Catching Up with Caroline

Posted by Bruce Miller

In a previous blog entry (When Off Broadway Began, Barksdale Was There [Aug 5]), I wrote about the late, great Josie Abady, mentioning her as one of the Richmond connections to the legendary Off Broadway company, Circle in the Square. A thoughtful anonymous commenter subsequently wrote: “I am so sorry to learn of Josie Abady’s death. I knew her in her youth, and had no idea that she had died. What a wonderful and inspirational family. Such strong women. What’s happening with her sister Caroline, do you know? I appeared with her years ago in a Dogwood Dell production of Winnie the Pooh.”

I’m going to try to get in touch with Caroline, pictured above and to the left with co-stars Kevin Spacey and William Ullrich at the NYC premiere of Beyond the Sea, to see if she’ll write a blog entry to bring her Richmond fans up to date. I'm afraid I don't know or remember anything about this particular production of Winnie the Pooh, but if it's true, and I have no reason to doubt that it is, then here's a GREAT example of a Dell alum moving onward and upward to become a NYC and Hollywood success.

Until I'm able to contact Caroline (if I'm able), here’s what I know (sorta).

Caroline Abady was born and spent her entire youth in Richmond. If memory serves, she went to Douglas Freeman High School. I think I met her maybe once or twice; she's a couple of years younger than me, but we were teen theatre enthusiasts in Richmond at the same time. Kind of like Chase Kniffen and Gray Crenshaw about five years ago. As I've mentioned earlier, I knew her mother Nina very well.

Caroline has had the kind of long term career success that most actors only dream of. She may not be a household name, but she works constantly in high profile projects with our nation's top tier of theatre artists. Her professional name is Caroline Aaron. If you go to http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000715/ , you can access a complete list of her film and TV credits. Or if you go to http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?id=74908 , you can access a complete list of her Broadway credits.

The great news is that Caroline is scheduled to be back on Broadway this fall for the first time in 16 or so years, opening in October at Studio 54 in Roundabout’s upcoming revival of The Ritz, written by Terrance McNally and directed by Joe Mantello (pictured to the right). You gotta be impressed by the company she keeps.

Here’s more information that I pulled from Caroline’s bio on the IMDb site:

Caroline Aaron “performed a one-woman, two-character play, Call Waiting, in 1994 and again in 2001. She later filmed it in 2004. The 87-minute film won the Best Comedy Jury Prize at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.”

Ms. Aaron is an “earthy, plump-figured stage actress of Broadway (Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Social Security; I Hate Hamlet) who appeared as a character actress on film and TV. She was a main ensemble player in several of Woody Allen's films during the late 80s and 90s, essaying many of his typical Jewish relatives, neighbors and/or friends in traditional New York settings.

Her late mother, Nina Friedman Abady, was a Selma, Alabama civil rights activist who walked with Martin Luther King in the 60s. She had to endure cross-burnings on her Virginia front lawn. More tragically, the family suffered the loss of their husband and father when he was 38.

Her older sister was Josephine R. Abady, a prominent artistic director of the Cleveland Playhouse (1988-1994) and Circle in the Square Theater (1994-1996). A noted stage producer, director and theater owner, Abady resisted employing her younger sister because they were related. This caused resentment and sibling friction for a period of time until Abady was diagnosed with breast cancer. Abady battled the disease for several years and died on May 25, 2002, at age 52. The Los Angeles-based Caroline returned to New York frequently to aid in her sister's illness.

Aaron did appear under her sister's stage direction in The Boys Next Door, co-starring David Strathairn and John Amos. Abady also cast Aaron in To Catch a Tiger, a 1994 AFI film which told the story of their mother's civil rights work. Caroline played their mother in the film and Abady's husband, Michael Krawitz, wrote the screenplay.”

For those who share my penchant for exploring connections, it's fun to note that not too long ago Caroline starred at George Street Playhouse in a reading of Spine, one of the new plays by Bill C. Davis (pictured to the right), playwright of Austin's Bridge.

I hope this helps inform Caroline’s childhood friends of her current success. As I mentioned, I’ll try to contact Caroline and see if she’ll give us more information. Along with Emily Skinner and Blair Underwood, she’s one of the Richmond theatre alum who has earned a lifetime of national success.

Thanks to our anonymous commenter for prompting this post.

