FROM THE TROUBLED BEAUMONT TO LINCOLN CENTER THEATER

AN INTERVIEW with GREOGORY MOSHER by CHRISTINE SCARFUTO

GREGORY MOSHER SERVED as the director of Lincoln Center Theater from 1985-1991. Mosher was 36-years-old when he took the job, straight off of seven seasons running the Goodman Theater in Chicago, during which his focus on producing galvanizing new works brought the theater national acclaim. When he came on board, the Vivian Beaumont Theater had only produced two shows in the past five years, had virtually no operating capital, had no community of artists, and was seen as a troubled behemoth that confounded some of the greatest theater minds of the 20th Century, including Elia Kazan and Joe Papp. His innovative programming choices combined with his revolutionary ideas around affordable ticketing and accessible membership changed the trajectory of the theater forever, building the foundation for what Lincoln Center Theater is today. Christine Scarfuto sat down with him recently to talk about his time as director of Lincoln Center Theater.

CHRISTINE SCARFUTO: When you came to the Beaumont, the theater seemed like an unsolvable problem. Why had there been so many struggles with the Beaumont in particular?

GREGORY MOSHER: In the early ‘60s, the Ford Foundation began getting involved in the arts, which was followed by the creation of the National Endowment of the Arts. There were fewer than ten not-for-profit theaters in America in 1960, so this whole idea of a nonprofit theater was new and interesting. The theater part was an afterthought even architecturally in terms of planning the complex at Lincoln Center, tucked in the corner there. The symphony was brought on board, the Met Opera was brought on board, and Balanchine brought his company on board. Nobody really knew what a not-for-profit theater was in 1964—they were inventing it, and some people thought it should be modeled after the National Theatre or the Comédie-Française, and that was kind of the dominant view and influenced the way the space was used. It’s a funny space. I remember seeing The Philadelphia Story there, I think I must have been a student or maybe I just started in Chicago. And people would say goodbye, ending some witty Phillip Barry scene, and then would have to walk literally 30 feet to get to the door. But for many years, nobody could figure it out, and a lot of people thought it was doomed. There was serious talk about giving it to the Film Society, which was fairly new at that point, and turning it into a series of screening rooms. Then Peter Brook did Carmen in 1983, and that worked because they didn’t try to use the whole space. Brook, along with designer Jean-Guy Lecat, reconfigured the theater in a way that it felt as intimate as the Mitzi, and that showed everybody that the theater could work. But when I arrived in ‘85, there was still a lot of argument about whether it should be converted into a proscenium theater, as if New York needed another 1000-seat proscenium theater. But it was Brook who solved it. And when I finally took the job, about the first thing I did was call Peter and say, “Excuse me, could you explain how you did that?” And he said,“Come to Paris and I will show you.” And I got on a plane and went to Paris, and he and Jean-Guy showed me all the plans. It was very simple what he did.

CS: How did you come to Lincoln Center?

GM: In 1984, an intermediary very quietly approached me and said, I think the Beaumont people want to talk to you. This was presumably because the Goodman was doing okay, and we had both Glengarry and Hurlyburly playing in New York. At first I thought it was a joke, but we had a little chat. And then like nine months later, most of which I spent saying there’s no way I will do this job, I accepted. Sometime that fall we started having serious talks, and over Christmas, I wrote up a plan emphasizing new work and affordable tickets and shared it with Board Chair John Lindsay and others. By then I had decided to leave the Goodman, but I was thinking of doing lots of different things, including starting another theater in Chicago. Remember, at this time the company had no money. People were telling me to stay in Chicago, that the Beaumont was a deathtrap. But my question wasn’t “Chicago or the Beaumont?” It was “What’s next?” At some point that winter, I started coming in every Monday, which was the Goodman’s day off, and talking to board members and Lindsay. Sometime in there, I said I would do it if they agreed to let me be the director of the theater—no play selection committees, stuff like that. I could set a direction and it would work or it wouldn’t. Well, they did agree to that, and in April ‘85 I accepted and it was announced. A few weeks later, I reached out to Bernie, and we agreed to have lunch. I was smart enough to bring Mike Nichols to the lunch. We’re at the Ginger Man, of course. When Bernie approached, Mike got up and extended his hand and said, “Well, the thought of you being involved in this is the best news I’ve heard so far!” This really charmed Bernie. We then what he called “dated” for three months—we talked about what the theater should be—and in June ’85, he came on board.

CS: What was your first play?

GM: It was the summer and fall of ‘85. John, Bernie, and other board members and I were having endless discussions about how to start because we didn’t have enough money to do a season, and we couldn’t raise any money until we started doing plays. The thing to remember about that time is that there was no money—we had $600K, which might as well be no money. We had one person on staff to open the doors, no paper clips, no computers, no stationery, and the place was a physical mess. And one night over Chinese food, in my memory it was like 1:30 in the morning at John’s apartment, somebody—and it was probably Bernie—said, “Well, we’ve got to start somehow, let’s just do a play. Forget announcing a season. Let’s do a play.” I loved that idea. And in 1985, it made sense to do a play of David Mamet’s. So our first show was two one acts by Mamet, Prairie Du Chein and The Shawl, which I directed. We had an amazing cast including Bill Macy, Mike Nussbaum, and Jerry Stiller, and they were wonderful. And everybody hated it. The critic John Simon said, “Well, we’ve heard of ending with not a bang, but a whimper. Who would have thought somebody would start not with a bang, but a whimper?” It was brutal. I called John the next morning and said, “If you want me to resign, I’ll resign, this must have been very embarrassing for you.” And he knew I was serious. And he said, “Don’t be ridiculous. What’s the next show?”

