Episode 103: Special Guest Episode! Peter Schmitz and Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia present "Jasper Deeter and the Hedgerow Theatre"

Introduction

0:00Hi, and welcome back to the Theater History Podcast. I'm Mike Leaguer. The show's been on hiatus while I attend to teaching, parenting, you know, all the other stuff that life brings besides podcasting. But we've got a great slate of new shows coming up, and I'm excited to share more interviews with scholars and artists who are doing great work that engages with the history of theater and live performance. But first, I want to bring you a very special episode. It's actually a guest episode from my friend Peter Schmitz, who's the host and producer of Adventures in

0:34Theater History Philadelphia. On that podcast, Peter, together with editor and sound designer Christopher Mark Colucci, explores a seemingly inexhaustible treasure trove of fascinating stories about the productions and personalities that have graced the Philadelphia stage from

Jasper Dieter Story

0:51colonial times to the recent past. Today's episode covers the story of Jasper Dieter and the Hedgerow Theater. I'll let Peter explain everything in more detail in the episode, but it's a wonderful exploration of an important and underappreciated bit of American theatrical history, featuring an interview with the late Barry Witham and a visit to the site of the actual Hedgerow Theater, which is still in operation today. Enjoy the show, and look for more episodes from both this show and from Peter's Adventures in Theater History Philadelphia, coming soon.

Hedgerow Theater History

1:35Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History. Today, we are going to be looking at one of the most interesting and influential figures in this city's theater history, the actor, director, and teacher, Jasper Dieter, who in the mid-20th century founded and led the tiny but highly influential Hedgerow Theater Company in Rose Valley, Delaware County, a small suburban enclave to the southwest of the city of Philadelphia. The Hedgerow Theater is, in fact, quite historic. It is the oldest continually operating

2:09theater company in the Philadelphia area and was founded a little over 99 years ago, in April of 1923. Their 100th anniversary season is coming up next year. And we are going to take this podcast right to the place itself. At the conclusion of this episode, we're going to take an expertly guided tour of the Historic Theater's grounds, its buildings, and its backstage areas. But before we do that,

Barry Witham Interview

2:37to set the scene, let's hear an interview I recently had with Professor Barry Witham, one of the most distinguished biographers of Jasper Dieter. Let me introduce our guest. Barry Witham is a professor emeritus of theater history at the University of Washington. That's Washington State. He is the co-author of the book Uncle Sam Presents, a memoir of the Federal Theater Project, and was the editor of Theater in the United States, a documentary history. His 2003 work, the Federal Theater Project,

3:11a case study, was honored as an outstanding academic title, and Professor Witham worked for four years as a professional dramaturg at the Seattle Repertory Theater. His most recent book, From Red Baiting to Blacklisting, The Labor Plays of Manny Freed, was published in 2020 by Southern Illinois University Press. But for our purposes today, we are here to talk about one of his previous works, which was published in 2013.

A Sustainable Theater

3:37It was called A Sustainable Theater, Jasper Dieter at Hedro. Barry, welcome. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. Well, that's very kind of you. You are possibly the most distinguished historian we've had on the show yet. I'm asking you to go back a little bit to talk about a previous work of yours, which is almost a decade old now. So thank you for going back into your deeper cuts. So, Barry, who was Jasper Dieter? Where did he come from originally? Well, it's a very interesting story. He was a

4:12local Pennsylvanian. Mechanicsburg, right? Mechanicsburg. Which is more south-central, near Harrisburg. He attended a couple of colleges for a while. Dickinson, I think, which is also in that area. Yeah. Somewhere else. He wanted to be an actor. So he went to New York and gave it a try. He wasn't terribly successful, and he fell back on being a reporter. So he was a newspaper reporter for a while. And then he gave that up and went back to New York and struggled. Got some, you know,

4:42some tiny parts, some bit parts, but eventually ended up like so many other youngsters in the village at Provincetown and made some connections at Provincetown, which really influenced his career. So this is the Provincetown Players were actually out in Massachusetts. It was a summer theater in Massachusetts, but they had a small space on MacDougall Street. Yes, in MacDougall Street. Right. And that was famously Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glassful and John Reed and others.

5:13Right. The original Bohemians. Yeah. The original Bohemian gang. Right, right. So he's left Pennsylvania. He's gone to the big city. He's working, though, in very intense, little theater, artistic theater, a little bit in the professional theater.

Hedgerow's Unique Approach

5:28I think he did a little, you know, vaudeville, some, some, you know, the commercial theater of his day. But then he was off on the Chautauqua circuit and he ends, but how does he end up in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, which was then rather rural? What is the story that took him to that particular part of the world? I think the way that he tells it is that he was at Swarthmore for a Chautauqua event. Right. And he and a friend decided to walk over to the Rose Valley where his sister lived. And they came

6:04upon this production that his sister was in or working on in this funny old grist mill. And it just seemed to occur to him that it would be lovely to have a permanent kind of theater outside of New York City, where he could put into effect a lot of the things that he'd been learning about acting and politics and race relations and many of the other things. He was very into the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance. And he was very interested in a non-commercial theater. He hated what he called

6:38the factories of Broadway. And in this, he was kind of following a certain trend that was happening both in Europe and America and in Russia of theater labs that were outside of the big city, that were adjacent to it in the countryside. Even the Moscow Art Theater, I think, had a similar institution where they had sort of a lab out in the country. And his sister was doing, I think it was Gilbert and Sullivan, right? I believe it was. It wasn't something that was, you know, particularly heady or intellectual, but he saw this space.

