Grove Playhouse celebrates 50th

Posted on Sunday September 18, 2005

Grove Playhouse celebrates 50th

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
cdolen@herald.com

In fickle South Florida, where devotion to all things hot, hip and trendy is practically a religion, the fact that the Coconut Grove Playhouse is still here after half a century is at least a small miracle.

Even more miraculously, the theater has endured through uncounted dramas both external and internal: Hurricanes and a deteriorating historic building. Sporadic financial crises, despite millions of dollars in government support through the years. Changes in ownership and artistic leadership. The longing eyes of developers on its prime Coconut Grove location. And a fairly constant flow of both admiration and criticism from the greater theater community as well as audiences.

With the first preview of Tuesdays With Morrie -- on Tuesday, fittingly enough -- the region's largest not-for-profit theater begins a mixed-bag 50th anniversary season of premieres, Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, popular titles and edgier fare. The lineup, which will also travel north to Fort Lauderdale's Parker Playhouse, is full of actors and directors with whom Arnold Mittelman has worked during his 20-year tenure in the theater's artistic hot seat: actors Theodore Bikel, Lucie Arnaz, Harold Gould, Hal Holbrook, Len Cariou; directors Jeff Moss, Michael Montel, Michael John Garcés, Gus Kaikkonen.

It is, says the producing artistic director, a season reflective of the playhouse itself.

''It's an institution with one foot in the past but a very large foot in the future,'' says Mittelman.

'[The season] utilizes people I've worked with in new and exciting challenges. It will be an introduction to new talent, like Dominic Fumusa in Tuesdays With Morrie. We're enhancing our celebrity function with people like Eve Ensler and Dixie Carter making their playhouse debuts. Passin' It On and Southern Comforts are both premieres. And though we don't have a true period classic, we have two contemporary ones in Lost in Yonkers and I Am My Own Wife, both Pulitzer Prize-winning plays.''

Certainly, the play that's beginning the theater's anniversary season could hardly be more different from the one staged almost 50 years ago.

Then, it was the American premiere of Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot, an intellectually challenging work so baffling to its elegant opening-night audience that many fled at intermission. Now, it's Tuesdays With Morrie, the tender-hearted two-character stage version of sports columnist Mitch Albom's slender book about the life lessons his dying former professor shared.

Adapted for the stage by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher and by Albom, the longtime Detroit Free Press sports columnist, radio sports talk host and ESPN commentator, Tuesdays With Morrie grew from something pragmatic into something phenomenal.

Purely by accident, Albom happened to be channel-surfing one night and alighted on Nightline. Host Ted Koppel's guest was, amazingly enough, Albom's favorite teacher, former Brandeis University sociology professor Morrie Schwartz. With warmth and frankness, the two were talking about death, something Morrie was facing sooner rather than later: Sitting there in his wheelchair on national TV, Morrie was dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease, which gradually robs sufferers of their ability to walk, move, swallow and breathe independently before it kills them.

Albom reconnected with his old professor, visiting him regularly at his home in Massachusetts, then began recording their conversations -- about life, death, regrets, marriage, love, family, forgiveness and more -- for a book intended to pay Schwartz's soaring medical bills. And with the advance he got before Schwartz died in November 1995, Albom did so.

Then, the little book that had an initial print run of 25,000 copies when it was published in 1997, the book meant to honor a man who had taught him so much, became a phenomenon.

To date, it has sold more than 7.5 million copies in hardcover and paperback. It has been published in 31 languages in 36 countries. Oprah Winfrey produced a TV movie version in 1999, with Jack Lemmon as Morrie and Hank Azaria as Mitch. And though he was initially reluctant, Albom collaborated with Hatcher on the play which opened Off-Broadway in 2002.

''As the book became more popular, I was getting all these money-making schemes. I said no to everything, for the same reason I said no to any sequels, even though I have enough material for five more books,'' says the frenetically productive Albom by phone.

``I didn't know a lot about theater. But of all the ways the story could be told, that was the most realistic. That's the way it was, me and Morrie sitting in a room. And one day it could be done in high schools and colleges. Can you imagine how happy Morrie would be?''

Hatcher, whose A Picasso was done earlier at the Grove Playhouse, is also a prolific writer, the author of numerous original plays, adaptations and screenplays.

The key to making Tuesdays With Morrie viable drama, he says, was to ``make it more dramatic, find more conflict. That's what fuels a play. I looked for cliff-hangers, arguments, secrets. . . . There was no question of whether Morrie would survive. There was no question of whether Mitch would become a more enlightened person -- he wrote the book. I looked at it as a craft and technical issue: How do you wrestle one form into another?''

Director Michael Montel, staging a production that will begin at the not-for-profit theater and then move on to a dozen theaters (including Fort Lauderdale's Parker Playhouse) on Clear Channel's touring Broadway circuit, believes Hatcher and Albom succeeded.

''There are moments in the play where they seem to be in conflict more overtly. There's a real steady dramatic progression,'' he says. ``Morrie's determination was to push through and rise above as long as he could. . . . He was able to look at life whole. He knew its depth and its joys.''

Preparing to direct the play, Montel watched tapes of the three Nightline interviews with Morrie. Star Harold Gould chose not to. But, Montel says, ``Sometimes I feel he's channeling Morrie. It's spine-tingling. It's a spirit getting in touch with a spirit.''

Gould, who stepped into the role of Morrie after originally announced star Hal Linden withdrew because of family illness, has done the play before and knows its effect on audiences.

'Morrie says to Mitch [near the end], `If I could have had another son, I would have liked it to be you,' '' Gould says. ``People would come backstage after the play with wet eyes. But the play has a balance of comedy, too.''

Fumusa, Gould's costar, often speaks directly to the audience as Mitch. The actor admits to being driven, but probably not as much as the character he's playing.

''Mitch has something going on inside him. He's not complete with his huge success as a sportswriter. Morrie rekindles something,'' he says. ``He had no idea where it was going to lead.''

As for the real-life Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie led to the aforementioned mega-sales, and much more.

He's still a Free Press sports columnist (last April he had to apologize in print for writing an advance piece about two former Michigan State basketball stars at a Final Four game which they didn't, in fact, attend). He still spends three hours five days a week doing his radio show in Detroit, still works for ESPN. He wrote another bestseller, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which has sold more than 6 million copies and was made into a TV movie. Two Albom-authored plays, Duck Hunter Shoots Angel and And the Winner Is, premiered at the Purple Rose Theatre (founded by actor Jeff Daniels) in Chelsea, Mich.

Albom knows it might not sound as though reconnecting with Morrie Schwartz changed him, but he assures you it did.

''Some people expected me to move to an ashram and hum all day,'' he says. ``But one of the things Morrie liked most was my job. I was a ridiculous, over-the-top workaholic. Now I work half a year. What it really did was reprioritize things for me.

'Before, when I was walking through an airport, people would yell sports questions at me. I'd answer and keep walking. Now, people show me pictures of people they lost, of someone who was their `Morrie.' You can't just walk away. You can't just race through it. At a stadium now, I look at the crowd and know I could say, 'Tell me the saddest thing that ever happened to you.' And everyone would have a story.''

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.

Copyright 2005 Knight Ridder

http:www.herald.com