‘No, we are serious,’ the other standing over me impressed upon me. ‘We should like to know whether or not the Communist Party operates in Nigeria and if so whether you belong to them.’
‘You need entertain no fear there,’ I assured them through my laugh. ‘The US still gives us aid.’
Eventually, however, we agreed that I mail them my work which they said Miss Frost, Robert Frost’s own daughter and as much a poet in her own right as she was their own star reader, would advise them on the presentation.
‘Have you, like the English, a title like poet-laureate?’
The kindly old lady fondled her hands. ‘We’d love very much to present you as Africa’s Poet-Laureate!’ At that I laughed again and nervously too, adding to her obvious disillusionment that luckily for the arts in Nigeria, they were managing very well without the afflatus of some government-paid clown and lackey. After mailing my stuff to the august corporation sometime about Christmas and the New Year, I never heard from its directors again. At first, I thought the long illness and then the ripe fall of Robert Frost had prevented his daughter and housekeeper and bednurse, all combined in one, from acting in respect of an unknown African poet. But the months rolled by, and the sudden season of my departure came, and nothing happened, to quote the Wilfred Owen dirge.
Ruth Stone proved a different kind of companion and guide altogether. She and her husband Sam, a top engineer at the American Telephone Company, for whom he has recently co-designed the first machine to harness successfully the revolutionary principle of Laser beam, had come to my AMSAC talk just before Christmas with the simple aim of collecting more material for the thesis she was doing on theater in Africa. Instead I became a rare piece in her collection! A couple of days after our first meeting, a long distance call was put on to me at the Graduate College in Princeton. It was Ruth calling. She wanted to produce and co-direct with some Nigerian Professor at Adelphi College my play Song of a Goat. Did I mind? I said not at all, except that my publisher’s agent had just written to say Brandeis University had placed order for twenty or so copies of the play which must mean they wanted to do something with it. In addition, a Mr Martin Magner and his photographer wife, both of whom I had met at a Christmas party at Langston Hughes’, had expressed a keen wish to have the play on in their own theater at Youngstown, Ohio. None of this however would put off Ruth; as I soon came to know, she was impossible to resist. She was not in any sense a professional, she hastened to assure me, but for seven years had been the sole director of an arts centre serving the two million odd suburban community of Long Island. And it was for this centre so much like Ibadan’s own Mbari of which she was a long distance member that she would like to co-direct Song of a Goat while I was still available for a personal appearance at the production. This she put sometime in the spring. Another proposition, more ambitious by far, would be a try at an off-Broadway showing with a mixed cast, but one or two people with name and money had first to be drawn into the cause. All this called for time and planning, and could I allow her a chance? That same week I took the train to Great Neck, had a big late lunch cooked for me by Ruth, and from that day on formed a firm friendship with her and Sam and their two teenage daughters Julie and Joanne that survived all my US strain.
The Stones took me to several shows in the city. Our first outing together was to the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of Ariadne auf Naxos. The night turned out to be rather remarkable. First, Karl Böhm, who had been a personal friend and colleague of the composer, conducted entirely from sweet memory with Leonie Rysanek in the lead, and secondly the opera, opened in English only to modulate violently into the original German. It left one somewhat rattled. But more interesting for us three was the seating plight in which we found ourselves. Perched on a couple of decks high on the steep cliff that is the side of the huge ugly stone quarry they call the Metropolitan, we could only see the players far away and way down below us, who looked like pin-headed puppets tripping up in a pirouette. The fall of the curtain after the long prologue and induction came therefore as a real relief.
‘Come with me,’ Ruth called to Sam and me. Her restless inquiring eyes in and out of her spy-glass had spotted a box by the stage right at the other sheer fall of the hall. Only one lady sat there in solitary glory.
‘She won’t let us in,’ Sam protested.
‘Oh, why not? She’s all alone and surely wouldn’t mind our joining her,’ Ruth swept us along. Next she got hold of a distinguished looking usher, and before the old man knew what was afoot, prevailed upon him to lead the way to the box ‘Can you resist her?’ the old man threw wide his hands when I could not contain a laugh. So into the box we all marched.
‘Here you are, lady,’ the usher bowed us in.