7:09And it all seemed to fit together for him. Now, very early in your book, I'm going to quote from it, you write, The erasure of Hedgerow and a, to a degree, Jasper Dieter, from many narratives about American theater has to do with the tendency to view Hedgerow as one of the many little theaters that came to prominence from 1911 to 1930, motivated by the independent and art theater movements in Europe. And little theaters in America soon expanded outside of New York experiments, such as the

7:41Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players. But in two critical ways, you write, Hedgerow was unique, and it is in that uniqueness that inspired many of its accomplishments, successes, and failures. Now, you say that its two unique ways was, one, that it was a repertory theater with a rotating repertoire of plays, and second, that it was grounded, literally grounded as a institution. It was an intentional community grounded in its natural

Sustainable Theater Concept

8:08environment. Is that what you mean by a sustainable theater in your title? I think so, yes. I think it's very interesting to try to trace the relationship between Dieter and the company and the land, because he really felt that big cities had become the blight of America, and he wanted to get back to some notion of ruralness and a kind of embracing of the environment. He talks about the environment a lot and how the environment shapes actors. But originally,

8:43it was the notion of getting back to some kind of bucolic, rural notion of America, where they could create theater as a way of life. And part of that way of life was living off and with the land. And there already was a community there, right? There was an arts and crafts community in Rose Valley, based on the sort of William Morris arts and crafts movement, right? The artisans. He found

Arts and Crafts Community

9:13something there already, and seemed to want to make a theater version of that. Yeah, exactly.

9:21Actually, Price, I believe, who had founded the whole arts and crafts movement there in the Rose Valley, was perhaps dead by this time. But his family was still very active, and would become active in Hedgerow. Right. As well as Wharton Esherick, the sculptor and craftsman. Yes. Who was already there, and became an essential part of the Hedgerow company, along with the rest of his family. So you also write that between 1923, the theaters founded in 1923,

9:57and 1937, the Hedgerow built 125 productions. And by 1956, there were almost 200 plays in the rotating repertoire of the company. Now, that's just an extraordinary number for such a small space for a thing that barely had 150 seats in its house, and where the acting company sometimes worked for literally pennies. And was there any other company like that anywhere in America at the time? Can you think of any parallels or any imitators?

10:27I think the thing that is unique about Hedgerow was that Dieter really believed that you built a production like Esherick built sculptures, like David Price built furniture. The whole notion was to create something and then not abandon it. You kept refining it and making it better, like making a a wooden chair. And you kept it in the repertory. And the whole idea of getting away from

10:59the long run, the single kind of starring vehicle. And Hedgerow was an attempt to build productions in the manner of the arts and crafts movement, and keep them and maintain them in the repertory. It was an extraordinary event. Right. But now, he didn't do this all by himself. Who were the actors and other theater artists who came to work with Jasper Dieter? What appealed to them about this rather monkish life? It was a little bit like joining a commune in the 1960s, wasn't it? Or maybe a utopian community in the 1840s. People would come there to

11:35really live. I mean, you lived in a communal housing, you worked in the garden, you had to make costumes, you had to build the set, and for almost no money at all. It was, you shared everything, and Dieter never made any money at it either. But what was the appeal to actors who came to live and work with him? Well, part of the appeal was his own notion that a fulfilled life is working at what you love, and that it is really, really important to have a life which is making theater. That appealed to a lot of people.

12:11You know, come here, you won't have a lot of fine things, you know, you won't have a lot of money, but you'll spend your life making theater. And he felt that that was the most wonderful thing you could do. Now, a lot of people came and left, obviously. Right, I noticed that. Some people would show up maybe for, do one show and go, I cannot live like this. And he'd say, fine, you can go. Right. I'm not holding you. No. You didn't, you didn't get a salary. You got a few dollars if you needed to go and buy soap or

12:43toothpaste. But I think most interesting to me doing the original research is, I wonder if Hedro Hedro could have survived with actors' equity or IATSE. Well, I wonder if it could survive in the current climate. There's been a lot of, after the pandemic, there was a lot of examination and very serious conversation about theaters that asked a lot from its actors and from its apprentices that asked you to sort of give up your life, to devote a lot of labor for very little in

13:18return for the cause. And I think the recent aesthetic and consensus is that no, no, it isn't. People need to be fairly compensated for the work that they do. But this wasn't really the feeling a hundred years ago. What is interesting to me, and amazing in a way, is that they began their day around 10 a.m., did a lot of work, you know, in the garden and on the roof. Then they performed. And sometimes they would begin rehearsals. Well, most times, they would begin rehearsals after the evening performance.

13:50Right. A midnight rehearsal after a full show, which often ran three or four hours. Then they go to work. And because of that, because of that discipline, and because of that excitement that he generated him, they made some wonderful work. But when you think back about actors' equity. Oh, no, no. It is now an equity company. The theater still exists, and it is now an equity company and operates under equity rules. But no, I mean, equity was a new thing at the time. The actors' equity started in 1918, right? So it wasn't that no one had heard of

14:24unions, but he wasn't working that way. No. So he called the company a hedgerow theater. Where did he come up with that term? There's a bunch of different stories. At one point, there was some confusion about the legality of them actually occupying this mill. And a sheriff apparently appeared to begin the process of evicting them. And the story goes, the legend of hedgerow is that Anne Harding, who was later going to become very famous, that Anne Harding stood up to the sheriff

14:56and basically said, if you kick us out, we'll stay here anyway. We'll perform between the hedgerows. And that story became very popular. I think it's probably public relations, but I think there's a bit of truth in it. I think probably it was Jasper who confronted the authorities and said, if we have to, we'll play in the hedgerows. I'm thinking, I guess, of the sort of hedgerow schools of Ireland when they were being confronted by the British Protestant church. Yeah, we'll have hedgerows. So a little

15:30something that's rooted in the soil and is a little, you know, a little subversive and a little under the, you know, underground. But so you mentioned Anne Harding, who goes on to have a really significant career in Hollywood, very famous actress, very beautiful leading lady. And when she did become famous, used to send a lot of money back to the hedgerow, which she always regarded as her artistic home. But she was working with Jasper Dieter even before the hedgerow, right? She was working on a production of Candida, I think, in New York. Yes, they had worked together in New York, and she was

16:04really devoted to a lot of the ideals that he had and came to hedgerow and, of course, became the kind of, I was going to say leading lady, but that would be detrimental. No, he wouldn't have such things, right? No stars. It was like the Moscow Art Theater. It was a no-star system. That's right. And she believed that. Who were some of the other playwrights, directors, and actors that worked at Hedgerow with Jasper Dieter in the 2030s? What other names would people be familiar with, perhaps? Okay. Certainly Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson.

