THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S PLAYERS

            I created the Lord Chamberlain’s Players at the University of Michigan from 1966.  It was active there until 1992, and then at Bellarmine  College in Louisville, Kentucky from 1992 to 1999, when the organization changed its name to Abbey West Players.  In 2009  it was again reconstituted, this time in Saarbrücken, Germany, as Abbey East Players at the Universität des Saarlandes.
            I began my theatre career just before my sixth birthday, in 1941.  I was the Prologue for the Christmas program at St. Joseph’s School in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

                                    Little folks, you will say,                                                                                                           Should be seen and not heard:                                                                                                   ^     But you woin't mind if I                                                                                                                           Say just one word?

                                    That one word is Welcome!                                                                                                                 Welcome everyone!                                                                                                                               And now that I have said it,                                                                                                                       Our program has begun!

I also played a young waif—a silent part—in the Nativity pageant, which closed our program.  I wore a nice white shirt and new knickerbockers as Prologue.  But as a young waif I was supposed to look waifish.  I knew I couldn't dirty my white shirt or my new knickers, so I just rubbed some playground mud on my face and my arms and my legs.  I did my waif's make-up, alas, before the program started, so I could do it well—and Sister Mary Annine—she was only eighteen, and this was her first year as a nun—didn't notice until I was on stage to say my little speech.

        In the early 1950s, while I was in high school, I wrote and directed two plays.  One was a very successful half-hour live radio opera called “Hansel and Fritzel,” the other a sort of absurdist play (I had never heard of such, of course) that I staged at College High School when I was a senior.  Then I retired from the theatre until 1965.

        I was a newly minted Doctor of Philosophy in 1965, in the second term of my first year as a member of the English faculty at Michigan.  That spring, Donald Hall volunteered me to play opposite him in the John Barton Wolgamot Society's production of Ubu Roi, by Alfred Jarré.  It was wonderful fun.  Don Hall—in his bearish phase—played Papa Ubu, and I was his conscience.

       In the autumn of 1966 I walked into the ornate rococo foyer of the university's Angell Hall, I stopped dead still.  This was the perfect set Oscar Wilde's “Salomé”—and I wanted to use it, and would ask Don Hall to play Herod.  I did, and he said yes.  I recruited students, and created The Lord Chamberlain's Players.  I chose the name because in 1896 the Lord Chamberlain, in London, refused to grant a license for the production of  Wilde's play on the grounds that it was obscene.

       Our production was a spectacular success.  I persuaded—pleaded, with and finally persuaded—Josef Blatt, professor of opera at the Music School, to attend.  He came—and declared it as moving a production as he had ever seen or heard:  “Better than Strauss,” he said.

       After that, the Lord Chamberlain's Players presented Byron's “Manfred” in Angell Hall, and Henry Fielding's “Tom Thumb,” and the American premier of Charles Marowicz' “Macbeth Collage.”    We also did several short medieval English plays, and several short plays of mine.  And—not in Angell Hall—P. T. Barnum's melodrama, “The Drunkard.”  And we made a road trip to the University of Notre Dame to perform in a theatre festival called “Expose Yourself!”

In the midst of all of this, Don Hall  used a lot of the Lord Chamberlain's Players in a 1967 production of “MacBird!”--Barbara Garson's anti-war play—that ran through several weeks in three different locations.  I got to play MacBird—dressed in a red kilt,  superman-blue tights and shirt with a big “McB” symbol on the chest, a red cape, a gold crown, jester-type shoes with long turned-up toes, and a long red rubber glove on my left hand to signify that I was a murderer.
 
When the lights were out and the house black after the intermission, I would sneak out in the darkness to the apron of the stage, just inches from the people on thr front row.  The rest of the cast would be at the back of the theatre, and would start to chant, “Hey! Hey! LBJ!  How Mny kids did you kill today?”  The audience would pick it up, quickly, and after a minute or so their angry shouts would be frightening.  If the people on the front row—university students, mostly—had known I was standing just six inches in front of them, they would have bitten my legs off.  But when the lights came up, I was MacBird, a ludicrous satiric idiot, and they would laugh.

