Performance
Out on a Limb with Roger Glade
Playwright's Showcase in Houston is doing what no one else is. The question is, does it need doing?
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Paul John Stephens has been staging his own plays, at his own expense, for years. A postal employee, he rented space and staged his plays for friends and a few interested spectators until his money ran out. The best thing about his play Her Hair Down Singing was its title. It was an unqualified failure at Autry House in December. Glade had asked for second act changes, and Stephens disappeared. The changes did not come and neither did the playwright. He never saw a performance of the play and those who did weren't happy about it. The play made little sense, which Glade knew, and as a result his direction was as aimless as the play. But after casting the show and getting well into rehearsals, Glade felt committed to doing it. One night a performance had to be cancelled because, like the playwright, people stayed home.
Eighteen months ago, Charles Schmidt, who is head of the drama department at Sam Houston State College, submitted his play The Obit Man to Glade for possible production. Glade liked the play but asked for changes which Schmidt was not willing to make. "After all," says Schmidt, "I've been in theatre a lot longer than he has and I know just as much about it as he and perhaps more." The script went to Houston's Theater Suburbia where they changed not only the title of the play but the script as well, and without the permission or knowledge of Schmidt. Opening night was quite a shock for the playwright.
New Plays. Original scripts...who needs them? They don't make money. (Glade: "It goes without saying that new plays don't make money. The best you can hope for is to break even. Maybe.") Glade's financial successes have all been by experienced playwrights. Summertree by Ron Cowan in 1969, The Investigation, Godot and Lear were his biggest hits, but the size of the audience at Autry is limited to 75 at most, depending on the number of chairs Glade can fit into the space he decides to allot the audience, which varies. The largest amount collected at the box-office was close to $200. Glade takes what he needs for his own living expenses from the gate receipts and the rest goes back into Playwright's Showcase, which is registered as a non-profit educational corporation. The profits from Lear were completely wiped out by the deficit brought on by Her Hair Down Singing. Yet Glade persists in doing untried plays. Why?
"I have," he explains, "pursued and developed a strong image of what Playwright's Showcase is. People know what I am doing here before they come. My image is strong and well-established. I am in the business of selling new plays."
To watch Glade conduct a rehearsal is to see an exercise in revelation by trial and error. Like some mad Hercules Poirot searching for the final clue to a murder mystery, Glade dances, pounces, sings and whispers—looking for the play, searching for the performance. Glade explains to actors, in effective, non-theatrical terms, what he thinks the play is and then sits back to watch the actor reveal to him the play as performance. His eye for theatrical effect is remarkable, and when he suggests a fine-reading or a sight gag that works—then Glade laughs harder than anyone.
"The play's the thing," he says, "only as performed, not as script."
This one-man show annoys some actors. "I heard about Roger Glade a long time ago," said one actress during a rehearsal, "and his reputation for temper tantrums scared me. I wouldn't come over here for a long time. But he does do good plays, and he does get good performances from people and that's why I'm here. But some nights after rehearsal I go home and cry." Still, actors consistently show up in numbers for his casting calls, and he cast Jonathon Wild from his bulging files with no auditions necessary. That's the way he likes it: a stable of playwrights, a stable of actors.
Glade has a small but faithful following who attend Playwright's Showcase productions (let's be clear, most theaters would consider his "small" non-existent; the house sometimes consists of five or six people.) Even for the devoted, entering Autry can be quite an adventure. The room does have a stage, but Glade rarely uses it. He decides where the playing area will be for each show and it is impossible, even for regulars, to predict where he'll put it next.
Roger Glade is usually at every performance to supervise ticket sales ($2.50 and $3.50), watch over actors, coffee preparations, and patrons looking for bathrooms (upstairs, down a dark hall), and in general cluck over his creation like a mama hen over her brood. When someone inadvertently steps into the playing area, as someone often does, and then out of curiosity fingers a prop or part of the set, Glade promptly reprimands the trespasser with "Please...!" or "Dear..." Which is all it takes.
Right now Glade is in debt to Autry House for back rent. His current one-man fund-raising drive is designed to pay off this debt and to help finance his spring program. His alliance with Autry was formed in the spring of 1969 when, after graduating from Rice, finishing classwork towards a master's degree at Columbia and directing in theatres in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington and New York, Glade decided to come back to Houston and form his own group. The chaplain at Autry, John Worrell, had been a friend of Glade's during his years at Rice and the two worked out a deal with Glade staging plays at Autry in the manner of the off-Broadway coffee houses of the time. Eventually, Playwright's Showcase became a separate corporation. Autry House charges it rent to pay for time, space and utilities. Playwright's Showcase has no connection with the Episcopal Church or Autry House, except for the diocese's unspoken support by allowing him use of the building.
Glade doesn't stay at Autry because he likes the pinched circumstances. Being an artist in a garret long ago lost whatever appeal it might have had for him. He would jump at the chance to direct in a building as grand and imposing as the Dallas Theater Center or the Alley—or the parapets of Allen Center, for that matter—where he could indulge himself in luxury. It would be for him like sitting surrounded by mountains of chocolate and vats of whipped cream and all of it his, even the cherry. Without doubt, he'd like to move on and make more of the world his theater.
Unlike most of his aspiring playwrights whose ultimate goal is a New York production, Glade envisions having a "stable of playwrights" someday who write for his theater. After all, Shakespeare had the Globe, Chekhov the Moscow Art Theatre, Brecht the Berliner Ensemble—someone as talented might well have the Playwright's Showcase someday.
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