16:37Well, Theodore Dreiser did An American Tragedy. He dramatized his own famous novel. But he did that after Sherwood Anderson had done his Winesburg, Ohio. Yes, the Winesburg, Ohio. Yeah. Yeah. Which got a lot of attention, although not great reviews at the time. Right. Which Dieter didn't really care about. His whole aesthetic was, I don't care what reviews it got. We're not here to please the press. We're not here to make a success. We're going to keep working on this play, and we're putting

17:07it in the repertoire if we like it, and it'll get better. Right. And Erwin Piscator came down to work on a play of Hattie Flanagan's, actually, didn't he? Yes. Yes. I was trying to look at my notes. The Caucasian Chalk Circle was one of their really famous premieres. But that wasn't until the 40s, right? And Eric Bentley came out and worked. Right. Yeah, that was later. Sure. Yeah. So there were significant and famous artists who were coming to the Hedgerow at times, and they would stay a while,

17:38or great playwrights would have their plays done there. I mean, he had a relationship with Eugene O'Neill, of course, who apparently allowed his plays to be done for no royalties. And George Bernard Shaw was another, although I don't think he ever met Dieter, they had this great relationship when, I mean, they would write checks to George Bernard Shaw for 20 cents. We did your play, we got four people came, and we're sending you the 20 cents. Eventually Shaw would say, you know, why don't you just save it up for the whole year, and send me whatever you make? You don't have to

18:09Well, the Shaw festivals, you know, they don't write about them much today. They've been kind of lost. Right, because in the 30s and 40s, every summer, they would do a George Bernard Shaw festival. Yes, they would do a Shaw festival. He really liked Shaw very much. And he liked the plays because he felt that they really, that they really could unearth secrets and ideas, and yet were very entertaining at the same time. And I think he found them challenging. His early, you know, Shaw's more

18:41early sort of socialist anti-war plays, I think he's very sympathetic to. But then the later plays that Shaw was writing is Shaw got a bit more cranky and authoritarian, as it were, in his later years. They challenged Dieter, but Dieter kept doing them. He was so interested by Shaw's mind. But the single most iconic play that Jasper Dieter and his company worked on was one that they brought back almost every year. It was Inheritors by Susan Glaspell. Tell us about that play. What was it about that play

19:12that made it the essential play for that company? It really was a kind of touchstone for their work, and for the way that they thought about the theater, and the way they thought about individual freedom. The Inheritors intrigued him because it was a story of a man who owned a great deal of land, I believe as early as 1840, maybe. In Iowa. He owned a great deal of land, and there was a competition for what would happen to the

19:44land. And instead of selling it, he donated the land to build a college for the pursuit of truth and beauty and art. And that was kind of the first act of the Inheritors. And then in the next couple of acts, he flashes forward to the more present time and shows how a young woman who was related to the man who made the original gift, how she is also confronted with a conscience, a question of social conscience, and how it repeats the same idea of what do you value? Do you value material

20:22things, or do you value idealism? And there's a moment in the second play, in the second or third act, where the young woman sees some Hindu students being attacked on the college campus. And that raises the whole notion of equality, and the whole notion of how do we treat people who are different from us? Right. She also talks about who are inheritors of this land that was inherited from Native Americans. She talks about the original tribal people who were, you know, who owned this property, and that's

20:56acknowledged. Then there's a sort of the irony that there are Indians from India who have now arrived as foreign students to be at this college founded on this land, and now they're being attacked for being foreign. So there's sort of a, you know, an ironic twist, but it's a very serious point as well. And it comes out of the whole post-World War I feeling of, you know, anti-imperialism and the idea that maybe fighting, going to war for a, for nationalistic causes is not the most important thing. And this

21:30ends up rubbing off on Jasper Deirdre, because when World War II breaks out, and he's, he still has a resident company of about, you know, a dozen or so people, many of whom are young men of draft age. Right. He wants to keep them from being drafted. And in fact, writes the army and says, we are doing an essential national service here at the Hedro. You cannot draft my actors. How did that go over? Oh, it was very controversial. Yeah. Jasper really grabbed onto the notion of conscientious objectors and conscientious

22:03objecting as a legitimate path to pursue. He was influenced by a lot of things. He was certainly influenced by Scott Nearing. Scott Nearing was a philosopher and a, and someone who really preached, you know, non-violence. And a very important socialist thinker of his day. Yes. We don't hear himself so many more, you know. And so when Dieter pursued this conscientious objecting, which he thought was a quite legitimate pursuit, the press came down very hard on him because they saw it as simply

22:39self-serving. You just don't want to lose your actors. Right. I've, I did a little research into what the Philadelphia papers were writing at the time, and they were actually writing, making cartoons showing Jasper Dieter shielding these young men from the draft. Yes. But the young men are sort of these well-muscled sort of fae looking for smelling roses. And it's, it's, it's very, very homophobic too, by the way. And I think there was, I mean, Jasper Dieter's own homosexuality was, you know, quiet, but known, you know, quality at the time. And the fact that some of the men might be gay,

