I was a member of a gang in Westport. It may seem hard to believe that there once were packs of wild youths carousing our streets, but, alas, it’s true. In fact, I was even affiliated with two gangs, The Sharks and The Jets. We were a tough bunch, armed with “toe-ball change-toe” maneuvers and particularly wicked “jazz hands.” We knocked ’em dead every time in West Side Story. Our other triumphs included Cabaret, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, Annie, and The Fantasticks. We were the legendary Staples Players.
Although it has been almost fifteen years since I left Staples, I spent my entire childhood in Westport and my memories of the Players are my most intractable and cherished. From the time I was in elementary school, the hand-painted marquees placed in front of 70 North Avenue intrigued me. It seemed that the Players captivated the Westport community; each show was an event that the town (from the local newspapers to town officials) rallied behind. Indeed, as my fellow Players alumnus Jamie Roth (who now appears nightly as a news journalist on WFSB Channel 3 Eyewitness News Hartford) suggests, we were the winning football team that Staples did not have during those years.
As I have grown older, I have begun to appreciate more that anyone could join the Players. Everyone received a part in a show, no matter how tone deaf. We had track-and-field members with surreptitious stand-up comedy aspirations. Swimmers who wanted to dance, and dancers who wanted to build sets. Best of all, students who were frequently not mainstreamed in academic classes because of perceived learning differences often thrived in the Players environment and became an essential part of the social fabric. Then, as now, Westport students were driven by athletic goals. The Players gave those of us who were always picked last for the team a field of our own. On this field, in theater, though, we broke the record for the most Moss Hart Awards for Achievement in Theater (Best Production in New England) given to a single school, learned to become professionals, and became devoted to performance in some form for life.
The man behind this extraordinary program was Al Pia. He was just over forty when he came to the Westport school system in the late sixties. At seventeen, he left his native Stamford to fly cargo planes over Europe during World War II. Later, he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of New Hampshire and pursued doctoral studies at Harvard. He acted and directed in Germany while producing dramatic segments for Voice of America radio. Returning to the United States, Pia taught in Stamford and performed in New York before founding and becoming the artistic director of Stamford’s Sterling Barn Theater, a position he held for many years while teaching full-time.
Pia brought his extraordinary energy and theatrical insights to the Players program, which could already count Taxi and Back to the Future actor Christopher Lloyd among its graduates. Pia encouraged his students to produce politically charged material, influenced in part by his views of the devastation of World War II. In the productions he directs, he defines evil as the inability of an individual to think for himself. (To date, the Players has performed seven riveting productions of a strongly anti-Nazi Cabaret.)
He also founded the summer theater program — one that he continued to direct well past his retirement in 1996 — and the studio theater program. Students choose, cast, direct and produce their own plays and musicals and perform them in any of the variety of spaces that Technical Director Joseph Ziegahn created out of forgotten spaces in the school. He possesses an ineffable ability to create wondrous stage sets out of literal scraps of wire, wood and paint. A mad genius, he teaches scores of students to run massive lighting rigs, to stage manage and to pull hefty flying set pieces.
The quality of the main stage group shows and the studio program is what makes the Players unique and able to handle such productions as Jesus Christ Superstar, Deathtrap, Crimes of the Heart, The Diary of Anne Frank, Women in White and The Children’s Hour.
First and foremost, Pia considers himself a teacher; and in Westport, he concentrated on changing the theater curriculum to offer experience at a sophisticated level. For example, he insisted students read college-level plays and study the Stanislavski acting method. Ask any of Pia’s students and he/she will tell you of his oft-repeated statement: “I always have old students coming back to me and saying that they read this material in college. I am telling you, you are reading and digesting college-level texts.” We tackled the plays of Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller and Joe Orton. Pia maintained an eclectic drama library and students were allowed to check out plays on the honor system. In the drama alcove, I discovered the works of Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, David Rabe, Neil Simon and Michael Frayn. In order to pass a semester of drama, Pia insisted that his students see or read twenty-four plays and write a full-length report on each one. I admit to once being skeptical of Pia’s claims about the plays we were reading; that is, until I went to college. When the professor handed out the syllabus for my first theater course at Yale, I discovered Pia had told us the truth — I had already read half of the semester’s list.
His rare ability to approach Staples students as professional, intelligent adults, without forgetting that we were also struggling, awkward adolescents, allowed Pia to consistently bring out strong performances from his students. And in studio training, his choice of the Stanislavski method was critical. This Russian method concentrates on using the actors own emotional memories and applies them to the situation the characters are facing. Pia recognized that this release was especially important for teenagers, and he created an environment for practice and exploration. In the world of the characters, we were free to roam; outside the classroom, we had to abide by the Players Creed: no smoking, drinking or taking drugs (which most others students, generally, tried). We followed the rules (except for the smoking, because, well, we were artists after all).
We played children and old women, hags and seductresses, free people and the oppressed — and each was a piece of what we were feeling. We could relate. And we worked hard: Rehearsals were three hours a day for four weeks, and the two weeks before the show, rehearsals lasted from after school until 11 p.m. Then we did our homework. During one memorable “Hell Week,” as we called the week before the show, we finished a terrible run at 1:30 a.m., and Pia called for another run through from the top. We were expected to be in school at 7:15 a.m., no excuses. If your average dropped below a C, you were out.
We did it, and we loved it.
Players provided a place to develop the tenacity and professionalism required in the difficult world of performance. The majority of my fellow Players alumni have gone into fields that directly involve performance or where performance is a key ingredient in their job success. Lauren Flans, for one, lives in Amsterdam and performs with Boom Chicago!, a sister company of Second City Chicago. Zak Walshon is a writer for the ABC comedy According to Jim. Alisan Porter is starring on Broadway in A Chorus Line. Holly Lamberson is an independent costume designer in New York. Abby Marcus cofounded and is managing director of Vampire Cowboys Theater Company in New York. Marty Dever is a set designer in New York. Seth Malasky is an agent in New York. Ari Edelson is cofounder of Old Vic/New Voices in London, England, and The Orchard Project in upstate New York. Brandon Borrman, former spokesperson for United Airlines, is now in public relations for Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle. And me? I’m a globe-trotting performance artist, filing this article from Bangkok.
The Staples Players program we loved so well thrives today under the direction of David Roth and the masterful hand of Ziegahn. The recent renovation of the school has given the program a fantastic new Black Box theater and improved costume and backstage facilities.
Al Pia thrives still, a true example of my great-great-aunt’s maxim that “energy begets energy.” He’s still teaching and recently published three books, including a novel about a group of drama students and two volumes of techniques for teaching drama. His best lessons, I think, will always live in the hearts of his students.
On Stage! The Communal Magic of Theatre and Acting the Truth, by Al Pia, are available at authorhouse.com.
Read more about the Players and the upcoming production of Beauty and the Beast at its website: staplesplayers.com.