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lack director scott on yet another stage
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Tirt, Ho-r.tx 14, 1972
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by Bruce Mann
Feature Editor
"I remember as a kid in Morristown, New Jersey,
running home and saying that I had a part. And my
mother saying what is it?" relates the black
actor-director-teaeher Harold Scott, currently in
residence to direct the Carolina Flaymakers" "And The
Old Man Had Two Sons"
"I said little Black Sambo. And the room came to a
dead halt."
It was not the last racial indignity Scott was to suffer
- years later at Exeter. Scott discovered that the
powers-that-be "couldn't, in their minds, see
Shakespeare's Hotspur being played by a little colored
boy," and so excluded him from their stage.
But it was the first sign of his nascent theatrical
impulse, the first stage in his career. And for an
ambitious black actor with Scott's energy, could there
by any way but up the theatrical success ladder?
Scott, 37, sat in the living room of Dramatic Art
Department chairman Dr. Arthur Housman Saturday -the
background filled with the brass of the marching
band's rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner"
playing at nearby Kenan Stadium and seemed
remarkably at ease, though the play's premiere was but
days away.
Scott spoke with studied diction - his "neither"
rhyming with "hi, there" - and you quickly realize
why such theatrical giants as Arthur Miller and
Lorraine Hansbury have befriended him and composed
roles for his unique talents.
His theatre credits read endlessly: a Broadway debut
in Robert Rossen's ("The Hustler") "The Cool World,"
with which he netted the Variety Critic's Poll award as
Broadway's most promising new actor; an
off-Broadway debut in "Deathwatch," a role he
accepted while still in college at Harvard and another
feather in his cap since he claimed an Obie Award for
his performance; roles in "The Blacks," "The Death of
Bessie Smith," "The Boys in the Band," and others;
directing experience with "Indians," "Waiting for
Godot," "The Birthday Party," "The Glass
Menagerie;" teaching work in theatre departments at
Harvard, Brandeis, University of Connecticut, the
University of North Carolina, and four others; and
three fruitful summers at the Eugene O'Neill
"Memorial Theater Center, the contact which now
brings him to campus.
But there's no pretension evident no
pseudo-professionalism to his manner. Scott sees his
rise as a natural thing.
"There's a terrific tendency to think that you plan
out your life and that you have control over it. You
really don't, though. You do up to a point. And then
..things start happening."
What happened to Scott -was initially a prize
speaking contest at Exeter. Brought up in an
essentially white middle class environment his
father was a doctor Scott had little black
awareness. He was shy, unable to understand why
other shunned him.
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But thanks to a public speaking course and a prize
winning reading of "God's Trombones" (which would
become his trademark for the next decade), Scott
learned that he could make people pay attention.
Then followed Harvard "According to 'The
Harvard Crimson,' I wrote, produced, directed, or
appeared in 31 plays in the four years I was there,
which is a bounteous plenty and still get a degree."
And then came "Deathwatch" at the first Yale Drama
Festival, and then an invitation by the off-Broadway
director to play the role in New York and Hal
Scott was off and running with co-stars George
Maharis and Vic Morrow on another stage of his life.
"I started out in the business as an actor. And
acting is still the thing I get greatest pleasure from
doing, because you get maximum creative exposure
and minimal responsibility. You're not answerable to
anybody, you just take care of yourself and deliver
that performance."
But the spinning Fates had more in store for him,
and directing and teaching beckoned, pulling Scott
away from the commercial New York theatre.
"I'm so tired of living out of a suitcase, I don't
know what to do," says Scott, drinking some
lemonade, the stage in Dr. Housman's living room
jutting out prominently as Scott talks of his career.
"But it seems to have been what was meant for me
in terms of staying busy doing things I think are
meaningful and creative to do.
"During the time I was playing in "The Boys in
the Band," I just came to realize that the commercial
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theatre was dying all around me. I was going into that
play, which was a great joy to do - otherwise I
wouldn't have stayed in it for two years nightly.
But even so, occasionally, I had to take a breather. I'd
take four weeks and go do "The Blacks" or I'd leave
and do something else. And I began to realize then
that if anything major were going to happen in the
theatre it was going to happen outside of New York."
Scott's realization has since led him on a personal
crusade of discovery - learning more about his craft,
trying to aid regional theatre, and teaching in
universities as an artist in residence.
Scott has this theory that "eventually the
universities are going to house the professional
theatre companies."
"The universities hjvc come to grirn v.ith the fjet
that large elements of their faculty are not prepared,
not trained, not gifted in being able to prepare the
actor to go into the commercial theatre. And so they
have begun - more and more university departments
- to affiliate themselves on some professional level:
inviting guest professionals as artists in residence, the
Second Step, various ways of bringing professionaK
into contact with the academic world.
"And eventually that exposure, that intercourse, is
going to produce some child."
It is to encourage the fulfillment of this dream,
one assumes, that brings Hal Scott to yet another
stage of his theatrical career - that of the
Playmakers Theatre, where, beginning tonight, the
fusion of university community elements and
professional elements will react and give young
playwright Elizabeth Levin an even closer look at her
developing play, "And The Old Man Had Two Sons."
Scott has great respect for the play, which he first
directed last summer in Waterford, Connecticut, at
the O'Neill Playwright's Conference.
"Elizabeth is writing within an epic form, spanning
three generations of American society, and she is
using poetic language as her medium. No one has
really done this since O'Neill."
As a director, Scott found the experience of the
Second Step rewaVding and challenging, a job in
which his role metamorphosed. Rather than impose
his interpretation on the play, Scott served the
playwright.
"I essentially am expected to, desire to, and wish
to mount what she has in her mind. That she see her
vision fulfilled is my determination, my great desire
to help that happen."
Tonight and each night this week, onstage, the
vision will unfold. Scott has taken pains to
"coordinate the time differences" in the play; to keep
the play a memory play "energized;" and "to
make you believe these people talk this way," in
Elizabeth Levin's unusual "poetic language."
And afterwards? For Scott, it's on to Cincinnati
to begin his appointment as Artistic Director of The
Playhouse in the Park, one of the nation's foremost
regional theatre centers.
Yet another stage . . .
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