23:11I think that was sort of, it seemed to me the subtext for a lot of this deep resentment. It's like, get these out of the theater and into the front line. Yeah. I totally agree. One of the reasons that I think Hedgerow did not get as much notoriety or fame or importance or significance as it deserved was that there was this kind of underground whispering campaign that had to do with his homosexuality. And a lot of the folks who went there were homosexual. And there was, I think

23:42there was a feeling amongst a lot of people that Hedgerow was sinful. And it also, it also had an integrated audience and cast as well. One of the things I've noticed, you mentioned the production of Caucasian Shark Circle, which is later in the 40s. And you often see a photograph of that production reproduced. But what I often like to point out is that at the back of that picture, there's an African-American actor playing the role of Azdak, who's the judge role. And, you know, there's no indication, you know, in the text that this should be a, you know, an African-American actor anyway,

24:17but that was typical of the Hedgerow company. And if sometimes, if there were people in the audience who found themselves sitting next to a Black person and might say, we can't sit in the, the person next to me is Black. And Jasper Deter would just say, okay, we'll wait for you to leave because my friend... Yeah, there is. There is a wonderful story about some commotion in the audience because of Black people next to them. Right. And Jasper stands up and very stoically and very quietly

24:47says, you know, if you're uncomfortable, you can leave and we'll wait until you leave and then we'll continue. Right. And of course, he was famous, of course, himself. We haven't mentioned this so far, is that his one major accomplishment as an actor was playing in the Emperor Jones, Eugene O'Neill's play, which is essentially a two-character play, although there are some other actors usually needed for it. But it's mostly a monologue between this great African-American dictator, as it were, of a small Caribbean island, which was played by Charles Gilpin. And for years,

25:20Jasper Deter played Smithers, the other guy, you know, and that was his... And he kept doing that role and he would do it with many other actors, including at one point I discovered Paul Robeson in a single production. And at one point with his... He actually had his boyfriend at the time, who was white, play it in blackface, which is interesting because it doesn't sound like something he would do. And there was another time, it was another actor that he brought in to play the role who eventually went off to... His name was Wayland Rudd. Yeah. Wayland Rudd, yes. Who had a very

25:56distinguished career for a black actor at this time. Yeah. But who ended up moving to Russia. Yes, he did. Like Paul Robeson's brothers-in-law and moved permanently to Moscow. So again, when we talk about there was an air of sort of subversiveness and transgression of many types out in Hedgerow, that's why it had a bit of a suspicious air. You know, what's also interesting is that he wanted to keep the play in the repertory, but he didn't want the Emperor Jones to be played by

26:30people in, you know, in blackface. Yeah, except for that one time. After Rudd, he actually approached a fellow named Arthur Rich, who was a local, I think he was a chauffeur driver. Right. He was a World War I veteran who now was working as a chauffeur for a rich man in Swarthmore. Yes. And Dieter worked with him and really turned him into quite a fine actor. So you devote an entire chapter to talking about Dieter as a director in the rehearsal room and as

27:04a teacher in the classroom, which of course is where most of his life's work was done. We tend to talk about productions and plays and things that were part of the public life of the theater. But most of his time there was spent as a director and as a teacher. And that is why in the end, I believe people flocked to this institution and were often willing to give up years of their life to better their craft working with this particular sort of guru in the Pennsylvania suburb. What did

27:36he do? Why was he regarded as such a special quality in terms of his director and acting teacher? He had some very clear ideas about acting. He felt that acting could be taught. He said you needed three qualities to be able to be trained. You needed to be spontaneous. You needed to have the ability to learn. And he said you had to have aptitude. And if you had these qualities, he was willing

28:07to work with you. His ideas about acting embraced many of the things that we would later associate with the method. And I think that his fascination with spontaneity, which was a big word for him, slowness. He did not like to brush things. He liked to take them slow. He believed that an actor could play any role that they just would examine it and find the empathy. Empathy was another big word for him.

28:40You know, I think it was an extraordinary experiment. And I think one of the things that intrigued me was Dita's relationship with the group theater, because it's the group theater that is going to get so much credit for introducing the method and for bringing Stanislavski, etc., to the United States. And what I try to show in the book is that there were a lot of things going on to make acting more realistic, to make it alive. And some people like Morris Karnofsky were working with Dita before

29:11they went off to work with the group. Yeah. And the interesting thing about Dita, when he would be asked about the group theater, he would demure and say things like, well, he didn't believe in manifestos and treatises. And anyway, a lot of those people, including Karnofsky and Biederman and others, had worked for him before there was a group theater. Right. I think there was a bit of resentment that they were getting so much credit for work that he had helped pioneer. Well, I think

29:41he also saw that the group theater really had an eye to commercial success, was still very much involved in the New York world, and really cared about things like box office. And although it's said all the time that it was trying to create a new difference, when soon as Hollywood called, they all went running. Every single one of them. Yeah. So he was, I think he had a jaundiced view of them to a certain extent. I think what is interesting, Peter, is that while we have a lot of the jargon associated with

30:11the method, and with the group, actors at Hedgerow had a kind of five point mantra that they would use to get ready to act. It was called mind, body, eyes, face, talk. And that's what Dieter taught them, that the impulses start in the mind, are manifest through the body, appear in the eyes, radiate in the face, and lead to the expression of the word. And actors for years, when they would think about

30:45Jasper Dieter, would always say, mind, body, eyes, face, talk. And so I've noticed that over the years, though, generally, he's working out there in this sort of semi-rural, but was then very much on the edge of things. It's now a closer in-suburb, only because the urban areas become so large. But I've noticed over the years, he frequently would book the company into Philadelphia theaters for short runs, to raise some money and attention, because they were interested in supporting the theater. Sometimes that would get them into big trouble, like they would book the theater during the

