They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (11 page)

At Lincoln Center and other excellent performing arts establishments around the world, such a method of operating would be considered a sacrilege. What and who appears on our stages is the product of collaboration and dialogue. The stakes are high, because the audiences are sophisticated and the critics demanding. We view what is mounted on our stages as a profound responsibility. It cannot be delegated or outsourced. And it certainly cannot be abdicated.

The artists who appear at Lincoln Center recognize that they are surrounded by talented administrators who understand what they are about and who are eager to create the best conditions for their performances. As a result, few do not long to return, early and often.

On Oscar, Tony, and Emmy evenings, when winners are announced, television audiences generally become impatient. From the podium, acceptance remarks almost always name names at great length, and quick shout-outs are offered to colleagues as time runs out. You may leave your living room when the litany of tributes begins. I sympathize with those winners. They are not holding their awards only because of their own natural talent or hard work. More often than not, that winner is part of a team. Jane Moss’s staff are astonishingly bright and hardworking. They reflect well on her. For what you see at Lincoln Center, they fully share in the credit.
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I
T ALL BEGINS
and ends with a compelling piece of performing art. The director of the Lincoln Center Festival, Nigel Redden, is eager to bring to New York City something truly spectacular—as befits Lincoln Center. In this case, it was the only opera ever written by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann,
Die Soldaten
. The subject matter is dark. It is about the traumatic damage inflicted on a young woman by World War II soldiers.

The twelve-tone score requires a huge orchestra of 110. At times the musicians, divided into three sections, are playing in completely different rhythms. They are joined by a 40-member cast of singers, dancers, and actors.

This daunting work requires that the audience be totally immersed in the theatrics of the opera. The director, David Pountney, conceives of a divided audience chamber that sits on top of tracks, allowing one thousand seats to move back and forth in the space, as if the audience were sitting in a trolley car while the scenes on the stage unfold.

But what space?

More often than not, the Lincoln Center Festival and all other Lincoln Center artistic presentations utilize the venues of constituents when they are available. This infusion of rental revenue from Lincoln Center helps our resident artistic organizations offset their overall fixed costs. To provide just one example, Lincoln Center regularly paid Jazz at Lincoln Center over $1 million each year for its use of the Allen (now Appel) Room and the Rose Theater.

In this case, Nigel Redden proposed that Lincoln Center use the mammoth fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Ward Thompson Drill Hall in the Park Avenue Armory. Opened in 1881 as a home for the military, the building had just been granted nonprofit status. Its fledgling board of directors, led by Elihu Rose, hired my close colleague Rebecca Robertson as its first president. She left being the first executive director of Lincoln Center Redevelopment to assume this new role. It played to her strengths. Restoring stunning but badly neglected rooms within the armory and activating this massive building was a natural for Rebecca. After all, for over a decade she led the transformation of 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue.

The venue Redden proposed was arguably the only one in New York City that could house this awesome production. I was intrigued. If Lincoln Center demonstrated that the Park Avenue Armory was versatile enough to accommodate large-scale performing arts productions, then a magnificent new option could be exercised by presenters and producers the world over. We could help prove the value of this singular space for a certain scale of performing art.

The costs of presenting
Die Soldaten
in the summer of 2008 were formidable. And we were aware that an activist Park Avenue group wished to limit the number and kind of events presented at the armory and therefore the size of its audience. Petitions circulated anticipating excessive traffic and noise. Litigation was threatened. Still, none of these obstacles seemed impossible to overcome. The opportunity was
enticing. I gave the production a green light, and it was deemed a success theatrically, critically, and civically.

What followed was a series of productions presented by the Lincoln Center Festival at the armory. First came the tender portraits of ordinary people that Ariane Mnouchkine and Le Theatre de Soleil called
Les Ephemeres
. Spread out over two evenings or in weekend marathons and performed during the summer of 2008, the stories were recalled by members of the company or improvised by them. Audiences were captivated. The following summer, in 2009, the festival also mounted in the Park Avenue Armory a very well-received
Boris Godunov
directed by Declan Donnellan.

Soon after, another production came to Redden’s attention that only the armory could house. It is a haunting opera called
The Passenger
, composed by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919–1996). On the upper level of a formidable ship’s deck, passengers without a care in the world are bound for Brazil. Down below is captured the living hell of the Holocaust. Beyond the height and width needed to accommodate the gigantic cruise ship, a separate expanse of space was set aside for a full orchestra. The sold-out performances were haunting and unforgettable. Only Lincoln Center could have brought the show to New York City.

By far the most ambitious Lincoln Center undertaking destined for the armory was the presentation of the Royal Shakespeare Company during the summer of 2011. It performed five plays in an auditorium literally shipped from Stratford-upon-Avon that was virtually identical to the one the RSC used in its own home. It took forty-six huge containers traveling by boat and truck over thirty-five hundred miles to transport this auditorium and everything else needed for the performances, from stage sets to costumes and props, from wigs to makeup. Only the Park Avenue Armory could hold 975 seats in a three-tiered auditorium that contains a thrust stage, so that actors and audience members are but an arm’s length from one another.

Never before had the RSC’s residency in New York City been as long (six weeks), and never before had its slate of shows numbered so many:
As You Like It
,
Julius Caesar
,
King Lear
,
Romeo and Juliet
, and
The Winter’s Tale
. In effect, the armory invited the RSC to bring its own playhouse along for the ride to New York City and insert it into
the cavernous building. Because the auditorium replicates the conditions with which the company is so familiar at home, lights, props, and sets did not have to be reconfigured, nor did the actors need to reblock the show.

