That's a wrap
Carl Stewart is slacking off.
As his retirement approaches — he’ll step down as artistic director of Terrific New Theatre, the theater he co-founded in 1986, on July 30 — he missed his first day on the job.
That’s right. After 30 years of manning the box office and then sitting outside smoking his Pall Malls while the show went on inside, Stewart missed a night recently to attend a wedding.
“Except for that one night, I had been there every night we had a show going on,” he said.
From Stephen Sondheim to Tennessee Williams, Charles Busch to Del Shores, Stewart has directed every show at TNT. When he turns out the lights on his career July 30 — the last night Dolores Hydock will perform her new show “Three for the Road” — a huge chunk of Birmingham’s theater history will come to a close.
“I just thought 30 years, that’s enough of that,” Stewart said.
Stewart’s trek to now — he’ll only say his age is “somewhere between 80 and death” — began long before that. He grew up in Florala and attended Florida State University before moving to New York to study with the legendary Stella Adler. He was a hairstylist in New York, which he continues to do in Birmingham, but he also became director of supernumeraries (basically, the extras wrangler) for New York City Opera. Stewart himself was a supernumerary on stage when a young tenor named Placido Domingo took New York by storm in the title role of “Don Rodrigo.”
In 1968, Stewart returned to Alabama, doing a little theater in Birmingham briefly before heading to California with three friends. A devastating car wreck and an earthquake would bring him back to Birmingham.
The accident on Birmingham’s Southside killed Bill Ozier, director of Birmingham’s Actors Studio and a theater icon, especially among younger actors. After a 1972 earthquake, Stewart fled California and, with friends Vic Fichtner and Randy Marsh, created Birmingham Festival Theatre and picked up where Ozier left off.
BFT opened with the Stewart-directed “Threepenny Opera,” and he estimates he directed another 60 shows there before he and partner Steve Stella opened their own theater, TNT, in 1986 at the corner of 21st Street and First Avenue South.
Kathleen Crawford Jensen, a longtime stage director and actress for TNT, was there from Day One.
“When I walked in, I thought, there is no way we’re going to turn this into a theater,” she said. “Then Steve lifted the drop ceiling and showed me there were 30-foot ceilings, and that’s when I started to see Carl’s vision. The three of us went in with sledgehammers and crowbars and took out old Sheetrock walls.”
TNT opened with a Sondheim musical revue and soon found its niche presenting small dramas, comedies and musicals, sometimes on the edgy side, and often shows that had never been produced in Birmingham.
For a young actress named Cari Gisler (now Cari Gisler Oliver), who met Stewart and Stella just after graduating from Birmingham-Southern College, it was heaven.
“I was in awe of these two men,” she said. “Their theater was wicked cool. I didn’t know it had just opened a couple of months before. They spoke about theater seriously, like it was OK to pursue this as a real job.”
Five years later, in 1991, Stewart and Stella moved TNT to its present building in Pepper Place. In the first 10 years, Stewart, of course, directed every show. Stella designed all of them, until he lost a battle with AIDS in 1996.
Both Oliver and Jensen have worked with Stewart and TNT on a volunteer basis for 30 years. They recently starred in “Matt & Ben” as part of Stewart’s last season.
“Carl Stewart has taught me so many things,” Oliver said. “A lot of it was in theater, sure — timing, pacing, trusting the process, listening, all those things that I think everyone who has worked with him took away. But there’s something you get from sitting with him day in and day out like Kathleen and I did that others didn’t benefit from. He taught me strength and commitment. Carl never let us think of TNT as a hobby. He treated us as professionals who knew better. Show up on time, be prepared, don’t waste time and work.”
It’s hard to come up with a Birmingham actor or actress who has not appeared in a show at TNT, and one of those who has appeared regularly on the TNT stage is going to step into Stewart’s shoes. Tam DeBolt, who also helped close out this final Stewart-run season in “Sophie Tucker: Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” will become TNT’s new artistic director July 31.
But first, Stewart will end his reign with another of his “regulars,” Hydock. She first appeared in “Carbondale Dreams” in 1990, and “Three for the Road” will be their 16th collaboration in 26 years. It’s made up of three of the shows they’ve done together over the years: monologues from “Talking Heads,” “Talking With …” and “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”
“The broad Southern comedy he does so well doesn’t always showcase his sensitivity to the human heart, but I’ve been fortunate to work on ‘meatier’ plays with him that have let that side of his directing brilliance come through,” Hydock said.
The actress said she hopes this isn’t the last chapter of Stewart’s theater life.
“If there’s a play he finds that he just has to do, I imagine he would find a way to do it,” she said. “And if I come up with something — something I write myself or a play I encounter along the way — that I really, really want to do, I would ask Carl to go on that journey with me.”
For his part, Stewart said he doesn’t know exactly what he’ll do.
“Right now, I’m done with it and ready to put my feet up and ready to quit putting my cigarette smoke on other people,” he said. “Other people don’t need to suffer with me.”
And his legacy?
“It used to always bother me that still, after all this time, we only can seat 98 people, and I was hoping the day would come that would demand that we have more seats to fill,” Stewart said. “But that didn’t happen. What did happen is all the other theaters started opening up, and in that sense, there are more chairs. You can’t fling a cat in Birmingham without seeing a theater, and that possibly might be my legacy.”