Someone in the 60s said it took ten years to build a theater company. When I decided 

to start my own company in the 70s, a most peculiar commitment for me since I was
the quintessential loner in an art form that mandated group interaction. Well
some of us make questionable decisions occasionally. I made a ten year plan to
build a classical theater ensemble that would start with Commedia del'Arte,
transition into early Moliere farce ( he performed Commedia, then evolved to
Baroque comedy) and we would do our first sophisticated performances in the
latter stages of the Moliere period. I would translate, direct and even
perform. The next period would be ancient Classical Greek comedy, Aristophanes,
which I would translate with a Classical Greek scholar, direct and perform.
This would take us into the seventh year of the company, when we would have our
first hit show that would transfer to a 299 seat Off-Broadway theater, the only
venue that could make money, which was the only way to produce art. 

This was an ambitious plan, especially considering my lack of negotiable currency. My assets were my skills, abilities and experience, and my brother, Robert, a highly skilled techie with many other abilities. At this time, Off-Off Broadway was flooded with a few serious theater practitioners, and hordes of college graduates with degrees In theater, gained in a hothouse protective environment. Young enthusiasts who worked in state of the art theaters in college, left the comforting confines of school  with their talanted fellow students and determined to stay together and build their own theater company. Of course, none of their instructors informed them that almost all post-collegial ventures lasted less than three months. The necessity for fund raising, rehearsal space, publicity, promotion, the endless management tasks were so beyond the reach of these eager youth who just wanted to do a show, that it was almost criminal negligeance that the institutions that churned them out, didn't prepare them for harsh reality. You really have to wonder about the deficient mentalities of their professors.
So if these offspring of the arts managed to get past the endless arguments and debates that they went through in college while preparing to do a show, without the nurturing professors to move the herd along, or a prosperous institution that provided a theater, scripts, costumes, in short, all the necessities of production, they found themselves in the wilderness of Off-Off Broadway, ratty store fronts, filthy lofts, dinghy apartments, unless Mommy or Daddy owned a barn.
 
To be continued.

Gary Beck