♪♪ Well, here we are.
Barry.
55 and counting.
I know, we're still counting.
[ Indistinct chatter ] Thank you for giving me my Broadway debut.
It's a pleasure.
What a joy.
Bravo on your Broadway debut.
Have a great night tonight.
The actors file in.
You know them all.
It's a home base in the city.
So let's see, how many shows have I done here?
I have done five plays for Manhattan Theatre Club.
I have been lucky enough to do two productions at MTC.
Hello, sir.
I'm off to warm up.
This is my seventh show at Manhattan Theatre Club.
I directed 19 shows here.
I guess I've been in four shows at Manhattan Theatre Club.
Yeah.
And then I directed a play.
I directed a play called "Ripcord."
I've been in two shows here at MTC.
I've done nine shows in Stage 1 and the Friedman together.
I've worked here at the Manhattan Theatre Club on five productions.
It's nine productions that I've done at Manhattan Theatre Club.
I've done 70 shows at the Manhattan Theatre Club, which sounds like a lot, but they were spread out over 50 years.
Grove: And it's so great to have our own Broadway theatre, after those years of trying to transfer shows and waiting for a house to come open, it's always here, waiting for the next play.
I know.
Do you get as excited as I do, opening this door?
I do.
I do.
[ Applause ] Tonight is a very joyous and special night for all of us at Manhattan Theatre Club.
This show is the third and final Friedman production of the season.
We are so excited to get to do what it is that we love to do, however many years we get to do it, however many minutes we get to do it.
We're all hooked, we hope you're hooked, and we'll see you after the show.
[ Applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Do this right.
The only right way is straight up.
I'm still the rep.
It's my job to protect these folks.
Sadie, I'm confiding in you.
I'm putting myself on the line for you 'cause I'm on your side, but I need you on mine.
Everybody talks to me like I'm the one.
You know, I should change.
Why should I change?
I've never even gotten to find out who I am.
and you want me to change.
That's crazy.
Ms. Rachel, I ain't got no beef with you, but with all due respect, you all up in between me and mine.
What I'm up in between is right and wrong.
I don't know, I never knew you felt like that.
I never wanted you to.
Not when you were little.
I loved you very much, and I worked hard every day to make sure that you didn't know what I was feeling.
You legacy.
That means you don't know what it means to be the only one -- the only from your family.
That means I got to be cordial, okay?
That means I can't get into fights.
That means I can't beat somebody down because they looked at me.
That means I got to keep my grades up because we ain't all paid for.
Manhattan Theatre Club was something I heard about in college before I moved here.
And it's sort of like an ocean liner that has just sort of been steadily moving its way through the world of theatre.
Grove: The Manhattan Theatre Club is a not-for-profit theatre center and theatre company.
We produce all our own work.
We have three theatres.
The one we're at today is our Broadway theatre, the Samuel J. Friedman.
It's a Broadway house that's 650 seats that we renovated back at the beginning of this century.
Grove: And at City Center, we have what's called Stage 1, a 300-seat theatre and Stage 2, a 150-seat theatre.
And in those theatres, we're producing new work for the stage.
No kids.
So what?
I didn't have kids either.
That's different.
People like you shouldn't have kids.
MTC's mission, which I actually wrote in July of 1972, was to develop and present new work in the theatre by American and international artists.
But also, as an extension of that, to support writers and their work in particular.
And so we spend a significant amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, commissioning new plays.
Your worth is not determined by whether your last show was a success or a failure.
They've invested in you, and so you get to get better.
I know that if I write a new play, even if it's a departure from things I've written before, even if it's an experiment, even if it's something I'm not sure of, they will take it seriously.
They will help me figure it out.
The execution has been stupendous, and I think that's another reason why people want to keep coming back.
Meadow: Manhattan Theatre Club has won every award possible to win in the theatre.
We've won 28 Tony Awards.
For best plays, best actors, best supporting actors.
We've hosted and helped develop seven Pulitzer Prize-winning plays.
We have received many Drama Desk Awards.
The Obie Awards.
New York Critics Awards.
Drama Critics' Circle, Drama Desk, Drama League.
These are the sort of relationships you dream about, that you don't think you'll have, that you get to grow up in a theatre, that you go from ingenue to leading lady to character actress in the same place.
Manhattan Theatre Club is one of those iconic spaces that if you're working in the theatre, you want to work here.
You dream to work in a space like this, especially on Broadway.
They are a cultural change maker.
They are the hub of what we love about this work.
It always felt like you were home.
Hi.
Now, you have to be downstage.
Today we started rehearsal with a new play for Broadway.
How are you?
Written by Dave Auburn.
Happy you are here.
Me too.
The happiest moment for me, always, and I dream about this when I'm on location somewhere making a movie, is walking into this room and seeing... Come come, come.
...a room with tape on the floor.
Meadow: Everybody, welcome back.
This is the world premiere of Dave Auburn's new play, "Summer, 1976."
[ Cheers and applause ] How many shows on Broadway have we done now?
