Harold Pinter in 1963
I hadn’t planned on posting anything further on Ellen Stewart’s death last week, but in reading Stephen Bottoms’ Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement I found the following delightful anecdote too good to resist. It says a good deal about both Stewart’s and Pinter’s rather laissez-faire attitude to the institutional conventions of theatre, and particularly their disdain of officialdom and stultifying bureaucracy:
The most noteworthy production [of the first year of La Mama] was the American premiere of Harold Pinter’s one-act play The Room. … Set in a lowly bed-sitting room, which is essentially the play’s central character and subject, Pinter’s play must have benefited atmospherically from being presented within the claustrophobic La Mama basement. … The play, however, was presented without licensing permission: Stewart assumed the production was so low-profile that nobody would care, but her transgression prompted a surprise visit from Pinter himself. In New York for the off-Broadway premiere of The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, he had been interviewed for the Village Voice by Michael Smith, who mentioned the La Mama production to him. Pinter promptly went to the Ninth Street basement with his American agent to demand that performances of The Room be halted forthwith. Yet when the agent angrily informed Stewart that nobody, not even the author, could mount a Pinter play in New York without her permission, the indignant playwright decided to prove her wrong, granting La Mama performance rights on the spot.
More to say about off-off-Broadway and Bottoms’ fine book during the next week, but for now I’d like to note that the Village Voice critic mentioned above, Michael Smith, who played a large role in the writing of Playing Underground, still maintains a Web site on which he briefly discusses his tenure there.
A great anecdote from a very, very good book. The same story is also recounted (in a little more detail) in “Off-Off Broadway Explosion” by David A. Crespy. As Pinter entered La Mama ( a space he was later to describe as a “stinky hole”) he loudly demanded to see this “La Mama woman” who dared produce his play without permission. Ellen Stewart pleaded her case before Pinter, his agent, and Pinter’s wife, Vivien Merchant. Pinter agreed to allow the La Mama production to continue until a proper commercial production could come together. Pinter’s agent was, as could be expected, aghast that Pinter would unilaterally decide to allow such a thing. But, Pinter had already made up his mind and was unmovable. Pinter would only later admit to the press back in Britain that his American debut had actually occurred at La Mama, and that he considered himself a “La Mama playwright.”