31:191926 sesquicentennial, and that was a big bust for everybody. And then in 1956, I think he would have learned, 30 years later, he tries the same trick, converting the, what was the former ballroom of the Academy of Music into a theater, and that just turns out disastrous, doesn't it? What happened there? He was really kind of opposed to that. He felt that going to, it was towards the end of his career, year. And the theater had been democratized in a way that was now a board of directors. And there

31:52was this notion that, you know, we'll play a season, half a season in Philadelphia, and half a season here, and we'll make some money, and it'll be good. He was very leery of going to Philadelphia at that point, because he felt that their reputation existed in the Rose Valley. He also felt that running two companies would get them into a lot of financial trouble. There's a very famous story where Louis Lippa, who was in the company, is trying to suggest how to draw the curtain properly to the

32:27stagehand in Philadelphia. And he's trying to say how the drawing of the curtain really is important to the mood of this. And the guy says to him, you know, I have three ways, fast, slow, and medium. What do you want? And it was that kind of, I suppose, brutal reality in terms of the money that they expected to make that Dita really mistrusted. Well, in his final years, he becomes, he was always a

33:02member of the company. He doesn't throw his weight around a lot, but he's obviously the leading light than the eminence and the person that people go to. But towards the end of his life, he does become more withdrawn from it. It seems to me he got a little, as he got older and sicker and would spend more time at the local bar, he began to withdraw from the theater. I just found, came across his obituary in the New York Times, which was printed in 1972, when he finally passes away after a fall in his home. And the photograph they published with the obituary, it's just, he doesn't look good. He

33:38looks very haggard and sad. And was that typical of the last years of his life, do you think? People who were there do talk about the way that the drinking really did begin to affect him, that he spent too long at Larry's or whatever the famous bar was. I think it's still there. Wow. That he spent too much time there. He had a vision that he wanted to write a book about acting. And in the archives at BU, there are a number of pages where he did attempt to write this book.

34:14It never got finished, unfortunately, but there are manuscript pages. But I think that that was the thing that kind of kept him going was that, yes, I'm retired, but I'm going to write this book. But in the meantime, I'm spending too much time at the bar. So we're going to spend some time, and I'm going to visit the hedgerow myself, and I'm going to meet

Tour of Hedgerow Theater

34:35with the current staff and the current leader of the company and try to record some sound there. But for those people who are conducting research on the hedgerow and Jasper Dieter, it isn't necessarily at the theater that you'd want to go. Where did you end up having to do most of your archival research for this book? There was a woman, Gail Cohen had been a member of the company for a number of years, and it was her plan to write the history of the hedgerow theater. And she had some kind of a

35:08falling out. I don't know all of the details, but she had some kind of a falling out. And all of the material that she had gathered, she essentially shipped to Boston University, where they developed this wonderful archive about hedgerow. And when I realized somebody had said, you know, have you looked at the Gail Cohen thing? And I said, no. And they said, well, it's Boston. So anyway, I went to Boston University and discovered this enormous archive. It is very rich. But in addition, this is really

35:42funny. In addition, when I went to hedgerow, and I went there, I think, two or three times while I was preparing the management. And this was 10, 12 years ago, back when Penelope Reed was running the company. Yeah. And I talked to Penny and Jared and Janet Kelsey, who was very influential there. And I talked to them, and they kept referring to the back room. And I went, oh, okay. Well, the back, you know, the whole hedgerow house is an adventure to begin with. But there is way past the kitchen and down the

36:15hall and around the corner, there was a back room. And in there, I found boxes and boxes of material. If it was in the main house, it would have survived the fire that took place at the theater itself in the 1980s. There was a terrible fire, which basically burned out and theater and the exterior walls survived. But it has since all been reconstructed. And there's been a lot of wonderful investment in the theater since then. It's a lovely physical space, I can attest. But if the materials had been kept in

36:45the theater itself, they would have been lost. That's the problem with archives. Barry, this has been a wonderful conversation. And I really want to commend you and thank you for your work on this, which has done something really important for the work that we're trying to do here. So I'd like to thank you once again on behalf of everyone here.

Conclusion and Thanks

37:03Oh, you're very welcome. So now let's go on a trip. Let's take a visit to Rose Valley. Just the other morning, I followed up on a very kind invitation of Marcy Bramusi, who is the current executive artistic director of the Hedgerow Theater Company, to give me and all of you an exclusive guided tour of the building and the grounds of the Hedgerow and to see the legacy that Jasper Dieter left behind and how it has been

37:37shaped by all the other many theater artists and supporters of the theater over the years. Marcy and I met and talked first at the longtime main house of the theater at 146 Rose Valley Road, where they have their administrative offices and living quarters. Then we got in a car and we took the very short trip down the road to the historical theater itself in the former mill building by the Vernon Run, a small stream that eventually flows down into Ridley Creek. Here we go.

38:10Hello, Marcy. How nice to meet you. Lovely to see you. Thank you. We're standing here in front of the orange-red door, which was historically where Jasper Dieter and his company would have gone in and out when this was their home and their farmhouse in the 1920s and 30s, when this was originally part of the Hedgerow Theater Company. And there are hundreds of actors and artists who have come in and out of this building, whether living for a summer or for multiple years, but we currently have artists living in the house as well. Great. Okay, well, let's go around the side and then we'll take a look inside this whole historic

38:41house and get away from the traffic noise from Rose Valley Road and we can hear passing by.

38:46All right, so we've walked now inside. We came through a screen door and there are, this is a room, it's about, what do we say, 25 by 25 feet. And there's a little fireplace over here to the side. There are mirrors. There are windows on either side. There's a mask of comedy and tragedy, a piano. And there's even a few track lighting installed. But it's mostly a fairly functional room.

