The Great American Play Series

I was glad I could come into the city to see your final performance of The Deer Park. There was so much energy, and you and the other actors were successful at bringing the characters to life. It was especially nice to finally see you perform as an actor. Got to say I was very impressed with you. It must have been difficult to direct, produce and play a significant role, especially with such a large cast. It must also be hard to put so much effort into a short run of a complex show. Great work! Sincerely, Susan Taylor

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I wanted to send a quick e mail to say that I was able to see the 1st act of "The Deer Park"- really enjoyed it, and appreciate the invite. I wish I could have stayed for it all, but had usual family stuff to get done- still, I feel lucky to have seen you, and the entire cast, on stage at Newyorican. Lulu was especially good, as was the director, and you as that 20th century scoundrel!!!

Stephan,

I wanted to take a minute to once again thank you for bringing Norman's play around for us "Mailer fans" to enjoy ! I was observing and listening to those sitting around me and I must tell you there was a pause of disappointment when intermission came - it was one of the few times that I can remember when I was looking forward to intermission being over so we could get back to the rest of the story... .

Anyway, a big congratulations on what you accomplished! I still can't believe, in a limited amount of time - you took on producing, directing and acting in this one. Your intensity for your work is contagious and is always reflected in the enthusiasm of those actors you are directing.

At the risk of making you glow - I think it was unanimous that with your presence and command of the stage you gave a gripping edge to the play. Norman Mailer would be proud!

Best to you,
Dianne Diktaban

I was pretty amazed yesterday to see how the actors had grown more and more into their characters. It was really very powerful to watch.

I hope things went well tonight as well and am looking forward to hearing about it.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to witness this exciting process. I've learned quite a bit.

Ten seasons of special event presentations of classic American dramas. 1999- 2009:

Guest Director at The Company ( The Alumni Repertory Co. of The American Academy of Dramatic Art:

Other Projects - originating from The Actor’s Studio, Playwright-Directing Unit (1985-1987)

Programs and Program Notes from the presentations of The Great American Play Series:

The Great American Play Series
in association with The Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92st Y
presents
Arthur Miller’s
"Incident at Vichy"
an extraordinarily powerful investigation of the political persecution that can happen once civil liberties are destroyed….

"The Price" by Arthur Miller

with Barry Primus, Lyle Kessler, Paul Mazursky, Judith Light.

Produced by Carol Anne Eisenrauch.

Directed by Stephan Morrow.

Ivar Theater, Hollywood. 2001.

"The Deer Park" by Norman Mailer.

Directed by Stephan Morrow

with Sally Kirkland, Stefan Gierasch, Shelley Desai, et al.

Glaxa Theater, Los Angeles. 2000

"After the Fall" by Arthur Miller

Directed by Stephan Morrow

A staged reading with Mark Rydell, Rebecca DeMornay, Sally Kirkland, Barry Primus, Lyle Kessler, Dilia Salvi, Lisa Richards, Stefan Gierasch, Harrison Young, Todd Connor et al. Barnsdall Theater, Los Angeles. 1999

From the program notes: Not seen in public in over twenty years, Arthur Miller's play encompasses his marriage to Marilyn, the McCarthy period - its truth and its ugliness, and contains the second act which in director Stephan Morrow's opinion is one of the great second acts in the canon of American dramatic literature where we see a woman start from the humblest of beginnings rise to the zenith of a career and then tragically self destructs ending up in a drug induced suicide. On the way, she engages in a marriage that at first is blissful and humane but that also descends into the hellish depths of antagonism with that perfect husband. Arthur Miller wrote this second act at the behest of none other than his erstwhile friend and colleague, Elia Kazan who insisted that he re write the first version he had presented to the cast for the innaugural production of Lincoln Center in New York. The result is stellar.

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The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1998).

with Barry Primus, Lisa Richards, Stefan Gierasch, Julie Garfield, Todd Connor, Cynthia Ruffin et al.

Two performances of a staged reading at the Odyssey Theater, Los Angeles was the innaugural offering of The Great American Play Series.

from the program notes: The Crucible, originally written out of the rage Arthur Miller had for the McCarthy hearings, today has a different resonance. It could be said that when out most intimate privacies are dragged into the public arena, forces may be unleashed that victimize everyone, from private citizen to president. This new take has been taken by none other than the playwright. Arthur Miller himself, as revealed in the recent article he wrote in The New York Times on the Clinton impeachment trial. ( The confirmation of Stephan Morrow's take on the play led to a correspondence with Arthur Miller and eventually the important work done on 'Incident at Vichy'.)

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'INSIDE THE SOUL OF AN AMERICAN DIRECTOR'
by Stephan Morrow

What is this cross we bear called ‘the desire to do great theater’? What draws us up the Sisyphaean mountain again and again? Is it that rare moment, that electric moment, when we are launched? When all the forces of the theater gods combine and pull us up from the darkened house of a theater into some Olympian chamber of cosmic revelation? I can say that for me, it happened recently, directing a workshop performance of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy.
Unfortunately it can be a very long time until rare moments such as these happen again. But we drive on. Why? Even when civilians (those whose lives do not obsessively revolve around the theater) think we’re crazy, or our family and friends look at us sideways with the doleful glance of pity that one gives to the ‘slightly tetched in the head’, to use a phrase by Mark Twain. It’s a reasonable response, coming from a culture that is itself obsessed only with material gain as the final arbiter of value. And one which actively dislikes any attempt at providing introspection, which certainly is theater’s strongest suit.

