RENEWING FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
By Anthony Chase
When Randall Kramer, artistic director of MusicalFare Theatre in Snyder, first decided to pen a musical theater piece about Frank Lloyd Wright, he had a very different show in mind from the Wright production opening this month.
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Archival photo of Frank Lloyd Wright
courtesy of Pat Mahoney. |
“I envisioned a show that focused on the volunteers who worked to restore Graycliff, the summer home commissioned by Darwin Martin in 1926,” explains Kramer. These volunteers, Kramer stresses, rescued the house, badly neglected and renovated, from demolition.
Important as that story is, Kramer’s dramatic energies veered in quite another direction when he began reading the letters between Wright and Martin in the University at Buffalo archives.
“I spent hours and hours at the archives, and the letters revealed a remarkable relationship between architect and client,” says Kramer. The story soon became about Darwin Martin and his wife, and their tumultuous but fruitful association with one of the world’s great architects.
“With all this historical material available,” says Kramer, “there was a danger of making the show accurate but dry. I had been working with [playwright] Manny Fried on The Stories of Life, [a show compiled of interviews with elderly people from Western New York], and I asked him if he would give me help during the process of writing the Frank Lloyd Wright piece. He encouraged me to write ‘between the letters,’ to get at the real drama, and to include the events that had inspired the letters in the first place. As I began to create moments of fiction based on fact, the piece started to speak.”
And Renewing Wright became the story of how a Buffalo businessman saved the career of the great architect.
Darwin D. Martin was the chief executive of the Larkin soap company, and one of the highest paid executives in America. He commissioned Wright to design three homes for his family, and championed Wright as the designer for the Larkin Co.’s administration building, the architect’s first major public commission.
Beyond these significant commissions, Martin extended his friendship to the financially irresponsible and arguably libertine artist, a relationship well chronicled in their 1903-1935 correspondence.
The musical’s first act follows this relationship through the mid-1920s. The second act continues the story of how Martin repeatedly rescued Wright from his spendthrift ways. The details of this relationship, provided below through the courtesy of MusicalFare, are astounding, especially when one considers the degree to which Darwin Martin is neglected in most histories of Wright.
Darwin Martin’s assistance to Frank Lloyd Wright included:
•Commissions in the early 1900s for two homes in Buffalo, including the expansive Darwin D. Martin house complex, with pergola, conservatory, gardener’s cottage, carriage house, and stables.
•The commission for the Larkin Co. Administration Building, Buffalo, New York, in 1904 (demolished in 1950).
•Helping Wright obtain commissions for homes for two other Larkin Co. executives, William R. Heath (1905) and Walter V. Davidson (1912).
•Loaning Wright thousands of dollars and paying him thousands of dollars for the Japanese prints Wright often sold off to cover debts.
•Buying the mortgage on Wright’s original home and studio in Oak Park, Ill., in 1912 so Wright could support his first wife and their six children after a scandalous affair in which Wright abandoned them and ran off to Europe with a neighbor’s wife. Martin subsequently learned that Wright had already sold the mortgage to another client!
•The commission in 1926 for Graycliff, Wright’s first major project since 1923.
•Editing Wright’s autobiography in the 1920s, sales of which helped Wright recapture attention and pay off some debts.
•Helping bail Wright out of jail in 1926 when he was arrested for violating the Mann Act after leaving his second wife for Olgivanna Hinzenberg, who would later become his third wife.
•Contributing $10,000—the most of any of Wright’s friends or clients—toward incorporating Wright to pay off his numerous debts.
The relative absence of Darwin Martin, the architect’s most important benefactor, from the standard histories of Wright makes Renewing Wright a musical—and historical—restoration of great significance to Western New Yorkers.
Renewing Wright is on-stage at MusicalFare through April 4. Call 839-8540 for more information.
Anthony Chase’s writing on theater appears in a number of local and national publications. he can be heard every Friday morning as the co-host of WBFO’s Theater Talk.
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