The Independent

July 7, 1989

 

INTERVIEW / Strangeinterludes

The Americandirector Jose Quintero talks to Emily Green about Eugene O'Neill and Off-Broadway

 

THE GOVERNOR of Panamahad wanted his son to be a doctor and sent him to Los Angeles City College,though the boy understood little English. There a chemistry professor took pityon the intense foreign student given to abject dunking of litmus paper, andgave him full marks on the condition that he 'never meddle in the sciencesagain'; the pact was sealed with a handshake. The boy returned to Panama, wherehe bungled three jobs in quick succession. In the summer of 1945, the Governorgave his son dollars 500 with which to return to the United States.

 

Such were theinauspicious beginnings of Jose Quintero, one of two stage directors who madethe 1950s one of the richest decades in recent American theatre. The other wasTurkish-born Elia Kazan. Kazan would discover the young Brando and direct thepremieres of Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a HotTin Roof. Quintero became the artistic force behind the company which forgedthe Off-Broadway movement. His company of unknowns included Geraldine Page,Jason Robards, George C Scott and Colleen Dewhurst. Like Kazan, he would be oneof Tennessee Williams's favourite interpreters, but he will probably be bestremembered as the young director who rescued the work of Eugene O'Neill from atortured realm of ghosts.

 

 

 

Two weeks ago he satin a London restaurant for an interview, oddly boyish for a 65-year-old who hasonly recently recovered from throat cancer. Only a hint of a Spanish accentpenetrated his speech, now amplified in a mechanical monotone through avibrating device from which he coaxes meaning through emphatic variations incadence.

 

Quintero's theatricalcareer began in Woodstock in upstate New York, with a motley brand of dramastudents, and a nervy Brooklyn-born lawyer, Theodore Mann. Quintero emerged astheir director with a proposition, in broken English, that they do Alice inWonderland as their first production, declaring that they must either 'sink ordrown!' They did neither: the summer population of Woodstock adored Alice anddreams of a Manhattan theatre took hold in the troupe. With cheques extortedfrom generous parents, they rented a deserted night club in Greenwich Village'sSheridan Square and named it Circle in the Square. Influenced by the economyand lyricism of the dance of Martha Graham and the music of Aaron Copland,Quintero ambitiously pressed his amateur company, at least once to ridiculouseffect: their second production, of Lorca's Yerma, was a disaster, with a frailmid-Western girl gamely attempting the lead.

 

In 1952, he turned toTennessee Williams's delicate Summer and Smoke, which had suffered a crudepremiere and poor reception four years earlier. He again cast the girl who hadmade such an unlikely Andalusian earth-mother: Geraldine Page. The role of AlmaWinemiller, a great Williams heroine, took Page to Broadway. Quintero now looksback on the time as a coming of age.

 

'It was the mostdelicious time of my life. The corruption began one morning after Summer andSmoke. Ted woke me up and said 'Look out the window.' There was a long line ofpeople buying tickets. It was because Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times hadcome down and written about us. At that time Off-Broadway did not exist, and MrAtkinson had heard from somebody that the play was being done in some nightclubdowntown. And he wrote about it. Before that, it was really just the work wethought about.'

 

There was too much ofthe questing artist, and too much of the guilty, Jesuit-educated lapsedCatholic about Quintero, who 'learned everything about theatre in church', forhim to have greedily embraced Broadway success. Leigh Connell, a bookishsoutherner who briefly worked at the Circle in the Square, suggested he turn tothe work of an all but forgotten playwright: 'Why don't you do an O'Neill?'

 

Carla Monterey O'Neillhad kept only the company of her husband's ghost for three years when JoseQuintero appeared at the door of her plushly-furnished Upper East Sideapartment in 1956 in search of the rights to produce The Iceman Cometh. 'At thedoor was this exquisite looking woman. She took my hand and said, 'Come withme.' I followed her through the apartment right into the bedroom. She stoppedat an enormous four poster bed, and said, 'This is where he died.' And then sheasked me to sit down while she showed me some hats. She took down three hatboxes, and put one hat on. I shook my head. She put another one on. I shook myhead. And she put the third one on. It had a veil, and was very French. I said'That one'. And she said, 'This is the hat I wore to bury him. You are here forthe rights to The Iceman Cometh. You have them.'

