Gene Frankel

Frankel's direction of the off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks was regarded as a crucial production in promoting African-American theater during the civil-rights movement which opened in 1961 and ran at St. Mark's Theatre for more than 1,400 performances, the longest-running Off-Broadway non-musical of the decade.[1] The cast included James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou and Charles Gordone; sets were by Kim E. Swados, music by Charles Gross, and costumes and masks by Patricia Zipprodt.

He began his own career as an actor and was one of the earliest members of the Actors Studio. He moved behind the scenes and became a theater director on and off Broadway. His most notable Broadway production was Arthur Kopit's Indians starring Stacy Keach, who was nominated for the 1970 Tony Award as Best Actor for his portrayal of Buffalo Bill.[2] The production was also nominated for a Tony Award for best play of 1970.

His other Broadway productions included A Cry of Players (1968), Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars (1972) and Harry Chapin's The Night That Made America Famous (1975). His off-Broadway productions included Brecht on Brecht, (starring Viveca Lindfors, Lotte Lenya, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson), I Am a Woman (again with Lindfors), and To Be Young, Gifted and Black starring Cicely Tyson. He directed an Arthur Miller play when Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe.

As well as directing over 200 shows and managing at least twelve theaters throughout his career, Frankel taught acting, writing and directing. His last stage was the Gene Frankel Theatre and Film Workshop at 24 Bond Street in Greenwich Village. Frankel said that the heart of successful acting was, "Truth. I don't let my actors tell lies. The camera doesn't lie, the stage doesn't let you lie." He was a visiting professor in theater at various institutions of higher learning including Columbia University, Boston College, and New York University.

On August 4, 1973, his Mercer Arts Center, a complex of seven small theaters, which had been located on the first two floors of the residential Broadway Central Hotel, physically collapsed. Frankel, who had been conducting a rehearsal at the time, noticed the ceiling and walls beginning to buckle and heroically led the actors and several residents to safety; five people died in the collapse.[3][4][5]

Only his last theater was a financial success, serving as home to artistic director Christopher Groenwald's New Mercury Players and as a satellite location for artistic director Marilyn Majeski's Grove Street Playhouse.

In 2003 Frankel made Gail Thacker[6] Managing Director of the Gene Frankel Theatre and Film Workshop at the Bond Street location. Upon Frankel's death his legacy passed into Thacker's trust.[7][8]

Frankel had two children, Laura Frankel and Ethan Frankel. His son, an aspiring actor, who studied at his father's school had struggled with psychiatric illness which led him to leap off the top of a Manhattan 17-floor-building in 1995 during a psychosis from which he survived. After a lengthy coma and therapy to learn to walk again Ethan was placed in a group home in the Bronx where he was murdered by a fellow resident the following year. Frankel created a scholarship at his theater in his son's name.[9]

Frankel was awarded the first Obie Award for directing, with his production of Volpone (1958) and then won two more also for directing. He also received the first Lola d'Annunzi and Vernon Rice awards for outstanding achievement in theater.

• Official website Gene Frankel Theatre
• Official website August Strindberg Repertory Theatre
• Gene Frankel papers, 1941-2004, held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
• Gene Frankel at the Internet Broadway Database
• Gene Frankel at the Internet Off-Broadway Database