Theatre Diplomacy During the Cold War: Volume 3: Cold War Theatrical Exchanges

By William Wadsworth and Jim O'Quinn

This multi-volume work began as a biography of Martha Wadsworth Coigney, who was a pioneering thought leader and advocate of internationalism in the American theatre during the cold war. It was expanded to include the contributions of her mentors and friends Rosamond Gilder, Maurice McClelland, Roger L. Stevens, and Ellen Stewart. Coigney served as director of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) of the United States for thirty-two years and President of ITI International from 1987-1995. The International Theatre Institute is an independent NGO devoted to the UNESCO mission of peace through mutual understanding. After World War II the organization sustained cultural exchange between artists on either side of the Iron Curtain, across religious divides and war zones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664159877

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Copyright © 2021 by William Wadsworth and Jim O’Quinn. 821818

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ISBN:      Softcover                              978-1-6641-5988-4

                Hardcover                            978-1-6641-5989-1

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Library of Congress Control Number:                          2021903686

Rev. date: 03/29/2021

CONTENTS

Chapter 24   ITI Backs Experimental Theatre

Chapter 25   Malgorzata Semil and Philip Arnoult on the New Theatre Festival (TNT), 1976: A Collaboration between the Theatre Project and ITI-USA

Chapter 26   The New Theatre Committee of ITI and Social Revolution:1977–83

Chapter 27   Gyorgy Lengyel: A Middle European Perspective on ITI during the Cold War

Chapter 28   An Interview with Joanne Pottlitzer: Theatre of Latin America (TOLA)

Chapter 29   An Interview with Stacy Klein, Founder of Double Edge Theatre

Chapter 30   The New World Order Canada and Cuba: The Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Document, 1948–83

Chapter 31   A Conversation with Pebbles Wadsworth about Gordon Davidson, UCLA, and the 1984 Olympic Festival

Chapter 24

ITI Backs Experimental Theatre

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We are aware that we are celebrating World Theatre Day at a time when there is much concern for the future of humanity; the nuclear threat has become greater in Europe and a military catastrophe could threaten universal peace. Let us place all our efforts, our art, in the service of the struggle for peace, to bring the arms race to a halt, to reduce and then abolish nuclear weapons.

All those who work in the theatre in my country, and the Soviet people as a whole, aspire to this goal, which has no higher or more noble equivalent. Let us strengthen the faith of those who know that the fate of our planet rests in their hands. Let us use theatre with passion to establish the harmony between peoples that is created between the spectator and the actor.¹

—Mikhail Tsarev

It is not enough to demand only cognition from the theatre, instructive images of reality. Our theatre must arouse pleasure in cognition and organize the joy of changing reality. Our audiences must not only hear of Prometheus freed from his bonds but must school themselves in the enjoyment of freeing him. Our theatre must instill all the enjoyment and pleasure of the inventor and discoverer, the liberator’s feelings of triumph.

—Bertolt Brecht

The catastrophe is approaching us, a sensual reality, which doesn’t admit any more answers. It is so depressingly sensual, that the coquetry with this catastrophe or with the absurdity of existence as a mood of a bourgeois society of consumption doesn’t function anymore. Either we suppress by force or we attack by force.

—Hard Choices for Theatre Culture in the New Theatre

Report of the German Democratic Republic, 1983

Theatre in Transition, 1975–85

MARTHA COIGNEY WAS AT THE HEIGHT of her powers in the late seventies and early eighties as director of the ITI-USA office. The experimental, internationalist, nonprofit, and culturally open theatre she advocated for kept increasing in importance. She was a spokesperson for and enabler of this campaign for inclusiveness.

Although Coigney was a member of the ITI-International Executive Committee and attended events overseas from Tashkent to India, she focused her attention on generating artistic exchanges and collaborations between U.S. artists and their foreign counterparts. She hoped the liberal U.S. model of peaceful coexistence among diverse communities governed by deliberative discourse and the rule of law might be adopted internationally. But what also happened was that her international focus rewrote the character of theatre in the USA—and ITI-USA itself. She transformed Rosamond Gilder’s embassy for an emerging national theatre into a U.S. Information Agency–style cultural hub that was part advocacy group, part talent service agency, part festival advisory service, part information center, and part dramatic arts consultancy. The organization adapted to changes required by its funders, who themselves perceived dangers in cultural liberalism and openly distributed information. As commentator Holly Hill reported in 1983:

ITI/US has two major currencies, Martha Coigney declares. "We generate human contact among theatre people and we give out voluminous information.

