Al Carmines; Experimental Theater Force
Hyfler/Rosner
August 13, 2005
Al Carmines, Experimental Theater Force, Is Dead at 69
By DOUGLAS MARTIN NY Times
The Rev. Al Carmines, who marshaled his gifts as a showman,
composer, singer and actor to turn the sanctuary of a
Greenwich Village church into a riveting avant-garde stage
that helped start the Off Off Broadway revolt against
mainstream theater in the 1960's, died on Tuesday at St.
Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan. He was 69 .
His brother, Ted, said the cause of death had not been
determined.
For more than a decade, Mr. Carmines was a seminal force in
the rise in New York of small, experimental theaters created
to challenge what many saw as the commercialization and
conformity of Broadway and Off Broadway houses. At the
Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, his specialty
was setting to music his many enthusiasms, which included
Abraham Lincoln, Christmas, homosexuality, St. Joan and,
most particularly, Gertrude Stein.
The new Off-Off Broadway theater, pioneered by Mr.
Carmines's Judson Poets' Theater, as well as Café Cino, La
MaMa E.T.C. and Theatre Genesis, was blossoming with new
insouciance, eagerness to experiment and, in a phrase of the
time, "polymorphous perversity." The net result, The Village
Voice said in an article this year, was to render
conventional realism out of style, if not obsolete.
By 1972, Off Off Broadway was staging about 500 shows,
compared with 100 for Broadway and Off Broadway combined.
Clive Barnes, writing in The New York Times in 1973, called
Mr. Carmines "the composer of more musicals than almost any
man now alive" and went on to suggest that his "ease and
daring" were matched only by Stephen Sondheim's.
Mr. Carmines dared to adapt Aristophanes to a minstrel
setting, set to music the sayings of chairman Mao and
ignited a firestorm among gay men in 1973 with a musical
entitled "The Faggot." In one Judson production, nudity was
made more interesting by commingling it with raw fish and
sausages.
Mr. Carmines's brazen creativity was at its brightest in one
of his five Gertrude Stein musicals, "In Circles," for which
he wrote and performed a different opening song each night.
Walter Kerr of The Times wrote in 1969: "There is literally
nothing Mr. Carmines will not use - gallops, waltzes,
polkas, circus blares and musical bumps and grinds - to get
his work done."
By Mr. Carmines's own count, he wrote about 80 musicals,
operas and oratorios, of which 10 graduated to Off Broadway
houses. Some of his works are still performed by regional
theaters. The one musical he wrote for Broadway, "W. C.,"
about W. C. Fields, died during out-of-town tryouts.
He won five Obie awards, one of them for lifetime
achievement. Productions by others for Judson won even more.
He also preached sermons, visited the sick and performed
other pastoral duties. At a time of hippies and happenings,
he firmly believed that his theatrical passion was a form of
worship, even if he seldom mentioned God.
"I've discovered for myself that God doesn't disappear when
you don't talk about him," he said in an interview with The
Times in 1966.
In 1973, he expanded on the thought in another interview
with The Times: "My domain - if I have one - is that crack
between ideologies where contradictory, frustrating,
un-ideological, stinking and thrilling humanity raises its
head."
In the fall of 1977, he was halted in his tracks by an
aneurysm that required a 5 1/2 hour operation and months of
therapy. He told The Washington Post in 1995 that it took
him three months just to learn to pronounce Minneapolis
properly.
He wrote a musical about death but continued to suffer
crippling headaches and ultimately had to resign his post as
assistant minister at Judson in 1981. A second operation
four years later stopped the headaches, giving him a measure
of peace.
"When your frame has been shaken by an aneurysm, either you
give in or you find a way to cope and go ahead, even if
going ahead means limping," he told The Post.
Alvin Allison Carmines Jr. was born in Hampton, Va., on July
25, 1936. His father was a fishing trawler captain on
Chesapeake Bay, and his mother was a substitute
schoolteacher. His mother was a strict Protestant, and the
boy picked up her faith. His talent sparkled early: at 13 he
appeared on television in Norfolk, Va., singing "Shoo Fly
Pie" while simultaneously tap-dancing and accompanying
himself on the piano.
He won a scholarship he could have used at any music school
but decided to go into the ministry and enrolled at
Swarthmore, where he majored in English and philosophy. He
began to doubt what he told The Christian Science Monitor in
1969 was his "rigid and narrow faith." But then a
conversation with the theologian Paul Tillich, who was
visiting Swarthmore, persuaded him to enroll at Union
Theological Seminary, where he earned a bachelor of divinity
degree in 1961 and a master of sacred theology degree two
years later.
The senior minister at Judson, a church with both
Congregational and Baptist roots, was Howard Moody, who had
long been active in civil rights and political movements. He
hired the newly ordained Mr. Carmines as assistant minister
in 1961 and asked him to begin a theater with Robert
Nichols, an architect and playwright. The new hires had two
demands, both of which were immediately accepted by the
liberal congregation: no religious drama and no censorship.
Mr. Carmines quickly became the face of Judson. Mr. Barnes
wrote in The Times in 1968, "The real performance comes from
Mr. Carmines, crouched at his piano like a benevolent tiger,
seeming cherubic enough yet with a face that sometimes looks
like the darker side of the moon."
Mr. Carmines began composing in 1962, when Judson's resident
director, Lawrence Kornfeld, asked him to improvise some
music to accompany George Dennison's "Vaudeville Skit." His
acting began with the part of the bawdy priest Father
Shenanigan in "Home Movies," for which he also composed the
music. Ane amoral, risqué spoof by Rosalyn Drexler, it ran
for 72 performances at the Off Broadway Provincetown
Playhouse.
For "A Look at the Fifties," in which the action in a high
school basketball game is frozen in time, Mr. Carmines wrote
words as well as music. He depicted being a cheerleader as
the acme of a girl's life in the 50's. As one girl admits,
"I'm not a virgin, but I'm still a cheerleader, and being a
cheerleader is like still being a virgin."
Mr. Carmines, a tall, husky man who liked gin and small
cigars, kept up his cabaret act over the years; in it he
sang his own songs and old standards in a brassy voice. He
also started a Bible study group in his apartment, which
grew into the Rauschenbusch Memorial Church of Christ at 422
West 57th St., with Mr. Carmines as pastor.
He wrote a musical in which Bessie Smith, a group of
history's most prominent theologians, and, of course,
Gertrude Stein get together at a Harlem nightclub. He could
not find financial backing.
In addition to his brother, who lives in Bloomington, Ind.,
Mr. Carmines is survived by his partner, Paul Rounsaville.
Mr. Carmines never doubted that as much spiritual meaning
could be found in the theater as in church.
"If you want to know how to live, go to church," he said in
a letter to The Times in 1989. "If you want to know how your
life is in its deepest roots, go to the theater."