WASHINGTON — Artists and officials across the nation’s capital are remembering a local creative pioneer who changed theater for the better.
Zelda Fichandler, co-founder and first artistic director of Arena Stage in the 1950s, died Friday morning of congestive heart failure at her home in Washington D.C. She was 91.
On Tuesday morning, D.C. Congressman Eleanor Holmes Norton issued an official remembrance:
“Enjoying D.C.’s Arena Stage, or any of D.C.’s performance venues, may leave the impression that D.C. was always a performing arts mecca,” Norton said. “The passing of Zelda Fichandler, co-founder of Arena Stage in the 1950s, reminds us of how much we owe to Fichandler and the pioneers of theater and performing arts here.”
“As the District struggled for home rule, it had to invent not only a political culture, but culture itself,” Norton continued. “D.C. was a great tourist city with no local government to promote our monumental sites. Fichandler, who grew up in D.C. and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School, took her hometown seriously enough to believe that we could be a center of serious theater.”
“It is no accident that the transformation of the District of Columbia is marked by the coming of self-government, the rise of theater and the performing arts, and the desegregation of entertainment venues, with the Arena State again as a pioneer,” Norton concluded. “We celebrate Zelda Fichandler, who was not content to leave her city in the backwater of American culture and dared to use the stage to lead us to become today’s cosmopolitan D.C.”
Last week, Arena Stage also issued an official statement on Fichandler’s passing:
“Arena Stage is deeply saddened to announce that visionary leader and pioneer of the regional theater movement Zelda Fichandler. She was co-founder and the first Artistic Director of Arena Stage. Arena Stage was founded August 16, 1950 in Washington, D.C. by Zelda Fichandler, Tom Fichandler, and Edward Mangum. Zelda Fichandler dedicated her early career to the establishment of America’s resident theater movement. When she co-founded Arena Stage, there were few noncommercial theaters in the United States and fewer theaters committed to providing a full range of world-class drama to its community with a resident company of professional actors.”
Arena Stage’s current Artistic Director Molly Smith added:
“Zelda Fichandler is the mother of us all in the American theater. It was her thinking as a seminal artist and architect of the not-for-profit resident theater that imagined resident theaters creating brilliant theater in our own communities. A revolutionary idea. Her thinking and her writing have forged the way we were created and the resident nature of our movement. She is irreplaceable but lives on in every single not-for-profit theater in America — now over 1,500 strong. Her legacy stretches from coast to coast.”
Executive Director Edgar Dobie added:
“Early in my tenure with Arena, Zelda corrected me on the term ‘regional theater’ versus ‘resident theater.’ Arena was and is envisioned as a ‘resident’ theater — of the community, for the community, with the community. I am honored to have Tom Fichandler’s chair in my office (a talisman), and honored to have known Zelda and learned from her. She taught without trying. She voiced confidence in the young. She extended her welcoming intelligence to everyone. Zelda was not alone in founding Arena — she had her husband Tom, professor Ed Mangum and a small supportive board — but Zelda’s artistic voice created not only an institution for Washington, D.C., but also encouraged a national theater movement. Because she was successful in both of these areas, Zelda Fichandler will be part of Washington theater and American theater always.”
Now, her name will live on forever in the lives she touched and the four-sided auditorium that bears her name, The Fichandler Stage, providing a “theater in the round” experience for years to come.
Click here for more memories of the late Zelda Fichandler.
