LESSONS FROM MR. BISHOP

SARAH RUHL

I FIRST MET ANDRÉ BISHOP when I was thirty-one years old; he took me out to lunch at Fiorello’s on the Upper West Side to tell me that he wanted to produce my play, The Clean House, at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi Newhouse. For a young playwright, this is a gob-smacking, life-changing revelation, like finding a Fabergé egg in a henhouse. André was apologetic, though. He didn’t have room for a season and a half or so. Could I wait a year and a half to have the play produced? True, I had another offer on the table from another theater in New York City. Now that I know André better, it doesn’t surprise me that he was apologetic while giving me the best news a playwright could hope for. He is unfailingly polite, modest, honest, and gentlemanly. He does not assume that what is best for him is also best for you. That’s a rarity in general in life, and also in the American theater. I was astonished.

For the rest of that meal, André and I ate good Italian food and talked about life, and art. Not only had I never had a play produced in New York City before, I had never been to Fiorello’s with such a cosmopolitan, wise person. He had a deep sonorous voice, a knack for finding just the right word, rosy cheeks, amused and penetrating eyes, and a thick head of silvery hair combed precisely to one side.

After lunch, already being pretty sure of what I would do, I called my friend Beth Henley over the phone. Should I accept Lincoln Center Theater’s offer, even though it was a year and a half wait, or take a more timely offer for another theater for my play? Beth said, “Oh my God! Go to Lincoln Center! You’ll have your play done by that glorious fountain! Come on! Honestly, the best part of making theater is anticipation anyway. So you’ll have a whole year and a half to wait and hope. Making a play and the aftermath is never as good as imagining it.”

So I said yes to André Bishop. That yes would alter my life for the better.

André would go on to produce four more of my plays at the Mitzi and one on Broadway, making for a total of five. I figure doing one play with a theater is like a one-night stand, two is dating, three is getting engaged, four is getting married, and five is a real rarity—a long marriage. I honestly cannot believe my luck in finding André and Lincoln Center Theater so young as an artistic home. I almost fear I daren’t say it aloud, for fear of tempting fate.

I didn’t realize that when I went into rehearsal for The Clean House I would have my six-month old baby, Anna, with me. That’s what happens when you wait a year and a half for a production, you might have another kind of production that’s unanticipated. André was the first artistic director to offer me an office for breastfeeding where the baby could also nap. Anne Cattaneo was the first dramaturg to offer me toys and rattles from her office. Jill Clayburgh, Vanessa Aspillaga, and Blair Brown were the first actors to bounce Anna on their laps. The costume shop made a little apron for Anna out of some extra fabric printed with apples.

As I went to rehearsals at the Mitzi that fall, I saw Tom Stoppard out smoking in the alley, impossibly charismatic (he was working on The Coast of Utopia then). When I went to a dinner party at Cora and Bernie Gersten’s that October, I brought little Anna, who pulled the glasses off of André’s face. When we sat down to eat and I realized I needed to breastfeed the baby, Tom raised a glass and said, “To Sarah! The only one at this table who is currently working!”

And so it was that I learned how theater families are formed in that basement of the Mitzi Newhouse. I felt so protected making my first play in New York City in that sub-basement. With its sturdy concrete underground, the rehearsal rooms seemed almost designed to protect one from a bomb going off, and making a new play in New York City can have an incendiary feeling. The Mitzi is a temporary dwelling for artists, a refuge. The architecture of the Mitzi reminds us that we are all in this thing together. The circularity, the democratic embrace of the audience, reminds me that theater is always telling a story with and to the audience, not walling them off. You can feel the ether in that theater.

André signed an opening night card for each person working on The Clean House, which I recently found saved in my desk. I learned later that this is not standard operating procedure for an artistic director to sign opening night cards. He also gave the whole creative team a gift of a key ring charm embossed with the play’s title. I learned later that André religiously and democratically rotates these charms on his own key chain. The opening night of The Clean House was a success. It was back before this current time of digital reviews, when opening night parties can turn into the zombie apocalypse around 10 p.m., people surreptitiously checking their phones by the cheese plate or in the bathroom. Back then, Jill Clayburgh said she couldn’t stand the suspense anymore, so she ran home in the rain prevaricating producers—André often seems to be the last gentleman standing. Radiating calm and good will, he makes honest forthright decisions that are best for the artist and for the institution. to check the paper, and ran back in saying, “It’s a rave!”

My going to André for wisdom and advice didn’t stop with the plays I did at his theater—The Clean House, In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play (at the Lyceum on Broadway), The Oldest Boy, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, and Becky Nurse of Salem. I called André when I had a theatrical pickle in general; I knew he would always give me confidential, incisive counsel.

I knew that he valued me as a person, a person with a private life and a family, and not just as a worker bee. In show business—a world that, on bad days, feels full of backstabbing gossips, divas, false friends, prevaricating producers—André often seems to be the last gentleman standing. Radiating calm and good will, he makes honest forthright decisions that are best for the artist and for the institution.

I’ll never forget having lunch with André after I’d done two plays at LCT and he wanted to commission a third; he is more interested in the lifespan of the playwright than in a one-off product. I told him a bunch of ideas that I had for new plays. One of them, a story about Tibetan monastics and reincarnation, I thought seemed almost impossible to produce, but André said that was the subject matter that made my eyes light up the most, and so, he said, that is the one I should write.

When an actor dropped out of The Oldest Boy one day before rehearsals to do a television pilot, and the creative team panicked, André calmly said we’d delay rehearsals and opening so that we could audition and find the right new actor. Daniel Swee, the most dramaturgically-minded casting agent I know, sprung into gear. A splendid actor was found. When Didi O’Connell got Covid during Becky Nurse of Salem, André calmly gave us ten more days of rehearsal to make the play. André is always there when you need him, and not hovering when you don’t. The protected artist-centered atmosphere at the Mitzi has been, for me, one that always projected calm, and the feeling that we were all on the same team, and that we were all valued for our contribution.

André has taught me: how to leave a play alone when it is done; how to collaborate honestly and kindly; and how to go on doing the thing you love for your entire life. He has a parade of Tony Awards in his office, one version of what counts as success in the American theater. But to me, the success of André Bishop and Lincoln Center Theater goes much much deeper, and I am so grateful to be one of the beneficiaries. Ralph Waldo Emerson defined success this way, and I think these words apply deeply to my dear friend André. Success is:

TO LAUGH OFTEN AND MUCH; TO WIN THE RESPECT OF INTELLIGENT PEOPLE AND THE AFFECTION OF CHILDREN; TO EARN THE APPRECIATION OF HONEST CRITICS AND ENDURE THE BETRAYAL OF FALSE FRIENDS; TO APPRECIATE BEAUTY, TO FIND THE BEST IN OTHERS; TO LEAVE THE WORLD A BIT BETTER WHETHER BY A HEALTHY CHILD, A GARDEN PATCH, OR A REDEEMED SOCIAL CONDITION; TO KNOW EVEN ONE LIFE HAS BREATHED EASIER BECAUSE YOU LIVED. THIS IS TO HAVE SUCCEEDED.

Photo: Deirdre O'Connell as Becky Nurse in Becky Nurse of Salem. Copyright: Kyle Froman.