Women of the Regional Theater Movement in America

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Women of the Regional Theater Movement in America

American producers and directors whose regional theaters, renowned for their high level of quality and commitment, spawned the nationwide movement that revolutionized theater and cultural life in America.

Fichandler, Zelda (1924—). American theatrical producer and director who co-founded the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C . Pronunciation: ZEL-da FICH- and-ler. Born Zelda Diamond on September 18, 1924, in Boston, Massachusetts; daughter of Harry Diamond (a scientist and inventor) and Ida (Epstein) Diamond; Cornell University, B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) in Russian language and literature, 1945; George Washington University, M.A. in dramatic arts, 1950; married Thomas C. Fichandler (an executive director of Arena Stage until his retirement in 1986), on February 17, 1946; children: two sons.

Awards:

honorary doctorates from Hood College (1962), Georgetown University (1974), George Washington University (1975), and Smith College (1977); Margo Jones Award (1971); Washingtonian of the Year Award (1972); Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Dramatic Arts (1985); Helen Hayes Award for best direction of The Crucible (1988).

Spent her early years in Washington, D.C., until moving to Ithaca, New York, for college; co-founded the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. (1950); served as producing director of Arena Stage (1952–94); received a Ford Foundation director's grant (1959); received grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to create a training program for her acting company (1965); involved with the founding of the Theater Communications Group (1961); served as delegate to the International Theater Institute Conference in Moscow (1974); served as visiting professor at the University of Texas in Austin and Boston University (1970s); assumed position of artistic director of the Graduate Acting Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (1984—); was artistic director of the Acting Company (1991–94).

Selected writings:

"Theaters or Institutions?" in Theater 3: The American Theater 1969–1970 (NY: Scribner, 1970, pp. 104–116); "A Humanist View of the Theater," in Performing Arts Journal (Vol. 7, no. 2, 1983, pp. 88–99); "Our Town in Our Times," in American Theater (October 1991, pp. 52–53, 143).

Plays directed:

over 50 during her tenure at Arena Stage, including the American premiere of Agatha Christie 's The Mousetrap (1955); Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit the Wind, which toured to Moscow and Leningrad (1973); American premiere of Chingiz Aitmatov and Kaltai Mukhamedzhanov's Soviet play The Ascent of Mount Fuji (1975); Arthur Miller's After the Fall toured to the Hong Kong Arts Festival (1980); Arthur Miller's The Crucible performed at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem (1987).

Jones, Margo (1911–1955). American theater director and producer who founded one of the nation's earliest professional regional theaters, Theater '47, in Dallas, Texas . Born Margaret Virginia Jones on December 12, 1911, in Livingston, Texas; died in Dallas, Texas, on July 24, 1955; daughter of Richard Harper (a lawyer) and Martha Pearl (Collins) Jones; Texas State College for Women in Denton, B.A. in speech, 1932, and M.S. in philosophy and education, 1933; postgraduate studies at Southwestern School of Theater, 1933–34, and Pasadena Playhouse, 1934; never married; no children.

Awards:

achievement award from the Dallas City Council (1954); the Margo Jones Award, established in her honor (1961) by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee to recognize those who, like Jones, demonstrate exemplary commitment to the production of new plays.

Spent most of her youth in Livingston until moving to Denton to enter college; worked as assistant director of the Houston Federal Theater Project (1935); founded the Houston Community Players (1936); served as faculty member in the drama department of the University of Texas at Austin (1942–43); was recipient of a Rockefeller fellowship (1944); founded Theater '47 in Dallas (1947).

Publications:

Theater-in-the-Round (Rinehart and Company, 1951).

Plays directed:

over 50, including several of Tennessee Williams' early plays, You Touched Me (1943), The Purification (1944), and the Broadway premieres of The Glass Menagerie (1945, co-director) and Summer and Smoke (1948); and dozens of world premieres, such as William Inge's Farther off from Heaven (1947), Dorothy Parker and Ross Evans' The Coast of Illyria (1949), and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit the Wind (1955).

