Lucille Lortel


Lucille Lortel was an American actress, artistic director, and theatrical producer. In the course of her career Lortel produced or co-produced nearly 500 plays, five of which were nominated for Tony Awards: As Is by William M. Hoffman, Angels Fall by Lanford Wilson, Blood Knot by Athol Fugard, Mbongeni Ngema's Sarafina!, and A Walk in the Woods by Lee Blessing. She also produced Marc Blitzstein's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, a production which ran for seven years and according to The New York Times "caused such a sensation that it...put Off-Broadway on the map."

Early life and acting career

Lortel was born Lucille Wadler on December 16, 1900, at 153 Attorney Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of four siblings born to Anny and Harris Wadler, Jewish immigrants of Polish descent. Her father was a manufacturer of women's clothes and frequently traveled to Europe to buy designs that he would copy. She had two brothers, Mayo and Seymour, and a sister, Ruth. She was raised in both the Bronx and Manhattan. She was homeschooled, after which she attended college at Adelphi University in Brooklyn, New York. She was remembered by her friends for being vivacious, outgoing, and flirtatious, and was known to be found dancing at parties well into her 80s.
In 1920, Lortel began to study acting and theatre at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1921, she briefly left the United States to continue her training with Max Reinhardt in Berlin. She made her Broadway debut in 1925 in the Theatre Guild's production of Caesar and Cleopatra alongside Helen Hayes. In 1926, she appeared in Michael Kallesser's One Man's Woman at the 48th Street Theatre in Manhattan. She also appeared in David Belasco's The Dove with Judith Anderson, and as Poppy in the touring company of The Shanghai Gesture with Florence Reed. In 1929, Lortel played the female lead in The Man Who Laughed Last with star Sessue Hayakawa. She performed the role both on stage and on film in what was one of the first talking pictures.
In 1931 Lortel married paper industrialist and philanthropist Louis Schweitzer. In deference to her husband's concerns, she retired from acting in 1939.

White Barn Theatre

In 1947, "after spending over 15 years looking for a way to express herself in the theater that was acceptable to her husband", Lortel founded the White Barn Theatre in an old horse barn on her and her husband's estate in Westport/Norwalk, Connecticut. According to Lortel's wishes, the theater's mission was aimed at presenting works of an unusual and experimental nature, existing as a sanctuary from commercial pressures, a place where writers could take a chance with their plays and where actors could stretch their talents.
Under Lortel's guidance, the White Barn premiered plays including: George C. Wolfe and Lawrence Bearson's Ivory Tower with Eva Marie Saint ; Seán O'Casey's Red Roses for Me ; Eugène Ionesco's The Chairs ; Archibald MacLeish's This Music Crept by Me Upon the Waters ; Edward Albee's Fam and Yam ; Samuel Beckett's Embers ; Murray Schisgal's The Typists ; Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers ; Norman Rosten's Come Slowly Eden ; Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds ; Terrence McNally's Next ; Ahmed Yacoubi's The Night Before Thinking ; Barbara Wersba's The Dream Watcher starring Eva Le Gallienne ; June Havoc's Nuts for the Underman ; David Allen's Cheapside starring Cherry Jones ; and Jerome Kilty's Margaret Sanger: Unfinished Business, starring Eileen Heckart. Ireland's famed Dublin Players performed for several seasons at the White Barn with Milo O'Shea.
Among the successful transfers to Off-Broadway from the White Barn Theatre are: Fatima Dike's Glasshouse, Casey Kurtti's Catholic School Girls, Diane Kagan's Marvelous Grey, and Hugh Whitemore's The Best of Friends. Transfers from the White Barn to Broadway include Cy Coleman and A.E. Hotchner's Welcome to the Club and Lanford Wilson's Redwood Curtain, later on television as a Hallmark Hall of Fame 1995 production. In September 1992, a storage area near the theatre was expanded and renovated to become the White Barn Theatre Museum. The final production at the White Barn took place 2002. In 2006, after a failed attempt to save the theater, the property was sold to a real estate developer for $48 million. The theater's legacy has been preserved by a Lucille Lortel Foundation grant to the Westport Country Playhouse, which now houses the Lucille Lortel White Barn Center.

