Gerald Alan Freedman

Gerald Freedman, 92, stage director, former Artistic Director of Great Lakes

Theater, and Dean Emeritus of the School of Drama at the University of NorthCarolina School of the Arts, passed away peacefully from natural causes at hishome in Winston Salem, NC on March 17, 2020. He was born in Lorain, Ohio onJune 25, 1927, to Dr. Barnie and Fannie Sepsenwol Freedman, both emigrants ofCzarist Russia.

As a child he spent Saturday mornings at art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and as a teenager he enjoyed a painting scholarship at the Cleveland Institute of Art. His earliest stage training came as a member of the Curtain Players at the Cleveland Play House. He played the piano and was a tenor soloist with the Lorain High School and Agudath B’nai Israel Synagogue choirs. Freedman graduated from Lorain High School and earned his BS and MA (summa cum laude) from Northwestern University under the tutelage of legendary drama teacher Alvina Krause. During his twelve years as Artistic Director of Great Lakes Theater from 1985 to 1997, he directed 28 productions, including Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate; Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding co-directed with Graciela Daniele; and the world premiere of Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders with Ruby Dee. He directed Hal Holbrook as Uncle Vanya, King Lear, and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman with Elizabeth Franz as Linda. Olympia Dukakis starred in his Great Lakes production of Mother Courage. He directed eight plays by Shakespeare, and his production of Love’s Labour’s Lost transferred to New York’s Public Theater as part of Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Marathon. Freedman was particularly proud of his adaptation of The Dybbuk, an homage to his Russian Jewish ancestry. One of the great honors of Freedman’s career was when the indefatigable director “Mr.” George Abbott agreed to direct his 1926 play Broadway when he was 100 years old. Great Lakes honored Mr. Abbott with a nationally recognized symposium called “Classic Broadway.” Symposium speakers included Eddie Albert, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Sheldon Harnick, Garson Kanin, Harold Prince, Donald Saddler, Oliver Smith, and Nancy Walker. Other notable theatre artists who collaborated with Freedman at Great Lakes include “artistic daughter” Victoria Bussert, his invaluable Associate Artistic Director John Ezell, Tom Hanks, Robert Foxworth, Piper Laurie, Anita Gillette, Shirley Knight, Cloris Leachman, Barbara Cook, JeanStapleton, Annalee Jeffries, Jane White, Josie de Guzman, Richard Jordan, David Shimotakahara, Rob Ruggiero, Amy Saltz, Richard Hamburger, Jeanne Button, Thomas Skelton, Mary Jo Dondlinger, Gene Friedman, Lawrence Casey,Chris Barreca, and Jamie Scott. Freedman enjoyed a rich and rewarding relationship with Great Lakes’ administration and staff, including beloved Mary Bill, Bill Rudman, Kate Lunsford, Tony Forman, Rich Costabile, Margaret Lynch, Al Kohout, Martin Simnonsen, DeAnn Boise, and many others. In 2013 he returned to Cleveland to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Freedman conceived and directed the original production, and its annual presentation has become a northwest Ohio holiday tradition, delighting audiences young and old for 30 years and counting.

Freedman began his professional career in New York City as a scenic designer/painter, night club singer, pianist, and cantor. In 1952 a Hollywood talent scout saw his production of As You Like It at Equity Library Theatre and offered him a contract with Columbia Pictures, where he was dialogue director on numerous films including Queen Bee with Joan Crawford; Bad For Each Other with Charlton Heston and Mildred Dunnock (who later introduced him to Elia Kazan at The Actors Studio, where he was invited to join the Playwrights/Directors Unit); Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart, produced by Stanley Kramer; and George Cukor’s It Should Happen To You with Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday. Freedman and Holliday became close friends, and at her urging he returned to New York in 1956 to assist director/choreographer Jerome Robbins on the original Broadway production of Bells Are Ringing. He went on to assist Robbins on two groundbreaking productions, directing book scenes for the original Broadway productions of West Side Story in 1957, and Gypsy in 1959. He directed the New York City Center revival of West Side Story in 1964, co-directed the 1980 Broadway revival with Robbins, and collaborated with Robbins on the his ultimately uncompleted autobiographical The Papa Piece. Freedman’s early television directorial career began in the 1950’s, with NBC’s Oldsmobile Music Theatre; Robert Montgomery Presents; CBS’s The DuPont Show of the Month; episodes of Rin Tin Tin and Blondie; later the Styne-Comden-Green musical I’m Getting Married with Ann Bancroft and Dick Shawn for ABC; and the critically acclaimed PBS Antigone with Genevieve Bujold. He directed the pilot for PBS’s The Adams Chronicles.

