The Virginian-Pilot
                             THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Thursday, September 1, 1994            TAG: 9408300179
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS          PAGE: 18   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Opinion 
SOURCE: BY MONTAGUE GAMMON III 
                                             LENGTH: Long  :  147 lines

FEDYSZYN LEAVES RICH LEGACY ON CULTURAL SCENE DEMANDING COMMUNITY THEATER DIRECTOR IS TAKING HIS TALENTS TO A DIFFERENT ARENA.

Stan Fedyszyn has left the arena.

That arena, which Fedyszyn dominated and reshaped, and in which his influence resonates strongly some two decades after his involvement began to wane, was the world of theater in Norfolk.

Not all will mourn his departure. Even among his friends and admirers, the sharpness of his tongue was feared as much as the sharpness of his intellect was respected.

Consider that Fedyszyn entered graduate school at Baylor University at the age of 19, having lost three years of his schooling to polio when he was a child. He became a Fulbright scholar, one of the first to go behind the Iron Curtain.

Consider that he founded and taught in the Christopher Newport theater department. Consider that he needs only a dissertation to receive his doctorate in urban studies from Old Dominion University.

Consider that Fedyszyn could turn the oft genteel and rarefied society of volunteer theatricals into an arena that resembled a bloody bull ring, strewn with the wide-eyed, shocked and shattered carcasses of those his words had savaged. To say that Fedyszyn did not suffer fools gladly is to indulge in understatement on a cosmic scale. Fedyszyn didn't suffer the best and the brightest, if they did something he considered foolish, or wrong or if they fell short of his standards.

Yet Fedyszyn, for all his ego and abruptness, could inspire an astounding loyalty. Under his leadership, volunteer labor converted the vacant Norfolk Public Library building on Freemason Street into a working theater.

In its heyday, the Norfolk Theatre Center, which he founded and directed, was presenting five mainstage performances and two performances of plays for children every week. That's seven performances a week by unpaid actors.

Night after night, volunteers gave of their free time, often rehearsing on evenings they did not perform, acting in mainstage shows at night and children's shows on weekends.

When Stan Fedyszyn came to Norfolk in 1965, theater meant, for many, the Little Theater. Dinner theaters had not swept into town, collegiate activity was low-profile, and the Norfolk Players Guild catered chiefly to African-American audiences. Professional shows toured occasionally to the old Norfolk Center Theater, on Llewellyn Avenue.

Yes, there was confusion between that municipal facility and the Norfolk Theatre Center. That may have been Fedyszyn's little prank.

Today, Hampton Roads has group after group vying to present new plays, locally written works, world and area premieres, re-evaluated classics and performances in non-traditional styles. Directors routinely speak of a commitment to the issues and to the particularities of our community, as Fedyszyn did long ago.

We now have the Virginia Stage Company and the Virginia Opera Association. The first sprang directly from the Theatre Center, the second is a collateral descendant.

The Theatre Center introduced Norfolk to the works of Beckett and Pinter and other icons of modern playwrighting. There were large shows by Shakespeare, and small shows by Chekov, Ibsen, Kopit, Sandburg, Sheridan, Toppard, Thurber, Wilde, Williams, O'Neill, Sholom Aleichem, Anne Sexton and others.

The center pioneered audience-involvement plays for children, an idea that has resurfaced in the Hurrah Players' new facility.

The Theatre Center staged ``Happenings.'' Truly experimental theater, multi-media events, and even a staged reading of ``Oh Calcutta'' in street clothes, found a venue in special summer events called Festival V (five nights of performances) and Festival X (10 nights) in 1969 and 1970. NTC brought to Norfolk the National Theatre of the Deaf, and avant garde companies from Eastern Europe.

The Tidewater Dance Guild and the Norfolk Chamber Consort were in residence at the Theatre Center. The best of local artists, A.B. Jackson, Wally Dreyer, Faye Zetlin, Rita Marlier and more designed for Fedyszyn.

Veterans of the Theatre Center remain prominent at ODU, Virginia Wesleyan, TCC and Generic. They are found on almost every local stage, and even here in The Compass. I unabashedly admit a debt to Stan Fedyszyn, for the opportunities he gave an adolescent playwright and director whom he once called a ``fuzzy-headed Harvard dropout.''

Given the writer's personal association, perhaps a sober chronological recitation is in order.

Fedyszyn was invited to be the first paid artistic director of the Little Theater of Norfolk in 1965. ``If you mention anyone,'' he insists, ``mention Rose Willis. She is the one I came here for.'' Rose Willis was, essentially, the founder of LTN in the 1920s.

Fedyszyn was cautioned that subscribers to the Little Theater, who consistently filled its seats and its coffers, would not take well to the challenging, often confrontational, productions he staged.

He ignored the warning and attendance plummeted.

Fedyszyn and the Little Theater's board had a mutually sought, but not quite amicable, parting of the ways in the spring of 1968.

The Norfolk Theatre Center opened Oct. 18, 1968. Rose Willis was on the NTC board of directors, as were many of the Little Theater's talented performers.

Local musician Bob Kriner approached Fedyszyn in 1973 with the idea of producing opera. ``No one will come,'' said Fedyszyn, who nonetheless took on the stage direction of a locally cast ``Cosi fan Tutte'' for the summer Festival of the Arts. ``Well, I guess I'll go down to the Center Theater and let in all 15 people,'' Fedyszyn wryly remembers saying, as he left home on opening night.

He found a crowd of 800 people waiting. Additional performances were added by popular demand. Somewhere along the way, someone started using a new name for this fledgling group, which had been conceived as another venture of the Theatre Center.

The next year, Fedyszyn says, he didn't join Kriner. A formal board of directors had by then formalized that new name, the Virginia Opera Association. Kriner's association with VOA lasted for one more production. The rest is, as they say, history.

In 1976, an ad agency bought the Theatre Center's building. The group took up residence in a small facility under Chrysler Hall and changed its name to Stage Down Under. After three years, Fedyszyn resigned to be a talent agent, a video producer, a copy writer, a family man and a church deacon.

Before he left, he and long-time Theatre Center and Stage Down Under board president, Bob Brown, had scouted out a new location for the professional troupe Fedyszyn had always envisioned. They had to buy tickets to an X-rated movie to get their first look inside the Wells Theatre. Under Brown's guidance, the Virginia Stage Company was born.

Fedyszyn's singular accomplishment was neither an institution nor a building.

He was the first person to combine an insistence upon a professional approach to amateur theater, incorporating an expectation of each performer's individual commitment to producing the highest quality work, with an unswerving institutional commitment to the presentation of demanding, difficult, challenging plays of special social and artistic importance to the community.

Talk to local directors now, and you will hear echoes of that same creed.

So where is Fedyszyn going?

Note that mention of the deaconship. Sometime in the '70s, Fedyszyn had accompanied his elementary school-age daughter to a church across the street from their house. A little child led him.

Fedyszyn is studying for the Master of Divinity Degree at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. The former enfant terrible of local theater will become a Presbyterian minister.

Now Fedyszyn speaks of making the church a vital part of people's lives, and of making his own ministry an important, relevant part of some community somewhere.

Those plans are so much like what we heard so long ago, as we hunkered on the rubble-strewn floor of an abandoned library, listening to Fedyszyn preach his aesthetic gospel, that the years collapse into hours and our youth taps on our shoulder with the insistent poignance of yesterday. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by JIM WALKER

Norfolk theater's Stan Fedyszyn is studying to be a Presbyterian

minister.

by CNB