Penn

It's been a long time since the last post, mainly because I've been looking at the shelf full of old Playbills that I have to go through in order to remember the many, many plays I've seen in New York. But there are a few items to write about before I have to do that.

When I was at Penn in the early 1970s, there was one theater group (Penn Players) and no theater department. But at the Annenberg School of Communications (which was a graduate school only, I believe) there was one course, Theater Lab, taught by Ilona Gerbner, wife of the Annenberg School's dean. She was a Hungarian actress who had met and married George Gerbner and come to the U.S. with him. Their son was a Penn student, and my roommate Charlotte dated him for a while.

I took Theater Lab during my last year at Penn. It was a two-semester course, I think, and the small group that took the class together became pretty close. I recall working on a production of "The Little Foxes," and I remember directing a play by Leonard Melfi. Along with Israel Horovitz and Charles Mee, Melfi was the type of then-New Wave playwright we were interested in. Ilona was a good teacher, and I got excited about doing theater by taking that class.

I had tried out for Penn Players as a freshman but since I didn't get cast the first time, I never went back--pretty typical for me at that time. But I did have an English professor, Enoch Brater, who taught several dramatic literature courses, all of which I took. He was a good teacher, Harvard-educated, and not stuffy at all. We became fairly friendly, and when I declared myself an English major, I chose him as my advisor. He dated and married a student, a friend of my friend Jane Savitt. That was something you could do in those days.

When he came up for tenure, he asked me to write a statement supporting him, which I gladly did, but he didn't make it. There was another young assistant professor in the department, Deirdre Bair, who had taken it upon herself to contact Beckett and ask if she could travel to France and hang out with him for a while, and he said okay, and she got a terrific book out of that. So Brater's work looked a little anemic by comparison, I suppose. He ended up at the University of Michigan in the Comparative Literature department.

When I was in my last year at Penn I was trying to figure out what to do with myself, and for a while I thought I should go to law school. Brater wrote me a recommendation, but I didn't get into any of the schools I applied to. Because I was enjoying Theater Lab, I decided to apply to the master's program in theater at the University of Illinois, my state university. When I asked Brater for another recommendation for that, he made some comments about my being wishy-washy. He had known from an early age that he wanted to teach English at an Ivy League university, and he had pursued that with single-minded energy; I just wished I had that kind of clear goal in mind.