Icons and Influences

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See “Rockettes” item bottom of Year By Year page.

OFF THE WALLS: Jean Harlow hung behind Joe Cino’s coffee machine.

OFF THE WALLS: Kate Smith’s triumph despite her weight and appearance seemed to inspire Joe. At really low moments he would play her God Bless America.

OFF THE WALLS: We gay guys covertly worshiped bodybuilders like Jim Stryker in physique magazines. I was considered bold for pinning him up and coloring his trunks thus. Tom Eyen later dressed Steve Davis in just such trunks for “Why Hanna’s Skirt Won’t Stay Down.”

OFF THE WALLS: Maria Montez as good and evil twins ruling a death cult in Cobra Woman was an icon for druggier Cino-ites.

OFF THE RACK:. We read many things that never made their way into our local or school libraries. (1) Sweet, overeducated, under-experienced Holden Caulfield, the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, so spoke for all of us that acting teachers had signs on the wall reading, “No More Salinger, Please.”

OFF THE RACK: Williams’ unprecedented popularity led to plays by Inge and others making it to the drugstore racks as well.

OFF THE RACK: An alternative to the society whose rancidness Salinger and Williams detailed was the wild, aimless, energetic roaming of the characters in Kerouac’s epic. Such roaming led many of us to the door of the Caffe Cino.

ON THE SCREEN: Most Off-Off authors had seen many more movies than plays. Foreign or “art” movies were rife with narration (justifying our passion for monologues), and juggled time as well as truth and fiction (as our plays did).

Metropolitan Predecessors: The Impressionists, banded together starving merrily, admiring one another’s work.

Metropolitan Predecessors: The Algonquin Round Table, alienated intellectuals without family ties or cultural bounds, living life merely to amuse one another.

The Beats and The Beatles. The Beats came just before us, and were a fashion-idea bonanza, not to mention a precedent for staying up all day and all night talking about everything in the world.

The Beats and The Beatles. The Beatles came right in the middle of us, as it were, and made a primary value of the one thing we had the most of–youth!

Whether in Original Cast Albums or Special Appearances on TV, musical comedy stars like (1) Ethel Merman and Mary Martin and (2) Noel Coward and Judy Garland taught us the sophistication of Cole Porter and Gershwin, and, of course, of Coward. In addition, the frontal, presentational style of musical comedy stood us in good stead in small theatres where we had nothing but the word and the actor to take audiences into our dreamworlds. (3) The Metropolitan Opera’s radio broadcasts did the same thing for many among us. (4) Records like this famous one of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning or Shaw’s even more popular Don Juan in Hell brought theatre where there was virtually none, while (5) rare televised Broadway plays (here Julie Harris in the Jean Anouilh/Lillian Hellman The Lark, one of the first) gave to us stage-struck but stage-starved outworlders the headiest whiff of all.

An atmosphere for experimental theatre was fostered by commercial New York City productions such as these, seen by many of us who stumbled out of “artless, heartless” Amerika in the late 1950s and early 1960s. What all these productions had in common was minimal production and maximal imagination, which became the watchwords of Off-Off Broadway.

SMALL TOWN STORY: How We Thought We Learned What We Thought We Knew: Exactly who were (or as a Lanford Wilson character might put it, Exactly who the f___ were) Tallulah Bankhead, Lynn Fontanne, Katharine Cornell, Helen Hayes, and/or George Jean Nathan? We learned all about them in dusty library stacks–and believe me, we looked up back issues. So suffused were we by the paper media that we would endlessly argue the relative merits of productions and performances which none of us had been around or alive to witness.

BOOM AND DOOM MUSHROOM: Unknown to us, Off-Off was financed by the billions poured into the economy by the Cold War’s massive arms build-up. Temp jobs were easy to get, and rents were cheap. In addition, our general sense of betrayal by the culture and the need for something, anything, new, was the result of the sense that if things did not change, we were all doomed to atomic holocaust, and a reaction against our parents’ soulless obsession with the material things which the boom produced.