Information includes a consultation service, publications, and a library. In 1981–82, the consultation service was used by sixty-two American performing groups and forty-three arts organizations.²

Driving this shift toward suasion over exchange was a sense of increasing political urgency in world theatre. As budgets for theatre were shrinking globally, Europe grew reluctant to fund travel for U.S. theatre people without reciprocal funding for their own people. ITI family members around the world increasingly were silenced or jailed by authoritarian regimes, whether Left or Right, each threatened by artistic freedom, theatrical humanism, and cultural diversity.

Theatre endures to expose and resolve human conflicts, paradoxes, and truths. Actors are not brushstrokes on a canvas. They connect with an audience in a palpable, dynamic present. Acting is an intimate art. The performers are vulnerable, and they invite audiences to share their discomfort. When theatre people do work, they share this human perspective, which offers common ground among political antagonists. Even where ideologies divide populations down to the last shred of thought, theatre unites people in a shared direct experience. However, most cultures ensure conformity and avoid open-ended exchanges—they manage fear and sexual intimacy (license marriages); celebrate strength and abhor weakness (disparage vulnerability); maintain mammalian roles, mores, and order; and allow arbitrary taboos and patterns of authority and enforcement. The inevitable tension between an individual and any group is the subject of most theatre; and, usually, theatre audiences identify with the individual caught in a dilemma. Theatre is a departure from social safety.

Coigney’s introduction to the report of the ITI-US for October 1979-81 describes the end-of-decade situation at ITI-USA precisely as one of vulnerability in a society determined to cut artistic budgets and reduce freedom of expression:

What was happened in the two years covered by this report has both threatened and celebrated the ability of ITI/US to act on the charter’s mandate. Threatened by financial stringencies, the organization has been forced to reduce its staff and limit some of its programs. Nevertheless, this two-year report celebrates work performed and results achieved. The overview of activities demonstrates the importance of ITI/US and ITI/Worldwide and underscores successful efforts to tighten the bonds of theatres of all nations, increase their understanding of each other, and reinforce their artistic and spiritual alliances.

Despite this crisis in 1980, in March of 1982 Martha wrote to Director William Moody at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund: Dear Bwana—we are pleased to send you this evidence of our work and our survival. Given the pressures and pains of the last two years, we are proud of the record outlined in the Report. Let us try and reschedule our now legendary drink. In reply from Moody: Dear Martha, I knew you were alive and persevering! Thank you for the confirmatory report. How about drinks on Monday April 1? Your materials about ITI/US’ last two years are very interesting. I look forward to getting together.

Martha had successfully pivoted away from disaster. How did she manage it? The Department of State had suddenly cut all funding supporting ITI’s long-term NGO relationship. This was nearly an existential cut; but from Martha’s work and writings, one sees that it was an even greater problem for all U.S. dramatists, and for internationalism generally. Martha responded by immediately making U.S. policy on cultural exchange her personal and organizational crusade. In relation to the International Communications Agency (ICA), created in April 1978, she wrote in the aforementioned annual report:

ITI/US has always insisted that an artist’s desire for an international dimension to his work is a legitimate aspiration. With ICA, ITI/US has tried to find the money to meet some of the needs for professional travel, not only to answer the requests of theatre people, but also to demonstrate abroad the cultural excellence and variety of the performing arts in the U.S.

To raise the profile of her referrals to the new State Department office, she created an official ITI Review Committee for Artistic Exchanges. The team worked with her but was sufficiently independent that it became the body that actually recommended artists directly to the USA, in alignment with new policy requirements. In Martha’s words:

At the end of 1979, ITI/US formed a Review Committee to evaluate and select the proposals for travel assistance: the Committee’s recommendations are then submitted to ICA in Washington where the final decisions on funding are made. A rotating body, the Review Committee is composed of Sara O’Connor, managing director, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre Company; Edward Hastings, associate artistic director, American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco; Nagle Jackson, artistic director, McCarter Theatre Company, Princeton: Hugh Southern, executive director, Theatre Development Fund, New York; Zelda Fichandler, producing director, Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.; Hazel J. Bryant, producer, Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art, New York.³

Rotating body means that these FOM (Friends of Martha) met when and where it was convenient and regularly considered Martha’s recommendations.

