ABSTRACT
In this first oral history chapter, Zelda guides Arena Stage during its first decade in a largely improvisational way, focusing on the theater’s survival. Both the intimacy of the in-the-round playing space and the work itself attract a loyal audience, but with only 237 seats to sell the theater can never break even. In 1955, Zelda persuades Arena’s stockholders to close the theater while she embarks on a yearlong search for a new space, settling on the Heurich Brewery in Foggy Bottom in the spring of 1956, four months before her second son is born. But the converted 500 seat theater affectionately known as the “Old Vat” is threatened by a new bridge across the Potomac, and the Fichandlers know they will need to find—or build—a new space for the theater to survive. Narrators of this chapter include actors Alan Oppenheimer, Nicolas Coster, and Gerald Hiken, and playwright and director Joan Vail Thorne, all of whom worked at Arena in the 1950s.