So how do you, in fact, convince someone of the value of a life in the theater, in the cultural climate we live in? Simple. That in spite of it all, there is that special moment in a theater when the hair on your neck raises up as you are taken somewhere out of the realm of everyday experience and into some kind of visceral understanding of non-ordinary reality; when you experience your inner emotional landscape shift and you are renewed on some level. And actually transformed into a slightly better individual, “if only for the fifteen steps past the exit of the theater,” as Harold Clurman once said. To him that was still of definite value. And since the life of the theater artist is more endangered now than ever before, for me, its become an anthem: Make a difference on the planet, whether large or small, by contributing to the consciousness of the body politic. And I don’t mean by presenting some kind of agit-prop skit that advances a political agenda. There’s probably nothing more well meaning and more deadly than ‘political’ theater’. After all, we get enough propaganda from the deluge of commercials we have to suffer through. No, I mean by raising the flesh and bones of great live drama that reaches across the footlights and touches our very souls. That’s what makes the struggle worthwhile.

You might also ask why theater artists on occasion wryly refer to theater as ‘my habit’ - as if it’s an addiction? Well, in a way, once you experience one of those rare moments, I suppose it can feel like that, pulling you back again and again, though it does something much more profound than any drug. I prefer to see ‘a life in the theater’ as being a monk without a monastery, a calling, and when the elements in a production combine to create an altered reality on the stage, I see it as being more related to a religious experience than anything else. Although, it might be said that even in the most dire and dark moments of drama the humor of irony often emerges which is as sacred as anything else.
So while your psyche is stretching faster than a speeding bullet and your soul is leaping over the tallest mountains, you definitely enter a zone of Olympian twilight and experience a dress rehearsal for all the issues that life confronts us with. The price of admission is high, no question, but for the chance to participate in the mysterious process of putting up a play so that it works to the best of the ability of the writing - there’s nothing like it, and a price well worth paying with the currency in sacrifices that it costs.

But, there’s the rub: the play. It all starts with the writing: if it has the power to create an authentic experience; if it raises issues of real significance; if it is emotionally cathartic and moves you on the deepest level. Arthur Miller’s play Incident at Vichy does that for me.

A few years ago I created what I called ‘The Great American Play Series,’ to present ‘performances on book’ of important plays of our time, plays with ideas of size that we should be hearing. I began without funding, costumes, sets, or lighting, but with the best actors I could get, and put up special event presentations of the plays. I began with Arthur Miller’s 'The Crucible'. And it was at that very moment Arthur Miller himself wrote a long article in ‘The New York Times’ saying how the play had changed for him, from issues of informing, to issues of the invasion of one’s privacy. What he said meant a great deal to me, and I decided to continue investigating his work, and so proceeded to have his play, 'After the Fall', as part of the Series. With the moral support I received from Shelley Winters, who had seen a staged reading I had directed of Norman Mailer’s 'The Deer Park' at The Actor’s Studio, I was able to enlist Mark Rydell, Rebecca DeMornay, Sally Kirkland, Lyle Kessler, and Barry Primus (who also took part in several other of my presentations, and who had been in four premiers of Arthur Miller’s work) for the ‘performance on book’ of ‘After the Fall’. During the performance, it was if the actors “caught a fever from one another” – a burning determination to do the writing the justice it deserved. Perhaps it was because as actors, they so seldom had the opportunity to work on material of such power, but whatever it was, it launched them. And at the end of the performance, it was as if they each left a little piece of themselves behind on that stage. The audience’s deeply passionate response to what had occured, spoke to me of a hunger for yet more great plays to be investigated by more terrific actors.

I had planned to move on to explore Tennessee Williams’s work, when the world suddenly shifted in many ways, both personally and globally – 9/11 happened. Traumatized by that horrific event as profoundly as everyone else, nevertheless, as time wore on, it seemed to me new issues started emerging that had a disturbing resonance. At that time, by the thinnest thread of a memory, I recalled that Miller’s play, 'Incident at Vichy' might be related to what was occurring. From that nether land of the subconscious, I had an image of the play as being a dark, nightmarish world where innocents were persecuted and arrested for unknown reasons. When I re-read Vichy I was almost shocked to find out how site-specific the play was, and how much it was a slice of an important history that should never be forgotten. And yet, as I returned to the play over and over again, I marveled at how the play in fact, did bring out the plight of innocent victims being arrested by an omnipotent police force in a universal arena. So I felt it operated on two powerful levels: one, a drama that looked at the historic persecution of Jews during WWII, while the other worked as a dark harbinger of things to come.
As someone who often feels vaguely subversive just sitting on a subway if I don’t have a suit on amongst commuters who do, it was not a long leap for me to imagine being an attractive target somewhere down the line, as all artists might be, by being one of the ‘antennae of our race’. What if with various justifications, citizens started getting arrested without due process of law, or without access to a lawyer, and what if they were then held indefinitely? While I can appreciate our need for protection, where were the safeguards, the checks and balances of these new policies of protection? It was hard not to miss the fact that in the larger scope of things we might be standing on a very slippery slope that could end up depriving us of the very civil liberties we prided ourselves on leading the world with. What better bulwark of protection could there be for our freedoms than to exercise our right to free speech, by indeed speaking up: in the passionate debating that a powerful evening of theater could ignite? And out of passionate discourse, might not some clarity be achieved in the best democratic tradition? What better purpose for putting on a play, and what better reflection of the merit of a play if that is what it inspires – a passionate response from its audience. I immediately set about to gathering a cast and a theater for a workshop performance of 'Incident at Vichy'.

As it turned out, the first workshop performance, had a cast that included of F. Murray Abraham, Austin Pendleton, Larry Block, David Margulies, Stephen Mendillo, and Leo Burmester, among many other excellent actors. To my deep satisfaction, the reading received a thunderous ovation from the audience that seemed to go on for longer than I had ever personally experienced in the theater. Cries rang out for the author as if it were a new play. And finally, Mr. Miller did ascend the stage because he had in fact, attended the performance. Shortly thereafter he gave me his personal blessing to try to get a full production up. Heady stuff for any director.

