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By Kerry Tremain  For a hundred years now, American presidents and world leaders, famous actors and student thespians, noted scholars and new graduates, opera divas and rock stars have taken the stage at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, but few know it more intimately than Mike Ferreira. “Mikey,” as everyone calls him, is a gnomish stagehand who for the last 20 years has occupied his behind-the-scenes lair, a windowless maintenance room just off stage right. He wears a Jerry Garcia-style beard and tucks his black hair under a baseball cap. At the end of a hot September day spent preparing for the Greek’s centennial celebration--two performances of Euripides’ Medea, in modern Greek, by the National Theater of Greece--he propped his work boots on an old desk and swung them to and fro to a beat only he seemed to hear. Although he meets practically everyone who steps on the stage, Mikey is rarely awed by the Greek’s parade of celebrities. Several tried his patience, like the Ramones’ roadies, whose pre-show preening with a bevy of blow-dryers crashed the electrical circuits. But he dug the Dalai Lama, who drank beer with him backstage and offered a Tibetan blessing before leaving. “He’s a great guy,” Mikey says.  It’s hard to know exactly what the Greek Theatre’s founders--University president Benjamin Ide Wheeler, philanthropists Phoebe and William Randolph Hearst, and architects John Galen Howard and Julia Morgan--would make of Mikey, or indeed of the Dionysian rock ‘n’ roll rites now regularly performed in the orchestra-cum-mosh pit. True, these turn-of-the-20th-century Berkeleyans spoke up for the common man and woman. In Everyman’s name, they built this marvelous public space, where they hoped to elevate the nation’s character--but through exposure to nature and the classics, not ganja-infused reggae and the like. Their worldview wove the branches of beauty, truth, and nature into a metaphoric tree of virtue. They imbued real trees with righteousness, too, and spoke explicitly of the nobility of the eucalyptus trees that hover above the Greek Theatre like Tolkien’s Ents. “It was a very spiritual thing,” says Linda Jewell, a professor of landscape architecture who has studied the Greek and other open theaters it helped spawn. “The arts-and-crafts crowd then living in Berkeley believed that we become better people, and achieve a more enlightened culture, when we live closer to nature. They thought it was important to save land for picturesque or sublime experiences.” These Berkeley artists and philosophers rejected the materialism of Gilded Age commerce and proposed California as the natural setting for the renewal of America’s virtue. And, like so many others seeking cultural renaissance, they turned their eyes to ancient Greece. They bestowed on Berkeley the appellation “Athens of the West,” spiritually linking themselves to the democratic and intellectual values, and even the Mediterranean climate, that gave rise to that great civilization. An Athenian theater, open to California’s azure sky, seemed just the ticket. Speaking about the new Greek Theatre, architect Emerson Knight wrote: “Gathering places in the open remind us of early worship in forests, in the hollows of hills, on the plains and in caves along the coasts of seas.” He echoed the prevalent mood by tying these forest and cave rites to intellectual and civic grandeur. “Citizenship of a higher type, of broader usefulness and sympathy,” he said, “is being built through these vital forces at work in the sky-roofed theater.” Such was the moral weight heaped upon the Greek Theatre when it first opened in the spring of 1903, after a remarkable three-month construction blitz. “The noblest theatre the world has known since the days when the Greeks were Greek,” gushed one of Hearst’s Examiner reporters. “California makes a long step forward in the direction of entering into the rightful heritage of Greek life and thought--a heritage which belongs...peculiarly to us, with our Greek landscape, Greek climate, and Greek attitude of mind,” said Edwin B. Clapp, the Greek professor and friend of President Wheeler, who himself had lived in Athens and taught the classics.  Wheeler invited another friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, to preside over the first ceremony in the new structure, on May 14, 1903. Roosevelt, like many of his campus hosts, was a Progressive who fought for reforms on behalf of the working classes. But these reformers were also capable of racial and cultural chauvinism towards the Asian, African, and southern European immigrants they sought to uplift. Roosevelt revealed this darker side with a remark in his speech at the Greek, when he credited “the Northern races” with leading California’s renaissance. “I think of Berkeley’s Isadora-Duncan-and-John-Muir crowd as an elitist movement,” says Jewell. “They were an educated class that thought if we could just expose everyone else to what we’ve