Minneapolis Rehearsals: Tyrone Guthrie Directs Hamlet

By Alfred Rossi

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520322004

Alfred Rossi

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

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MINNEAPOLIS

REHEARSALS

Tyrone Guttrie Directs Hamlet

MINNEAPOLS

REHEARSALS

Tyrone Guttrie Directs

Hamlet

BY ALFRED ROSSI

UNIVERSITY CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELLY LOS ANGELES LONDON

1970

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1970, by The Regents of the University of California

ISBN: 0-520-01719-6

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-115496 Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Dave Comstock

For the original Minnesota Theatre Company, and especially Pat Slingsby, my brother-in-law and fellow-actor in Hamlet, who died during the run of the production

FORWORD

by Alan Schneider

I don’t remember exactly when I first met Tony Guthrie—my favorite director in the English-speaking world, and maybe in a few foreign languages as well—but I remember vividly when I first began chasing after him. Just after the war, the Theatre Guild brought before my youthful Washingtonian eyes a spectacular production of Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped, replete with Stella Adler, Dennis King and directorial virtuosity and pyrotechnics such as I had only heard about and not seen. I dashed off my first (and last) fan letter to a director, one Tyrone Guthrie, in care of the Theatre Guild, detailing my enthusiasms and thanking him for having set me on fire. There was no answer to the letter. (I still wonder if Guthrie ever received it.) That was the first disappointment of a long line.

Not too many years afterward, when as resident director at Dartington Hall in England, I was being introduced to the special pastoral delights of Devonshire, as well as to the general richness of the current British theatre, I started hearing about a touring production of Henry VIII, directed by that same magical creature, Tyrone Guthrie (with settings by a Tanya Moiseiwitsch), as well as rumors of something called An Satyre of the Three Estates to be presented by him at the Edinburgh Festival in its second season (1948).

Immediately, I wrote a second letter to Mr. Guthrie explaining that I, too, was a director, young, gifted, and American, and terribly anxious to watch him at work. Could I come to a rehearsal somewhere in the Midlands, or wherever? Once more, no reply. Another letter; the same silence. Had I had enough shillings and a mastery of Button A and Button B of the British phone system, I might have telephoned; I didn’t.

Instead, I journeyed all aglow to Edinburgh to watch, with practically mesmerized admiration, as on that bold tongue of a stage at the Assembly Hall there unrolled before me the rich tapestry of Guthrie’s production of The Three Estates, a marvelously counter- vii poised blend of Henry V and the Marx Brothers, which introduced me to the thrust stage, as well as determinedly and forever into the ranks of the Guthrie worshippers. Of Guthrie himself, however, hard at work with a flock of candelabras for another Festival production, I had only a glimpse and half a dozen fast words: Oh, dear, yes he had gotten my letter. Who would want to watch him rehearse! In any case, he wasn’t sure this would be possible because he didn’t know where or when, if ever, he’d be working again. (No words about the current candlelight.) Yes, do keep after him if I wanted to. Foiled again! I had, however, discovered something to set my young blood roaring: Tyrone Guthrie did exist, albeit very busy—and perhaps a bit vague.

Then, in 1953, something called the Stratford (Ont.) Festival began, and Zelda Fichandler and I (newly installed as Artistic Director of the recently established Arena Stage) drove breathlessly through interminable wheat fields to Stratford’s historic opening night. Arriving there a night early, we scrambled down to the site to catch our first glimpse of that glorious tent, and to hear a series of frustratingly indistinct mutters from the rehearsal going on inside. No amount of friendly persuasion or American guile could convince a collection of Canadian watchdogs to let us sneak inside. We had to be content with watching successions of off-duty actors attired in glorious Moiseiwitsch costumes (the show was Richard III) pace about, smoking or trying to make themselves comfortable. Eventually the rehearsal was over, and a little man emerged, got on a bicycle stacked among many and peddled off past the trees. My God, that’s Alec Guinness. He was followed by the Master himself, a shirt-sleeved Guthrie, almost entirely bisected by a tremendous tureen stacked full of props. He said hello without stopping forward motion. Oh, yes, so glad we’d come all this way to see it—and him. Yes, he remembered me indeed. Yes, he’d love to do a show for Arena sometime: how about Volpone. As to seeing rehearsals? Oh dear, we weren’t really serious, were we?

And so on. Many times, many years. When Guthrie was directing Thornton Wilder’s Matchmaker, the predecessor to Hello Dolly! in Philadelphia, I was getting ready to do that celebrated second edition with Helen Hayes and Mary Martin of Skin of Our Teeth. We had a drink in Thornton’s hotel room. Could I watch Tony’s rehearsals? Oh, dear, he’d much rather watch mine. When he was doing The Tenth Man on Broadway, I sent echelon after eche-

Ion of my directing colleagues to the Booth Theatre to watch his incredibly skillful orchestration—à la New Yorkese—of that play’s inner movement and rhythms. Did I get to a rehearsal? No. When his production of Tamburlaine came to the Winter Garden and laid a big jeweled egg with the critics, I sat night after night in that practically empty theatre marveling at all of Guthrie’s golden arrows, literal and metaphorical. But I never even saw an understudy rehearsal. His failures were always more interesting than most people’s successes.