39:17It's only about eight feet tall. There's very well-worn plywood flooring on the floor. Obviously, this has been used as a rehearsal space in the classroom for many years. And certainly for a gathering space for meals and the like for company members throughout the time in this house. And in 1985, when we had the fire at Hedro and the theater burned down, this became the primary performance space, the only performance space. I thought they were working at a local community college as well.

39:49So that happened as well. This is one of the solutions and became the venue for five years. That would be a very intimate performance space. And it was amazing that the community members actually came along for that journey. So community members would be packed in this space. And actors would be using for entrances, exits, and figuring out how to make this space functional and fully useful as a theater venue itself. Wow. And so there's practical doors and little tiny closets and nooks and crannies.

40:24But that would have been real environmental theater. Then we go back this way.

40:30So we're crossing the yard now from the house across the parking lot towards the old barn. We can see over to the left, there's actually a historic cemetery over there in the back. And that's always been there as part of the, there's no actors buried there though, I hope. Not that we're aware of, but Jasper Dieter did notoriously lay upon one of the graves to memorize his lines for a particular production. And one of our company members has tried that same method to see how it works. How did it go? A bit of a meditation. Oh, okay. It seems successful. Spiritual presence of someone. So there's a white barn over to, across the parking lot from the house.

41:04And then there's an older barn with a typical Pennsylvania earth ramp up to the second level. Yeah, so the barn at the back, that's one of the few remaining historic barns of Rose Valley. And that's where we store props and furniture and all kinds of items. When I first arrived last summer, the company members that were here tipped me off to realize we really need to go through the barn because there are things that have not been touched in 30 to 40 years. So we ultimately took every single item out of the barn, cleaned it, organized it, put it back, and all of the critters that decide to make their home in that barn as well.

41:40All right, we're opening up the old barn with its high-tech security system. She's taking a chain off a big old 20-foot-high wooden door. She's pulling it back. Getting the work out. Well done. And now we're inside this barn, which has two levels. We're walking to the lower level. There's wooden stairways going up, but we're surrounded. There's typewriters and desks and tables and doorways and other items here. This is us getting ourselves organized for the inventory we need to pull to build the set for the Pillow Man.

42:15This is also us moving and maneuvering the space so it can be part of a backstage area for our outdoor production of Robin Hood, which opens this weekend. So, I mean, that was one of the really fortunate things for us in the pandemic that a lot of other theater companies, you know, weren't able to run because they have their venues and they're indoors. But with our campus, we have two and a half acres here at the house and we were able to perform our children's theater shows, which is also something Hedro has done for previous years and in the past that performances outside and up here at the house is part of our history and DNA as well.

42:49So going back even to the 1920s during the original days of the theater with this, this was the storage space for sets and things because they had a repertory of about 90 plays. So they would have had to move things in and out of here a lot. Although the, and Barry will be able to speak to this as well, but the scenic design was contained in a way that they were able to do some theater magic and transition things very easily without much maneuvering of actual scenery. So they, they had a system in place that allowed them to transition from one show to another show to another show without cumbersome moves, which currently our scenic design is for productions that last for four weeks.

43:27Right. It's a different approach. Exactly. So it's not a repertory company that changes every night. You have a, you have a run, uh, for several weeks system, like most, uh, regional theater companies nowadays. So I don't believe this was their storage space at the time because this, um, wasn't in the ownership of the theater at the time from the, from the initial founding. Okay. So this barn, uh, wasn't originally part of the campus. Um, it was part of the campus, but when the house was, um, gifted to the theater, the barn went with it. Okay. Yeah. All right. But then, so when the, what would the act, did they use it as an actual barn?

43:59Because they were growing their own food. Yeah. So then this was part of the food production infrastructure of the company. Okay. Not part of the theatrical infrastructure. That's what it became later. Okay. All right. Well, now Marcy and I are standing in front of a historic theater. We're on the front steps where, uh, Rose Valley Road is about, uh, 20 feet behind us. There are these, uh, flagstone steps leading up to the old front door of the theater. You can hear cars going by on the road. Um, and there's a arched, uh, porchway with two old stone columns, uh, holding it up.

44:36There's, uh, dark red doors and with a sign, a brass sign in the front that says, uh, Hutton's Grist Mill around 1840, Artsman's Hall from 1905 to 1923, and then, of course, Hedgerow Theater, 1923. Part of the Rose Valley Historic District has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior. However, this doorway isn't, um, isn't used now. It's, it's, it's not functional.

45:07It's not, um, we don't encourage folks to use this, but we, this could be a way that some folks leave. People who've been coming for years and years and years, they end up walking out this way when they leave. And it's just, you know, part of habit. Oh, it's a fire exit. It is a fire exit, and it's a really lovely space. So, um, we use this space. Okay, now we're coming, we've come down to the side of the old mill, but is now the main engine to the theater. This was reconstructed with a very generous grant, as I understand, from the Wincote Foundation, uh, the Haas Family Foundation, which supports many local theaters.

45:39And, of course, it's now named Wincote Way, I see from a sign on the door. And it's a lovely, um, glass atrium, which is incorporated into the historic sort of niche there in the side. And now, if you read, our executive artistic director was responsible for having this new entranceway, and it was incredibly important because this allows wheelchair accessibility and mobility. So, um, there is now a ramp going from the parking lot all the way straight into the theater. And previously, I mean, it's just wild to think, but going in from the front doors, people would have to walk around the sides of the buildings to get to the bathroom.

46:14And so it was not actually physically accessible, even getting into the theater or using the restroom spaces for folks with physical challenges. This is a blessing in so many ways. Um, and then sloping down, uh, down the hill is a lawn, a lot of Adirondack chairs on it. And then the, the, the stream, which is the reason the mill is here at all. That's where they stuck the wheel in the water to get their power. And we were able to use this space during the pandemic. We performed outdoors to gentlemen of Verona last summer and tested out our, you know, a new kind of streaming, being by the water and being outdoors.

