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I grew up in Woods Hole on Cape Cod and in the suburbs of Boston. My father was part of the instrumentation lab at MIT under Dr. Charles Draper where the inertial guidance systems for the first intercontinental ballistic missiles were invented. I attended Williams College in philosophy, studied aesthetics with S. Lane Faison and discovered the theatre in a serious way, apprenticing at the Williamstown Theatre Festival under Nikos Psacharopoulos. One summer a classmate and I started a theatre on Montserrat in the British West Indies. Then I arrived at Yale Drama, where I studied with Stella Adler and met Joe Papp. He took me into NYC as his assistant and I began a sudden career in the off Broadway theatre. At the New York Shakespeare Festival, I helped Joe write The Naked Hamlet, founded the Other Stage and directed the first off Broadway play ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, No Place to be Somebody, “a black, black comedy” by Charles Gordone. I directed in many of the leading theatres of the day, worked with some of the great actors of my generation, and some of the great designers. The exhilarations and discoveries of this extraordinary world only increased my appetite for the direct experience of life. I ended up in an old hotel under the Brooklyn Bridge living with some friends in the very place where Hart Crane is supposed to have written bridge us, O Bridge, that we may not be abridged. I helped win a rent strike there, and we took over the building. I was for several years a single parent to my two boys, drove a cab, worked as a brakeman on the Penn Central Railroad and as an itinerant professor of acting and directing at places like NYU, Hofstra, and Ohio University. I kept a hand in the theatre world, directed a revival of Charles MacArthur’s political satire, Johnny on a Spot at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and won an Obie for it. I was co-coordinator of the Playwrights and Directors Unit at the Actors Studio for a while, and I was also sometimes part of a small investment banking firm. Our offices were at One World Trade Center, and we made privately placed tax exempt bonds for rural hospitals. Then I moved to the country and began a serious study of painting. I didn’t take formal lessons. My teachers were my sons Ethan and Noah who had gone on to art school and a friend who is a curator of painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She would take me through the galleries and into her shows. We talked and I spent time alone with the great paintings. In time I found a life here at Crooked Brook on an old farm in the Adirondack Park. I’m president of the trustees of the Wadhams Free Library and was chairman of the planning board for a while, helped write the new zoning ordinance and fomented a few peace events. There is a professional theatre I act with sometimes, and I have my own swamp, a brook and a forest that has secret places and stands next to a vast primeval wilderness. I have an emotional companion. I get into NYC a lot, haunt the museums and stay with my sons who still live the art life in the big city. And I paint and make stuff out of junk.
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