The Times-Picayune/ ArchiveDavid Cuthbert watches as sunlight replaces stage light as the St. Charles Theater, at Poydras and St. Charles Avenue, was demolished back in 1967. The Theater just across the street from the former Times-Picayune building's loading dock.

Playwright-director George S. Kaufman was once stopped by an overzealous, and apparently new, doorman as he tried to enter the stage door of a theater where one of his shows was in rehearsal.

"Are you with the play?" the doorman asked.

"Let's put it this way," Kaufman replied, "I'm not against it."

This is the way I have always felt about theater.

People sometimes ask me how I can see as many plays as I do and not have it become a grind. But the truth is, as the lights go down, I never fail to experience a little frisson of excitement, because there is always the possibility that something wonderful will happen. And on occasion, it does.
 

I've also felt a kinship with Kaufman because he was originally a newspaperman. In fact, he was a reviewer ("I saw the play at a disadvantage; the curtain was up") and eventually the theater editor for The New York Times, the latter at the same time his career as a playwright was beginning to take off. He avoided using any news item that pertained to his plays.

An exasperated publicity man for one of his shows once asked him, "What do I have to do to get our leading lady's name in your paper?"

"Shoot her," Kaufman said.

After several hits as both a playwright and director, he quit journalism to collaborate with Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, and, most successfully, Moss Hart. He directed and acted in the first Kaufman & Hart play, "Once in a Lifetime."

Kaufman is what I'd call a "Theater Guy." He's someone who touched virtually all the stage bases, knocked home runs into the balcony, but also had his share of strikeouts.

In my own, infinitely smaller way, I like to think of myself as sort of Kaufmanesque. Before taking on my current job, I was a Times-Picayune city desk reporter who also reviewed movies and theater that our all-purpose, world-class critic, Frank Gagnard, couldn't, or didn't want to cover.

My first feature story was the 1967 demolition of the fabled St. Charles Theatre, at Poydras and St. Charles Avenue, just across the street from the former Times-Picayune building's loading dock.

"Debris-strewn, abused and misused, the St. Charles will have as its final audience a wrecking crew," I wrote. "Its only sin was to grow old, and impede the flow of progress."

I was little more than a child at the time I wrote that purple prose; 20, in fact. The story's saving grace was photojournalist Phil Guarisco's haunting photographs, in which he used his cub reporter as the sole, shadowy human figure prowling the playhouse's ruins.

Then came 16 years of writing about TV and 10 years as a features writer. During this period -- don't ask me how -- I collaborated on more than a dozen musical comedies with much better writers than myself. I wrote several things for the stage solo, co-produced the local premieres of many plays, commissioned and produced work from other writers I admired.

Even here, I had Kaufman as a model. His first Broadway play, "Someone in the House," was panned and had the additional misfortune to open during a flu epidemic, when the public was advised to steer clear of large gatherings. Facing abysmal business, Kaufman wrote an ad for the show: "Avoid crowds: see 'Someone in the House.'¤"

What I've always tried to do -- through reading of the play, attending rehearsals (when directors invited me), interviews with creative personnel, and seeing the end result -- is to illuminate what's onstage in print in much the same way that the creative team does in performance. We're all in this together -- actors, directors, technical personnel, critics and the all-important entity that completes every play: the audience. Even though it exists on the page, a play doesn't come to life "until it reaches the eyes and ears of the audience" -- another Kaufman quote.

When June Havoc was running Repertory Theatre, New Orleans, Havoc invited Frank Gagnard to lunch to discuss the faltering theater, and Gagnard took me along. He told Havoc that I was going to be handling a good bit of theater coverage. Havoc, who was hoping that her buddy (and mine), TP reporter Don Lee Keith, would be assigned the job, sputtered, "Well, of course, David's interested in what we do, he comes to our rehearsals, performances, he saw my Jenny Diver in 'The Threepenny Opera' how many times was it, darling?"

"Seven," I replied.

"But he's so young!" Havoc said. "So inexperienced!"

"June," Gagnard said, "David loves theater. Can't you tell that in his writing?"

Forty-one years later, I can see it in the St. Charles Theatre photographs. And I would hope, over many years, and hopefully a few more to come, that readers have seen it, too.

Theater writer David Cuthbert can be reached at dcuthbert@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3468.