IN REMEMBRANCE: 1-16-2011

Ellen Stewart, the founder, artistic director and de facto producer of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, a multicultural hive of avant-garde drama and performance art in New York for almost half a century, died Thursday in Manhattan. She was 91.

Ellen Stewart in 2006. More Photos »

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Ms. Stewart had a history of heart trouble and died at Beth Israel Hospital after a long illness, said Sam Rudy, a spokesman for La MaMa, where she had lived for many years in an apartment above the theater, on East Fourth Street.

Ms. Stewart was a dress designer when she started La MaMa in a basement apartment in 1961, a woman entirely without theater experience or even much interest in the theater. But within a few years, and with an indomitable personality, she had become a theater pioneer.

Not only did she introduce unusual new work to the stage, she also helped colonize a new territory for the theater, planting a flag in the name of low-budget experimental productions in the East Village of Manhattan and creating the capital of what became known as Off Off Broadway.

She was a vivid figure, often described as beautiful — an African-American woman whose long hair, frequently worn in cornrows, turned silver in her later years. Her wardrobe was flamboyant, replete with bangles, bracelets and scarves. Her voice was deep, carrying an accent reminiscent of her Louisiana roots.

Few producers could match her energy, perseverance and fortitude. In the decades after World War II her influence on American theater was comparable to that of Joseph Papp, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, though the two approached the stage from different wings. Papp straddled the commercial and noncommercial worlds, while Ms. Stewart’s terrain was international and decidedly noncommercial.

Her theater became a remarkable springboard for an impressive roster of promising playwrights, directors and actors who went on to accomplished careers both in mainstream entertainment and in push-the-envelope theater.

Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Olympia Dukakis, Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler, Diane Lane and Nick Nolte were among the actors who performed at La MaMa in its first two decades. Playwrights like Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Harvey Fierstein, Maria Irene Fornes and Adrienne Kennedy developed early work there. So did composers like Elizabeth Swados, Philip Glass and Stephen Schwartz.

La MaMa directors included the visionary Robert Wilson; Tom O’Horgan (who helped create the rock musical “Hair” at the Public); Richard Foreman, who founded the imaginative Ontological Theater Company; Joseph Chaikin, who founded the Open Theater; and even Papp, before there was such a thing as the Public Theater. Meredith Monk, the composer, choreographer and director, presented her genre-bending pieces there regularly.

A few La MaMa plays, like the musical “Godspell,” moved to Broadway, and others had extended runs in commercial Off Broadway houses.

“Eighty percent of what is now considered the American theater originated at La MaMa,” Mr. Fierstein once said in an interview in Vanity Fair, perhaps exaggerating slightly. His play “Torch Song Trilogy” was developed there.

La MaMa became the quintessential theater on a shoestring. Salaries were minimal, ticket prices were low, and profits were nonexistent. For decades Ms. Stewart often swept the sidewalk in front of the theater herself.

But an adventurous theatergoer would be rewarded there. More than 3,000 productions of classic and postmodern drama, performance art, dance and chamber opera have been seen on La MaMa’s various stages. For Ms. Stewart a vast number of them were leaps of faith, arising from her instinct and belief that what artists need more than anything else is the freedom to create without interference. She would typically appear onstage before a performance, ring a cowbell and announce La MaMa’s dedication “to the playwright and all aspects of the theater.”

During the earliest days of her theater she supported her family of artists — her children, she called them — with the money she continued to earn designing clothes. She installed a washer and dryer in the basement for the performers, and many a visiting artist slept in her apartment or in the theaters themselves.

She didn’t begin directing shows herself until relatively late in her life. She often said she didn’t read plays; she read people. Her gifts, as affirmed by a MacArthur Foundation award in 1985, were intuitive and hard to pin down.

“If a script ‘beeps’ to me, I do it,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “Audiences may hate these plays, but I believe in them. The only way I can explain my ‘beeps’ is that I’m no intellectual, but my instincts tell me automatically when a playwright has something.”

Her programming stretched far wider than the American theater. It was at La MaMa that Andrei Serban, a Romanian director transplanted to the United States, refought the Trojan War with his reinvention of Greek tragedy, “Fragments of a Greek Trilogy,” incorporating “Medea,” “The Trojan Women” and “Electra.” La MaMa became a magnet for the most adventurous European and American companies, including Peter Brook’s Paris group. Playing there now is “Being Harold Pinter,” a politically charged production by the Belarus Free Theater, based in Minsk, some of whose members were arrested and others forced underground by an authoritarian regime.