Vance, Nina (1914–1980). American theater director and producer who founded the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas . Born Nina Eloise Whittington on October 22, 1914, in Yoakum, Texas; died in Houston, Texas, on February 18, 1980; only daughter of Calvin Perry Whittington (a cotton broker) and Minerva (DeWitt) Whittington; Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, B.A. (cum laude) in public speaking, 1935; postgraduate work at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, 1935, and the American Academy of Dramatic Art and Columbia University, 1936; married Milton Vance (a lawyer), on August 30, 1941 (divorced 1960); no children.

Awards:

honorary doctorates from Southern College of Fine Arts (1960) and the University of St. Thomas (1969); Distinguished Alumna Award from Texas Christian University (1964); Houston YMCA'sWoman of the Year (1965); inducted into Phi Beta, the national professional fraternity for women in music and speech (1966); recognized by the American Theater Association as a pioneer in the field of resident professional theater (1975).

Spent her youth in Yoakum, Texas, before moving to Fort Worth to enter college; was founder and artistic director of the Houston Jewish Community Center's Players Guild (1945–47); was founder and artistic director of the Alley Theater (1947–80); received a director's grant from the Ford Foundation (1959); was active in the Theater Communications Group (TCG), first as a member of its advisory board and later on its executive committee (1961–71); was invited by President John F. Kennedy to serve on the advisory committee for the proposed National Center for the Performing Arts (1961); was appointed to the U.S. Advisory Commission on International Education and Cultural Affairs (1963); received a director's grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (1974); hosted the second Conference of Volunteers of Professional Resident Theaters (1975); invited by the U.S. Department of State, the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and the Russian Copyright Agency to join a delegation of American theater directors to tour Leningrad and Moscow (1977); produced the American premiere of Mikhail Roschin's Echelon, directed by Galina Volchek of Moscow's Sovremenik Theater, the first instance of such collaboration between a U.S. and Soviet theater (1978).

Plays directed:

over 125 during the course of her career, including the highly acclaimed Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms (1949) and The Iceman Cometh (1959), and Edward Albee's Tiny Alice (1976); world premieres included Ronald Alexander's Season with Ginger (1950), James Lee's Career (1956), Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1965), and Shirley Lauro 's The Contest (1975).

Margo Jones

While the young Margo Jones—with help from her sister and brothers—created plays in the family barn during the 1920s, virtually no professional theater existed in the United States outside New York City. Most road companies from the 19th century had long since folded, and movie screens had replaced the stages where live actors had once performed in cities across America. Professional theater meant "Broadway," named after the street that runs through the theater district in New York, and Broadway meant a certain kind of theater: commercial ventures created to make a profit, not necessarily created with the goal of making great art.

Margo Jones envisioned a different kind of professional theater: one that was truly regional, where the people of every city in America with a population of more than 100,000 could enjoy quality live performances; one that was composed of a company of theater artists who worked together for at least an entire season rather than the one-time-only structure relied on in New York; one that was devoted to producing a combination of classic plays and new scripts; and one that embraced an avant-garde style of production Jones dubbed "theater-in-the-round." Known to many as "the dynamo," Margo Jones was just the person to lead the way; along with Nina Vance and Zelda Fichandler, she stood at the vanguard of a new idea for theater in America.

Born in 1911 in the sleepy little East Texas town of Livingston (population 2,000), Jones did not see a professional theatrical production until she was 19—a performance of Cyrano de Bergerac in Fort Worth. But after watching her lawyer-father at work creating real-life drama in the courtroom, Jones was smitten with the theater, and knew by age 11 that she desired to direct plays. She called the experiments created out in the barn her first directing ventures. When she enrolled at Texas State College for Women in 1927, Jones claimed that she was the only drama major interested in directing; everyone else seemed bent on acting careers.