been exposed to, then we will be a better society. And they thought if we could get poor folks into nature, everything would be great.” Populists from the agrarian and labor movements resented that attitude. When the University was founded, they had fought to make it a school for agriculture and the mechanical arts, not philosophy or the classics. While Berkeley’s middle-class reformers revered ancient Greece as the birthplace of democracy and modern civilization, the populists associated Greek studies with private colleges that trained Plato’s “philosopher-kings” to lord over them. Just a few years before the Greek Theatre opened, another president of the University, Daniel Gilman, was castigated for “teaching rich lawyers’ boys Greek with farmers’ money.” History professor emeritus Henry F. May believes Wheeler’s success lay in reconciling the University’s multiple roles as a public school, a training ground for intellectuals and leaders, and a research laboratory. The University juggled popular democratic ideals--the school charged no tuition, offered courses in agriculture and engineering, and admitted women and a large number of poor students--with the genteel culture inherited from Harvard and Yale, where many of its teachers had trained. According to Mark Griffith, a current professor in the classics and theater departments, the debates over the meaning of ancient Greece--including whether Athens promoted popular democracy or philosopher-kings--were not new in 1903, and continue to this day. They survive in controversies over how the classic plays are interpreted. “These plays are like the Bible,” says Griffith: People draw opposing conclusions from the same words. Euripides’ Medea, Griffith says, has always divided audiences. Medea betrays her family and leaves her ancestral home out of love for her husband, Jason. When he abandons her for the young daughter of the king, Medea kills their sons in revenge. Was she a proto-feminist, a monster, both? In traditional versions of Medea, black robes denote tragedy. But in the Greek’s centennial production, held September 20 and 21, the entire cast wore stark white costumes that contrasted the clear night sky and the theater’s massive gray walls and columns. The National Theater of Greece took full advantage of the space (as in traditional Greek productions); a square pool of water in the orchestra pit became the center of the play’s action--including an argument between Medea and Jason that felt eerily up-to-date, and a highly stylized representation of the boys’ murder (the pool lit up red). While Medea remains the central, powerful character (“the best woman’s role in all the ancient plays,” says Griffith), this troupe’s interpretation portrayed Jason as an equally tragic figure. In baptismal scenes, donned in white, husband and wife sought to reclaim a lost, inpossible innocence. Griffith hopes the Greek Theatre will once again become a home to plays that address moral issues. “Great art endures because it focuses on deep-seated, persisting problems,” he says, sounding a bit like his Berkeley ancestors. The early 20th-century beliefs of those ancestors--that they were harbingers of a cultural revival based on classical, inseparable ideals of truth and beauty--have taken a devastating beating in the last hundred years. To modern ears, their pronouncements on architecture, art, and nature can seem naïve or condescending, even silly. But if their theories were overdrawn, those early Berkeleyans also derived an enviable joy from new art and ideas, and from nature itself. In photographs from the period, the women strike dramatic poses in their flowing gowns. “For the women actors, the gowns were terribly risqué,” Jewell laughs. “Look at what the women were wearing on stage compared to what women in the audience were wearing. It’s a bit like Christina Aguilera is for us today. “There’s another thing about outdoor theater,” she adds. “So much of our culture demands predictability, but unexpected things can happen outdoors. Birds fly through. Sirens wail.” (On the first night of Medea, it was a confused man who wandered out on stage.)  True to the intent of its founders, the Greek Theatre became a place for the whole University to gather and to feed a community spirit that Wheeler thought essential to its success. Many traditions begun there, like the pre-Big Game bonfire, continue today. Cal Performances got its start as the Committee on Music and Drama at the Greek. And, from the mid-century Sunday concerts to today’s panoply of musical performances, the Greek Theatre remains a place that connects local people to the campus. Berkeley’s self-image as a beacon of progress to the rest of the world also endures. So does its concern for the common man and woman, although virtually no one in Berkeley, including Mikey, thinks of him- or herself as common. Mikey, after all, is the one who sets the stage for the Greek’s comedies, tragedies, and revelries. |
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