Theodore Hoffman 1922–2009

Theodore Hoffman (a theatre devotee, advocate, critic, playwright, activist, and teacher) who was a seminal figure in professional training for all areas of theatre, passed away on July 9 at age 87.  “Ted” had a distinguished career, and had great impact on his field.  He was deeply influential in the regional theatre movement of the early 1960s, and the explosive growth of related theatre initiatives that followed over the next two decades.

Born on the Fourth of July, 1922, the first son of a semi-professional baseball player who was also a foreman on the Brooklyn docks, Ted also showed promise as an exceptionally agile infielder. At age nine he contracted polio, recovered, went back to school and the baseball dream. At age fifteen, he was again hospitalized, due to a degenerating spinal structure. His exceptional physical capacities were re-channeled, during his two-year, bed-ridden stay in the hospital. He emerged as a self-driven, severely spine-twisted, well-read, intellectual phenom. On release from the hospital, his doctors told his family that their son had a life expectancy of no more than age forty. OK, Ted said to himself and others over the ensuing years, he would accomplish all that he possibly could by age forty. And if you parse the account of his life, you can infer that as his actual achievement, with many more cherries on top.

Having spent his early adolescent years focused on a career in baseball, Ted was guided by a prescient English teacher to apply to Columbia University, an Ivy League enclave this Brooklyn kid had never heard of. While there, he was influenced by teachers, Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. In those years, 1941–1945, he hung out with the Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Simpson, Allan Temko group, became editor of The Jester, and ran CDC, the university radio program.

Graduating from Columbia, Ted took a job at Loew’s International, MGM, in the Foreign Title division. In the fall of 1947, Ted’s life began to fall into place. He met and fell in love with Lynn Baker. A graduate of Radcliffe, she matched Ted’s intellect and cultural ambition. In a stroke of good fortune, MGM assigned Ted to Paris, while Lynn had just won a scholarship to the Sorbonne. Once ensconced in Paris, Ted’s and Lynn’s life horizons took on unexpected dimensions. (See Lynn’s account below.) Returning to the U.S., he taught acting and theatre criticism at Bard College and had his first play produced by the Compass Theatre in Chicago. There followed a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley and then, an appointment as head of the Carnegie Tech Drama Department in 1958.

While at Carnegie, Ted was invited by The Ford Foundation to co-chair the formation of the Theatre Communications Group.  This organization was conceived to provide connective tissue and shared services for a burgeoning regional theatre movement.  In fact, it began to define the goals of that movement, and Ted led that discussion.  In 1963, Ted left his position at Carnegie Tech to devote himself to the cultural issues involved in this movement.  He was immediately engaged by The Rockefeller Foundation to conduct a two-year study of actor training in England and Europe. The regional theatres were going to need a cohort of classically trained actors to achieve their mission. His report to educational leaders and theatres in 1965 changed actor training in America.

In late 1965, Ted was appointed Director of the Theatre Program of the School of the Arts being formed at New York University.  In the space of eight months, he formed what many people continue to refer to as “the greatest theatre training faculty ever assembled.” On the shoulders of that original faculty, one of the finest theatre training programs in America was built. In addition, he collaborated with Eric Bentley in translating Chekhov’s plays. His own translation of “An Italian Straw Hat” is still being produced. He wrote major articles for The New York Times, as well as Theatre Arts Magazine, The Drama Review and others. He served as theatre critic for WINS, as Associate Editor for TDR, co-founded the journal Alternative Theatre, and served as the ethical, artistically observant touchstone for so many theatre practitioners. He retired from NYU at age 65 and moved to Arizona for health reasons. He died there at age 87, having more than doubled his expected life span.

He is deeply mourned by all, but especially by his family, wife Lynn Hoffman, his children, Martha, Joanna, Livia, his brother Robert, and his most faithful friend, Robert Rabinowitz. He possessed a warm but restless soul. May it finally rest on a life of service well founded.

Ted was my mentor, my friend, my colleague, my buddy, my sometimes roommate, and in the end as close to me as an umbilically connected brother could be. I and so many others that he touched and encouraged will miss him.

J. Michael Miller
July, 2009

“A Memoir of the Paris Years and Beyond”
By Lynn Baker Hoffman

Note: In the fall of 1947, Ted met and fell in love with Lynn Baker, a recent Radcliffe graduate who was working in New York. Lynn was about to go to Paris on a scholarship to the Sorbonne. As luck would have it, Ted’s boss at MGM sent him to Paris to make a series of educational shorts from old newsreels, using blocked currency. Lynn’s memoir picks up there, about nine months later.