In 1960, Freedman directed his first production in Central Park for The New YorkShakespeare Festival: The Taming of the Shrew, winning him an Obie Award. Theater critic Robert Brustein wrote for The New Republic: “The production’s boisterous, irreverent, indigenous approach to a familiar classic instantly delivered us from years of enslavement to British models.” Thus began Freedman’s long association with Joseph Papp and Bernard Gersten, where Freedman developed an approach to Shakespeare for actors that truly reflected an American sensibility. He directed the world premiere of the rock musical Hair as the inaugural production of The Public Theater in 1967, and served as Artistic Director there from 1967 to 1971. Among his Public productions were Electra with Lee Grant and Olympia Dukakis; Peer Gynt with Stacy Keach, Judy Collins, Estelle Parsons, and Olympia Dukakis; Hamlet with Stacy Keach, James Earl Jones, Colleen Dewhurst, Sam Waterston, Barnard Hughes, and Raul Julia; and Much Ado About Nothing with Kevin Kline and Blythe Danner. During Papp’sregime at Lincoln Center, Freedman directed Julie Harris and Charles Durning in The Au Pair Man, and Ruth Gordon and Lynn Redgrave in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. He directed 26 productions for Papp between 1960 and 1989. Freedman’s 15 Broadway directorial credits include Dietz and Schwartz’s The Gay Life with Barbara Cook; Bock and Harnick’s Man in the Moon with Bil and Cora Baird’s Marionettes; A Time for Singing, his musical adaptation of Richard Llewellyn’s novel How Green Was My Valley co-written with composer John Morris; King Lear at Lincoln Center with Lee J. Cobb; The Incomparable Max with Richard Kiley; Arthur Miller’s The Creation of the World and Other Business with Zoe Caldwell; Uhry and Waldman’s The Robber Bridegroom (first with The Acting Company featuring Patti LuPone and Kevin Kline, and a year later with Barry Bostwick in the title role); Jerry Herman’s The Grand Tour with Joel Grey; and The School for Scandal with Tony Randall for the National Actors Theatre, premiering first at GLTF. Off Broadway productions include the first revival of On the Town with Harold Lang and Pat Carroll; Molly Kazan’s Rosemary and The Alligators with Jo Van Fleet, Piper Laurie, and William Daniels; Arthur Kopit’s Sing To Me Through Open Windows and The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis; the politically explosive Macbird!; Elinor Jones’ Colette with Zoe Caldwell, with songs by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt; King Lear with Hal Holbrook (originating at Great Lakes), and The Crucible, both for the Roundabout Theatre.

Freedman directed at regional theaters across the country, including San Diego’s

Old Globe, The Mark Taper Forum, Hartford Stage, Westport Country Playhouse, Yale Rep, Shakespeare Theatre of DC, and Williamstown Theatre Festival, where he notably directed former student Mandy Patinkin in An Enemy of the People. He was Co-Artistic Director of The Acting Company with John Houseman from 1974 to 1977, and Artistic Director of Stratford, Connecticut’s American Shakespeare Theatre from 1978 to 1979. Internationally, he directed in London’s West End, Paris, Tel Aviv, Adelaide (Australia), Istanbul, and was the first American to direct at Shakespeare’s Globe in London (Richard Brome’s The Antipodes c. 1638). He directed 28 of Shakespeare’s plays in over 50 productions between 1952 and 2011. A noted opera director, Freedman’s world premiere of Alberto Ginastera’s Beatrix Cenci for The Washington Opera was part of the opening of the JFK Center of the Performing Arts in 1971. He directed many productions for the New York City and San Francisco Operas, working with impresarios Julius Rudel, Beverly Sills and Kurt Herbert Adler. At San Francisco Opera he notably directed Kata’ Kabanova’ with Anja Silja, conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi; and his staging of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion received national acclaim. For New York City Opera he directed Beverly Sills as Adele in Die Fledermaus, popular productions of the Broadway musicals Brigadoon, South Pacific and Song of Norway. He directed lifelong friend Jean Stapleton in Lee Hoiby’s one-act operas The Italian Lesson and Bon Appetit for The Baltimore Opera, the latter based on an episode of Julia Child’s The French Chef. In 2005 he directed former student Patti LuPone in Marc Blitzstein’s Regina at The Kennedy Center. Freedman served as Dean of Drama at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts from 1991 to 2012. Under his guidance, the School of Drama became one of the highest ranked undergraduate and high school acting conservatories in the nation. Prior to UNCSA, he taught at Yale University and The Juilliard School. He served on the board and was voted a Lifetime Member of the Society of Stage Directors & Choreographers, and served on the board of the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. He was inducted into the College of Fellows of American Theatre, and was a recipient of Northwestern University’s President’s Medallion, the Cleveland Arts Prize for Distinguished Service to the Arts, and the North Carolina Award in the Fine Arts. Isaac Klein’s book The School of Doing: Lessons from theater master Gerald Freedman, about his process as a director and philosophy of actor training, was published in Nov. 2017.

Gerald Freedman is preceded in death by his parents; and brother, Dr. Robert Freedman; survived by cousin “sister,” Lois Spector, husband, Bill and son, Bobby; Natalie Bernard; Shlom Sepsenwol and many other cousins; sisterbeloved in-law, Lois Freedman; nephew, David Freedman (Gwyneth Anne); nieces, Lisa Keating (Phil Odenweller) and Carol Fine (Rick); four grandnieces, Jessica and Becca Keating, and Jennifer and Sarah Fine; and best friend and former Assistant, Dean Robert Beseda.

The Boyer and Cool Funeral Home in Lorain, Ohio has been entrusted with arrangements and burial is at Salem Jewish Cemetery, Sheffield Township, Ohio.

Memorial donations may be made to the UNCSA Foundation for The Gerald Freedman Excellence Endowment Fund, by mail at 1533 S. Main Street, Winston-Salem, NC 27127, or online at uncsa.edu/freedman.

Condolences may be made online at www.salemfh.com.