Episode 113: Todd London on Zelda Fichandler and the History of Nonprofit Theatre in the United States

Introduction to Zelda Fitchandler

0:00Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Liger. Zelda Fitchandler was one of the founders of the repertory theatre movement in the United States. Her tireless advocacy for the cause of non-profit theatre led to a substantial volume of writing, much of which has now been edited by Todd London and published as The Long Revolution, 60 Years on the Front

0:33Lines of a New American Theatre. Today, Todd joins us to talk about this book. Among many other roles, he's served as the Artistic Director of New Dramatists and the Head of the MFA Playwriting Program at the New School. Todd, thank you for joining us. Sure. Nice to be here. I'm always happy to talk about Zelda. Well, who was Zelda Fitchandler and what circumstances

Zelda's Background

0:57shaped her worldview? Zelda was, well, I would start by saying she was one of a kind. She was part of a group of disparate individuals who in the 1940s, late 40s and early 50s, started theatres in this country where there were none. In her case, it was Washington, D.C. She co-founded Arena Stage, which is now, I think, celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. She was a product of her

1:31age, an upper middle class Jewish woman. Her father was a scientist. He was, in some part, I think, maybe singularly responsible for instrument panels on planes and was one of the first people to fly blind, essentially, by virtue of the instrument panel. And he was very much a sort of a model for her as a thinker and as a person who played while he worked, who really enjoyed

2:06his work. So Zelda grew up in that. She was trained in Russian. She was trained in political science. She had a great mind. And she turned her attention to theater with colleagues, a teacher and colleagues from the Catholic University in D.C. And in 1950, founded Arena Stage, which she then ran for 40 years, about seven, I think, years before she left. She also took over the lead of the graduate acting

2:41program at NYU New York University, which she headed up for 25 years, ultimately, that being her only job after she left Arena. So those are kind of, that's sort of the job report. But her role in the American, you called it the repertory theater, I think, it's a little more expansive, I'd say, regional resident repertory theater, the kind of three R's that it was known by early on. But we think of it as the

3:12non-profit theater. I think of it also as the art theater in the U.S., which is really in distinction to the commercial theater of Broadway. She was really a leader of that movement. She was one of three women with Margo Jones in Dallas and Nina Vance in Houston, who founded these theaters in the late 40s and early 50s and ran them. She was the one who ran it for the longest. And she also, through her writing and her

3:45speeches and her leadership, really articulated the values of this regional repertory resident theater movement and continued to do that until she died at almost 92 years old. So that's who Zelda was. She was formidable, rabbinical, leaderly, outspoken, and indomitable.

Pre-Regional Theater Landscape

4:12Yeah, I have to, sort of on a personal level, I grew up going to the Milwaukee rep in my hometown. I don't think I, and maybe people about my age or younger, remember a world before there were regional repertory theaters. Could you talk about maybe what the landscape was like prior to the efforts of people like Fitch Handler? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's a great historical framing too, Mike,

4:43because I'm 68 years old. And for the most part, with the exception of Arena and Dallas 47, which became sort of became Dallas Theater Center in the Alley, and some of the older, what were community centers like Cleveland Playhouse and the Goodman was a teaching theater for a long time. I grew up in a world without regional theaters, without resident theaters. So for me, I look at this movement, and I think this is a baby movement. This is my lifetime, which I don't like to think of as very long. What was

5:19here before that, and what they were really responding to, was what's known basically as Broadway and the road. So there were, Broadway was the American theater. You know, it was, I don't know, maybe less than 100 years old at that time too, really. There had been theaters in New York from colonial days. You probably know this better than I do, because you're a real historian. But Broadway as a

5:51seat of actual, you know, serious drama, musicals, but also spectacles, all of that kind of thing, was really the seat of the theater in this country, and then whatever went on the road. So the hits of last year, or whatever, that would tour. I certainly grew up in a culture that also had dinner theaters, but they tended to play musicals and Broadway hits, community theaters. So that was really what this movement was in

6:23response to. It was, first of all, what do we do if we live in Dallas or Houston or Cleveland or Chicago or DC and want to be theater artists? Do we have to go to New York? Do we have to struggle the commercial theater? But also, you know, we were in a new moment of post-World War II, where America had shown its military might, but hadn't in any way lived up culturally to its strength or its centrality as a

6:59power, as a superpower, emerging superpower. And so under the Eisenhower administration, this notion of like, how do we build an American culture that is in some way equivalent to our military and monetary power? It was in the air. So, but specifically, the theater was the commercial theater. And the commercial theater in Zelda's formulation was a one-shot, make-a-pudding, smash-a-pudding

