AFTER DARK

September 1970

By Harold Stern

Just as was true first in television and then in motion pictures, the theater is now undergoing a director explosion. This is an era of the young or the new or the emerging stager.

Milton Katselas isn’t exactly a novice. He directed the original New York production of The Zoo Story over a decade ago. He followed this with another off-Broadway triumph, Call Me By My Rightful Name. But for some reason, though he had ample opportunity, Broadway success proved exasperatingly elusive.

Katselas didn’t “arrive,” in fact, until the 1966 revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, which moved from City Center to the Billy Rose Theatre. He didn’t arrive with any noticeable impact until just last season. Katselas was the director of the generally well-received Lincoln Center revival of Williams’ Camino Real. But most important, from a commercial and professional standpoint, he was the director of the incredibly successful Butterflies Are Free.

“Without question, it’s my biggest commercial success,” Katselas told me when I met him for lunch at Sardi’s recently, a smile breaking out of his luxuriant beard. “And it is probably the lightest material I’ve directed, though I feel it’s akin to Call Me By My Rightful Name. There’s a humanness in Butterflies, the characters are there and I responded to it in a warm way.

“There’s a lot more to it than may strike you at first glance. There are things people didn’t sense about the material. The matter of the overcoming of the blindness attracts people, the fact that the kid has a perception in spite of the fact that he can’t see – or maybe because of it.

“We approached it seriously and I just wish that the first encounter Keir Dullea and I had about the part had been recorded. You’d have thought we were discussing Dostoievsky

“Actually, though almost all the plays I’ve directed might be considered serious, I never think of myself as a serious director. I always look for the humor. Humor is often the difference between a dreary character and an aware character, one who is objective enough about himself to be humorous. I think humor is an essential key to a character.”

Katselas is himself an aware character who doesn’t take himself as seriously as he once did. His work and his recognition have flowered accordingly. But there was a time when Katselas had very little to laugh at professionally.

Perhaps it was a case of too much success too soon. The Zoo Story and Call Me By My Rightful Name were the off-Broadway blockbusters of their day. Katselas was the white-haired boy, the director to watch.

He made his Broadway debut as the director of Garden Of Sweets, which lasted one night and followed this with two Broadway plays which were schedule to run in repertory, On An Open Roof and Kaddish. On An Open Roof opened at the Cort Theatre and was so thoroughly raked by critics, it not only closed on opening night, it carried Kaddish into oblivion with it.

To my knowledge, Katselas holds what must be a rather unique and unenviable theatrical record, that of being director of three consecutive Broadway shows which were able to amass a total of only two performances among them.

When he later withdrew as director of the off-Broadway Journey To The Day prior to opening, only a fool would have bet anything on Katselas’ chances of making a triumphant return. Katselas was just enough of a fool not to quit and his stubborn insistence that he is a good director has paid off.

Today he looks back at that bleak period without bitterness.

“It’s always intrigued me,” he said, “about the difference between doing something that’s a failure and something successful.

“I still look back at Garden Of Sweets fondly. It was a privilege working with Katina Paxinou, and I think the play had one of Boris Aronson’s finest sets. The material just missed.

As far as On An Open Roof and Kaddish were concerned, they marked his debut as a producer, which fact he felt helped compound the problems.

“I never wanted to be a producer,” he said, “and I never want to be a producer again – except under completely different circumstances. Our intentions were honorable, but we just didn’t have the material.

“I was the same director who did The Zoo Story and Call Me By My Rightful Name. The difference is that I was very impatient in those days. I accepted anything I thought would play on a stage.”

After his first hot flush of success was followed by that even hotter flush of failure, Katselas spent much of his time out of New York, directing an enormous and impressive list of stock and resident theater productions.

He did The Country Girl with Shelley Winters and Joe Anthony at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, The Visit with Jo Van Fleet at Philadelphia’s Playhouse-in-The-Park, Macbeth with Robert Loggia and Salome Jens at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, After The Fall with Jose Ferrer at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Coriolanus at the San Diego Shakespeare Festival, Camino Real in Los Angeles, a tour of On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, the national company of The Great White Hope with Brock Peters, and many others

“I have no limitations on where I do plays,” Katselas told me. “I will do a play in a garage, in a field, anywhere I can put on a play I like. I didn’t realize I had worked in so many different places until a friend of mind started to enumerate them. And I’ve had nothing but good experiences in all of those places.”

