Interviewee: Peter Gerety

Interviewer: Anne Lewis

Interview date: Saturday, October 18th, 2003

Anne: So, I guess, to start off, I was wondering what you're doing in New York right now and how long you've been here.

Peter: Mmhmm. Well, my family came from New York. And they were passing through Rhode Island and they had me and then they stayed in Rhode Island. So I'm the only one in my family who's a native New Yorker, I mean, a native Rhode Islander.

Anne: Oh, wow

Peter: And um, I went to the University of Rhode Island. But before that, I got, when I was a teenager, I got involved in theatre, because my sister Anne (he gestures to me), who's a fabulous actress, uh, did some work with Trinity Repertory Company, and, she plays a huge part in my life. I mean, she was an actress at the Provincetown Playhouse on the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown (Voice over loudspeaker of Stage Manager: We're back everybody) in the theatre that Eugene O'Neil built, on a wharf going out into the water, tiny little theatre. And they did great work there. And in the fifties, I was there because they didn't pay them any money. So, I was there taking care of, she had these three little children. And so I was the free babysitter, and because I was hanging around the theatre all the time, and those were the days where they actually used grease paint and you could smell the grease paint in the theatre. They painted flats with it and all of that. And I was, I would hang around and, and because it was right next to the beach, the wharf went out into the water. I would hang around, and I would, um, help them paint flats. And finally, they put me in a show. They put me in Chicago, before it had music to it.

Anne: okay

Peter: it was just a straight play. My sister was playing Roxy Hart. And I played a newsboy in Chicago. And that was it. I was hooked. I was totally hooked. So, through high school and college, I just didn't want to do anything but theatre, to the detriment of, I mean, I got thrown out of the University of Rhode Island three times. You have to be a pretty bad student to get thrown out of the University of Rhode Island three times.

Anne: How'd you get back in?

Peter: Well, I would write these empassioned letters, you know, very profoundly declaring that I had learned the lesson of my ways, and I was gonna be the grad, and I was, I was a little bit of a poet and I was in fact the president of the poetry society at the University of Rhode Island, even though I was getting evicted constantly and so I would write these long poetical, philosophical letters, you know. And they would say, geez, this kid's got something going for him. And they'd let me back in, and then I'd flunk out again because I would just hang around the theatre, and, you know, it was all about theatre and skirts. And, uh, but I did a lot of theatre in college, and then, I wasn't going to graduate from college, so I went to Boston University and studied philosophy for like one semester, and I got hired in 1962 at the Charles Playhouse in Boston, and worked for a year and a half in Boston. And that was really the beginning of my professional career, and that was '62 and then I immediately came to New York. In '63 I came to New York, so I've been in and out of New York. I was in New York for two years doing work offBroadway. I did Othello with James Earl Jones at the Martinee theatre in '64 and '65, and then I went back to the University of Rhode Island, and met Rudy Cheeks, and a bunch of other people, and um, oh God, their names are escaping me though. And at that time, Adrian Hall had started Trinity Repertory Company that year, and they were doing a summer season on the University of Rhode Island campus, and I was the artist in Residence for the University Theatre across the street, and Adrian came to see me do Mosca and Volponi, and he said, would you like to join my company. And I joined Trinity Rep in the summer of '65 and that was it, I never went back to New York.

Anne: So, this is after, you had been in URI, you'd been to Boston, you'd been here.

Peter: I had been two years in Boston, two years in New York, living in Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan playing at the Bottom Line or you know, before anybody really basically knew who he was, Wavy Gravy, The Merry Pranksters coming through town, the Holy Modal Rounders. All this stuff, and you know, just really great stuff. Jack Kerouac reading poetry and you know, really wonderful stuff, and then I went to work for Trinity Rep in Providence in '65, and I worked there for four years, and it was such amazing theatre. So, I'm not sure exactly where your paper wants to go, about talking about the Avant Garde, but we probably, I mean, in my life, my working with the Avant Garde is relatively limited. In those first years, that I did, with working Off-Broadway, I was very lucky. I was working. I was a student at the Herbert Berkoff studio down on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. I got a couple of Off-Broadway shows, but then the second year I was in New York, I got Othello, with Mitchell Ryan and James Earl Jones, and it ran all winter long. So I was a lucky actor, in that I got into a legitimate OffBroadway show that was very popular, and it was very powerful, and it ran all year long. So I wasn't in the position of a lot of Off-Broadway actors where they kind of hustle around, and they work at PS122, or these Off-Off-Broadway, and really experimental venues. I kind of had a gig all year long. And then when I went to Rhode Island for the summer, basically to visit my wife, and got hired by Adrian Hall, um, I then had a gig for four years.

Anne: Did you see Trinity in it's founding, as something more cutting edge, or. . .

Peter: Well, I was part of that. And it was, cutting edge. I mean, it was an established repertory theatre. Adrian made it so. But, uh, in its beginnings and really through the first fifteen, at least fifteen years of its existence, it did, in my opinion, the greatest theatre of any theatre in the United States, and I've seen most of them.

Anne: What kind of theatre did it do?