This is our 56th.
So this is our 56th show since we opened the theatre.
I can't believe you're asking me for a number.
Because it's our 56th play together and my last Broadway play at the Manhattan Theatre Club.
So it's particularly special for me to be saying thank you before I have to say goodbye.
♪♪ The thing that distinguishes the Manhattan Theatre Club from other theatre companies, first and foremost, is Lynne and Barry.
I've never seen two people who have worked together that long who are not married.
I think they are kind of married, whether they want to admit it or not.
Meadow: When I was hired at Manhattan Theatre Club, I knew that there were many things that I knew how to do and more things that I didn't know how to do, and I needed to find someone who would be a partner, who could do all of those things that I didn't know how to do.
The phone rang and it was Lynne Meadow saying, "Are you interested in coming to New York and working with me at a place called the Manhattan Theatre Club?"
I'd never heard of.
He came to the office for a meeting.
We had a casting crisis.
I sat with him for five minutes and said, "I'm sorry, can you come back tomorrow?
I don't have time to talk to you now."
He said, "Sure, I'll come back tomorrow."
And I kind of knew when he said that and the way he said it that this was going to be the guy for me.
Anyway, he came back the next day.
I offered him the job.
He said yes.
I started to say yes, and then I realized I needed to talk it over with my family, and I wasn't really finished with the work we had just begun in Rhode Island, so I said no.
And then a year later, I called him in Providence and said, "Are you ready to come now?"
Lynne doesn't like taking no for an answer.
That's a great quality she has.
And he said, "I am."
So that's how I hired Barry Grove.
I came here when I was 23 years old.
We had $172,000 budget.
Today we have $27 or $28 million budget operating on all levels.
I am responsible for everything that you see on the stage, the artistic choices.
I have overall responsibility for the budget, the long-range planning, working with the nonprofit board of directors, recruiting board members.
Fundraising is a big part of what we do.
So there is a wonderful partnership between art and business, and together, we have both set policy for these last 48 years.
We're going to jump to the proposal.
Well, I ain't here because I'm worried about dying.
I'm with you because I'm ready to live.
Meadow: At any given moment in the history of the Manhattan Theatre Club, in the various rehearsal rooms that we have, there are readings being done of plays.
There are workshops being done of plays.
♪ I know you think I'm joking, what the hell am I smoking?
♪ ♪ But being next to you is what's got my heart thumping ♪ I think over the years, because there's been so much activity at the Manhattan Theatre Club, I've always felt that people are inspired by people in the next room doing something.
So if you're in your first week of rehearsal and the people next door are about to move to the theatre because they're ready to start their technical rehearsals, there's a kind of excitement that happens.
♪ We're gonna get married ♪ ♪ I can't believe I just said it ♪ ♪ Where the hell are we going?
♪ ♪ We don't know, but we know that ♪ ♪ However impossible this is ♪ ♪ We'll make this place our new homeland ♪ ♪ Home Meadow: It's a very peculiar job, and not many people want to have the chaos as much as I enjoy having it.
I think it's a very inspiring thing when there are a lot of things going on at a lot of different stages of development.
And what we're going to do is we're going to go through each woman and start talking about the very intricate hair tracking.
Okay.
We have a very fun and impossible jigsaw puzzle of women who have one look who are braiding in the shop, and then women who come back one, two, three times each to get a different style and look.
And changing characters.
Changing characters.
Changing look.
Let me ask one question -- at the end of the play, is everybody done?
Is everybody there and complete in what they came in to do?
What's harder -- Okay, so what's harder is there's jump cuts in the play.
So like, you start at 8:00 a.m. and then we jump cut to noon.
And then at noon, we cut to 4:00.
So this is where maybe a little director technique can help, because there can be a montage-esque moment where the hair is getting finished.
I think when people come together to confront something as challenging as most theatrical work, particularly, I think straight plays, it's like nothing else.
Are you going to tell him?
About your daughter?
I think so.
It's vital that places like MTC are enabled to provide that opportunity for us.
The emergence of the nonprofit Broadway production, which MTC has pioneered, has made a huge difference in New York theatre in the last 20 years.
It's probably been the biggest single change and the best change.
You can have a play that maybe isn't the kind of play that's going to run commercially for three years, but you can see it in a Broadway house with a big audience and major stars and the scale of Broadway, while still taking artistic chances.
And that's the blessing.
We're driving across the country.
Chicago, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Omaha!
The Great Plains.
Sacramento!
There is no need to mention Sacramento.
Meadow: In the commercial theatre, you raise money with the idea that you will get a return on your investment.
In the nonprofit theatre, you raise money with the idea that you will not get a financial return on your investment.
Marianne.
You will get a different kind of return.
Will you marry me?
You have to have theatre that is the public's theatre, that voices can be developed there, can be heard there, where you don't have to jump in saying, "I'm going to make a lot of money."
Of course you want to make a lot of money, but you also want to have room to fail and room to experiment a little.