He considers Butterflies Are Free the smoothest and most compatible production he ever directed.

“I had never worked with Blythe Danner before Butterflies,” he said. “I caught her in an off-Broadway play and liked what I saw. This part is just perfect for her. She and Keir Dullea are so at ease with each other and so responsive to each other. It was the happiest experience I’ve ever had in the theater.

“But I think the best piece of work I ever did was in Florida. It was After The Fall with Jose Ferrer. Ferrer may be a director, but basically, he’s still an actor. And he’s a beautiful guy. If he trusts a director, he’s brilliant. Opening night of After The Fall, I gave him 17 notes before the show. He attended to all of them except one and after the show he came over to apologize for missing it. I’ve never worked with a more cooperative actor. Jose himself considers it the best or one of the best performances he’s ever given, including Cyrano.

“The two guys I’ve worked with I most admire are Jose Ferrer and George C. Scott. If only someone would write a play for both of them that I could direct. Even if I didn’t direct it, that’s one play I wouldn’t want to miss.”

During his recent years, Milton Katselas has become very involved with Tennessee Williams and his works – they’ve even collaborated on a screenplay – and Milton recalls their first meeting.

“It was on the first day of rehearsal for The Rose Tattoo at City Center,” he said. “It was a nervous experience. After the reading of the play, he called me aside and told me he thought it was going to be great. Then he said: ‘About the second act…’ and I expected the worst. And he went on ‘…That line she says about spending a nickel on a phone call to Biloxi…shouldn’t we make that a dime?’

“We spent a lot of time together on that show and on Camino Real. And of course on our screenplay. He’s another beautiful man.”

But they aren’t all beautiful people, even if one would like them to be.

“The basic difficulty in the theater,” said Katselas, “is an unwillingness to communicate. A lot of people in the theater are so uptight. It’s a pressure business to begin with, but they seem to feel that unless it’s tense and there are disagreements, it can’t be worthwhile. That’s just not true.

“But, aside from the unwillingness of some people to communicate, I’ve had very few problems – and they seem to be getting fewer all the time.”

One thing which does trouble him is what he believes to be limitations placed on what is accepted in the theater.

“I don’t understand the fact that some people are willing to go to art movies and enjoy abstract experiences,” he said, “but they are not willing to let that happen in the theater. In the theater one has to be quite literal. I think the theater has to tolerate more abstract ideas. I certainly don’t think the theater should become completely abstract, but why should it be confined to one room?”

It should therefore come as no surprise to learn that Katselas is becoming more involved with films.

“Tennessee Williams, Lanford Wilson and I opened up Williams’ short story One Arm into a screenplay,” he said. “It’s a poignant story and I think it should make an excellent film.

“We now have a shooting script and we started making it into a screenplay before Midnight Cowboy. The story itself was written years before. Where the hustler in Cowboy was ineffective, One Arm is very effective. All we need to go ahead with the film is the money. Unfortunately, that’s no longer as easy to get as it used to be.

“I can’t have any reality on the film until the money is in. I can feel serious about pursuing it until I know we’re going ahead. I am thinking of actors, but we’re not thinking in the direction of a star. We’d like to discover someone.

“There’s a word for you – Discover! It places you closer to God. As if you’re discovering someone who wasn’t there before.”

Before One Arm, Milton may be directing another feature, A Medley Of Native Tunes, to be produced by Paul Roebling and Gil Pearlman.

“Pearlman wrote the screenplay,” said Katselas, “and I think it’s a funny, charming, light, original story, and very young. When I say young, I mean that in the best way. It has the feeling of youth, without force feeding in rock music. I deplore that phony ‘Let’s appeal to the young’ approach.”

Katselas’ only prior experience in films was with All In A Night’s Work.

“I was the dialogue director,” he said, “the only post in the picture that was non-union. I learned a lot about the picture from the director, Joe Anthony, and the cameraman, Joe LaShelle. I’d do a set-up and I’d bring it in and ask if it was possible. As a result of that, I think I learned a lot about film. That’s the basic knowledge a screen director needs, he has to have a sense of the visual and be able to communicate with his cameraman.”

He does not feel his inexperience as a screen director will stand in his way.

“The best directed picture this country has had,” he said, “was directed by a man who had never directed a film before. It was Orson Welles with Citizen Kane. He refused to accept the limitations. Sometimes not knowing too much can be an advantage. When you don’t know, you try to find the answers. You pursue a question and try to find a solution.”