During her undergraduate years, Jones ravenously devoured plays, claiming that she read a play a day, minimum, then and for the rest of her life. After receiving a B.A. in 1932, Jones entered Texas State College's one-year graduate program. Because the college did not offer a graduate degree in drama, Jones focused her studies on educational psychology, but the topic of her thesis proves that her interest in theater never waned. Its title was "The Abnormal Ways out of Emotional Conflict as Reflected in the Dramas of Henrik Ibsen," a study of three strong female characters including Ibsen's most famous heroine, Hedda Gabler.

The very day Jones received her M.S. in August 1933, she visited the Southwestern School of Theater in Dallas where she spent almost a year taking all kinds of classes. She then enrolled in the 1934 Pasadena Playhouse Summer School in southern California. As the highlight of her experience there, Jones co-directed the final play of the summer, Enid Bagnold 's The Chalk Garden. Through a friend, she then landed the opportunity to direct several plays at California's Ojai Community Theater, including Hedda Gabler. In 1935, she spent several months traveling around the world as the assistant to a wealthy woman, and saw plays in such exotic places as Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore. After such an abundance of experience, Jones felt ready to return to Texas and build her theater dream at home.

In the fall of 1935, Jones joined the Houston Federal Theater as assistant director. The Federal Theater Project (FTP), founded in 1935 and funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), had been created to provide jobs for thousands of unemployed theater artists as a part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Although the Houston arm of the FTP lasted only six months, Jones met many theater people and found herself at home in Houston—at least temporarily. In 1936, she set sail again, this time to Europe and the Moscow Art Theater Festival, which she wrote about in articles for the Houston Chronicle.

When she returned to Houston this time, Jones took a job with the Houston Recreation Department teaching playground directors around the city how to create plays with children. She quickly took advantage of her connection with the recreation department, asking if she might use—free of charge—a small park building with a stage to produce plays for adults. With permission granted, Jones announced the formation of the Houston Community Players, and in December 1936, its first production, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, premiered. By the fall of 1937, having directed three more successful shows for the troupe, Jones convinced the Houston Recreation Department to use the proceeds to pay her salary and production costs. Thus, she was finally paid to produce and direct plays full time. In the two years that followed, Jones produced and directed both contemporary and classical plays, including Shakespeare's Macbeth, Noel Coward's Design for Living, Molière's The Learned Ladies, and Maxwell Anderson's High Tor.

In the spring of 1939, she attended a community-theater conference in Washington, D.C., and saw a production performed in a hotel ballroom in which the stage was placed in the center of the room with seats for the audience surrounding it on all sides. Theater-in-the-round, also known as arena staging, soon became one of Jones' signatures as a director. She realized that theater-in-the-round had several advantages: it was relatively inexpensive because it did not require a lot of scenery; it created an intimate environment because the audience was in close proximity to the stage; and it allowed Jones to convert nontraditional spaces into theaters without much fuss. Her Community Players had taken a hiatus each summer because the Houston heat prevented them from using their traditional, proscenium theater. Jones simply persuaded Houston hotels to rent her their airconditioned meeting rooms, and by the summer of 1939, she was directing plays year round.

The outbreak of World War II meant a shift in focus for all Americans, and such leisure activities as community theater were sacrificed for the war effort. Jones lost over 100 volunteers to the armed services, and in the fall of 1942, she decided the Houston Community Players must close. She taught in the drama department of the University of Texas at Austin from 1942 to 1943, continuing to direct productions in the round.

About this time, Jones conceived her idea for a new theater: a professional company dedicated to producing both new plays and classics in repertory, which meant that several different plays would be produced on a rotating basis. She also began to articulate her belief in decentralization:

establishing professional theaters all across the country's hinterlands to counterbalance their current predominance in New York City. Thus, the idea of a "regional" theater was born—a professional theater for every region of the United States, not confined just to Broadway.