And although I've said Manhattan Theatre Club is not an experimental theatre, I think it has allowed playwrights that they have continuing relationships with to experiment with their voices and uncover new aspects of their voices.
♪ I couldn't hear nobody pray ♪ ♪ Lord, I couldn't hear nobody pray ♪ Meadow: Our choices about what work we would do was not based upon whether we thought the work could make money at the box office.
Our choices, and the way that I made artistic choices was based on what I thought the talent of a particular writer was, what I thought the talent of an actor was.
If you want to know the utter truth, I believe Adam is coming from America in search of a wife.
A wife?
Lynne wasn't trying to pick perfect plays.
She was trying to pick urgent voices.
She wasn't trying to pick commercial hits.
She was trying to pick writers of talent and enormous storytelling abilities that needed help or time to mature and grow, but already had something at their core.
And she had an amazing gift for doing that.
Lynne has always been very ambitious and also very courageous, so she tries things that sometimes, nobody else will touch.
It really is the shows on which I've taken the greatest risk and we've taken the greatest risks that we've had the greatest successes.
You're not going against no man in a robe and win, sister!
He's got the position.
And he's got your son.
Let him have him, then.
Do you know what you're saying?
I know more about it than you.
This is opening night of "Doubt" off-Broadway, Doug Hughes and John Shanley and me.
And it was great.
John Shanley won the Pulitzer Prize for that, and he'd been writing for us -- I think he's written 12 plays that we've done over the years, and he began his career with us as our house manager many years ago on 73rd Street.
I started at Manhattan Theatre Club in about 1980 as a house manager.
He was one of the most charming house managers we've ever had.
I don't like to brag, but I was the best house manager I've ever met.
At that point, they had two theatres and a cabaret that ran six nights a week and had curtain times that were staggered half an hour apart.
It was the summer.
It was so hot, the air conditioning broke, and John Shanley stood in front of the audience for about a half an hour, entertaining them while we figured out how to get some air into the theatre and continue the play.
But I was doomed to leave that profession and become a playwright.
That's kind of a metaphor for John.
He breathed air and breathed life into so many of the works that he did for us over the years.
I remember telling her that I was a playwright.
And the look of compassionate, "Oh, you, dear boy," across your face, but nobody was more delighted than her when it turned out I was a playwright that she could work with and that she could produce.
And as the years went by, there were a number of times when my confidence faltered, and in those moments, Lynne remained a strong and constant presence of optimism.
Having made sustained commitments to many playwrights, has provided a kind of incentive to hang in there, because it takes time and it takes time to learn to write plays and to produce plays and to have your play done.
♪♪ Wesley: East 73rd Street, it was the beginning, and everyone who was in the space in those days that I can remember were not much older than Lynne and Barry.
We occupied three floors of a five-story building on East 73rd Street, and we were performing in 150-seat theatre, and we had a cabaret theatre.
Grove: There were maybe eight staff members total, you know, crammed into a couple of two or three small spaces.
The staff was taking turns as the box office and the house manager.
It was sort of if Barry leaned out of his door, he was in Lynne's space, and if Lynne stood up and went around her desk, she was in Barry's space.
Grove: We used the basement for a scene shop in what had used to be a bowling alley, so you had to even build some of the stuff narrowly, in parts.
And we didn't have enough money to cover over the bowling alley, so the technical director told me that the scenery could be as long as I wanted, but it could only be this wide.
So I remember Lynne's amusement, I devised what we call handkerchief drops, which are little drops that you tie together like handkerchiefs and make a big drop, because that was the width of the bowling lane.
We've come a long ways, but it's always amuses me that the theatre club started with that little and grew to be what it is now.
In my first season, we had no money, a full-time staff of three, but I thought it would be a very good idea to do an opera.
And the most exciting thing happened when we learned that Hal Prince was coming to see the show.
And I had developed a questionnaire, because I thought, well, we have to find out who our audience is.
So I developed this questionnaire, you know, "What's your current home?
How did you hear about the show tonight?"
Hal came to see this opera and he filled out a questionnaire, which I have to my office until this day.
And it says, the last question or the number 14 is, "Please make any comments you have concerning the Manhattan Theatre Club or the show you came to this evening."
And Hal Prince wrote in very bold capital letters, "Sensational!"
So that was just so exciting.
And actually, it generated -- Hal was then the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, the theatre program, and so we got our first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that year because Hal had come to see this work at Manhattan Theatre Club.
This place has nurtured and given birth to so many great artists.
I mean, so many people that, you know, are at the top of their game, have at one time or another, and most of them, when they were very young, gotten their start at the Manhattan Theatre Club.
Sarah Jessica Parker was in a play for us when she was a young child.
I think I was about 12, maybe -- a new 12, certainly, and it was a fantastic experience.
We had a cabaret and I would program these tributes to various composers and lyricists.
One of them was a dedication to Charles Strouse, who was one of the creators of "Annie."
I had never, ever performed on stage as a singer in a musical, ever.