--Bruce Miller

My Lunch with Arthur Miller

Posted by Bruce Miller

Four years before Phil Whiteway and I started Theatre IV, I worked summer stock in Southbury, Connecticut. The year was 1971, and I had just finished my junior year at the University of Richmond. None of us knew it at the time, but many if not most of the wonderful summer stock theatres that had thrived throughout New England for over 30 years were on their last legs. After the glory days of the 40s, 50s and 60s, true summer stock theatres were fast becoming a thing of the past.

A true summer stock theatre—at least this is how it was explained to me—produced ten shows in ten weeks, or twelve shows in twelve weeks. During each one week run, the show ran for eight performances, opening on a Tuesday and closing Sunday night.

If you worked for an official straw hat theatre (named for the fashionable headgear that gentlemen donned when the temperatures began to rise), the acting companies were booked in. They brought their own costumes and hand props, and the theatre built the sets and provided lights and sound. If you worked for a summer stock company that wasn’t a part of the official straw hat circuit—the Southbury Summer Playhouse wasn’t—then you created everything from scratch and nothing was booked in. The actors were part of a rep company, half of whom did nothing but act while the other half acted occasionally and worked their donkeys off every minute they weren’t on stage.

Our ten shows at Southbury in the summer of ’71 were Arsenic and Old Lace, Barefoot in the Park, Boys in the Band, Bus Stop, Cactus Flower, The Mousetrap, See How They Run, Under the Yum Yum Tree, West Side Story, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? At least that’s what my fading memory tells me they were. I was the props master for all ten shows, I helped out with any and everything else as needed, I played a lead in See How They Run and tiny supporting parts in Arsenic and Cactus.

The work was grueling, pretty much 9 a.m. until midnight or 1 seven days a week. Our only off time was Wednesday from noon until 6, when about 12 of us would pile into two cars and drive into NYC to buy standing room tickets to a Broadway hit. There was no TKTS booth, but standing room cost only $3, if memory serves.

I had the time of my life!

Even in those days when summer stock theatres were still fairly plentiful, jobs were hard to come by. You more or less had to know someone. I knew my college roommate and best pal Rick Gehr from Binghamton, New York. Rick knew his high school buddy Richard Ebeling, who had somehow managed to get a job at Southbury in 1970, and was not returning in ’71. Ebeling put in a good word for Gehr, and Gehr put in a good word for me. Rick Gehr and I took a bus up to Southbury to interview and audition with the producer, W. Thomas Littleton, and we both were cast.

We were paid $75 a week, and each of us paid $25 a week to rent a bed from Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, who owned a big white frame house about ten minutes up the road in Woodbury (pictured to the left). If we wanted to eat dinner at the Andersons, that was an additional $3 per meal. All in all, we scraped by.

I have a million stories, but one of my favorites involved Arthur Miller, who lived about 8 minutes away in Roxbury. That's his house in the picture to the right. Early in our 12-week contract, one of the locals drove us around to visit the houses of the famous people who were our neighbors in the Litchfield Hills—Arthur Miller, Alexander Calder, Jerzy Kosinsky, William Styron, John Updike, Richard Widmark, Sylvia Sidney, etc. Today you can add Dustin Hoffman, Frank McCourt and Stephen Sondheim to the list.

When we got to Arthur Miller’s house, I was stunned to see that his mailbox had Miller written on it in big block letters just like my parents’ mailbox at home in Virginia. I made them stop the car and take my picture next to the mailbox. I have no idea where that photo is today. Behind and to the side of Miller's white frame house is the studio he build in the late 40s, pictured above and to the left. It was in this studio that he wrote Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and most of his other great plays.

Anyway, one day I was taking a lunch break from my desperate search for free props, and I sat down at the lunch counter at Canfield Corner Pharmacy in Woodbury. I was sitting by myself eating a sandwich when a man in his 50s sat down on the counter stool next to me. The man who ran the lunch counter came over and said, “Hello, Mr. Miller.” I looked up, thinking he was talking to me, and wondering how he knew my name. It was instantly obvious from his gaze that he was talking to the fellow sitting next to me. I glanced over just long enough to realize that the man sitting five inches from my elbow was none other than the legendary Arthur Miller himself. He ordered a corn beef on rye, and we sat there silently until both of us had eaten our sandwiches and he went on his way. I never had the nerve to say anything, but I tried to soak it all in as much as I could.

