Village Interviews: Jerry Tallmer

Play Time. Edward Albee, left, with Jerry Tallmer at the Obie awards. (May 1960)
photo: Fred W. McDarrah

The following can be viewed on any high-speed computer anywhere or on TV in Manhattan:

This Wednesday, April 9 at 7:30 PM, on my shoestring cable show Famousx2, I am re-airing the third of three half-hour programs of interviews I did in 1998 with Jerry Tallmer, one of the founders of the Village Voice and long-time theater and cultural critic at the Voice, Post and now The Villager.

In this installment, in Washington Square, Jerry talks about the cultural liberation that Lenny Bruce represented, not only for comedians but also for society at large. Then we move over to the current site of the Public Theater on Lafayette Street. There, Jerry tells stories of the early days of the institution's performances at various venues along FDR drive for the "neglected" communities of the Lower East Side in the late 50s and early 60s. He talks about some of the early legendary performances of actors such as Roscoe Lee Browne, Colleen Dewhurst and Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. He talks about how Joseph Papp stood up to Robert Moses, who tried to eject the theater from giving performances in Central Park,....and won! He discusses his close friendship with the great playwright Lorraine Hainsberry and how he and others fighting the corrupt Carmine DeSapio Tammany political machine that controlled lower Manhattan for decades were an inspiration for her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Finally, he discusses his extremely negative experience with Rupert Murdoch at the New York Post and declares that Murdoch has helped to destroy everything good that did once exist in U.S. journalism.

If you are in Manhattan and have access to Time Warner, you can see it this Wednesday at 7:30 pm (DST-that's NYC Daylight Savings Time) on channel 67. On the RCN system,
that should be Channel 85 or thereabouts these days.

If you are outside of Manhattan, anywhere in the world, and you have high-speed connection on your computer, you can go to mnn.org and click on channel 67 to see it at the same time.

Sometimes MNN does screw up broadcasts, but usually they air things without too many problems.....so be patient.....

Best,
Jason Howard