Gay Troupe Revives Caffe Cino Classic
by Jonathan Warman - Friday, April 13, 2007
In the beginning, there was the Caffe Cino, the birthplace of both Off-Off-Broadway and U.S. gay theater. The key playwright in both events was Doric Wilson (now the general director and founder of TOSOS II, the city’s most vibrant gay theater troupe).
His very first play to be produced, "And He Made Her" opened to great acclaim at the Cino (named for proprietor Joe Cino) in 1961, where it, in the words of playwright Robert Patrick, "helped establish the Cino as a venue for new plays, and materially contributed to the then-emerging concept of Off-Off Broadway."
"And He Made Her" is receiving its first New York Revival in more than 40 years, in a very entertaining TOSOS II production briskly directed by the company’s artistic director Mark Finley. It is an "Adam and Eve" play, taking a highly satirical view of humanity’s first couple.
Many, many plays and musicals have been written about this duo, most of them beyond dreadful. "And He Made Her" is easily the best play on the subject I’ve ever seen, largely because of the subtle feminism of Wilson’s Eve (deftly underplayed by Jamie Heinlein), and the gay sensibility of two oh so fey angels.
That said, "And He Made Her" is clearly the work of a very young playwright—not as probing or funny as, say, Wilson’s excellent Stonewall drama "Street Theater"—but an intelligent young playwright with abundant wit and a distinctive point of view on subjects ranging from philosophy to warmongering.
It’s also very much of its time, featuring "an angel of conservative cant" named Disenchantralista (Roberto Cambeiro, hitting just the right note of gimlet-eyed resentment) who could have easily walked out of one of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpieces.
Doric has commented that this is one of his least gay plays (it is mostly about the original heteros, after all). What gayness it possesses comes mostly from the two fey angels mentioned above: Disenchantralista’s opposite number Urhelancia (Nick Matthews), "an angel of liberal enthusiasm," and Silvadorf (Chris Weikel). Matthews gives Urhelancia the feel of playfully excitable queer activist, while Weikel’s Silvadorf is the very soul of mid-century gay New York supper club sophistication.
Matt Rashid has the most difficult job of everyone, playing "straight man" Adam in the midst of this swirling vortex of eccentric spirits—and he carries it well. All in all, this little bit of theater history is well worth repeating.
Interview with Wendy Taylor - April 6, 2007
"I was raised atheist," begins Doric Wilson, almost immediately following his greeting. "So it’s odd that the first play I wrote would be about Adam and Eve." We are sitting in his west-side walk-up, a small railroad apartment covered floor to ceiling with posters and photos chronicling nearly a half century spent in what we now easily refer to as Off-Off-Broadway theater. That play, And He Made a Her, was first performed in 1961 at the Caffe Cino, a small coffee house on Cornelia Street often credited as the birthplace of Off-Off Broadway. In it, Eve appears and in the most dulcet tones convinces Adam that procreation will beget generations of mankind, each of whom will bear some stamp of Adam himself. Somewhere in the forty-six years between the play’s premiere at the Caffe Cino and its revival by TOSOS II opening this month, Off-Off Broadway spawned hundreds of small theater companies in New York City. Like the mankind Eve hopes for, each of these bears some stamp of those early days in the Cino, before Off-Off Broadway had a name.
Reading through the play one is charmed by its seeming innocence, while at the same time on alert that there is something slyly subversive going on. A triumvirate of angels joins Adam in puzzling over God’s latest creation, this unknown entity known as "woman." When "woman" enters in the form of Eve she is met with a hostile and confused Adam and a cast of angels bickering like a celestial congress over the righteousness of this new addition to biology. Using wiles developed on the spot, Eve sweetly seduces each of the angels and eventually even Adam into wanting to experiment with creating generations of mankind.