At first, I was a little stunned when my attempts to have the play produced - even though it was written by one of our greatest living writers in the winter of his career - were rebuffed. While the cast is not small, a revival of this play that seems more alive and vital today than even when it was first written, seemed completely appropriate. Unfortunately this didn’t happen, and so to keep momentum of the project going, I did another workshop staging, this time, with Richard Dreyfuss and Fritz Weaver, in the leads, and with Barry Primus coming into town to be part of the cast. Again, it was an evening of theater that relied on only great acting and great writing and rivaled any in its power. People had turned out in large numbers on a night of sub-zero temperatures to virtually fill The Houseman Theater. Not only that, but this time a post-play discussion that went on for an hour and unleashed a whirlwind of heated debate, seemed like a town hall debate on the state of things in the world.
'Incident at Vichy' is a play that should be seen and heard today by thousands of people. And even though I remain optimistic, so far there still has only been a deaf ear from the movers and shakers who would make it possible to bring the play into the major arena it deserves. What can I say? We’re still looking. The Sisyphaean mountain calls….

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The following is an excerpt from

'The Unknown and the General : Notes on Norman Mailer's production of 'Strawhead - A Memory Play about Marilyn', 'Tough Guys Don't Dance' and 'The Deer Park'.

My black T-shirt feels painted onto me with sweat and my fingers are slippery inside the black leather motorcycle gloves as my chest heaves from the exertion, desperate for oxygen. I am going eighty mph on my Harley - and giving it to Marilyn at the same time. Her back is arched to get as much of me as she can and as she hits a peak, belts out “Gee Rod, it’s like fireworks on the fourth of July.” This is how it goes. in my mind. Except this is no dream; I’m in a church. No. It’s not a church anymore. It’s been converted. into a theater : The Actor’s Studio. And I have just finished performing in a scene from Norman Mailer’s play ‘Strawhead’ about Marilyn Monroe. There is a pause and into this gap rises a husky matron who, with a piercing voice, suddenly launches into a loud harangue:

“ You don’t know she did that . I was her first roommate in Hollywood. You should be ashamed of yourself....” It is Shelley Winters. She seems ready to ream Norman at full blast for quite awhile, but before she can and completely bring the performance to an untimely halt, an older, bull-necked man also stands up, turns to her and says “Shelley. Shut up. Sit down.” And instantly, she does. It is Elia Kazan, the moderator of the Playwrights and Directors Unit. But it doesn’t stop there. Ellen Burstyn decided to take up Shelley’s banner and continue the attack. I remember her as being very subdued in her tone, but her remarks carried the weight of a velvet sledgehammer. “...nothing new is revealed here... why write a play, if you have nothing new to say about her. ...we’ve seen so much of this before...the writing is good but it’s so chauvinistic.” Well, Norman who was usually pretty cool during these kind of discussions, just bristled - his silver hair seemed to have an electric current running around it. He slowly stood up and with great poise, said: “If you think that this is chauvinistic, my God, then this place, (the Actor’s Studio) is going to end up being run by a bunch of Stalinoid dykes...” There was a long, thoughtful, perhaps uneasy pause, as some, if not all of us, were launched into a reverie of what brave new world we might be approaching. Then, incredibly, Shelley Winters again. With a deadpan delivery, she asked “ Norman, what’s the difference between Stalinist and Stalinoid?” It brought the house down. And Norman, with no condescension, almost humbly, answered her. “Well, one is of style, and the other is of a period.” The studio audience roared again. End of discussion. I had always heard about something called a perfect moment - when things fell effortlessly and perfectly into place. For me, that was one of them.

So we continued. But the next time we presented it, at just about the same moment, another heckler stood up and started a harangue repeating Shelley’s rant almost verbatim and the play again broke down. Except this time it was Norman who had written it - he had planted her in the audience and was now investigating that uneasy but fascinating theatrical territory of where make-believe ends and reality begins. Talk about turning a disaster into a victory. Whew.

Everyone knows about Norman as a novelist and prose writer, but almost nowhere is there more than a scant line or two mentioning his directing in theater and film. And if it’s true that being a good director is related to some psychological zone of leadership, as it happened, Norman had it in spades. In his presence there was an amazing aura of commitment - one had the feeling of participating in something of great import, ground-breaking, historic even, and you gave one hundred and ten percent of your stuff as an actor. We met when I was playing a Scottish gang leader trying to go straight and in some mysterious way, a Scottish accent was terrifically liberating. Maybe the distance it created from my own personal reality, gave me a mask, behind which I could leave my particular self behind, and be free - unless it was the terror I felt in front of such an audience of heavyweights - that put an extra zing into my performance, but suffice it to say, if there had been any scenery to chew I would have had a feast. And when it was over, with people milling around the way they do after a main-event bout at the Garden, I knew in my bones, that it was one of those times in my life where it had indeed, been my night. Now it was fortunate that I felt this, because I happened to catch sight of a large flock of white hair next to me. It was Norman. Like I said, the adrenalin pumping through me that night, had given me a little more bravado than I might otherwise have had. So I planted myself in Norman’s path and be damned. Sure enough, he turned, and as if it was all in the plan, said “And you. There’s a role for you. Not the lead, but a role I think you might find interesting. He’s a stuntman, and one thing he does is, take Marilyn for a ride.” You’ve already heard about that scene. But what’s really significant here is that he offered me a role in his play only because of the merit he saw in the work - he didn’t know me from Adam. A gesture of that kind of fairness is almost unheard of in the Byzantine casting channels of theater and film. To give a young actor a break, without asking for credentials, or who he knew, or was connected to, with the only consideration being the work itself, seems like it is almost looked upon as heretical by the powers that be. So that was my first sense of Norman, that he was a stand-up guy - a fair man. Rare indeed.

