Lucille Lortel

Lucille Lortel, born Lucille Wadler on December 16, 1900, at 153 Attorney Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was an American actress, theatrical producer, and artistic director whose career spanned from the Broadway stage to the founding of landmark Off-Broadway institutions. She died on April 4, 1999. One of four children born to Anny and Harris Wadler, Jewish immigrants of Polish descent, Lortel grew up in the Bronx and Manhattan. Her father manufactured women's clothing and traveled frequently to Europe to acquire designs. Her siblings included two brothers, Mayo, a violinist, and Seymour, and a sister, Ruth. She was homeschooled before attending Adelphi University in Brooklyn, New York.

Lortel began formal acting and theatre training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1920, and in 1921 she traveled to Berlin to study briefly under director Max Reinhardt. Her Broadway debut came in 1925 in the Theatre Guild's production of Caesar and Cleopatra, which starred Helen Hayes. She continued performing on Broadway through 1932, appearing in Michael Kallesser's One Man's Woman at the 48th Street Theatre in Manhattan in 1926, as well as in David Belasco's The Dove alongside Judith Anderson. Additional Broadway credits include the melodrama The Man Who Reclaimed His Head and the play Two By Two. In 1929, she played the female lead opposite Sessue Hayakawa in The Man Who Laughed Last, a role she performed both on stage and on film in one of the first talking pictures. Outside of Broadway, she appeared as Poppy in the touring company of The Shanghai Gesture with Florence Reed.

In 1931, Lortel married paper industrialist and philanthropist Louis Schweitzer, and she retired from acting in 1939 at his request. In 1947, at the urging of actor Danny Kaye, she founded the White Barn Theatre in an old horse barn on the Westport/Norwalk, Connecticut estate she shared with her husband. The theater's mission was to present experimental and unusual works, offering writers and actors a space free from commercial pressures. Under Lortel's direction, the White Barn premiered a substantial body of work, including George C. Wolfe and Lawrence Bearson's Ivory Tower with Eva Marie Saint in 1947, Seán O'Casey's Red Roses for Me in 1948, Eugène Ionesco's The Chairs in 1957, Edward Albee's Fam and Yam in 1960, Samuel Beckett's Embers in 1960, Murray Schisgal's The Typists in 1961, Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers in 1965, Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds in 1966, Terrence McNally's Next in 1967, and Jerome Kilty's Margaret Sanger: Unfinished Business starring Eileen Heckart in 1989, among many others. Ireland's Dublin Players performed at the White Barn for several seasons with Milo O'Shea. Productions that transferred from the White Barn to Broadway include Cy Coleman and A.E. Hotchner's Welcome to the Club and Lanford Wilson's Redwood Curtain, the latter of which was later produced as a Hallmark Hall of Fame television production in 1995. In September 1992, a storage area near the theater was expanded into the White Barn Theatre Museum. The final production at the White Barn took place in 2002, and in 2006 the property was sold to a real estate developer for $48 million. The theater's legacy was subsequently preserved through a Lucille Lortel Foundation grant to the Westport Country Playhouse, which now houses the Lucille Lortel White Barn Center.

In 1955, Schweitzer purchased the Theatre De Lys at 121 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village as a 24th wedding anniversary gift for Lortel. Her first production there was a revival of the White Barn staging of Marc Blitzstein's translation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, which ran for seven years and was credited by The New York Times with putting Off-Broadway on the map. The production won a Special Tony Award for best Off-Broadway show as well as the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Lotte Lenya, and Scott Merrill received a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Among the many productions Lortel subsequently presented at the theater were Jean Genet's The Balcony in 1960, which won the Village Voice Obie Award for best foreign play; Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot starring James Earl Jones; Christopher Fry's A Sleep of Prisoners; Charles Morgan's The River Line with Sada Thompson, Beatrice Straight, and Peter Cookson; Tom Cole's Medal of Honor Rag; David Mamet's A Life in the Theater; Sam Shepard's Buried Child; and Marsha Norman's Getting Out. On November 16, 1981, during the run of Tommy Tune's production of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, for which Tune won the Drama Desk Award for best director, the Theatre De Lys was renamed the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

During the 1983–84 season, Lortel co-produced Michael Cristofer's The Lady and the Clarinet starring Stockard Channing, followed by Woza Albert!, which received an Obie Award. In 1985, she produced Win Wells' Gertrude Stein and a Companion starring Jan Miner and Marian Seldes, and the production was recorded and broadcast on the Bravo US and Bravo Canadian television networks, receiving the National Education Film and Video Award for historical biographies and an Emmy Award. That same year, Lortel received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play. Other productions at the Lucille Lortel Theatre during the 1980s included Not About Heroes, Elisabeth Welch in Time To Start Living, The Acting Company's Orchards and Ten by Tennessee, Groucho: A Life in Revue, which subsequently played London's West End, and Steel Magnolias, which ran for 1,126 performances.

Over the course of her producing career, Lortel produced or co-produced nearly 500 plays, five of which received Tony Award nominations: William M. Hoffman's As Is, Lanford Wilson's Angels Fall, Athol Fugard's Blood Knot, Mbongeni Ngema's Sarafina!, and Lee Blessing's A Walk in the Woods. In 1992, she produced Larry Kramer's The Destiny of Me, which received the 1993 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play Off-Broadway from the League of Off-Broadway Theatres and Producers. That same season, the theater housed the Circle Repertory Company's production of The Fiery Furnace, starring Julie Harris in her Off-Broadway debut, as well as Jane Anderson's The Baby Dance and Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart.