The White Barn Theatre was a theater founded in 1947 by actress and producer
Lucille Lortel
Lucille Lortel (née Wadler, December 16, 1900 – April 4, 1999) was an American actress, artistic director, and theatrical producer. In the course of her career Lortel produced or co-produced nearly 500 plays, five of which were nominated for ...
on her property in
Norwalk, Connecticut
, image_map = Fairfield County Connecticut incorporated and unincorporated areas Norwalk highlighted.svg
, mapsize = 230px
, map_caption = Location in Fairfield County, Connecticut, Fairfield County and ...
. The theater premiered numerous plays by established playwrights that often continued to successful
Broadway
Broadway may refer to:
Theatre
* Broadway Theatre (disambiguation)
* Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
** Broadway (Manhattan), the street
**Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...
and
Off-Broadway
An off-Broadway theatre is any professional theatre venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, inclusive. These theatres are smaller than Broadway theatres, but larger than off-off-Broadway theatres, which seat fewer tha ...
runs.
Lortel founded the theater on her estate at the corner of Cranbury Road and Newtown Avenue. The property is in both Norwalk and
Westport, Connecticut
Westport is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States, along the Long Island Sound within Connecticut's Gold Coast. It is northeast of New York City. The town had a population of 27,141 according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
History
...
, with about in Norwalk and in Westport."Governor Rell Presents $6.8 Million for Open Space Grants in 24 Communities" State of Connecticut, Governor M. Jodi Rell Papers. November 17, 2005. Retrieved June 27, 2011. The location was sometimes referred to as Westport, which has more theater than Norwalk. Lortel later donated much of her memorabilia to the
Westport Public Library
The Westport Library is a public library in the town of Westport, Connecticut, established on February 4, 1886, by members of the Westport Reading-Room and Library Association.
Morris Ketchum Jesup, born in 1830 to a country doctor, amassed a ...
.
The theater was created from an old horse barn on the estate, and seated 148. Lortel's aim was to present unusual and experimental plays, promote new playwrights, composers, actors, directors and designers, and to help established artists develop new directions outside of commercial theater.Biography Lucille Lortel Foundation. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
Plays
Plays produced at the White Barn include:
*
George Wolf
George Wolf (August 12, 1777March 11, 1840) was the seventh governor of Pennsylvania from 1829 to 1835. On June 29, 1888, he was recognized as the "father of the public-school system" in Pennsylvania by the erection of a memorial gateway at E ...
and Lawrence Bearson's ''Ivory Tower'', featuring
Eva Marie Saint
Eva Marie Saint (born July 4, 1924) is an American actress of film, theatre and television. In a career spanning over 70 years, she has won an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award, alongside nominations for a Golden Globe Award and two Brit ...
(1947)
*
Seán O'Casey
Seán O'Casey ( ga, Seán Ó Cathasaigh ; born John Casey; 30 March 1880 – 18 September 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.
...
's ''
Red Roses for Me
''Red Roses for Me'' is the debut studio album by the London-based band the Pogues, released on 15 October 1984. It was produced by Stan Brennan, who had managed the Nipple Erectors/The Nips and Rocks Off Records shop in London.
Overview
''Red ...
'' (1948)
*
Hugo Weisgall
Hugo David Weisgall (October 13, 1912 – March 11, 1997) was an American composer and conductor, known chiefly for his opera and vocal music compositions. He was born in Ivančice, Moravia (then part of Austria-Hungary, later in his childhood ...
's ''
The Stronger
''The Stronger'' ( sv, Den starkare) is an 1889 Swedish play by August Strindberg.
The play consists of only one scene. The characters are two women: a "Mrs. X", who speaks, and a "Miss. Y", who is silent, an example of a dramatic monologue.
I ...
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco (; born Eugen Ionescu, ; 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco inst ...
's ''
The Chairs
''The Chairs'' (french: Les Chaises) is a one-act play by Eugène Ionesco, described as an absurdist "tragic farce". It was first performed in Paris in 1952.
Setting
A high tower surrounded by water.
Characters
*Old Man, aged 95
*Old Woman, age ...
'' (1957)
* Archibald MacLeish's ''This Music Crept by Me Upon the Waters'' (1959)
*
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III ( ; March 12, 1928 – September 16, 2016) was an American playwright known for works such as ''The Zoo Story'' (1958), '' The Sandbox'' (1959), ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' (1962), '' A Delicate Balance'' (1966) ...
's ''Fam and Yam'' (1960)
*
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic expe ...
's ''
Embers
''Embers'' is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in 1957. First broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959, the play won the RAI prize at the Prix Italia awards later that year. Donald McWhinnie directed Jack ...
'' (1960)
*
Murray Schisgal
Murray Joseph Schisgal (November 25, 1926 – October 1, 2020) was an American playwright and screenwriter.
Life and career
Schisgal was born in Brooklyn, New York City. He was the son of Jewish immigrants, Irene (Sperling), a bank clerk, and Ab ...