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An excerpt from

"Traveling to Theater (The Making of a Theater Director)" by Stephan Morrow

I had the pleasure and honor of working with Arthur Miller for three years trying to get his play 'Incident at Vichy' to Broadway. He had attended a ‘performance on book’ I directed and gave me his blessing and permission to continue trying to bring it to a full production in a major venue. During that time we occasionally spoke on the phone and while we naturally talked about the nature of the project - for example, casting and the rehearsal process for the other stage readings I was planning ( We presented four of them and they included actors like F. Murray Abraham, Fritz Weaver, Richard Dreyfuss, Austin Pendleton, Barry Primus, David Margulies Stephen Mendillo, Fred Kimble and Larry Block), our conversations were often wide ranging .

In one of our early conversations, after complimenting me on the work I had done with his play, he not so subtly asked 'Why don't I know you? What's your background in theater?' Well, I went through a couple of featured projects on my resume which probably didn't loom too large in the world class arena that he was used to but he was pretty kind about it and that part of the conversation petered out. Fact was, I hadn't scored any points on that account with him - that was clear. In desperation - I suppose at wanting him to know who I was and where I really lived - I blurted out that I had spent two years traveling around the world. That got his ear. 'Where had I gone? In which places did I linger? Why?' and so forth. After a story or two from my travel tales there was a pause on the other end of the phone line. Finally, he said in a voice that was gravelly with the experience which comes from disappointment with the world, he said 'You know, I have a theory....' He felt that theater - especially in the institutional camp, had succumbed to what he called 'The Hothouse Effect'. That those individuals inside the hothouse - however they got there - by charm, credentials or connections, were nurtured and brought along, just like the plants in a hothouse. But if you spent most of your waking hours in a black box or around a producer’s office you might make the contacts necessary for moving up the chain, but what experience in the world did that give you? Serious life experience that would inform your work in the theater? Not likely.

And if you became a bistro denizen obsessed like so many Manhattanites with ‘eating out’, and terrifically skilled at ordering from a menu say, at one glance; or if your worst trauma was that the kitchen was out of your favorite on the brunch menu, how would that enable you to bring depth or deep understanding to the great dramas?

But at the same time he said, those independent spirits who were operating outside the hothouse, where they would be buffeted by the trials and tribulations of the real world - those mavericks - rough around the edges perhaps and less able to make nice with producers and administrators - would remain outside. And as a result, his conclusion was, theater had become anemic. What a statement. And story. Miller was not Miller for nothing.

As for myself, I have indeed often wondered how trekking with a knapsack around the world at the end of my teenage years impacted on my work in the theater afterward. With a miniscule amount of funds - having a hundred bucks or so extra at any given moment - and no safety net - there was no plastic in India then, I can assure you, the sense of distance from the familiar was so great that it seemed like you had not only traveled galaxies’ distance, but back in time as well. Stepping off an ancient bus painted like an elephant in Herat in the middle of a dark Afghani night was like stepping into the land of The Arabian Nights. No electricity. No lights. No sound but the wind of the desert. And little huts with kerosene lanterns throwing their orange glow on little stacks of fruit. If you saw a speck of light moving toward you in the dark and heard a clip clop you knew that it was up to you to jump out of the way of a donkey cart because he certainly wouldn’t see you. So there I was, a young pilgrim, searching the world for what the old ways could tell me, or just wandering until I felt satisfied with my ‘comprehension of reality’ - globally or otherwise - such as it was in the 70’s. I think at the time I would say - to myself mostly - that to challenge myself by not knowing where I would put my head at night for almost two years - there might be some value in that. That such a journey would push me outside my conventionally bourgeois comfort zone and that might be a sufficient challenge to break the bonds of that conditioning and upbringing and open my eyes to some kind of deeper experience of things. Later, the idea to go ‘full circle’, crept into my thinking - that might be significant. Some mystical significance that a Sioux shaman mentioned, Black Elk I think, was the power of the circle, so to close the loop and end up where I had begun without repeating anything would be somehow sympathetic with the laws of the universe and rewarded. Those were my preoccupations at that age, and though now sometimes I shudder to think of the kind of things that dance in your head when everything is ahead of you and time is insignificant, still there was something to the atavistic instinct that led me to them so that I feel lucky to have been able to follow it. Of course, that I am here to look back with nostalgia at the things that happened means that at least I survived and truth be told, that’s saying a lot. There wasn’t the dire jeopardy of combat - and I saw myself in direct contrast to that - a self appointed ‘soldier of peace’ trying to embrace the many people whose path I crossed - but being on the road beyond the beyond in the outback of Afghanistan or in the mountains of India took its toll on many a young traveler who just disappeared into oblivion. A brief letter from a consulate office, if there was an official report, but that was about all.

But the question that begs to be asked, what value has that had in my work as a theater artist? Is there a direct line from the mountains that I climbed both metaphorically and physically, to the truth that I could bring to the stage? I can’t say absolutely, but there a few things which inform your outlook and that stay with you from traveling: One is a sense of scope - the sheer immensity of the earth - when N.Y. and L.A. can seem to subsume the entire planet, how far the mountains of Afghanistan were from the Rockies. Or the gray hills of Korea from the green hills of the Catskills. So space - that would be something. The global gauging of it. A sense of proportion of the vastness of the entire globe.

