Arts & Entertainment
Blind to barriers
Bi theater head recalls emerging sexuality
Ike Schambelan, artistic director of Breaking Through Barriers, an off-Broadway theater outfit in New York. (Photo courtesy Ike Schambelan)
The artistic director of the only disability-specific off-Broadway theater in New York, knows a few things about being different.
The 72-year-old head of Breaking Through Barriers recalls during a phone interview his early sexual explorations.
“I’d gone to a folk sing in a dorm,” Ike Schambelan says. He was at Swarthmore College when another male student invited him to his room. “I was told,’ Don’t do that, stay on the sofa,” he says. “I knew without anything being verbalized that I was being protected. I did not want to be protected.”
He co-founded Theater Breaking Through Barriers (then known as Theater By the Blind) in 1979 not to be altruistic, but to “support my directing addiction,” Schambelan says.
It’s the only off-Broadway theater, and one of the few in the country, dedicated to advancing actors and writers with disabilities. The company can be a tough sell to people wary of disability, Schambelan says.
“They spend five minutes trying to figure out who’s disabled and who’s not, often getting it wrong. But, then they relax and get into the play.”
Schambelan, who was raised in West Philadelphia with the theater bug embedded in his DNA, grew up with many of the conflicts around sexuality held by many of his generation.
“My grandmother, who went blind, lived with us until I was 10,” he says. “Every Monday night, we’d listen to Lux Radio Theater and I’d brush her hair. I came to associate blindness, affection and theater.”
When Schambelan was in junior high a friend invited him to go to a drama at school.
“I was hooked,” Schambelan says. “I acted in high school. When I went to college I mostly stage managed, which I loved, as I wasn’t a very good actor.”
In his junior year, Schambelan directed the annual Thanksgiving musical.
“It was a big hit and I was hooked to a discipline, directing,” he says.
After graduating from Swarthmore in 1961, Schambelan earned a degree from Yale Drama School in 1967.
There, his passion for the theater and his burgeoning, conflicted sexuality merged.
“On my first night at the Drama school, a med student picked me up,” Schambelan says. “We had sex. Then, I … didn’t have sex until the end of the year. I dated women a little, but I didn’t do a lot of sex.”
In the 1960s during the pre-Stonewall era, being queer was more openly accepted at the Drama School and in the theater than in other parts of society, Schambelan says. Despite this, he was “conflicted.”
“It was internalized homophobia — feeling it was wrong to have sex with men.”
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Schambelan directed productions at such companies as Playwrights Horizons and the George St. Playhouse. He shot a TV commercial with Farrah Fawcett (“She was lovely to work with,” he says) before she was famous.
Over these years, Schambelan dated women and men.
“I’d take up with a woman during the summer and the romance would last until the fall,” he says.
He married a woman in 1980, Joan, who remains his wife. She’d been a dancer so she’d known gays and just felt her husband’s bisexuality made him “more interesting.”
For years, he saw a psychotherapist who “… wanted me to be straight,” Schambelan says. “But, then, being gay had just been removed as the list of mental illnesses by the American Psychiatric Association.”
The therapist he sees today is completely accepting of his bisexuality, Schambelan says.
He admits it’s not always an easy thing to explain.
“The LGBT community doesn’t always get what it means to be bisexual,” he says. “Sometimes people have worked so hard to come out as gay, they have difficulty understanding the greater complexity of being bi. They want you to be gay.”
Photos
PHOTOS: DCGFFL 25th Anniversary Party
Gay flag football league marks milestone at Penn Social
The D.C. Gay Flag Football League (DCGFFL) held a 25th season anniversary party at Penn Social on Saturday, Sept. 23. Proceeds from the event benefited the LGBTQ youth services organization SMYAL as well as the D.C. Center for the LGBTQ Community.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
Books
New book goes behind the scenes of ‘A League of Their Own’
‘No Crying in Baseball’ offers tears, laughs, and more
‘No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of ‘A League of Their Own’
By Erin Carlson
c.2023, Hachette Books
$29/320 pages
You don’t usually think of Madonna as complaining of being “dirty all day” from playing baseball. But that’s what the legendary diva did during the shooting of “A League of Their Own,” the 1992 movie, beloved by queers.