The early eighties still benefited from two decades of incredible investment in the arts by liberal foundations, combined with a peak moment of expanding middle-class earnings; but America went into recession in 1981-82, throwing various sectors into crisis. Antipoverty measures had been deployed for two decades and were working, but competed for funding with Vietnam. So, surprise, surprise, investment in people worked (where Hooverite trickle-down theories and monopoly deregulation had failed). This was pre-NAFTA; people had jobs, and despite the election of Ronald Reagan and the disturbing events of 1979, the theatre was relatively healthy, including Broadway.

Hugh Southern’s Theatre Development Fund (started in 1967, the same year as the first ITI Congress in New York) brought all the theatre players and politicians together and provided tickets to students, church groups, seniors, workers in the arts, and, yes, foreign visitors, which greatly helped ITI. These operations were in full swing and effective in the mid-1980s.

Financially, private support for ITI and exchanges shrank with the oil crisis in 1979, and recession followed. There is strong reaction to the creation of ICA and to more restrictive and consolidated cultural funding at the Department of State, as is evident in an internal Rockefeller Brothers memorandum by Director William Moody:

I became acquainted with Coigney during the series of roundtable discussions over the past two years concerning international exchange in the arts. We talked about Arts America that was launched by ICA a while ago. Coigney told me that the budget for Arts America was expected to be $2.7 million, of which $1.7 million would come from ICA and $1 million would be raised from the private sector. Coigney added that Sablonski had just tendered his resignation as head of the Arts America Program. According to Coigney, he threw up his hands at the overwhelming range of responsibilities not only in running Arts America but also raising money from the private sector for it.

Martha clearly had become an expert in her negotiations with ICA, and she was keeping everyone informed, but the fund was adapting and creating an organizational means for direct partnership with ICA. Moody, though sympathetic, had only recently replaced Martha’s dear friend and reliable advisor/funder Stephen Benedict, so he did not understand well the history and scope of ITI that was already was in place.

What did Coigney change? She increased the tempo and emphasis on individual exchange and travel, acting in tandem with her agent friends (Ellen Stewart, Ninon Karlweis, and Edith Markson) and sometimes as an agent herself. She thought big, not small. Breaking all barriers, she used her direct access to Russian and East Bloc theatre to gain funding from the wider State Department mandate to communicate western values to those countries. In effect, she brought the Russians to the true U.S. consulate for New York theatre: La Mama ETC.

Historians (and the rest of us) can read about Coigney’s partnership with Edith Markson and the first Russian delegation in Coigney’s 1978-79 ITI-USA Inc. report:

Ms. [Edith] Markson convinced them [the Russian theatre bigs, in 1976] that if a group of American directors could see Soviet plays on stage, they would be far more likely to do them. When she returned home, she came to ITI/US and together we convinced the Department of State to send the group. In May of 1977, seven directors went to Moscow and Leningrad for 17 days. They saw 34 performances and countless theatre people.

As an immediate result of that visit, Nina Vance invited Gallina Volchek to direct Echelon by Mikail Roshchin at the Alley Theatre in Houston. Also, Alvin Epstein invited Anatoli Efros to direct Gogol’s The Marriage at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis.

This was an important breakthrough, and was supported and orchestrated with guidance from George White, who afterward maintained steady exchanges of theatre artists and training programs with Russian theatre. The report continues:

Starting the minute the American group came home, we worked on getting a return delegation of Soviet theatre people to visit the U.S. It took a year and a half to organize, and they came in October 1979.

The Soviet delegation was headed by Georgiy Tovstonogov, chief director of Leningrad’s Gorky Theatre and recipient of the Lenin Prize, and included the distinguished directors of the USSR’s most noted theatres: Andrey Goncharov of Moscow’s Mayakovsky Theatre; Yevgeniy Simonov of the Vakhtangov State Theatre, Leonid Heifitz of the USSR’s Maly State Theatre; and Robert Sturua of the Georgian State Theatre. Aleksandr Anikst, Ph.D. scholar at the Ministry of Culture’s All-Union Research Insititute of the Arts; Aleksander Petrashkevich, dramatist; and Yevgeniy Klimenko, Deputy Chief of Administration, All-Union Agency for Author’s Rights (VAAP was also part of the delegation).