La MaMa’s range of activity was kaleidoscopic and multicultural, embracing an Eskimo “Antigone,” a Korean “Hamlet” and a splashy re-creation of the golden days of the Cotton Club in Harlem, directed by Ms. Stewart herself.

She was a theatrical missionary, scouting new talent abroad and planting La MaMa seeds wherever she went. She produced site-specific performances all over the world — a “Medea” created by Mr. Serban and Ms. Swados, for example, at the ruins in Baalbek, Lebanon, in 1972. Satellite La MaMa organizations sprouted from Tel Aviv to Tokyo. With the $300,000 MacArthur grant she bought a former monastery in Umbria, Italy, and turned it into an international theater center.

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DAVID NELSON, SON IN ‘OZZIE AND HARRIETT’

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: January 12, 2011

The cause was complications of colon cancer, said Dale Olson, a family spokesman.

At first on radio and, beginning in 1952, on television, “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” dramatized the gentle conflicts and lapses in communication of the sweet-tempered, well-behaved Nelson clan and brought them into American homes for 22 years.

By today’s standards the word “Adventures” can be read as ironic. The plots generally revolved around misunderstandings — a presumed traffic ticket that turns out to be a Christmas card, a pair of mistakenly delivered chairs — and were invariably resolved good-naturedly. Sex, religion, politics and other subjects with argument-starting potential were avoided. Though the show spanned the years from World War II to Vietnam — the radio show began in 1944 and the television show stopped filming, after 14 seasons, in 1966 — the outside world rarely if ever penetrated the comfortable idyll that the Nelson family seemed to inhabit.

“Ozzie and Harriet” laid the groundwork for other mild, family sitcoms like “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best,” but it also had a weirdly postmodern and prescient aspect to it: the four Nelsons were, in some ways, television’s first reality stars.

The show was scripted, but the characters were based on the Nelsons themselves, named after the Nelsons themselves and, from 1949, when 12-year-old David and 8-year-old Ricky replaced the actors who had initially voiced their roles on the radio, played by the Nelsons themselves. Their actual Los Angeles home was used in filming, and a reproduction of its interior was built in the studio. When David and Rick married in real life, their wives were incorporated into the show.

David Nelson was probably the least prominent of the four characters, dully mature as a son, quietly sage as an older brother. (In one departure from reality, his character graduated from college and became a lawyer.) Ozzie was the know-it-all dad whose presumptions often got him into trouble and drove the story. Harriet was the wisely, teasingly understanding helpmeet, and young Ricky was the adorable one, the mischievous boy who mispronounced words, made wisecracks, grew up impossibly handsome and became a pop star. His career as a singer took off in 1957 when he performed the Fats Domino song “I’m Walkin’ ” with a backup band during an episode of “Ozzie and Harriet.”

David Oswald Nelson was born in Manhattan on Oct. 24, 1936. The family lived for a time in Tenafly, N.J., but moved to California when David was about 5. Ozzie Nelson was a popular bandleader, Harriet his lead singer, and they worked together in films and were regulars on Red Skelton’s radio show. When Skelton joined the Army in 1944, Ozzie wrote a script for a show based on his own family, and the Nelsons’ future found a new direction. For two years after the show began on television, it continued, with separate scripts, on radio as well.

David graduated from Hollywood High School and attended the University of Southern California. Aside from “Ozzie and Harriet,” he had an abbreviated career as an actor, appearing in films like “Peyton Place” (1957), “The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker” (1959) and “The Big Circus” (1959), in which he played a catcher on a trapeze team, a role that led to his studying circus aerialism and performing as a catcher in an aerial troupe known as the Flying Viennas.

Ozzie Nelson died in 1975, Harriet in 1994. Rick Nelson was killed in a plane crash in 1985. David’s first marriage, to June Blair, who appeared on “Ozzie and Harriet,” ended in divorce. He is survived by their two sons, Daniel and James; his wife of 36 years, Yvonne; her three children, John, Eric and Teri, all of whom Mr. Nelson adopted; and seven grandchildren.

During the final years of “Ozzie and Harriet,” David directed several episodes. He went on to work as a director of other television shows and commercials and to form his own production company.

In 1971, five years after “Ozzie and Harriet” went off the air, Esquire magazine interviewed all the Nelsons about the differences between their real selves and the characters they played on television. It was David who made the most vehement distinctions. One family was real and one wasn’t, he said.

“For your sanity you had to keep that clear,” he said. “Rick and I had to distinguish between our father and the director telling us what to do. If we got the lines crossed, that’s where the arguments started, and I would end up putting my fist through a wall behind the set, because I was that angry.”