Peter: It's kind of a different thing from, you know, it wasn't the Avant Garde in the sense that, although we constantly had money problems, and the bank was always threatening to foreclose, etcetera, etcetera, it wasn't the same thing. We weren't doing theatre in attics, or on street comers, or you know, in somebody's basement or something, the way struggling, young Avant Garde artists do and sometimes find brilliant ways of expressing themselves that are very, very difficult to do, if you're functioning as an establishment theatre with millions of dollars in back of you, right. I mean, right now, as we are talking, we're talking in my dressing room of Never Gonna Dance, which is a classic broadway musical, a kind of semi-revival of a show that never existed before, but it's Fred Estaire and Ginger Rogers. It's based on Fred Estaire and Ginger Rogers' 1930's movie Swing Time, so it's all, Jerome Kern music, Johnny Mercer music, Dorothy Fields music. It's stuff that you probably grew up hearing your grandmother singing, you know, and it's classic, wonderful, wonderful music, but there's millions of dollars behind it, you know, and you go down into that theatre - I'll show you in a little while. You go down into that theatre, and out in that theatre, there are a bank of twenty computers operating the lights, operating the sound, operating things that fly in. I mean, it's just, amazing the money that's behind it. There's millions of dollars behind just this show. Well, you know, that's. . . Grotowski. Have you ever read Grotowski's book, Towards a Poor Theatre? (1 shake my head, no) Well, you should read that book, that's a genius book, and it really talks about, you know, it's like, I guess it was Christ that said, or something, or I'm not a very religious man, but uh, something about - it's more difficult for a person to enter the kingdom of Heaven if he's a wealthy man than it would be for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. (I laugh) Well, I have something, there's a parallel between that and difficulty in making theatre that truly grabs people at their roots, if you're functioning from a place where you have a lot of money.

Anne: And, did you see Trinity. . .how did Trinity's financial situation affect the theatre that it did, from the beginning, when it was smaller, to when it moved to the Lederer Theatre?

Peter: Well, it forced us, to, uh, I don't know how much not having money forced us to grapple with things maybe in a way that the really truly establishment theatres at that point different, uh, did. But, uh, Adrian had a philosophy right from the beginning that he wanted his theatre - and this was a kind of a revolutionary notion - was that he wanted his theatre to be about the artist. So, how that manifested itself was, that, rather than have uh. Most theatres go to New York and they cast in New York. If you're Richard Hamburgher, you're the director of the Dallas Theatre Center right now, and you're doing, you know, Ibsen's Enemy of the People, you come in and get a casting person in New York and casting studios and you come in and you cast ninety percent of it out of New York. And you bring them to Dallas and they do the show, and then they go back to New York. And it's about the show for your audience and making a profit and etcetera etcetera. Adrian wanted to be about, it about the artist. He wanted to create a theatre that was about creating a company. And he did that. And he first of all, demanded that he have two theatres. He needed two theatres in order to keep the company constantly employed. Or he would lose them. And, um, and he cast his shows from his own company, and he, cast his company rather brilliantly, particularly in those early years. Um, and so he had actors that were very versatile and could do many different types of characters, and so his vision was really to create a home for the artist. Now, you know, we were never very, very well paid, but I'll tell you, I worked for him from 1965 through 1969, for four and a half years or so, and then I went out and worked with another Avant Garde theater that my sister, Anne (gestures to me), and my brother in law Tom Hill had created out in Portland, Oregon, and that was during the Vietnam war, and that, was truly an experimental theatre and we, it came out of our passion. It was an anti-Vietnam war passion, so it was a very political, politically and sexually oriented theatre, and it was right all during the drug years and everything. I mean, it was insanity, but it was fabulous. And that seemed to be, in 1975, then the war was over, that came. . . it didn't come screeching to a halt, but its kind of reason for existence came to a halt, and I came back to Trinity, and spent another 17 years at Trinity. So I was, wound up being at Trinity for approximately 25 years in total. And there were about twenty actors that were also in Trinity, for say, between fifteen and twenty years. And so we had a company of about twenty actors that had been together for between fifteen and twenty-five years. No other theatre in America had anything like that. Steppenwolf, in Chicago, had a company over a long period of time, so they were close. Bob Brustein in ART had a company for a long period of time, but he only had about five regulars that stayed on all that period of time. We had about twenty. You know, so we could do shows like The lce11llln Cometh using all of our own people. We didn't bring anybody in. You know. And, um, immediately, one of the things that we needed to prove to ourselves, that, or prove to the government really, because in order for Trinity to take off and make its mark, it needed to become subsidized by the federal government. The federal government started something at that time. I believe it was oh, boy, the names fail me, but, I believe it was called the Title I Project, and they had something like, I dunno, several millions of dollars to give away, and they were gonna give it away, every year for five years in a row, as seed money, to two theatres in America, and they wound up choosing Trinity Rep and a theatre in New Orleans that was run by Stuart Vaughn. And, so we were lucky, so we got this big chunk - that was a lot of money in those days - and we got this big chunk of money in 1967, I think. And that allowed Adrian to expand his theatre, and part of the rationale for having that kind of money was that we promised that we would do, um, I believe four shows a year, four main stage shows a year, and, for every high school student in the state of Rhode Island. Every high school student in the state of Rhode Island.

Anne: Wow.

Peter: Seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshman, they all came to see four shows a year. And what this did was, it forced us in the position where, we very rapidly learned, I think it was during Enemy of the People in fact, or some Shakespeare like Twelfth Night or something, that, we were doing it in those days at the old, I think it was, we did some shows at the Old Albee, the Old Albee Theatre that doesn't exist anymore. On Westminster Mall. And then we were in the Rhode Island School of Design Auditorium. And, um, and the kids would come in, and they had never seen theatre before, and the Rhode Island School of Design Auditorium, at that time, held something like two thousand people. So there'd be these two thousand kids, and the last ones, up on the way back, in the last rows, you know, we were like ants down there, and, they didn't give a damn. They weren't prepared, they had never seen theatre before, they had no theatre tradition. So they would throw quarters at the stage and they would throw half-dollars. They would, they would throw marbles. I mean, we would be pelted with. . .

