Robert Károly Sarlós, 1931–2008
Robert Károly Sarlós was born into an assimilated Jewish family (a shirt tailor/ haberdasher and a saleslady/housewife) June 6, 1931, in Budapest, Hungary, and attended the city’s renowned Lutheran High School (EvangÈlikus Gimn·zium). Admitted in 1949 to a select class in stage direction at the Hungarian Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, he was after one semester expelled for “bourgeois” descent AND thinking. He became a lathe-operator, served in the Hungarian (“Peoples”) Army, studied theatre history, had a small part in the 1956 revolution and then left his native land.
After three months in Austria, Sarlós was admitted to the U.S. as a refugee, worked as a lathe-operator in Long Beach, then attended Occidental College in Los Angeles on a scholarship (B.A. í59). A Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled him to study theatre history with A.M. Nagler at Yale (Ph.D. í65). In 1962 he married Charlotte Harris in April and became a citizen in November. Charlotte and he had two children: Lilian Margit, born in 1962, and Tibor Thomas in 1965; they were divorced in 1986.
Sarlós taught theatre history at UC Davis from 1963 until his retirement in January 1993. He has contributed to 15 books in America and Europe, published over 40 articles and reviews in scholarly journals (Theatre Research International, Maske und Kothurn, Theatre Survey, The Drama Review, etc.), dealing with various periods of European and American theatre and drama. His book Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre In Ferment (University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) was honored with the American Theatre Association’s Barnard Hewitt Award for “distinguished achievement in theatre history” in 1983.
At the Department of Dramatic Art in Davis, Professor Sarlós took a leading role in creating the doctoral program, of which he served as director for over 20 years. He was chiefly responsible for the development of Shields Library’s performing arts holdings and for the assembly of a significant body of source materials in Special Collections. He directed seven productions, including the English language premiere of The Tót Family by Hungarian playwright Istvan Orkeny (1968) and a performance reconstruction of the Stuart masque The Triumph of Peace (1974). Sarlós organized, or contributed to, several exhibitions (one at the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor); he was instrumental in saving the Woodland Opera House and in its eventual restoration. He participated in the creation of the university’s intercampus M.A. in Dance History and in 1990-1992 served as director at the Budapest Study Center of the University’s Education Abroad Program.
Since retirement, first living in Vienna, Austria, Sarlós devoted himself to a wide range of pleasures (of palate and pallet; of travel; of concerts, theatres, opera, and exhibitions; of books in three languages), while ñ very occasionally ñ still publishing. He proudly maintained a childlike curiosity and playfulness to the end, keeping contact in person and in correspondence with kindred spirits on a broad scale of all ages, from 5 to 95. In November 2002 he moved to Portland, OR.
Phyllis J. Kress, 1938–2016
Professor Emerita
Former UC Davis professor of theatre and dance, costume design, Phyllis J. Kress of Sacramento, California, passed away on Sunday, July 10, 2016, at 77 years of age. Kress retired in 1998 after 32 years at UC Davis.
During her tenure in the Department of Theatre and Dance, Kress designed costumes for over 100 productions giving life to numerous characters onstage in beautifully crafted garments. A gifted but strict educator, she mentored hundreds of students during her three-decade career at UC Davis including Maggie Morgan, current professor of theatre and dance, costume design, and Roxanne Femling, costume shop director.
In the classroom, Kress instilled in her costume design students the value of doing intensive research and problem-solving. “We spend a lot of time trying to solve the mystery of how people created their clothing,” said Kress in an interview for The California Aggie in December 1996.
Beyond UC Davis, Kress designed costumes for numerous productions in the Sacramento area. Her legacy includes leaving numerous costume design illustrations, posters and photographs to the UC Davis Special Collections in the library’s archive.
