When the curtain went up on the National Actors Theatre star-studded revival of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" last month, a very important person was conspicuously absent from the audience.
Tony Randall, the theater company's founder and artistic director, should have been looking on with paternal pride. This was, after all, the troupe's first production, the culmination of 10 years of effort on Randall's part.Instead he was on stage, a living testament to one of the oldest adages in show business: The show must go on.
One of the production's stars, Fritz Weaver, had lost his voice the day before, and the understudies were unrehearsed. So Randall, script in hand, took the stage of the Belasco Theatre as Deputy-Governor Danforth.
"Three performances," Randall said. "Three performances that will live forever in the annals of bad acting."
Randall took time from a hectic schedule on a wet, chilly afternoon last month to discuss the focus of his life for the past decade. The National Actors Theatre is a not-for-profit company dedicated to classic plays performed by well-known actors. Randall hopes that one day the company will be recognized as the premier repertory company in the country.
Seated in the company's office lobby under a large framed image of John Barrymore as Hamlet, Randall said a national theater was overdue in the United States.
"Everybody's had the idea," he said. "I think every actor believes in it and everybody in the theater believes in it, but I suppose I've believed in it and wanted it since the day I graduated from drama school.
"Every nation has a national theater - every nation but us. When you think that the Comedie-Francais is 400 years old - state supported, mind you, all that time. The Habimah of Israel - Israel had a theater before it had a nation. Amazing!
"The Kabuki of Japan, the Abbey of Dublin. England has two now - the National and the Royal Shakespeare. We've never had it. We've never had a classical repertory theater."
True, the United States has never had an officially designated and subsidized national theater comparable with the Abbey, which now is performing Brian Friel's "Dancing at Lughnasa" on Broadway.
But Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington could each arguably claim recognition as a national theater. And some would contend that the League of Resident Theaters, whose member companies embrace the classics, in effect exists as a sort of coast-to-coast national theater.
But Randall has in mind a single theater with a standing acting company that represents a country'sbest theatrical tradition.
"We are very remiss here in America about doing the world's great plays," Randall said. "We do the world's great operas, we do the world's great symphonies, we do the world's great ballets. We do them everywhere. "We don't do the world's great plays. To do them properly, you have to have a company. You just couldn't put on a symphony without having an orchestra that's worked together."
Orchestras and ballet companies must rely heavily on corporate support, and the same is true of Randall's theater company. The roster of corporate heavy hitters listed in programs for "The Crucible" include the Anheuser-Busch Foundation, Philip Morris Cos. Inc., the National Broadcasting Co., Coca-Cola Inc., CBS Inc. and Capital Cities/ABC Inc., an investor in Broadway shows.
"We don't have government support the way every other civilized nation does, or, if we do, it's so small that it's only a drop in the bucket," Randall said.
Compounding the problem, he said, is that few Americans think of theater in the way they think of symphonic music, ballet and opera.
"They haven't thought of theater as an art, a non-profit art that must be supported," he said. "We've thought of theater as showbiz. Commercial. Blockbuster. Hit. And you can make a fortune in it.
"Occasionally," he added, "you can."
Randall set out to create a not-for-profit theater company, but he wanted it on Broadway. Based in the historic Belasco Theatre, the National Actors Theatre joins three other not-for-profit Broadway companies.
"I wanted to get a great Broadway house at the very heart of the theater district," he said. "I wanted to be part of the theater scene, part of the New York theater, part of where the excitement is, part of where the action is, part of where the crowds are. Theater should be fun, theater should be exciting."
The inaugural season will consist of three plays. "The Crucible" runs through Jan. 5. Next, from Jan. 15 through March 1, comes the Georges Feydeau farce "A Little Hotel on the Side," in which Randall will star with Rob Lowe and Lynn Redgrave. Then Randall will direct Henrik Ibsen's "The Master Builder," starring Earle Hyman and Redgrave, scheduled to run March 11 through April 26.
In the second year, Randall said he hoped to extend the season to eight months and four or five plays. Eventually he wants the company to produce all year.
But in the day of obese musicals and Cameron Mackintosh spectaculars, will theatergoers venture into the Belasco to see material as dark as "The Crucible," a profoundly serious drama that depicts wrongly accused men and women condemned to death during the Salem witch trials?
"You seem to think there is some inherent dichotomy there, but there's not," Randall said. "It's just that we're better. The great plays are better than other plays, that's all. That's what made them great. That's what made them classics.
"A classic is a play that's lived. Only one thing has kept it alive and that is its popularity with audiences over the generations and centuries
"But I got off my subject. Your questions was: Will the tourists come? The Broadway theater has shrunk frighteningly, mainly because it's so expensive that the average New Yorker cannot afford to go.
"So only tourists can afford to go because they don't care what they're spending. And they don't care what they're seeing, either. They just want the glitz. They don't care.
"Maybe my theater isn't for people who don't care. My idea is to bring great plays with great actors at a price the average New Yorker can afford to go and take his family to."
Upon testing the waters, Randall discovered that his hoped-for audience existed in large numbers.
"We took one ad in The New York Times and sold 28,000 season subscriptions," he said.
"There's a market out there and there's a hunger and there are people who know what they want. They want to see good theater. They don't want to see 'Cats.' "
The taste of many tourists notwithstanding, Randall has reason to believe that out-of-towners will seek out the National Actors Theatre.
"We sent out a brochure nationwide and we got responses from everywhere," he said. "Also, my funding comes from everywhere. For instance, Anheuser-Busch, which is in St. Louis, has given me $300,000. Sears, which is in Chicago, has given me money."
The brochure contains endorsements from Robert De Niro, Anthony Quinn, Lauren Bacall, Stockard Channing, William Hurt and other well-known actors who collectively "look forward to performing with the National Actors Theatre in future productions."
"Important actors have come to me and said, 'I don't care what I do, I'll understudy, I just want to be in it,' " Randall said. "It's hard to believe, but it's true. I'm paying well above scale. I don't want actors to work for nothing. I don't believe in that. But I'm not paying what stars get."
Eventually, Randall hopes the theater will mount national and international tours.
"That's part of our plan," he said. "That's why we put the word 'national' in our title. We've got to do that. But it can be ruinously expensive. That's the problem that has to be worked out. It has to be underwritten wherever we go."
Randall also would like to have more than one playhouse.
"I'd like to have two theaters," he said. "I would have them right this minute if I had the money. It's all money. I need an endowment."