The other major pivot Coigney made so ITI could survive was to create the parallel Theatre Forum Series, which she explained as an outgrowth of the exchange/visitor activities ongoing at ITI:

A direct outgrowth of the visitor-service program, the Theatre Form series, started in 1978-79 with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, aims to share the expertise of distinguished foreign theatre experts with a wider section of the theatre community and the general public. When master artists, such as Peter Brook, Georgii Tovstonogov, Tadeusz Kantor, Wole Soyinka and others, come to the U.S. to perform or to visit, the theatre community and the public should be able to encounter them, to gain an understanding of their theories, to explore the techniques underlying their work. Since October 1978, ITI/US has organized ten forums which gave audiences an insight into the methods, concepts and practices of 90 visiting artists from 23 countries (see Appendix C).

ITI/US is now engaged in discussion with Columbia University’s School of the Arts to form a liaison based on the idea of using foreign theatre artists in the training of young Americans.

The Columbia University program was also negotiated into being. This had lasting administrative impact when Andrei Serban of La Mama, after contributing to the forum series, was appointed to the faculty of the School of the Arts in 1992 as director of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies to teach directing and develop a concentration in acting for the MFA theatre program.⁴

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Grotowski ITI Forum, Columbia University, 1982

To illustrate the strengthening tempo of the forum exchange program created by Martha in this transitional and vulnerable period, let us examine the following list of the program’s undertakings and participants:

Robert Joffrey’s work as co-president of the ITI Dance Committee and his participation as a juror of the Varna and Moscow Ballet Competitions led to the founding of the International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi. This competition, the first held in 1979, the second scheduled for 1982, has brought international attention to the flourishing dance life in America.ITI/US-ICA fund supported Joffrey’s costs.

In 1978 John Dillon, artistic director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre Company, was a member of the first ITI/US delegation of American theatre leaders to travel abroad. In Paris, he saw production of L’Atelier by Jean-Claude Grumberg, produced at the Theatre National de l’Odeon. Eighteen months later, the play, now titled The Workroom, had its American premiere in Milwaukee. (Sara O’Connor, the managing director in Milwaukee, is also on ITI Board.)

In June 1979, Lloyd Richards, Dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, went to Bulgaria as a member of the American delegation to the 18th Congress of ITI. In Sofia, he found a play, An Attempt at Flying by Yordan Radichkov, and a director, Mladen Kiselov, artistic director of the Theatre of Satire. Richards wanted the play and the director at Yale Rep. On May 1, 1981, it opened in New Haven.

Other Exchanges, 1979–81:

Stephen Wangh and Suzanne Baxtresser, actors/directors Reality Theatre, Boston, to England, FRG, France, GDR, Poland, Spain, Switzerland to study experimental theatre.

Robert Kaflin, producing director, Chelsea Theatre Center, New York, to England, November1979, to explore.

Hazel J. Bryant, producer, and Mical R. Whitaker, artistic director, Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art, New York, to England, the Netherlands, and Jamaica.

John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, British/Irish playwrights, London to New York.

Harold Clurman, director/critic/teacher/critic, and Martha Coigney to Paris to European/North America Theatre Conference and the World Theatre Conference UNESCO/ITI event.

Richard Cottrell, director, Bristol Old Vic, and Braham Murray, resident artistic director, Royal Exchange Theatre Company, Manchester, to Milwaukee

Lars af Malmborg, secretary general ITI-Paris, to New York, April 1980.

Peter Brook, to New York April 25–June 15 1980, to perform in repertory four plays, presented by La Mama E.T.C. in association with Alexander H. Cohen and Micheline Rozan, with ITI as coordinator. Brook and his company participated in forums at New Drama Forum Association at Dance Theatre Workshop and Columbia University.

Jon Jory, producing director, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Lloyd Richards, artistic director Yale Repertory theatre, to Warsaw, May 1980. They represented the USA at an international symposium on the Training of Theatre Directors, sponsored by the Polish Center of ITI.

Ron Jenkins, director, and Barbara Dacey, musical director, of Mudhead Mask Theatre Company, Cambridge, Mass., to teach in Paris

Ronnie Gilbert, actress/director/musician, Theatre Energy, to New York to collaborate with Joe Chaiken.

Samuel Alyson, playwright, and Valerie Maskolenko, representative from VAAP Copyright Agency, Moscow to New York to meet George Wright and do a publication on American theatre.