46:46So it was really exciting for folks to regather. That was the first time, you know, where folks are really coming out of their houses and gathering together. And it was wonderful to have the grounds to make that happen. Well, now let's go inside. Now that you have got your keys and we'll, um, open up the side door and head on into the theater itself.

47:04Thank you. Thank you. All right. We've come into the, um, here are different qualities of sound because now we're in sort of an echoey space. There's a large, um, uh, entryway with a stone floor and a glass ceiling up above. There's, uh, posters for recent productions. Uh, but some of them are very historic. There's one for the Emperor Jones, one of the first productions ever done here with the old, looks like Wharton Esherick type woodcut. That's right. And, uh, there's also ones for In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play by Sarah Rule, which was done just last June.

47:37Um, and there's also a, um, oh, there's an interesting, uh, chart here of the schedule. What is this? Hedro Theater, Moreland PA, repertory schedule, July 17th through September 14th. And this is how repertory had worked. So what you're seeing is this chart that expresses the, the days throughout August, August 1st through the 31st and all of the programming happening, um, on the hedgerow stage. And as you can see, it changes from night to night. So on August 1st to Thursday evening, we had Emperor Jones. Um, and then on August 2nd, a Friday, um, opening night for Martine by George Bernard Shaw, um, The Seagull, um, performed the very next day, August 3rd, and so on, that these productions were really in repertory, being able to shift from day to day to day.

48:23Right. So seeing this is quite stunning, and this really was, um, Jasper Dieter's vision for what he wanted Hedro to achieve and become, and he made that happen. Wow. The rates of the tickets, by the way, for the first three rows were $2.40, and then from the 4th to the 6th row was $1.80, and from the 7th to the 13th row, $1.20. All prices include tax. The curtain was at 8.30 sharp. And these were for shows that sometimes lasted three, three and a half hours, so you get out of here late.

48:58But to her right now, uh, is the new entrance to, from the audience we'd use to get from the lobby into the theater itself. So we'll go through the doors into the audience area, which will open up this nice soundproof black door, or almost soundproof, I'm sure. And we're walking into the theater space itself. So there's a definite change in sound quality now. It's much more hushed. There's air conditioning installed, which I can feel. We're recording this on a very hot day in August. But I understand, Marcy, when this theater was first built, there was, of course, in the 1920s, no air conditioning.

49:35It could be quite a, um, trying experience for the audience, yes?

49:41All right. Marcy's going up the stairs to turn on the lights. She's using her phone to find her way. So we'll let her go turn on the lights. There she is. She's gone to the back of the house, uh, where the, uh, stage management and sound people would, would sit. Up to the, my, uh, right, as they face the stage, is a balcony, uh, with a sort of wood, uh, railing on it. Uh, very small, uh, space where you could perhaps have someone lean out. Uh, and then there's an, uh, there's an opposite number to the left. Uh, and now looking out into the audience, it's raked up at about a, uh, 30, 35 degree angle.

50:19And there's, you can sit in rows A through J here, um, and, uh, quite comfortably. So, Marcy, how much of this remains from the original theater that Jasper Dieter worked in? Um, quite a bit. I mean, the envelope of the building is, remains. So when we move this curtain that's currently, um, upstage, you'll see the exposed stone wall that echoes the same character of all of these walls in the house.

50:51And so all of that envelope of the building is as, as it was. I mean, things have been re, um, you know, repointed along the way, but this is the building envelope. But because there was a fire here in the 1980s, as you mentioned, a lot of things, the, the, the ceiling, the roof were all gone. It was just a mangled, mangled place. And, and he had a, as I remember reading about, there was a semicircular, uh, cement wall behind the stage, which he liked to light up with special lighting effects. Exactly. But that was lost in the fire as well.

51:21I, I'm not sure if that was, it may have been lost in the fire. I know it, it didn't, it didn't continue. Um, but that was exactly how they were able to change the scenery so significantly from show to show to show was because of that device. Right. Mm-hmm. Well, let's, what, you were going to show me what's here now, though. That's, uh, what, what. Well, so right now, I mean, we're on the, at ground level, there's no basement beneath this particular space, but initially, this had been the backstage area. Okay. So the audience would have been seated over our head. The, um, the seating would have been at this level.

51:52I'm pointing to a hearth space. Okay. So it's over our heads. All right. And that would have been ground level. The hearth opened here. I see. And another hearth at the back that was much higher than where we are. We're now in the basement of what it had been, um, initially. I see. And then this significant rake allows for much improved sight lines and, um, and engagement on the audience's behalf. And the bench seating remains a very important facet for us. It feels very communal, open, and, um, just a, you know, a lovely way to gather. Right.

52:22There are red benches with numbered seats that you reserve, but there's no, there's no, uh, armrests in between. Separated seats. Everyone sits, um, hip to hip. Mm-hmm. Uh, in a very, uh, communal way. Okay, great. What should, what should we look at next here? Um, we can head, do you want to head up to the, um... Sure. ...the old lobby?

52:44So we're walking up the, the aisle stairs here on the audience right side and, uh, heading up to the back of the house where there's the control table through a heavy old wooden door into the old lobby space. Now, this is, this is the room which is directly inside the historic entrance. So now we're on the other side of the red doors and underneath us are, our old wooden floors. There's a nice smell. Someone's cleaned this well. There's a nice piney smell in the air. And there's all sorts of historic photographs and displays here for audience members to see.