William Kleb, professor emeritus theatre and dance, stated, “I too am saddened by the news about Phyllis Kress. I never worked directly with her, but I remember her well. She was a constant, positive presence in the life of the department when I was there. Bob Fahrner [chair emeritus of theatre and dance] often told me how much he trusted her, and valued her work. She was one of those steady, reliable hands behind, and, literally, below, the scenes, helping to hold things together, to get our ‘children’ dressed and up and out on stage—and teaching all the while. One of those people—calm, friendly—who always did ‘a good job.’ I have many, many memories, even at my age, of my many, many years at Davis: she is one of the good ones.”
Kress was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1938. She received her training at Aquinas College, University of Wisconsin at Madison. Prior to her appointment at UC Davis, she worked as a costume designer at the Cleveland Playhouse and taught costume design at Penn State University.
After retiring from UC Davis, she lived quietly in the Land Park neighborhood of Sacramento, where she took in rescue animals. In her remaining years, Kress pursued her love of art and created many beautiful paintings which were exhibited at numerous galleries in the Sacramento area.
Alan Stambusky, 1929–2011
Professor of Dramatic Art, emeritus
Alan A. Stambusky (1929 – 2011) became chair of what was then called Dramatic Art and Speech (now the Department of Theatre and Dance) in 1964. He retired in 1991.
Alan was central to the way Dramatic Art developed from his arrival at the University in 1961 well into retirement. One of his greatest contributions to the UC Davis campus came after his retirement in 1991—his leadership in a long-range effort to produce a videotape history of the campus through interviews with faculty and administrators. Working with Vern Mendel and others, he and a small team of volunteers produced more than 250 hours of videotapes recording accounts of UC Davis events going back to the 1950s. These form the central core of an ongoing project currently generated through the Emeriti Association and held in Special Collections at the Shields Library.
He was born in Niagara Falls, New York, on January 17, 1929, and attended Niagara University before earning an a master’s degree in theatre at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in 1955, and then a PhD in the same subject at the University of Wisconsin in 1960. During this time he also served two years in the US Army, 1951–53. In 1955 he married (Rita) Mary Trojan in Chicago and they had three children, and in 1961 he came to Davis.
On the UC Davis campus Alan had a well-deserved reputation as someone who always spoke his mind. As one former member of the Academic Senate Committee on Committees put it, Alan was someone who constantly looked for common-sense solutions to complicated problems. He was always an independent thinker, he bowed to no one—and as a reward/punishment he ended up serving on numerous campus committees which came to treasure his views irrespective of coalitions and disciplinary prejudices.
Active in the early years of the American Educational Theatre Association, Alan was a champion of the value of teaching acting and of the study of plays—both as they were conceived in script form and in production. In the 1960s the model for theatre arts in the University was largely based on books, and Alan set the tone for the new wave of studies in theatre, dance and performance that now also includes practice as research for which the current Department of Theatre and Dance is nationally recognized. He was constantly learning, and supporting others in their learning, through detailed scholarship, through doing, and often through humor.
At UC Davis Alan directed many plays and musical comedies. A few of his favorites: Candide, Macbeth, The Plough and the Stars, Guys and Dolls, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Misalliance, Three Penny Opera, Cloud Nine, King Ubu, and Henry IV, Part I. As the span of these titles may indicate, it is not surprising that he also taught in the Medieval Studies Department and the Integrated Studies Program.
In the Davis, Sacramento, and California regions, Alan contributed in many capacities. He directed several operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan for the Davis Comic Opera Company. His acting credits include 15 hot summers in an even hotter tent for Music Circus in Sacramento and cooler seasons in the Globe theatre in San Diego. Radio and TV commercials also claimed his attention, as did numerous readings of poetry and prose for Davis audiences of 25 or 2000. For many years he served as a Lector at St. James Church in Davis, and is remembered for never speaking with a microphone and sending his voice booming out to the gathered congregation. He also contributed to the Memorial Union Scripture group, and was notorious for introducing abstruse discussions such as “Who Knows What God’s Thinking?”
