Spence Porter was elected to The Lambs in 2018 as a Theatrical member. He has a long tie to theater.
“I write plays that are mostly somewhere on the outskirts of conventional theater,” Spence Porter describes himself on his website (www.SpencePorter.com). “I love using puppets and masks and dancers and onstage musicians, and basically I have a lot of fun doing all the things that people keep trying to tell me not to do.”
In his plays, Porter’s major interest is in narrative. “The events that happen in a play are themselves the container of the real meaning of a play.” Or said another way, “A play’s most powerful metaphor is the sequence of events that happen in the play.”
Porter’s method of writing is remarkable. “I do everything in my head until the final draft. I then write it rapidly, with little or no rewriting.” He lives the events in his head. He said, “The words are the last thing I do.”
Spence Porter is best understood through his plays themselves. He has written a wide-range of works that both challenge and reward one’s attention. They have been performed in the U.S. and abroad.
His corpus includes a play that draws upon Hippolytus, written by Euripides in antiquity. Called the same name, his Hippolytus was performed in Tucson, Salt Lake City, and Athens, Ohio. The work received rave reviews, including one by the Arizona Daily Wildcat: “It is a stark, spare play that is terrifying in its simplicity. In its very short hour and a half, it moves with the fatal inevitability of a guillotine racing on its downward course to the chopping block.” His Triangle is a screenplay that draws on the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, but its meaning is an examination of the process of historical change.
Spence Porter’s play Sick Minds: An Evening of Appallingly Bad Taste, Featuring Warped Desires and Milton Eckendorf, Jr, Infant Detective has five actors and a piano player performing 130 characters. His show Francesca, was performed in Leiden, where Leiden’s newspaper praised the play, “The Theater was vibrating with passion last night.” Another production, The Mouse Prince, is dark and bloody. “It’s probably the closest thing to J.R.R. Tolkien in theatre.” The Woman from the Sea, freely based on a play by Ibsen, was commissioned by theatre director and acting teacher Terry Schreiber.
Porter has had some attention inside the academy as well, in a design class in Virginia and a course in Singapore.
Porter’s life journey begins in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. The family traveled often in his early years. As a young man, Porter’s dream was to be a orchestra conductor, but found his talent was not in that direction. He pursued classical music until about age 14, then took up theater.
He attended Bronx High School of Science, and had already written a play by his junior year there. Matriculating to Harvard, he majored in applied math and physics while auditing lots of arts classes that he was more interested in. He lived at Winthrop House. “I was the Winthrop House Dramatic Society. There was no other person. So we didn’t accomplish very much.”
He studied with William Alfred, a noted Anglo-Saxon scholar at Harvard and author of an acclaimed play called Hogan’s Goat.
Upon graduation, Porter won a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship, which set him on a largely Western European odyssey. First he headed to England and Amsterdam, but found “bliss” in Berlin. Porter crossed into East Berlin to see the Berliner Ensemble featuring actors who had worked with Brecht. “I was one generation removed from Brecht.” He saw The Good Woman of Szechuan at the Volksbuhne, directed by the great Swiss director Benno Besson who had been a protégé of that German playwright, a production where many characters donned giant masks. Porter reflects, “It set me in that direction.” He visited Vienna, then had a detour in Prague before heading to Greece and Italy. Then he went on to Dublin, London, and Paris. Porter also visited Scandinavia and Denmark. It was a “Grand Tour” like the one that many in the upper class once traversed to broaden themselves in Europe after their formal education.
In Paris he saw work by Georges Feydeau, a dramatist from the Belle Epoque whom the French deem cheap commercial theater. But Porter staunchly believes Feydeau is high art. As Porter describes this late 19th-century and early 20th-century playwright, his work “paints a picture of a universe in which at any given moment there is one worst thing that could happen–and inevitably that is what will happen in that moment.”
After Europe, Porter attended, and was expelled from, the Iowa Writers Workshop, before earning an MFA at Ohio University in Athens, OH. Among other subjects, he studied ceramics and history of dance there.
He then headed to New York.
Porter likes “the city’s infinite cultural resources.” He immersed himself in Hitchcock, seeing almost all of that director’s films at MOMA’s great 1999 retrospective. “I revere him.” He said the master of suspense had “the subtlest and most complete understanding of narrative of any artist of any kind ever.” He likes, among others, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt and “unfashionably, To Catch a Thief.”
He also likes – and studied – Japanese films, Kurosawa in particular. Porter’s taste tends toward films depicting pre-westernized Japan. Chaplin, Bergman, Mizoguchi, Bunuel, and Fellini are some other cinematic peaks for him.
Outside of theatre, Porter said, “My first love is music.” His tastes range widely from Middle Ages to atonal composers like Messiaen. He added, “I like composers who emotionally communicate.” He plays piano for an hour a day in the late afternoon or early evening. He’s currently working on playing Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. He attends the New York Philharmonic. “I consider it a civic obligation to support the hometown orchestra.” By sitting regularly in the same seats, he hears the orchestra with more detail.
As to dance, “Ballanchine is like a God to me.” Porter was greatly saddened by the death of choreographer Paul Taylor. In literature, Porter has been deeply influenced by Chaucer and Dickens.
From the 1990s to about 2009, Porter began to host widely-admired events at the Harvard Club of New York, building an arts community there. He hosted Hal Prince once and Edward Albee twice, among many others.
He then took up the role as head of the New York chapter of Harvardwood, Harvard’s officially recognized organization for the arts, media and entertainment.
He is an ideal Lamb, because he gives of himself wholeheartedly to any artistic community he participates in. Gary Shapiro (the writer of this article) introduced him to the Lambs.
Porter has already made a significant contribution to life at The Lambs in hosting a number of successful programs. He recently hosted actor, choreographer and raconteur Lee Roy Reams in conversation with film historian, Foster Hirsch. He brought Marion Cooper Janis, the daughter of famed actor Gary Cooper, on the occasion of a book on Gary Cooper’s iconic film, High Noon. Porter also brought Fran Leadon who wrote a book on Broadway (the street, not just the theater district). This past season, he also hosted an entertaining presentation by Mike Reiss, one of the The Simpsons television show’s original team who continues working with the show to this very day. Also he brought to The Lambs, actress Joan Copeland, the sister of Arthur Miller, who spoke – and sang – in her 90s. His interviewer of choice is film historian Foster Hirsch. Porter notes, “He’s a magnificent interviewer” who is adept at getting interviewees to open up about their lives and work.
Porter has organized events around the City, including one at the National Arts Club featuring director, Andre Serban. Others have taken place at the Downtown Association, the Dramatists Guild, and corporate offices.
He is also an accomplished wine consultant — a true oenophile (wine lover), in fact — who has taught highly praised classes about wine. What makes a good wine? Porter said when you taste wine you are looking for three things: intensity, complexity and harmony.
What he likes about The Lambs: “It is really friendly.” Its essence is about people finding community, he said.
- – Gary Shapiro