7:31enterprise. You know, you make it, it works, it goes on the road, it doesn't work, you smash it, and you make something else. And that kind of system doesn't allow for any kind of growth, development, cultivation of artists or artistry, singularity of vision over time, bodies of work. The other thing that I just want to note is that the sort of unseen in the American theater at this

8:02time, and continues to be unseen, was a serious and arch theater that really began in the settlement houses of Chicago and New York in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. And those were settlement houses for immigrants, largely from Eastern Europe, from Italy, from Greece, from the displaced people of Eastern Europe, from Germany. And those theaters were highly diverse by the standards of the day. So,

8:38I mean, diverse in they weren't all Anglo-white theaters. They were mostly white, but they were Eastern European whites who were not necessarily considered whites in America at the time. And so, there's a kind of unseen mix, diversity, immigrant power that is baked into our theater, our serious theater, that is often overlooked. And I think that too has, you know, as we talk forward in this long revolution, that's something that I think has been retapped in a way. But the landscape they were

9:15responding to, that Zelda was responding to, was like, I want to be in DC, I want to be a theater director, how do I do that? I don't want to go to New York. New York is kind of, it's mammon-minded. It's all about money. It's not really about art. We want to make art. And our examples are the long-standing European art theaters that have resident acting companies, singular artistic director revisions, state subsidy, and long-term resident acting companies.

Creating Arena Stage

9:48Yeah. How did she go about sort of creating that vision first with Arena Stage? What was the beginning of that institution? How did it evolve? And how was it part of this movement pushing back against the state of affairs that you just described? Well, first of all, she, like everybody, they started with their friends. Do you know? You know, we think of something like Arena Stage, and if you visit it today, it's this monumental building where the original theaters of it are encased in this glass surround that is, you know,

10:26architecturally designed and pristine. Or if you go to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, which is closer to your hometown, you know, it's now this architectural behemoth on the, overlooking the Mississippi River. So we think of them as these institutions, but really they were a bunch of kids getting together, in her case with her, one of her teachers, and putting, wanting to put on plays. I mean, the great story is of Nina Vance, actually. In Houston, they had like $2.14 between her and

11:06her friends. So they bought 214 penny postcards and started sending them out to get audiences to their first show and people to help with the work. In Zelda's case, it started as essentially a for-profit theater. They, you know, I guess they pooled their money. I don't know too much about the actual early years. She didn't start writing really until later in the 50s. But they, you know, she talks about it throughout her book. They pooled their money. They put it on plays. They had to make

11:40their money at the box office. So it was go as you sell or sell as you go. They didn't pay themselves or pay themselves much. You know, it was really an amateur to professional kind of proposition with the goal of a kind of professionalism and a long-term artistic vision. She was one of, I think, three or four of the founder, founding team. And she became the force that really drove that theater.

12:12Is there another part to the question that I'm not getting at? Well, I think as much as anything, you know, the arena space and sort of just what the focus was as the company continued to evolve. Well, one of the things that was particular about arena was that it was a predominantly or exclusively white theater in a segregated city that was increasingly black.

12:45So there's a point in the 60s, I believe, where it becomes the first minority majority city in this country. But that was the landscape of her theater. So arena became the first theater with an integrated audience and where it was out, it was not allowed to have integration in the theaters and hers became the first and later became the first with integrated stages as well. So that's part of the thing. The spaces I know less about, but they're, they were as they are now in the Southwest

13:23neighborhood of DC. And, you know, they were putting on, she stoops to conquer, you know, they were putting on classic plays or classics of a sort. And ultimately as well, sort of modern, what became modern classics, but this is the fifties. And then in, at some point in the later fifties, Zelda wrote a position paper for governmental support for the arts. It's a long paper and a version of it

13:59is at the close of the book. And the myth of this paper, and I don't know the actual truth, because one of the things about Zelda passing while, well, she sort of handed the book off to me and died. It very, you know, so even though we'd been talking about it, it wasn't as real to me as it became. So I wasn't able to ask her all the questions. I had to ferret out a lot. And it was a book of, it's a book of essays, not a book of history. So I wasn't doing independent research in

14:31that way. But my sense is that this position paper, she wrote, that was about a 75 page case for a permanent resident classical theater in the nation's capital, somehow wound up on the desk of a patron of arena stage, who was also a member of Congress. So this is really, as far as I know, the first statement since the federal theater project in the 30s under Hallie Flanagan. This is

