A LAMB’S MEMBER WHO IS PART OF A GREAT THEATRICAL TRADITION
Tandy Cronyn has had the privilege of working with many talented directors, producers and actors over the years. “I was very fortunate,” said Cronyn. She would know. As the daughter of famed thespians Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, she grew up in New York seeing many landmark theater productions of the 50’s and 60’s, often meeting the exceptional theater artists that her parents worked with. Although she was born in Los Angeles, she counts herself lucky that her parents decided to move back to New York when she was barely five, so she was educated here and by the time she was 12 years of age, she was totally hooked on theater and knew she wanted to become a stage actor.
One of Tandy Cronyn’s godparents was Robert Whitehead, the legendary producer, who was a Canadian first cousin of her father. The other was Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who won back-to-back Academy Awards for Screenplay and Direction for both A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve in 1949 and 1950.
Tandy recalls Joseph Mankiewicz as one of the wittiest men she has ever known. “When he got going, there was nobody like him for literate wit.” She recalls Mankiewicz telling the story of being introduced by Bette Davis at a function honoring him, and she spoke so long and effusively about all his talents and accomplishments that when Mankiewicz came to the microphone he said, “I want to assure you all that on the seventh day, I rested.”
The one theater that had the most lasting effect on Tandy was The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It opened in 1963 led by the great British theatrical director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, also the founding director of the Stratford Festival of Canada. “I was a high school student when my parents took part in the inaugural season of the Guthrie, and I spent my summer vacation hanging out, often watching rehearsals. I have to pinch myself when I recollect that I was able to watch Tyrone Guthrie direct.” In its inaugural season, the repertoire included Shakespeare’sHamlet, Moliere’s The Miser, Chekov’s The Three Sisters, and Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman. The company did rotating repertory and included actors like George Grizzard, Zoe Caldwell, Ellen Geer, Ken Ruta and Lee Richardson. “Their work defined the kind of actor I discovered I wanted to be”, said Tandy
Wanting classical training, Tandy went to London’s Central School of Speech and Drama for a couple of years and in the summer of 1967, she got her first season of repertory at the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. “Then I found myself getting work in television. British television was quite extraordinary in the 1960s, but I desperately wanted to do classical theater and I was not getting any roles,” she said. So when she was offered a job with a touring company in southwest Minnesota, which had a grant to take plays to high schools, doing Shaw and Moliere, she grabbed it. This meant flying from London to Minneapolis, then going by car to a rural college in Marshall, Minnesota. This was in 1968 when cultural ferment in the US was rising. “The move from London to rural Minnesota gave me a severe case of culture shock,” said Cronyn.
She later returned to New York and started auditioning. She had never done a musical before, but was cast as Sally Bowles in the second national tour of Cabaret. While frantically studying with a voice coach to prepare for the 1969-1970 tour, Anita Gillette, who was playing Sally on Broadway left the show to appear in the new musical Jimmy. “They put me in the Broadway show for a month to fill in. I had Ethel Merman’s dressing room.”
Between the month on Broadway and the subsequent “bus & truck” tour, Cronyn played Sally Bowles for almost a year. “It was a brilliant show, but not always appreciated in some of the more conservative parts of the country”. She had first seen Cabaret in London with Judi Dench starring as Sally. “She made a huge impression on me.” Cronyn said, “I don’t think I would have got the role if I hadn’t first seen her play it.”
She performed in the summers of 1970 and 1972 at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, as part of its Playwrights Conference. She said, “It was marvelous. That theater has nurtured so many playwrights important to American theater, including August Wilson, Charles H. Fuller Jr., Israel Horoviitz, John Guare, Lanford Wilson and many others.”
After the tour of Cabaret, Tandy also went on the road with Sondheim’s Company and the Broadway revival of Mary Chase’s Harvey. By the fall of 1974, she decided she had had enough of the road. “I was living out of a suitcase.” Cronyn took a break from acting. For three years Cronyn worked with the National Theater of the Deaf, first as assistant to the company’s founder and artistic director, David Hays, then as company manager.