When the MGM project came to an end in the fall, a friend of Lynn’s from Harvard asked the couple to join him in running a winter program for the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies.  This meeting was first organized by ex-Harvard student Clemens Heller in the summer of 1948.  It is still running sixty years later, but the “American Studies” in the title has dropped out.

The Salzburg Seminar was housed in Schloss Leopoldskron, the home of the famous director Max Rheinhardt, whose widow had rented it to the Seminar year round.  Ted took on the duties of Program Director, and after a few months of running it as an uninteresting Rest Center for Austrian and German students, he decided to create a series of monthly programs mainly in the arts and try for participants from all over Europe.  

While in Paris, Ted and Lynn had become good friends with the Chicago writer Saul Bellow, and the British drama critic Eric Bentley, among others. Thus we were lucky in our faculty.  For instance, Bellow agreed to come for a literature month; Bentley came for a theater month; composer David Diamond came for a music month, and the “students” came from every country we could find them in, brilliant young practitioners in many fields.

The most amazing session by far was the one on Theater.  Ted had been electrified by the European theater scene, which which provided such a different view from American “Method” acting based on Stanislavsky. Going about with Bentley, he had seen the theater company of Jean Louis Barrault in Paris, of Bertoldt Brecht’s marvelous Berliner Ensemble which did Mutter Courage in Munich, and the work of the famous Piccolo Teatro in Milan.  Eric, with his wide knowledge of the European stage, found many of the faculty and participants.

The group included a yet to be famous mime, Marcel Marceau; Hans Curjel, who had been director of the Berlin Opera and had fled Germany for Zurich; a young Kenneth Tynan just out of Oxford;  and an Italian troup from Bologna that was re-inventing the Commedia dell’Arte, with authentic leather masks and characteristic gestures based on historical research.  Jacques Le Coq, who later became a pioneering gymnast, was the movement trainer for the group.  Then, of course, there was Bentley himself, who played and sang Kurt Weill’s songs from Brecht’s The Beggar’s Opera on his traveling harmonium. Every night after supper, he or Marceau or some other talent would offer unparalleled entertainment to the group.

During this month, the Bologna group presented Goldoni’s “Servant With Two Masters” in Reinhardt’s outdoor amphitheater on the lake in front of the Schloss.  Marceau presented his “Bip” series with a young woman partner; Eric Bentley put on a production of “him” by e.e. cummings, with Tynan in the lead; Ted directed Sweeney Agonistes by T.S. Eliot.

The piece de resistance was “L’Histoire d’un Soldat by Stravinsky, complete with orchestra, and directed by Hans Curjel in the out door theater. Marceau played the part of the Devil. When the play began, the stage was empty but behind it, on the far side of the lake, a beam of light picked up Marceau in a formal white suit, carrying a butterfly net and leaping into a boat. The boat came slowly to where a scrim of bushes formed the back of the stage and the Devil, in all his elegance, bounded through a gap into our midst.  

Our shows were open to the public, and Marceau’s name became so famous in the town of Salzburg that Ted arranged a series of performances at the Peterskeller, every one of which was sold out.  At the end of the month, Ted got the American Army, which was still holding parts of Germany and Austria, to offer Marceau a tour throughout its far flung USIS facilities.  It was the first time he had performed outside of France, and the beginning of his world-wide reputation.

At the end of the second year, we decided to go back to New York, but since that required us to fill out official forms, we faced a problem.  We hadn’t expected to stay more than a few months at the Seminar, so we told everyone that we were married, otherwise we would have been given separate rooms.  When we stayed two years, it was a little embarrassing to confess our true status, so we went to town to apply for a license.
    
The official looked up our papers, and of course we were listed as married, so my heart sank.  But Ted saw that the carbon had slipped so that the copy we were looking at said, under Date of Birth, “Student,” and under Occupation, “USA,” and so forth. The official was so flustered that he agreed to accept our story.  We then drove out to a village in the Alps with two friends and got married in the town of Lofer.  Presiding was a red-headed clerk with a bow tie who told us “It is no longer “who is right,” but “what is right” (“Nicht ver ist richt aberwas ist richtig.”). Missing was “honor and obey.”