15:03the first statement out of this regional repertory company, a kind of company to the government for government subsidy of some sort. At the time, there is at the Ford Foundation, a man named McNeil Lowry, W. McNeil Lowry, who becomes the patron saint of these burgeoning theaters, and starts funding a small group of them. And that funding continues into the 60s and 70s, as well as through the startup,

15:40the generation of the Theater Communications Group, or TCG. I do want to just circle back for one minute, because of your initial question about what was the environment of the theater when these were, when Arena was started. The federal theater project under the visionary Hallie Flanagan, as part of the Works Progress Administration under Roosevelt, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a really powerful example, because it too was an attempt to move the theater out of New York to center it in different

16:17regions. The federal theater project had regional hubs that would hire and create plays, often that would travel through those regions. But that only lasted four years, in large part due to the horrible relations between artists and the federal government, and especially the right wing of the federal government, which will come back into play in the culture wars of the late 80s and 90s, and with the

16:49NEA. And now, welcome to the Trump-Kennedy Center. Oh, geez. We'll get there.

Government Support and Paradox

16:56I hope not. In the interview, I meant, in the interview. But actually, this does speak, I mean, you were just talking about government support and stuff. And one of the recurring themes of the book is this paradox about money. Fitch Handler keeps insisting, you know, you want to make money, theater is probably not really the ideal place to do it. At the same time, well, you need continued financial support of one kind or another to keep non-profit theater alive. Can you speak to how that, you know, seeming paradox

17:29played out in her work and her writings? Yeah. Well, it's a paradox that we all live in, as you're pointing out, and continues to. You know, one of her, as you're asking that, I'm thinking of her recurring allusion to the notion that who pays the pipe or picks the tune. And so she lived in this world sort of caught between two models, models. And one of the models was the model of the commercial theater, where you do, you play as you go, and you pay as you go. And everything is about financial success. But the very notion of

18:05non-profit, it isn't that we don't make money or have profit. It's that the profit lies elsewhere. The profit lies in our relationship as artists, or rather the arts relationship to living culture. That art singularly has an opportunity to shape our thinking, our relations, our culture, our society, our beings. And that's something she strongly believed in, that art is a humanistic enterprise

18:39that can really change the world and change the individual. And so that's the kind of like non-profit value as opposed to no money. So on one hand, we have this commercial theater model. And on the other hand, we have her great example is the Romanian national theater led by, that was founded and led in part by her great friend and mentor and colleague, Livio Cule. And that was like a highly subsidized theater, government-funded, you know, massive resources in terms of personnel,

19:18buildings, design, you know, all the things you need to create an ongoing repertory theater. And if the government didn't like your production of the inspector general, for example, they could really come down hard on you. So on one hand, there's the censorship of commerce. And on the other, there's the censorship of subsidy and government. And it's all around this notion that who pays the piper picks the tune, right? Zelda was operating, as we all do today in the non-profit theater, in a world that is defined

19:53by capitalism, which I would say is in even greater hyperdrive than it is now, than it was then, defined by capitalism, trying to maintain values that are not necessarily capitalistic, but unlike almost any major developed culture in this world, this globe, we have almost no government subsidy. So this mix of private contribution, box office, a little bit of government, and the private

20:34being sort of, you know, corporate foundation, especially individual, especially patron board directed giving and that kind of thing is unusual in the history of the world, as far as I understand it. And as far as she understood it. So it's a real, it's like you're making it up as you go along, but on either end, you know, you've got the, you know, corruptists of government censorship and the

21:05of capitalism and commerce. Yeah. And some of this also comes to a head in, you know, controversies over the National Endowment for the Arts. They said we'd get to some unfortunately relevant material here. And, you know, Fitch Handler really gets involved in arguing for the continuing necessity of the NEA. Could you tell us a little bit about the historical background for that and maybe specifically how she got involved in some particular battles? I don't have too much specific to say about that.