Alan was an avid theatergoer. In one eight-month stay in England he saw 99 plays (London, Stratford, Dublin, Paris, and Amsterdam). His wife Mary estimated that altogether he saw more than 700 plays. He loved opera as well, and could be found at the San Francisco Opera on many Sunday afternoons. As one might expect from his outgoing, friendly manner, he blessed his many friends with his dry humor and love of language. Longtime friend Jerry Murphy said of Alan what Macbeth said of his old friend Yorick, “He was a fellow of infinite jest.”
Ruby Cohn, 1922–2011
Professor Emerita
The following obituary was written in 2011 by Elin Diamond, professor of English and director of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Diamond, who specializes in feminist criticism and dramatic theory, earned her doctorate and master’s degree at UC Davis. See the New York Times obituary here.
Renowned theater scholar and Beckett specialist Ruby Cohn, a professor of comparative drama at the University of California, Davis, died Oct. 18, 2011 following a prolonged struggle with Parkinson’s disease.
She was 89 and lived in San Francisco.
For 30 years at UC Davis, Cohn was a member of the comparative literature and theater departments and affiliated with the English and French departments. She taught courses on modern and experimental drama, Shakespeare’s legacies in modern drama, dramatic genres, and Samuel Beckett and his contemporaries.
“Ruby Cohn was and will remain a much-respected and well-loved part of the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC Davis,” said Professor Lynette Hunter, chair of the department.
“She brought a mind and heart open to the radical theater that emerged after the second World War in Europe, especially to studies of the work of Samuel Beckett, but also to the emerging voices of the newly enfranchised British working class. She was responsible for the acquisition of many of the theater materials in the Shields Library Special Collections, and for the shaping of a department that has continued to respond to the challenges of today’s society.”
Earlier in her career, Cohn was a professor of language arts at San Francisco State University, where she launched a comparative literature program and also joined a student strike to bring ethnic studies to the curriculum. Refusing to teach her courses on campus, Cohn resigned in protest in 1968.
In 1969, she joined the faculty of the theater school of the California Institute of the Arts. She joined UC Davis in 1972.
A recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, Cohn was also selected the 1978 UC Davis “Faculty Research Lecturer,” the highest honor bestowed by the Davis Division of the Academic Senate. She retired from UC Davis in 1992, yet continued to teach and write.
At her death, Cohn was the author or editor of more than 20 monographs and anthologies on modern and contemporary U.S., British, and Continental drama, among which was the first full-length study of Samuel Beckett.
Born Ruby Burman on Aug. 13, 1922, in Columbus, Ohio, she later moved with her family to New York City. While in high school, she saw the Federal Theater in action, including Orson Welles’ “Voodoo Macbeth.”
A graduate of Hunter College, she joined the WAVES during World War II, learned to install radar on battle ships and became an accomplished marksman.
She took her first doctoral degree at the University of Paris, reveling in Paris’ genial postwar ferment. One cold January night in 1953, she attended the first public performance of an obscure play called “En Attendant Godot” (“Waiting for Godot”), a work that would establish the reputation of “absurdist” theater in Paris, with its heady mixture of Sartrean alienation, linguistic experimentation, music hall antics, and an emphatic refusal to pander to conventional theater audiences.
Back in the U.S., Cohn took a second doctorate at Washington University in St. Louis, where her husband, microbiologist Melvin Cohn, taught (they were amicably divorced in 1961). She developed her dissertation, on Samuel Beckett, into her first book, “Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut” (1962).
In the Irish-born, French-speaking Beckett, Cohn found a poet, novelist, and dramatist of stabbing wit and formal daring, one whose field of philosophical and literary reference encompassed the entire Western tradition.
“Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut,” was one of the first full-length studies of Beckett, and it set a high intellectual bar for the vast industry of Beckett criticism that followed. With its epigraphs in French (Descartes) and English (Shakespeare), the book’s 13 chapters interweave careful analysis with biographical, translation and publishing information, all of which illuminate and explain Beckett’s paradoxes and arcana.
