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Creator
Weinberg, Sydney
Call number
*T-Mss 2024-011
Physical description
0.63 linear feet (2 boxes)
Language
English
Preferred Citation
Sydney Weinberg interviews with Robert Whitehead, *T-Mss 2024-011. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Repository
Billy Rose Theatre Division
Access to materials
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Robert Whitehead (1916-2002) was a Canadian American theatrical producer, presenter, director, and performer whose career spanned nearly six decades and focused mainly on producing and directing plays on Broadway. The Sydney Weinberg interviews with Robert Whitehead, dating from 1998 to 1999, consist of sixteen transcribed interviews about Whitehead's theatrical career. Weinberg conducted fifteen interviews with Whitehead and one with American theater critic and writer Howard Kissel.

Biographical/historical information

Robert Whitehead (born 1916 in Montreal, Canada) was a Canadian American theatrical producer, presenter, director, and performer whose career spanned nearly six decades.

Whitehead attended acting school at the New York School of Theatre. In 1938, he worked at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia as an actor, stage manager, and scenery builder. From 1939 to 1942, Whitehead landed theatrical roles in New York City and produced shows at the Provincetown Playhouse with The Producer's Theater.

After serving as an ambulance driver in the American Field Service during World War II, Whitehead produced Robinson Jeffers' play Medea (1947) starring Judith Anderson and John Gielgud on Broadway. He then presented the Rodney Ackland dramatization of Crime and Punishment (1947) also starring Gielgud with Lillian Gish and Dolly Haas. Both productions were commercial hits and created Whitehead's reputation as a producer who could make artistic plays successful.

Whitehead married dancer and singer Virginia Bolen (1917-1965) in 1948.

He went on to produce plays by Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, Carson McCullers, Arthur Laurents, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, Robert Bolt, Jean Anouilh, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Terrence McNally. Whitehead presented fourteen productions with American theater director, producer, and critic Harold Clurman, including The Member of the Wedding (1950) starring Ethel Waters and Julie Harris; Bus Stop (1955) starring Kim Stanley and Elaine Stritch; and A Touch of the Poet (1958) starring Helen Hayes and Stanley.

In addition to producing plays, Whitehead served as the managing director for The American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), a non-profit theater training and production organization established by Congress in 1935 as an alternative to for-profit Broadway houses. In 1960, Whitehead and Elia Kazan were asked to lead the first Lincoln Center theater company with Whitehead producing and Kazan directing. The Lincoln Center Repertory Theater's first season opened in January 1964. After one season, Whitehead was forced out of his position by George Woods, the chairman of the theater's board.

After his wife Virginia died in 1965, Whitehead met and married Australian actress Zoe Caldwell (1933-2020) in 1968.

Whitehead produced many plays starring well-known actors and actresses such as Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in The Visit (1958); Katherine Hepburn in A Matter of Gravity (1976) and The West Side Waltz (1981); and Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons (1961). He also worked on theatrical productions starring Caldwell, including directing her in the titular roles of Medea, for which she won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award (1982), and Lillian Hellman in Lillian (1986).

During his career, Whitehead won five Drama Desk Awards and five Tony Awards, including a Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 2002. He died in Pound Ridge, New York in 2002.

Sydney Weinberg is an American architectural historian, a Trustee of the Sidney J. Weinberg Foundation (founded and named after her father), and a former Trustee and Vice Chair of the board at the World Monuments Fund.

Howard Kissel (1942-2012) was an American Theater critic and writer. Beginning in the mid-1980s, he was the chief theater critic for the New York Daily News for twenty years. In 2000 Kissel published David Merrick: The Abominable Showman about the Broadway producer. In the same year, he compiled and edited The Art of Acting by Stella Adler.

Scope and arrangement

The Sydney Weinberg interviews with Robert Whitehead, dating from 1998 to 1999, contain sixteen transcribed interviews about Whitehead's career in theater. The transcripts are annotated by Weinberg with content summaries on the front page of each interview. Weinberg highlighted names, play titles, and productions in the interview text. Some transcripts include the location of the interview, but most do not. The transcripts also contain bracketed commentary by the transcriber (possibly Weinberg's husband, theater critic John Heilpern).

Weinberg conducted fifteen interviews with Whitehead from February 10, 1998 to April 16, 1999. The content of the interviews is largely unstructured and holds many tangential stories. In one of the earlier transcripts, Whitehead mentions that the purpose of the interviews is for a book about his career.

During the interviews, Whitehead discusses his career producing plays on Broadway with Harold Clurman and the inaugural year he spent heading the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater with Greek American director Elia Kazan. Whitehead brings up stories about actors, directors, and writers he worked with, including Sanford Meisner, John Gielgud, Tennessee Williams, Stella Adler, Zoe Caldwell, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller. Whitehead also talks about his first and second marriages in the context of his producing career and WWII. Other topics include Whitehead's experience publishing forwards for books about theater; how Whitehead did not become a United States citizen until 1996; working in the theater during the Depression; Summer Stock at the beginning of WWII; the Equity fight over the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive filming Whitehead's productions; the founding, running, and financing of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA); members of The Group Theatre; and the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Communist Party's influence on theater content and production.

The collection also holds Weinberg's interview with Howard Kissel on November 3, 1998. During the interview, Kissel and Weinberg discuss the playwrights of the 1940s through the 1960s and Whitehead's experiences with various directors, actors, and producers. Of note is Kissel's mention of Whitehead's rivalry with producer Kermit Bloomgarden.

Arrangement

The interviews are arranged chronologically.

Administrative information

Source of acquisition

Donated by Sydney Weinberg in 2024.

Processing information

Processed by Amy Lau in 2025.

Using the collection

Location

Billy Rose Theatre Division
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center
40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-7498
Third Floor