He added: “We would keep up the front of this totally problemless, happy-go-lucky group. There might have been a tremendous battle in our home, but if someone from outside came in, it would be as if the director yelled, ‘Roll ’em.’ We’d fall right into our stage roles. You’d get to wondering which was the true thing. It’s an awfully big load to carry, to be everyone’s fantasy family. How long can you keep protecting that image and never let any of the outside world in?”

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BOBBY ROBINSON, HARLEM MUSIC IMPRESARIO

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: January 12, 2011

His inspiration was to use all his savings to buy the shop and turn it into a record store that, as Bobby’s Happy House, became a treasured Harlem institution for a half century. The store spawned a remarkable recording business that helped launch artists from rhythm and blues giants like Gladys Knight and the Pips to the rap stars Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

Mr. Robinson died on Friday at the age of 93 in Manhattan, his family said. He had been one of the first blacks to own a shop on 125th Street, the fabled Main Street of Harlem, and his was one of the last old-time stores to battle the neighborhood’s relentless gentrification, albeit unsuccessfully.

Old-timers remember James Brown’s limo parked outside, and people breaking into a happy strut as they responded to the music tumbling onto the street. Mr. Robinson, known for his style that in later years included a cascade of white hair, did not sing or play music himself, but he produced, sold, found, promoted and simply lived it.

He was very good at spotting opportunities. The musicians who visited his store as they strolled from the Apollo to a nearby steakhouse inspired him to start his own record labels. He had many, sometimes with partners and often with colorful names like Fury and Enjoy. He recorded early works by Ike and Tina Turner, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and the Scarlets, later The Five Satins.

Mr. Robinson’s musicians were admitted to the rhythm and blues, rock and roll and hip-hop halls of fame.

His instincts were keen. In 1959, he paid $40 for an extra 15 minutes of recording time so that Wilbert Harrison could record one more song. The result, “Kansas City,” was a No. 1 hit.

“I record things that touch me,” Mr. Robinson said. “And I try to record them pure, 100 percent, no water added.”

Morgan Clyde Robinson, a grandson of slaves, was born in Union, S.C., on April 16, 1917, and as a teenager walked six miles to high school, where he was valedictorian. The Black Music Research Journal in 2003 told how he fell in love with the blues: he and other townspeople gathered outside a jailhouse window to listen to a talented singer. The incarcerated bluesman let down a pail for contributions.

During World War II, Mr. Robinson was a corporal stationed in Hawaii in charge of hiring entertainment, from big bands to a one-footed tap dancer. He amassed $8,000 in savings by offering sailors and soldiers another service: “I was the biggest loan shark there,” he told The New York Times in 2003.

Mr. Robinson headed for Harlem, where he had no problem paying $2,500 cash for the hat store — hats not included. “I said to myself I will open a small record store and if that fails, no one can say I didn’t try,” he told The New York Amsterdam News in 2001.

He hedged his bet by buying four electric shoe-shining machines. These were in the front of the store, the records in the back.

Shoe-shining was soon unnecessary. An early doo-wop group he recorded, the Vocaleers, who harmonized on 142nd Street, rivaled Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays as Harlem folk heroes, the music historian Philip Groia wrote.

Mr. Robinson got to know the powers of the music business. Ahmet Ertegun, the renowned head of Atlantic Records, stopped by to chat about trends. “He’s a major personage in Harlem,” Mr. Ertegun said of Mr. Robinson in 2003.

When Alan Freed, the D.J. who championed the new music, first broadcast in New York in 1954, Mr. Robinson helped answer phones.

Happy House acquired its euphonious name in 1956 in honor of a doo-wop song Mr. Robinson wrote for Lewis Lymon & the Teenchords titled “I’m So Happy,” a hit in the Northeast. (Lewis Lymon was the younger brother of Frankie Lymon, best known for a song with the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”)

In the 1970s Mr. Robinson became one of the first label owners to record rap music, presenting artists like Doug E. Fresh and Spoonie Gee. In the early 1990s he moved his store from 301 West 125th Street around the corner to Frederick Douglass Boulevard to make way for a KFC franchise. He was evicted in 2008 in favor of an office building.

Mr. Robinson is survived by his daughter, Cheryl Benjamin; his sister, Minnie Stewart; two grandchildren; and five great grandchildren.

Another legacy is the catchy stage name of Gladys Knight and the Pips. When meeting the group, Mr. Robinson asked, “What the hell’s a Pip?”

The answer, The Times reported, was that the family ensemble was named for a cousin who used to sneak them into nightclubs.

“I said, ‘Gladys is the singer, so you better put her name out front,’ ” Mr. Robinson remembered. “They went for it, otherwise Gladys Knight would’ve been just another Pip.”

