general Center Stage

The last time I went to the Book Thing, I picked up a copy of a book I’d been meaning to read (and still haven’t, for reasons that’ll become apparent), Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I’m not sure when that was. Maybe February? Anyway, some time in March I opened the book to read it and realized it had been heavily underlined and highlighted and marked, perhaps read for a class, and was completely unusable in its current state. I couldn’t have followed it with that many marks. So I decided I’d find another copy, and flipped through that one in a desultory way to make sure it was marked up all the way through (it is), and this fell out.

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That’s a ticket stub from a theater performance in Baltimore that took place eighteen years ago. Someone used it as a bookmark, and they forgot about it, and they gave the book away, and it found its way to the Book Thing, and it found its way to me, and the ticket stub stayed in it for eighteen years.

To my way of seeing, that’s worth more than a free book any day of the week.

I saved the ticket stub with care and determined to figure out what the play was. Because it’s a stub, you see. The owner of my book went to the play.

It took me forever—well, until today—to sit down to see if I could find out what the play was. My first shot was the archives of the Baltimore Sun, which super-helpfully go all the way back to 1990. Not 1989. 1990. So screw them. So then I went to the Center Stage website, and a little clicking around in there brought me to a page called Past Productions.

1988-89: Stan Wojewodski, Jr., Artistic Director
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, Directed by Stan Wojewodski, Jr.
Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, Directed by William Foeller
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson, Directed by Irene Lewis
The Tempest by William Shakespeare, Directed by Stan Wojewodski, Jr.
There’s One in Every Marriage by Georges Feydeau, Directed by Stan Wojewodski, Jr.
The Broken Pitcher by Heinrich von Kleist, Directed by Michael Engler
The Increased Difficulty of Concentration by Vaclav Havel, Directed by Stan Wojewodski, Jr.

I figure “Show 4” must mean it was The Tempest. In any case, that’s what I choose to believe. The person taking—studying—Ursula LeGuin in 1989 went to see Shakespeare around the same time. She (most likely) put her ticket stub in her book, finished the book, finished the class, and forgot about it. Years later she gave the book away. And now I have her ticket stub.

And Stan Wojewodski, Jr.? Two years later he was appointed to no less a position than dean of Yale Drama, as the New York Times‘s wonderful new free archives tell us. He left that position in 2001 after two five-year terms. And now he’s Distinguished Artist-in-Residence and a directing teacher at SMU.

It’s easy to find things out if you bother to look them up.