21:38I think that, you know, Zelda was a spokesperson for the movement. So when there was needed someone to provide congressional testimony, she was often the person who went. Also, she was in DC. She knew many of the players. She was building a major leading flagship theater in the center of government. She was a woman of a certain class in a certain time and had access as well, including

22:09through her patrons and her boards. I'm not really an expert on the history of the NEA, though I believe it began in what, 63? Do you have the date? Maybe later, maybe under Nixon. But in any case, so I'm just going to be an idiot about that for a minute. But I do know that in the 60s, and then later again in the 80s, Zelda is before Congress, making the case that this kind of art

22:40is central to the living heart of any great civilization. It is central to our humanity. It was central in the days of cave painting and storytelling around fires. It was central in the life of villages and shtetls. It is central to any culture at any time. And therefore, the government should be providing because it is like the government by providing for the theater is paying

23:13for its own humanity and supporting its own storytellers and its story. So that's really what I have for you, Mike, on that. I don't really know much about her intimate struggles with the NEA Certainly, she was a leader and leading spokesperson, though almost on her way, seeing her way out of arena during the great culture wars, so-called, of the late 80s and early 90s, which were more about

23:44focused around obscenity and sexuality. And, you know, the performance artists, Karen Finley, and Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, and was it John Fleck? And then, you know, paintings by Andre Serrano or photographs and so on and so forth. So I can confirm that the NEA was founded in 1965, which is a fact that I definitely knew and did not just look up. I was so glad.

24:16So where does the book itself, The Long Revolution,

The Book's Publication

24:18come from? What's unique about its road to publication? That's a moving and sad story and important one. So Zelda somehow wrote for 50 or 60 years while she was doing all these things. And a lot of what she wrote were speeches, testimony for Congress. She would, you know, visit the Psychiatric Society in D.C. and give a speech about humanity and the mind

24:51and creativity. When she was at NYU, every year she would deliver a speech to the players, to the new acting, to the actors there. And many of those actors I've found over the years can still remember actual phrases from those speeches because they were so compelling and beautiful. She would write essays in an American theater magazine. She would write director's notes that she would read long director's notes for the first rehearsal of plays, some of which were then published in the Washington

25:27Post or, you know, in other magazines. And so she had boxes and boxes, you know, file boxes, not shoe boxes, big file boxes of published and unpublished speeches, essays, documents. Like I said, she showed up in 1958 or whatever with this paper that was 75 pages long about the need for this classical resident theater in D.C.,

25:57and towards the end of her career, you know, she left, I don't remember what year she left NYU, but she, you know, it was a good 10, 15 years before her death, and she wanted to make a book of her writings. And she worked on it all the time and got nowhere. As I understood it, she often had, she would bring in someone who had been someone who had been a dramaturg with her or someone who was a writer or something to

26:31help her shape the book. And she would pick out essays and put them back in the boxes. She would make outlines. She would write notes. And she would really, she was really like going nowhere fast for a long, long time. And about the book came out in 23, 24. I finished it in 2019. I think Zelda died in 2015 or 16. And in the prior 10 or more years, she was working on this book was the center of her work.

27:10But literally, there was no book. She had a contract with Theater Communications Group that I think was well over a decade old when I delivered the book. And at a certain point in 2014, I got a call from her kind of out of the blue. Because even though she was significant in my life as a voice and a leader and someone I had written about or written a little bit about and certainly it chronicled this movement, I didn't really know her or I didn't believe she knew me. I had met her

27:46several times. And she called me. I was at New Dramatists at the time. I was about to maybe a little less than a year from leaving there and going to the University of Washington in Seattle. And she called me as if we were old friends or old intimates. And she was like, Todd, I've been reading about you. I've been reading your work again and again and again. I want you to come down. I want you to help me with my book. And when Zelda calls you, you don't say Zelda who? And you don't say no,

28:22because it is like a call from the gods in some way. And so I wound up going down to her house in the Calorama area of DC for about three days in the spring of 2014, I guess it would have been. And she showed me her boxes. She showed me the books. She started sending me things and outlines and notes and essays. And she was working with a personal assistant who was a very dear and great

28:53helper of hers for many years. She had been a stage manager, I believe, at the arena, Angie Moy. And Angie started sending me these essays and so on. And Zelda wanted my help. And then when I was in Seattle and it was about a year or so after that, I got a call from her. She had terrible fibromyalgia, which was a very painful disease. And she had struggled with it for years and years. But she was going into surgery. This must have been 2016, going into surgery for something unrelated, knee or

29:30hip or something. And she was afraid that when she came out, she would not be able to finish the book, which in a sense she hadn't even started. I mean, she had started it and started it and started it and started it. But it was still papers in boxes. She would send me notes about it and her thoughts and titles and things like that for sections. And she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to finish the book because she'd be debilitated by the surgery. She was 90 years old. She asked me if I would

30:04make the book for her or finish it if she was unable to. And of course, you don't say no to Zelda.