 

Quintero hired JasonRobards, an unknown actor-cum-taxi driver who lived down the street from him,to play Hickey, the haunted murderer, in The Iceman Cometh, and nearly split upwith his co-producer, Theodore Mann, over the choice. 'Jason was totallydifferent from what O'Neill described, but he had the essence of it. Themadness was in him. He knew the landscape of guilt like a blind man knows hisapartment. I hadn't realised at first that Eugene O'Neill had not beenperformed in his own country in ten years. Critics and producers had reallybeen convinced then that O'Neill was old hat. They complained that he was dark,no humour whatsoever. There is great humour in O'Neill! So this production justblew them over. And Jason was magnificent, like something out of the Bible.'

 

The production began along, Gothic saga between the director and the playwright's widow. 'The weeklylunches began. After escorting her back from the fifth or so lunch, she said,'He's there. The sonofabitch! He comes to torment me. Come in to defend me.Tell him how much I am working for his plays.' A few nights after the openingof The Iceman Cometh, Carlotta O'Neill summoned Quintero to her apartment. Alsopresent were a lawyer for the estate and, according to Mrs O'Neill, 'him', theplaywright's ghost. The lawyer offered Quintero the rights to Long Day'sJourney into Night. 'I had to excuse myself, and go to the bathroom, where Ithrew up. When I returned, she said there was only one condition, that I do itexactly as he wrote it. That I not change a line. That's how I did it.'

 

Eugene O'Neill hadstipulated before he died that the play not be produced until 25 years afterhis death. Long Day's Journey into Night opened on 7 November 1956, three yearsafter the playwright's death, with Fredric March as James Tyrone and JasonRobards as James Tyrone Jr. It ran for 390 performances, and earned theplaywright a third Pulitzer Prize. In the years following the American premiereof Long Day's Journey into Night, Quintero directed a host of O'Neills: StrangeInterlude, Marco Millions, Hughie, Anna Christie and Touch of the Poet. He evennamed his dog 'Hughie'.

 

In 1967, Mrs O'Neilloffered him yet another unproduced script: More Stately Mansions, a survivor(alongside Touch of the Poet) of O'Neill's family history cycle of eleven playswhich he burnt, summoning his wife as an audience, shortly before he died.Ingrid Bergman - who had made her American stage debut in Anna Christie twentyseven years earlier - returned from a long European exile to appear inQuintero's production.

 

More Stately Mansions,Quintero remembers, pleased Mrs O'Neill. He was less satisfied, and contemptuousof the Los Angeles audience who applauded mercilessly when Bergman appeared. 'Itold her to make them suffer, and not begin the play until they were quiet.Opening night after she entered she had to keep up business, moving around thestage, for almost twenty minutes while they clapped.'

 

Back on Broadway,three years later, Quintero directed one of his most satisfying O'Neillproductions - Moon for the Misbegotten, with Colleen Dewhurst and JasonRobards. Dewhurst, like Geraldine Page and Jason Robards, had been an unknownwhen he spotted her in 1959. She was playing Camille at a theatre across fromhis building. 'This buxom woman, can you imagine? It would have taken doublepneumonia, tuberculosis and I don't know what to kill her!' He flagged her downone day, invited her to join the Circle in the Square Company, and cast her asLaetitia in Children of Darkness opposite a then-obscure George C Scott.

 

A simple philosophyhas operated behind his history of remarkable casting: 'I never - almost never- make actors read in auditions. I look for a quality.' He seems to have foundthe most abiding qualities in Dewhurst and Robards, with whom he revived LongDay's Journey into Night on Broadway for the O'Neill centenary. It was his lastproduction of the playwright's work. 'I have done my O'Neill's. It is time forthe young directors.'

 

Tennessee Williams isthe American playwright Quintero most admires outside of O'Neill. But despitethe resounding success of Summer and Smoke, he watched all the major Williamspremieres go to Kazan. 'I admire the work of Kazan very much. I did not likehim at all, but no American director understood violence the way he did.'Nevertheless, he would like to resurrect the late plays like Small-CraftWarnings, which he feels have been misunderstood. And he is in Britain to beginwork on the Brian Friel's translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters. 'I thought Imight die without doing that play', he says, 'We need many lives.'

 

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