“No Crying in Baseball,” the fascinating story behind “A League of Their Own,” has arrived in time for the World Series. Nothing could be more welcome after Amazon has cancelled season 2 of its reboot (with the same name) of this classic film.
In this era, people don’t agree on much. Yet, “A League of Their Own” is loved by everyone from eight-year-old kids to 80-year-old grandparents.
The movie has strikes, home runs and outs for sports fans; period ambience for history buffs; and tears, laughs and a washed-up, drunk, but lovable coach for dramady fans.
The same is true for “No Crying in Baseball.” This “making of” story will appeal to history, sports and Hollywood aficionados. Like “All About Eve” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “A League of Their Own” is Holy queer Writ.
Carlson, a culture and entertainment journalist who lives in San Francisco, is skilled at distilling Hollywood history into an informative, compelling narrative. As with her previous books, “I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy” and “Queen Meryl: The Iconic Roles, Heroic Deeds, and Legendary Life of Meryl Streep,” “No Crying in Baseball,” isn’t too “educational.” It’s filled with gossip to enliven coffee dates and cocktail parties.
“A League of Their Own” is based on the true story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). From 1943 to 1954, more than 600 women played in the league in the Midwest. The league’s players were all white because the racism of the time prohibited Black women from playing. In the film, the characters are fictional. But the team the main characters play for – the Rockford Peaches – was real.
While many male Major and Minor League Baseball players were fighting in World War II, chewing gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley, who owned the Chicago Cubs, founded the league. He started the AAGPBL, “To keep spectators in the bleachers,” Carlson reports, “and a storied American sport–more important: his business afloat.”
In 1943, the Office of War Information warned that the baseball season could be “scrapped” “due to a lack of men,” Carlson adds.
“A League of Their Own” was an ensemble of women’s performances (including Rosie O’Donnell as Doris, Megan Cavanagh as Marla, Madonna as Mae, Lori Petty as Kit and Geena Davis as Dottie) that would become legendary.
Girls and women still dress up as Rockford Peaches on Halloween.
Tom Hanks’s indelible portrayal of coach Jimmy Dugan, Gary Marshall’s depiction of (fictional) league owner Walter Harvey and Jon Lovitz’s portrayal of Ernie have also become part of film history.
Filming “A League of Their Own,” Carlson vividly makes clear, was a gargantuan effort. There were “actresses who can’t play baseball” and “baseball players who can’t act,” Penny Marshall said.
The stadium in Evansville, Ind., was rebuilt to look like it was in the 1940s “when the players and extras were in costume,” Carlson writes, “it was easy to lose track of what year it was.”
“No Crying in Baseball” isn’t written for a queer audience. But, Carlson doesn’t pull any punches.
Many of the real-life AAGPBL players who O’Donnell met had same-sex partners, O’Donnell told Carlson.
“When Penny, angling for a broad box-office hit chose to ignore the AAGPGL’s queer history,” Carlson writes, “she perpetuated a cycle of silence that muzzled athletes and actresses alike from coming out on the wider stage.”
“It was, as they say, a different time,” she adds.
Fortunately, Carlson’s book isn’t preachy. Marshall nicknames O’Donnell and Madonna (who become buddies) “Ro” and “Mo.” Kodak is so grateful for the one million feet of film that Marshall shot that it brings in a high school marching band. Along with a lobster lunch. One day, an assistant director “streaked the set to lighten the mood,” Carlson writes.
“No Crying in Baseball,” is slow-going at first. Marshall, who died in 2018, became famous as Laverne in “Laverne & Shirley.” It’s interesting to read about her. But Carlson devotes so much time to Marshall’s bio that you wonder when she’ll get to “A League of Their Own.”
Thankfully, after a couple of innings, the intriguing story of one of the best movies ever is told.
You’ll turn the pages of “No Crying in Baseball” even if you don’t know a center fielder from a short stop.
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Theater
Rupert Murdoch’s powers on full display in ‘Ink’
Media baron helped pave the way for Brexit, Prime Minister Thatcher
‘Ink’
Through Sept. 24
Round House Theatre
4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda, MD 20814
$46-$94
Roundhousetheatre.org
Yes, Rupert Murdoch’s loathsome traits are many, but his skills to succeed are undeniably numerous.
