George C. White, founder of Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, dies at 89

Boston Globe

2 days ago

There, on a sprawling property that rolled down to Long Island Sound, they lived, ate and worked together, far from the pressure exerted by producers, critics, actors and everyone else who, for better or worse, shape the public presentation of a play.
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White, the child of an artistic, semi-patrician Connecticut family who founded the center when he was in his 20s, called himself its 'innkeeper.' He spent most of the year in New York, raising funds and running the admissions process, and migrated north in the summer to run the O'Neill's day-to-day operations.
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'There have been plays here over the years that I think are pretty awful,' he told The New York Times in 1982. 'But I stand behind the selection of the playwright every single time. We really are looking for the playwright who shows promise, more than the play that can be a hit.'
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Though White was an accomplished director in his own right, he relied on Lloyd Richards, the longtime head of the Yale School of Drama, to act as the center's artistic director.
Together they developed an unerring eye for new talent. Famously, they accepted an unsolicited script from Wilson, who was still unknown at the time; the work, 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,' was nominated for the Tony Award for best play in 1985 and established Wilson as one of the great American playwrights of the 20th century.
Other noted plays and musicals (which got their own, similar conference in 1978) that originated at the O'Neill included Guare's 'The House of Blue Leaves' (1966), Wendy Wasserstein's 'Uncommon Women and Others' (1975) and Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty's 'Avenue Q' (2003).
White cultivated a reliable network of actors to perform staged readings of each play. They, too, were drawn from the ranks of the young and promising, and many were destined for fame: Michael Douglas, Charles S. Dutton, Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, among others, did time at the O'Neill early in their careers.
'He took his privilege and used it to share the goodies for a wide community,' Jeffrey Sweet, the author of 'The O'Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater' (2014), said in an interview. 'And he did it with just enormous heart and enthusiasm.'
George Cooke White was born on Aug. 16, 1935, in New London, not far from Waterford, where he grew up. He came from a long line of noted landscape painters, including Henry C. White, his grandfather; Nelson C. White, his father; and Nelson H. White, his brother.
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His mother, Aida (Rovetti) White, came from a working-class family and was a seamstress before she met his father. She later served on the O'Neill's board.
George studied drama at Yale University. After graduating in 1957, he spent two years in the Army, stationed in Germany, where he met Elvis Presley, who was already a singing sensation but wanted to do more acting. He asked White for advice, and they spent an afternoon running through a monologue.
After his discharge, White studied at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and then returned to Yale to get a Master of Fine Arts in drama. He graduated in 1961 and moved to New York, where he worked for television producer and talk-show host David Susskind.
White married Betsy Darling in 1958. Along with their children, she survives him, as do his brother and 10 grandchildren.
One afternoon, White, an avid sailor, was tacking past the Hammond Mansion, an empty seaside home that was slated to be used for firefighting practice by the town of Waterford.
He was already thinking of starting his own theater in honor of O'Neill, and he asked the town if he could lease the estate. Happy to help a local boy, the town gave it to him for $1 a year. The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center opened there not long after.
White initially wanted to stage full productions at the site, drawing on the connections he had built under Susskind's tutelage. But even with his prodigious people skills, the task proved daunting, and in the interim he held his first summer conference for young playwrights.
The conference was a hit, and he soon abandoned his original plans, focusing instead on cultivating new talent. He also began hosting similar conferences on theater criticism and musicals -- Lin-Manuel Miranda workshopped 'In the Heights' at the O'Neill before taking it to New York.
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White retired in 2000 but remained involved with the O'Neill, and with theater generally. He was particularly active with other organizations that took the O'Neill as their model. Robert Redford, for instance, used it as a template for his Sundance Institute, focused on young filmmakers, and White agreed to serve on the Sundance board.
He also served in the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary as a flotilla commander; in 2014, the Coast Guard gave him its distinguished public service award.
Like many theater programs around the country, the O'Neill has struggled in recent years. This year, the federal government clawed back some of its funding, and the O'Neill has had to slash its budget and employment rolls in response.
But Sweet said that White's legacy had put the O'Neill in a better place than other endangered programs.
'It's going to be belt-tightening for a while,' he said. 'But I think there's such a huge community of people who view the O'Neill as one of their homes, and a lot of them are famous and rich. A lot of them owe a lot to it.'
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