Nagle Jackson, a prolific director, playwright, performer, and artistic leader in the American theatre for several decades, died on July 15. He was 88.
If it is true that the 1961 Ford Foundation grant of $9 million drove the 50-year expansion of America’s regional theatre, then Nagle Jackson spent his professional career creating an astonishing volume of work to ensure the field’s success. From his 1959 acting debut as Feste in Twelfth Night for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Nagle worked in regional theatres as an actor, a director, a translator, and a playwright. He directed for the Seattle Repertory Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Old Globe in San Diego, the Repertory Theater of St. Louis, Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., the Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City, Hartford Stage Company, and the Acting Company. He was a resident director for the American Conservatory Theater for three years. From 1971 to 1977, he led Milwaukee Repertory Theater as artistic director, and he served as artistic director of Princeton, N.J.’s McCarter Theater from 1979 to 1990. I personally appointed Nagle as an associate artist of the Denver Center Theater Company in 1991, where he remained a vital part of the company’s work until I retired in 2005.
I first worked with Nagle in 1975, when I hired him to direct King Lear for the Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts (PCPA). When he learned that his Lear would be one of six productions in a rotating repertory offering 15 performances a week in two theatres located 40 miles apart, he hid his panic beneath the quiet, unruffled mask familiar to everyone who ever worked with him.
In the design conferences, Nagle insisted that he wanted one simple costume for each character, with the thrust stages left bare in both theaters. Of course, I thought, another actor-turned-director who doesn’t know how to utilize the talents of his designers. It took me another year to understand that Nagle’s minimalist design choices were not a personal limitation but a self-protective shield. Nagle chose to deliver King Lear by relying on himself and a talented cast, with minimal dependence on a production team he did not know.
The production was mesmerizing. After the close of the PCPA season, Nagle took the Lear (Richard Risso), the Kent (Jim Baker), the fool (Daniel Davis), and the stage manager (Lyle Raper) to remount the production as part of his 1974-75 season at the Milwaukee Rep.
When invited to return to PCPA later in 1975, Nagle asked to direct He Who Gets Slapped, written in 1915 by Leonid Andreyev for the Moscow Art Theater. This time, with full confidence in PCPA’s production capabilities, Nagle asked for, received, and exploited brilliant designs by Linda Fisher (costumes), Ralph Funicello (scenery,) and Dirk Epperson (lighting), and a haunting score by resident composer Larry Delinger.
Nagle directed three productions for PCPA while I was its artistic director, and 19 more for the Denver Center Theater Company. But it was his work as a playwright, translator, and dramaturg that became most valuable to the DCTC. Nagle had graduated from Whitman College with a double major: English literature and French literature. On a Fulbright scholarship, he studied mime in Paris with Etienne Decroux. For three years, he performed in the Julius Monk satiric revues at the Plaza in New York City. His natural impish wit was disciplined by personal intellect, by the “be funny or die” reality of those who dare to perform satire, and by a passionate interest in French literature.
For the DCTC, Nagle translated and directed seven French masterworks: Tartuffe, School for Wives, The Imaginary Invalid, The Miser, Cyrano de Bergerac, Scapin, and The Misanthrope. During the same 15-year period, The DCTC premiered six of Nagle’s plays:
- The Quick-Change Room, a comedy of the struggle between artistic integrity and commercial viability during the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
- Taking Leave, a funny and touching look at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease with a Lear-like protagonist at the mercy of his three daughters.
- The Elevation of Thieves, a prize winner in the Onassis Foundation International Playwriting Contest, with the award presented to Nagle in Athens by the President of Greece a year before its Denver premiere. This provocative satire—which includes an offstage mass shooting—coincidentally opened two weeks after the massacre at Columbine High School. It was met by both enthusiastic praise and indignant outrage from Denver audiences.
- A Hotel on Marvin Gardens, a comic riff on savagery in the corporate world that revolves around a vicious game of Monopoly played annually on April Fool’s Day.
- Bernice/Butterfly: A Two-Part Invention, two hilarious and heart-breaking two-hander one-acts that must be performed together, which explore the search for dignity in small-town Kansas.
In addition to his work in America’s regional theatres, Nagle acted with the New York Shakespeare Festival, performed for President John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C., and was featured in a Cole Porter revue with Tammy Grimes in Los Angeles. In 1979, Nagle directed Celeste Holm in the Broadway production of the Clark Gesner musical The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall, which had been given its world premiere at PCPA in 1976 and was further developed at the McCarter Theater in 1978. In 1987, Nagle was the first American ever to be invited to direct in the Soviet Union, where he staged The Glass Menagerie at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre in Leningrad. In 1990, he directed Romeo and Juliet for the Trøndelag Teater in Trondheim, Norway.
Nagle directed scores of productions as a guest director in regional theatres across the nation. While many of these companies routinely went into crisis mode throughout the tech, previews, and opening of each production, the Nagle Jackson production process did not include tension, chaos, arguments, or temper tantrums. Actors, designers, composers and technicians adored Nagle. When the company gathered to begin the first tech for one of his productions, he would remind the actors that the team was being expanded and the new additions would be experiencing the play for the first time, so they would be making discoveries and mistakes. He would remind the company, “There is no one working this production named Props or Costumes or Sound. When you get a chance, introduce yourself to your new colleagues so they don’t have to call you Actor.”
This gentle man knew that the process has an enormous impact on the product. And he taught this truth to those working to spread professional theatre across America.
Donovan Marley was the founding artistic director of PCPA and served as artistic director of Denver Center Theatre Company from 1984 to 2005.
