Putting on a Show, continued
Note to Penn’s
admissions office:
You might want to skip this part.
“I
was devastated,” Prince is saying back in his office. I assume that
I’m just not hearing him right. I’ve just asked him a question
about Mask & Wig, which he had not joined because Jews were pretty
much relegated to the chorus back then. But Prince isn’t interested
in revisiting that old story, which he’s told before to the Gazette,
among other publications; so he’s telling me about his experience
applying to Penn in 1943. The information that he got turned down is just
not registering, so I ask if he’s referring to Mask & Wig.
“No!”
he ejaculates. “Penn! Penn turned me down!” Oh …
“And
so my mother said, ‘We’re going down to Philadelphia on the
train, and you’re going into the admissions office.’ And I said,
‘Oh, God.’ I was very shy. Terrified. And she said,
‘No, we’re doing it.’
“So
I went down to Penn with her, and I walked into the admissions office—no
appointment or anything—and I asked to see the admissions director.
And I said, ‘This is where I want to go. I don’t want to go
anywhere else.’ I had good reasons; it was a great school; it’s
a great city; there was a lot of theater coming in and out of that town
on the way to New York. And it was near New York. Everything worked for
me.
“So
anyway, I talked to this man. I must have been incredibly shy, and he
said, ‘Well, I’m looking at your record, and the reason you
have not been accepted is you want to be a liberal-arts English major,
and your English marks aren’t high enough.’
“And
I said, ‘But I’ve just won the graduate English prize at school,
which is the top award you can give for English, and my teacher happens
to be one of the principals of the school, and he doesn’t believe
in giving anything over Bs.’ And he said, ‘Really?’ And
I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Oh, my.’ And he said,
‘Go on home.’ And I went to my mother, who was waiting, sitting
in front of Ben Franklin’s statue, and I said, ‘They’re
taking me.’ And she said, ‘How do you know?’ And I said,
‘I know.’ And I was taken and I started.”
World
War II was still turning young men into soldiers, and Prince, who describes
himself as a “wimpy, frightened 16-year-old,” felt like a “child”
compared to all the guys in uniform. But he soon found a home with the
Penn Players, winning the Best Male Performance Award in 1945 for his
portrayal of the Reverend Collins in Pride and Prejudice, under
the direction of Kaki Marshall, known in those days as Catherine Santa
Maria.
“They
gave me a great role, and I got the award for best actor,” he recalls.
“Over-actor, I think it probably was. But I’ll tell you—they
never gave me another part. Because the next year, everybody came back
from the war, and they got back all the actors that they really admired,
so I was reduced to not acting. I hated acting.”
“He
was later quoted as saying that was when he realized that acting was not
going to be his career,” says Marshall with a laugh. “I thought
he made a very good decision at that point.”
“Oh,
I knew it wasn’t my metier,” Prince says. “No one ever
shook so much; no one was ever so terrified. Insofar as a director has
to know something about acting, I know how to indicate, if it’s necessary,
what I want. But don’t copy me, because it would be poisonously ill-advised.”
His
real metier was directing, and in 1947 he won the J. Howard Reber Award
for directing a Penn Players production. (He wrote the play in question,
though he can’t remember the name of it.) Curiously, he was not interested
back then in musicals, which he found “trivial” and “camp.”
“I
like character,” he says. “You know, my idea of theater is that
Russian stuff that Meyerhold did and Piscator’s German stuff, and
I loved the whole tradition of Asian theater. So—ask me how many
times I’ve seen A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Or go
to the movies—Citizen Kane. Those are the high-water marks
in my audience attendance. So even though I thought the songs were fun
and so on, it didn’t interest me.”
At
Penn, he points out, “the pre-eminent theatrical attraction was the
Mask & Wig show and guys putting on drag,” which left him cold.
“I never got it! I don’t get it now! I guess I’m not a
cheery enough guy to think, ‘Oh, isn’t it funny—guys in
dresses.’ You know—they’re not trying to be drag queens;
they’re trying to be funny. And they’re trying to make a lot
of people laugh. But it closed off any opportunity I might have had to
get involved with musical theater at Penn. I wasn’t really interested.”
He
did get interested in—and helped found—WXPN, serving a stint
as station manager. It was an “amazingly useful” experience,
he says, especially when he began adapting plays for radio. He even wrote
a soap opera, called Stella Fort Worth: A Woman of 65 for Whom Romance
Is Never Over.
“We
did it on the air five nights a week,” he recalls. “Which means
I had to write the script—15 minutes, it was—take it in, rehearse
it, and provide it for two seasons.”
His
idea of “extra-curricular entertainment” was to “haunt”
the old library.
“I
would go in idly and leaf through the file cards and send for things,”
he told a small crowd of theater fans at Van Pelt Library in 1993. “You
know: a playwright’s history; the history of a period of the theater;
the history of an acting family; the history of the Walnut Street Theater—which
is as rich a one as you can get; and so on. I’d sit there with whatever
I got from the library and just leaf through it, and indulge my hunger
for that history—and my dream of having a place in it someday.”
Nov/Dec Contents | Gazette
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