It would be easy on first blush to see Eve as manipulative, focused only on breeding and even guilty of casting herself as subservient to Adam. Delving more deeply one sees that Eve’s instantaneously developed craftiness serves to bring mankind into being, not as a creation of God, but as a product and self-generating continuum of man. As Mark Finley, director of the upcoming TOSOS II production, states it, "If man starts recreating himself then they really didn’t come from God. They came from man." This view—of Eve as an agent of unwavering determination, designing to help mankind become self-creating (and thus attaining freedom from the confines of heaven)—is precisely what makes Wilson classify And He Made a Her as a feminist play. Describing her vision of the generations to come, Eve states with complete hopefulness, "Their wisdom would be words and ideas and when they spoke them even the wind would stop to listen." Her words are not cynical, despite the inherent humor in angels rebelling against a bureaucratically top-heavy Eden, the discovery of sex and Eve’s completely optimistic view of the future of humanity. As Finley states it, "People refer to the Garden of Eden as this ideal, as the way it should be. I want people to look at Eve’s description of what it (Earth) could be and feel the hopefulness that the optimistic kids dream about."
In the winter of 1961 at Caffe Cino, that vision of hopefulness was well received and And He Made a Her was extended and booked for a return engagement. Broadway producer Richard Barr moved the piece to The Cherry Lane’s Monday night series, making it the first Off-Off-Broadway play to be moved Off Broadway. Despite the acclaim, Wilson was never completely satisfied with the piece. For many years he "hated the script so badly," and felt he had not written the role of Adam well. "Plus," Wilson said "there was no market for it. The religious put-downs in there were way too sensitive to be put out there even in the college circuit. Even at the Cino you didn’t point-blank say ‘I’m an atheist.’ People talked around touchy subjects." Add to that a German publisher who couldn’t find a translator, a less-than-zealous agent and some sloppy filing of the manuscripts in the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library and it was easy for the script to languish un-produced for decades.
All that changed shortly after the turn of the century when author Stephen J. Bottoms unearthed the manuscript during research for Playing Underground, a 2005 book delving into the history of the early Off-Off-Broadway scene. The English scholar surprised Wilson by declaring the work "quite good." A continued interest in the Cino, the publication of two further books on the subject and the masterful restoration of a badly deteriorated original cast recording made keeping And He Made a Her buried nearly impossible. Then in 2005 Peculiar Works contacted Wilson about the possibility of doing a reading of one of his four Cino plays on a bill with works by Robert Heide and Robert Patrick. Two of Mr. Wilson’s plays, Babel, Babel Little Tower and Pretty People had been written as site-specific pieces for the Cino and did not work without it. At the time Wilson was talking to TOSOS II about doing a full production of one of his later plays, Now She Dances! Reluctantly, he agreed to allow the group to stage a reading of And He Made a Her as long as he did not have to watch it.
He did. Wilson arrived at the reading planning to sit at the back and cringe as the play he remembered as not one of his best had its first public presentation in decades. When the very first line elicited a laugh from the packed crowd, he began to listen anew and, to his delight, realized this joyous piece of work was better than he thought. "It was like reading the play for the first time," he almost giggled to me. The reading took him back to his experience writing the play and he allowed United Stages to publish the manuscript with the re-master of the original cast recording, which included the remarkable Jane Lowry as Eve and a wonderfully dry Paxton Whitehead as the angel Silvadorf. Wilson still credits the two actors as the reason for the play’s initial success. Barry Childs, the administrative director of TOSOS II, commented on the recording’s freshness. "You don’t get a sense that this is forty-five years old. The characters are so enduring and compelling. It has endured."
TOSOS II has wanted to produce the play for some time. Childs spoke about the company’s long-standing desire to mount a full-scale production of the play. "We do a lot of readings," he told me, "partly out of necessity and partly because of our desire to focus in on the work." The technical simplicity and short length of And He Made a Her made it seem ripe for inclusion on a double bill. Somehow the other half of the bill never materialized. The company decided to produce the play on its own, and forty-six years after the March 18, 1961, Caffe Cino premiere, And He Made a Her will return to the Off-Off-Broadway stage. As Childs put it, "It’s great that there’s so much interest in some of these companies, and people really interested in working at this level—not just as a stepping stone. You find people who want to do it and almost by necessity you focus less on lighting, costumes, set. You pare it down so you can focus on the core of the play."
At the core of And He Made a Her is the message that a single individual can have the power to change the direction of a world. The existence today of TOSOS II among so many equally impressive small-venue theater companies populating storefronts and ingenious performance spaces in every corner of this city—just two generations removed from the Caffe Cino—is proof of how one small café on Cornelia Street spawned the rich and vibrant world of Off-Off Broadway.