Became dramatic matriarch of regional-theater movement
Zelda Fichandler, who co-founded Washington’s Arena Stage in a defunct burlesque house, guided the troupe to prestige rarely achieved outside Broadway and became a matriarch of the regional-theater movement, died Friday at her home in the District of Columbia. She was 91.
The cause was complications from congestive heart failure, said her son Mark Fichandler.
Broadway remains the glamorous juggernaut of American theater production. But in the years after World War II, Mrs. Fichandler was at the vanguard of a quixotic effort to create serious-minded repertory hubs in other major American cities. The Arena Stage, started on a shoestring in 1950 and the first racially integrated theater in Washington, became one of most influential of regional theaters that now number in the hundreds.
From the start, Mrs. Fichandler’s goal was to train promising actors and directors, provide a venue for emerging playwrights and, above all, to reverse what she called, with characteristic dramatic flourish, “the contraction and imminent death of the art of the theater.”
Arena presented plays by Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, embraced contemporary works by Arthur Miller, Jean Anouilh and Samuel Beckett, and gave second chances to plays that flopped commercially on Broadway. Mrs. Fichandler advocated multiracial casting long before it was common in mainstream theaters.
Arena’s breakthrough production was Howard Sackler’s 1967 boxing and interracial love drama “The Great White Hope,” starring then-unknown actors James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander. The play was the first original show to premiere at a regional theater and then transfer to Broadway, where it won several Tony Awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama and was turned into an admired film.
“The Great White Hope,” which Mrs. Fichandler spent a year shaping with the writer, showed many that highly successful commercial enterprises could emerge from regional repertory theaters.
Under Mrs. Fichandler’s watch, Arena continued to shepherd plays to Broadway over the decades while also providing a strong training ground for actors and directors who achieved notable careers in film and onstage.
In 1973, Arena Stage became the first regional theater selected by the State Department to present U.S. plays in the Soviet Union. Three years later, Arena Stage became the first troupe outside New York to receive a Tony Award for general excellence.
In his book “Regional Theatre: The Revolutionary Stage,” Joseph Wesley Zeigler wrote that the effort to start Arena was nothing short of herculean and that Mrs. Fichandler was a seminal early force in the regional-theater movement.
Mr. Zeigler wrote that Arena Stage’s example led to the founding of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater and the Charles Playhouse in Boston, among others.
Mrs. Fichandler grew up in Washington attracted to progressive politics in the 1930s and 1940s. In theater, she told The Washington Post, she found a medium that satisfied “my political conscience, my interest in literature, my dramatic sense, my curiosity about people.”
Mrs. Fichandler helped will Arena Stage into being. A Cornell University graduate with a degree in Russian language and literature, she enrolled in a master’s of fine arts program at George Washington University in the late 1940s and confronted a drama teacher who bemoaned the lack of professional theater outside New York. "So I said. 'Why don't we do something about that?" Whimsically sealing my fate for the next 40 years," she told the New York Times.