He doesn’t believe that even an inexperienced director can let his budget run wild.

“If a director gets out of hand,” he explained, “sometimes all you have to do is look at the producers. Some producers are intimidated by directors. It often gets to be a game. A producer has to be able to exercise judgment in knowing when to OK an extra expense and when to put his foot down.”

Aside from getting his first motion picture experience under the aegis of Joe Anthony, Katselas has been associated with his fellow director on several occasions.

“Joe Anthony is a good friend,” said Katselas, “which is one reason I went to Hollywood for All In A Night’s Work. I directed him in The Country Girl and I assisted him when he directed Once Upon A Tailor. I also helped Joe cast The Lark and I had a bit part in the play. I was a monk. I had so little to do that I actually fell asleep on stage during one performance.”

Which may be one reason Anthony never used his talents as an actor again.

“I acted in college,” Katselas confessed. “I also acted when I first arrived in New York, but I had decided to become a director during my junior year in college. As an actor, I studied with Lee Strasberg, acted on TV under Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn and I did a little off-Broadway. But any acting I did was with the idea of eventually becoming a director. I got something out of every experience. I observed a lot and I’ve gotten a lot out of what I observed. I was like a European apprentice, trying to assimilate as much as possible from observation.”

The 36-year-old Katselas was born in East Pittsburgh, Pa., was a basketball player in high school and attended Carnegie Tech. He moonlighted by running his father’s theater and the pool room directly beneath it.

“I learned an awful lot about people and life in that pool room,” he said. “I also learned an awful lot about people, life and props, when I worked on a moving truck in New York. I learned how much objects and physical things mean to people. But the pool room came first. Third was my father’s theater and last was all the rest of my education.

“The greatest breakdown in the formal education system is the failure to teach anything about what life is really like and about communication. The greatest waste is the teaching of so many facts that don’t matter.

“People who go into pool rooms leave a lot of the pretensions of civilization behind them. I learned in the pool room that if you’re going to be effective gambler, you have to be willing to lose. That’s what you have to do in the theater and in love and in everything else. A willingness to fail leads to success. Don’t sell that short, it’s a big concept. And of course, there are those characters you meet in a pool room.”

Katselas has developed an intense interest in painting in recent years, part of the reason for which may be that his wife is a painter.

“Painting gives me almost as much pleasure as directing,” he said. “I started to paint about six years ago. I went to an exhibition and I saw some work I liked, but I felt I could do it better. About five years ago, I entered a competition and won a prize. Since then, I’ve sold some paintings to friends.

“So now I paint late at night or when I’m not working. It’s become more than a hobby and if I started to sculpt too, which is what I would like to do, it could become the more serious part of my life. But I guess I enjoy directing too much for that to really happen. Besides, my wife is the real painter in the family. A lot of designers and artists visit our home and are amazed at her work. But she doesn’t push it, she doesn’t have the drive.”

Katselas hasn’t directed anything on television and if you ask him why, he’ll tell you it’s because he has very little respect for the medium.

He has directed one record album, his original Broadway cast version of The Rose Tattoo.

“I’ve never heard the album,” he said. “I don’t listen to recorded drama myself. Too much attention is paid to diction. But when it comes to a Robert Frost or a Dylan Thomas reading from their own works, ah, there’s a difference. They don’t care about missing a sound here and there. Their intent comes through.

“I don’t know that I’d care to hear my Rose Tattoo album. The night before I did it, I ate some bad Mexican food and when I woke up that morning, I thought it was all over for me. We recorded the entire play in four-and-a-half hours. All I wanted to do was get it over with. I wasn’t interested in diction or subtlety, just speed. Everything would have been all right, except someone decided that what we all wanted for lunch was lasagna, and it was ordered in quantity. During the last part of the session, the studio reeked of lasagna and I was tottering on the brink of disaster.

“(faded text). I tried to race out the door but it wasn’t that easy. Everyone kept stopping me to tell me how terribly pleased they were. Even the technicians came over to compliment me. They said that in all their years in the business they had never seen anyone work as rapidly before.”

On the Katselas agenda, in addition to those two pending movies, is the preparation of the London edition of Butterflies Are Free in September. What this will involve is getting the New York company ready to transfer to the British capital and then whipping a new company into shape for Broadway.

“I’d love to find a new play,” he said, then added, almost wistfully, “What I’d really like to find is a play that’s not about man as a victim. Just once, I’d like to find something about man’s potentials.”

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