Lucille Lortel Theatre

In 1955, eight years after Lortel founded the White Barn, Schweitzer purchased Theatre De Lys at 121 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village for Lortel as a 24th wedding anniversary present. For her first production in her new theatre, Lortel reopened her White Barn production of the Marc Blitzstein translation of The Threepenny Opera. The production ran for seven years, and represented a seminal moment in the history of Off-Broadway theatre, winning the only Tony Award ever awarded to an Off-Broadway production. The production won a Special Tony Award for best Off-Broadway show and the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical to Lotte Lenya. Scott Merrill was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
As Threepenny Opera continued and eventually concluded its run, Lortel produced many other plays, including Jean Genet's The Balcony in 1960, which won the Village Voice's Obie Award for best foreign play; Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot starring James Earl Jones; Christopher Fry's A Sleep of Prisoners; Seán O'Casey's I Knock at the Door, Pictures in the Hallway, and Cock-A-Doodle-Dandy; Charles Morgan's The River Line with Sada Thompson, Beatrice Straight, and Peter Cookson; and Tom Cole's Medal of Honor Rag. The theater provided a home for such plays as David Mamet's A Life in the Theater, Sam Shepard's Buried Child, and Marsha Norman's award-winning Getting Out.
On November 16, 1981, during the run of Tommy Tune's production of Caryl Churchill's' Cloud Nine, for which Tune won the Drama Desk Award for best director, the Theatre de Lys was renamed the Lucille Lortel Theatre. During the 1983/84 season, Lortel co-produced Michael Cristofer's The Lady and the Clarinet starring Stockard Channing, followed by Woza Albert!, which received an Obie Award. In 1985, she produced Win Wells' Gertrude Stein and a Companion starring Jan Miner and Marian Seldes in the roles they'd originated at the White Barn.
Gertrude Stein and a Companion was recorded and broadcast on the Bravo US and Bravo Canadian television networks. It received the National Education Film and Video Award for historical biographies and an Emmy Award. Other plays presented at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the 1980s included Not About Heroes; Elisabeth Welch in Time To Start Living; The Acting Company's Orchards and Ten by Tennessee, which were presented by arrangement with Lortel; and the hit , which went on to play in London's West End. The decade ended with the hit production of Steel Magnolias which ran for 1,126 performances.
In 1992, Lortel produced Larry Kramer's The Destiny of Me which received the 1993 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play Off-Broadway from the League of Off-Broadway Theatres and Producers. That same season, the theater was home to the Circle Repertory Company's production of The Fiery Furnace, starring Julie Harris in her Off-Broadway debut. The theater housed her production of Jane Anderson's The Baby Dance, as well as Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart, and Nicholas Wright's Mrs. Klein and Donald Margulies' Collected Stories, both starring Uta Hagen.
On October 26, 1998, Lortel unveiled the Playwrights' Sidewalk at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in order to create a permanent tribute to playwrights whose work has been performed Off-Broadway. As part of the Lucille Lortel Awards each year, one playwright is inducted to the sidewalk, having their name engraved into one of the solid bronze stars in front of the theater. She wanted the theater to continue after her death, and in 1999 granted the Lucille Lortel Theatre to the Lucille Lortel Theatre Foundation, establishing a new policy of only booking not-for-profit productions.

ANTA Matinee Series

During the mid-1950s, the board of directors for the American National Theater and Academy was interested in creating a repertory theater of national standing. Lortel, then a member of the ANTA board, and feeling somewhat frustrated by the success of the Threepenny Opera, persuaded ANTA to instead support a matinee series as a "laboratory for innovation" based on the model of the work she was doing at the White Barn Theatre.
With the board's approval, Lortel opened the ANTA Matinee Series in the spring of 1956 at the Theatre de Lys. She served as the artistic director of the series and was committed to presenting a program free of commercial influence. Plays were chosen for the Matinee Series without regard for popular appeal, and no financial benefit was claimed if commercial interest did develop in the course of a production. The series was presented every Tuesday afternoon and ran for twenty years. Two productions that began in the Matinee Series went on to the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy: Tennessee Williams' I Rise In Flame Cried The Phoenix and Meade Roberts' Maidens and Mistresses at Home in the Zoo, the latter of which also played Off-Broadway.
Other significant productions of the ANTA Matinee Series included Helen Hayes in Lovers, Villains, and Fools; Eva Le Gallienne in Two Stories by Oscar Wilde: The Birthday of the Infanta and The Happy Prince; Siobhán McKenna in an experimental production of Hamlet; Peggy Wood in G.B. Shaw's Candida; a dramatic recital by Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson ; Walter Abel, Richard Burton and Cathleen Nesbitt in An Afternoon of Poetry; and Orson Bean in A Round with Ring.

Other projects

Library of Congress
Broadway
Off-Broadway
Education
1950–1979
1980s
1990s

Death

On April 4, 1999, Lortel died at the age of 98 after a short hospitalization in Manhattan's Presbyterian Hospital. She is buried in Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.