From NYFA Quarterly - The Long Run: A Performer's Life
Summer 2003 issue

In this column, NYFA Program Officer Edith Meeks interviews performing artists about issues relating to their working careers. Here, she speaks with George Bartenieff.

George Bartenieff began his theatrical career on Broadway in 1947 at the age of 14 in Harold Clurman’s production of The Whole World Over. He has made a rich and varied life for himself as a performer, taking part in some of the most influential ensemble companies of the off-Broadway theatrical explosion and the off-off-Broadway experimental scene. Co-founder of the Theater for the New City, he has received Obie Awards for Sustained Excellence as a Producer and as a Performer, and for his recent solo performance as Victor Klemperer in I Will Bear Witness.

Edith Meeks: You started performing at an early age. Did you ever think of doing something else?

George Bartenieff: I got sick and tired of the theater in my late teens. It didn’t seem real, there was something not real about it. This was after appearing in a couple of Broadway shows and training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. I had a fit of throwing it over and wanting to do something with my hands—to be a cabinetmaker, a shoemaker, or a tailor.

I encountered and fell in love with Shakespeare at RADA; that was fortunate. And I saw the greatest acting in London. It was the golden age of British acting. I saw John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Irene Worth, Sybil Thorndike, and Wendy Hiller, all together onstage.

EM: When you started out, did you have an ideal in mind for the kind of career you wanted? How does that compare with the way things turned out?

GB: My hero was Laurence Olivier. I thought I was going to be a classical actor. My dream was to find the right company and play Shakespeare, the classics. All the regional theaters were being born around that time. I started working with Andre Gregory’s group in Philadelphia, Theater for the Living Arts. Back in New York one night, I met a beat poet on the street. He told me about someone who was putting together a “showcase” production of a modern play in iambic pentameter. The term “showcase” then was very low, degrading, a vanity thing. It turned out the director was a poet, and all the people in the play were writers, sculptors, painters. I was the only trained actor. It was the Judson Poets Theater. It was totally cross-discipline. Dancers could be actors, actors could be in the dance. I was six to seven years commuting between Judson and Broadway, Judson and Philadelphia, Judson and the New York Shakespeare Festival. I did Irene Fornes’ first play, Rosalind Drexler’s first play.

The poets and painters started the theater of the 1960s. What was happening on Broadway, with the exception of John Guare and Edward Albee, wasn’t really connected to what we were experiencing. In the early happenings, poets and painters broke the rules and inspired the whole direction of theater. They were the prophets for what would soon affect everything else in society.

About that time I also started to do street theater. No permits were necessary then; people would just go out and do it. There were about 20 companies working in the streets. I met a writer of plays for street theater named Bob Nichols. He was a master carpenter, as well as being a landscape artist, as well as being a poet. He wrote a play against the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Robert Moses wanted to take the West Side Highway through Little Italy and there was a tremendous uproar. At the end of the play a car comes down the street and destroys the stage. Joe Papp read that sensational ending and wanted to use the play to open his experimental theater. We did it first in the gutter right there in front of the Public Theater, then we toured it through Little Italy and the West Village. Nichols designed an ingenious set that would splinter apart when the car came through.

EM: In 1970 you co-founded the Theater for the New City. What gave you the impetus to start a theater of your own?

GB: Judson had peaked. We had seen the breakup of all these companies. There were four of us from Judson, including [the director] Larry Kornfeld. The impulse coincided with the availability of an unbelievable building space at Westbeth, which was formed at that moment by the Kaplan Foundation. There were three floors which we turned into several theaters going at one time, several theaters that could cross-pollinate.

We wanted to create a cross-disciplinary theater that emphasized poetic language. We wanted to translate the ideas we had seen and admired at other theaters and translate them concretely. We were looking to address what was, where we were, the moment we were in. We did our own plays, and also invited other companies—Richard Foreman’s company, Mabou Mines, Talking Band—these companies were just starting out or they were homeless. We wanted to provide a home and cross-pollinating furnace.

