photo by Charles R. Trottier
ROYALL TYLER RETURNS
Theatre alums reunite and remember legendary professors
“Great, Just Great” The words boomed out from the stage of UVM’s Royall Tyler Theatre and into the hearts and memories of dozens of alumni gathered to honor the career of Professor Emeritus Edward J. Feidner, whose death in 2008 marked the close of an era at the University and robbed decades of former students of a lifetime friend and mentor.
The words were Feidner’s—“Great! Great!”—his signature line and summation statement, but were spoken last June by Ed Tracy ’76, who complemented his lively Feidner impersonation by waving a cigarette, squinting at a script held an inch from his face, and pacing the Royall Tyler stage with a mug of coffee nestled in his hair. In life, no one asked Ed Feidner what he was doing with a coffee cup on his head (if they had, he’d probably have told them, “It isn’t a coffee cup! It’s a Russian tea glass!”). But the act was pure Feidner, bold and indelible, apparently eccentric but in fact designed to keep students on their toes. It was said of Ed Feidner that he got the best work out of everyone through sheer unpredictability—you never knew what to expect from him, so you had to be ready for anything.
“He used to jump out of his office as I went past,” recalled Adam Zahler ’77, “hit me in the small of the back, and shout, ‘Stand up straight!’ Good posture became a matter of survival.” No one who knew and worked with Feidner could doubt the truth of these words. Ed’s life was filled with surprises, sudden asides, bellowed commands, roars of laughter, monologues, speeches, mismatched furniture, stray collectibles, dog-eared manuscripts, and cigarette smoke. I was with him once when he bought a violin at auction in the belief it was a Stradivarius (it wasn’t), but when I asked him, “Do you play?” he looked at me as if I were crazy. “Oh, no-o-o-o!” he said, as if buying a violin in order to play it would defeat the purpose of violins.
And in fact Ed Feidner didn’t “play”—that is, work and play were the same for him through the decades in which he was a driving force in establishing theatre at UVM. First director of drama, first full professor of theatre, first chair of the new department, his career was rich in premiere performances. For eighteen years, Feidner also produced and directed the Champlain Shakespeare Festival, Vermont’s renowned summer theatre company, which managed to stage all but three of Shakespeare’s plays during the years of its existence. Even the Royall Tyler Theatre itself, where alumni gathered last June, was an Ed Feidner production. Largely due to his vision and push, the structure built as a gymnasium in 1901 would morph into a performance space and a home for the Theatre Department in 1974.
photo by Ted Lyman
Before Ed Feidner’s death, the idea for a reunion of theatre alums had begun to take shape after the loss of Bill Schenk, another bedrock figure in the study of theatre at UVM. On a day of mourning in February 2008, a circle of theatre alumni managed to celebrate as we thought Bill would have wanted, right down to the post-memorial “wake” at a Burlington tavern, where a glistening shot of whiskey sat waiting at the end of the bar for the man who was no longer there to drink it—a sort of Schenk equivalent of the riderless horse at a presidential funeral. And while the occasion was sad, the celebration was nostalgic, affirming, and, yes, fun.
Planning began then and there for a larger, formal reunion with Ed Tracy taking the organizational lead from his home in Chicago, assisted on the Vermont end by Keith Gaylord ’76, Patrick Orr ’77 (now the Royall Tyler’s technical director), Jerrilyn Miller ’90, and staff from the RTT and UVM Development and Alumni Relations.
Conceived as a chance to meet and reminisce, to renew old friendships and make new ones, the UVM theatre alumni weekend was also a fundraiser for the Schenk and Feidner endowments (see sidebar) and a chance for those who cared—or dared—to perform again on the Royall Tyler stage, in a “main stage” production on June 14, called “Bring ’Em Back Home.” It was an evening of music, song, comedy, monologue, works-in-progress and a dazzling Vegas magic act—the last in the hands of Will Roya ’99, whose personal motto, “If you don’t take a chance, you don’t have a chance,” seemed to capture the essence of our collective education.