Anne: Like the Rocky Horror Picture Show

Peter: Oh, it was horrendous. And we would have to stop, we would have to stop the shows, and one point, um, they had to get policemen to stand in the aisles, because the kids were taking pocket knives out of their pockets and they were just ripping up the seats, with their knives. I mean, there was no there was no tradition for them to pay attention, and the situation was such that they, uh, you know, there was nothing demanding their attention. And, uh, so Adrian realized that having police in the aisles was not the answer. You know, I mean, that's a band-aid solution that is not gonna go anywhere. So what he needed to do was, he needed to make his theatre, so what it did, was it forced him into creating theatre that would just reach out and grab you (he gestures). So that no longer were we gonna do anything that could be remotely considered a costume pageant. If we were gonna do Shakespeare, we were gonna do Shakespeare with people coming out into the audience, and people coming up from under seats. And, at one point, we had, in early in the rehearsals of Billy Bud, or late in the rehearsals of Billy Bud, Melville's Billy Bud, we had, uh, cargo netting stretched over the heads of the audience, and, and, that wound up not being something we kept. But, but for that brief period of time that we had that cargo netting, actually two sailors would fall from a mast in the middle of a fight, and they would fall into that cargo netting, and the cargo netting would dip down because of the weight of the sailors, and would almost touch the heads of the audience, and they would have a knife fight right over your heads. And then a cannon would come rolling out on the stage and roll out past the edge of the stage (he demonstrates with gestures). So it was like here, if you were sitting in the front row, it was like four feet in front of you, and Bam! This noi. . .and Brie Cabassos, bless his soul, would be down in the cellar, right below that cannon, aiming a double barreled shotgun, into a corrugated metal garbage can, and the explosion, was, I mean, people would leap out of their seats, and the smoke would come belching out of that thing, and people were climbing up Crow' s Nests forty feet in the air, coming down, leaping out and coming down on ropes that were knotted, and running across platforms that were set over the tops. They would be shoulder height with the audience that was sitting, and I remember Ron Frasier, at one point, had a, uh, a live chicken in a basket, and sometimes (he laughs) the chicken got loose. I mean, it was just, it was an expl. . . and water would come spurting out of the gun, uh, the uh, the traps, and sailors would have to use these giant squeegees and squeegee the water back in, so that it didn't literally go in the. . .

Anne: Was it in the RISD auditiorium?

Peter: RISD auditorium. I remember Brother to Dragons, which wasn't in the RISD auditorium, that was in the old Trinity, uh. Ethel Eichenberger, James Eichenberger, who later became an enormously successful transsexual artist in Greenich Village, and is revered. He was part of the Ridiculous Theatre Company, but he, you know, we were all bobbing for apples, and Jimmy Eichenberger had long, long hair, and he would bob for apples, and he would come up with an apple, and his hair would be soaked with water, and his hair would fly back from his head, and the water would just go Shump! Over the faces of the people in the front row. You know. And, what happened to the students with this explosion of noise, and fire and energy and you have people going up and the theater coming out to them. So that they became participant in it. That was the trick. They now had a vested interest. They now had a P.O. V, as they say in the movies. They had a point of view. They were not, as they are in a traditional theatre. You would see if you went down into the theatre here, Never Gonna Dance, where the audience is all sitting in nice, comfortable seats, and they're here, and the experience is up there on the Proscenium Stage, and never the twain shall meet, really, and you just come and you watch a nice piece of entertainment. This was not that. This was theatre coming out and grabbing them and making them become a participant in that theatre. And Billy Bud is a very interesting example of that way of working that Adrian gradually developed more and more and more and more and brilliantly and brilliantly and brilliantly in a way that no other theatre company in America did. And, until after they saw Adrian, you know, Adrian's work. (pause) Billy Bud is an interesting piece, because Billy Bud starts out with this sailor being brought on to a ship, and then becomes the battle of good and evil. The first mate of the ship is a truly evil man and Billy Bud is a truly saintly, almost Buddhist kind of person, kind of Christ-like person. And then these battles that happen in the First Act and it's wild. The second act is a trial. And the second act is like pure intellectual. . .it is a debate, it is an intellectual debate, and we were thinking when we were first thinking about doing that show, and, the kids will never sit for it. You know, I mean, they were ripping up the seats, why are they gonna sit for this? But because Adrian structured that first act the way he did, by the end of the first act, they were so invested, personally invested in the life of Billy Bud and the trial and problems that he was going in, and they were so wired into the show, that they were perfectly happy to sit and contemplate what the intellectual import of the whole second act was. And that was a giant lesson for us, and it became, so in a way, of having to - this is a long-winded way of answering your question - about needing to put the money in the coffers. We needed to go to the federal government, to go to the federal government, we had to do shows for high school students in schools, as a part of our bargain, the Lefowskian bargain that we made there, that forced us to deal with the students in a way that we had never dealt with any audience, and that taught us how to deal with audiences. And part of it came from, we were the first company in America to be of. . .asked to go to the Edinburgh Festival. And we brought a play to the Edinbugh Festival, that Eugene Lee did the set for. He did all of our great sets. He did the Billy Bud as well. And we went to the Edinburgh Festival with a play called The Years of the Locust, which is about the years that Oscar Wilde spent inReading Jail for homosexuality, and um, it was set in a prison, and it was just a wonderful, wonderful show. But, but, more or less traditional. I mean, Adrian was never overwhelmingly traditional anyway. He was a very, very, very creative man. But when he was in Edinburgh, he got to see Grotowski's theatre. Grotowski's theatre had also come to Edinburgh that year, and uh, I'll probably get this wrong. But I believe, because we didn't get to see it, the company didn't get to see it. Adrian did because we were working on stage. Adrian wasn't.

Anne: Okay.

Peter: So he could go see other theatres at night time. And he went to see a play by Grotowski called Acropolis, I think it was called. And, basically, it had to with, because Grotowski's theatre was Polish, it had to do with W orld War Two, the Holocaust, and uh, and it was all done in Polish. And Adrian would come, came and sat and watched that piece, and he, it was, I don't know how to explain this in a way that makes sense for a tape recorder, but, um, uh, basically, during the course of the play. . .members of the company, of Grotowski's Company would die, and they would become, no longer active. I'm not explaining this well. But in any case, there was a time, whether you spoke Polish or not, there was a moment about two thirds of the way through that play, where every one in the audience realized that they themselves represented the dead.

Anne: hmm.

Peter: The Holocaust dead.

Anne: Wow.