I mean, I'd been in children's theatre in Cincinnati, Ohio, but Lynne and Barry were always around, and it really felt as if someone had opened their home up to Manhattan.
I mean, it felt very intimate.
The space was intimate, but they were just these young kids, I realize now, very young kids doing really interesting things and making an impact in the theatre, and it was a very happy experience.
And that has been my experiences across the board, even as they grew, even as they became commercial in some ways, meaning intentionally so, it always felt like you were home.
Brantley: You went not necessarily to see adventurous theatre.
The plays here tend to be very well-structured.
They're kind of self-consciously classic, I guess, in some ways.
But the lesson of the Manhattan Theatre Club is that often in conventional boxes, there are surprises waiting for you.
♪ Your kisses are worth waiting for ♪ ♪ B-B-Believe me In 1978, in our cabaret series on 73rd Street, I asked Richard Maltby to do the idea that he had of an evening celebrating Fats Waller and cast an unknown actress singer named Nell Carter, Armelia McQueen, and Ken Page, also an actress named Irene Cara, who would go on when the show moved to Broadway to be replaced by Charlayne Woodard and an actor named André De Shields, whom I had admired.
We had a family of five and a group of songs that became "Ain't Misbehavin'."
which put the Manhattan Theatre Club on the proverbial map and the literal map.
"Ain't Misbehavin'," I mean, my gosh, that was probably what gave Manhattan Theatre Club a halo in its youth.
I mean, that was a sensational show, a sensational assembly of performers.
For anybody who has seen the show and saw the original choreography, which was created by a man named Arthur Faria, was that all of the movement took place like this.
That was the dancing.
♪ Bang those ole white notes ♪ Bang those ole black notes ♪ Bang those ole eighth notes ♪ Bang those ole whole notes And then maybe an occasional step to the left or step to the right, but mainly it was very tight, shoulders and hands going like this.
And that was because the stage was about this big.
♪ Yeahhh Every song was a play.
It had a beginning, a middle and an end.
And Richard Maltby was smart enough to understand that if he added a few lines of interstitial material, it would appear as if this were a book musical.
When I was growing up in Baltimore, my mother used to sing around the house.
"Black and Blue."
♪ Cold, empty bed Not as a serious political lament, but in some humorous situation.
She was just saying, "what did I do to be so black and blue?"
♪ What did I do ♪ To be so black and blue?
♪ ♪♪ ♪ No joys for me De Shields: It came right to the edges of my consciousness when I knew, "Oh, we're going to be singing 'Black and Blue'."
♪ From my heart It's not going to be humorous, because now it has a political overlay.
♪ I've been so black and blue ♪ When you look at "Ain't Misbehavin'," you think, "Oh, this is a Black show."
No.
♪♪ What it was, was an opportunity to educate America and then the world at large, about how important the Harlem Renaissance was and how the music that Fats Waller created was one of the first tools used to integrate America.
♪ Powerful feeling, feeling with a handful of keys ♪ And it was a breakthrough moment.
It was a watershed moment.
And the winner is... "Ain't Misbehavin'."
Meadow: "Ain't Misbehavin'," which started in a 60-seat cabaret, would end up on Broadway that same season.
It would win the Tony for Best Musical.
I'd like to thank Lynne Meadow, Barry Grove, Dick Ticktin of the Manhattan Theatre Club.
And the winner is... Nell Carter.
[ Applause ] It's a reminder of how important it is for art to lead the choices that are being made, and for people not to be afraid to take the risks.
That's where invention and the newest creativity and actually, in our case, the ability, frankly, to pay for some of the work that we do has come.
Sybille Pearson had written a play called "Sally & Marsha", and I was directing the show for Manhattan Theatre Club on 73rd Street.
It was my first play at the Manhattan Theatre Club.
I just have a visceral memory of how how cramped it was.
"Sally & Marsha" was a love story between two New York ladies who couldn't have been more different.
Sally was a wholesome homemaker and, you know, loved everything about her domestic life.
And Marsha was, you know, the neurotic New Yorker who was permanently unsatisfied and judgmental about everything.
We all felt as if we died and went to heaven with Bernadette Peters and Christine Baranski, Sybille Pearson and I in in a room working on this play that she had written about a wonderful friendship that happens between two very unlikely women.
It was my first experience of working with Lynne Meadow, and we were in our early 30s at that time.
I wasn't quite comfortable in that role.
She knew how to play Marsha better than I did, and so she'd give me a lot of notes on how to do it.
And I remember feeling that she was quite a controlling director, and we talked about it.
And in retrospect, we laugh about it, because she has evolved to being the most nurturing director who really gives actors a lot of space.
We really laugh about how far we've come as collaborators, because I have so much faith in Lynne now as a director and so much love for her as a human being.
So I love that we've made this journey, this Manhattan Theatre Club journey together.
♪♪ After our first 10 years on 73rd Street, we moved to City Center.
East 73rd Street was like, "Wow, let's make theatre!"