With more than seventy alumni representing forty years of theatre students, the Royall Tyler reunion differed from most by being interest- rather than class-based; thematic, not chronological. If the preponderance of attendees came from the years 1974–1979, it’s because those were the inaugural years of the Royall Tyler, the moment when theatre literally came up from underground at UVM and theatre studies took its place as a full academic discipline. We didn’t know until midway through the planning that our reunion would also be a memorial for Feidner, whose death on April 24, 2008 made gathering inevitable and completed the circle of loss and achievement.
courtesy Royall Tyler Theatre
There are many simple lessons in life,” Ed Tracy began in his tribute to Feidner, putting down his props—the cigarette, the coffee-cup—and switching effortlessly from mimicry to eulogy. “And all of them can be learned in a theatre. The trick is to remember those lessons when they are needed most.” Like all of us present that day, representing classes from 1966 to 2008, Tracy thanked Feidner and fellow faculty not just for his “love of theatre,” but for helping him earn “a degree in life”—a kind of roll-with-the-punches, lemon-to-lemonade spirit and style that’s allowed him to adapt and improvise in the “real” world of jobs, vocations, and careers.
“The theatre faculty let us grow on our own,” Tracy recalled. “They gave us the tools to be successful, but also allowed us to fail from time to time, to build our character so we could see how glorious success is when you work hard for it. Through each growing experience we became better students, team players, stronger adults, more self-assured and better able to think and act on our feet in all kinds of situations.”
Neither Feidner nor anyone in his department ever let us think that a life in the performing arts would be easy, or even possible for most contenders. Some of us have made our way as actors, writers, designers, and technicians. But most of us, confronted with the realities of living and working, have honed and refined and transformed our skills to find “theatre” in whatever we do.
Take Tracy. He was a freshman at UVM, his major undeclared, when he happened to take an acting class in 1972. “It was a quiet day in the green room of the old Arena,” he recalled, speaking of the performance space in the basement of Fleming Museum that served for years as the University stage before the Royall Tyler was remade. Tracy was working on a scene with his acting partner, Jody Jarvis ’77, when Ed Feidner swept in the room, “a book balanced on his head, posing inside the door as if he had just dismounted his noble steed in the courtyard.”
“Jody,” said Feidner. “I need a maid for our play. Will you do it?”
Jarvis paused only a moment before answering, “Yes.” As Tracy explained, “No one would consider denying a personal invitation from Ed Feidner to be in a show.” And before he knew it he’d jumped on board himself—unasked.
“Need another maid?” Tracy squeaked.
“Feidner stopped,” said Tracy, “turned slowly and took three steps in our direction, eyes peering out from his extra-thick glasses, the book still firmly balanced on his head. ‘No!’ he said. Then pausing, dramatically, ‘But, I could use an orderly!’”
courtesy Royall Tyler Theatre
Thus Ed Tracy began his career toting a samovar in Feidner’s production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and stayed to become what all of us felt ourselves to be under the theatre umbrella—members of a special family, privileged indeed to work in a world of dreams and imagination, but never far removed from the nuts and bolts at the back of the illusion, all the loose screws and concealed surgeries and eternal quick fixes that hold theatre in its place.
To Feidner’s cry of “Great, just great!” came Bill Schenk’s answer of “Just do it!” and the late Professor George Bryan’s gentle, if vaguely sinister, interrogative when he managed to catch you flying up or down the stairs with a two-by-four, a lighting instrument, or an unfinished costume in your hands: “So, when am I going to have the pleasure of torturing you in my History of Theatre class?”
For Tracy it was total immersion, as it was for most of us. “I was there all the time in those days,” he says, “listening and exploring, playing piano, volunteering for this show or that one. I wanted to know more about it all—how to direct, hang lights, build sets, do makeup, stage management, and public relations. Ed Feidner helped me along because he knew that I loved the business. He saw all that passion in me. But when I asked him about continuing on in graduate school in acting, he said, ‘Ed, some people should just go out, get a job, and go to work.’”
In Feidner’s hands, such advice was never condescending. It was simply realistic. The overwhelming majority of theatre aspirants, then as always, never “make it” in the theatre, and even those who do are well advised not to “quit their day jobs” before they’re certain of success. Tracy went on to spend a decade in the radio licensing division at ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers in New York, and another in development, fundraising, sports information, and sports broadcasting at Norwich University, before landing his current position as executive producer of programs at Pritzker Military Library in Chicago. Tracy’s work at Pritzker, especially in TV production, draws not just on his prior professional experience but on everything he learned at the RTT. “Everything,” he emphasized. “All of it.”
courtesy Royall Tyler Theatre
Across the three-day reunion in June, alumni shared stories similar to Tracy’s, united by the lessons from their study of theatre and the many paths it has led. One of our finest actresses, Stacey Gladstone ’80, is now a teaching nurse, specializing in AIDS treatment and services, where her stage training—quick thinking, a ready smile and considerable sang-froid—might be said to be essential for the job. Scene designer Lisa Devlin ’76 is now a landscape gardener in California, building sightlines and pathways to outdoor specification. Craig Purinton ’75 has moved from acting and directing into fundraising, another area where conviction, innovation and equipoise coexist: Purinton is national director of major gifts for Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.