There were countless Guthrie productions, successes and failures, which I somehow always managed to see: Oedipus Rex, All’s Well That Ends Well, Gideon, Troilus and Cressida at the Old Vic, Six Characters in Search of an Author at the old Phoenix. But did I see a rehearsal of his? Or watch him work? Or see how he dealt with actors, or arranged those marvelously swirling crowd scenes, or did a scene from scratch, or developed some lovely piece of business—like Lechery mocking Dame Chastity in the stocks by shaming her with his finger and calling her Chastititee? Oh, dear, no!

Finally, Minneapolis gave birth to the Guthrie Theatre, and I flew up after an afternoon’s rehearsal of Threepenny Opera at the Arena Stage to see the opening night of George Grizzard’s Hamlet —flying back the next morning in time to rehearse again. And one bright day, shortly afterwards, I heard the persuasive voice of Tyrone Guthrie, himself, on the phone, asking me if I’d come to the Guthrie the following summer to direct Skin of Our Teeth. Would I! Yes, I would—whatever the terms—but only if he’d let me watch him rehearse! Jolly laugh. Of course, my dear boy, if I were silly enough to want to. Couldn’t imagine why.

The next summer, for various subtle reasons, I directed The Glass Menagerie instead of Skin, and I saw Guthrie all over the place, including for tea and cocktails and we even had some political discussions. But rehearsals? Somebody in the scheduling department was determined to keep us apart by always putting our rehearsals together. I got to watch the voice coach and the movement coach all right, and lots of Douglas Campbell; but Tony might as well have been still at Edinburgh as far as I was concerned. Oh, yes, the night Henry V went on, I watched for two hours while Tony was moving some banner bearers hither and yon and George Grizzard, playing Henry, and his Katherine stood around and got nervous. And Tony did get to a Menagerie rehearsal to tell me he thought it was going to be all right (it wasn’t) and he didn’t have many suggestions (he had a few).

All of which brings me to the subject of Mr. Rossi’s labor of love—and observation. How startling it is, finally, to watch Tony Guthrie in rehearsal! How gratifying and how necessary. Because if one cannot get in in person—and you can see how hard I tried— at least in these all too few pages, one can get the flavor and sense of what was happening during this particular production and with this particular director in charge. I could wish that Mr. Rossi had now and then provided a bit more for us (or, sometimes a tiny bit less) of what actually went on or why. But for those of us who are directors, as well as for those of us who would like to be directors (and does that leave anyone out?) these pages are extremely enlightening—and often amusing, serious, understanding, and characteristic of the process and the man. And, forgive me, it is all much more relevant than something, say, by Alexander Dean—or some of his latter-day equivalents.

Thank you, Al, for finally getting me to Tony’s rehearsals. They were worth the wait.

PREFACE

Less than a century ago an event took place which was to have an incalculable influence on the production of plays for the stage. On May 1, 1874, an unknown company of players under the aegis of George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, opened an engagement in Berlin and the era of the modern stage director was born.

Since that auspicious day the importance of the stage director has grown astonishingly; not altogether a surprising fact, if one considers the astonishing individuals whose exceptional creative talents have graced this period. The names of Saxe-Meiningen, Antoine, Brahm, Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Denchenko, Vakhtangov, Copeau, Jouvet, Poel, Granville-Barker, Meyerhold, Reinhardt, Belasco, Clurman, Kazan, Brook, and the subject of this work, Tyrone Guthrie, are as important to the history of world theatre in this period as those of any playwright, actor, or designer—perhaps more so. Their contributions to the image of the director as régisséur, the overseer of all aspects of a production, the one creative artist responsible for the unity of the mise en scène, are enormous.

Their work was, and is, however, as evanescent as it is prodigious, so that, except for film direction done by a few of these men, there is no way of re-experiencing their creative efforts. This is the inevitable fate of the theatre artist whose magic conjures a unique experience for his audience—it happens once and only once. Theatre experiences are unequivocally transient: they make their effect through ephemeral means and are almost impossible to analyze validly. Each observer at the two hours’ traffic has a unique experience in the truest sense of the word, no two experiences are alike. They, unlike the phoenix, will never rise again, at least not in the same way.

Just as it is difficult for the artist to determine why a certain effect is made on an audience member, it is also difficult for the spectator to determine the techniques by which the effect is produced. Perhaps it should be. If when we view a work of art—in this case a play performed by living actors in