‘Yes, thank you so much,’ replied Ruth, bowing out the man. And then turning that same winning smile of hers upon the lady seated inside, she stated simply as a matter of course that we had come to swell her company.
‘Well, that’s all right by me,’ said the lady seated inside the box, ‘except that the box is not mine really.’
‘Oh, that’s fine, then,’ Ruth soothed her, and looked over to Sam and me to see how comfortable we were in the seats she had already settled us in. Then the curtain rose for the opera proper, and with that fell our joint fortunes. A solid shadow of a man emerged suddenly, darkening the entrance to our box.
‘Please come back with me to your seats,’ he said briefly and with supreme blandness.
‘Why, the lady here invited us in,’ Ruthremonstrated with him.
‘Sorry, madam, but you don’t want me to lose my job. So come with me, please,’ the shadow said in a voice still more portentous than fate.
‘Oh, surely the lady who owns the box does not mind our staying,’ Ruth insisted, appealing to that august personage. But no help came from that high state. Instead she said:
‘Oh, no, I told you the box was not mine,’ and then she added something to the effect that she was the wife of some manager or director at the Metropolitan, but by this time we had been marched out and consequently lost her mumbling in the music then pouring all over the place. On the way, Ruth, irrepressible as ever, steered Sam and me into another private box, this time occupied by its legitimate owners, an elderly couple who regarded us sternly in turn through their lognettes and then very wisely returned their attention to the business on hand. We had not even bothered to say hello but flopped straight into the first empty seats we saw vacant in the box.
We went to several more shows together, Harold Pinter’s two plays The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, in a double bill off Broadway, and John Gielgud’s star-studded revival of The School for Scandal supplying both ends of the beat. I arrived for the latter in heavy snow and on a train more than two hours behind schedule but got in all the same ahead of Ruth and Sam. They found me on the outskirts of a large crowd crushing their way through the foyer of The Majestic.
‘There must be lots of celebrities here tonight,’ Ruth drank the scene in at one go. ‘Have you spotted any?’
‘I wouldn’t know them,’ I said in my innocence, and a woman with a face pock-marked with frost and glowing like boiled prawn snorted in distaste. The show itself, though of the highest polish possible, well proved that old proverb saying all that glitters is not gold, for shallow behind the shine of the nickel that is the play lay its incontrovertible core of rust and mould.
Even worse and more of a worthless experience was the matinée of Chin-Chin I attended with Ruth. The Plymouth Theater was filled to overflowing chiefly with matrons, their girls at home from colleges, and younger sons still at preparatory schools. Such was the irresistible draw of Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton, the stars of the show. But theirs were properties of gold washed with sediment down the drain. The protagonists were an unhappy couple jilted severally by their original partners; Quinn had no real trouble portraying the dark, warm, Italianate construction-engineer and husband seeking solace and consolation in the arms of the abused English wife he meets in a posh New York hotel, but Miss Leighton, a real sybil if ever there was one, and worthy of the stage and screen, cut a terribly, poor, pathetic figure as she tried stripping to her skin and bones to awaken manly passion in her new found partner. The only feelings she succeeded in arousing however both in her lover and herself were those of disgust and disillusion. And you could not have agreed more with them. But, on the contrary, everybody else there seemed to have had the greatest treat of their lives. The big names, the special promotions and press parties, and the thoroughly automatized props now creating with a mere flick of lights the vast Pan American Airway building complex in a void, next spreading out with a click of buttons the entire parched sprawl of New York’s lower East side, not counting the pale songs, speech and dance that provide the staple for musicals so standard now on Broadway, were all there as auto-suggesters and prompters to laughter and cheers.
‘Coming behind stage to salute the stars?’ Ruth asked at the final curtain call.
‘Not for a thousand stripes!’ I said in my most surly voice. Sitting as a stranger in stalls, show after show, and especially after watching Vivien Leigh, undoubtedly ‘one of the crown jewels’, dazzle her way through a Tovarich anything but bright, I came to find myself more and more foxed by a common riddle: which deserved the other, the public or the production?