And when you have no safety net and you are seven thousand miles from home - if you even think of the U.S. as home anymore - and eating becomes something that there is no guarantee about, surrounded as you are, by strangers in the south of Taiwan say, and haven’t spoken English in a week - the loneliness is profound. That dimension of the human experience is something that you can’t imagine unless you’ve been there - no matter how alienated you have been in your adolescence. Or when an extra djapati (something akin to an Indian version of a tortilla) found squirreled away in your knapsack seems like manna from heaven when you are trekking in the mountains in Northern India where there are no shops at all much less those monstrous food distribution centers we call Super Markets. Think about that. SUPER markets. Markets that are beyond normal so that eating more than normal is de rigeur. But if the only thing you can do is hope to see a farmer and further hope that his cow is dispensing extra milk that day, not week, day - obviously there’s nothing remotely like refrigeration to keep milk from spoiling so it has to be fresh from the udder. Or even if the giant pine trees up near the Rhotang Pass in the foothills of the Himalayas are so beautiful that you and your traveling partner exhort each other to keep going because ‘Yes. Yes. We made it. We are in God’s country!’, you still have to carry food with you or beg to buy whatever a local villager has extra of. I might add that a woman’s protectiveness only extends to her family, and it’s the husband who wants to strut his stuff and brandish his hospitality by bringing a stranger home to eat with the family.

And added to this was an ancillary principle to my traveling regimen, which was that I felt I was cheating myself out of another experience of the world, if I had to pay for lodging. Better to engage in conversation with a villager and throw myself on the grace of his hospitality. For a bit of shelter, whether a space on the floor for a sleeping bag, in an empty school room for the night, or a Sikh temple’s veranda. Even on a cement railroad platform in Chandigarh waiting for a train - much to the chagrin of the more well-heeled nouveau riche Indians who stared with disbelief at a Westerner lounging like the lowest castes on the ground and with them ( what can I say, it made sense to me).

But staying with people, you would meet the wife, the kids who were usually awed by the sight of a young Westerner willing to engage with them. And you really get to see who people are this way, as opposed to the fawning hoteliers all over the world. As someone’s guest you’re on equal terms with your host and people level with you. You’re actually asking them to dip into the reservoir of their generosity if they have one. And I found generosity an overwhelming currency wherever I traveled. Never had a problem in all that time. And many many doors opened. It’s so different in the West when civilization alienates citizens enough so that each person is left to his own devices to find shelter for the night and it becomes a commercial endeavor. People in less developed countries understand the need for a roof without paying for it and willingly share theirs most of the time. I was welcomed everywhere from salvaged castles in Wales to a monastery on Cyprus that I had hiked to, to The Golden Temple in Amritsar, to a Japanese Tendi Kyo Buddhist temple in Kyoto to Kibbutz Kisufim in the Negev to another kibbutz at Yamagishi Kai in Nara, Japan, and on and on. Once in the boondocks of Taiwan I knocked on the door of a brick making factory and gestured to the man and his family that I wanted to lie down and ‘seep seep heah’ and gestured what I meant - and they welcomed me in without hesitation even though it was about 2AM when I had been stranded out on the highway. The only time I remember having a problem was at a school compound on Lanyu, an island off Taiwan where the aborigines of the island, the Yami, sent their children to learn English and where I had been told I could stay. There was nothing even like a hotel even if I had wanted one. I had already spent a week as a guest with some prisoners on a farm - it turned out the island, beside being inhabited by aboriginal people was also a low level prison island. I was intractable because I had been told people had stayed there and eventually the principal gave in and accepted my presence. Because it was typhoon weather I ended up staying for more than a week waiting for the ferry, teaching English and even sharing a jar of pickled vegetables from my pack, when the islands food supply got dangerously low. But that was the only time.

And then of course, there are the moments of extreme hazard when traveling with ‘the people’ either hitchhiking or by bus or train. Or on the back of a motorcycle with the weight of your 35 kilo knapsack swaying the whole rig like a drunken driver was steering, which he wasn’t - just a generous soul who was not used to having a boulder on the back of his cycle as you both proceeded along the switchbacks through the gorges of the southern Taiwanese mini-mountains. So there were hairy moments. Certainly you didn’t have to go 12,000 miles to twist the tiger’s tail, but moments like that just seemed to occur with more frequency than in the safety of high civilization. It’s not so much the wild west as the wild east.

So. Thus far, we have space, hunger and danger. Well, these are no small things. One might ask how you can work on a play like 'The Lower Depths' if you haven’t felt real hunger? Well you can, but I would wager it’s with a different approach than if you’ve had your stomach growl and had absolutely nothing to calm it with. Nada. More emptiness. What happens of course, is you get light-headed and have to fight the inclination to sleep. So it might change how you see the behavior of half starving denizens in a rooming house when there wasn’t even what we call ‘work’ available for most folks to earn their bread. It’s a tiny example but that’s where your sense might be different. How the actors would move in that world. Or wouldn’t move. And in fact, I had been in moments like that, and to this day on the rare occasion that I am in a posh restaurant and see perfectly good food being bussed from the other tables all around me while diet conscious pencil blondes push their plates away with disdain, I have to fight the urge to jump up and stuff it all into a bag, maybe to feed more hungry denizens of the street, whatever, anything to save it from being so utterly wasted. Call me crazy. Call me Ishmael, but it seems so unthinkingly criminal and that is also the kind of perspective traveling gives you. It’s true that I have on occasion seen some folks leave their doggy bags next to a guy sleeping in a doorway, but I can’t help but think that’s like pissing in the ocean. Can’t help it. When you see people not in Africa, but all over the world, from Turkey to Taiwan, frequently thin. For example, one thing I know is that there are nothing but empty plates in Kandahar in Afghanistan when folks may not use forks to eat with, but they sure wipe the plates clean with their pan bread. I’m not trying to sound like some bleeding heart, I often felt like a traveling eyeball. Bearing witness, not so much to turn the world upside down, but to at least KNOW. Observe. To go outside of the parameters of the box that one was conditioned by and see with new eyes.

