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SALT LAKE CITY — We've all had the experience of reconnecting with an old classmate or friend decades later. That happened recently to me while on the arts beat at Pioneer Theatre Company.
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Mary B. Robinson. We went to prep school back east and were in the drama club together. She was writing to tell me she was the next guest director at PTC. It had been 46 years since we had seen each other.
“Isn't that amazing?” Robinson said. “Life is like that. It flies by."
Robinson is an award-winning director of more than 30 years with credits in off-Broadway theatres and around the country. Nominated for a Drama Desk award, she has taught directing at New York University to undergraduates and MFA students at Brooklyn College. She is also the author of “Directing Plays, Directing People, A Collaborative Art,” with a forward by actress Cynthia Nixon.
One person on Robinson’s resume is fascinating: American playwright Edward Albee. Robinson directed Albee’s “At Home At the Zoo” more than once.
“He sort of insisted that I come along and direct it,” she said. “He was really present, too,” Robinson said. “He was at rehearsals. The actors were thrilled and terrified at the same time, as you can imagine. Underneath his kind of edgy exterior, he had a real heart of gold. He was a real sweetheart, and it’s very sad that he’s gone at the age of 88. But what an illustrious career he had.”
Now she is directing the work of another American great, Tennessee Williams, at a theatre she has come to love and respect.
"They (PTC) just produce on a really exceptional level,” Robinson said. “They can get really good actors out here and really good designers. The staff, the stage managers, the whole crew backstage, the shops, they’re just exceptional. There are some theatres that are good in some areas but not so good in others. I think Pioneer Theatre is just an extraordinary theatre on every level.”
"The Glass Menagerie" is set in 1940s St. Louis. It tells the story of a single mother of two adult children. Her son wants to find his way in the world but hesitates to leave his sister, who has both a physical disability and is mentally fragile. The daughter spends much of her time with her glass animals. The play remains a classic we all read it in high school.
When asked why “The Glass Menagerie” is still relevant today, Robinson said the theme of family is the reason.
"Because everyone has a family,” she said. “While on the one hand this is a very specific family at a very specific time, still, the relationships between mother and son, brother and sister, mother and daughter are very familiar in many ways.”
The play itself connects people to the past and, in this case, even brought two old friends together again.
"The Glass Menagerie" opens on Thursday and runs through Nov. 5 at Pioneer Memorial Theatre at the University of Utah.
Contributing: Xoel Cardenas
