Lawrence Christon literally wrote the book about the founding of South Coast Repertory and was a friend of Martin Benson for many years.
Martin Benson through the years, clockwise from top left: PHOTO 1: 1967. Benson, left, and David Emmes in a detailed section of a photo taken to promote the second half of the 1967-1968 season. The photo was also used as the cover for "Stepping Ahead" by Lawrence Christon. PHOTO 2: Circa 1974. from left, former trustee Herbert Kendall, architect Stewart Woodard, Emmes and Benson go over designs for the Fourth Step Theater. PHOTO 3: 2015. Benson directs Adam Haas Hunter in "The Whipping Man" by Matthew Lopez, PHOTO 4: 1988. Benson and Emmes after receiving the Tony Award for Outstanding Resident Professional Theatre. Photos courtesy of South Coast Repertory
Here’s a story about my friend Martin Benson, who recently died.
Benson is former co-artistic director and co-founder of the South Coast Repertory (with David Emmes). For more than 25 years, he and I played intensely fought tennis matches, mostly at the Lindborgh Racquet Club in Huntington Beach, where he lived. Except for one night on a court atop the Westin Hotel across the lawn from the Costa Mesa theater, he won every single time. I didn’t mind. Tennis wasn’t my game. I’d had success as a basketball player. Besides, our epic matches were invariably followed by a roistering night of dinner and drinks. Still, one match was so hard-fought that I was emotionally drained within 10 minutes.
One night after he came home with the result of yet another outing, his wife Wendy said, “Why don’t you let Larry win at least once in a while?” to which he replied, “That would be dishonest. To give less than my best effort every time out would be cheating, and unfair to him. We owe each other and the game everything we can give.”
That was Martin. And that’s how important the truth was to him. The one time I beat him at the Westin, he attributed the loss to faulty night vision. I believed him. His game showed it.
He brought up the subject unprovoked numerous times in later years – you won, Larry, fair and square. Even recently, long past the point that I even cared. Besides, he was the nephew of the legendary Don Budge, one of the greatest American players of the early 20th century, who drove up to Walnut Creek in a Lincoln Continental to visit his sister, Jean, Martin’s mother, and to give his gangly young nephew tennis equipment and lessons. Martin was the captain of his tennis team at Diablo Valley College, where he first encountered the magic of the theater by building props for the drama department. The game never left him until age and injury forced him to give it up. Neither did the magic of the theater.
The story of SCR’s monumental success and national Tony-winning prominence is fairly well known among Orange County cognoscenti. To wit: A ragtag group of theater majors at early ‘60s San Francisco State enjoy the visionary tutelage of two great pioneering theater professors, Jules Irving and Herbert Blau, who stage a groundbreaking production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” at San Quentin Prison, which leads to Martin Esslin’s landmark book, “The Theater of the Absurd,” and a movement in American theater.
The group reconvenes for a 1963 summer production of Schnitzler’s daisy-chain drama, “La Ronde,” at a steamy Quonset hut in Long Beach called the Off Broadway theater. Emmes and Benson stay in touch, both recognizing the ardor of their former classmates as sufficient to continue in earnest. The troupe forms once again in a marine swap shop owned by Emmes’ stepfather on the Balboa Peninsula, which has never seen a theater before. Drunks occasionally stumble by to yell into performances. Nonetheless, Benson and Emmes are convinced that they have enough of a future to draw up a manifesto on a Copper Skillet napkin and call their new enterprise the South Coast Repertory. Their first performance, “Tartuffe” at the Newport Beach Ebell Club, is directed by Benson, the first of 119 he led throughout SCR’s history. Their operating budget was $17 and they transported costumes and props in Emmes’ 1947 Studebaker.
In the meantime, this is the turbulent ‘60s. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, plus the widening of an as-yet undeclared war in Vietnam, plunge the nation into turmoil. In the arts, a national movement consisting of theater visionaries like Benson and Emmes wants to break with the notion that Broadway defines everything good about American theater. The American regional theater movement is born in New York, Washington, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Houston, Oregon, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles. William Ball moves his breathtakingly accomplished troupe to San Francisco and re-christens it the American Conservatory Theater.
In Los Angeles, Otis Chandler successfully transforms the Los Angeles Times into a nationally prominent newspaper. Its new theater critic, Dan Sullivan, sees enough of these new SCR kids on the block not just to make them a regular stop in his regional coverage, but to celebrate the vitality and freshness of their approach in his reviews (he considered Ron Boussom’s SCR performance in “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel” superior to that of Al Pacino’s in New York).
In the meantime, Benson and Emmes not only score with monster successes like their original staging of the Who’s “Tommy,” a quasi-hippie production of “Mother Earth,” and a blistering “America, Hurrah!” but in the vigorous freshness of their staging, and the premieres of quality plays gain the attention of accomplished professionals like art impresario Tom Garver, architect Stewart Woodard, and post-WWII homebuilder Herb Kendall, all of whom relocate to Orange County. Kendall lives in the hills overlooking the Santa Anas plain and looks out at night to see “130,000 acres devoted to housing, with nothing to do and no place to go.”
Somehow they, and other community leaders eager to bring culture to Orange County, band together to form the board of directors that guides SCR, which in turn is outgrowing its storefront space. The board’s mandate: “We don’t care if you don't make money. Just don’t lose it.” Benson and Emmes ride that need for a growth spurt too.
“They were as likable as could be,” Kendall said. “David was the salesman. Martin was the guy with the hammer.” Enter the region’s leading philanthropist and builder of South Coast Plaza, Henry Segerstrom, to offer not just his friendship and support, but to provide what he called “the hole in the donut,” the former lima bean field that sprawled near the Westin, plus $50,000, to support the glamorous site that became the Fourth Step theater. SCR enters the 21st century to become one of Orange County and the nation’s venerable cultural institutions. Up until the past few years, Benson and Emmes stay with it all the way, even after deferring their leadership roles to other artistic directors.
The novelist-poet Lawrence Durrell once wrote, “I move through many negatives to who I am.” No one embodied that process more than Martin Benson. His youth and early manhood were characterized by a hideously painful sense of inferiority. Looking for work as a Hollywood actor, he’d show up during lunch hour at agents’ offices, knowing they wouldn’t be there to meet him. His misshapen teeth produced a horsey look (dental work later fixed that condition). He slept in his car outside the Off Broadway theater. He literally starved for his art, waving away competing seagulls outside burger joint dumpsters. He suffered clinical depression. His first wife died tragically by suicide. He survived cancer. Two weeks before he died, he was still recovering from a bad fall and a bout of pneumonia. But he never relinquished his upbeat, up-tempo demeanor. He never lost his wry sense of humor.
One of the ironies of being alive, it seems to me, is that only when someone we think we know is gone do we stop to ponder what they have meant, when in fact we should have stopped to do that before it became too late.
“There’ll always be theater,” he said to me in our last conversation, in answer to my skepticism on the subject. For me, for the rest of my life, there will always be Martin. I know I’m not the only one.
Obituaries
From Culture OC : SCR Cofounder Martin Benson Has Died