53:20Yeah, this is part of an open house exhibit that we had done this spring, but, um, one of the facets that we highlight in this particular space, the, um, the, the initial lobby is that there are charred beams that are still in the space. Blackened and charred beams from the fire. From the fire. Yeah. So we do, we hold on to, to that and, you know, the humbling, you know, energy of, of what that had been in this space and also the sense of resilience of the organization and what we've been through. I have to say, the dress rooms aren't much to write home about. Okay, well, but... Would you like to see them? Well, I'll see them.

53:51We're just going to narrate what we're doing, but it's all part of the reality of the space. Okay.

54:00That's usually on the space. This is a fascinating space, actually. This is the, uh, was this, so this is now way up in the loft, all the way under the, the roof of the old mill, the, the rebuilt roof, of course, which is now fireproof and all that. But, um, is this, when they held rehearsals, those famous late night rehearsals for the Hedger back in the twenties and thirties, where were those conducted? Do you know? I'm not sure. I would assume, I would assume at the house, after the shows, we're on the stage of the house. We need to consult the archives to know.

54:31Right. I don't think this space was a functional thing at that time. Right. Well, this may have been, when it was a theater, this, the roof may have gone all the way up to here. Yep. But now there's, this is used as dressing rooms and, uh... Yep, and it can be reconfigured in any which way, depending on the size of the group and how many individual, um, dressing units. So it's an open carpeted space, but there are, um, sort of, um, drapes hanging down that they can, room dividers if they need to, uh, make, uh, separations in the room and those. And this certainly is now a rehearsal space.

55:02Right. Right now it's open with certain rugs stretched out and they're using it to, to rehearse play. So it's a, it's a flexible space. There is still quite an amazing tangle of wires back here at the back. What on earth is going on there? Those are our dimmers. That's our lighting system. That's how our lighting system works. Imagine that. You don't usually see those. Looks like an old telephone exchange. Yeah. And then this is the way you access backstage. I see. Because there's no crossover space. Right. So there's this. So now there's, there's a circular, uh, metal stairway which goes down, um, back down to,

55:32when you need to make a stage entrance, you come down this way. So be nice and careful. Hold on to that railing. I promise. I promise. Because there are two stairwells you need to go down to get to the backstage. Wow. This is the first one. You've got to watch your head. So we've gone down. Yes, thank you. I've gone down about 20 steps here in a circular way. And Marcy is following me. With your blue light that's on. Right. And then I'm going, I go up a series of three small cement steps. And then you go down another straight, um, stairway of about 15 steps.

56:05With a handrail. And now we're finally back on the stage once again.

56:11Over here is stage right in the wings. And we'll finally walk onto the stage itself. Have you performed on this stage ever? I have. So that was my, um, I performed in Three Sisters, um, pre-pandemic. I guess that was 2018 or 2019 that I performed here. And I attended shows here when I was younger and growing up. I grew up in Delaware County. So I would see shows here with my school group and with my family. And, um, then most recently I performed in The Weir this past fall. So. So what is it like now? You're standing here on the stage.

56:43What is the sensation of performing as an actress in this space for this particular house? Is there, is there a unique quality to it? This is my favorite venue in our whole region. I love this space. I love the intimacy of it. I love the feeling of community and, you know, it's from the bench seating to the stone walls, but it feels like you're held in this space in a really lovely way. But it also has been inhabited by so many exceptional, amazing artists that, like, these, the energies of creativity just continue to flow through this space. And, um, we try to keep channeling that.

57:15So I, I find it to be a rather magical space. And I hear that from audiences coming in as well, and from actors who are with us on the stage, but. All theaters, all theaters are living spaces and they, they, to continue putting on their works, they need, you know, revision and rethinking and reevaluation and reconstruction. So nothing stays exactly the same, but that's the nature of the art. That's part of it. Exactly. And we have to evolve. We're in the femoral world to begin with. Exactly. Yeah. We're not, we're not stuck in amber. To stay, to still, exactly, as, you know, to cease to exist.

57:47So. Beautiful. Thank you. Marcy, thank you so much for this amazing tour. I hope that was helpful. I know some folks know a lot more about the historical integrity of all the things. I'm gathering it and learning from Barry and things. I am, I am so impressed at, uh, what's still here and of the, the commitment of the, of you and the company, uh, to maintain this as an ongoing, uh, Philadelphia area organization. Well, that was a great privilege, both to talk to Barry and to Marcy and to get a chance to

58:19bring you all along with us. I thank both of our kind friends today, once again, for their generous gift of their time and their expertise. If you're in the area this fall and spring, please don't miss the chance to visit the theater itself and take in a performance. The theater's website is www.hedrowtheater.org, where you will find all their season schedules and how to contact their lovely and their very helpful box office staff. Oh, and I found out one more thing during my conversation with Marcy Bermussi, the answer

58:55to Barry Witham's question about what happened to all those old boxes of documents and archival materials and other ephemera about Jasper Dieter and the hedgerow that he found in the back closet. In 2016, all of them, and more besides, were safely transferred to the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Library's Kislak Center for Special Collections. Altogether, there are 59.5 linear feet, or 67 boxes of material stored there, and they

59:28can be accessed by researchers and historians. Thanks for listening today. Thanks for supporting the podcast. And thanks for supporting our ongoing mission. Our theme music and our sound engineering are by Christopher Mark Colucci. Thanks for coming along on another adventure in theater history, Philadelphia. If you'd like to continue today's conversation, please visit theaterhistorypodcast.net and follow

1:00:14at theaterhistory on social media. Please note that, while we usually spell theater T-H-E-A-T-R-E, it ends in E-R on our social media handle. Our theme music is the Black Crook Gallop, which comes to us courtesy of the New York Public Library Libretto Project and Adam Roberts. Thanks as well to Tip Kress, who designed our logo. And finally, thank you for listening. We'll be right back.