I want to make a point here. Especially to all the academics who spend their time theorizing amongst the forest of advanced degrees. It turns out that - to name only a few - Arthur Miller himself, Norman Mailer, Eugene O’Neill, certainly Ernest Hemingway all fled from the halls of academia. For Norman, even after the diligence and brilliance it took to for a young Jewish kid from Brooklyn get to the hallowed halls of Cambridge, he sensed that there was a bitter truth waiting for him in the jungles of the Pacific in WWII and voluntarily put himself there. And Miller worked as a master shipbuilder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and by all accounts felt as proud of those accomplishments as anything else he would do, including playwriting. In O’Neill’s case, it was a miracle that he made it back from several years on the ships, after being down and out, utterly broke in places like Buenos Aires. He wasn’t just slumming, gathering material for his plays to come, he was battling his demons and figured he had gotten to the end of his rope in Argentina. That was it. Hemingway of course, whose college was the streets of the Toronto Star beat he was given, brought ex-patriate experience to his art like nobody else. Made it the main subject of his work, alongside war. So I’m not under any illusion that I’m inventing anything with this exhortation to get out and see the world. Just stating the case for engaging in a rite of passage that tears down an inherited comfort zone and in the process gives you a heft of the world that is adult and deep. It could be boiled down to a question a Welsh trucker who had given me a ride once asked me in the middle of a downpour - I forget what we were talking about exactly, something about how to turn into a vehicle into a skid on a slicked highway not away from it, but he suddenly blurted out ‘ Do you know what you’re talking about? You know what’s what? Or are you some kind of a paper arse hole? You know, that you read about it...”

There are two other directors that I personally know, from another generation, who fit this profile. One is Jack Garfein, an early director at The Actor’s Studio and who directed ‘End as a Man’ which started as a workshop, made its way to Broadway and then into being a watershed film. Jack was a living survivor of the camps and I think the story goes that as a child he had been arrested in the Warsaw ghetto sneaking in and out of the ghetto trying to ‘organize’ food. And Ulu Grosbard, director of much theater and independent film (‘True Confessions’) was a refugee from Europe and after fleeing through half a dozen countries ended up in Cuba for the duration of the war. My question is, are these the kind of credentials being asked for from directors today? Unfortunately, I don’t think so.

---------------------------------------------

Program Notes from The Deer Park. 2009

The Great American Play Series and

The Nuyorican Poets Café

present

Norman

Mailer's

‘The Deer Park’

(or ‘Hollywood Goes to Hell’)

directed by Stephan Morrow

Sundays and Mondays - June 14, 15. June 21, 22. Sundays @ 5PM. Mondays @ 7PM.

Nuyorican Poets Café-236 East Third Street (Bet. Aves B&C).

Info: 212-505-8183 or www.nuyorican.org for more program details. AEA approved showcase.

 Some background notes on The Deer Park and

this presentation:

Norman Mailer wrote 'The Deer Park' as his

second major novel after having his book 'The Naked

and the Dead' become a global phenomenon.

'The Naked and the Dead' was written as a

testament to what a soldier's life was like in a

platoon on a Pacific island but went far deeper

into the human condition than most war novels

of the time. In fact, there was almost no combat

in it, and instead revelations about the character

of the soldiers in the squad and the existential

challenge of climbing a mountain were its

central focus.

However, 'The Deer Park' was rejected by

six publishers in 1955 because Mailer

refused to censor portions of it that

he felt were honest, if graphic. The novel

was eventually published to a solid if not

overwhelming reception. But the story

of Hollywood that he encountered in the

50's never left him and several years later

he returned to the subject adapting it as a play

and bracketing it with a new concept: it

now took place in Hell.

Finally produced in the mid 60’s it ran for over one hundred performances at The

Theater de Lys (The Lucille Lortel) featuring Rip Torn in the cast and was considered a solid success. Then it was all but forgotten. After working with Mr. Mailer on his play ‘Strawhead - A Memory of Marilyn’ and his film ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’, Stephan Morrow discovered the play after it fell out of a bookshelf he was scanning in a Venice Beach, California used bookshop. This fortuitous event led to Stephan directing two staged readings of The Deer Park, first in L.A. (with Sally Kirkland as Elena) and then in New York at The Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92^nd St.Y , Daniel Gallant, Program Director. After reading as political activist, Allard Lowenstein in Hank Myerson's Play 'Allard', Mr. Mailer suggested that Stephan play Marion in 'The Deer Park' which he did while also taking on the job of directing it as a staged reading at Makor. After attending that presentation Norman Mailer invited him to co-direct a film of ‘The Deer Park’ and perform in it. Mr. Mailer was quoted in Vanity Fair in an article by Patricia Bosworth as saying about Mr. Morrow’s presentation at Makor:

“Finally somebody understood the language and what I was trying to say,” Mailer said.

His plan was to shoot the play on a stage in Provincetown. We spoke about the project again at the Paris Review tribute to him, on April 23. He was frail, on two canes, but his blue eyes sparkled. ‘Why, after all these years, are you still obsessed with this one book?’, I asked.“Because it’s about the trouble men and women always have, dealing with each other,” he replied. “It’s a mystery. I still can’t figure it out.” - Patricia Bosworth, Vanity Fair.

Leading up to the 2009 presentation of 'The Deer Park', Mr. Morrow was seen in a wide variety of roles over the past couple of seasons. First, as passionate and idealistic if closeted, politico Allard Lowenstein, then as conflicted writer Hank Teagle in love with his best friend's wife in Clifford Odetts' play 'The Big Knife in a staged reading for The Actor''s Legacy Group, next in a staged reading of Jordan Buck's two character play 'Refugees' as a southern redneck survivalist who channels dead relatives and is near suicide. Then as Fritz, the de facto leader of an Italian American WW II internment camp in upstate New York in Joanne Tedesco's play 'Perfidia' about this little known chapter in American history in a staged reading of it for The Lark. And finally, in the U.S. premier of noted Italian playwright Marco Calvani's play 'Beneath the City' in a staged reading of it at The Sage Theater, playing the leader of an underground Arab conspiracy who is

caught and murdered.