Peter: So, if you think if you're in the audience and you're watching a play, and then you suddenly realize that this play is about the dead, the people who died in the Holocaust, and then you realize that you, in fact, and the rest of your audience people are those people, you have a very strong, now you have a very strong point of view. You have a very, you are no longer an objectified audience watching, you know, a separate piece of theatre. You are a part of that theatre. And you realize that you, that all theatre happens in one room, and they are all in it together, the performers and the artists and the actors and the audience, and they're all participatory in it. So watching that piece of Grotowski where Adrian suddenly became weeping, because he realized that he was, he was dead. And it made the piece so powerful for him. And he realized that that was the trick. That the trick for ever and ever and on, became in his mind, to bring the theatre to the audience, to grab them, and to make them look at that piece in a way that gave them a function to perform. Sometimes he would do it very prosaically, I mean, very, kind of obviously, like when we, when we did Inherit the Wind, uh, the opposing lawyers would talk to the jury, and the audience became the jury, and that was kind of an obvious thing. But it still worked. You know, and at other times, he would do it in ways that were not very obvious. So, you know, I don't know where that comes in with the Avant Garde, Ijust know that it was light years ahead of anything I had ever seen on stage. Uh, it was new. Adrian did a play called Cathedral of Ice. This is all stuff that you could look up, I suppose, in archives in Trinity if you wanted to, and get photographs of. Cathedral of Ice was about Hitler, was about the Holocaust, was about Hitler, and it was interesting. Right from the very beginning, Adrian kind of tricked the politicians of Providence. What he did was he created a, he made the space upstairs - in those days Trinity was totally flexible. It didn't have permanent risers. You could take all the temporary risers out, and you could make it just one big vast plain space. And he made it one big, vast plain space, no seats whatsoever. And he put, uh, bar. . .booths, like carnival booths and all different things in all different corners of the theatre. So they would have acts going on in them that um, that pertained to the piece about Hitler. One was a little pornographic movie that had, uh, a pornographic slide show being super-imposed on actors who were playing Hitler as a child, and Eva Braun as a child, and Hitler's mother. It was just fabulous. And another was a boxing match between communists and fascists. Uh, with girls sitting on boys' shoulders, you know, like. . .

Anne: Like a chicken fight

Peter: Boxing, like that kind of fight, you know, around a boxing match, uh, I mean, just fabulous stuff, and when the audience came up, they had to make a choice between what acts they wanted to go see, the way you do if you're walking round a circus midway, or a carnival midway, you know, and, but, to begin with, he put a great big circus tent out in the muse there, that little alleyway that's right next to Trinity, and he created kind of a political meeting, and he asked all the politicians around Providence if they wanted to speak to the public because they would have the audience come in there. Well, it was an election year, and there isn't a politician in the world that can give up having the choice to speak for twenty minutes before, you know, a couple hundred people or a thousand people or whatever it was, you know. So they would all come and they would speak. But it was about, the play was about, the acquiring and the misuse of political power, and how politicians manipulate us with how they structure the thing, you know, so unwittingly, the politicians who came in there and spoke were being, in a way, actors in that piece, and the audience who came and sat in that tent outside and listened to the politicians could listen to them as, you know, maybe moved by something they said, but or else, very aware of them as politicians. And then when that whole thing was over, after about twenty minutes, they'd file up the stairs, into this carnival space, which was all basically about how politicians manipulate people and the misuse of power.

Anne: Whoa. What year was this?

Peter: This was, uh, I don't know, this was when I came back, so it was probably late seventies, maybe early eighties, you know, I don't know, '79, '80, '81, somewhere around there, I forget when it was. You know. But just no body was doing theatre like that. No body. You know, so then, when I went out, and I took a break for four years, and I went out to, um, I really just wanted to work with my sister. I had grown up watching her on stage, and I had spent four years with Adrian, and I thought, okay, look, I'm gonna go out and I want to experience the West Coast, and, and the Vietnam war was in high gear and we were marching against it in Providence anyway, and so I wanted to go out and participate in that whole thing out on the West Coast, and I went out and I joined my sister, and, uh, that's kind of a long story. But we created a very politically oriented experimental theatre company in Portland Oregon called the Storefront Actors Theatre. Um, and we just created, right from the ground up. We did things like Harlem Rent parties because we had no money at all, and so we would have a rent party once a month, and charge a buck a piece for it, just to raise the rent for the theatre, but we had found this old warehouse in the black warehouse district of Portland, and, it cost us something like, I don't know, I mean we could do that, we could, we could have a party and raise the rent for it, like they used to in the 30's in Harlem. Rent Parties. And, um, almost all the work we did. . .we did a lot of. . . the very first piece that we ever did was Lysistrata. We did it with, uh, a, we did it out on farms in the country-side.

Anne: You traveled?

Peter: And it was a tremendous amount of nudity. We did it up and down the coast. There was a, kind of, not a circuit, but there were, in those years, there were kind of gatherings of people up around Belingham Washington, and, uh, Astoria, Oregon, and around Eugene, and they would have people, like from the San Francisco Mime Troupe would come up, or Peter Shuman's puppets from Vermont if they were on the West Coast, or Ken Keyze, coming from his Eugene. . . and he had a Eugene group and we would come from Portland. The Storefront Theatre would come from Portland and Empty Space, I think it was called Empty Space, would come down from Seattle. There would be kind of like these Avant Garde Theatre Festivals that would happen in great drug-oriented and drunken ecstasy and total sex, sex binges and stuff (laughter). You know, I mean, it was really wonderful, but, but, and fun, and it'd be done on beaches and just be really great, but there was a, uh, a profound sociological and political impetus behind it, and that, you know, for me, it was the time of my life. And I've had an amazing career with Adrian, and then, and Trinity, and doing other things. I just finished doing a wonderful piece by, that Michael Greif, who's directing this piece, Never Gonna Dance. Michael Greif directed a piece called Fucking A, by um, Suzan Lori Parks, who won a Pulitzer for Top Dog Under Dog, and we did that down at the Public just six months ago, and it was really wonderful. I mean, that was dynamite. (Stage Manager calls over the loudspeaker, "Karen and Peter, if you're here, will you go to the back of the house please")

Peter: That's me

Anne: Okay.