Throughout, Cohn homes in on Beckett’s words and the peculiar forms they take, sometimes matching his punning wit with her own. In the chapter, “Watt Knott,” Cohn notes Beckett’s comic couplings of, and puns on, names: “Cream and Berry, the hardy laurel, Rose and Cerise, Art and Con,” and wryly adds in a footnote: “Con [is] a French obscenity (as I learned through its homonym Cohn)….” Beckett’s credo of failure — “to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail” — was, for Cohn, testimony of his commitment to explore, through the discipline of art, the ludicrous ironies of human striving, the sham of sexual love, and, as Beckett himself famously put it, “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express…no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” That obligation betokened, Cohn felt, Beckett’s deep humanity, which Cohn implicitly celebrated in her criticism.
Literary theory bored and angered her, but she read a great deal of it and read everything ever written on Beckett, no matter by whom.
She walked out of bad theater performances sooner than she closed another scholar’s book. Her scholarly integrity is on view in her conscientiously trilingual bibliography for “The Comic Gamut” (her French was fluent, her German quite good), and in this way, too, she set a standard for Beckett research and criticism, although few had her comparatist’s skill in languages.
As Beckett’s canon unfolded, so did Cohn’s: Casebook on Waiting for Godot (1967), Back to Beckett (1974), Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism (1975), Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (1980), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (1984), From Desire to Godot: Pocket Theater of Postwar Paris (1987), and, finally, A Beckett Canon (2001). The latter is a beautiful book, written in the leisure of retirement, a rumination on the Beckett canon as it unfolds chronologically. It begins: “Having read nothing by Beckett, I fell in love with his ‘En Attendant Godot’ in 1953, when it was performed at the short-lived Theatre de Babylone in Paris.” She promises not “to impose coherence upon the many threads of Beckett’s tapestry” but rather writes for an engaged reader, “and I imagine her/him as one who has been drawn to Beckett in print or performance, and who is curious about other facets of his oeuvre.” In other words, a reader very like Cohn herself, starting on her Beckett journey in 1953.
Even when Beckett was not her obvious subject, his astringent forms influenced her taste in other dramatists, and she was determined to give full exposure to the best modern American and British drama in her “Edward Albee” (1969), “Currents in Contemporary Drama” (1969), “Dialogue in American Drama” (1971), “Modern Shakespeare Offshoots” (1976), and “New American Dramatists” 1960-1990 (1991).
In the 1990s, living half the year in London, she concentrated on British theater in her books “Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama” (1991) and “Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama” (1995).
In these years, she particularly admired the formally adventurous work of Caryl Churchill.
Cohn’s lifelong effort to join the immediacy of theater performance to the careful analysis of dramatic texts made her an eager if exacting theater-goer. She developed warm friendships with the experimental directors and actors who worked on Beckett’s texts, especially Joseph Chaikin and Herbert Blau, and she supported the Mabou Mines experimental theater company, when, with Beckett’s permission, founding member Frederick Neumann adapted eight of Beckett’s nontheatrical prose works for the theater.
Ruth Maleczech of Mabou Mines notes, “Ruby would put her finger on things very clearly. There was a level of trust between her and the company [and] she was interested in what we did even when it wasn’t Beckett.”
This would certainly hold true of Joan Holden’s San Francisco Mime Troupe, of which Cohn was a faithful supporter.
Fiercely opinionated and capable at times of quite memorable rebukes, Cohn was also memorably committed to her students who benefited from her scholarship and lucid criticism, and to her legions of friends on whom she lavished her concern and loving attention.
She is survived by all these people and by her goddaughter, Polly Richards, and her family.