Special thanks
                                             to Daniel Gallant,

 Anna Lisa Lazzaro, T. Pope Jackson

and Elijah Schiffer.

Full Bio of Stephan Morrow -

Stephan Morrow is an actor and director who has been laboring in the trenches of non-commercial theater in New York and Los Angeles for over twenty five years. A staunch proponent of the Off Off Bway arena, it is in that cauldron of creativity that he finds the work to be most compelling and interesting. He came to this calling after surviving a two year global pilgrimage that took him overland from Istanbul to India and then on through Asia.

He has directed the plays of some of our most outstanding writers, working personally with Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, John Ford Noonan, and Leonard Melfi. A member of the Playwright-Directors Unit at The Actor’s Studio (East and West), he has also worked with member playwrights Gloria Goldsmith, Phillip Hayes Dean, Michael Dinelli, Gene Ruffini, and Earnest Kearney staging many works-in-progress.

The first production he directed was the critically acclaimed revival of Sam Shepard’s play ‘Back Bog Beast Bait’ with Paul Austin in the lead. The Soho Weekly News was exhuberant in its praise. In a peculiar twist, in a recent conversation with Sam Shepard, Shepard jokingly referred to it as one from his 'alliterative period' while Mr. Morrow countered with a passionate defense of the power of the darkly, apocalyptic play and how remarkably well the production had turned out.

Next, Showbusiness Magazine awarded his production of Joseph Maher’s play ‘Dance for Me Simeon’ at The American Theater of Actors “Outstanding Production of the Year” and Walter Kerr of the N.Y. Times claimed “ …it was a gem passing in the night - literally…”. Also at The American Theater of Actors, he directed Gene Ruffini’s play ‘The Choice’, a disturbing play about a Nazi war criminal.

In Los Angeles at The Actor’s Studio West he directed a production of Michael Dinelli’s play ‘Cash Deal’ with Tony Russell. For Dan Lauria’s Patchett Kauffman Entertainment Series he directed six staged-readings of new plays working with actors Ed Asner, Sally Struthers, Pia Zadora, Alice Ghostley, and Charles Durning among many others.

He has had a long collaboration with John Ford Noonan as well, directing a staged reading of his trio of one acts entitled ‘Messages’ with Paul Gleason and Jackie Bartone. Later he presented a staged reading of Noonan’s ‘Spanish Confusion’ with Joseph Ragno and Phil Peters for Elia Kazan, as the moderator of the Playwright Directing Unit at The Actor’s Studio.

As an actor, he has performed in many Off Off Bway productions : He first performed in Jean Claude Van Itallie’s historic and enormously powerful play ‘The Serpent’ in Buffalo, New York whose investigation of the roots of violence from the Bible to the JFK assassination lingered in the public mind for decades there. His performance in that as Abel, the innocent brother and also as Lee Harvey Oswald, led him to be invited to join The NOW Theater Repertory Company under the direction of Gerald Miller and with which he performed at La Mama in New York City in the controversial production of ‘Sabbat- Mass of Darkness’.

As a member of The Spectrum Theater Company he appeared at The Van Dam Theater in Anna Marie Barlowe’s civil war epic ‘Glory Halleluhah’ as Preacher, a soldier who believed passionately in the rebel cause, and in ‘The Trial of the Catonsville Nine’ by Daniel Berrigan, as one of the major witnesses giving testimony to the brutalities committed by the dictators of Latin America.

He appeared as Mark Antony in the site specific production of 'Julius Caesar' directed by Darryl Croxton at historic Federal Hall in downtown New York.

And at The Actor’s Studio he played the unfortunate Count D’Orleans (caught cheating in cards against King Louis XIV) in David Margulies’ epic production of Bulgakov’s ‘A Cabal of Hypocrites’. He also created the role of ‘Allie’ a Scottish gangleader trying to go straight, in Willie Holtzmann’s play ‘ Bovver Boys’ at the Actor’s Studio and which led him to be invited by Norman Mailer to perform in his play ‘Strawhead (Marilyn…A Memory Play)’ playing Rod, the stuntman. Subsequently he played Stoodie, a biker/tattoo artist, appearing opposite Ryan Oneal in Mr. Mailer’s film ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’.

At The Public Theater he appeared opposite Anne Jackson and Roberta Wallach playing mother and daughter in a workshop performance of ‘New World Monkey’ by France Burke which took second place in the P.O.W. Festival. In that he played a young husband struggling against the domination of a mother in law determined to sabotage his marriage. The Professional Older Women Festival was a series of plays commissioned by Joseph Papp with women over 40 in the title role.

He has also had a long and fruitful collaboration with playwright Mario Fratti, performing in his internationally acclaimed play ‘The Cage’ at The Manhattan Theater Club with Anne DeSalvo and William Russ, and later in a bill of three Mr. Fratti's one-acts called ‘Her Voice’ at The Quaigh Theater.

He has worked closely with Victor Steinbach on his award winning adaptation of Dostoevsky’s epic ‘The Possessed’ and a newer play about an out of work KGB assassin living as an exile in New York.

In Los Angeles, he had the pleasure of performing as Bluntschli in G.B.Shaw’s play ‘Arms and the Man’. And at The West Coast Ensemble he played one of his favorite roles, Phil in ‘Hurly Burly’. In Nikolai Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ he played the Narrator for Alexandra More’s L.A.Celebrity Staged Reading Series.