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PETER YATES, DIRECTOR OF ‘BULLITT’ AND ‘BREAKING AWAY’

Warner Brothers/Seven Arts, via Photofest

The cause was heart failure, his wife, Virginia, wrote in an e-mail message forwarded by Mr. Yates’s agency, Judy Daish Associates.

Mr. Yates was nominated for two Academy Awards for directing, for “Breaking Away” (1979), an underdog-triumphs story in which four local teenagers in Bloomington, Ind., take on a privileged team of bicycle racers from Indiana University; and for “The Dresser” (1983), an adaptation of Ronald Harwood’s play about an aging theater actor and his long-serving assistant, which starred Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. (Both films, which Mr. Yates also produced, were nominated for best picture as well.)

Still, Mr. Yates’s reputation probably rests most securely on “Bullitt” (1968), his first American film — and indeed, on one particular scene, an extended car chase that instantly became a classic. The film stars Steve McQueen as a conscience-stricken lone-wolf San Francisco detective, and the chase begins with him behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang in a slow, cat-and-mouse pursuit of killers who were in a Dodge Charger. It escalates into high-speed screeches and thuds on city streets and ends in a fiery blast on a highway.

The chase, often paired in discussion with a New York City counterpart from William Friedkin’s “French Connection”, featured McQueen doing some of his own driving: a camera placed in the car and peering out the windshield registers the violent shifts in the driver’s perspective as the car bounds in chassis-challenging fashion over San Francisco’s famous hills.

Mr. Yates’s grasp of the American landscape and American characters stretched from coast to coast. He directed Robert Mitchum as a small-time hood desperate to avoid jail time in the low-key crime drama “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973), set in and around Boston; it was especially attentive to the local color and local accents of the George V. Higgins novel on which it was based. Among his New York-based films were “For Pete’s Sake” (1974) — a gag-laced farce set in Brooklyn involving the Mafia, a call-girl operation, cattle rustling and the brassy woman (Barbra Streisand) who gets mixed up in it all — and the 1983 suspense thriller “Eyewitness,” set in Manhattan, starring Sigourney Weaver as an ambitious television reporter following a murder story and William Hurt as an informant who may or may not be reliable.

“Breaking Away” and “Eyewitness” were both written by Steve Tesich, a Yugoslavian immigrant with whom Mr. Yates shared a shrewd appreciation of details that perhaps only foreigners might determine were peculiarly American. (Mr. Yates also directed an Off Broadway play by Mr. Tesich, “Passing Game,” in 1977.)

“Breaking Away” starred four actors who were unknown at the time (one was Dennis Quaid). They played local Bloomington-ites — or, as they were disparagingly known, “Cutters” — who lived in resentment of the rich college students annually invading their hometown. Mr. Yates and Mr. Tesich used them to illustrate American attitudes toward class, education, upward mobility, romance and athletic success.

The film, wrote Vincent Canby in The New York Times, “is so cheerful it almost hurts, but its cheerfulness is grounded in a true appreciation of certain so-called American values (pluck, perseverance, family ties) which, though idealized more often than honored, are a part of the way we see ourselves.”

Peter James Yates was born in England on July 24, 1929. Most sources say his birthplace was Aldershot, Hampshire, about 40 miles southwest of London, though his wife said in an email that it was the village of Ewshot, which is closer to the city. His father was in the military.

He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and he worked as an assistant director for, among others, Jack Cardiff, on “Sons and Lovers” (1960)and Tony Richardson on “A Taste of Honey” (1961). It was a 1967 film, “Robbery,” based on the 1963 English heist known as the Great Train Robbery, that impressed Steve McQueen and earned him the assignment to direct “Bullitt.”

Mr. Yates’s career was marked by a willingness to skip from genre to genre, and for a director with so many significant hits, he had an up-and-down career. Among his other titles, not all well-received, were “John and Mary” (1969), about an anonymous tryst that leads to love, which starred a youthful Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow; “Murphy’s War” (1971), a historical drama about a sailor (Peter O’Toole) bent on avenging the sinking of his ship by a German U-boat; “The Deep” (1977), an undersea thriller with Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Shaw and Nick Nolte; “Krull” (1983), a science fiction adventure, and “Eleni” (1985), an adaptation of the memoir by Nicholas Gage about his search for the Communists who executed his mother during the Greek civil war.

Mr. Yates married Virginia Sue Pope, a New Zealander, in 1960. She survives him, as do their son, Toby, of Los Angeles, daughter, Miranda Yates Brassel, of Brooklyn, and two grandchildren.

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