Last week, I took my family back up to Southbury, Woodbury, Roxbury and Washington CT. Washington made the list because it’s the neighboring town that served as the inspiration for Stars Hollow on one of my family's favorite TV shows, The Gilmore Girls. The interior and signage of Crossroads Cafe, the diner that served as a model for Luke's on The G G, are featured in the photos to the left and right. As you can see, the church is across the street in Washington just as it is in Stars Hollow.

Unfortunately, the barn that served as home to the Southbury Summer Playhouse was torn down decades ago, but we still had a grand time visiting my old haunts.

While there, we stopped in a framing shop in Woodbury to ask for directions to Alexander Calder’s house, and met with a lovely young lady who asked if I knew Bill C. Davis. I told her that I’d just met him at the world premiere of Austin’s Bridge at the Firehouse in Richmond, and that he seemed very nice. Turns out she’s his hiking partner, and he now lives in that part of the world as well. She told me that he really is the nicest guy in the world, and asked me all about what I thought about Austin’s Bridge. I shared my opinions, and referred her to my earlier entry in this blog.

It was a great trip, and a wonderful chance to remember again my lunch with Arthur Miller.

--Bruce Miller

A "Bridge" to Cherish

Early in the performance of Austin’s Bridge, now enjoying a wonderful World Premiere with Firehouse Theatre Project, the character of Austin Quinn sings that his actions are about to finally set him free. Watching the musical play that follows, I kept thinking that author Bill C. Davis was also experiencing a sort of freedom.

Much of the action of Austin’s Bridge is set in a residential community for mentally and developmentally disabled adults in Upstate New York. For four summers, I lived and worked at a similar residential facility, Camp Baker in Chesterfield County, and for one full year thereafter I was employed at the Development Training Center in Richmond.

I remember as if it were yesterday how strange the residents of those facilities seemed to me at first. I felt like 95% of their physical, psychological and emotional traits were different from mine. By the end of that first summer, I realized that the opposite was true. In 95% of the ways in which we thought and felt and acted, we were exactly the same.

Except they had one major strength that I lacked. Freedom. I was living my life behind a wall of self-consciousness, social mores, artifice and subtext. I regret that I still do. The residents seemed to me to be completely free of these obstacles. They said exactly what they felt, they asked for exactly what they wanted and needed, their emotional lives were rich and layered and unencumbered by a desperate need to appear to be “normal.”

Lacking this freedom, I began to feel like I was the one who was disabled.

Very early in his career, Bill Davis (pictured to the left) wrote a super-hit—Mass Appeal, which has been internationally successful both on stage and screen. Mass Appeal is a beautiful play. We produced it years ago at Theatre IV with an African American cast.

I’m sure that writing a super-hit can provide traps just as easily as it can provide freedom. I’m so glad that, at least at this stage in his career, Bill Davis seems to have chosen to be free.

Austin’s Bridge is not like most contemporary plays. It wears its heart on its sleeve. It is honest and gentle and sweet in a way that reminded me of The Fantasticks, except it is of course completely different. Like the residents it portrays, it makes no attempts at artifice or subtext. It’s all about freedom and feeling and shucking off the need to hide. To be honest, it took me a while to get used to its simplicity and sweetness. But ultimately, I found myself caught up in its spell, in a very similar way to the manner in which I remember becoming enthralled by the unencumbered emotions of the Camp Baker residents.

Depending on what kind of person you are, Austin’s Bridge may seem beautiful or sappy, baldly honest or sentimentally manipulative. I’m sure that Bill Davis knows this, and he has written freely the play that shows the inner-workings of his heart. He openly shares emotions with us, writing honestly with the courage of his convictions.

Chalk me up among those who found his work to be beautiful and honest. When one central couple explains, in two or three words, the absolute necessity of marriage, my heart leapt into my throat.

And let me express my admiration for the wonderful cast, who entered into their roles with body, mind and soul. Not to mention the fact that they sing their hearts out. You guys knocked me out.

By all means, go see Austin’s Bridge. However you respond, you will surely be impressed by the fact that this World Premiere is happening right here in River City. And just like Bill Davis, his startlingly gifted composer Brett Boles, and the multi-talented cast, the Firehouse itself is going for it with everything its got.

I’m jealous of theatrical intentions and exercises and institutions that are so pure, and simple, and free. I wish this run, and whatever runs may follow, all the success in the world.

--Bruce Miller