Lucille Lortel

Lucille Lortel (née Wadler, December 16, 1900 – April 4, 1999) was an American actress, artistic director, and theatrical producer. In the course of her career Lortel produced or co-produced nearly 500 plays, five of which were nominated for Tony Awards: As Is by William M. Hoffman, Angels Fall by Lanford Wilson, Blood Knot by Athol Fugard, Mbongeni Ngema's Sarafina!, and A Walk in the Woods by Lee Blessing. She also produced Marc Blitzstein's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, a production which ran for seven years and according to The New York Times "caused such a sensation that it...put Off-Broadway on the map."

Lortel was born Lucille Wadler on December 16, 1900, at 153 Attorney Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of four children of Anny and Harris Wadler, Jewish immigrants of Polish descent. Her father was a manufacturer of women's clothes who frequently traveled to Europe to buy designs to copy. Lortel had two brothers, Mayo (a violinist) and Seymour, and a sister, Ruth. She was raised in the Bronx and Manhattan, where she was homeschooled until attending Adelphi University in Brooklyn, New York. Lortel was remembered by her friends as vivacious, outgoing, and flirtatious, and was known to be found dancing at parties well into her 80s.

In 1920, Lortel (her stage name) began to study acting and theatre at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1921, she briefly left the United States to continue her training under Max Reinhardt in Berlin. She made her Broadway debut in 1925 in the Theatre Guild's production of Caesar and Cleopatra alongside Helen Hayes. In 1926, she appeared in Michael Kallesser's One Man's Woman at the 48th Street Theatre in Manhattan. Lortel also appeared in David Belasco's The Dove, with Judith Anderson, and as Poppy in the touring company of The Shanghai Gesture, with Florence Reed. In 1929, Lortel played the female lead in The Man Who Laughed Last with star Sessue Hayakawa. She performed the role both on stage and on film in one of the first talking pictures.

In 1931, Lortel married paper industrialist and philanthropist Louis Schweitzer. In deference to her husband's concerns, she retired from acting in 1939.

In 1947, "after spending over 15 years looking for a way to express herself in the theater that was acceptable to her husband" (and at the urging of actor Danny Kaye), Lortel founded the White Barn Theatre in an old horse barn on her and her husband's estate in Westport/Norwalk, Connecticut. According to Lortel's wishes, the theater's mission was to present works of an unusual and experimental nature, existing as a sanctuary from commercial pressures, a place where writers could take a chance with their plays and where actors could stretch their talents.

Under Lortel's guidance, the White Barn premiered plays (many of which enjoyed successful transfers to commercial theatres) including: George C. Wolfe and Lawrence Bearson's Ivory Tower with Eva Marie Saint (1947); Seán O'Casey's Red Roses for Me (1948); Eugène Ionesco's The Chairs (1957); Archibald MacLeish's This Music Crept by Me Upon the Waters (1959); Edward Albee's Fam and Yam (1960); Samuel Beckett's Embers (1960); Murray Schisgal's The Typists (1961); Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers (1965); Norman Rosten's Come Slowly Eden (1966); Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1966); Terrence McNally's Next (1967); Ahmed Yacoubi's The Night Before Thinking (1974); Barbara Wersba's The Dream Watcher starring Eva Le Gallienne (1975); June Havoc's Nuts for the Underman (1977); David Allen's Cheapside starring Cherry Jones (which Lortel later co-produced at the Half Moon Theatre in London); and Jerome Kilty's Margaret Sanger: Unfinished Business, starring Eileen Heckart (1989). Ireland's famed Dublin Players performed for several seasons at the White Barn with Milo O'Shea.

Among the successful transfers to Off-Broadway from the White Barn Theatre were: Fatima Dike's Glasshouse, Casey Kurtti's Catholic School Girls, Diane Kagan's Marvelous Grey, and Hugh Whitemore's The Best of Friends. Transfers from the White Barn to Broadway include Cy Coleman and A.E. Hotchner's Welcome to the Club (which premiered at the White Barn as Let 'Em Rot) and Lanford Wilson's Redwood Curtain, later on television as a Hallmark Hall of Fame 1995 production. In September 1992, a storage area near the theatre was expanded and renovated to become the White Barn Theatre Museum. The final production at the White Barn took place 2002. In 2006, after a failed attempt to save the theater, the property was sold to a real estate developer for $48 million. The theater's legacy has been preserved by a Lucille Lortel Foundation grant to the Westport Country Playhouse, which now houses the Lucille Lortel White Barn Center.

In 1955, eight years after Lortel founded the White Barn, Schweitzer purchased Theatre De Lys at 121 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village for Lortel as a 24th wedding anniversary present. For her first production in her new theatre, Lortel reopened her White Barn production of the Marc Blitzstein translation of The Threepenny Opera. The production ran for seven years, and represented a seminal moment in the history of Off-Broadway theatre, winning the only Tony Award ever given to an Off-Broadway production. The production won a Special Tony Award for best Off-Broadway show and the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical to Lotte Lenya. Scott Merrill was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.