On March 6, 2023, the New York Theater Festival informed me that a play on the intellectuals of Weimar Germany I’d been working on 20+ years was accepted for its Fall ’23 Winterfest season. Retired from classroom teaching, I’d had the nerve to forsake critical prose for dramatic notation. But I’d never even taken Theater 101. The months between that day and the opening on October 23 of that year would prove among the most exhilarating and dramatic of my entire life. It took me until May to track down Brian Rhinehart, an experienced local director, willing to set out the full A to Z of standard theatrical production. It turned out that my very first act in my newfound role—Producer!—hiring a Director and Stage Manager—was a coup. These two exceptionally talented people assembled a cast worthy of their shared creative vision and gathered the expertise in stage and costume design and musical direction requisite to a viable production. And as show-time approached, the creative team achieved full synergy with the Festival’s technical capability—e.g. lighting, audio-visual—embedded at the Teatro Latea.
Throughout development and rehearsal stages, New York Theater Festival supplemented its concise, comprehensive set-up package with timely regular updates and reminders and helpful suggestions. No question was ever too uninformed or all-out dumb to pose. Their approach, no doubt related to the ongoing acrobatics of nursing along 15-20 productions at various degrees of completion at any given moment, was to be available 24/7/365. On more than one occasion, I had a clear response to a hysterical question posted at 11 PM by midnight. Perhaps in tribute to the City whose cultural life it enhances and fertilizes through broad inclusivity and cultural democracy, the Festival never sleeps—or so it seems. Over the course of my unexpected, transformative tutelage at the Festival, I absorbed two crucial fundamentals of theater: 1) it is its own unique state of super-consciousness, intensifying and dispersing attention across the full gamut of its activities, details, and functions. 2) Theater, in all phases of its operation, demands stringent discipline, one possibly seeming arbitrary at first. But by time-honored convention, the excruciating attention to detail and rule works—time and time again. Among the Festival’s supreme goals is the discovery of new theatrical talent and promoting the careers of those who have discovered this calling. Even at an advanced stage of my personal development, I have been beneficiary to this commitment. And “Soirée at Walter Benjamin’s,” by enlisting the incredible combined talent of its cast, directors, and musicians, has in its own small way contributed to this indispensable cultural and professional mission.
~ Henry Sussman
Playwright of the Production Soirée At Walter Benjamin’s
Laura Paganello