Alas, when we returned from a speaking tour by Ted at USIS centers in Germany, which we privately considered our honeymoon, the entire work staff of the Schloss stood in front of the building to greet us. With a huge, knowing smile on her face, the manager for the building  stepped forward with a big bunch of flowers and said, “Froliche Hochzeits Reise, Frau Hoffman” (Happy Wedding Day, Mrs. Hoffman, deeply emphasizing the word “Frau ”)  Everyone cheered.  The awful truth came out that I had left a copy of the wedding certificate on our bedroom table!  

When we got back to New York, I went to work as The Reader (a low paying but prestigious job) at the Viking Press, which was about to publish Saul Bellow’s “Adventures of Augie March.”  Bellow had kindly recommended me for the job. Ted, for his part, had gone back to Columbia to get his MA in English Literature, but after finishing it had a change of heart as to what he wanted to do next. He wanted to teach what he felt was a radically different style of theater training. Instead of focusing so absolutely on “character” and the “actor,” as in the Stanislavsky-based “method” work, this new concept paid attention to what was called “the play without a text.”  It valued stage craft, movement, lighting, sound, and included elements of popular theater, like circus, mime, and juggling. Joseph Papp’s “Public Theater” represented this approach in many ways, but apart from “Sweeney Agonistes” in Salzburg, Ted had never directed a play in his life.

He had written one, when he was in Salzburg, based on the story of a Czech D.P. who applied to the Seminar from a local D.P. camp and was then employed as a handy-man at the Schloss.  The play was a mordant, witty “how to get ahead” in post-War Europe and featured this Til Eulenspiegel character who was quite amoral and kept getting into trouble.  Mike Nicholls and Elaine May of the Second City in Chicago liked it and put it on.  

Ted had already joined Bentley in his work of translating plays from the British versions which sounded so lame to American ears. Included in one of the anthologies that Eric was putting out in paperback, were plays by Brecht, Strindberg,  and other playwrights that were virtually unknown to American theatergoers.  Ted himself translated  Chekov’s short play “The Brute,” and together with Lynn had done Henri Labiche’s “An Italian Straw Hat.”

Another accomplishment of Ted’s was to join the company of so-called “public intellectuals” by having a story of his accepted by Partisan Review.  Through Bentley, he also got a request to review plays at The New Republic.  Then, possibly on the strength of his reviews, he was asked to apply to be the new head of the Theater Dept. at Bard College. In an effort to correct his lack of experience, he marched us down to the Cherry Lane Theater in New York, where an Irish singing group, the Clancy Brothers, had put on a successful run of Casey’s “The Plough and the Stars.” Ted had learned that they were going to take their company to the old Rice Theater on Martha’s Vineyard that summer.  Tom Clancy, the director of the group, interviewed us and accepted our kind offer to do gratis whatever was needed in terms of set building, costume making, and box office, with a little acting possibly thrown in.

The Clancy Brothers were big on ambition and poor on administration, so in the middle of the summer, Ted virtually took over running the operation.  The Clancy Brothers left the island with debts unpaid, but Ted and I had made a friend of a local real estate broker, and he found us a small cottage on Deep Bottom Cove in West Tisbury which we could afford.  To my surprise, Ted did get the job at Bard, although the salary was pitifully low.  In the two years we were there, he turned a handsome old coach house on the estate where Bard was located into a new theater.  

Ted also negotiated a job teaching literature at Bard for Saul Bellow, who had come back from Europe and was looking for work.  The novelist Jack Ludwig and the writer Keith Botsford were also on the faculty.  Among us, we could put on an interesting salon.  Its most famous meeting was on the occasion of Dylan Thomas’ last moments in a New York hosp together with Bellow, Ludwig, and Botsford,  to mourn Dylan’s passing, whenever that might be.  Pearl Kazin was glued to the telephone and fielding reports.  When Dylan’s death was announced, Pearl, who had been very close to him, ran out into a snow-covered cornfield without her shoes on, and Ted rushed out to bring her back.

