"I was naive enough to believe..." --Bob Kalfin
That tells the entire story as far as I'm concerned. The quotation appears in Ms. Napoleon's book relating to a specific incident surrounding the need for money to meet the Chelsea Theater's budget.
I have lifted it out of context because it represents in a larger way why the Chelsea was born, flourished, and disappeared. The Chelsea years were those of idealism, of confrontation, of public roiling in pursuit of principles; and these years gave way to materialism.
I hadn't realized how many of the Chelsea plays I had seen until I read this book: Slave Ship, of course. Saved, Yentl, Kaspar, Total Eclipse, Happy End, and more, many more--and one, Kaddish, which ranks among the most beautiful, emotional, flawlessly acted (by Marilyn Chris as Allen Ginsberg's mother) directed (by Bob Kalfin), productions I have ever seen. I place it on a list with Laurette Taylor's The Glass Menagerie and Olivier's Oedipus. Hold on there! I do--I mean just that.
I served on the advisory board of the Chelsea through most of its years. They asked me because they saw me so frequently in their audience. It was no difficult trick to induce me to work there. The difficulty was in getting me to consider a new version of Candide. But all of that you can read in this thorough history of the most energetic, creative, not-for-profit theater in the United States.
What appealed to me from the start about the Chelsea was that, possibly inadvertently, it modeled itself after the European theaters I most admired. Lyubimov's Taganka in Moscow or Peter Brook's Bouffes du Nord and more recently Ariane Mnoushkine's Theatre du Soleil come to mind because they introduce new material in altered venues. They, too, spill over into the lobbies and out onto the streets, and when occasionally the re-examine a classic, it is an unprecedented interpretaion.
All three of the initial management team--Bob Kalfin, Michael David, and Burl Hash--were idealists, impractical, perhaps, but in varying degrees. And certainly Kalfin was the most impractical. Because he was its director, its moralist, its daydreamer.
Bob Kalfin was as long on trusting people as he was on talent.
I believe this book documents a tragedy. It is a metaphor for the gradual and quickening change in the priorities of our society. It follows a diminishing curve of moral responsibility emphasized by the government's unwillingness to acknoweldge the place of art in the quality of our lives. We live in an age when not-for-profit theaters are plagued by interfering boards of directors answering to the demands of safe audiences looking for pleasant trifles. Theaters all over the world are in danger of becoming museum repositories much as our opera houses have.
It is ironical that while udnerestimating Broadway as an artistic center and undersupporting the not-for-profit sector, we leave ourselves with nothing. So the Chelsea had to fold. But before it folded, paraphrasing Miss Millay, what a wonderful light it made!
I owe the Chelsea so much. For a brief time, I discovered how much creative fun I could have away from the burden of economics. I have never worked so selfishly without regard for success or failure before or since. Also, the Chelsea introduced me to the designers Eugene Lee and Franne Lee and Doug Higgins, with whom I subsequently worked on Broadway.
....But what finally matters is that there is no Chelsea. Bob Kalfin directs wherever he can--but not often enough and not always material of his choice and too rarely do we see what he is accomplishing. Burl Hash presumably has found a home in Maine. Good for him! But I rarely get to Maine. And Michael David and his Dodger group are working on Broadway, working well and working rarely.
They tell me that it's only cyclical, that times will change, that the worship of Mammon will give way to daydreaming, impracticality, naivete, idealism. Perhaps they're right. After all, there once was a Group Theatre; there once was a Mercury Theatre; and there once was the Chelsea.
Like Bob Kalfin, I'm naive enough to believe that eventually the good guys win.
Hal Prince
New York City, March 1991