Cape May Diaries
28 - In search of American theatrical past: East Lynne Company
My wife and I tried to catch an East Lynne Company performance in 1992 when the theater company put on “Yellow Wallpaper,” a landmark suffragette play from the 1890s. But we being still unfamiliar with the streetscape of Cape May got lost the night of the performance and ended up watching a movie instead.
A few years later in 1995, I managed to catch up with the company up north at the William Carlos Williams Center in Rutherford, which then served as the company’s winter home.
Prior to his death, I interviewed the company’s founder, Warren Kliewer, a remarkable man who had a deep commitment Victorian era theater.
Michele LaRue, Kliewer’s widow who eventually relocated the company year-round to Cape May (excluding tours) claimed her husband lived and breathed the theater company.
Kliewer said the company came as a result of a 1980 theatrical experiment conducted in the Jersey City Library. He and several other performers got together to discuss how to revive some long forgotten American plays. Most of the historic plays presented to that point came out of 1600 Elizabethan England such Shakespeare and Marlow, or even the more ancient Greek plays twenty centuries older than that.
Yet American had seen its own renaissance period after the American Revolution – a renaissance that lasted for more than a century, ending just prior to World War One. During those years, thousands of plays were written and performed. While history books made reference to the titles of some of these, no one was actually offering them for public performance.
So Kliewer and his fellow performers decided to do something about it.
“He had a real vision,” La Rue told me when I finally caught up with the East Lynne Company again in Cape May in 2001.
La Rue, of course, neglected to sing her own praises how she had stood my Kliewer’s side through the whole revival, watching the movement take root and grow, and suffering through those moments of doubt. She also failed to talk about how she rescued her husband’s dream – painfully taking up the dream when he husband died of cancer in 1998.
The name “East Lynne” came from one of the most popular 18th Century plays, and one that became something of a cliché – often mocked as the symbol of a kind of play typical of the period the way Survivor symbolizes the silliness of contemporary reality TV today.
But Kliewer claimed this and other plays of its kind were wrongfully disparaged after they fell out of favor with a fickle public. In struggling for a name, Kliewer said many names sounded too pretentious, and that East Lynne most aptly fit what the production company was about. Oddly enough, the company did not revive the play from which they got their name for more than a decade after their foundation.
While East Lynne has become nearly synonymous with the Cape May Victorian revival, Kliewer maintained the purpose of the company was to present plays that did not “merely amuse” the contemporary public.
“We’re not doing museum pieces,” he told me in 1995. “We’re trying to reestablish the original connections. It’s the search for the past.”
The company became a not-for-profit organization devoted to exploring the American tradition through performance, study and preservation.
“The study of American theatrical history is not rare on university campuses, but the result of such research rarely leaves those campuses,” Kliewer said. “Attempts to make theater history available to an audience and theater professionals is so rare that East Lynne is the only company in the country devoted solely to reviving 18th and 19th century American plays and their tradition of style and technique.”
Although the company started in Jersey City, it settled for a time in Secaucus where the company still kept sets as late as 2001. But East Lynne found a summer home in Cape May in 1989 – holding its initial performances in the ballroom at the Chalfonte Hotel after which it moved to the Cape May Institute of Continuing Education where we managed to miss them during our trip to Cape May in 1992. We eventually caught up with the company at the historic First Presbyterian Church on Hughes Street, right in the heart of the historic district after which La Rue spoke to me about the company and husband.
Kliewer’s death in 1998 left a void in leadership that she and a close associate Gayle Stahlhuth had to fill.
“When he died, I thought the company would fold,” she said. “But then Gayle took up the effort and it’s been her that has allowed the company to continue.”
In a collaborative effort the two women reshaped the company so that it could survive, and even thrive.
Stahlhuth had done just about everything there is to do with the stage from stage hand to union, and made her living as an actor appearing on the road tours of productions of such notable plays as Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof. She also appeared on TV’s Law and Order and served as the television spokesperson for Southern Bell. But she already had quite a reputation for one-woman showed based on historic figures or people from her own life.
LaRue and Stahlhuth in many ways looked and acted like sister, part of the East Lynne Family whose character had grown more and more like the movement they were trying to revive, bearing a remarkable and positive sense of hope that tended to spill off the stage and into the audience.
In the years since rediscovering East Lynne Company, we made it a point to catch one of their performances with each visit. Perhaps part of the lure wasn’t merely the reflection of an era when Americans still looked positively upon the world – that time when we still believed industrial progress also meant social progress. I think part of the attraction of the East Lynne Company comes from the belief that dreams can come true and that people can still work together for a common cause, and that is very contagious in these times when hope seems very distant indeed.