30:13And I was incredibly moved. I mean, it was like a shocking request. It was like from someone I knew intimately and barely knew to be asked to be the steward of her life of writing. And she died six, eight months later. And I started to work on the book. I met her sons. She has two sons who are about my age. I met them at a small memorial at her apartment after her death. And I figured the

30:46book would, the idea would, it would just be the end. But she had talked to them about me. And they said, you're going to make her book, right? And I was like, well, of course, of course. So the next several years I spent working on it, it sat at TCG. It was supposed to come out right before the pandemic and then sat there for a few years during and post and came out in 23 or 24. But it was a long revolution of a book. But it also contains 60 years of writing. And much of it, you know,

31:23I edited a lot. Zelda, there were things Zelda wanted in the book that I left out. There were things that she didn't indicate that are in the book. There are things that she said were necessary that of course were necessary. So that's the long story of the book. As I understand it, one of the things that maybe prevented Fitch Andler from finishing the book was because in her own words, I don't know enough about now, about what's happening now,

31:58about what has come of it all, this thing we made, our movement. So I'm going to put you on the spot

Legacy of the Movement

32:05and ask, do you have any sense of what has come of that movement in which she was so involved? Where are we? Where do you see regional nonprofit theater going in the future? Oh, you're going to ask a small question. I see. Well, first of all, I just want to, I want to sort of underline that because I think this was something about both the way in which she was doodling on the book, but also a real insight into her turn of mind.

32:38She was such, I don't know that I've ever known anyone who was as intensely intellectually engaged in this life, who was always learning, always synthesizing what she was learning. She was a brilliant, you know, capacious mind and hungry. And so she was always asking the questions, you know, what has come of this? I mean, it is a huge question and it's an unfair question,

33:11and I will punish you in the afterlife. I'm so sorry. It's all right. But in some ways, I don't think, so before I say where we are now, I want to say that where we are now is the seeds for where we were now were always there. And one of the most amazing things about Zelda was her ability to name values and also to see the contradictions in the reality that she was operating in. And so

33:45all of those contradictions, like we were talking about between subsidy and commercialism, between the localness of a theater and the mainstream culture of commerce, the desire to keep a resident company or a specific directorial voice, and the inability to do that because people were called to New York or Hollywood because the institutions grew bigger than anyone ever dreamed

34:19they would be. And the administration of those institutions overtook the artistic staffing of those institutions. All of these things she called. The inability to diversify well, to sort of really deal. And she tried this with two big swings about 20 years apart. She tried to truly integrate top to bottom her theater. The first time she did, it was about the acting company. And then 20 years

34:51later, she was like, no, that didn't work because the actors got called away or left or couldn't live in this city or whatever it was. So then she tried to integrate and diversify the entire structure of the institution, which by then was quite an institution. So those contradictions are still very much in play in the movement that she created. They haven't gone away. If anything, you know, I mean, I think we all know

35:21that the pandemic exacerbated so many of the conflicts, so many of the contradictions, that the things that were small cracks are now huge cannons. We're losing theaters. There are so many theaters. I mean, you know, that first group of Mack Lowry-funded theaters that became TCG, it was founded, TCG Theater Communications Group, was founded as a community of educational community and professional

35:52theaters. And very early in its infancy, it decided to only serve professional theaters. And the theaters that qualified, there were only something like 13 or 17 of them. They had to have a certain kind of budget, a certain kind of board, a certain kind of management, artistic director split. Sorry, I'm going off a little bit. All of those sort of fissures and contradictions just have gotten greater and

36:22greater. The pull of New York, we've never really, the regional theater or the art theater or the non-profit theater has never really sufficiently countered the lure of Broadway. People in this country, 70 years after the, 75 years after the founding of Arena, you say theater and people say Broadway. How can that be with 2,000 theaters or more of size in every city in this country and many

36:54small towns, how can it be that people still equate theater with Broadway? The loss of artists to television and film. The mainstreaming of plays and successes, you know, as opposed to the, that sense of like each theater is local and its own thing and its own voice. I mean, none of these theaters, including Arena, started as homes for new plays. That, that came later, kind of in the 60s,

37:25with the, especially with the Mark Taper Forum, which now we know as the centered theater group more broadly. And it started also with Arena Stage doing The Great White Hope that became a huge Broadway and film hit. And, and so sort of paved the way for like, oh, we can really make it big if we do a play that then moves to Broadway, rather than we can really make it big if we remain who we are, where we are, thoroughly ourselves in DC or Houston or Chicago or Cleveland or Kansas City.

