Arthur Giron was a distinguished American playwright and
educator who died in February 2022. He
was 85. A founding member of New York’s
venerable Ensemble Studio Theatre, he was known most recently as the author of
the book for the musical
Amazing Grace, which had a brief run on
Broadway in 2015 and has since found more success in other venues. Several of
his subsequent works for stage and film are in process and may yet be realized.
Probably his first bold call on theatrical and media
attention was Edith Stein, a play about a real person and actual events,
a Jewish woman who converted to Catholicism and was murdered by the Nazis in
the Holocaust. Many of his later plays
were also on historical subjects, including biographical explorations of such
figures as physicist Richard Feynman, the Wright brothers (a script that has
become the basis for several musicals), and the passionate relationship of
Voltaire with the scientist Emilie du Chatelet, in a play that won the Galileo
Prize for illuminating scientific innovation. Even given their subjects and
historical sweep, Giron explored the emotions at the heart of these
achievements.
Giron was
commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Guild to write a bilingual
(Spanish/English) opera, The Golden Guitar. At that point, Edith Stein had itself already become an
opera.
His plays often dealt with moral and political questions,
none more so that A Dream of Wealth, which dealt with the defining
influence of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, the country of his family’s
origins. “I think the theatre in
general is the last haven of the truth,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter
during a rehearsal of this play. “We in
the theatre have the responsibility to get under the surface of things…”
Arthur Giron grew up in Los Angeles, where his father was a
“dentist to the stars” at MGM. During
World War II, Hollywood was a haven for the displaced artists and
intelligentsia of Europe whose relationship with the movies was uneasy, but
some of whom were passionately committed to theatre, not yet prominent in
southern California. As a precocious young stage actor in his teenage years,
Arthur absorbed this passion and commitment.
(He describes this period in an essay, “The Golden Silence,” posted onhis website.)
I first met Arthur Giron in the early 1990s, when he was
head of the graduate program in playwriting in the Drama Department at Carnegie
Mellon University, one of the most prestigious theatre programs in the country.
He was mentor to my partner, playwright Margaret Thomas Kelso. Though at that time she was no longer a
student, having earned her MFA and gone on to also teach, we saw a lot of
Arthur in the years before we left Pittsburgh for California, and he returned
to New York.
He was tall and handsome, his height and appearance enhanced
by an erect posture that was unaffected and constant. He could be funny and acerbic but he earned his air of authority. When he was a guest artist at a southern
California university, the predominantly Latin theatre students addressed him
as Maestro. That was Arthur.
At the same time, he deployed the kindness, courtesies and
soft voice of an old world gentleman. I once saw his gallantry on display at a
surprise birthday party for Margaret at a Pittsburgh restaurant I arranged with
her friends. After dinner there was
dancing, and an elderly woman guest was watching alone until Arthur asked her
to dance.
With his principled idealism he was also practical about
playwriting and the business of artistic survival. His work observed the power
of passions. He endured tragedies in his life, but his bulwark was his devotion
to his wife Mariluz.
Although I was not
one of his students, he encouraged my writing.
Margaret directed a short theatre piece I wrote, and the next day Arthur
left an effusive phone message of praise, which he repeated the next time I saw
him. This is just one instance of his
interest.
I saw an early version of his Wright brothers play at CMU,
and one of his one-acts at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Manhattan. Probably his most produced play—mostly by
university theatres unafraid of large casts and challenging staging—is Becoming
Memories, and so far I’ve seen three productions of it, each memorable in
its own way.
Becoming Memories follows five small town families
through three generations from the frontier to modern days, beginning in
1911. It is based on the memories and
family stories contributed by members of the Illusion Theatre in
Minneapolis. The first scene depicts
the rescue of a teenage girl on horseback—when I first read it, I couldn’t see
how this would work on stage. But this
imaginative dimension in a realistic story often characterizes Giron’s plays.
The first production I saw was created by my partner
Margaret when she was the entire theatre department of a small college in
central Pennsylvania. However small,
the college had a fine old theatre with a large stage, and Margaret used that
space and a large student cast to create a colorful epic. Most memorable to me was how she staged the
final scenes of each act to produce an emotional, ecstatic effect. Other
audience members felt it, too. (Arthur
had visited the cast during rehearsals and talked with them about the play.)
The second time was a university production in Vancouver,
B.C., where I happened to be while researching a Smithsonian story on the Haida
artist Robert Davidson. This time the
stage was much smaller, an improvised space in which the audience was close to
and on pretty much the same level as most of the action (though there was
creative use of ladders and platforms as well.) This produced some revelatory and magic moments, particularly the
personal moments we witnessed close up.
Afterwards I met its actors backstage, and when I told them I knew the
playwright and would be seeing him when I returned to Pittsburgh, they all
signed a production poster for him. I was pleased to deliver it to Arthur in his
office at CMU.
The third time was at the University of Pittsburgh. One of my nieces living in a town east of
Pittsburgh was about to enter high school, and I gave her a day in the city as
a gift marking the transition. We were
to end the day with Becoming Memories.
But earlier in the afternoon, I took her on a tour of the CMU campus,
where we happened to run into Arthur just as he was leaving. So I was able to introduce her to the author
of the play she would see that evening.
The production itself was on a scale between the previous two, and once
again it illuminated different aspects of the story.
These are some of the virtues of theatre that sets it apart,
and so Arthur Giron’s plays will continue to generate new and even surprising
permutations. May he rest in peace. His
work certainly lives on.
Also lost in 2022 was the epic British theatre director
Peter Brook.
After a decade of
Shakespeare productions with many of England’s great actors, he electrified
theatre internationally in the mid-1960s with his production of
Marat/Sade.
He introduced his version of India’s
Mahabharata
to western stages, and brought a visual lyricism to unconventional productions,
notably of Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970.
He then moved to France and created many
productions there, while experimenting with new acting and narrative
techniques.
He also directed films,
notably the 1963
Lord of the Flies.
Other theatre artists who died in 2022 (apart from actors,
to be named in a later post) include: playwright Charles Fuller, director
Derrick Golden, playwright Terry Teachout, playwright and theatre scholar Paul
Harrison, playwright and musician Jo Carol Pierce and French theatre director
Francois Tanguy.