Ted and I stayed at Bard for two years, at the end of which he was offered a one year grant by the Kenyon Review to go to Oxford and write.  We found a flat in Woodstock, a half-hour bus ride away from Oxford, which was in a house owned by Elizabeth Mitchell, who later became a “midden” printmaker, well known for her prints and assemblages. She would find odd scraps like flattened bottle caps or bits of shoe leather in the street, or old envelopes in people’s trash, and create impressions on an antique printing press which was taller than she was.  Ted went to the Radcliffe Library and spent the winter over a convenient heating grate on the building’s ancient floor, working on various writings and trying not to freeze.  

When we came back from Oxford, Ted was asked to join the Theater Dept. at the University of California at Berkeley.  He came there together with two other new faculty members:  Jim Kieran was one and the other was Robert Goldsby.  We made up a sympathetic club of newcomers, with young wives and young children, and it was for all of us a halcyon year.  The next year, Goldsby was chosen to head the Berkeley theater department, Kieran went to the University of Los Angeles, and Ted was offered the post of director of the famed Drama Department at arnegie Mellon in Pittsburg.  Only 36, he was the youngest director they had ever had.

Happy Birthday
by Richard Schechner

Dear Ted,

Happy birthday!

It’s been a long long time. One year you were here in New York, we were working together, and/or fighting, and the next you were gone. And then the long time elapsed. I won’t talk about that absence now. I don’t know if it makes any difference to you, now. But I do want to remind you of some of what happened between us during the years we were in contact.

I was a young man, just starting out at Tulane in 1962. You were a “great figure,” teaching at the “legendary” Carnegie Tech. You were Bob Corrigan’s friend and, some said, his tutor – the power behind RWC’s throne. I didn’t know, don’t know. But I do remember that you and Corrigan wanted to start a magazine that would put TDR out of business. After all, who was I? My gut reaction, which I followed, was to offer you the Associate Editor’s post on TDR and thereby prevent you from working with Corrigan on a new magazine. You accepted, and the rest is (as they say) history. TDR is still around, still going strong. And, would you believe it, I am still editing it? I did take 17 years off! But I came back in 1986 and have been doing it ever since.

And then came the NYU days. There is where we had lots of tugs of war, you and me. I was then, and am now, your junior. Funny how that feels – me almost 75 years old (on August 23) and still feeling “junior.” But some feelings never go away because they are always structurally true. I know you are very ill, and given your inherent irascibility, maybe don’t want to be bothered by all this narrative. But the stories are what I have of you – that and memories of Lynn, my marriage to Joan MacIntosh in your home, with Dan Isaac, the rabbi turned theatre critic, performing the ceremony at the bottom of the steps of your beautiful townhouse. And I have many memories of you berating me – “educating” me as you might say – about the American theatre, actor training, the NYU School of the Arts … everything to do with what I was trying to do. But, as you well know, I am educatable only up to a point. I hear my drummers … and they are often different.

But through all the storms of your words and your incessant enthusiasm, your energy electric, I always felt your dedication, no, devotion, to the truth as you saw the truth. And this was so unusual: a man who worked for the right way as he saw right. I put the qualification in because yes we disagreed. But even so, I sought you out for your integrity and honesty, your ability to call a spade a spade. And, of course, your willingness to gamble: to take chances in order to make a better theatre.

The years we were colleagues in the Performance Studies Department were contentious. You are a great writer, with a strong style, and the ability to see to the heart of what matters. You are not an academic scholar. You are the primary resource, not the one using other’s resources. So your years at PS were not happy ones – neither for you nor for me with regard to you. But, now those years are far away, gone; evaporated. I recall the times before: the first Grotowski workshop in 1967; your articles; your passion.

Yes, passion. Maybe time has eased some of the passion from your bones. But when I knew you best, you were a firecracker. You were active, hyper-active. You really both transcended and inhabited your body. You made the phrase “differently enabled” meaningful, and not a euphemism. And you fixed people – nailed them – with your gaze.

I was nailed. You taught me a lot.

Thanks.

And again: Happy birthday!

Love,
Richard

Remembering Ted
by Eric Bentley

My book In Search of Theatre is dedicated to Bill and Ted, the latter being Ted Hoffman, whom I met in Paris in 1950 and who, with his wife Lynn, soon belonged to my most intimate circle of friends. We had much to offer each other. Each of us seemed to have what the other wanted to have. When we both worked on Chekhov's farces... he translating some, and I, others...I thought his work better than mine, but he thought mine better than his. The channels of communication between us were open and deep.And we plunged into a life of theatre together, he at Bard College, I in Manhattan....it was the McCarthy era but Ted Hoffman and Eric Bentley were nothing daunted...the world, or at least New York, was our oyster...