Jones met the influential drama editor and critic of the Dallas Morning News, John Rosen-field, and proposed her plan. He suggested Dallas as the site and introduced Jones to many Dallas citizens who also supported the idea. While she continued to develop her Dallas theater plan and garner support, Jones also accepted directing jobs.

Neither the building, nor the organization, nor the finest plays and actors in the whole world will help you create a fine theater if you have no consistent approach of your own, a true philosophy of the theater.
—Margo Jones

In 1943, she had directed Tennessee Williams' You Touched Me at the Pasadena Playhouse; she returned there in 1944 to direct his work again. Jones had developed a zealous respect and deep affection for the young playwright, and this time she directed his one-act play, The Purification. She received notification that she had received a prestigious Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study the American theater scene and seek potential artists to join her company. But another golden opportunity created a dilemma for Jones. Tennessee Williams was about to have his big break on Broadway with a play that was to become a modern classic: The Glass Menagerie. He invited Jones to co-direct the play with Eddie Dowling, who also played the lead character, Tom, in the production. She requested a leave of absence from her fellowship for the experience of working on Broadway.

When the play opened in 1945 to the accolades of critics and audiences, Jones returned to Dallas more determined than ever to forge ahead with her plan. She approached Mrs. Eugene McDermott , a local philanthropist and former member of the defunct Dallas Little Theater. When Jones described her concept of a "permanent, professional, repertory, native theater in Dallas," McDermott responded by donating $10,000 to the cause. Jones articulated a well-conceived operating plan that included a board of directors, season subscriptions, status as a nonprofit organization, and the preparation of a budget designed by a business manager. Her outline for success would become the prototype for dozens of professional theaters that followed hers in the years to come—including those of Nina Vance and Zelda Fichandler.

After a long search for a suitable building, Jones found what she wanted on the grounds of Fair Park, a short drive from downtown Dallas. In just two months, she supervised its conversion into a theater-in-the-round, and on June 3, 1947, her Theater '47 was inaugurated with William Inge's drama Farther off from Heaven (which later received critical and commercial success under the new title Dark at the Top of the Stairs).

For the next eight years, Jones championed the work of unknown playwrights who were struggling for recognition. Her Theater '47, which changed its name to correspond with the current year, reflecting Jones' philosophy "to remain contemporary at all times," became the spawning ground for six plays that were later produced on Broadway. The most memorable of these, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit the Wind, which was based on the (in)famous Scopes monkey trial, also succeeded as a major motion picture.

In a mere ten years, between 1945 and 1955, Jones produced and/or directed about 100 plays, many of which also reflected her commitment to the classics. She expanded her season from an initial 10 weeks to 30 and steadily increased the number of plays offered. At national theater conferences, Jones continued to preach her belief in a regional professional theater as well as her partiality to arena staging. She was, indeed, a "Texas Tornado," as Tennessee Williams claimed.

In July 1955, a freak set of circumstances claimed Margo Jones' life. One evening, as she often did, Jones settled down on her living-room carpet to read from the stacks of new scripts that sat piled around her. That same day her carpet had been professionally cleaned using carbon tetrachloride. Jones fell asleep on the carpet, inhaling the toxic chemical fumes, and 11 days later, on July 24, 1955, she died from their fatal effects on her liver and kidney. Jones' unexpected death at the age of 43 sent a tremor through the theater community around the country, for her dynamic personality and fervent belief in the theater as a cultural institution had influenced hundreds of people. Jones was the visionary who led what historian Joseph Wesley Zeigler aptly called a "theater revolution."

Nina Vance

Nina Vance was also a revolutionary. She shared Margo Jones' vision for a national network of professional theaters as well as her Texas roots. Born in 1914 in another small Texas town called Yoakum, located on its southeastern plains, Vance, too, felt her calling to the theater at a young age. At six, she was enraptured by elocution lessons and made her formal theatrical debut as a buttercup in elementary school. Vance also recalled playing a "dope fiend" in her first Yoakum High School production, which was followed by many other parts. When she arrived in Fort Worth to attend Texas Christian University (TCU) in 1931, Vance knew she wanted to study theater.

