Saratoga News

Saratoga News file photograph

Olivia de Havilland, who started her career in Saratoga, returned several years ago when she was honored as a distinguished alumna of Los Gatos High School.

Saratoga was known for dramatic activity

BY WILLYS PECK

If, as Shakespeare wrote, all the world's a stage, Saratoga of a generation or so ago could have qualified as Central Casting. That may be mangling the metaphor a bit, but it is true that, for a community of fewer than 1,500 souls, there was what seemed an unusual amount of dramatic activity hereabouts.

My own 15 minutes of fame in this milieu occurred in 1933, when I appeared on the same stage as Olivia de Havilland in a production of Alice in Wonderland. Olivia, a high school junior at the time, played Alice, and I, a fifth-grader, played a duck. I should say the duck, since it was a one-duck cast.

Our paths didn't really cross all that much, on stage or off, but, over the years, she has been kind enough to remember the occasion in our infrequent correspondence.

Alice was produced and directed by the late Dorothea Johnston, the doyenne and high priestess of the dramatic arts in Saratoga during the 1920s and '30s. She had had some professional stage experience, but she returned here to live with her mother, Elizabeth Johnston, who ran the old Saratoga Inn.

I came into Miss Johnston's orbit not so much through dramatic talent as through some kind of laryngeal quirk, which, in early youth, enabled me to imitate bird calls. Hence, in a 1935 production of As You Like It, I was off in the bushes providing audible atmosphere for the Forest of Arden, as well as carrying on a sign between scenes telling the audience what was coming up next.

This bird-calling capacity got me the title role in Miss Johnston's 1936 production of The Cricket on the Hearth, a dramatic adaptation of a Dickens story, which had me ensconced offstage making appropriate insect sounds. I also had some lines as the Spirit of the Cricket, not to be confused with Jiminy Cricket of later Disney coinage.

Although she mounted several productions, including Alice, at the Saratoga Foothill Clubhouse, Miss Johnston's best-known venue was the Theatre of the Glade, which she created behind the old Saratoga Inn. The Inn was on the site of the present Saratoga Inn Place condominiums where, at the rear of the property, an embankment drops off toward the creek.

Between this embankment and the creek there was sufficient level ground to accommodate several hundred chairs, even after construction of the swimming pool at the site in 1937. The chairs faced the ivy-covered embankment, the base of which had been terraced off into a couple of levels as the playing area.

It was a perfect setting for such bucolic Shakespearean works as A Midsummer Night's Dream and the aforementioned As You Like It. In fact it was with a production of Dream that Miss Johnston opened the Theatre of the Glade in the summer of 1934.

Playing the role of Puck was Olivia de Havilland, whose introduction to Hollywood already was being arranged by influential people familiar with her considerable talent. Later that same year, she left Saratoga to appear in Max Reinhardt's Hollywood Bowl production of Dream and, in the following year, she played Hermia in Reinhardt's remarkable film version of the play.

The last Glade production was in the summer of 1941, when Miss Johnston staged Distant Drums, by Marin playwright and screenwriter Dan Totheroh. It was a drama of the Overland Trail, with a set consisting of the backs of several covered wagons. Definitely heavy stuff, but, and I could be wrong on this, I don't think it was produced anyplace else.

Although there were a couple of summers when the theater was dark, so to speak, there were some memorable productions in that seven-year period: Romeo and Juliet in 1938, a repeat of As You Like It in 1939, and, in 1940, a repeat of Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor.

Those Shakespeare plays were quite a community blender. Although Miss Johnston recruited some of her principals from as far away as the Peninsula and San Jose, there were plenty of roles for interested townspeople.

For instance, my mother, who played the Cheshire Cat in Alice, was Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet and a pioneer wife in Distant Drums. My brother and I were figurative spear-carriers in Romeo and Juliet, but, by the 1940 Dream, had graduated to speaking parts.

What sticks in my mind most concerning these productions, though, is an appreciation of the language that could come only from such an experience. There is something about hearing the majestic cadence of Shakespearean lines over and over in rehearsal that gives them a dimension that cannot be gained elsewhere.

Miss Johnston, who died in 1969 at the age of 77, was one of several in Saratoga who gave richly in time and talent in furthering dramatic art. I'll always feel indebted to her for putting me on speaking terms with the Bard.

Willys Peck is a local historian and lifelong Saratogan.