The Lord Chamberlain's Players also did two productions of a play about Einstein and James Joyce's Ulysses, which I called “Yes to the Universe.”  And twice we did productions of my stage version of Plato's “Apology,” with Charles Stallman as Socrates—talking, as Socrates did, forever.

In 1992 I left Michigan.  For the next ten years I taught at a small college in Louisville, Kentucky.  The first spring I was there a new version of The Lord Chamberlain's Players staged “Oedipus the King” in a natural ampitheatre on campus.  Except for Oedipus, it was pretty awful.  But my students were quick learners, and the next year we did a fine production—with mostly the same cast--of the Irish dramatist John Synge's “The Playboy of the Western World.”  It was good enough that we changed our name to Abbey West Players, and dedicated ourselves to doing Irish theatre.

Over the next six years my Bellarmine College students performed beautifully, wonderfully, in four Brian Friel plays--”Philadelphia, Here I Come!” first, then “Translations,” “Aristocrats,”  and “Dancing at Lughnasa.”  I had seen the original Abbey theatre production of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” in Dublin and in London, and three American productions.  Our production wasn't in the same league with the Abbey productions, but it was much better than any of the American ones, including a (very bad) one at Actors Theatre in Louisville.

As Abbey West Players we also did two short Lady Augusta Gregory plays and Synge's “Shadow of the Glen,” three one-act plays by William Butler Yeats, and two of my plays.  Then we staged the American premier (unwittingly) of Thomas McDonagh's “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” and finally Samuel Beckett's “Waiting for Godot.”

We played “Godot” in the college's chapel, the stage in the theatre being much too big.  The local Catholic archbishop objected to our using the chapel, but I told him than many people thought that “Godot” was to be taken as “God,” and that the play was a highly moral work of art.  “Of course,” he said.  (Beckett might have enjoyed that.  When asked, once, if “Waiting for Godot” were about God, he answered, “I know how to spell God.”  It is, of course, a very moral play.)  After we finished with “Godot” on campus at Bellarmine, we took it to a theater-bar in downtown  Louisville for another week's run.

Abbey West Players became Abbey East Players in 2008, when I started teaching at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, Germany.

There was a student theatre group in the English department, with a faculty moderator.  I went to see a production of Wilde's "The Importance of Being Ernest" with two of my colleagues.  After a ninety-minute first act, we all three produced excuses requiring our immediate departure.  I tried again the next term, but had to escape during a scene change.  So I recruited five students, none of whom had ever acted before, and we put on “Waiting for Godot.”  It was hard work, but didn't really take much time.  And the five of us designed and built our set, and created the lighting.  After the first night, the cast knew what they had done—and were amazed at themselves.  The audience was amazed, too.  And I was so very, very happy with what my students had created that I immediately started thinking of what Abbey East Players could do next.

But there was no next. I couldn't get any students interested.  Not even one.

So that's it.  My career in drama has also included, since 1974, a total of 434 performances as Charles Dickens, doing dramatic readings from A Christmas Carol and other of his novels.  I have played Dickens all over the United States, and in Canada, Ireland, England, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, and on both radio and television.

And once, for an Ars Musica concert,  I got to play Giuseppi Borroni, an 18th century Italian composer about whom history knows almost nothing.  None of his music survives.  As a young man he heard the music of Pergolesi, and as an older man he heard Mozart.  In recreating Giuseppi Borroni, I got to let him talk about Pergolesi and Mozart, and I made him the great-great grandfather of my own great-grandfather, Giuseppi Borroni., who in the 1870s, in America, changed the spelling of his name to Borrone.
    
Now, except for my Dickens readings, my drama career is over.  Except for those annual readings, I will just play me, and direct me.  But that should keep me busy.   But I'm sorry that the Lord Chamberlain's Players are no more, and that the Abbey West Players and Abbey East Players are gone.