She graduated cum laude from TCU in 1935, and spent the following summer taking classes at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles—with the pipe dream of being in the movies. After landing only one part as a crowd-scene extra, Vance returned to Yoakum at the end of the summer to her first teaching job. But teaching speech at the local grade school did not hold her interest for long; she was off again, this time to New York City. She enrolled for the 1936 spring term at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. Although she took acting classes, Vance claimed that she learned more observing people on the streets of New York than through any of her formal training. After extending her stay through the summer, taking continuing-education classes for teachers at Columbia University, Vance returned once again to Yoakum. She taught speech and drama classes at Yoakum High School and there began her career as a director. After three years of teaching to her credit and the directing experience of approximately 25 high-school plays behind her, Vance turned her aspirations eastward—toward Houston.

When Vance arrived in Houston in the fall of 1939, its "cow-town" image was fading. That summer Margo Jones and her Community Players had first used arena staging in a rented meeting room of the Rice Hotel. Vance embarked on several new ventures: teaching in the Houston public-school system, as well as her associations with both the Houston Little Theater and Jones' Community Players. Margo Jones was undoubtedly the most influential person in Vance's early theatrical career. For Margo, Vance ran box office, worked backstage, sewed costumes, swept floors, acted in 14 productions—and most important—observed Jones' professionalism and the merits of arena staging.

Three years after Jones left Houston in 1942, Vance found herself following the example of her mentor. In 1945, she agreed to direct plays for the Jewish Community Center, christening her group the Players Guild, and converted rented rooms into arena theaters. For two seasons, Vance directed a series of crowd-pleasing comedies before the Players Guild folded, its operating funds exhausted. Then, in the summer of 1947, she and her theater friends began talking. They wanted a theater of their own, a nonprofessional (i.e., nonpaying) theater with standards of professionalism—a theater devoted to plays that were serious and socially relevant, in addition to the occasional comedy. But where would they find this theater and how could they make it a reality?

Bob Altfeld, a former member of the Players Guild, had an idea. His wife Vivien Altfeld ran a dance studio by day; perhaps they could convert it into an arena theater by night if Vance would direct. Over 100 people attended the organizational meeting on October 3, 1947, that gave birth to the Alley Theater and declared Nina Vance its artistic director. Only a month later, Vance and her group of theater enthusiasts made their Houston debut with A Sound of Hunting

by Harry Brown, a drama about World War II. The theater had a hit, both critically and financially, and from the onset, the name Nina Vance became synonymous with the Alley Theater.

Vance directed six productions in a row before the Houston fire marshal condemned the tiny theater for lack of sufficient emergency exits. In February 1949, the Alley Theater opened its first permanent home, a converted fan factory just a few blocks away from the original dance studio, with Lillian Hellman 's The Children's Hour. For the next 19 years, Vance directed a total of 91 productions in-the-round on the Alley's famous "postage-stamp stage."

In many ways, Vance continued Jones' legacy in Houston. From its inception, the Alley Theater was established as a nonprofit organization. Vance's insistence on arena staging created an intimate theater experience for Houston audiences and kept production costs down because it required relatively little scenery. Vance also championed new plays; in the Alley's first decade alone, she produced six world premieres. Certainly her most famous discovery was the debut of Paul Zindel's script The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds in 1965, which later premiered on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1971. And although her personal style was not nearly as flamboyant as that of Margo Jones, people also gravitated to Nina Vance. Many accounts confirm that she was a charismatic leader, an excellent director, and a wise producer who brought locally acclaimed productions of previous "Broadway flops," as she put it, to Houston's theatergoers. Vance believed in producing plays of literary merit, and she succeeded in persuading her Houston audiences to believe in them, too.