But by the time they got to City Center, everything had to be so much more professional.
At City Center, we were now moving into a 300-seat theatre with Barry's reassurances to me that I would find a way to find the plays and to create the work that would fill that 300-seat theatre.
Grove: Lynne kept doing great work, and the work kept wanting bigger audiences, and so we began to transfer shows around to other off-Broadway theatres.
And for a while, we played what we called hopscotch, where a show could start at City Center and stay put, and then maybe the next one would start at a rental theatre, and then this could move out and another thing could move in.
So at one point, we had three and four shows off-Broadway running all at the same time.
So I was always used to working in a three-ring circus.
I did my best work when I was programing and producing shows three at a time.
So we created a second theatre, 150-seat theatre at City Center, and once we were at City Center for a number of years, the next move, according to Barry, was to find a Broadway home.
Lynne deserved it, the artists deserved it, and we had the help of great board leadership to do it.
At that moment, I think it was, you know, do Broadway or die if you were going to grow, because that was clearly where Empire was headed.
It took me 10 years and three or four publicly failed attempts before we finally latched on to the Biltmore.
And the Biltmore was built in the late '20s.
It was the home to Mae West.
She was busted here for being too racy early on.
Later, it was a CBS television studio.
Robert Redford did the original "Barefoot in the Park" here.
"Hair" had its original extended run here, and then in 1984, the building, along with the other Broadway theatres, was landmarked.
And that was a very important time for Broadway, because today, we have 41 Broadway theatres.
It's the largest concentration of theatrical real estate in the world.
But in the heyday of the '20s, there were 70.
So they'd already lost, like, 30.
So the landmarking movement was very important.
But in 1987, the Biltmore was the victim of fire, and the fire department came and cut holes in the roof to vent the roof, that is to let smoke out and put out the fires.
but it was left open that way for 15 years, and so it became the victim of water damage and was just a complete wreck by the time we came upon it.
And so in 2001, on a $35 million budget, more than I had ever raised before, we set out to renovate the Biltmore Theatre.
Fortunately, Jane Friedman, the daughter of Samuel J. Friedman, a theatrical press agent, was looking for a Broadway theatre to name.
And so, five years after we began in this space, it was renamed the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
♪♪ ♪♪ Don't you just find it essential and important that a theatre like MTC has an education program for young people?
This is how we create and support and relate to the next generation.
It is the legacy of a theatre, I think.
Did you ever have one of those dates where you can't stop talking?
Falco: In the course of doing a play here, there will be education matinees, and they really are an entity unto themselves, because you are dealing with an entirely different demographic, insofar as the material you're presenting.
So you never really know what they're going to find funny, what they may respond to in other ways, so it was always very exciting.
It definitely can wake you up as a performer out of laziness about, "Oh, this is what they'll laugh here and there," because you really don't know what to expect.
It's very exciting.
The line of questioning, it's usually way more daring than a lot of other theatres that I tend to do student talkbacks with.
So there's a profound respect for the intelligence and the maturity of these student audiences that they invite to the shows as well.
Falco: But it's thrilling, like, I mean, the reason I do what I do is from having gone to see plays and the actors came out and talked afterwards.
The whole thing was completely magical as a kid.
So, I mean, my fantasy would be like, maybe one kid will be an actor or, you know, a person involved in theatre as a result of seeing a talkback.
I don't know what's more exciting than that.
My brain is -- Water!
Salt water!
Holy water.
A faucet.
A drop of water in a still lake.
Grove: We have a program called the Stargate Theatre Company that takes court-involved youth -- these are young men who got sadly involved in the criminal justice system and are fighting to get back into the mainstream, if you will, of society.
And so we hire them over the summer, and we have an Emmy-winning writer named Judy Tate, who helps coax their own stories out of them and ultimately builds a play that we put on in our smallest space.
So there's a lot going on behind the scenes in addition to three Broadway shows, three off-Broadway shows, and periodically shows in what amounts to small off- or off-off-Broadway theatre Stage 2.
Dear justice system -- Meadow: Educational outreach has now served over 100,000 people, and it's something that I feel has been a jewel in our crown, something that says how much we care about young people having access to theatre who would not normally get access.
Grove: We had an enormously important relationship with Terrence McNally through much of his life.
Early on in their relationship, she began doing something very special behind the scenes with him, which was, before it was reviewed and opened, she said, "I want to do your next play, whatever it is."
Well, it was about two couples on Fire Island and it's the height of the AIDS crisis, and Terrence was writing about that.
Here was a play about four people, who were all straight, who had been left this house on Long Island.
And they go there for the weekend with their friends, and they're afraid to get in the swimming pool because he died of AIDS, and they think, "Well, maybe we'll get AIDS if we get in the swimming pool."
In retrospect, I think it was fairly thrilling, because we were really developing that play in the rehearsal hall.
The play definitely had a lot of work going on in previews, and the actors were incredible working on it, because there were a lot of changes.
