Mayer’s Threepenny Opera was so brilliant I can still replay it in my head: Stockard (then Susan) Channing was Jenny, and I’ll never forget the way she ran her tongue over her lips when she sang, “I was thinking about reforming . . . Guess not.” Or the way Lucy Brown (Virginia Mannack) sang the “Barbara Song” sitting on top of an old upright piano and turning the pages of the piano player’s score. Sinister Macheath was Dean Gitter, who went on to open the legendary Orson Welles Theatre. Tom Babe, who later became part of Joseph Papp’s stable of playwrights and wrote the scenario for Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel, directed a production of Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening (also with Channing) that remains the single most moving play about children coming of age I’ve ever experienced.
Hearing me wish aloud my desire to be part of this group, my friend Anne dared me to audition for the company’s summer season. I’d written a mixed review of Mayer’s Tempest production at the Loeb, and my guess is that he cast me out of revenge. He gave me two humiliating bit parts in his new rock-musical version of Aristophanes’s Peace (it was the height of the peace movement), featuring Susan Channing, James Woods (an intense young actor from MIT), and Steven Kaplan (now Steve Hannon, who went on to create the role of Gus, the Theater Cat, in the original Broadway run of Cats) as the hero who flies to heaven on the back of a dung beetle to ask the gods to end war. I got my own revenge when Harvard Crimson reviewer Tim Crouse (Lindsay Crouse’s brother and son of Broadway legend Russell Crouse, who co-authored Life with Father and The Sound of Music) ended his review (I can still quote it) with “and Lloyd Schwartz made a marathon of his two walk-ons.” I was in heaven.
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So I became an actor. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, every night I watched Channing from the wings making profound emotional sense in the challenging role of Isabella. I got another bit part in Coriolanus, with the remarkable Harvard actor and football star in the title role, Tommy Lee Jones. Too bad American theater couldn’t give these amazingly gifted classical actors the opportunity to do more Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Wedekind.I worked myself up to bigger roles. For a production of The Dybbuk, I grew a beard, which has stayed with me ever since (“So that’s what I’m supposed to look like!” I said to my mirror). I was the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland, with Stockard Channing as Alice and Tommy Lee Jones as the White Knight; the late Arthur Friedman, who became the Herald’s acerbic theater critic, directed and narrated. The late Skip Ascheim, later a director himself and Globe theater critic, played the Caterpillar and was surely the first actor in Boston to have more than water in his hookah. As the student Trofimov in a production of The Cherry Orchard directed and translated by a comp-lit graduate student named Laurence Senelick (his award-winning Chekhov translations are now a Norton Critical Edition), I got an especially good review from a young theater critic from Boston University named Stephen Mindich, who had recently started his own weekly newspaper, Boston After Dark, and who was one of the few critics to recognize the significance of these “amateur” theatrical ventures. I was offered a teaching job in New York, but I didn’t want to leave.