Even during the Alley's fledgling years, Vance's vision of professionalism informed all her choices for the theater's future. As early as 1951, she insisted on paying some of her actors, and in 1954 the Alley officially became a fully professional theater by adhering to the regulations of Actors' Equity Association, the professional actors' union. This also meant maintaining a core group of actors—as Vance had done from the beginning—that became the foundation for a permanent company in residence. Thus, alongside Jones' Theater '54, the Alley became one of the country's first professional resident theaters.

But Vance was interested in more than a play factory—she wanted to establish an institution in the fabric of Houston's cultural life; she wanted to impart an appreciation and understanding of the theater as an art form. To that end, she created the Alley Academy, a training school for children. She initiated an apprentice program for young people desiring to pursue careers in the theater. She developed a speakers bureau to talk to clubs around the city. This steady expansion of the theater as a multifaceted educational institution became one of the distinguishing hallmarks of the professional nonprofit resident theater movement that was to emerge nationwide in the 1960s.

Nina Vance and her Alley Theater were at the forefront of the resident theater movement in the late 1950s. Her work came to the attention of W. McNeil Lowry, director of the Ford Foundation's Division of Humanities and the Arts. Lowry led a plan he called "organized philanthropy," which was the first private funding of the arts on a national scale in American history. The Alley, in particular, benefited from several programs Lowry established. In 1959, in addition to Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., it was one of four theaters to receive monies to support a company of actors for three consecutive seasons. In the same year, Nina Vance received a director's grant. After the success of these and other programs, the Ford Foundation's commitment to theater took a dramatic turn. On October 10, 1962, newspaper headlines around the country announced the largest sum ever awarded to theaters by any philanthropic institution: a total of $6.1 million to nine nonprofit theaters. The Alley received the largest sum of all: $2.1 million specified for the construction of a new building.

For the next six years, Vance continued to direct on her postage-stamp stage while she consulted with engineers and architects from around the country, planning the most state-of-the-art theater imaginable. During this time, she also lent her expertise to Lowry as an advisor and was instrumental in the early development of the Theater Communications Group (TCG), a nationwide networking organization founded by the Ford Foundation in 1961. Vance's was one of the earliest voices to articulate the philosophy and goals of a national theater community, and when the new Alley Theater opened on November 26, 1968, the news made headlines around the world.

In the decade that followed, Vance continued her work at the helm of the Alley Theater, although her primary role evolved from director to producer. The Alley became known as one of the first-generation theaters of the revolution, a model for others to follow. When Vance died of cancer in February 1980, her death was mourned by America's most respected theater professionals. Her Alley Theater lives on, a constant tribute to her search for excellence.

Zelda Fichandler

One of those theater artists who spoke at Vance's memorial service was Zelda Fichandler. Along with Margo Jones and Nina Vance, Fichandler has been dubbed by historian Dorothy B. Magnus a "matriarch of the regional theater." Indeed, Fichandler reigned for decades as a leading artist and advocate representing the professional nonprofit theater. Although her career parallels those of Jones and Vance, Fichandler's early history was quite different. A city girl born in Boston in 1924, Fichandler grew up in Washington, D.C. She studied Russian language and literature at Cornell University, from which she graduated with a B.A. in 1945. She then studied dramatic arts at George Washington University, receiving an M.A. in 1950.

Just a year before, Fichandler's mentor at George Washington University, Edward Mangum, conceived of the idea to start a professional theater in Washington. Fichandler found herself—a graduate student—on the ground floor of a plan to create the city's first theater-in-the-round. Crediting Margo Jones for her early interest in arena staging, Fichandler says it was Jones "who took the time to talk to a frightened young girl, to encourage her objectives and stiffen her right arm." In 1950, the converted Hippodrome movie house opened its doors as Arena Stage.