It speaks to the nature of the collaborative process that can happen at the Manhattan Theatre Club.
Lynne was holding everybody's hand, and we were pushing it through.
And in previews, we were still working, and I would say it was exhausting and hair-raising.
We went in to see the first runthrough in the rehearsal space, and we all laughed and we loved it.
And they were just perplexed by our behavior.
They couldn't understand what was going on.
It is a perfect example of doing a new play.
You really don't know.
And then it turned out that something came out, and then it turned out to be quite a profound experience.
So it was a very pertinent play, very touching for its moment, a little dangerous.
I mean, for a long time we thought, "This is really a disaster."
But, you know, if it's a disaster at Manhattan Theatre Club, it's a creative experience, not a disaster on Broadway.
It's a disaster because it was a lot of money.
Virtually every season, we were doing a new play by Terrence McNally, and as Nathan Lane has said, he thinks that Terrence did some of his finest work when he was in residence with us.
I could never do this with anyone watching, of course, even a boyfriend, if I had one, which I don't!
[ Laughter ] [ Applause ] I used to tell Terrence that he was a jewel in our crown, and a wonderful relationship, and really some wonderful work came out of it.
♪ She's your tootsie-wootsie Brantley: A moment where they really were on the pulse was with "Love!
Valour!
Compassion!," the Terrence McNally play about a group of gay men in a summer rental house.
I think you've come to look more and more like each other over the years.
You haven't known us that long.
That's not what he's saying.
I think that -- Brantley: It was a moment when the expression of a community in the world of gay men, and it wasn't treacly, it wasn't, "Oh, come on, let's all do a group hug."
It was sort of before the days of that, and it showed a number of friendships developing against a mortal landscape.
Musicals don't all have happy endings either.
Yes, they do.
That's why I like them.
Even the sad ones, the orchestra plays, the characters die, the audience cries, the curtain falls, the actors get up off the floor, the audience puts on their coats, and everybody goes home feeling better.
You know, working with Terrence was one of the profound moments of my life.
He changed my life.
I learned so much from him, and I think the two of us did our best work together, and his plays were filled with such humanity and theatricality.
These are the exact movements that won me my high school talent contest.
Meadow: The theatre has a responsibility.
We have a platform and a platform to share and to speak out and to represent as many voices as we can.
I think we all believe in God in our way, or want to or need to, only so many of us are afraid to.
Unconditional love is pretty terrifying.
I feel very proud of the statements that we made by doing Terrence's work, and how he influenced so many artists and so many people with his works.
Tonight, there was a sold-out crowd for an off-Broadway opening that some people wish never made it to the stage.
It's a controversy over a new play that opened tonight at the Manhattan Theatre Club portraying Jesus Christ as gay.
"Corpus Christi" was probably the most notorious of the Manhattan Theatre Club productions.
It was by Terrence McNally.
It was -- Even before it went into previews, the plot was discovered to be about Jesus Christ as a homosexual man with gay disciples.
It was a heartbreaking experience, actually, because the play itself was, in my estimation, not remotely controversial.
It was a writer who was struggling to find himself in faith and questioning, what is faith and what is spirituality, and approaching that from the point of view of a gay man of a certain generation.
Immediately, the picketing began.
the letters, the threats from especially Catholic organizations that objected to this representation.
I sort of knew early on that we were kind of screwed, because the content of the play didn't match the size of the controversy.
The blowback, based on something that people haven't seen or heard or read is so obstructive.
I mean, imagine if that had been during the days of social media.
It would have been even more of a storm.
Mantello: And I always felt like it never got a fair shake, but it's one of the things in my career that I am the most proud of.
You know, sometimes we go to the theatre and we see ourselves in the characters on stage, and when we do, it informs us either of how ridiculous we're acting or how we can change our attitudes about things that are existing in the world.
I told myself to wait until I was sure about you, that you were feeling okay again, consistently okay.
So I'm to take this conversation as a vote of confidence?
I'm honored.
Take it however you want.
I believed you'd get better.
Thank you very much.
Don't thank me.
I had to.
I was living here.
Alright, Catherine, that's enough.
Let's get back to the subject.
This is the subject.
Meadow: "Proof" is about a brilliant young woman named Catherine, who was played by Mary-Louise Parker, and her father, who was a mathematical genius.
She herself is a mathematical genius.
And when you have geniuses, complications ensue.
Maybe you'll pick up where I left off.
Don't hold your breath.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Anyway...
Call this loitering, but every once in a while, they pick up a book and they flip the pages.
Lynne came right up to the table where I was sitting, and I looked up and she went, "You have to do this play."
And I already felt that I had to, but I looked to her and I rely on her.
and, you know, the sound of her voice over the phone when I feel like I'm in crisis or something's not working is so comforting and so fortifying.
Hair is dead.
What?
It's dead tissue.
You can't make it healthy.
Whatever.
It's something that's good for your hair.
What, a chemical?
No, it's organic.
Well, it can be organic and still be a chemical.