We also wanted to do street theater, like Bob Nichols’ work. Once you had done street theater, you could never go back. You had to be real for a street audience; but at the same time you could be outrageously poetic, and it was totally accepted no matter how outrageous. The play had to match and outdo the theater of the street itself. We played behind the Fort Apache police station [in the Bronx]. They had nothing, no furniture inside, because furniture could be used as a weapon. But the kids, the people were incredible. They would help us set up and load it all back onto the truck.

The idea was to make the theater part of the community and the community part of the theater. Every program we invented somehow represented a relationship to the community in a real way, not just discounted tickets. Every year we toured the five boroughs with a new play about whatever were the current issues. We created the annual Halloween Parade. We produced it the first two years with [puppeteer] Ralph Lee. That was the first real extension of the theater into the streets. The whole idea was for it to be totally open—transparent walls or no walls.

EM: You were with TNC for 24 years. How did your purposes develop during that time and what finally led you to seek a change?

GB: We were just reacting to whatever there was. There were so many things that were happening spontaneously because of what was happening in the country. That’s when American theater is really great—when it’s reflecting an explosive moment in society. In 1972 we were already doing one person shows, before they were called performance art, before Laurie Anderson. We were doing Jack Smith, and Charles Stanley, and Stuart Sherman—a really extraordinary abstract performance artist who did these really kind of surreal puzzle things with props. It was at the height of the women’s movement. We presented an all-women’s band, just because it was something that was happening. It was fantastic, those years. Nothing short of wonderful.

EM: But eventually things changed and you decided to move on?

GB: Then that energy changed and the focus changed. We just try to keep with the focus. That sort of wonderful, spontaneous energy spent itself in a way. It became a matter of keeping the doors open and finding new ways and finding new directions and trying to stimulate myself.

We were forced to seek a new space for TNC. We went through an incredible struggle to get the building and renovate it. We had millions of dollars to raise. Finally, I had to return to my own work, from being the Cecil B. DeMille of off-off-Broadway to the idea that small is more. I reinvented myself with a one-person show. This has been my first time collaborating with a playwright to edit material toward a dramatic piece. It’s a new experience and very exciting.

[I Will Bear Witness is adapted from the memoir by Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor at the Dresden Technical University who documented in a secret diary each act of kindness, suffering, resistance, and heroism he witnessed under the reign of Nazi terrorism. Bartenieff developed the piece with writer/director Karen Malpede, to whom he has been married for 9 years.]

EM: Do you still worry about making a living?

GB: Sure. I’ve started to teach again, at CUNY. And I’m teaching kids in a high school in Bed-Stuy. I feel an urgency to hand on what I know and what I’ve got: a lot of stagecraft and a love of Shakespeare and poetic drama and what makes Shakespeare so important—why Joe Papp thought it needed to be free. One of the great things about being an actor is coming back to the same role with new understanding, new depth. I’m coming back to Shakespeare now and teaching much better than I ever have.

EM: Do you have any advice for young performers starting out?

GB: Have at least one other art discipline—two is even better—that you can practice when you are not acting. That is the most important thing. The future is the expansion of your inner life through creativity, not the expansion of your bank account.

Read the daily paper. Inform yourself about everything that is going on. Know what’s going on, understand it, try to see through it, try to see what’s a lie and what’s not. You can’t start a theater without ideas that are bigger than you are. But they have to be based in what’s going on. Your work should be what you are, what you envision, against what’s happening, what is.

And every ten years you have to be able to inspire yourself to make a change, something totally new that you’ve never done before.

Disraeli said most people die with their music still inside them. There’s nothing in our system, no tradition of cultural respect. It’s the great American desert. Reagan called artists the “voluntary poor.” Our use of culture has nothing to do with culture or the making of culture. We buy paintings to put on the wall so we can feel important.

In being creative, you are adding a viewpoint into the culture that doesn’t exist without you. What if people thought of themselves that way?