To Be Announced

In the old days, no New England town was complete without its village idiot, but now there are the summer theater managers. How many times, after all, can a man watch Springtime for Henry in his own barn? But last week one impresario decided that he was not the only unbalanced character in town. After 29 years at Maine's Kennebunkport Playhouse, Robert C. Currier took an ad in the local paper, put his famous theater up for sale, and explained why. "I have felt for some time," he said, "that a person must have an examination proving he's half cracked before he can live in this place." Currier followed that up by cataloguing the woes of a straw hat manager.

George Washington. "It takes 20 minutes to sell two tickets over the phone," says Currier. "All these people want to do is talk. When they start asking how much the $3.30 tickets are, you really start wondering. During an intermission, one lady asked if the movies around here are always so bad. Can you imagine? She actually thought she'd been watching a movie. When they see our advance schedule, some customers ask us who wrote To Be Announced."

About 30% of the audience, according to Currier, regularly shows up smashed to the gills. Unselfconsciously recalling the rocky seasons before he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, he says that for years he himself was a drawing card: "They used to come to the Playhouse to see if I'd fall over the porch banister."

On the wagon since 1953, he has developed a relatively clear head as well as an unqualifiedly bitter eye. He cannot even stand his financial patrons, blue-rinsed resident grandes dames who look like Gilbert Stuart's George Washington. One of them collects bones. Another once threatened loudly that the improvements-minded Currier must never think of destroying a small, one-story extension that contained the backstage toilets, since "the Gish sisters used them."

Codfish Aristocracy. A master of the straw hat trick--he pays his loyal apprentices nothing, makes them pay $30 a week for room and board, and constantly threatens to fire them--Currier, now 46, started his theater when he was 17, and built it into one of the country's most durable stock houses by the traditional method--milking Broadway cows turned out to pasture (this season: Under the Yum-Yum Tree, The Pleasure of His Company, etc.). But he has also mixed in Wilde, Williams, Sherwood, and Giraudoux, giving the Kennebunkport Playhouse a high reputation among actors, critics, and the sober side of his audiences. Performers are fond of returning there, including Tallulah Bankhead, Henry Morgan, Russell Nype, and Currier's own sister, Singer Jane Morgan.

Directed largely at the year-round residents, Currier's arrows also twanged toward the summer people, whom he calls "the Codfish Aristocracy; they come here and rot with cocktail parties, and when they entertain our stars, they do so to show them off as freaks to their guests." If the Kennebunkport Playhouse makes it to the last item on his 1961 schedule, the summer people and the year-rounders will again be watching Edward Everett Horton in Springtime for Henry. Then, if anyone comes along with the $300,000 asking price for the Playhouse, what will Robert C. Currier do with himself?

"This is an ideal town for neurotics," he says. "I'll never leave here."

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