Skip to main contentBetween seasons as a commercial herring fisherman, Gladden Schrock co-founded the famed Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., founded the theater department at Hampshire College, taught theater at Bennington, wrote plays that were produced at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater and elsewhere, and wrote novels, of which one (1973's Letters from Alf) won a Pulitzer Prize nomination and the distinction of being one of the books most stolen from college libraries.
Schrock is in Portland this week to see the Lightbox Studio production of his play Taps, a phantasmagoric "oratorio on hubris" with a gamesome word hoard to rival Edith Sitwell's Façade. Schrock spoke to WW on his work, the sorry state of American regional repertory theaters and Tyrone Guthrie.
Willamette Week: How did Taps come about?
Gladden Schrock: It was co-commissioned by the Guthrie Theater and Grove Press, and I wrote it in 14 days. Grove was publishing a play anthology that included my play Glutt, and they felt it needed to be balanced with something DNA-connected. So I plugged into the left part of my mind and went from there.
It's a complicated piece of language.
It was written explicitly for the Guthrie's Shakespearean-level actors, who would understand the sounds and rhythms. Of course, it runs the risk of being done for superficial reasons, such as 'this will shake people up.' That's not the intention.
Taps strikes me as far ahead of its time, as does your novel Letters from Alf. There's Alf's cataloging the hubris of a faddish age circa 1973 that now seems prophetic.
A lot of people reading Alf now understand what I was up to, which is gratifying. Unfortunately, the book is out of print. I think the most exciting questions humans can ask are 'Where are we?' and 'What the hell are we doing?' But asked soberly, not sentimentally. None of that preciosity of self that stinks up the culture.
It is a culture of self-indulgence, though Sept. 11 seemed to offer the hope of reflection.
Yes, but it's too early to tell what the lasting effect on American culture will be. But at the moment, well, we still have George C. Wolfe at the Public Theater in New York, and he shouldn't be there. In the eye of what's happened, how can we tolerate the doltish frittery that goes on at the Public?
You were once a strong advocate of regional repertory theater. Yet the movement seems to have failed.
When we started the Long Wharf, there were seven or eight regional repertory theaters, Cleveland, Pasadena...They all had a sense of professionalism and of community. Now, rather than this singularity, we have mass assembly, cookie-cutter culture. I think a renaissance is still possible, but I'm less hopeful.
And American theater in general?
We're in a period of imitating ourselves collectively. Theater will live though it's always dying. The thing that concerns me is the academic invasion in theater, this pyramid scheme of graduates that come from the safety of classrooms and the coddlement of New York studios.
You worked with Tyrone Guthrie?
Yes. The first time I watched Guthrie direct, it was something improbable like Hello, Dolly! It was a run-through rehearsal, and the first act dragged with no energy. Guthrie asked for the actors to be gathered, then after a brief pause barked, 'Move your fucking asses!' That was it, and back they went. It was worth more than five chapters in a how-to book.
Lightbox Studio, 1331 NW Kearney St., 231-0839. 8 pm Fridays- Sundays. Opens Feb. 22. $10.
"Art should terrorize, purge. Instead, 'like foolish birds to painted grapes' we fly." From
Lightbox Studio includes many former students of Schrock's from Bennington, including artistic director Ian Greenfield.
WWeek 2015