s thanks to Kubler, Lord, and Schenck that the electricity came on for The Crucible on July 4, 1965. Newt believed in what Jory and Kleiman were doing and helped them through the bureaucratic process, Kleiman said. Enough money was raised — at cocktail parties and at soup parties at Kubler’s home — to present the play and the first season. And Lamberti had secured excellent prices to have the physical space renovated, Kleiman said.
The audience members who attended the theater’s first production sat in seats purchased from the Old Howard Theatre, a burlesque house in Boston that had closed more than a decade earlier. In her Smith Alumnae Quarterly piece, Kubler wrote: “By July 4th, somehow, everything was pretty well finished. Even the air-conditioning was working.… Almost every night chairs had to be put in for the overflow of customers. In fact, there were only 23 unsubscribed seats for the summer season. This has been commented on as a minor miracle for a new theatre. Nobody seemed to mind the rather stark interior, the 440 battered seats, and the bleak aspect of the lobby.”
In addition to The Crucible, the first season in the summer of 1965 included productions of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Rick Besoyan’s Little Mary Sunshine, and Peter Shaffer’s The Private Ear and the Public Eye.
“Luckily,” Jory said, “that summer sold like hot cakes.”
The following season didn’t do as well. Still, the theater grew.
After a few years, Jory and Kleiman moved on — the former to the Actors Theatre of Louisville, the latter to New York, where he produced plays and for a time served on the faculty at New York University. Long Wharf Theatre soon became a preeminent regional theater under the artistic direction of Alvin Brown, whom Kleiman had hired to run the children’s theater programs, and the management of Edgar Rosenblum. After working in television and as the head of programming at HBO, Kleiman turned his attention to healthcare funding, starting Shoreline Pacific Equity and then founding the San Francisco – based Self Health Network, of which he’s currently the executive chairman.
Kubler, Lord, and Schenck died in 2009, 2014, and 2002, respectively, but their involvement with Long Wharf Theatre’s founding remains a watershed moment in New Haven’s cultural history. Jory described the atmosphere around the theater in the early days as one of “passionate hysteria.” He also acknowledged his youthful naiveté.
“I was in way, way, way over my head,” he said.
Thomas Waites, Clifton James, and Al Pacino in David Mamet’s American Buffalo.
Of Long Wharf Theatre’s early productions, Jory said, “I think they were qualitatively pretty good.” The mood, he said, was “buoyant … it was wonderfully exciting.”
Still, Jory said, it was “extremely stressful.”
“We did The Trojan Women and I had never seen a Greek play,” he explained. “I was just operating out of sheer chutzpah and some talent.”
Growing pains notwithstanding, Jory and Kleiman created momentum for Long Wharf Theatre. Fred Walker, who succeeded Schenck as the organization’s board chairman and today is a trustee emeritus, said it only took a few years before “the drums were beating … you heard about Long Wharf Theatre.”
There was “high-grade theater,” Kingsley said, “but you didn’t have to go into New York City to find it — which is still true.”
And it began with the efforts of a “handful of extremely idealistic and energetic theater lovers,” Edelstein said, “non-artist citizens who were taking responsibility for the cultural life of their communities.”
“Their generosity of spirit was quite extraordinary,” Jory said of the community of people who helped found the theater. “I was too young to be grateful enough.”
It was, after all, 50 years ago.
“We were pioneers,” Kleiman said.
This article — one of three about New Haven cultural institutions marking landmark anniversaries — originally appeared in the Arts Paper.
The Elm City is truly blessed by this gem of regional theatre. I attended a performance of American Buffalo way back in 1980 and still recall the thrill of seeing the great Al Pacino perform live on stage.
Many fond memories over the years:Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Cyrano De Bergerac with Anthony Zerbe,(one of the most lavish sets ever), The Heiress with Richard Kiley, The Front Page with Waterbury native Brian Dennehy. I could go on.
When I tell people where I'm from,I brag that New Haven is rich with theatre. I explain that the Shubert was a Broadway preview theatre back in the day and that the Long Wharf along with the Yale Rep have each won regional Tony awards. Oh yeah that and Pizza!
Bravo to the Long Wharf Theatre.