(Peter goes to rehearse. About an hour later, he has a ten-minute break and we reconvene in the basement. Tape 2 begins here.)

Anne: How does Rhode Island, and Providence, the city, fare as a place for the arts, and how do you see it as different than other cities in which you've worked? Peter: Well, of course, I mean I have an emotional connection to it because it's my hometown. It's where I was born, you know, and I think that Providence has a particular, uh, make-up. It's so kind of working class, almost socially, it's kind of a working class background, and there's so much energy in Providence that comes from maybe, the kind of melting pot that it is. You know what I mean? Boston's like that, New York's like that, but there's an awful lot of cities that aren't like that. Providence really has this wonderful synergy between, it hasn't always been positive, a lot of negative, between the Italians and the Irish and the Jews and, you know, and Portugese, and the blacks, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of energy there, uh, and it may be the kind of energy that also comes from um, uh, sort of a, uh, ooh, depression, or you know, it seems like, you know, when the rest of the country is in a recession, Providence was in a depression, all the way through the fifties and sixties as far as I remember. And in the 70' s as far as I recall. And it's wonderful to see it going through a resurgence. Now, I don't know what all of that means, but they really took us, Providence really took us to their heart, and one of the off-shoots, one of the byproducts of the way that Trinity was structured, and a lot of the young theatres in Providence, uh, I remember old time, there were the Wicken and Gate, there was the Second Story Theatre.

Anne: Perishable?

Peter: And Perishable. And a lot of those theatres were fed by Trinity. They were people who came to work for Trinity, and either left Trinity or didn't stay. Maybe they came and were part of the conservatory or something like that. But they fell in love with Providence. That happens a lot in Providence. People go to school for the Rhode Island School of Design for instance, and they, they graduate, and they're in love with Providence. And they don't want to leave it. You know, I mean, there's a certain quality of life, if you love the ocean, and you love old buildings, and you know, I mean, a certain quality of life that Providence has. So they kind of fed those theatres, and when you, if you grew up for instance in, theatrically, if you grew up in the conservatory, and you, being a part of, or seeing Adrian Hall's shows, when you were a young forming artist, and then you go off on yourself and you have a Perishable Theatre or a Second Story Theater or something like that, well, the theatre that you create is very interesting, cause you've kind of, you, you, you've learned at the hands, at the feet, of this master, you know, and so, you know, I think that a lot of the off. . . well, you know, I mentioned the names of the drama groups. I'm not a fan of critics, but um, you know, what they call the "off-Trinity" kind of groups and theatres, you know, I think that probably, they're of very high quality, you know, higher quality than in most cities, because they have this particular kind of way of theatre to look up to, and that was. . .that as a basis for forming. And there wasn't a hell of a lot in Trinity, in Providence rather, when Trinity was first formed in the mid nineteen sixties. Providence didn't have any, I mean there was the Philharmonic that was in trouble all the time, there was a kind of an opera company, but there wasn't a lot of cultural. . .I mean there were maybe wonderful museums, Rhode Island School of Design was the.. .there wasn't a lot of theatre or anything. I mean, the point is, and then suddenly now you've got this world class theatre growing up right in front of your eyes. So Providence really took it to their hearts. And another factor in that was because we were forced into the situation, or we were lucky enough to be in the situation where we got federal money so that we performed for every high school student in the state for, and that went on for four or five years, every high school student in the state, seeing four. . . So that means by the time you graduated, if you were a freshman in 1966, uh, you saw sixteen mainstage shows in a great theatre company. You know, so you got out of there, with a knowledge of theater. And even if you didn't do any, even if you didn't go into theatre, as ninety percent of people don't, but nevertheless, for years and years and years, and even after those first four years, Trinity still kept doing things for high school students. They just had less and less federal money cause they kept cutting back on, foundations kept cutting back on it. So they would wind up, doing maybe shows for certain schools, or maybe, students would see one or two a year, then maybe one a year, but never the less, I remember, uh, say in the mid nineteen seventies or early nineteen eighties, and I'm driving around Providence, and now, I'm married with kids and everything like that, going into my middle age as an artist. I'm driving around Providence, and I pull into a gas station in Wickford, you know, or Portsmouth or something like that, and the guy giving me my gas would say hey, weren't you, didn't you do, you know, Richard in Our Wilderness, or didn't you do such and such, you know, and I saw you. And these would be gas station attendants or you know, or mechanics, or you know, the guy who sells you your insurance or something. So there was a kind of, I think that Trinity, uh, or I think that Providence has a theatre-going audience that is more, that is more working class because of that. I think that, I think that it brought theatre across the board to a broader array of people, socioeconomic array of people than most theatres do. I mean, I know. I've been to the Seattle Rep and Milwaukee, and they have, they all have high school programs, too, but not like Trinity had, and, their audiences have the tendency to be these upper middle class people that can afford the tickets, and so, they're, they're kind of homogenized, and, I know cause I've been there, and they're not as willing to accept dramatically different forms of theatre, and, or, theatre that challenges them. A lot of audiences in other cities demand that the theatre kind of entertain them because basically the wife says to her husband, "Come on we're going over to the theatre," and the husband says, "Alright we'll go and watch something," you know cause he's tired and he's been working in the office all day long or something like that. And I think that there's more passion in the audience, across a broader array of socioeconomic classes, in Providence, than there are in other cities.

Anne: And do you think that the plays Trinity chose, or that Adrian Hall chose to direct, catered to that, in trying to raise some kind of political awareness?

