Remembering Jacques Cartier who set Hartford Stage up to becoming a top regional theater in U.S.

Yahoo

29-01-2025

Jacques Cartier, who founded Hartford Stage and was its artistic director for the first five years of its existence, has died at the age of 94. The theater has now been around for over 60 years, moved to its current location nearly 50 years ago and has done hundreds of productions since he left in 1970, but Hartford Stage still carries Cartier's imprint and honors his original vision.
In 1963, Cartier announced his intentions to bring a professional theater company with a repertory troupe of actors who would live in the area to Hartford. The original Hartford Stage building was a former food warehouse on Kinsley Street in downtown Hartford.
Cartier, who was born in Missouri and spent much of his childhood in California, first came to Connecticut to get his Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama. He had no particular attachment to Hartford when he went searching for a suitable city in which to create a professional theater company with a resident acting troupe.
Cartier convinced some of his former Yale classmates to join him, including actor/director Paul Weidman. The acting company included future stars of stage and screen such as Charles Kimbrough ('Murphy Brown,' the original Broadway productions of the Sondheim musicals 'Company' and 'Sunday in the Park with George'), Katherine Helmond ('Soap,' 'Who's the Boss?,' the movie 'Brazil') and Roy London (who became a famous acting teacher).
When Cartier conceived of creating a professional theater company in Hartford, his dream was shared by arts leaders in dozens of other cities around the country. Regional theaters had existed for most of the 20th century — the Cleveland Playhouse was founded in 1915 — but in the 1950s and '60s, it became a major arts movement, displacing or overshadowing many of the summer stock theaters and 'little theaters' that had been the main generators of live local theater until then. Regional theaters were intended as cultural institutions that directly served the communities they were in.
In the 1977 book 'Regional Theater: The Revolutionary Stage' by Joseph Wesley Zeigler, Hartford Stage Company was described as 'another theater created by an outsider (though with neither the flair nor the chutzpah that characterized the Long Wharf). … Demographically, Hartford looked as good as any other city and so (Cartier) set out to create his theater there. He raised more than $100,000 privately (a healthy portion of it coming from the insurance magnates for which Hartford is famous). He found an abandoned supermarket in downtown Hartford, had it converted to a 225-seat theater with a thrust stage and opened in the spring of 1964.'
In Connecticut, the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre was founded in 1955, Goodspeed Musicals (which specializes in American musical theater) was founded in 1963, the Long Wharf Theatre in 1965, the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1966, the National Theatre of the Deaf in 1967 and the Hartman Theater in Stamford (which only lasted until 1987) in 1975. A national organization designed to unite and support regional theaters, Theatre Communications Group, has been around since 1961.
Cartier directed many of the earliest productions at Hartford Stage. From the start, the theater offered a subscription that alternated classics and contemporary plays. The first season opened with Shakespeare's 'Othello' and also featured the 17th-century Restoration comedy 'The Country Wife' by William Wicherly. Both were directed by Cartier. The season also included recent works like Fay & Michael Kanin's 1959 stage adaptation of the Akira Kurosawa film 'Rashomon' (based on stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa) and Harold Pinter's 1960 drama 'The Caretaker.' Those were both directed by Joel Oliansky, who later became a Hollywood screenwriter ('Bird') and film director ('The Competition').
For Hartford Stage's second season, Cartier directed a new play written by Oliansky, 'Putting on the Agony.' Cartier also directed Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman,' Shakespeare's 'The Tempest,' John Osborne's 'The Entertainer' and Chekhov's 'Uncle Vanya' that season.
In 1966, Cartier used Hartford Stage to do something that he believed had never been done in American theater: Two completely different productions of the same play with different directors, actors and designers alternating performances in the same space. The play was Samuel Beckett's 'Endgame,' and Cartier directed one version while Weidner (who also directed Beckett's 'Act Without Words' as a companion piece) did the other. While alternating different actors in a play is fairly common, doing entirely different productions of the same script simultaneously is not. Longtime Hartford Courant arts critic T.H. Parker wrote that 'the chance to compare two productions of one play is unique, and one should see both versions.'
His final season at Hartford Stage may have been Cartier's most ambitious. He directed his new adaptation of Molière's 17th-century French comedy 'The Miser' set in 19th century America and retitled 'Skinflint Out West,' as well as Arthur Miller's 'A View from the Bridge,' Noel Coward's light comedy 'Hay Fever' and Max Frisch's absurdist political metaphor 'The Firebugs.' Other shows that season were 'Antigone' by Sophocles, 'The Hostage' by Brendan Behan and the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill musical 'The Threepenny Opera.'
Hartford Stage produced four shows in its inaugural season, nine during the 1964-65 season, eight each in the 1965-66 and 1966-67 seasons and seven in 1967-68. It then settled into the six-show season it has generally held to ever since. Cartier directed two of the shows in the first season then four or five shows in each of the following four seasons.
Hartford Stage had 800 subscribers by the end of its first season. When Cartier left the theater five years later, it had well over 3,000 subscribers and had set a reasonable goal to hit 5,000 within a few more seasons.
It was Weidner who became artistic director when Cartier left Hartford Stage (referred to locally then as just 'The Stage Company') only five years after he founded it. One apparent reason for Cartier's departure was that the theater was so small — just 225 seats — that its limitations affected budgets, growth and artistic decisions. Despite selling out many of its performances, the company faced a sizable deficit every year Cartier was in charge, one of the more anxiety-building elements of the new company's growing pains.
In the mid-1970s, Weidner — who is also credited with expanding the programming to include new and experimental works — spurred the move to the 489-seat 50 Church Street space that Hartford Stage still occupies today. The new space maintained the thrust stage design that Cartier had pioneered in the original Kinsley Street location. Weidner died in New York in 2018.
Cartier returned to Hartford Stage just once after those first five seasons, to direct a 1971 production of 'A Long Day's Journey Into Night' by Eugene O'Neill, who had set that drama at his family's summer cottage in New London. Besides that one show, Cartier wasn't involved with Hartford Stage for the rest of his career. That's not uncommon for artistic directors who have usually moved on to other theaters (in Cartier's case it was Center Stage in Maryland) or to busy freelancing careers. Returning to theaters they used to run can be disruptive for the leaders who succeeded them. Cartier did show up for panel discussions with other former or current Hartford Stage artistic directors when the theater marked its 40th and 50th anniversaries.
Cartier died near the end of December but his news of his death became public recently when his family released an obituary.
'It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Mr. Cartier,' said Melia Bensussen, who in 2019 became the sixth artistic director of Hartford Stage, in a statement released Monday. 'Cartier's vision and legacy for producing award-winning, top-notch theater in Connecticut lives on.
'Jacques Cartier, a born storyteller, lived a storied life, from hosting various entertainment acts in his time in the Army to teaching literature before launching his successful career in the theater,' she added. 'There is much to be learned and admired from Mr. Cartier's long and rich life, particularly his dedication to live theater, and we are honored to continue his legacy.'