In the first scenes of John Graham’s West End and Broadway hit drama “Ink,” an exciting year-long detail from the life of a burgeoning media baron, Murdoch’s powers of persuasion are on full display.
It’s 1969 London. Over dinner with editor Larry Lamb, a young Murdoch shares his plan to buy the Sun and rebrand the dying broadsheet, replacing the Daily Mirror as Britain’s best-selling tabloid. What’s more, he wants to do it in just one year with Lamb at the helm.
Initially reluctant, Lamb becomes seduced by the idea of running a paper, something that’s always eluded him throughout his career, and something Murdoch, the outsider Australian, understands. Murdoch taunts him, “Not you. Not Larry Lamb, the Yorkshire-born son of a blacksmith, not the guy who didn’t get a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, who didn’t get a degree from anywhere. Not you.”
Still, Lamb, played convincingly by Cody Nickell in Round House Theatre’s stellar season-opener, a co-production with Olney Theatre Center, remains unsure. But Murdoch (a delightfully brash Andrew Rein) is undeterred, and seals the deal with a generous salary.
Superbly staged by director Jason Loweth, “Ink” is riveting. Its exchanges between Lamb and Murdoch are a strikingly intimate glimpse into ambition involving an ostensibly average editor and a striving money man who doesn’t like people.
Once on board, Lamb is trolling Fleet Street in search of his launch team, played marvelously by some mostly familiar actors. He makes his most important hire — news editor Brian McConnell (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh) — in a steam bath. The remainder of the Sun’s new masthead falls handily into place: Joyce Hopkirk (Kate Eastwood Norris) the women’s page editor whose forward thinking is marred by her casual racism; Zion Jang plays Beverley Goodway, an awkwardly amusing young photographer; persnickety deputy editor Bernard Shrimsley (Michael Glenn) who learns to love ugly things; and an old school sports editor who proves surprisingly versatile, played by Ryan Rillette, Round House’s artistic director.
At Lamb’s suggestion, the team brainstorms about what interests Sun readers. They decide on celebrities, pets, sports, free stuff, and —rather revolutionarily for the time —TV. Murdoch is happy to let readers’ taste dictate content and the “Why” of the sacred “five Ws” of journalism is out the window.
Murdoch is portrayed as a not wholly unlikable misanthrope. He dislikes his editors and pressman alike. He particularly hates unions. His advice to Lamb is not to get too chummy with his subordinates. Regarding the competition, Murdoch doesn’t just want to outperform them, he wants to grind them to dust.
Loewith leads an inspired design team. Scenic designer Tony Cisek’s imposing, inky grey edifice made from modular walls is ideally suited for Mike Tutaj’s projections of headlines, printed pages, and Rein’s outsized face as Murdoch. Sound designer and composer Matthew M. Nielson ably supplies bar noises and the nonstop, pre-digital newspaper clatter of presses, linotypes, and typewriters.
From a convenient second tiered balcony, the Daily Mirror’s establishment power trio Hugh Cudlipp (Craig Wallace), Chris Lee Howard (Chris Geneback) and Sir Percy (Walter Riddle) overlook all that lies below, discussing new tactics and (mostly failed) strategies to remain on top.
Increasingly comfortable in the role of ruthless, sleazy editor, Lamb is unstoppable.
Obsessed with overtaking the Daily Mirror’s circulation, he opts for some sketchy reportage surrounding the kidnapping and presumed murder of Muriel McKay, the wife of Murdoch’s deputy Sir Alick (Todd Scofield). The kidnappers mistook Muriel for Murdoch’s then-wife Anna (Sophia Early). Next, in a move beyond the pale, Lamb introduces “Page 3,” a feature spotlighting a topless female model. Awesta Zarif plays Stephanie, a smart young model. She asks Lamb if he would run a semi-nude pic of his similarly aged daughter? His reaction is uncomfortable but undaunted.
For Murdoch’s purposes, history proves he chose well in Lamb. By year’s end, the Sun is Britain’s most widely read tabloid. Together they give the people what they didn’t know they wanted, proving the pro-Labour Daily Mirror’s hold on the working class is baseless and paving the way for things like Brexit and a Prime Minister Thatcher.
“Ink” at Round House closes soon. See it if you can.
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