Della Davidson, 1951–2012
Professor
Della Davidson was a vital creative force for the Department of Theatre and Dance for over ten years and was a central figure in the Bay Area dance world since the early 1980s. She has been described as one of the West Coast’s most fluent writers for the body, a dance maker of works that ruminate with poignancy and beauty on topics ranging from a woman’s anger to disease, death and the fragility of human existence. Her work echoed with references to the United States tradition in modern dance, and yet her dancers perform with a passionate abandonment of commitment and rage. Over her successful career, she created more than 40 works and received many awards including the Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography and the 1990 North American Award for Choreography.
Born in Texas and raised in Michigan, she moved to New York City to start her career in dance in 1972. Ballet-trained since elementary school, she discovered that being over six foot on pointe made classical partnering impossible, but at Michigan State she discovered modern dance, and at the University of Utah she apprenticed as a choreographer. After earning an M.A. in 1983 at the University of Arizona, Tucson, she began co-directing the San Francisco Moving Company with Ellen Bromberg. Dance scholar Janice Ross identified the style of Della Davidson’s work as an invitation to interplay between narrative content and physical form, between physicality and theatre. Davidson once told Ross that she felt “at home” in a mixture of theatre and education with choreography that emphasizes that “we all have our own artistry.”
Davidson arrived at UC Davis to become a professor of dance in 2001 just as the Department of Theatre and Dance became a merged department. At UC Davis she wore many hats, not the least of which was to help articulate what an interdisciplinary M.F.A. in theatre and dance might become. She was the artistic director of the department’s Sideshow Physical Theatre, which she also established. Each piece of choreography usually took years to complete, as she worked interactively with the dancers and other collaborators to develop the work. A survivor of Hodgkin’s disease that she conquered at the age of 28, her gift was to make work darkly-toned yet human, with beautiful movement that faced tragedy with hope. Driven by an urge to get away from the “roles” she and other women had been brought up to inhabit, she often created dance that evoked the raw energy of forceful women, their strength, physicality and sensuality. Heavily ironic, pieces such as “10 P.M. Dream” or “Fierce/Pink/House” displayed gender stereotypes only to expose them as insidious traps, and she was firmly committed to feminism as a challenge to oppression and small-mindedness.
A recipient of the UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellowship here at UC Davis, much of her new work was involved in multidisciplinary choreography. Working again with Ellen Bromberg, the choreographer/dance filmmaker, she co-created “The Weight of Memory” and, with the Keck CAVES institute in the Department of Geology, “Collapse (suddenly falling down).? Della Davidson was working with Bromberg on a new piece for this spring, “and the snow fell softly on all the living and the dead,” which will premiere in May 2012.
Davidson’s bywords were “creativity” and “collaboration,” and one of her greatest gifts was to recognize potential in others and bring out their strengths, whether they were her students, her dancers, her collaborators, her colleagues or her friends.
Robin Gray, 1956–2017
Lecturer
Robin Gray, Production Stage Manager, has worked, locally, for Music Circus, B Street Theater, Capital Stage and for the Sacramento Theater Company. She worked on Hugh Jackman’s pre-Broadway show at the Curran in San Francisco in 2012. She last toured for Kansas City Starlight with Hello Dolly starring Michele Lee. Regionally, she stage-managed Phantom of the Opera in San Francisco. Before moving to Sacramento, Ms. Gray lived in New York City and worked on Broadway and off-Broadway productions, including national tours of Annie, Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, TapDogs, David Copperfield, and Man of La Mancha. Opera credits include The Aspern Papers for Dallas Opera, which was filmed for the PBS Great Performances series, and Dead Man Walking, with Frederika von Stade, for Cincinnati and Pittsburgh Operas. She has stage-managed over 20 productions for Sacramento Opera, including Carmen, La Bohème, Faust, La Traviata, Tales of Hoffman, Hansel & Gretel, Romèo et Juliette, Don Giovanni, La Cenerentola, Madama Butterfly, The Barber of Seville, Die Fledermaus, Turandot, Così fan tutte, and Aida. She taught stage management and production at University of California, Davis.