When Mangum accepted a position with another theater in 1952, Fichandler was left in charge. From 1952 until 1991, Zelda Fichandler held the position of producing director at Arena Stage. During her tenure, the theater steadily expanded. By 1955, it had outgrown its original 247-seat space, and a new 500-seat arena theater was built inside an old brewery, home to Arena Stage for the next six years. The year 1961 was a momentous one for Arena Stage. The company moved into a new building, designed by architect Harry Weese, on the shores of the Potomac River. This landmark structure was one of the very first modern regional theaters built specifically for that purpose, rather than converted from a preexisting building. Then in 1962, Arena Stage was named the recipient of $863,000 from the Ford Foundation to be used for the new theater's operating costs. Like the Alley Theater, Fichandler and her Arena Stage received many Ford Foundation grants over the years. Culminating a decade of expansion, the Kreeger Theater, housing a proscenium stage, was constructed adjacent to the existing arena building 1971. This complex is now home to Arena Stage.

Under Fichandler's leadership, Arena Stage achieved a reputation as one of America's foremost resident theaters. She shared Jones' and Vance's dedication to producing a combination of classics and new plays. Throughout her tenure, Fichandler produced many original works that went on to Broadway and national acclaim, including Moonchildren by Michael Weller, Indians by Arthur Kopit, and K2 by Patrick Meyers. She also introduced American audiences to foreign plays, such as Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Peter Barnes' The Ruling Class. But it was Fichandler's world premiere of Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope in 1967 that created a turning point for the resident theater in America. Starring James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander , the production received enormous critical acclaim, and Fichandler decided to move it to Broadway. The play then gained national recognition, including the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Since the commercial success of The Great White Hope, resident theaters have been established as the nation's most important spawning ground for new scripts.

Fichandler also pioneered international relations between the Arena Stage and foreign countries. In 1973, it was the first resident American company to tour the Soviet Union, with productions of Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Lawrence and Lee's Inherit the Wind. She directed the American premiere of the Soviet play The Ascent of Mount Fuji, by Chingiz Aitmatov and Kaltai Mukhamedzhanov, in 1975. In 1980, the company took Arthur Miller's After the Fall to the Hong Kong Arts Festival, and in 1987 Miller's The Crucible to the Israel Festival. This paralleled Fichandler's work at home: since the late 1960s, she sought to build a multicultural company of actors, bent on reflecting the diversity of her audiences in the composition of her productions. For these and many other strides made by the theater under Fichandler's aegis, in 1976 Arena Stage received the first Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award designated to a regional theater for outstanding achievement.

In addition to her impact on the American resident theater through her work at the Arena Stage, Fichandler has been a prominent figure in other parts of the American theatrical landscape, as well. Since 1984, she has held the position of artistic director of the Graduate Acting Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She has been actively involved with the Theater Communications Group since its inception in 1961 and also served on its executive committee. From 1991 to 1994, Fichandler acted as artistic director of the Acting Company, a touring ensemble composed of young actors and devoted to productions of the classics. Although she stepped down as producing director of Arena Stage in 1994, she continued her connection with the theater as an artistic associate, directing occasionally. During her remarkable career with Arena Stage, Fichandler produced more than 400 plays and directed more than 50 of them.

Spanning almost five decades, Fichandler's life in the theater is a testament to the work of her former colleagues Margo Jones and Nina Vance. They shared a philosophy that defined theater across America: an insistence on standards of professionalism; a desire to produce plays of literary merit; a belief in the importance of a resident ensemble company of actors; and a concept of the theater as a multifaceted, educational institution. Through their theaters and their work, these women made an indelible mark on contemporary theater practices and audiences in America.

sources:

Robinson, Alice M., Vera Mowry Roberts, and Milly S. Barranger, eds. Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary. NY: Greenwood, 1989.

Sheehy, Helen. Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989.

Stanley, N.J. "Nina Vance: Founder and Artistic Director of Houston's Alley Theatre, 1947–1980." Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1990.