I don't know what it is.
Haven't you ever heard of organic chemistry?
I was so sure that people were going to not respond to my character and not like her, in a way, but I felt like, I know that this is what I'm doing.
They're probably going to feel a certain way about it, but this is, I stand behind it.
She has this kind of clouded radiance that was perfect for a play about a brilliant woman who may live too much inside her own mind.
So you're not entirely sure, is her perspective the narrative perspective and do we trust it?
I always liked you.
You did?
Even before I knew you, I'd catch glimpses of you when you visited your dad's office at school.
I wanted to talk to you, but I thought, "No, you do not flirt with your doctoral advisor's daughter."
Especially when your advisor is crazy.
Especially then.
There's an anxiety about her, a slightly paranoid edge, and at the same time, there's a quality of being at ease with the paranoia.
So she becomes, actually, a really good figure for American history in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
This is a play that an audience connects to, and everything was so aligned.
It was one of the great experiences of my whole life.
This was the biggest break that I had gotten as a playwright.
It was the first time in my career that I felt, maybe I can have a career in the theatre.
They bring in writers who would seem to conform to a certain type, and I think this place encourages them to stray from type.
John Patrick Shanley, I wouldn't have thought had "Doubt" in him before he delivered it.
Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.
When you are lost, you are not alone.
"Doubt" is based on, I guess, the fact that I grew up in an Irish and Italian neighborhood in the Bronx, and I went to a church school called St. Anthony's, and there I was taught by the Sisters of Charity, and the Sisters of Charity wear a peculiar Victorian bonnet that frames their face in an interesting way.
And I always knew that one day I would write about that place and those nuns, because I had them in my bones.
I knew them so well.
The central question in "Doubt" is of the guilt of a popular young priest who has established himself as an adviser and friend to young adolescents boys.
The woman, his superior, played by Cherry Jones, worries that there might be something wrong in the relationship.
I should have foreseen this possibility.
How could you imagine it?
It's my job to outshine the fox in cleverness.
That's my job.
But maybe it's nothing.
Then why do you look like you've seen the devil?
I think it's not a spoiler to say the question is never answered with total clarity.
The great thing about "Doubt" is that it exists in a state of doubt itself.
John, really, as he has in so many of his works, describes his own state of mind in the kind of poetry that he writes.
And he was questioning the role of women in the church and what kind of status and stature they had and what kind they didn't.
Did you give Donald Muller wine to drink?
No!
Mental reservation?
No.
You lie.
Adriane Lenox as the boy's mother, making it clear that she expects compromises in life, that that's the only way you get ahead, even if it involves, you know, a priest perhaps getting too friendly with her son.
It's a harrowing moment.
Why do you need to know something like that for sure when you don't?
Please, sister, please.
You got some kind of righteous cause going with this priest, and now you want to drag my boy into it?
My son doesn't need additional difficulties.
Let him take the good and leave the rest when he leaves this place in June.
He knows how to do that.
I taught him how to do that.
What kind of mother are you?
Meadow: It went on to be done on Broadway and to win a Pulitzer Prize.
And just was another another measure of how important it is, I think, to stand by playwrights and to do repeated work by playwrights.
Shanley: That kind of, like, "I'll bet on you again, even though I lost the first time" attitude is key to what makes this a special place.
♪♪ ♪♪ My start at Manhattan Theatre Club actually started with the play "The Assembled Parties."
The play is really about love and family and misunderstanding and forgiveness.
There are a lot of secrets and heartache and heart swell that came out of this group of people.
Count of three.
One.
Two.
Three.
Amen.
And it was all about the intimacy of who you call family.
When Lynne directed us in "The Assembled Parties, ” she said, "There are no laughs in this play, So we will rehearse it, this is a serious drama."
And what ended up happening was, we got the audience at the first preview, and they were hysterical.
But you love them.
You love Mort.
No.
[ Laughter ] That was never part of it on either side.
It's not a Tevye-Golde thing.
30 years pass.
♪ Do you love me?
Not really.
Which was so fabulous, and of course, it was a very funny play, and we knew that somewhere, but we didn't really know it until the audience came in.
So that was a very interesting dynamic of the way that she was directing it.
My template for making choices about what plays to choose and what plays to produce is to have a certain variety.
So we try not to have the same kind of play, stylistically, every time.
August Wilson was a friend and a mentor and a brother, you know, to me.
He is the writer who I spent the last three decades of my career totally engrossed in his work, teaching it, directing it, writing it, acting in it.
There was one thing I thought was missing, and that was this incredible play called "Jitney."
"Jitney" was August Wilson's first play in this cycle he wrote about, the Hill Community in Pittsburgh.
We can go on and play by their rules like we have been.
When I first come along, I tried to do everything right.
I figured that was the best thing to do, even when it didn't look like they was playing fair, I told myself they would come around.
Time it looked like you got a little something going for you, they would change the rules.
Mm-hmm.
Now you got to do something else.