Late in 1977, as she describes it, “I tiptoed my way back into acting. I thought I’d give stage management a try.” She soon became assistant stage manager to the Broadway production of Dracula starring Frank Langella, designed by Edward Gorey. She was also the understudy for the two women in the show. The show was an enormous hit, but Cronyn didn’t stay with it for long and at last found the kind of work she had always aspired to since experiencing the Guthrie Theater’s rotating repertoire.
She was part of the inaugural season of the Denver Center Theater Company, which opened in 1980 under artistic director Edward Payson Call. “It was magical,” Cronyn recalled. We opened the season with Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, starring Tyne Daly and that production alternated with Moliere’s The Learned Ladies. “It’s like my prayers had been answered.” In the second season with the Denver Center Theater Company in 1981, Cronyn played Lady Percy in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Hypatia in Shaw’s Misalliance, and led the Chorus in Medea.
From 1980 through 1982, Cronyn alternated between the Denver Center for the winter season and the Old Globe in San Diego during the summer. “I went back and forth for two years, with occasional contemporary projects in between” she said, playing mostly classical roles.
In the summer of 1980, when she joined the Old Globe Theater, she worked with its artistic director, Jack O’Brien. “On a tight budget and even tighter schedule we were doing three Shakespeare plays in rotating rep.” She added, “You rehearse two shows at once on alternating days, open one and then the other, then start rehearsing the third. You’re rehearsing only five hours, if you’ve got a performance that night. You open after three weeks or less of rehearsal for each, which is very difficult with Shakespeare.” She played Lady Capulet in Romeo & Juliet, (“a small but fascinating role”) with Tovah Feldshuh as Juliet. She also played Silvia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost. “I felt like I died and went to heaven,” said Cronyn.
But after 2 ½ years of alternating between Denver and San Diego, she came home finally and after an initial struggle to get back onto the radar of casting directors in New York City, she laded a role in Shaw’s The Philanderer at Yale Repertory Theatre, with Christopher Walken and Brooke Adams. This production was directed by David Hammond who subsequently became artistic director of PlayMakers Repertory Company at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and this theater became Tandy’s artistic home. She performed in a dozen productions at PlayMakers, became an Associate Artist there and reveled in the diverse and challenging roles that have defined her career: Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing; Estragon in Waiting for Godot; Lavinia in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra; Gertrude in Hamlet;Our Town; The Laramie Project; Wit; and others.
Cronyn loved working in regional theaters. Aside from The Old Globe, Denver Center, Yale Rep and PlayMakers, she has appeared at Hartford Stage, South Coast Rep, The Pioneer in Salt Lake City, The Stratford Festival of Canada, Missouri Rep in Kansas City, Tennessee Rep, Studio Arena Theater in Buffalo, and others.
But with the turn of the millennium, Cronyn decided she wanted to develop a solo show for herself and in 2010 acquired the rights to a short story by Kay Boyle. The Tall Boy is a surprisingly timely story about child refugees in the aftermath of World War II – three European boys swept up by American units and made into G.I. mascots, desperate to follow their army buddies home to America but stuck in a displaced persons camp without papers. “I fell in love with it.” She commissioned the playwright Simon Bent to adapt it into a one-person show, which she later performed in Manhattan at the United Solo Festival in 2014 where it won the award for best adaptation.
Cronyn loves to read and has recorded a number of audio books. Some of her favorite authors to record include Ursula K. LeGuin (The Unreal and the Real, Vol. 1 & 2) and Cynthia Ozick (Foreign Bodies). “They give me my literature fix.” One of Cronyn’s audio books, Helen Frost’s Salt: A Story of Friendship in the Time of War, has won AudioFile’s Earphone Award for Excellence.
She had always heard of The Lambs and visited the Club as part of a writers group known as Writers@LargeNYC, which was founded and organized by James Lawson. “Over the years, it has attracted such extraordinary talent. We meet for readings regularly at The Lambs” Cronyn said. Cronyn knows Lambs Leslie Middlebrook, Leslie Shreve, Marc Baron, Peter Kingsley and Wanda McCormick. Her primary sponsor was the late Lee Moore, with whom Tandy was fortunate to have performed in The Return of the Prodigal at the Mint Theater in midtown Manhattan.
- — Gary Shapiro