's ''The Typists'' (1961)
*
Adrienne Kennedy
Adrienne Kennedy (born September 13, 1931) is an American playwright.Peterson, Jane T., and Suzanne Bennett. "Adrienne Kennedy". ''Women Playwrights of Diversity''. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. 201–205. She is best known for '' Funnyhous ...
's ''
The Owl Answers
''The Owl Answers'' is a one-act experimental play by Adrienne Kennedy. It premiered in 1965 at the White Barn Theatre in Westport, Connecticut one year after Kennedy's most well-known piece, the Obie Award-winning ''Funnyhouse of a Negro''. Sub ...
'' (1965)
*
Norman Rosten
Norman Rosten (January 1, 1913 – March 7, 1995) was an American poet, playwright, and novelist.
Life
Rosten was born to a Polish Jewish family in New York City and grew up in Hurleyville, New York. He was graduated from Brooklyn College and ...
's ''Come Slowly Eden'' (1966)
*
Paul Zindel
Paul Zindel Jr. (May 15, 1936 – March 27, 2003) was an American playwright, young adult novelist, and educator.
Early life
Zindel was born in Tottenville, Staten Island, New York, to Paul Zindel Sr., a policeman, and Betty Zindel, a nurse; h ...
's ''
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
''The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds'' is a play written by Paul Zindel, a playwright and science teacher. Zindel received the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the work.
Production ...
'' (1966)
*
Terrence McNally
Terrence McNally (November 3, 1938 – March 24, 2020) was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter.
Described as "the bard of American theater" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced," ...
's ''
Next
Next may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Film
* ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare
* ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage
* '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film
Lit ...
Armand Assante
Armand Anthony Assante Jr. (; born October 4, 1949) is an American actor. He played mobster John Gotti in the 1996 HBO television film '' Gotti'', Odysseus in the 1997 mini-series adaptation of Homer's ''The Odyssey'', Nietzsche in ''When ...
and
Lori March
Lori March (March 6, 1923 – March 19, 2013) was an American television actress. She was best known for her roles on daytime soap operas. Her obituary on the Television Academy's web site noted that she "was dubbed 'First Lady of Daytime Tele ...
(1969)
*
Ahmed Yacoubi
Ahmed ben Driss el Yacoubi (1928–1985) was a Moroccan painter and storyteller. He was born in Fez, Morocco.
Career
Yacoubi met the American composer and writer Paul Bowles in Fez in 1947, and later in Tangier. Yacoubi then began doing tran ...
's ''The Night Before Thinking'' (1974, produced by
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (La MaMa E.T.C.) is an Off-Off-Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, African-American theatre director, producer, and fashion designer. Located in Manhattan's East Village, the theatre began in the ...
)
* Paul Hunter's ''How Do You Live with Love'' (1975)
* Barbara Wersba's ''The Dream Watcher'', featuring
Eva Le Gallienne
Eva Le Gallienne (January 11, 1899 – June 3, 1991) was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne gave up her Broadway appearances to devote herself to founding t ...
(1975)
*
June Havoc
June Havoc (born Ellen Evangeline Hovick; November 8, 1912 – March 28, 2010) was a Canadian American actress, dancer, stage director and memoirist.
Havoc was a child vaudeville performer under the tutelage of her mother Rose Thompson Hovick, ...
's ''Nuts for the Underman'' (1977)
* David Allen's ''Cheapside'', featuring
Cherry Jones
Cherry Jones (born November 21, 1956) is an American actress known for her roles on screen and stage. She has received various accolades for her performances in television and theatre including three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, thr ...
(Lortel later co-produced this play at
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
's
Half Moon Theatre
The Half Moon Theatre Company was formed in 1972 in a rented synagogue in Alie Street, Whitechapel, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. ''Half Moon Passage'' was the name of a nearby alley. The founders, Michael Irving and Maurice Colbourn ...
)
*
Lynn Rogoff
Lynn Rogoff is an American film and television producer, playwright, screenwriter, theatre director, and academic. She is best known for writing the 1979 Emmy Award winning documentary film ''No Maps on My Taps'' and the 1983 play ''Love, Ben L ...
's ''Love, Ben Love, Emma'' starring Penny Allen (1984)
* Douglas Scott's ''Mountain'' (1988)
*
Jerome Kilty
Jerome Timothy Kilty (June 24, 1922 in Baltimore, Maryland – September 6, 2012) was an American actor and playwright. He wrote ''Dear Liar: A Comedy of Letters.'' He worked extensively on the stage, both in the United States and abroad.
Career
K ...
's ''
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins; September 14, 1879September 6, 1966), also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control ...
: Unfinished Business'', starring
Eileen Heckart
Anna Eileen Heckart ( Herbert; March 29, 1919 – December 31, 2001) was an American stage and screen actress whose career spanned nearly 60 years.
Early life
Heckart was born Anna Eileen Herbert in Columbus, Ohio. The daughter of Esther (), w ...
(1989)
Transfers to Off-Broadway:
* Fatima Dike's ''Glasshouse''
* Casey Kurtti's ''Catholic School Girls''
* Diane Kagan's ''Marvelous Grey''
*
Hugh Whitemore
Hugh John Whitemore (16 June 1936 – 17 July 2018) was an English playwright and screenwriter.
