Susie Anderson
Staff Writer
When Jules Feiffer joined author Roger Rosenblatt on the Chautauqua Amphitheater stage in June 2014, Feiffer discussed the idea of choosing one path.
“The grown-ups inform you that you have to pick one thing to do, because if you scatter your interests, you end up not doing anything well. … And that wasn’t what I wanted to do. One of the things I was never any good at was listening to grown-up advice,” Feiffer said, according to a lecture recap in The Chautauquan Daily on June 27, 2014.
Feiffer was a cartoonist, children’s book author, novelist, screenwriter and playwright. He died at age 95 in January at his home in upstate New York. In celebration of his life and work, the Friends of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center and Friends of Chautauqua Theater will co-sponsor a reading of excerpts from Feiffer’s 1969 play Feiffer’s People featuring Chautauqua actors at 4 p.m. today in the ballroom of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall. Stephen Stout of Friends of Chautauqua Theater will direct the reading.
Rather than choose a single thing to do, Feiffer combined several artistic pursuits in an extensive career. Feiffer rose to fame for his regular cartoon strip in The Village Voice, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award. Feiffer wrote acclaimed plays, novels and screenplays, including Little Murders, Carnal Knowledge, and the animated short “Munro,” which won an Academy Award. He has also received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Writers Guild of America and the National Cartoonist Society.
One of Feiffer’s earliest plays, titled Crawling Arnold, caught the attention of Fred Zirm, president of the Friends of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, when he was a theater director.
“The one little thing I can’t resist name-dropping in that first production of Crawling Arnold … I was fortunate enough that, in this first production, a freshman came in to play Miss Sympathy, and her name was Julia Louis-Dreyfus,” Zirm said, “So I said, ‘Oh, this directing is a piece of cake.’ ”
After seeing Feiffer onstage with Rosenblatt in 2014, Zirm expressed his gratitude backstage for Feiffer’s work. When Zirm told Feiffer that Crawling Arnold was the first thing he’d ever directed, Feiffer said, “Oh, that was my first play, too.”
Phil Lerman, an actor, author and playwright, will read an introduction to the reading. For him, Feiffer served as a prominent voice of Jewish humor in the 1960s, among names such as Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg.
“Feiffer was the most prominent voice of that neurotic but intellectual Jewish humor,” Lerman said.
Through quick and caustic wit, Feiffer took cartoons to new levels as a social critic, Lerman said.
“He became a great supporter of liberal causes in cartoons, … and he also was a great scold of the liberals who were not as strong as him,” Lerman said.
In addition to Feiffer’s illustrations, including his work for Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth — a CLSC Young Readers selection in 2014 — his snappy dialogue emerged as a staple in both his comics and plays.
“When you read his cartoons, they all have incredibly funny and ironic and sometimes absurd and trusting dialogue,” Lerman said.
Feiffer’s wit as a writer and cartoonist characterizes his work in Feiffer’s People. A collection of brief sketches, monologues and playlets, Feiffer’s People offers a characteristically inventive display of Feiffer’s voice. Stout said he looks forward to bringing the music of the words to the ears of Chautauquans. Transforming the resounding build of comics to a theatrical reading, Lerman looks forward to seeing Feiffer’s words brought to life.
“He has a brilliant ability to build, build, build and then pun,” Lerman said.
Bringing the words from page to performance in the reading is part of the magical marriage of literary and theater arts, said Stout.
“I really like the fact that it’s a collaboration between those two kinds of arts — literary arts and theater arts — because that’s kind of where (Feiffer) lives in my thinking,” Stout said.
In a celebration of a lauded cartoonist, writer and social critic, the reading will echo levity and depth straight from Feiffer’s heart.
“Feiffer was writing at a time of an incredibly divided country and typified the importance of having voices that speak out,” Lerman said. “I think rediscovering him and his words at this moment is as relevant as it can be.”
