I was writing a theater history, I thought. The Chelsea Theater Center of Brooklyn thrived in the late 60's and 70's. I set out to restage the scenes that brought Chelsea critical acclaim and to present the behind-the-scenes scenes that devastated it. I wanted to create a panorama of those days, the culture and counter-culture of the times, the socio-economic mileau that was Chelsea's.
I never guessed I was writing current events. As I began to describe Chelsea's tribulations, I didn't imagine a museum would soon be put on trial, or that Actors Equity Association would try to tell a British producer who he could cast in the hit musical he wanted to bring to America. I didn't know the National Endowment for the Arts would be threatened by censorship, or that the New York State Council on the Arts would reduce its budget so drastically that many theaters would shorten seasons and talk about closing.
I just wanted to recall a theater that was on the cutting edge theatrically, a theater that earned prestigious awards and loyal audiences but rarely found funding to finish a season as planned.
I wanted to profile Robert Kalfin, who founded Chelsea in 1965, when there were few not-for-profit theaters in New York. To show you the ten years when new theaters opened, funding sources decreased, costs rose, and many nonprofits responded with conventional seasons designed to attract mainstream audiences.
I wanted to introduce Kalfin's partners, Michael David and Burl Hash. For a long time, they responded to changes as he did--by going out on a longer limb than they had before.
When black separatism threatened integration attempts in the late 60's, these three white produces staged some of the first militant black plays. When women began declaring independence from male-run institutions, these men produced feminist plays. Chelsea asked Jewish audiences to appreciate a play that showed the humanity of a Nazi sympathizer, invited young audiences to understand the pain of old age, and gave senior citizens a close view of youth culture. And believing that theater "reflects shared universal experiences," Kalfin routinely put artists with different cultural and aesthetic backgrounds on the same project.
Chelsea's pioneering multimedia and environmental experiments shared a stage wiith lost treasures, revived flops, and new plays adapted from screenplays, stories, even a poem. Naturalism and surrealism shared a stage with bawdy musicals. Only that stage wasn't always the same shape; the Chelsea Three reconfigured the entire stage and auditorium to suit each work.
Glenn Close, Frank Langella, Chirstopher Lloyd, Des McAnuff, Alan Schneider, Brent Spiner, and Meryl Streep were among the artists who worked for minimum salaries to be part of the Chelsea experience.
In 1973, Hal Prince came to Brooklyn to stage the revival of a Broadway flop. The audience sat under, inside and around the remarkable set Eugene Lee imagined for Candide. And when the show moved to Broadway, the producers cut their potential profit by gutting the theater to recreate the staging.
Critics often said Chelsea stretched the boundaries of theater. Spectators subscribed to seasons before they knew what Chelsea would produce.
But not everyone supported the Chelsea experiment. Artistic and political values, creative work and pragmatic business practices, one artist and another clashed too often at this theater whose compounded disasters rivaled Candide's.
I set out to tell you this story. I decided to write it in the style of a novel, even though it was a history. And a history it is, after all. The story of Chelsea's work, of its resistance to mediocrity, is not the story of what is happening in the American theater today. It is the story of what isn't happening and why, of the obstacles to creative risk-taking, and of the artists for whom we have no place.
Davi Napoleon
Ann Arbor, 1991
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