Peter: Well, he definitely did have a talent for, I mean, when uh, we had a production in the works called Son of Man in the Family that was about the Manson event, the killing ofTaton, Bianca, and uh, you know, Sharon Tate, and Roman Polansky's girlfriend at that time. And um, there was such a horror show. And we had that show in the works way before the Manson trials. I mean, Adrian had a real talent for coming up with stuff that was so current. So it would be like, and he did a play, I forget what it was called, but it was about the murder, the uh, the mass suicide in Guyana, Jim Jones' followers, where they took poisoned kool-aide, hundreds of people died, and he did a play about that. It was very, very controversial. He would always choose at least one play. I was in a play called Eustace Chisolm and the Works, by James Purdy, which is a wonderful play, but it just happened, it happened to have a certain amount of male nudity, and me and Dan Bombargan got out of bed totally naked. And, in one performance, as if I was playing a young homosexual prostitute, and, so it was as if we had just had sex. Well, that's just not something that you did in any theatre at that time. And we did a lot of nudity before other theatres. I'm not sure I'm answering your question because I've forgotten it already.

Anne: I was asking about political consciousness that came from the plays

Peter: Well, I think his theory is, I mean, his feeling is that everything that you do is political. Well, you can say, well, my theatre isn't political, but if you choose to not find the political quotient, if you choose not to find the political quotient in any given piece of work, whether it's Shakespeare's, you know, King Lear or Hamlet or or All the King's Men by Willie Stark, if you find James Purdy's Eustace Chisolm and the Works, if you choose not to find the political, than you're denying a great deal of what that piece is written about. Shakespeare was a very sexual person and very political person, you know, so the theatres, the establishment theatres that chose to do plays in a way that didn't touch on the political, were just cutting off their noses, despite their face, because they were afraid of what their Boards of Directors would say, or they're afraid, that their more middle class, maybe conservative audiences wouldn't stand for it. And Adrian would just walk into the teeth of the tiger and say, look, this is what it's about, here it is, whether you like it or lump it. And audiences, Trinity audiences, Providence audiences, would leap at it and just say "Yes!" Or not and want to close him down. So very often we ran into situations where they wanted to shut us down. And almost succeeded.

Anne: Wow, there were some harsh critics.

Peter: Oh, huge. Huge. And they almost succeeded. There were several times when, when, there was one time, one famous time, in fact, I believe Eustace Chisolm and the Works, may have sparked this, but, uh, where they wanted to, the board voted to kick Adrian out. (We are walking upstairs back to the house, as the break is almost over)

Anne: Really?

Peter: Yeah. The board of the theatre.

Anne: Who was on the board at that time?

Peter: Well, uh, I don't remember their names, which is just as well. But, uh, the historical fact is that the board voted to kick Adrian out as the artistic director, and Adrian turned around the next day and fired the board. And created his own board. And that was a war, I'll tell you.

Anne: What year was that? Oh, you gotta go back on.

(An hour later, Peter finishes with rehearsal and we return to his dressing room.) Anne: So, I was gonna ask you, how you grew as an actor through working at Trinity and in Providence.

Peter: Well, that's one of the benefits, you know, of working in a Repertory Company. Because, if you, if I had stayed for instance, when I was in my early twenties, if I had stayed in New York, I would have just gotten cast as certain types of roles, because the reality about New York is that you've got ten thousand actors that are out of work all the time at any given moment. And so, if you need a, you know, red-haired, freckle-faced, fifty-six-year-old transvestite or something, they, you can go get 'em, they're out there, you know, they're actors, and, and, you know. But in a rep company, that falls to the actors in the company to do, and Adrian believed in creating a company. That was what he was all about. And, uh, and so, we got to do, I mean, I got to play roles that I never would have played in New York, and Adrian made very, very strong choices in terms of the type of theatre that he did, so you were doing Beckett and you were doing Ibsen and you were doing Shakespeare and Chekov and doing all this great theatre that is great literature. But also, than as literature, as theatre, it's like an extension of literature, and it maybe has the ideas and the beautiful language, but it's also just a skeleton for what the theatrical artist wants to make of it. So Adrian would always present Shakespeare, for instance, in a way no other theatre ever did. He would stretch it and torture it and shape it and, and, bring it to a point, where no one ever had seen that before. This was not just Shakespeare done for costumes and for historical accuracy. This was really gutsy, passionate emotional stuff, and, um, so you get to playa lot of stuff, that you just wouldn't have done, and playing stuff, like doing anything that stretches you, um, you know, is what makes an artist. So I personally just kind of fell into the theater, fell into the theatre because my older sister Anne was a great theatre artist. Never got recognized as a great theatre artist, except for by her peers for instance, but because she mainly worked in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Seattle and Portland, Oregon and The Dallas Theatre Center and Providence, Rhode Island. She did, she did a passion play, I think it was written by Peter Nichols for Trinity Rep, with Richard Cavanaugh, who is no longer alive, but I mean, and her, and Richard Neelan, I mean it was a phenomenal performance and a great production, you know. One of the things about Trinity was, that we almost always got, was, a lot of our patrons used to go to New York, cause it's not that far away, and they would go to New York and see Broadway Theatre and they would come back and they would say, "I'm sorry, I saw the Broadway production and I've seen your production, and the Trinity production is head and tails above it." You know, in terms of its passion and psychological depth and just the attack that it takes on it. A lot of that was Adrian, but a lot of, most of that was Adrian. A lot of it belonged to Eugene Lee, because he would create sets that would force the actors to do things that Broadway never would, it just wasn't done. I mean, you saw that set down there, that's a proscenium stage. Well a proscenium stage has been in effect since the seventeenth century, you know, eighteenth century, and so, uh, and Adrian almost always broke through the Proscenium stage, and forced the audience to become participatory and more involved, and more, you know, just closer to the action. The action would become more interwoven around them. So, so, um, I've lost track of what I'm saying entirely.

Anne: That's okay. We were just talking a little about your own personal experience growing when you were working at Trinity.