The answer they told me lay outside the vast bazaar in the desert called Broadway. So one week in March I did a grand tour of the few independent stalls making a stout job of resisting the utterly commercial sway and character of Broadway. My first place of call was the American National Theater and Academy, ‘an organization of theater services, information and activities, Congressionally Chartered’ so its brochure proudly declares, ‘and independently financed by its members and interested donors, dedicated … to extend the living theater beyond its present limitations by bringing the best in the Theater to every state in the Union.’ I spent my time admiring ANTA’s letters of commendation from the State Department while the young girl at the reception desk tried to check up whether I really had a previous appointment.
But Old Colonel Grumpy from his emporium at Princeton had seen to all that so I was soon in the presence of handsome Mrs Ruth Mayleas, Director of the National Theater Service Department. She met me at the door with a close colleague of hers, a most charming woman. Plagued by a terrible habit of not paying attention to names when meeting new faces, I did not for quite some time know which official and personage exactly I had then the pleasure of meeting. So there 1 sat between my two hostesses fidgety about which side to move my chair nearer, and which warm smile I should return first. fortunately, two outside calls came in almost at once, and for a brief gorgeous scene, it was quite a joy watching these two women executives chatter away at the same time, each on her line to a different caller on a separate subject. In due time I came to know who was who.
‘Now you know who we are,’ Mrs Mayleas finished briefing me. ‘ANTA serves as a national theater for our country, represents her abroad on international bodies like UNESCO or ITI, and when theater people from other places come over here to the US, it is our job to show them the right things to see.’ And that was what she would like to do with me. ‘Are you thinking of publishing some of your poetry here?’ she asked.
I said yes, that is, if it was not too much trouble. To which she replied: ‘Oh, no, magazines like Evergreen Review would be pleased to hear from you. And what about a drama magazine? The Tulane would be just right for you.’ I took all these down.
‘But you must be wanting very much to visit the Actors’ Studio.’ She changed the subject and picked up the telephone at her desk.
It turned out that the great director of the Actors’ Studio Mr Lee Strasberg was away in Moscow for a Stanislavski anniversary and festival. His secretary did not know exactly when he would be returning. In that event classes at the studio could not sit that Tuesday. But Thursday should be all right for the visitor from Princeton, no, Africa, and everybody at the Studio would be delighted to meet him.
Before leaving, I gave Mrs Mayleas copies of my plays.
‘I’m not promising we’ll put them up at our theater,’ she said frankly.
‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t expecting that. They are just for a keepsake.’
‘Well, thank you very much,’ she shook my hand. At this point, her associate and friend also rose, and with care almost maternal, both walked me to the door and out into the corridor beyond.
In the meantime Ruth had been waiting for me at another famous and even more individual stall a couple of streets and avenues off Broadway, where ANTA has itself installed by Times Square, and there I went through the slush of early spring and screaming stream of traffic to join her. Coming from Princeton with its Institute of Advanced Studies, first directed by Albert Einstein and now by Robert Oppenheimer (to whom I had a note of introduction from Melvin Lasky of Encounter, but got no reply), the name of the stall, that is, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theater Arts, rang familiarly in my head. Ruth was something of a supporter and assistant to the founder and director Dr John D. Mitchell. A solid silent American Brahmin, I ran into him at the head of the staircase. After our brief introduction by Ruth, who never missed a chance of touting me, Dr Mitchell walked back with me into his office.
To answer my queries about his establishment, he gave me one or two brochures to study in my spare time, but meanwhile he suggested that it would be a great idea if Ruth took me to the studio and workshop theater to watch his visiting German Director rehearse a specially selected cast in their current production, Bertolt Brecht’s Good Woman of Setzuan.
‘Yes, that’s what we really want to do,’ said Ruth. ‘The drama group at his college in Nigeria actually staged the same play some time ago. Now he wants to compare.’
‘That’s fine,’ Dr Mitchell approved and left us to ourselves.
Founded in 1958 by the doctor and his heiress wife Miriam, IASTA, as the institute is affectionately called by those of it, invites leading directors from different countries every year for six weeks each, to analyse and direct in English translation a theater classic of their respective countries. Actors usually double as assistant directors and other staff are enrolled members of the institute, the aim being ‘to increase the American theater artist’s chances of studying at first-hand the styles and techniques of foreign theater traditions and to help meet the challenge of theater forms other than the naturalistic, true to life style in which he excels.’