Marty Arden, coordinator, Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theatres South, Inc.), Knoxville to Ghana, Senegal, Togo, Upper Volta, to explore the viability of cultural exchange.

Letitia Eldredge, mime/mask/sculptor, San Antonio to Paris, 1980.

Ellen Stewart to Nicosia, Cyprus, to attend an international conference on Third World Theatre.

John Orlock, resident playwright/literary manager, Cricket Theatre, Minneapolis, to Dublin, November 1980. This dovetailed with Declan Burke Kennedy, playwright/director, Focus Theatre, Dublin, to Minneapolis.

Kenneth Brecher, associate artistic director, Mark Taper Forum; Maria Irene Fornes, playwright/director, New York; Adrian Hall, artistic director, Trinity Square Repertory Theatre, Providence; Robert Mars, director, Theatre Program of the New York State Council on the Arts; Nagle Jackson, artistic director, McCarter Theatre Company, Princeton, to the Federal Republic of Germany, GDR, Poland, and Hungary.

Roger Planchon, director/actor/playwright, Theatre National Populaire, Villeurbanne, France, to New York, 1981.

Max Ferra, artistic director, INTAR: Hispanic American Theatre, New York, to Paris, January 1981, to meet Alejandro Jodorowsky of Mexico.

Ion Caramitru, leading actor, Teatrul Bulandra, Bucharest, to USA, August 1981.

Yoshi Oida, actor/director, member of Peter Brook’s Centre International de Recherches Theatrales, Paris, to San Francisco, 1981

Clearly, when people speak of theatre in the late seventies and early eighties—when Ronald Reagan’s USA lurched toward radical conservatism, nationalism, and isolationism by withdrawing public support for UNESCO and investment in arts and science—ITI must be recognized as an active force in a serious counternarrative. As public arts and education came under threat, Coigney and her colleagues responded with strong vocal resistance and a ground plan for cultural alternatives. Her international experience taught her how to recognize autocracy in emerging neoliberal, neocolonial, elitist thinking. Her work shifted from the creation of cultural exchanges one-by-one to wider theatrical and cultural consultancy and promotion.

In point of fact, it was this counternarrative to the politics of the time and her unrestrained advocacy for humanism and the arts that turned Martha Coigney into an international rock star. She was an organizer or consultant for every major international arts festival within the United States. She became a board member at the Asia Society and the New York Council for the Arts. She was a regular consultant for the huge annual Pepsico Summerfare program at SUNY-Purchase. Throughout the 1980s, Martha worked closely not only with the funding establishment but with Peter Zeisler and John Sullivan at TCG, so valuable liberal communication increased over the course of the decade. Under the editorial leadership of Jim O’Quinn, TCG’s American Theatre magazine published article after article about international artists promoted by ITI, most notably Peter Brook, Tadashi Suzuki, Augusto Boal, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Tadeusz Kantor. Martha and Mira Trailovic were in constant regular communication, with each other and with a colloquy of ITI-USA bilateral contacts and friends, and they had an absolute grasp of what was going on in Europe. The small ITI staff and advisory dramatists worked tirelessly to goad the world’s wealthiest country to support the export and import of theatre art. We see ITI in 1983 on a collision course with the majority culture’s paradigm, in which art is frivolous entertainment.

Speaking for artists in the United States, Coigney intensified her support for experimental work and the freedom-of-expression gestalt of the ‘60s, exactly when mainstream society was fatigued by clamoring voices of disgruntled minorities, subcultures, and countercultures. Ironically, the tearing down of state authority initiated by the avant-garde to prevent nuclear holocaust and future war was, by the 1980s, perceived to be causing failure in Vietnam and collapse of empire. Although a victory for the American and the Vietnamese people, the withdrawal of U.S. power from Vietnam became an existential threat to the American empire—the imperialists had to double down on power strategies and opinion management in order for their self-enriching, carbon-based progress to continue. The donor class no longer felt obligated to support experimental work that targeted them.

Despite these trends, liberalism, internationalism, and theatre activism—even Robert Brustein’s tellingly evoked theatre of revolt—were connected in Martha Coigney’s brain. And her funders knew of the class tensions this created.

Regardless of the shift, Martha persisted in her labors. Often she was the diplomat representing all of United States theatre to the rest of the world. She was a liberal and multicultural missionary, but globalization itself was driving change, and, ultimately, she was a passenger.

