Growing Our Future:
Young Professionals at the Playhouse

Celebrating our 80th birthday this June, the Playhouse proudly embraces our rich and storied past, made possible by the support and patronage of artists and audiences that join us every year and make what we do possible.

But what about the future? Who will be the Playhouse’s future audience and where are they now? Like many of you, they are savvy, motivated and busy individuals with vibrant careers and full family lives. They are also under 45. The Playhouse marketing team asks ourselves every day - how do we reach new audiences? In that one question we also hold the great responsibility of making sure we do. So where do we start? If you are under 45, there is a good chance we won’t reach you by only having a strategic marketing campaign that is 140 characters or less. You will see that the difference will be in the details.

One important example of these details is the recent creation of the Westport Country Playhouse Young Professionals Network. The WCP YPN is comprised of individuals all across Fairfield County from varied professions and lifestyles, all aged 25 to 45 years young. The YPN plans events with the goal of attracting other Young Pros to the Playhouse. The events combine a night out at the theater with the values and interests of a younger audience; price accessibility, one-of-a-kind access, value added incentives or in other words….free food and drink! Networking and socializing are also important part of the mix. Going to the theater right here in Fairfield County is different from the usual night out.

Joining us at the theater can also be spontaneous, a treat whenever some free time finds you. This can especially be true for young professionals We are excited to debut our $25 for 35 and under program, offering $25.00 tickets for all Friday night performances for patrons 35 years and younger.

Slow and steady will be the way. As we invite our younger audience back in ways that are consistent and in line with their interests, we hope they will become a part of the Playhouse family for years to come. But in the meantime, tell your friends – we know that works, too.

Jenn Bond Huisking
Community Relations Liaison

Spotlight on Nicholas Martin

Director of the Playhouse’s upcoming production of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Circle, Nicholas Martin is a true theatrical renaissance man. Throughout his long and prolific career in the business, he has been celebrated as a performer, director, writer, producer and presenter, as well as a beloved professor to theater students at Vermont’s Bennington College and Boston University. On Broadway, having won respect for his outstanding productions of Match, Butley and Hedda Gabbler, Martin recently directed Roundabout Theater Company’s stellar revival of Present Laughter. Among his many credits Off-Broadway, he won an OBIE Award for his direction of Christopher Durang’s Betty’s Summer Vacation in 1999 and also directed Durang’s newest work Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. No stranger to the world of regional theater, Martin has served as Artistic Director of both Huntington Theater Company and Williamstown Theater festival, and, additionally, has directed at some of the most prominent regional theaters across the country, including the McCarter Theatre and the Mark Taper Forum. Martin is even a Westport Country Playhouse alumnus, directing our 1993 production of The Substance of Fire by Jon Robin Baitz and our 1995 production of A.R. Gurney’s A Cheever Evening.

Recently, Nicky devoted a bit of time to answering questions posed to him by Playhouse Associate Artistic Director David Kennedy.

W. Somerset Maugham was one of the most successful living playwrights of his time, but his work is less known today. What is it that makes his work so special, and what draws you to The Circle in particular?

Well it’s a very good play, probably Maugham’s best play and unique in drawing room comedy in that its considerable wit is based entirely on character. I’m drawn to any literature that makes me laugh out loud because of the frailties and strengths of its participants. I feel that way about life as well. The theater world has been rediscovering Maugham for about twenty years now. In a prescient moment the playwright wrote, “The first little splutter of interest that follows a person’s death in the case of a writer is followed by some years of neglect. Then if there is in his work anything of enduring value, interest in him is renewed. But the dead period may well last twenty or thirty years.

For those who are unfamiliar with Maugham, would you say that his work is reminiscent of any other writers of that period? Or perhaps of another period?

Oscar Wilde, John Galsworthy, Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward, and Georg Bernard Shaw, at his least garrulous. And antecedents of The Circle are, of course, the plays of the Restoration, and those of Sheridan, Farquhar, and Goldsmith.

Anticipating your coming rehearsal process, what do you feel is the best preparation for the actors working on The Circle?

Twenty years in a first rate repertory company. And for the younger actors, observing actors who have spent twenty years in a first rate repertory company.

Of course, the work with the actors is only an aspect of any production. Can you talk a little bit about your many collaborations over the years with scenic designer Alexander Dodge? He has created consistently beautiful worlds for your productions. What’s your process with him like?

Oh, process. Well Alexander is a genius. Even when he was at school, where I first encountered him, he clearly had the visual and intellectual skill to design sets that would enlighten any play. And I do mean any play. As he designed more frequently, he absorbed the necessary technical knowledge that more complicated sets involve, his sets for major opera houses no more elegant or probing than his work for small stages. We have a kind of shorthand now where I can suggest one or two ideas and Alexander can magically place before me the world of the play in a little box. You know there aren’t many designers who can make a good set and actually provide an excellent ground plan.