And after that? I could write another book about this, and it wouldnt be all beer and skittles.For now I mourn the death of a wonderful person. To have been close to such a person for a period of years is a great privilege. These are the things that make life worth living.

From René Auberjonois

When one has lived as long as this

One is called upon - on occasion - too many occasions - to memorialize others who have left the scene

So the rule is - try not to talk about yourself... talk about the person who has left - led the way

But how does one talk about Ted without the I - the me - the we of that extraordinary person.

So - fuck "the rule"

I was a teenager - barely - earning pocket money as a babysitter for the children of various artists, writers, theatre folk - many blacklisted - who lived on South Mountain Road in Rockland County during the 1950s

Duni (sp?) Katzman and her husband where a young couple who lived in a cottage in the woods and on many occasions I watched over their sleeping children - raided their icebox and did my homework

for 50 cents an hour

Duni had a lovely sister named Lynn who would visit and - in the summertime - join the community as we whiled away the afternoons around the Anderson's pond - Alan Anderson - son of Maxwell.

There was a young painter - Danny Newman - who lived in a studio in the woods

On Friday nights he would gather the local kids in his VW bus and in his studio we would work on theatre pieces

Dan was a recent graduate of Bard College and so all the pieces fell into place and we were invited by Ted (through Lynn??) to bring our performance of Thurber's "The Thirteen Clocks" to the campus - it was an electrifying experience

Not long after that we moved to England

After a time - when it was time to apply to university - seemingly out of the blue - I was accepted at Carnegie Tech - on arrival I met Ted Hoffman who reminded me of the time at Bard and of his lovely wife Lynn

For four intense and blindingly magically-oblivious years Ted was the center of my universe

well - apart from myself... a young actor after all

The images and sounds of Ted surround me now

His quizzical whimsical sarcastic-al sentimental brusque caring twinkling snorting laugh as he puffed puffed puffed on his endless supply of Kents and commented sagely

and innocently flirted with the girls

He was so young - not even a decade older than we were - and yet - the undisputed - often maddening - Master

We studied and played under his watchful eye for four years

his four year tenure

And then with the first TCG auditions in Chicago - he shepherded us all into our futures

Only in retrospect have I come to understand just how much he influenced and engineered my life and my career

When Ted moved to Arizona we lost touch

Perhaps that was his plan

I made a number of attempts to reach him

To no avail

Finally - recently - Bob Goldsby sent us word

There are no words - only a void

Safe Passage Ted

Arne Zaslove’s
TED HOFFMAN EULOGY

Where to begin to recall all those wonderful moments that have come flooding back in tears of laughter and sadness?

Rene recalled his barking laugh as he was quick to erupt at his own wit and our funny gags. Ted was directly responsible for changing the American theater scene in every position he held. Lynn’s account of the early days in Europe fills in a lot of what we, the students, did not know. He was as modest for himself as he was ambitious in his plans for all of us whom he mentored. He pushed us to be better, work harder, show up ready and take chances.

One of my favorite incidents with Ted was when during my 2nd year (’58) at “Tech’ (CMU to you youngsters) was when he called me into his office for a private chat. I thought, “What did I do this time?” Probably that I had cut HAC (History of Arts & Civilization) again, because I didn’t have time to read 6 books over the weekend. Sitting behind a huge desk like a king too small for his throne, puffing and crushing cigarettes into a full ashtray, he said, “Look Zaslove, I want you to know that you are going to have a career in the theater….But Edith Skinner insists you shave your moustache!!” Ever the rebellious youth, I did not shave; but he was right about my career, which unfolded largely because of his encouragement.

Ted was responsible for discovering Carlo Mazzone in Salzburg around 1956 and bringing him to Tech. Carlo was an extraordinary inspiration, who changed the entire idea of movement for theater in America. B.C. (Before Carlo) there was dance! Now there was tumbling, masks, Commedia dell’Arte, clowns, mime and ‘style’. It was a wonderful sight to see the two of them walking together in the halls. Ted so comfortable with his disability - Carlo with the stride of a superb athlete.