Martha was responding, actually, rather slowly. The activists within ITI pushed, and she resisted to keep ITI together diplomatically. Ironically, her liberalism no longer represented her increasingly isolationist and politically conservative homeland; nor did it jibe with the aesthetics of the young new theatre and third world theatre workers from foreign countries, rooted in community-based labs, experimental theatres, and political theatres. Martha was sympathetic. But from her elevated perch in the executive committee, she had to modulate committee radicalism and enthusiasm to keep communists and capitalists, as well as first-world and third-world theatre people, talking to one another.

She succeeded. Coigney’s influence grew internationally in direct proportion to its decline at home—her open support of feminist, socialist, LGBTQ, African, and Native American theatre, all of which she viewed as cultural contributions, raised her stature internationally, but reduced it with corporate funders at home.

One good example of how Martha enriched institutional drama by bringing talent from Eastern Europe was her contribution in 1980 to the thirteenth annual UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette) puppetry celebration in Washington, D.C.

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The Smithsonian, which became involved in the UNIMA event to contribute expertise about traditional world puppetry, asked Martha to help with international talent. She brought Bulgarian puppeteers and several specialists, and must have helped enlist the American great Jim Henson as well as Peter Schuman’s well-traveled Bread and Puppet Theatre.

Martha’s popularity among U.S. dramatists remained high into the twenty-first century, because she listened to young artists and, as director of ITI-USA, had a wonderful range of friends and allies. George White, Ellen Stewart, and Philip Arnoult were meeting with her regularly and coordinating activities, and the team co-created the TNT Festival in 1976–1979 (see Chapter 26) and Joanne Pottlitzer’s TOLA Festival in 1979. Stewart and Cecile Guidote hosted Arab, African, and Asian art in New York in La Mama’s various theatres while pushing UNESCO initiatives in theatres worldwide, including their Culture Corps student exchanges (1979) and TWITAS theatre programs. Francoise Kourilsky, director of the strongly experimental 1984 Nancy Festival, also mounted a New York version of the Parisian repertory UBU Theatre that brought contemporary French theatre into the mix.

The Passing of the Baton

MARTHA W. COIGNEY—MATURED BY CRISIS IN MOSCOW, by her eight years of leadership as U.S. delegate on the executive committee of ITI-International, and by real achievements sponsoring great foreign artists in the United States—emerged in 1977 as the face and voice of ITI-USA, replacing Rosamond Gilder. More importantly, major private and public funders, led by Richard Lanier at the JDR III fund, acknowledged her as an important thought leader.⁵ Coigney’s taste in theatre, her progressive postwar inclusiveness, and her generational voice were sources of the iconography that shaped ITI going forward: the organization became the instrument of her quest for the liberation of theatre artists from all varieties of autocratic repression.

Politically, it is sobering to recognize that as a New York liberal she was perceived by the U.S. neoconservative movement to be as alarmingly countercultural in the United States as she was in the Soviet Union.

The following back-to-back speeches given by Coigney—one written by Gilder, the other by Martha herself—represent passing the baton of leadership in 1977 at the American Theatre Association convention. Martha stood to receive an award for Gilder (whose back problems prevented her traveling to the event), then spoke about ITI for the first time at a national convention as the organization’s spokesperson. Giving the award to Gilder was in fact controversial—she was a founding member of ATA and deeply connected to everyone on its board, which gave the appearance of bias; nor was she a theatre artist per se. In recognition of her failing health and years of dedication, the selection committees broke every rule to honor one of their own—Gilder was a living icon with a hand in creating every national theatre organization. The award was unprecedented because she was unprecedented.

Gilder’s remarks are valuable. They succinctly explain the evolution of professional theatre organizations in the U.S. and their interrelationships before 1977. She acknowledges her primary affiliation with AETA (American Educational Theatre Association), even though this is an ATA (American Theatre Association) award. For the record, the box below lists organizations with representation on the board of ANTA or ITI and active affiliations with Gilder (and, from 1977 forward, with Coigney):

All these theatre organizations leaned on ITI at some point, and all attended the East German ITI Congress in 1983. This is Coigney speaking at that event for Gilder, accepting her award in absentia:

First her words, then mine.

[QUOTING GILDER:] It is with a combination of pride and pleasure, spiced with fury at my inability to be with you