The list goes on: Among our number were teachers, carpenters and technicians, advertising, development and corporate executives, “creative consultants,” box office and audience service managers, salesmen, showmen and “project personnel,” working case to case and job to job as independent contractors in the performing arts. Hamilton Gillett ’76 left acting in 1991, returned to Vermont and helped start a recycling and composting company in Woodstock; he’s now head of customer relations (again, that ready smile!) for Charles Shackelton Furniture/Miranda Thomas Pottery in Bridgewater. Ruth Feldman ’77, a trained soprano, with teaching degrees in both music and theatre and years of experience as a company stage manager, is director of education and accessibility services at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven. Our dependable pianists, Steve Freeman and James Kowal (both 1977), are still tinkling keys in New York City: Kowal is musical director for a network soap opera. Et cetera.
“A theatre reunion is like a high-school reunion,” said Brooke Gladstone ’78, co-host and managing editor of National Public Radio’s On the Media, “only with a much higher likelihood that you will have first-hand knowledge of how everyone looked naked twenty to thirty years ago.” Gladstone is referring, no doubt, to the quick costume changes we all made between scenes—there was no room for fake modesty. Her print and radio journalism has embraced topics as varied as defense policy, strip-mining, the 1991 rebellion of the Russian parliament in Moscow and “the aesthetics of Pampers,” but her career resembles other theatre alums’ in its essentially protean nature. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, UVM theatre has given birth to a host of lawyers—Myron Grauer ’71, Nadine Maleski ’76, David Godkin ’77, Jonathan Bourne ’77, Beth Boepple ’80— and writers: Sari Bodi ’76, Elin Zimmerman Hampton ’81, Maureen Hart ’90 and probably half of all reunion attendees, who tend to write when they aren’t doing something else, and often when they are.
Sometimes, of course, training for the stage leads directly to the stage, as in the case of Karen Trott ’77, who sings, acts, writes, directs, and walks tightropes, literally—a skill she learned overnight when facing an audition for Barnum in New York (she got the part). More recently Trott won raves on Broadway for her one-woman show, The Springhill Singing Disaster, earning high praise from New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley, who remarked approvingly, “There’s a little bit of Miss Trott in all of us.”
On the evidence, there is. After Feidner’s memorial and a reception hosted by Ellie Miller, dean of Arts and Sciences, in the Royall Tyler’s Craftsbury Room, we repaired to the stage itself and let it rip for our Saturday night performance, a showcase production of fifteen songs, scenes, and acts of bravura. (The only thing we all insisted on was that we not be made to sing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” as a closing number, so Keith Gaylord, our director, settled instead on “The Impossible Dream.”) The very nature of our enterprise found expression in an impromptu monologue by Sally Faye (Reit) Hiebert ’78, who simply took to the stage and reflected on what it had meant for her to have tasted the theatre’s magic.
“I am still reeling with all that the weekend was for me and inspired in me,” Hiebert wrote us later. “It is a wonderful thing for me to have my present life meet my former life. I don’t know what all this is or how it will settle, but I know it was big for my reconciliation of all the ‘me’s’ that are me.” This was, I suspect, the true goal of our vanished mentors—that our needs and talents should finally meet in fully creative lives, that we should experience no difference between living and performing, ‘theatre’ and ‘life,’ and that we should all say with Feidner at the end of the day that it had, indeed, been “Great! Just great!”
SUPPORT FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
Thanks to the generosity of alumni, families, friends, and patrons of the Royall Tyler Theatre, two of UVM Theatre’s all-time greats will be honored in perpetuity with endowed awards in their names.
The Edward J. Feidner Award is presented to a deserving undergraduate theatre major to help defray his/her educational expenses. The recipient, a junior, is selected on the basis of academic merit, having a minimum 3.0 overall GPA, and significant involvement in more than one area of Department of Theatre productions gained through involvement outside of course requirements. Special consideration is given to students who have demonstrated an affinity for the works of William Shakespeare. Financial need may also be considered.
The William M. Schenk Award for Technical Excellence is given to a student who demonstrates excellence or the potential of excellence in one or more of the following areas of production (in priority order): (1) Lighting Design, (2) Scenery Design, (3) Technical Production. The award is given annually to a junior theatre major who in addition to the above criteria has a minimum 3.0 overall GPA and who has demonstrated a sincere interest in all areas of theatre production and education.