Ruben Santiago-Hudson: These Gypsy Cab drivers are trying to hold their community together.
They're upstanding, fine gentlemen in the community, all just trying to make a way out of no way.
It's about the spirit and those people and the vitality and the defiance in that life.
You don't see the new Darnell.
You don't see how I've changed.
I know people change, but I know they can slip back, too.
No!
I was dedicated to bringing Jitney to Broadway, and it took me 11 years to finish that 10-play cycle having all been done on Broadway.
I take a tremendous amount of pride in teaming together with Lynne and Barry and bringing it here to Manhattan Theatre Club, and it took prodding and thinking and pushing and begging and pleading, and eventually, Lynne heard me.
I'll never forget, actually reading for "Jitney" and Lynne, who I hadn't had a working relationship with prior to that, she invited me in to come and read just so she could see if there was a possibility of the casting, you know?
I don't want all this.
I don't want to hear about my life being ruined.
I just stopped by to say I don't want this.
I done paid my debt.
You don't even know where your debt begins.
Well, I know where it ended.
It ended after I did them 20 years, I don't owe nobody nothing.
I was working out a scene with Anthony Chisholm, and Lynne was all the way in the back of the house.
And after we finished the scene, I just remember her walking straight down that center aisle in that theatre and extending her hand and being so gracious and basically saying, "Welcome," and offering the job there on the spot.
I just always remember her generosity and her openness in that moment to say, "Welcome here, welcome home.
It will be an honor to make art with you."
I look around and all I see is boarded-up buildings.
Some of them have been boarded up for more than 10 years.
I think the care that MTC afforded us when working on August Wilson's "Jitney," it told me that they were in complete partnership with us to say, you know, this is the best that American theatre has to offer, and we are going to give you the best experience possible.
And we did, and luckily, we were awarded with a Tony Award for it.
But that was almost secondary to the experience of being able to perform it every night and being in relationship with the audiences every night.
♪♪ Grove: I announced publicly that I was stepping down from the Manhattan Theatre Club after 48 years.
There's a wistful feeling that I have about the idea that Barry's stepping away and that he's not going to be here.
I'm gonna miss that guy.
What will it mean now that Barry is retiring?
How will that look?
Grove: I hope that there will be a place for new voices and new work continuing, and that we would be happily surprised by all the new doors and windows they open to the world, and that I can come back as an audience member and continue to be moved by this work.
Twice and three times.
Because to this day, the art of storytelling and the magic it brings to an audience can't be beat.
Now, I don't like being out here as much as I like being out in the back of the house.
Fair enough.
Directing other people, telling them what to do while they're on the back.
Show them, where's your seat when the show is going?
My seat... Mantello: It's an astonishing achievement, what Lynne and Barry have done for 50 years, the contributions they've made to this city, the artists that they've developed, that they've nurtured, the actors, certainly, the playwrights.
Who the hell do you think you are?
I know who I am.
It's you I'm worried about.
Auburn: I just remember Lynne coming to me and saying, "We're eager for your next two plays."
So that you have this feeling that it's not just about the success or failure of this particular show.
"We're interested in you as an artist for the length of your career, as long as you want to be working with us."
I like finding Edward Hopper paintings and thinking, "This is where I came from."
"Morning Sun."
When you're doing plays just to do plays because new writers need a place to see their work done, I don't know, your priorities shift.
It's more about the work and about giving an opportunity for a new voice.
Dirden: For 50 years, for these two individuals to basically give us a north star, not just in New York theatre, but in American theatre, what it really points to is that you have tastemakers who are dedicated and who are driven to really uncovering the true complexities of what America, you know, has to offer, in all of its forms of humanity.
And these are not people who are tangentially involved.
They are there all the time, and you begin to lean on them as a real pillar of support.
They have their eyes on the world, their eyes on the theatre, their eyes on the art, but also their eyes on themselves to say, "What are we missing?"
And I think that is essential and important and so distinctive about them.
It's been wonderful to see from a tiny, what seemed a fairly narrow building on the Upper East Side to calling a Broadway house their own and maintaining this space on 55th Street.
I just hope for more of the same, because it's been great for audiences and great for actors and writers and directors.
What else have you lied about?
What?
Did you know about Daddy?
Of course not.
Our responsibility is to make a space so that next generation, that next group of young people like Lynne and Barry and myself, for instance, where that that same kind of playground that we found back then is existing today for the artists who are going to be responsible for the next 50 years of the Manhattan Theatre Club.
How can I help?
No.
I can handle this.
I'm fine.
Light: I don't hope anything for them.
That isn't as active as I trust and know and believe that they will continue to make the magic that they have done for 50 years, and they will continue that in the future, as long as people support them and make sure that this theatre stays alive.
♪♪ ♪ I couldn't hear nobody pray ♪ Lord, I couldn't hear nobody pray ♪ ♪ Oh, way down yonder by myself ♪ ♪ And I couldn't hear nobody pray ♪ ♪ In the valley ♪ I couldn't hear nobody pray