Through the Looking Glass with André Gregory

I’m delighted to report that André Gregory (b. 1934) is still with us as I write this, a hale and hearty 89.

The Mad Marchioness and I had a delightful time re-watching My Dinner with André (1981) during the pandemic and I think it was partially responsible for reawakening the spirit of investigation and articulation that informs this recent gathering of related posts about the theatre. For me, that strange movie is like taking your own temperature. When I first saw it not long after it came out, I related to Wallace Shawn (as I think most people do) and thought Gregory principally a figure of fun. A few years later, fresh from theatre school, intoxicated with the ideas of Artaud, Grotowski, Genetet al, I indignantly took Gregory’s part. And finally watching it a few months ago, I enjoyed it as I believe it was meant to be enjoyed, with a spirit of balance. For those who don’t know this famous sui generis of the cinema, it’s a sort of salon-like Socratic dialogue about the role of theatre in modern society, directed by Louis Malle. The men are playing themselves, but in a heightened way, shaped by both for maximum entertainment value. Shawn the playwright is in evidence to the practiced ear. And in the tradition of most great theatre directors, Gregory is a spell-binding raconteur. He gets on a roll and you get swept up in it and you go, “Yeah! Yeah!” and then finally “Wait — what?!” as he goes too far. Artistic Directors, the great ones anyway, possess the same bag of tricks as cult leaders. They have to. Otherwise how could they convince actors to do all those crazy things?

The missing piece of the film, though, is some kind of grounding in who Gregory IS. You can extract a fair piece of it from his own ramblings during the movie, but I do think general audiences, even well-educated ones, across America might appreciate the film more if it were less bewildering to them from the outset. France, where Malle is from, doesn’t have the same unhealthy cultural bifurcation that America possesses. This state of affairs is what I’ve spent my whole professional life trying to talk about and address. I often feel like Buster Keaton, with a foot on each of two disconnected train cars racing down the track in The General. And it is worse by orders of magnitude now than it was forty years ago. Most Americans have never BEEN in a theatre, or heard of its key artists and practitioners. I was sitting in an audience at a production of one of my plays about 15 years ago, and overheard a conversation of young people (young adults, not children) who seemed bewildered about the unfamiliar experience of being in a theatre and watching a play. Once I was talking to my brother, who possesses a couple of graduate degrees, and discovered that he had never heard of Bertolt Brecht, or for that matter several key early 20th century Russian theatre artists, despite being beyond fluent in the Russian language and encyclopedic on the topic of Russian history. I mean, we are in SILOS today. So…this is to impress upon you that Gregory is and was an important guy in the theatre, and it’s more than possible, it’s downright LIKELY to achieve that in America without mainstream audiences ever having heard your name before.

Gregory was a founding figure in both the regional theatre movement and off-off Broadway. Educated at Harvard, he produced the American premiere of Jean Genet’sThe Blacks at St Marks Church in 1961, the longest running non-musical play at the time (it ran for over a decade). Directed by Gene Frankel, today it’s considered legendary for its cast, which included James Earl Jones,Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett Jr,Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Helen Martin, and Maya Angelou. In 1963 he founded the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, two members of which, George Bartenieff and Crystal Field, went on to start Theater for the New City. He was also one of the founders of the Seattle Rep, and was involved in L.A.’s Inner City Cultural Center in Watts, shortly after the riots. His only Broadway show, Leda Had a Little Swan closed before it opened in 1968. He then started The Manhattan Project, which produced a devised, Grotowski-influenced production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that opened in 1970 and played for seven years. Based on improvisations, the show was rehearsed over a period of many months. Wallace Shawn is said to have attended every single performance of this production. In 1975 Gregory directed Shawn’s play Our Late Night, the first of many by the playwright he would direct over the decades. Shortly after this, Gregory experienced the European adventures he describes in My Dinner with André, including the crisis he articulates, the doubts, and his worries about the future of this ancient and ritualistic art form in an era of snowballing corporate Fascism. The conversation in My Dinner with André is, if anything, more relevant today than it was then.

The irony of course is that Gregory sort of drank the Kool-Aid himself. Not his own Kool-Aid, for he is definitely the kind of guy who dispenses Kool-Aid, though his is more hallucinogenic than fatal. But, like Shawn, Gregory became a character actor in Hollywood movies. He had originally studied to be an actor, had been involved with Neighborhood Playhouse, the Actors Studio, and the Berliner Ensemble. He has an elegant, mesmerizing presence (I’d cast Adrien Brody to play him in a bio-pic). Movies you can see Gregory in include Author! Author! (1982) with Al Pacino, Protocol (1984) with Goldie Hawn, Peter Weir’sThe Mosquito Coast (1986), Some Girls (1988) Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), The Linguini Incident (1991), Demolition Man (1993) with Sylvester Stallone and Wesly Snipes,The Shadow (1994) with Alec Baldwin, and Woody Allen’sCelebrity (1998). It can’t have escaped your attention that plenty of those movies are, as my wife puts it so eloquently, “bad and stupid”.

But not all of it. He also worked with Shawn and Malle again on Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), featuring aChekhov adaptation by David Mamet, and he appeared with Shawn in a 2013 film adaptation of Ibsen’sThe Master Builder directed by Jonathan Demme. He was the subject of his wife Cindy Klein’s 2013 film  Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner. In 2020, his book (written with Todd London) This is Not My Memoir was released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (the same folks who published my first book.). Also don’t miss Sara Farrington’s interview with him in her 2022 book The Lost Conversation.

For much more on this important avatar of the American arts, go to his website here.

As I say, there couldn’t be a better time to watch or re-watch My Dinner with André — on a bill perhaps with Andy Kaufman’s 1983 My Dinner with Blassie, and Peter Dinklage’s My Dinner with Herve (2018). Now THERE’S a uniquely American trilogy.