ARTS

'Irritating, arrogant, nuts -- and a genius'

Theater legend Paul Baker to make rare appearance at book festival today

By Michael Barnes
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, October 26, 2009

A theater legend comes to town today.

Not that Paul Baker lives far away. The 92-year-old former director of the Dallas Theater Center and drama departments at Baylor and Trinity universities shares a converted barn on a ranch near Waelder — about 70 miles southeast of Austin — with his wife, Kitty.

Yet rare is the chance to meet the man who, some 50 years ago, invented a revolutionary arts training known as "integration of abilities" that won the attention of theater artists around the world.

"Irritating, arrogant, nuts — and a genius," is how the late stage and film star Charles Laughton described director and teacher Baker.

The same man affected almost every theater hall built in Texas during the late 20th century by insisting that spectators share the theatrical space with the performers.

"In the long history of theater architecture, no single person has contributed more to its development than Paul Baker," wrote Dallas architect Arthur Rogers.

If this claim is rather exaggerated, Baker easily ranks among the three or four most influential theater artists that the state has produced. Thanks to the Texas Book Festival — and authors Robert Flynn and Eugene McKinney, who edited the tributes in " Paul Baker and the Integration of Abilities" (Texas Christian University Press) — the legend will speak at the Capitol Extension today.

A minister's son, Baker was born in Hereford in 1911. His imaginative responses to the West Texas landscape deeply affected his later teaching on creativity.

"Much of Baker's philosophy and methods are based on relearning childhood freedoms and unlearning the barriers, fears and inhibitions to creative expression," writes theater professor William Doll in the tribute book. "We must relearn how we became the individuals we are, discover what Baker calls our personal 'landscape.' "

Baker attended Trinity University when it was still located in Waxahachie, and then earned his master's degree in drama at Yale University. In 1934, Baker accepted a teaching position at Baylor University, where he met and married Kitty Cardwell, a math teacher and artist who later translated Baker's theories to children's art and theater. They had three children, Robyn (founder and current director of Dallas Children's Theater), Retta (an executive with the Austin American-Statesman) and Sallie (who teaches theater and writing in Denver).

Two years later, Baker made a crucial voyage to England, Germany, Russia and Japan to observe theater. Insights from this trip helped form a new Baylor theater, Studio One, which placed the audience in swivel chairs embraced by six stages. Over the next decades, Baker would contribute to 10 other Texas theater designs that positioned the dramatic action around the halls, rather than on a 19th-century-style picture-frame stage.

In 1952, Baker led Baylor students to Paris to perform at the avant-garde Theatre de Babylone. During that visit, he studied the techniques of modern artworks — the Cubists particularly — which Baker translated into theater productions back at Baylor.

His famous rendition of "Othello," for instance, acknowledged the characters' multiple points of view by dividing the main parts among several actors.

"( Baker) accomplished what Orson Welles' motion picture tried and failed to do — applied the visual arts to a great play without allowing them to inundate it," wrote critic Henry Hewes in the Saturday Review.

The late actor Laughton, on a public reading tour, saw Baker's "Othello," calling it "the most exciting piece of theater in America." In 1956, Baker used a similar split-personality approach to "Hamlet" with stage and film star Burgess Meredith.

In 1959, Baker co-founded the Dallas Theater Center, which served as the Baylor drama department's graduate school. With Baker's input, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Dallas Theater Center, the great architect's last building. Baker remained artistic director for 23 years, promoting many performers and playwrights along the way.

" Paul Baker has produced more bad plays than any theater director in America," wrote playwright McKinney admiringly about Baker's belief in raw scripts. " Baker's program has spawned hundreds of writers."

The best-known product of Baker's tenure at DTC was Preston Jones' "Texas Trilogy," which won plaudits at the Kennedy Center, but closed after a short run in New York.

Larger than life, Baker did not suffer contradiction easily. When a protest about bad language threatened a Baylor production of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night," Baker transported the entire department to Trinity University in San Antonio, where he built another experimental hall, Ruth Taylor Theater.

Baker published "Integration of Abilities" in 1972, which explained his technique of encouraging creativity by urging students to use all their senses. He also prodded theater students to paint, dance, sing and compose music, while participating in all aspects of production, from building sets to selling tickets.

By the early 1980s, Baker tangled with the DTC board of directors; he wanted to retain the educational approach, they preferred an Equity union theater with well-known stars. In 1982, he resigned, which spelled the end of the Baker era in Texas. His innovative Baylor theater was torn down, his Trinity theater severely altered.

Baker has not stopped making theater. In Austin during the late 1980s, he directed Preston Jones' "The Oldest Living Graduate" at the Paramount Theatre and his adaptation, "Hamlet ESP," at Hyde Park Theatre.

"Living theater demands experimentation and point of view," Baker once said. "When it becomes pompous, self-satisfied, a follower of dead rules; when theater forgets its soil, its people, its heritage, its religion; when it goes academic, losing its vitality, its honest two-fisted search for understanding, it becomes a cheap streetwalker and dies."