The Society posted this announcement in September 2009:
The Great American Play Series
Stephan Morrow, Artistic Director
and The Nuyorican Poets Café present
A Symposium on Norman Mailer’s work in Film and Theater. “Did you love it or hate it? Norman would agree.”
Hosted by The Nuyorican Poets Café. 236 E.3rd St. N.Y.C. (btwn Ave. B &C).
$7 admission
Wednesday Evening, Sept.23, 2009 from 6:30PM - 9 PM.
As we approach the second anniversary of the sad passing of Norman Mailer, one of the most important voices of the twentieth century, The Great American Play Series and The Nuyorican Poet’s Café are proud to present “A panel discussion on Norman Mailer’s work in film and on stage” Led by actor/director Stephan Morrow* and Daniel Gallant, Executive Director, Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
Panel Members : Norris Church Mailer, John Buffalo Mailer, Michael Chaiken - Mailer film archivist and moderator of The Lincoln Center Mailer Film Retrospective, Jonathan Rosenbaum - noted film critic of The Chicago Reader, Richard Stratton - producer, author and close friend of Mr. Mailer’s, are scheduled to appear. Others to be announced.
The discussion will attempt to assess how successful Mr. Mailer was in his efforts to reach a mass audience, or at least one that went beyond the intellectual elites of his books and why he felt the need to make the attempt.
Also, why the response to his work seemed to be so polarizing - between those who became Mailer partisans and passionately defended it and those who excoriated it. Finally, how his work in film and theater fits into the legacy of his work as a whole with a final section devoted to what the future holds for writers. The discussion will include a Q&A with the aim of creating an evening as free-wheeling and open as Norman Mailer himself would have liked, covering as many aspects of his work and life as time allows.
As might be appropriate for a discussion about Mr. Mailer - there will be a cash bar available to the audience during the evening.
As an actor, Stephan Morrow had the privilege to perform in three Mailer projects: Strawhead - a memory of Marilyn, Tough Guys Don’t Dance and act in and also direct The Deer Park - which led to his working closely with Mr. Mailer in the winter of his life on plans for a filmed version of the play. He had two excerpts from his soon to be completed memoir “The Unknown and the General - my life in the trenches with Norman Mailer on stage and screen” published in The Mailer Review one in 2008 and another in 2009.
Stephan Morrow and Mailer
Morrow first met Mailer after a performance for the Actors Studio, and Mailer, who did not know him, offered him a part in Strawhead, Mailer’s play about Marilyn Monroe, as a stuntman who takes Marilyn for a ride; Mailer’s daughter Kate played Monroe. In Mailer’s 1987 film of Tough Guys Don’t Dance he played Stoodie (Stephan Morrow, “Norman Mailer: A Requiem,” The Mailer Review, 2008; 2015 conference biographies). Works and Days dates the Actors Studio Strawhead to 1986.
Years later, in a used-book store in Venice Beach, he came on Mailer’s The Deer Park: A Play, a play that had never come up in all his time with Mailer on Strawhead and Tough Guys. When he called Mailer about it, Mailer told him, “I put twenty years into that play.” Morrow directed a staged reading with Sally Kirkland in Silver Lake, and in March 2007, when a slot opened in the Great American Play Series at the Makor Center of the 92nd Street Y, he directed it again and played the bisexual pimp, a role Rip Torn had played in the original. Mailer, walking on two canes, came to the performance and the discussion afterward, and later asked Morrow to co-direct a film of the play and act one of the leads (“A Requiem”). Morrow founded the Great American Play Series for “performances on book” of neglected American classics by seasoned professionals.
The play had opened at the Theatre de Lys in New York on January 31, 1967, and ran for 127 performances, with Rip Torn in the first company; Mailer underwrote the production and once thought he might care more for the play than for the novel it came from (Works and Days).
The Mailer Review printed three pieces by Morrow in those years: his tribute “Norman Mailer: A Requiem” and “The Unknown and the General”, memories of working on Strawhead and Tough Guys Don’t Dance, in 2008, and “Tough Guys Do Dance,” on the set of the film, in 2009.
The panel
Michael Chaiken was one of the interviewers at Mailer’s last public appearance, before a screening of Maidstone at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater on July 22, 2007 (Works and Days), and his conversation with Mailer about his films, “Author, Auteur,” appeared in The Mailer Review in 2008. Richard Stratton had conducted the two-part 1975 Rolling Stone interview with Mailer and became a long associate; Mailer championed him during his imprisonment on marijuana charges in the 1980s (Works and Days). Also announced for the panel were Norris Church Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer.
A year for Mailer’s films
The symposium came in a year of new attention to Mailer the filmmaker. In March the Mailer estate gave its film holdings, including the original negatives and outtakes of Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone, to the Harvard Film Archive, and on September 17, six days before the panel, Mailer’s first film, restored by the Harry Ransom Center, had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival (Mailer in the News, 2009). That October The Mailer Review’s third volume took a special look at Mailer’s nonfiction and film, with Chaiken’s interview of Lana Jokel and Jan Welt on Maidstone, D. A. Pennebaker on Mailer the filmmaker, and Morrow’s “Tough Guys Do Dance.”
The Society’s records do not say how the evening went, or who in the end took part. Morrow came back to Mailer’s work on the Society’s own stages. At the 2015 conference in Provincetown he read Big Mac in the marathon reading of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and in 2016 he was among the film’s actors heard in The Norman Mailer Society Podcast’s ten-part, scene-by-scene study of the film(/publications/podcast/).
In Works and Days
- Norris Church Mailer — Painter, model, and writer; Mailer’s sixth and last wife.
- John Buffalo Mailer — Mailer’s ninth and last child and his third son, born 16 April 1978 to Norris Church Mailer; an actor, playwright, and writer in adulthood, and a co-author with his…
- Michael Chaiken — Film curator and editor; interviewed Mailer about his films (including at Mailer’s last public appearance, July 2007) and later edited collections of Mailer’s film…
- Richard Stratton — American writer and filmmaker; he conducted the two-part 1975 Rolling Stone interview with Mailer and became a long-running associate, later the subject of Mailer’s…
- The Deer Park: A Play — Mailer’s stage adaptation of his 1955 novel, first produced at the Theatre de Lys in New York in 1967.
- Strawhead — Mailer’s unpublished play about Marilyn Monroe, staged at the Actors Studio in 1986 with Kate Mailer as Monroe.