Thomas J. Munn, 1944–2022
Thomas J. Munn, an internationally recognized Lighting Designer, has designed for theatre, opera, ballet, television, videos, and industrials. A graduate of Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts in Design, he made his Broadway debut in 1974 designing scenery for Brightowerby Dore Schary.
In New York, as a member of USA 829, he was an active Scenic Artist as well as a Scenic and Lighting Designer. He served as Lighting Director/Designer for San Francisco Opera from 1976 through 2000, creating designs and special effects for over 190 productions. These include the Emmy-nominated, televised world premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire (Projection Design and Lighting) and Professor Munn’s Emmy Award-winning work on La Gioconda.
Since 2000 Munn has designed Meistersinger von Nuremberg, The Ballad of Baby Doe (San Francisco and New York City Operas), The Tsar’s Bride, Don Carlo, and Semele for SFO as well as numerous revivals for that company. Munn’s credits as Lighting Director for television include Dangerous Liaisons, Samson et Delilah, La Bohème, Aida, Orlando Furioso, L’Africaine, Capriccio, and Turandot. Scenic design credits include productions of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Roberto Devereux, Pelléas et Mélisande, Nabucco, Billy Budd, Don Giovanni, and Christophe Colomb.
Other recent designs of note include television work as Lighting Director for the LA Opera video of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; Pioneer Theatre Company’s Julius Caesar, Beauty and The Beast; Mefistofele for Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy; Rodalinda, Carmen, Cenerentola, Hansel und Gretel, La Traviata, Dallas Opera; Samson and Delilah, Julius Cesare, Simon Boccanegra, Don Carlo, Idomeneo, San Diego Opera; Candide, Whitman College; Bluebeard’s Castle, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Elephant’s Graveyard, Nest, Urinetown: The Musical, Carmen, Big Love, Rocky Horror Show for UC Davis. Ballet and Dance credits include works for the Mary Anthony Dance Theatre in New York City, The Nutcracker and Coppelia for the Hartford Ballet and Ballet Arizona. As a Lighting Consultant he has worked on prestigious projects such as the renovated War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, Het Musiktheatre in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), and St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco.
John Iacovelli, 1959–2023
MFA, New York University, Scenic Design and Art Direction
Professor Iacovelli has designed more than 200 productions at theaters across the nation, including the critically acclaimed, TONY-nominated Broadway revival of Peter Pan starring Cathy Rigby. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Iacovelli the coveted 2001 prime-time Emmy Award for his art direction of the A&E broadcast of Peter Pan. He also designed The Twilight of The Godson Broadway. Internationally he designed Pinter’s A Slight Ache for the Teatro Beckett in Barcelona and Oedipus in Colonus directed by Wole Soyinka for the Cultural Olympiad in Delphi, Greece. Recent designs include The Book of Daniel starring Aidan Quinn for NBC Primetime and Warner Theatricals’ Casablanca, a ballet based on the classic film.
He has designed for the Pasadena Playhouse, the American Conservatory Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, the Magic Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Old Globe Theatre, and South Coast Repertory, among others. The winner of the 2001 Bob Z Award for Lifetime Achievement in Set Design, presented by the LA Drama Critics Circle, Iacovelli has also won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, a Bay Area Drama Critics Circle Award and the Backstage West Garland Award, plus fourteen Drama-Logue Awards. He recently received the 2012 NAACP Theatre Award for Best Set Design.
In addition to his theater work, Iacovelli is a television and film production designer and art director for such shows as Ed, Babylon 5, The Cosby Show, Resurrection Blvd., and the films Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Ruby in Paradise. He works on the cutting edge of integrated digital art direction and was nominated for the 1997 Excellence in Production Design award from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Art Directors. He is both a TONY and an Emmy voter. He holds an MFA in Scenic Design and Art Direction from New York University.