Soon Ted broke the rules, when he chose three one-acts for the main stage season. Anouilh’s, Antigone, Yeats’, Full Moon in March, and T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. I got to wear a mask, do a somersault, court the lovely Susan Trussman, as a swineherd, and do a pratfall off a chair. Lloyd Battista did a performance as Creon that showed he was Broadway bound. We were all cast to our abilities - and then pushed beyond. Rene Auberjonois outdid Ray Bolger as Charley in Where’s Charley and charmed us all for years before Ted mentored him towards Bill Ball and a brilliant career.

After my four years, Ted’s recommendation for me to receive a Fulbright to go to Paris to study with Jacques Lecoq was a dream come true. I was the first American to go there and when I came back, the ‘New Vaudeville’ movement had just begun. I saw Ted in Paris, and in Montreal where he enabled me to obtain a job teaching and directing at The National Theater School of Canada. The job was directing ‘The Seagull,’ and Ted warned me not to present myself as a farceur. But who said Chekhov is not funny? Several years later, I was offered the position of Artistic Director of the English Acting Section.

After Paris in 1966 I joined the NYU Theater program where Ted and J. Michael Miller assembled an extraordinary faculty: Mel Shapiro, Omar Shapli, Carl Weber, Hovey Burgess, Carlo, Jules Fisher, Richard Schechner and many others. Next year, at Expo ’67 in Montreal, Ted and Schechner desperately called me at the last minute to come translate for Grotowski, whom they had “kidnapped” from an international colloquium. I was obliged to cancel a rehearsal of a French production of Endgame that I was directing, in order to facilitate Ted and his cohorts arranging that famous residency at NYU. The Polish guru in the shiny blue suit had a terrible French accent, but they got their man.

Over the years, I would regularly meet with Ted either in Seattle or in New York and I always worried about him the way a son worries about his father. No need to have worried about Ted, as he never seemed to grow old. As it turned out he was only a decade or so older than most of us. In New York, he often took me to Arlequino, his favorite restaurant in the Village. I still go there but it is not the same without him.

Between my trips to New York, I read a story by Saul Bellow which had a description of a tweedy, dapper academic who limped, smoked incessantly, had a twisted back, and was a ladies man. “Ted!” I exclaimed, recalling that he knew Bellow. When I mentioned the story to Ted, he roared out that Bellow was an s.o.b. for using him without permission and should have paid him a royalty.

Just a few years ago we spoke on the phone from his home in Arizona. He sounded exactly the same, joked, laughed and had to excuse himself as he was getting a massage and couldn’t talk much while he sucked on his oxygen tank.

He became distant in the later years and he had often said he was on borrowed time. Thankfully, we can be grateful for everything he did for so many of us and his work and energy and drive will always remain an inspiration for us and generations to come.

Arne Zaslove
Seattle Washington, August 14, 2009

notes to himself
by Bill Killian

I
student

he really isn’t that talented
but he has heart
likes to learn

vulnerable

well-read
shy about a limited past

hails from a town of two-hundred
has heroes
is impressionable likeable

forty-five years on the stage
no training
has all the known bad habits

I want to be kind to him
what to do
in my world he’d be eaten dead

we work a few scenes
he gives me lines
my patience wears thin

then without knowing it
he hits the target
but I have to tell him he did it

II
professor

too many years out of new york
time strikes no deals
for the known or the unknown

I see my friends my students
on tv in film in books
but few call or write

the only lament I have
this body is slowing down
tricking me mid-day

my car has quit
I’m selling off my collection
doctor wants to see me again

this student took my mind
for a moment
noted gratefully of what he saw

summer sent us miles apart
he to family in the east
me up north away from doctors

in fall we’ll write the next act
move the professor the student
deeper into plot

Ted Hoffman, or “Get me out of here!”
by Mel Shapiro

He arrives the end of my sophomore year at the drama department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Ted Hoffman, mentor. Meteor. To know him was to try to love him. To try to love him was not easy.

Aside from mentor extraordinaire, what else was he? A provocative provocateur. He loved a good brawl, a stimulating mind-fuck, he could kick your brain until it began thinking with what had been its unused portions. He was a revolutionary in search of walls he could tear down, ossified ideas he could vaporize, and mainly, if the world was moving to the right, we’d move to the left.

Ted took care of me and the long list of those he mentored. He got me my first two jobs in summer stock. He helped me into Arena Stage, the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre. According to him, he even got Joe Papp to call me. When he started NYU’s program, he insisted I be present at the creation and be a “master” teacher. I, who never taught.