38:00So I think, you know, we see that now we saw, you know, during the pandemic, the call out of white theaters, predominantly white institutions, we see white American theater, we see the kind of ongoing lure of Broadway that the extremity of enhancement money being put into help fund the non-profits as a way of pre-buying or, or enhancing or instigating material that then can move to the

38:32commercial theater. And so theaters that, you know, where even 15 years ago, enhancement was a rarity, many theaters now rely on it to make their budgets. And so that, because we have no subsidy, because the foundations are whimsical and move from one necessity to another or one perceived necessity, because we've never solved the problem of wealth in our country and how to support art, except through the wealthiest patrons, who then want to, having paid the piper, want to pick the tune,

39:08we haven't sufficiently opened the doors of our theaters to audiences of different classes and cultures and races. So we have an aging audience. And so we have a theater that is seen as predominantly white and as exclusive. And we have institutions that are running major deficits as structure that have not been able to solve the problem of those deficits as foundations move on, or as the box office isn't

39:42sufficient, that are relying more on box office funding, because whereas, you know, it was started with this sort of dream that there would be a 25, 75 or 30, 30% box office to 70% subsidy or donation or charity. That is totally flipped and even a greater reliance on box office. I don't know the figures. I'm not a management person. But how do you deal with nonprofit theaters without subsidy, without a surplus or endowment

40:15or any way to fund themselves moving forward? You have to do it at the box office. You have to cultivate wealthier patrons. And these issues of institution versus non-institution, art, profit versus profit, profit become just bigger, bigger, bigger, and more insoluble. And the notions of inclusivity and exclusivity become crappier. And the ability to, you know, so much of Zelda's writing so brilliant

40:49is about risk. It's about risk. It's about the need for failure, excuse me, to fuel success. That you need to fail to find out who you are. You need to learn to face what your theater is from within. That the theater is not a place where plays get made. A theater is the enfolding of an artistic idea and the elaboration of that idea over time through singular vision and resident artists and a kind of devotion to a kind of material.

41:26You know, you might be a Shakespeare theater. You might be a new play theater. You might be a, you know, a theater with a resident voice, a resident playwright voice. But whatever that is, you need to know who you absolutely are as a theater. And that becomes harder and harder and harder if who you are has calcified as you don't have the funding to try new things, as you can't risk. You have to go to where you know there will be success, which isn't always a bad thing. Success is, as she says, it's the first rule

42:00of the theater. But failure is the operating mode of the theater. So how do you do it? I don't know if that makes any sense, but that was my attempt to answer your question.

Current State of Regional Theater

42:13I think it makes a lot of sense. No, that's a, that's a really, uh, uh, great sort of way to sort of speak to the issues that appear in her writings that, that are in the book and how they manifest themselves today. So, yeah, thank you. I guess the only thing that I would add to, which bears saying is Zelda was part of a founding matriarchy of the American theater and in the way of things. And this is totally my opinion. I don't, but I think it's based on actual, uh, facts. Many of the founders

42:47of these theaters were women, women of a certain, you know, cultural class and their friends. And then when the theaters became viable, they were taken over by men. And for many years, actually three or four decades, the big majority of theaters in this country of size were run by male artistic directors and very often male managing directors as well. Though I would say there were probably

43:17more women managing directors than men, but the artistic visionaries were often men. And then in recent years, as theaters have tried to become more inclusive as other generations have risen up and as the theaters have become less viable, they have been handed off to more women leaders, more people of color, and the ground has not really been prepared for them because they are not, you know, there's one

43:50thing about a white man walking into a room of wealthy people and being identified as a leader. And it's another thing for a black woman or a Latinx man to walk into a room and show themselves as a leader of a major cultural institution. And our society has not paved the way for that change of generational leadership. And so we have a whole new generation of leaders in our theater who are leaving in five or

44:24six or eight years. There's huge turnover right now, because the way was not paved. And because basically, when the theaters started to fall victim to all of these, you know, built in cracks in the edifice, they were handed off to a new generation of leaders who are in many ways better trained, who grew up in this theater, but have not been supported to the same extent. And now we see that,

44:58you know, we'll post links in our show notes that will allow you to explore the life and career of Zelda Fitch Andler, as well as learn more about the long revolution, 60 years on the front lines of a new American theater. Todd, thank you for introducing us to Zelda Fitch Andler and her work.

Conclusion and Next Steps

45:16Thank you, Mike. I really love to talk about her. It's a pleasure. Thanks for your great questions.

45:28If you'd like to continue today's conversation, please visit theaterhistorypodcast.net and follow at theaterhistorypodcast on social media. Please note that that's theater spelled T-H-E-A-T-R-E. 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.