Peter: Well, so it made me, just, it made me, it made me stretch to do roles. I mean I played Scrooge when I was very young. And, and I played Willy Stark in All the Kings Men which was a play written by Robert Penn Warren, which is about, loosely about Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana, who was Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt. . . or historians from that period of time in the thirties in America felt that Huey Long had the potential to become the American Hitler. And, uh, you know, he was a powerful populist governor of Louisiana and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was afraid that he was going to run for President. In fact, he was going to run for president, but then he got assassinated. You know, and it's a great play, and, uh, usually people mangle it when they do it, and Adrian put all of his heart and soul into it, and he had a genius for Southern gothic tales, and intrigues in Southern sexuality and political life, and he just made that sing. And we also put Randy Newman music to it, and it was, aw, it was phenomenal. Just a phenomenal production. Robert Penn Warren, who at that time, I believe, was the Poet Emeritus of the United States, Poet Laureate of the United States, came to see our opening night, and he had to be brought in by an ambulance because he was, he was dying. I mean he was really on his last leg, so Adrian sent an ambulance to his home in Connecticut, and brought him in to see our opening night. At the end of that opening night performance, the audience gave him, the playa huge round of applause, and then some one indicated that Robert Penn Warren was in the front row, and he stood up, and the audience gave him a round of applause, and then Robert Penn Warren gave the cast a round of applause, and then the entire audience gave the cast another round of applause. And it just never seemed to stop. It was, you know, one of those golden nights of your life in the theatre. So, I'm sure, I mean I, you know, I was just brought up in Edgewood. My dad was a, uh, uh, military man. He got out of the army a major after World War II. He was a chef, he sold a lot of things. My mom was a nurse. I was just a middle class kid from Edgewood with no particular, um, artistic bent that I knew of. I was a little athletic, and I liked to sing, but I had no particular artistic bent. And I was just fortunate that my older sister was an artist and into theatre and I kind of fell in love with it and then the second fortunate thing that happened was that I bumped into Adrian when I was just starting and he took me under his wing and I spent twenty-five years with that company. And, and, you know, not to blow my own horn too much, I mean, I'm not, I don't mean to be conceited about it or anything, but, you know, in the last five or six worldview years, I've worked with the best people in the business. You know, I mean, I've been in one of the, two of the best television shows ever produced, "Homocide", I was a regular on "Homocide" for two and a half years, and I've done ten episodes of "The Wire", which I think is one ofH.B.O.'s best shows, and really good writing, and I've worked in films with, uh, you know, Kevin Spacey and Robert Redford, and you know, Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, and, and I've worked on stage with Suzan Lori Parks and Most Def, and you know, and now I'm on Broadway doing this thing. I mean, I don't know how I ever would've gotten to that place without the opportunities of stretching my instrument and just being able to, just, basically I was given twenty-five years to, in a very protective place, to be able to make a fool out of myself and have a hell of a lot of fun doing it, and learn at the same time. That's basically how actors, that's a lot of the trick of how actors learn to get really good, that they have the freedom to just take all kinds of choices, which very often means making a fool out of yourself, and Adrian and Trinity gave me the protective place to be able to do that.

Anne: I was doing a little bit of reading, and in 1981, How I Got That Story, how you played twenty-three roles in that one production.

Peter: That was fabulous. It was, um, it's a story about Vietnam. It's a two-character piece. One of the performers plays The Event. The other perfor. . .one of the performers is a photographer who goes to Vietnam to film The Event - The Event meaning the entire Vietnamese experience, the Vietnam War - in the middle of the Vietnam War. It's loosely based on, it's a wonderful book called, by a photographer named, I think his name is Michael Herr. H.E.R.R. I think. Oh shoot, the name of the book (pause) DisDatches, I think it's called. And he was this crazy photographer who went to Vietnam and got quite insane and just went around Vietnam getting these phenomenal photography, photographs and stories and everything like that, and he wrote about them. And the other character in How I Got That Story plays The Event, which means he plays all of Vietnam. So there's the photographer filming The Event, and then there's The Event, and The Event is, that you play, the, the Vietnamese, the old Vietnamese woman who basically is Madam Nue, who was running the country after the death of her husband, and, and Vietnamese generals, South Vietnamese generals, and North Vietnamese regulars, and Vietcongs, the underground fighters, and a Saigon bar girl prostitute, and American Grunts, and the American G.!. 's, and the American politicians who are running the show. I mean, I didn't remember how many characters there were. You say twenty-three, so I'll take your word for it. But most of the time, I had a, uh I had something like ten seconds to make costume changes in order to be back on the stage.

Anne: That's a total. . .

Peter: Oh, it was so much fun. And one of my favorite characters was the Saigon, the prostitute. And I shaved my legs and I found these really incredible white high heel pumps that fit my feet, you know, and, and you get into walking across the stage in those things, and suddenly, as a man, you realize why women are so sexy when they walk in them (he laughs and I laugh). You know, these fabulous pumps, and I, I had several uh people in the company who used to come down and just watch that scene because they had fallen in love with my Saigon bar girl (he laughs) you know. But it was a, it was a. . . that wasn't directed by Adrian. That was directed by Larry Eric. And it was, a really interesting political experience. And a fabulous experience for me on stage. I mean, that's exactly what I mean. You get to play twenty-three other, twenty-three separate characters in a play, and it just stretches the hell out of you, you know. Uh, I mean, I thank God that I didn't stay in New York. And, what if I had gotten involved with, you know, Soap Opera, and what if I had gotten involved with do. . . being a musical comedy person. I mean, I'm having a ball doing this musical comedy thing, but I wouldn't want it to be my life. I wouldn't want it to have, just that, the direction my theatrical life had taken. I'm so happy that I have that opportunity to do much more profound and kind of shaking kind of things, things that shake you, you know, things that have at least the potential of changing your soul. You know how you look at the world, you know, not just entertainment. And I'm not putting down entertainment. I think there's a great spiritual value to making people laugh a lot. That was what I love about Rudy Cheeks. I love. . . Rudy Cheeks used to make me laugh. He was hysterical. He was a hysterical performer. Rudy Cheeks used to. . .I have a photograph still of Rudy Cheeks pretending to be dead drunk dressed in a Santa Clause, uh, uh, suit, uh, flat out on the sidewalk with his arms out like this with a bottle in his hand. I mean, he's just hysterical. He used to perform in a rock band as a lead singer and guitar player and dressed in the Santa Clause suit, or dressed in a Hawaiian suit with coconuts for a bra, or you know, I mean, he just, a mad man, in the best, most wonderful, uh, profane kind of way, you know, in a way that stretches your mind and makes you look at things differently. And there's something about the way that Rudy Cheeks made people laugh that I think is that, you know, not to be modeled about it, but I think it's an incredible spirit. . . it's a gift spiritually, it's a gift to people spiritually to be able to make them laugh in that way. I mean, I really believe that.

