Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507070007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL KUCHWARA AP DRAMA WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For a two-month season this summer and for two more summers, Bingham, - playwright, novelist, philanthropist, feminist and a daughter of one of the newspaper industry's most distinguished families - will bankroll the new theater company and its international theater festival.
Why Santa Fe?
``That's where I now live - it's as simple as that,'' Bingham said the other day during an interview in her New York City apartment. ``And being a playwright, I really don't like living in a place that has no professional theater.''
No professional theater, but plenty of other culture, including the highly regarded - and highly visible - Santa Fe Opera, one of the nation's premier summer festivals. The town, population 70,000 and growing, also boasts a large collection of writers and artists, most of them full-time residents, and a chamber music festival.
Santa Fe Stages, which will run its inaugural season through the end of July, is under the direction of Martin Platt, who ran a repertory theater in Santa Fe until it folded about 18 months ago.
Platt has put together an eclectic season that includes Peter Brook's adaptation of ``La Tragedie de Carmen''; Tony Kushner's version of Pierre Corneill's 17th-century comedy ``The Illusion,'' and ``Mabel,'' a portrait of Mabel Dodge Luhan, the famous art patron and eccentric New Mexico resident.
``Nobody in the Southwest has had access to this kind of international theater,'' Bingham says. ``It's not an attempt to re-create just a standard repertory that you can get anywhere.''
Bingham says she had input into planning for the season which will take place on the campus of the College of Santa Fe.
``This is the role I love. When I find a talented person, I say, `You do it,''' Bingham adds. ``I like to back talent - with no strings. I am sure there will be things Martin is doing that I won't particularly like - but that doesn't matter to me.''
Bingham also is the woman who is going to see that the company has a life for at least three years.
``I think Martin would have liked five, but I felt the community needs to show its support before five years,'' she says. ``That's always the danger with one donor: The community feels its participation is not needed, but it definitely is - as audience and as donors.
``Yet I wanted to make certain that the theater could show Santa Fe what it could do - which will certainly take three years. People have to see more than one season. The total will be something like $3.5 million in the course of three years.
``The theater is starting already to raise matching money. And I will match what they are able to raise. But it's going to depend on who else is willing to come forward.''
Bingham came to Santa Fe seven years ago and ``just fell in love with the desert."
``I was at a point in my life where I needed a visual change as well as every other kind. The bareness of the landscape is very inspiring.''
Bingham found a sophisticated community, blending three distinct cultures: American Indians, an Hispanic community that has been there for 400 years and the Anglo community, which includes many artists. She found them all quite accepting of newcomers.
Bingham has been working for a decade on a new play called ``The Death of Henry Flagler,'' which recently had a reading at the Women's Project in New York. She now is revising it.
The play, set in 1911, concerns the three wives of Flagler, who was John D. Rockefeller's original partner in Standard Oil and was married at one time to Bingham's step-grandmother.
Bingham also has been writing fiction. Her latest book, ``Matron of Honor,'' was published last summer. She usually works on a novel and a play at the same time.
``It's more interesting for me because they use different compartments of my mind,'' Bingham says. ``Plays come out of a very different place. It's like doing something with your arms and also with your legs. Plus, it saves me from terminal frustration.''
She has started another novel, ``Cory's Feast,'' which takes the characters from ``Matron of Honor,'' which is set in 1970, up to 1995.
Bingham says she always draws on her personal life for her work - ``but in a way that is not always traceable. Things I have felt rather than things I have had a direct experience with. I draw on those hard nuggets of feeling which get translated into plots and characters not usually from my life.''
Her independence, she says, has come at a cost.
Bingham's family owned the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal and other media properties.
``The South is not a good place for an independent woman - and even less so when I left there in 1954 to go to college,'' Bingham says. ``Too conventional. It wasn't so much the family. I've always looked on that as more of an advantage than a disadvantage.
``The social life in the South is so narrow. And the resistance to originality is still so powerful. It's crushing. You can fight it all the time, which is crushing, or succumb to it, in which case your back is broken.''
Sallie Bingham had challenged her brother Barry Jr.'s control of the media empire. She and her sister, Eleanor, were ousted from the board of directors, and Sallie refused a family offer of more than $25 million for her stock in the company. After a public family battle, her father, Barry Bingham Sr., sold the properties in 1986.
Today, Sallie Bingham remembers the major contributions her family made to the arts, education and social programs through the Mary and Barry Bingham Sr. Fund.
``I was very fortunate because I had a focus from very early on,'' the woman says. ``My parents were role models in funding for the arts, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s when there were very few people who were interested in supporting them.''
by CNB