Biography
Whitemore studied for the stage at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he was taught by Peter Barkworth, then on the staff at RADA ...
's ''The Best of Friends''
Transfers to Broadway:
*
Cy Coleman
Cy Coleman (born Seymour Kaufman; June 14, 1929 – November 18, 2004) was an American composer, songwriter, and jazz pianist.
Life and career
Coleman was born Seymour Kaufman in New York City, United States, to Eastern European Jewish parents ...
and
A.E. Hotchner
Aaron Edward Hotchner (June 28, 1917 – February 15, 2020) was an American editor, novelist, playwright, and biographer.Welcome to the Club'' (premiered at White Barn as ''Let 'Em Rot'')
*
Lanford Wilson
Lanford Wilson (April 13, 1937March 24, 2011) was an American playwright. His work, as described by ''The New York Times'', was "earthy, realist, greatly admired ndwidely performed."Margalit Fox, Fox, Margalit"Lanford Wilson, Pulitzer Prize-Wi ...
's ''Redwood Curtain'' (later on television as a
Hallmark Hall of Fame
''Hallmark Hall of Fame'', originally called ''Hallmark Television Playhouse'', is an anthology program on American television, sponsored by Hallmark Cards, a Kansas City-based greeting card company. The longest-running prime-time series in t ...
1995
production
Production may refer to:
Economics and business
* Production (economics)
* Production, the act of manufacturing goods
* Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services)
* Production as a stati ...
)
*
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hug ...
' ''Shakespeare in Harlem''
* Dos Pesso's ''USA''
*
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980) was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel ''Ship of Fools'' was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her sho ...
's ''
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
''Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels'' () is a volume of three short novels by American author Katherine Anne Porter published by Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1939. The collected novels are "Old Mortality," " Noon Wine" and the eponymous ...
''
*
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the thre ...
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' about an event at the White Barn,
Alvin Klein
Alvin Klein (c. 1938 in Brownsville, Brooklyn – February 28, 2009) was a theater critic for ''The New York Times'' for more than 15 years, publishing nearly 3,500 reviews and other articles.
Early life and education
Klein was raised in Fl ...
wrote that the August 25, 1996 gala, exhibition opening, stage performances, and reception was "the night of the year... memories are made of this!"
At another gala a year later (August 31, 1997), in celebration of the theater's fifty years and Lortel's career as a producer, Klein wrote in the ''Times'', " er the years, Ms. Lortel — now in her 90s — has often been quoted as saying she won't take on another White Barn season. After Sunday's celebration she could be overheard inviting two well-known performers to 'put something together and come up to The Barn next summer.'"
The Dublin Players of Ireland performed at the theater for several seasons with
Milo O'Shea
Milo Donal O'Shea (2 June 1926 – 2 April 2013) was an Irish people, Irish actor. He was twice nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performances in ''Staircase (play), Staircase'' (1968) and ''Mass Appeal (play), Mass A ...
.
On September 26, 1992, the White Barn Theater Museum was created by renovating a small area of the theater formerly used for storage.
After Lortel's death
Lortel bequeathed the property to her foundation, which later proposed building a
housing development
A housing estate (or sometimes housing complex or housing development) is a group of homes and other buildings built together as a single development. The exact form may vary from country to country.
Popular throughout the United States ...
and a school. This proposal was opposed by the Save Cranbury Association."Save Cranbury Association" Save Cranbury Association, Retrieved April 17, 2007.
In 2005, the
State of Connecticut
Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York (state), New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the ...
granted $450,000 to the Norwalk Land Conservation Trust to help preserve the property, which contains a pond, fields, wetlands, and woodland. Stony Brook, a Class A stream, runs through the property into a nearby
aquifer
An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing, permeable rock, rock fractures, or unconsolidated materials (gravel, sand, or silt). Groundwater from aquifers can be extracted using a water well. Aquifers vary greatly in their characterist ...
.
In 2006, the property was sold for $4.8 million to 78 Cranberry Road LLC, according to ''Westport Now'' magazine.Jennifer Connic "White Barn Theatre Property Sold for $4.8 Million" WestportNOW.com (May 30, 2006). Retrieved June 27, 2011
In 2008, the property was purchased by the Connecticut Friends School in nearby Wilton. The school planned to expand their campus onto the property. The Connecticut Friends School was not able to raise the money for their expansion.
Jim Fieber of Special Properties II submitted a plan in 2015, to build a 21-home conservation development on the property. Fieber subsequently amended the plan to a 15-home conservation development.
As of 2015, the Norwalk Zoning Commission was still considering the proposal, including demolition of the theater. Local historians were attempting to save visual art they believe to have been done in the theater by
Geoffrey Holder
Geoffrey Lamont Holder (August 1, 1930 – October 5, 2014) was a Trinidadian-American actor, dancer, musician, and artist. He was a principal dancer for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet before his film career began in 1957 with an appearance in ' ...
.
The White Barn Theatre was demolished July 17, 2017, after the most recent two-year effort to save it from development.