CS: Do you have a show that you’re most proud of?

GM: I think the least likely things. There were a couple things that were very unlikely that any other theater would or could do. One was Serafina by Mbongeni Ngema, which was amazing. Another was when I got a script package from Skip Gates, and it turned out to be the draft of Mule Bone by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. It had never premiered. Skip put a Post-it note on it saying, “Just do this play. Skip.” So we had a reading, and had a conversation in the rehearsal room after asking, “Should we do this play?” And we did it, and that was amazing. It played at the Barrymore because the Beaumont was tied up, and we extended it and it played at like 90% of capacity. It was 35 of the best actors in New York up on that stage. Who else was going to do that? You weren’t going to do it as a commercial production, and very few not-for-profits have the resources to do a play like that. I’m also proud of the fact that we opened the Beaumont after all those years of darkness with the Flying Karamazov Brothers on April Fool’s Day. That was fun. You know, I think people were kind of expecting King Lear with the original cast. And instead, they had four jugglers. It sold out. It was incredible, it was joyous. I’m proud of the things that we did that other people would not have been able to do, because it meant that we were using our resources well—we used our resources to support artists. That’s what I’m proud of.

CS: How has Lincoln Center Theater impacted the theater landscape?

GM: We were a writer-centric theater, and that’s because I was always inspired by The Court. The one thing I always thought would have an impact is that we decided not to take a cut of the writers’ future royalties. I remember saying to Bernie, “Well, we don’t take a cut of Patti LuPone’s salary, we don’t take a cut of Kevin Kline’s, why would we take a cut from the writer? A writer usually only has three or four successful plays in their lifetime, why are we taking a percentage of that? It’s wrong. We can’t say we are a writer’s theater and then take their money.” I thought everybody would imitate this, and the Dramatist Guild would use that as leverage to say, “Well, if the biggest theater in town isn’t taking a cut, why should we give you a cut?” But they didn’t, or tried and didn’t succeed. I mean now, 40 years later, everybody’s going on about how maybe subscriptions are not such a good idea. Our membership model came about this way. Bernie thought we should have subscribers for obvious reasons, you get all the income in May and you know how much you have to play with. And I thought, what if you “join” rather than subscribe, and our audience would have the huge advantage of only coming to see the plays they wanted to see. That way, everybody who was there actually wanted to see the show. Whether they liked it or not was another question, but they chose to see it. This seemed like a cool idea, but nobody had ever done this before. So Bernie said, “Okay, we’ll compromise, we’ll have subscribers and members.” We made the membership affordable, it was $25, and under the radar if you couldn’t afford $25, we didn’t charge you the $25. And once you were a member, the tickets to all of the shows were $10. Within like six weeks, even Bernie abandoned the subscription idea. The key was the $10 tickets. We had $600,000 back in 1985. A few years later, in 1988, we had shows running in five theaters in New York City from BAM to La MaMa to Broadway. And that’s because the $10 tickets primed the pump and got us into those extended runs, and once we were in an extended run, you had to find another theater. I remember saying to Bernie, “Aren’t you worried that we’ll be labeled a Broadway theater?” And he said, “Not if the tickets are $10. We’re Lincoln Center Theater, no matter what the venue.”

CS: What are some of your favorite memories from your seven years as Director?

GM: The word memories is a funny word in this context, because some memories are about really in-the-weeds stuff. There used to be two entrances to the theater— one was for the staff, and one was for the artists and actors. And one of the first things I did was padlock the actors’ entrance. The actors walk in, and two steps to the right is the receptionist, and then there’s a long hallway with cubicles on the left and offices on your right, and the actors have to walk through all those people. And people stuck at their computers all day long remember why they’re doing it, and then the actors are reminded there’s a whole team behind them making this possible. That I’m proud of, that decision. That’s a vivid memory. This is a good story. You know how in Homer it’s always “the wine dark sea” and “brave Achilles”? In the mid1980s, it was always the Troubled Beaumont. Always. And I thought, I don’t want to be the head of the Troubled Beaumont. So I thought, let’s just be Lincoln Center Theater. We made up stationery with “Lincoln Center Theater” printed on it. Keep in mind, we hadn’t produced a play yet. I got a call from Nat Leventhal who was the president of Lincoln Center who said, “Could you come to my office like, now?” And I said, “Sure.” I walked in and he was sitting at his desk dangling this piece of stationery by the corner with two fingers, and he said “What is this?” I was a 36-year-old kid from Chicago. I said, “That’s our new stationery.” And he said, “Who said you could call yourselves Lincoln Center Theater?” And I’m sure I blushed and was speechless. And he said, “You better be good. Get out of my office.” ▪

Photo: Vivian Beaumont Theater, 2019. Copyright Marc J. Franklin.