But his most noted achievement there was creating The Great American Play Series for which he has produced and directed ten years of ‘special event presentations’ - staged readings - of neglected American classics, beginning with ‘The Deer Park’ by Norman Mailer, with Sally Kirkland in the lead role. Followed by ‘The Crucible’ by Arthur Miller with Barry Primus and Lisa Richards ( set in the White House during then President Clinton’s impeachment trial and which led to a fruitful relationship with Arthur Miller ), ‘After The Fall’ by Arthur Miller with Rebecca De Mornay as Maggie opposite Mark Rydell and Sally Kirkland, ‘The Price’ by Arthur Miller with Judith Light, Paul Mazursky, Barry Primus, and Lyle Kessler.

In 2001 in N.Y., he staged ‘Incident at Vichy’ by Arthur Miller with F. Murray Abraham, and Austin Pendleton in the lead roles and for which Mr. Miller, after attending that performance on book, gave his personal blessing for Stephan to seek a venue for a major production. During the time of what turned into a three year mission, Mr. Miller’s loyalty never flagged and it ended only with his sad passing. Stephan staged three more ‘performances on book’ of the play first, with Richard Dreyfuss and Fritz Weaver in the leads, then with Peter Weller and Fisher Stevens and finally bringing the full cast to Hartford for one evening’s performance in the hope that backers could be found. Alas, in the current economic climate of Broadway, not enough backing could be raised for a play with such a large cast that wasn’t a commercial entertainment.

Mr. Morrow moved on to another staged reading of Norman Mailer’s play, ‘The Deer Park’ which he directed and played Marion Faye in, one of the leads, and was mentioned by Mr. Mailer in the Vanity Fair of March 2008. Mr. Mailer said, after attending the performance on book : ‘Finally, someone understood the language and what the play was all about.’ Subsequently, Mr. Mailer invited Stephan to co-direct a film of the play and play one of the leading roles. With the sad passing of Mr. Mailer that project has been put on hold, but there are plans to continue with his son, Michael Mailer producing.

One production that he is especially proud is ‘Pieces of Paradise’ by Tennessee Williams, a benefit production to save the historic ‘Thirteenth Street Theater Repertory’ which was threatened by real estate interests. By staging four one-act plays by Williams that had been discovered in a box in 2000 and never been seen in New York, the production ran for eight months and raised enough funds to help save the theater. Martin Denton of N.Y.Theater. com gave it rave reviews and it may very well have been the last premier of a Tennessee Williams play ever to be seen in New York.

Over the past couple of seasons in New York he has been very active in the burgeoning arena of staged readings ( the economic climate of producing theater being what it is, staged readings have become the presentation of choice for many independent theater artists such as Mr.Morrow), and in which he has been directing as well as playing a wide variety of roles - from Southern redneck to urbane writer to Muslim conspirator to bisexual pimp. This began with his reading as idealistic if closeted politico, Allard Lowenstein in Hank Myerson’s play ‘Allard’. After that, Norman Mailer suggested that he play Marion Faye the bisexual pimp in ‘The Deer Park’ which he did as well as direct the production at Makor/92^nd St. Y. Then he played tortured writer, Hank Teagle who is in love with his best friend’s wife in Clifford Odetts’s ‘The Big Knife’ in a staged reading for The Actor’s Legacy Group. In a rehearsed reading of ‘Perfidia’ by Joanne Tedesco at The Lark Theater, in addition to directing a cast of seventeen actors, he also performed in the lead role of Fritz, the de facto leader of the Italian American internees in a POW camp in upstate New York during WWII. This season he created the role of ‘the man’ a tortured southern farmer who channels some of the relatives of his past and is saved from suicide by a black woman refugee, in Jordan Buck’s play ‘Refugees’. Finally, he had the privilege of performing in the American premier of Italian playwright Marco Calvani’s ‘Beneath the City’ in a staged reading at The Sage Theater as the leader of a Muslim conspiracy in a city similar to Sarajevo who is caught and murdered. He has just finished again directing ‘The Deer Park’ by Norman Mailer at The Nuyorican Poets Café and in which he again played Marion Faye.

Education - Mr. Morrow graduated from Stuyvesant H.S. in Manhattan with an award for General Excellence and The Latin Award. Most notably, he traveled around the world for two years. On that trip he went overland from Istanbul, through Afghanistan, and trekked in the Himachal Pradesh in India for four months, volunteered on kibbutz Kissufim in Israel for five months, lived on Lanyu Island in the South China Sea with the Yami, a tribe of aboriginal people and lived off the land for a month in Kalalau Valley on the island of Kuai, before returning to New York and the trenches of Off Off Broadway theater.

He has a Magna cum Laude Degree in English from The University of Buffalo.

Mr. Morrow was very fortunate to have studied acting when many of the great acting teachers were still alive and teaching in New York. He studied with Bill Hickey, Mike Gazzo, Stella Adler ( awarded a scholarship by Ms.Adler), Uta Hagen, Wynn Handman and Elizabeth Dixon. At The Actor’s Studio he was mentored into the Playwright-Directors Unit by EliaKazan.

In addition to his ongoing work in theater, he is currently working on three books: One is the expansion of his article of his experiences working with Norman Mailer,‘The Unknown and the General’. The other is a memoir of the global pilgrimage he made as a young knapsacker before war, mayhem, and modernization destroyed so many of the old ways of indigenous culture around the world.

Because of his unusual exposure as a teenager to life among several artists that extended from The Fulton Fish Market to Haystack, Maine to Berkeley, California and included such figures as New Museum founder and critic, Marcia Tucker, sculptor Mark di Suvero, installationist Brian Oneill, sculptor Norm Lofthus, water colorist Fred Miller and reknowned potter Ron Burke, he is working on a piece about that episode of his life as well, entitled ‘Portrait of a Non-Artist as a Young Man’, dealing with his experiences in the trenches with working artists.

He was honored to receive The 2009 Silver Solas International Travel Writing Award for Adventure Travel for his story 'Amorgos' - about an episode that occurred on a Greek Island

he had lived on for a winter.

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