Ted Hoffman, mentor. Meteor. He never stayed with anything very long. It was as though his psyche could not bear the tedium of putting his brilliant theories into day to day application. He gave others, like myself, the job of doing that. Lynn Hoffman once told me Ted was born, screaming, “Get me out of here.”

When he returned to head the Theatre Program at NYU, after a long exile in Performance Studies, he asked me to join him. As exciting as it had been the first time, I wanted other adventures. It didn’t work out for Ted and he left again, this time to retirement.

About 15 years ago, Ted and I found ourselves sitting next to each other in a theatre in LA. He was very remote, indifferent. It was a very confusing experience. When my first book came out I called him in Arizona. Told him I paid tribute to him. He thanked me in a kind of “don’t get too close to me” way. I never called again.

Out West, all those years. I can see him at his table, some Chinese restaurant in the middle of the desert, Cactus Wu, ten gallon hat, orthopedic boots, sipping his whiskey, smoking his cigarette (maybe not smoking now), holding forth with old cowboys, cute country girls, various pensioners, talking…talking Rodeo. Getting those folk jobs in Rodeo. For hundreds of miles around whenever hired hands or the best bronco bustin’ riders were needed, the word would be, “Hey, call Ted! That man knows Rodeo!” It’s true. Ted was doing Rodeo all the years we knew him. Think about it.

Ted cast a big burning light over so many lives. He opened doors. He opened minds. He got us to take the journey. We were very lucky.

I’d say rest in peace, Ted, but know you won’t.

From Bob Goldsby

Ted and I shared so much: Brooklyn, Bard, Columbia, Berkeley, Carnegie with Angie, and so many hours of bull and booze.  He was as contentious with me as he seemed to be with Richard Schechner, and apparently as he was with many others, but I never minded being put down by Ted. It seemed just part of how things were. He was so full of ideas and beginnings. He saw strategies that never occurred to me, and his advice helped me from the first day at Berkeley when I went into an assigned acting class and found it was totally empty. Ted said to make sure I got a class and was not allowed to just “be” there and direct plays. I did that and found a place with many wonderful students. Even when he went to Carnegie and we lost Jim Kerans to UCLA, we kept in touch. After so many years in different places he still came to see us in Berkeley and Los Angeles and we went to Tucson to spend time with him. My world seems much emptier today.
 
Remembering
by Lloyd Battista

For those of us who were fortunate enough to be at Carnegie Tech when Ted arrived, in one way or another, most of us profited greatly from the privilege.
By now most of us have also reached the time in our lives when, more and more, we find ourselves playing "the old game" . . . find ourselves looking back and remembering. Unfortunately, most often those memory banks are stirred by obits.
Earlier this month, Lee Kurty, one of our classmates, passed away, and I couldn’t help but think back to all the productions the two of us had done together at Tech. With only the irony which life brings with it, one particular production kept coming to mind, Anouih’s "Antigone", which Ted had directed. And now, quick upon Lee’s death, we learn about Ted.

All those memories prompted me to ask myself why, not only over the last weeks but throughout my career, "Antigone", and more importantly, Ted, so often came to mind. The answer was easy. From the moment he arrived at school, everything about Ted caught my fancy: the way he carried himself; the way he dressed (very cool); his quick wit and ready laugh . . . and, oh yes, his way with the ladies . . . always a twinkle in his eye and a flirtatious glance as, cigarette in one hand, and the other hand, very Cary Grantishly tucked under his snappy sports jacket and into his pants pocket, he smoothly moved away and worked the room. Also, for me, personally, selfishly, particularly since I’d already been dreaming of playing the part for years by then, and also because of the obvious attraction that Ted held for women, he was, for me, the perfect physical image for Richard III. Poor Lady Anne would never have had a chance.

Most importantly, however, Ted taught me something during that production of "Antigone" which I’ve never forgotten and have tried to carry with me ever since. My strong suits as an actor at school had always been stage technique (from having done so many productions at the Cleveland Play House before ever coming to Tech), and my having a strong emotional base to work from and having easy access to those emotions. When Ted cast me as Creon, he called me into his office for one of his sit-downs. In so many words he told me that because of those gifts that I had, I was often a bit of a lazy bum on stage and I often got away with murder. He told me that he knew very well that "Antigone" and his approach to the play would not be my cup of tea, probably not be to my liking, but that he was casting me for that very reason. He made it clear he believed in my talent, but also made it clear that as far as he was concerned, I was often lacking something . . . the application of my intellect, the thought content, to go along with my emotions. To that date, no one had ever worked me over quite that way, and it, of course, made me angry, but was also a sobering conversation.