Switching gears, can you tell us a little bit about how you began your career as a director?

Sure. In my early forties I stopped drinking and discovered—to my dismay—that acting no longer held for me the rewards I always thought it might and I took a teaching job at Bennington College. My great friend Sandy Dennis (of Westport, CT) told me that I would want to direct if I began teaching. I resisted the notion as I had all my life, but after my first class I was seized with a need to direct. A calling if we care to put it in spiritual terms. I began at Bennington and continued my new career at other drama programs while continuing to act. When Playwrights Horizons in New York called to ask me if I would consider the position of Associate Artistic Director, I began my directing career in earnest. My first production in New York was Jonathan Marc Sherman’s play Sophistry with a cast, then largely unknown, that included Ethan Hawke, Calista Flockhart, Steve Zahn, Austin Pendleton, Dick Latessa, and Anthony Rapp. So I was very lucky. And this production catapulted me to the first ranks of the B-list. And the rest, as they say, is of minor historical interest.

Not only have you had a successful career as a freelance director, but you have also served as Artistic Director of both Williamstown Theatre Festival and Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, two of the country’s major regional theaters. Can you talk a little bit about what it is like to run a nonprofit theater after spending so much time as a freelancer?

It is seriously more difficult, more time consuming and more frustrating, but far more exciting. I think Mark [Lamos] could expand on this notion.

Finally, you have had a successful career as a director and artistic director, but I imagine there are still some dream projects you’ve never gotten to do. Any ideas you care to share with us?

Shakespeare is my greatest love, and I wish I had been free to concentrate on more of his plays. As an actor I appeared in 27 of them, but I’ve directed only a handful. Also there are a couple of twentieth century plays I’d like to try my hand at: June Havoc’s Marathon ’33 is one. I like great big plays teeming with oddball characters. If Dickens had written plays, I’d be all over them.

David Kennedy
Associate Artistic Director

Maugham at the Movies

Film, like theater, can make for strange bedfellows. One of the best examples is W. Somerset Maugham, who penned our season’s second production The Circle, and Bill Murray sharing a film credit. When director John Byrum wanted to make a new film adaptation Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (the 1946 version starred Tyrone Power), he gave a copy of the novel to actress Margaret Kelly while she was in the hospital after giving birth to her son. At 4:00am the next morning, Byrum received a phone call from Kelly’s husband, Bill Murray, who simply said “This is Larry, Larry Durrell (the protagonist of the novel).” Murray was so desperate to work on the film that he only agreed to star in Ghost Busters after Columbia Pictures green-lighted The Razor’s Edge. The film marked Murray’s first dramatic role on film and showed his versatility as an actor.

Spanning the history of the cinema itself, there have been a staggering 108 filmic representations of Maugham's work, in German and Russian as well as English. The first film adaptation of Maugham’s work was the black and white silent drama The Explorer in 1915; the most recent was 2006’s The Painted Veil, which had been previously adapted with Greta Garbo and George Brent in 1934. Several of Maugham’s works have been adapted multiple times, each time exposing new and successive generations to his signature wit and subtle cynicism. Rain, The Razor’s Edge, The Painted Veil and Theatre have all been adapted three times, as well as Of Human Bondage, considered to be Maugham’s best novel and most famously in 1934 as the film that shot Bette Davis to stardom. In addition to those previously mentioned, Laurence Olivier, Sean Penn, Peter Cushing, Rita Hayworth, Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Fred MacMurray, Edward Norton, Veronica Lake, Gene Kelly, Gloria Swanson, John Gieguld, Kim Novak, Peter Lorre, Lee Remick, Joan Crawford, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore have all appeared in film or television adaptations of Maugham’s novels, plays, and short stories.

Another of Maugham’s Hollywood fans was legendary director Alfred Hitchcock, who counted Maugham among his favorite authors, and one of the few whose fiction he read for leisure. Not one to let a good spy story go by, Hitchcock’s 1934 Secret Agent was adapted from two of Maugham’s Ashenden stories, which were partly based on Maugham’s own experience as a British secret agent in Europe during the First World War. Although not Hitchcock’s best known film, it deeply influenced Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and the entire secret agent film genre.

Maugham himself had a brief though complicated stint in Hollywood, spending the first few years of World War II working on screenplays. Though he was one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations, Maugham frequently described film actors as “less than human” and observed, “In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally."

Chad Kinsman
Patron Services Supervisor