We were most excited by the fact that the armory’s column-free space would permit Lincoln Center to bring a true repertory company to a largely American audience. Watching the same actors perform in varied works with the same ensemble may be somewhat routine in Great Britain, but it is extremely rare in the United States. And it is thrilling. The RSC’s residency, complete with its four-hundred-ton replica of an auditorium, was among the most expensive and the most gratifying artistic adventures in Lincoln Center’s history.

As is often true in the arts, individual donors, in this case benefactors like Les Wexner and Suzi and Bruce Kovner, were the unsung heroes of the initiative. My colleagues and I roamed the earth, well, at least the borough of Manhattan, for prospects. We found them. Before too long, they became delighted philanthropic supporters. Before too long, I could give this massive artistic undertaking a thumbs-up.

This search for the best space available for the work of art being presented is characteristic of the festival. In 2012 and 2014, the Sydney Theater Company performed Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya
and Jean Genet’s
The Maids
on the stage of New York City Center, to much acclaim. Both productions featured Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett. All agreed that the choice of venue worked well.

When the Druid Theater Company of Galway presented a cycle of three plays by the contemporary Irish playwright Tom Murphy, they were performed at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater, ensconced at, of all places, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Lovingly mounted in that same venue was the performance of “DruidSynge,” a full cycle of J. M. Synge’s six plays. The Druid Theater’s Tony Award–winning director Garry Hynes no doubt regards the Gerald Lynch as her home away from home.

Returning to the festival for the third time, the Grand Kabuki Theater Company performed twice in Avery Fisher Hall and most recently in the Rose Theater at the Time Warner Center. The Rose Theater is also where the festival mounted the one-man
Macbeth
, starring Alan Cumming and directed by John Tiffany.

Nigel Redden and his colleagues are nothing if not adventurous. In July 2010 the Lincoln Center Festival presented a Russian play,
The Demons
, also known as
The Possessed
, based on Dostoyevsky’s novel. It was staged in a spare theatrical space at Governors Island and was directed by the acclaimed Peter Stein. The running time for the play was roughly eleven hours. It was performed in Italian with English subtitles. Endurance was required, not only by the 26 European actors, but also by the 975 members of the audience in a fully sold-out, ten-day run. That day included two 45-minute breaks for meals, eaten communally and prepared by the staff of well-known chef Tom Colicchio. There were also four fifteen-minute intermissions. The audience was transported to a different time and place. And speaking of transportation, Lincoln Center provided a ferry, departing from lower Manhattan at 10 a.m. and leaving from the island for the return home at 11:30 p.m. It carried an audience that will fondly recall what transpired on the stage and how they enjoyed their theatrical marathon.

Perhaps the best illustration of real estate as theatrical destiny can be found in the Lincoln Center Festival production of Deborah Warner’s
The Angel Project
. In the wake of 9/11, the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, and the loss of some three thousand lives, Deborah Warner, the English director, created a site-specific set of installations spread out across a dozen locations in midtown Manhattan. In the summer of 2003, from Roosevelt Island to the top of the Chrysler Building, to an empty storefront on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, she fitted out rooms filled with carefully selected and assembled objects intended to evoke feelings of remembrance, transcendence, and commemoration. The experience was meant to be solitary. At the Lincoln Center box office, participants were handed a map with
Angel Project
locations noted on it and given a Metro card to use on the subway or bus to get to some of them. Departures to the sites occurred at intervals of twenty minutes, three each hour, to minimize the chances of overlap between viewers.

To secure these spaces for an art project lasting three weeks was a major undertaking. It required the cooperation of property owners and real estate developers not necessarily sympathetic to the whole idea. We tried persuasion first, then groveling. And finally the intervention of third parties. The effort paid off handsomely. No one fortunate enough
to have joined Deborah Warner on this journey will ever forget having done so.

Ben Brantley, the chief
New York Times
theater critic, wrote that this experience offered by the Lincoln Center Festival persuaded him, for the first time, to think of New York City as a “holy place.” Until then, such a thought had no more occurred to him than it had to me, a born and bred New Yorker.

O
F COURSE, WHILE
it may be illuminating to view the Lincoln Center Festival through the lens of where productions are performed, location alone offers a limited perspective. Besides the suitability and availability of the proper venue, what determines the selection of performing art presented by the sixteen-year-old Lincoln Center Festival?

A group of Lincoln Center constituent companies is largely rooted in nineteenth-century western European art forms: opera, ballet, and symphonic music. The Lincoln Center Festival is intended not only to supplement this emphasis innovatively, but also to present classical forms from different countries and different centuries. An example of the festival’s role in providing fascinating additions to standard constituent fare is its presentation of the Cleveland Orchestra under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst, performing all of Bruckner’s symphonies, juxtaposed with those of composer John Adams. Examples of supplementing everyday Lincoln Center offerings are Kunqu Opera, Vietnamese water puppets,
The Secret History of the Mongols
, Robert Wilson’s
Fables of La Fontaine
from the Comedie Francaise, and Middle Eastern religious epic theater from Iran—the Ta’ziyeh.

Complementary classicism is one continuing festival theme. Another is selecting work based on the sheer difficulty of presenting it or on whether it would otherwise be seen in New York City. But for Lincoln Center,
The Angel Project
would not have found its own angel, and Peter Greenaway’s opera
Writing to Vermeer
would never have been presented in the cultural capital of the world. Bringing productions from Chile’s Compania Teatro Cinema, Mexico’s Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, and Spain’s Centro Dramatico Nacional offered New York audiences a sense of the inventiveness and exuberance of contemporary Latin American and Spanish theater. Only the Lincoln Center Festival would have made this happen.