Needless to say, during the early rehearsals I resisted Ted as strongly as I possibly could. However, it didn’t take me long to figure out that he had a powerful vision of the play, and the entire production and everything about it, reflected him and his take on theatre, and if I didn’t open myself to those ideas, I wouldn’t have a chance of bring Creon to life. Ted certainly wasn’t going to change and if I didn’t, I’d be a not very pleasant smelling fish out of water in that production.

Little by little I began to take his notes and tried to make them work, and also began to find that when I gave myself to his approach, I found the style of the piece much more satisfying than the naturalism which until then I’d easily made so comfortable for myself. Finally about a week before we opened, I felt I’d made a break though and came away with a wonderful sense of freedom. I got a note later from Ted saying that he thought I’d finally gotten it, and if I were smart I wouldn’t dare leave my mind at home or in the dressing room any more, and if I’d keep bringing it on stage with me as I did that day in rehearsal, it would take me a long way.

That changed my approach to everything I’ve tried to do on stage since. To try and find that point of balance, the golden mean, the addition of creative intelligence to emotions in performance. Over the years I tried to say it as often as I could, but I’ll simply say it again . . . thank you, Ted, thank you. Amen.  

Lloyd Battista
Riverbank, CA  8/16/09

From Judy Finelli

Theodore Hoffman - the faculty Ted assembled in 1966 was phenomenal. It was an honor to know him and hear his brilliant lectures about the exciting influences in the modern theater. He had a great wit and razor sharp sense of humor. He was warm and wise. His instincts were keen, his knowledge immense. My sincere condolences to his family and friends. Thank you for everything, Ted.

Judy Finelli, NYU SOA fall/1966 - winter/1968


From Frank Converse, Written for Ted’s 87th Birthday

Dear Ted,

Limited as your strength may be allow me to celebrate your--who's counting baby--birthday with you.  Seems our last night together at your Pgh. place, we drained a bottle of whiskey together. Ah, tacky old memories; and, sufficiently influenced, you allowed that I was "salt of the earth". And same to you! You should know, however, that as many times as I've tried :"s.o.e" listed on a resume is useless.
 
A few candles you must light: for being one of, or the, creator of TCG and a white knight of the regional theatre movement which, while not a carbon of the Brit and European version you studied so closely, does provide--as A.E.A. likes to say--many job hours for actors. And frequent productions of quality.  Sorry, no need to shill this to you BUT...that is good reason to light more than a few.  And (here I'm happy to read that we Hoffmanites agree) some candles and salutes to you for opportunities at Tech with the likes of Moore, Karra, Fletcher, Weber (wow!...once in a lifetime...I know you never tire of the raising of the straw proscenium story), the man of many masks from the Picolo Teatro--Carlo,The Skinner ( the sooner you master her intense lessons the sooner you may break them), and that guy from Bard, Ted. Seldom since have I had such material to work on and in such a concentrated time: Brecht, Shakespeare, Spewak (your note to me working on 'Boy Meets Girl": F: You'll do yourself, and all of us, a favor if after an exit, you don't go off in a corner muttering "shit, shit, shit".); and with my peers the plays of Wilder, Miller and Camus via. Dostoevsky:  so many thanks to the talented Melvin.  Tough as it may be to find similar chances in the real world, by the late sixties it was increasingly available in the regionals. So put that in your cap you "merry wanderer of the night."  As a very soft headed francophile, francofou, or  for sure a francophony I have made many trips to France, enfamille, and please credit your influence for sending me to two or three performances of Comedie Francaise and at least one to their branch on r. Vieux Colombier.
 
Apart from the theatre I repeat thanks to you and Lynne for houseparenting and caring for my two oldest in their St. Anne's school days.  Beyond the pale indeed.  And to spin this out the more, in the four years that ended with our youngest's graduation from Bard dance and theatre dept. this May, I have no doubt that your tweed-jacketed ghost kept her devotedly at work.
 
No doubt I am one of the multitude of actors grateful for The Regionals, so, hoisting a J.D. to you: Sel de terre a toi, mon ami!    

Frank
July 3, 2009

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