Anne: So I guess, to wrap things up. What led you, in the end, to decide to leave Trinity?

Peter: Well, I had spent that five years in, four or five, really five years in Portland, Oregon, working with my sister. And, uh, the Storefront Theatre, and that was very exciting, um, in addition, and very political, and uh, I think it was just when I got back from, and so I. . . you know, it was very strange for me to have been hired in the first place when I was only twenty-five years old to spend a couple of years in New York, and then get hired by a rep company cause I auditionedfor several, and got several offers from, one offer was from, uh, the uh, theatre in Washington, DC, the Alley. Anyway, whatever the Washington DC theatre was, the Arena, the Washington Arena, the Arena Stage, and, and, uh, but Adrian, offered me this job and I had seen his work and I knew I wanted to work with him so I went back to Providence, Rhode Island. I mean, so I'm a kid who grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and then I go back to my hometown. So it's been, I was like in danger of spending my entire life mainly wrapped around Providence, Rhode Island, and while I love Providence, Rhode Island, there's other fish to fry. And after Adrian left Trinity, uh, Trinity went through such a difficult time. It was going through a difficult time the last few years of Adrian's reign there, and then, and then we went through the unfortunate, certainly creatively trying and interesting year of Anne Bogart's reign, and then when she left, the theatre was almost closed, we were in such a disastrous state financially. And Richard Jenkins, who was a member of our company and one of our leading actors for years, uh, and now plays the father on Six Feet Under on H.B.O. And I mean, he's a brilliant actor, and also, uh, not very many people know about this, if they don't work for Trinity, but he's an amazing director, one of the most amazing directors I've ever seen and worked with, and, and probably won't direct again. I don't know if that's bad. But God he's good. And, and, and, so he was asked to take over Trinity, and he took it over for four years, and for four years, and he saved Trinity's bacon. I mean, he really saved that theatre, and, and you know, kind of kept it in a holding pattern so it didn't die. And then finally they found Oscar Eustis, who came in and took it over now. And Oscar is a wonderful artistic director. I mean he's not the, uh, kind of seminal genius that Adrian was, but he's a much better artistic director than Adrian was, in the sense that a great deal of responsibility of the Artistic director is being able to talk to boards of directors and being able to talk to C.E.O's of corporations and raise money and provide salaries and keep things afloat. I mean, that wasn't Adrian's strongpoint at all, you know, and Oscar is really good. He's, he's made that theatre much more financially stable and, so it has a chance of existing for the long run. And he's a great guy. He's a great guy. And he's a really good director, too. Um, but, after Adrian left, I knew it was only a matter of time before. . . I only stayed through Richards Jenkins' reign, because we were in such a crisis in the Anne Bogart years, and just the theatre was in crisis, and I didn't want to leave it because I was a leading actor for it, and I didn't want to. . . I didn't feel like abandoning it. But once, uh, Oscar took it over, then I felt like I was free to go. You know, and I, and I got offered a, uh, a you know, a role in Conversations with my Father at the Royale Theatre, which is just at the back of this theatre, on the other comer of the street, forty-sixth street. So I got offered a Broadway show. So I came to New York, as a New York actor, and I got myself an apartment, and I was staying. And for a long time, because I didn't really have a lot of New York jobs, I mean, New York is brutal, in the sense that, they don't care how many lead roles you've done in whatever rep company, or. . . they're only interested in what have you done in New York. You know. And so for a long time I kind of floundered around for about six or eight months where I didn't work a lot, and that's when I started branching out into film and television and really now for the last, I've been here twelve years, I've been back here in New York twelve years. And for the last ten of those years, I'd pretty much work all the time. I'd work Off Broadway or on Broadway or for television shows. And I'm a very fortunate actor. So. . .I'd just like to, I mean it's really fun playing in New York, cause you're playing with, you're playing with so many creative people, you know, and Trinity had, you know, a dozen really creative people that I loved to play with, that I played with for almost thirty years, and New York has a lot more, not better necessarily, but a lot more, and I really like that variety. It's just a great city. The greatest city in the world. As far as I'm concerned. And then lately I've been thinking of retiring cause I'm getting older. And I keep thinking of going back and finding a little house in Rhode Island.

Anne: Really?

Peter: Yeah.

Anne: Where in Rhode Island?

Peter: Well, I have a house in Riverside, but it's kind of falling down, I'd need to get something else. But you know, somewhere near the water, uh West Barrington, Connecticut Point or, I don't know. It's just a thought. I'm not. . .I don't know what the heck I would do if I stopped working. I just don't know what I would do. I've never not worked. I've just always worked, or I have been since 1962. I don't know what the heck I would do with myself. I've been offered a teaching job in theater, in teaching theatre here in New York, with the Stella Adler Studio, which is a famous old acting studio. And, it's a possibility I might incorporate teaching into my life. Maybe, but not for a couple of years. I'm just gonna work in theatre just for a few more years. See how far I can run this monkey up the flagpole. (Pause) I'm tired.

Anne: Yeah.