artistic intersections, collaborations, inspirations

Ms. Stewart had a history of heart trouble and died at Beth Israel Hospital after a long illness, said Sam Rudy, a spokesman for La MaMa, where she had lived for many years in an apartment above the theater, on East Fourth Street.

Ms. Stewart was a dress designer when she started La MaMa in a basement apartment in 1961, a woman entirely without theater experience or even much interest in the theater. But within a few years, and with an indomitable personality, she had become a theater pioneer.

Not only did she introduce unusual new work to the stage, she also helped colonize a new territory for the theater, planting a flag in the name of low-budget experimental productions in the East Village of Manhattan and creating the capital of what became known as Off Off Broadway.

She was a vivid figure, often described as beautiful — an African-American woman whose long hair, frequently worn in cornrows, turned silver in her later years. Her wardrobe was flamboyant, replete with bangles, bracelets and scarves. Her voice was deep, carrying an accent reminiscent of her Louisiana roots.

Few producers could match her energy, perseverance and fortitude. In the decades after World War II her influence on American theater was comparable to that of Joseph Papp, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, though the two approached the stage from different wings. Papp straddled the commercial and noncommercial worlds, while Ms. Stewart’s terrain was international and decidedly noncommercial.

Her theater became a remarkable springboard for an impressive roster of promising playwrights, directors and actors who went on to accomplished careers both in mainstream entertainment and in push-the-envelope theater.

Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Olympia Dukakis, Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler, Diane Lane and Nick Nolte were among the actors who performed at La MaMa in its first two decades. Playwrights like Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Harvey Fierstein, Maria Irene Fornes and Adrienne Kennedy developed early work there. So did composers like Elizabeth Swados, Philip Glass and Stephen Schwartz.

La MaMa directors included the visionary Robert Wilson; Tom O’Horgan (who helped create the rock musical “Hair” at the Public); Richard Foreman, who founded the imaginative Ontological Theater Company; Joseph Chaikin, who founded the Open Theater; and even Papp, before there was such a thing as the Public Theater. Meredith Monk, the composer, choreographer and director, presented her genre-bending pieces there regularly.

A few La MaMa plays, like the musical “Godspell,” moved to Broadway, and others had extended runs in commercial Off Broadway houses.

“Eighty percent of what is now considered the American theater originated at La MaMa,” Mr. Fierstein once said in an interview in Vanity Fair, perhaps exaggerating slightly. His play “Torch Song Trilogy” was developed there.

La MaMa became the quintessential theater on a shoestring. Salaries were minimal, ticket prices were low, and profits were nonexistent. For decades Ms. Stewart often swept the sidewalk in front of the theater herself.

But an adventurous theatergoer would be rewarded there. More than 3,000 productions of classic and postmodern drama, performance art, dance and chamber opera have been seen on La MaMa’s various stages. For Ms. Stewart a vast number of them were leaps of faith, arising from her instinct and belief that what artists need more than anything else is the freedom to create without interference. She would typically appear onstage before a performance, ring a cowbell and announce La MaMa’s dedication “to the playwright and all aspects of the theater.”

During the earliest days of her theater she supported her family of artists — her children, she called them — with the money she continued to earn designing clothes. She installed a washer and dryer in the basement for the performers, and many a visiting artist slept in her apartment or in the theaters themselves.

She didn’t begin directing shows herself until relatively late in her life. She often said she didn’t read plays; she read people. Her gifts, as affirmed by a MacArthur Foundation award in 1985, were intuitive and hard to pin down.

“If a script ‘beeps’ to me, I do it,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “Audiences may hate these plays, but I believe in them. The only way I can explain my ‘beeps’ is that I’m no intellectual, but my instincts tell me automatically when a playwright has something.”

Her programming stretched far wider than the American theater. It was at La MaMa that Andrei Serban, a Romanian director transplanted to the United States, refought the Trojan War with his reinvention of Greek tragedy, “Fragments of a Greek Trilogy,” incorporating “Medea,” “The Trojan Women” and “Electra.” La MaMa became a magnet for the most adventurous European and American companies, including Peter Brook’s Paris group. Playing there now is “Being Harold Pinter,” a politically charged production by the Belarus Free Theater, based in Minsk, some of whose members were arrested and others forced underground by an authoritarian regime.

La MaMa’s range of activity was kaleidoscopic and multicultural, embracing an Eskimo “Antigone,” a Korean “Hamlet” and a splashy re-creation of the golden days of the Cotton Club in Harlem, directed by Ms. Stewart herself.

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Mel Gussow, a theater critic and reporter for The Times who contributed to this obituary, died in 2005.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 14, 2011

An earlier version of this obituary mistakenly listed Adrienne Rich as among those who developed early work at La MaMa. 

Rest in peace, Ellen Stewart.

The proposed rules of the online road would prevent fixed-line broadband providers like Comcast and Qwest from blocking access to sites and applications. The rules, however, would allow wireless companies more latitude in putting limits on access to services and applications.

Before a vote set for Tuesday, two Democratic commissioners said Monday that they would back the rules proposed by the F.C.C. chairman, Julius Genachowski, which try to satisfy both sides in the protracted debate over so-called network neutrality. But analysts said the debate would soon resume in the courts, as challenges to the rules are expected in the months to come.

Net neutrality, broadly speaking, is an effort to ensure equal access to Web sites and cutting-edge online services. Mr. Genachowski said these proposed rules aimed to both encourage Internet innovation and protect consumers from abuses.

“These rules fulfill a promise to the future — to companies that don’t yet exist, and the entrepreneurs that haven’t yet started work in their dorm rooms or garages,” Mr. Genachowski said in remarks prepared for the commission’s meeting on Tuesday in Washington. At present, there are no enforceable rules “to protect basic Internet values,” he added.

Many Internet providers, developers and venture capitalists have indicated that they would accept the proposal by Mr. Genachowski, which Rebecca Arbogast, a regulatory analyst for Stifel Nicolaus, a financial services firm, said “is by definition a compromise.”

The companies have said the rules would provide some regulatory certainty. In private, they have acknowledged the proposal could have been much worse. If approved, they “will give some assurances to the companies that are building Web applications — companies like Netflix, Skype and Google — that they will get even treatment on broadband networks,” Ms. Arbogast said.

But a wide swath of public interest groups have lambasted the proposal as “fake net neutrality” and said it was rife with loopholes. One group, Public Knowledge, said that instead of providing clear protections, the F.C.C. “created a vague and shifting landscape open to interpretation. Consumers deserved better.”

Notably, the rules are watered down for wireless Net providers like AT&T and Verizon, which would be prohibited from blocking Web sites, but not from blocking applications or services unless those applications directly compete with providers’ voice and video products, like Skype.

F.C.C. officials said there were technological reasons for the wireless distinctions, and that they would continue to closely monitor the medium.

Citing the wireless proposal, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, said over the weekend that the F.C.C. was effectively allowing discrimination on the mobile Net, a fast-growing sector.

“Maybe you like Google Maps. Well, tough,” Mr. Franken said on Saturday on the Senate floor. “If the F.C.C. passes this weak rule, Verizon will be able to cut off access to the Google Maps app on your phone and force you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it is not as good. And even if they charge money, when Google Maps is free.”

He added, “If corporations are allowed to prioritize content on the Internet, or they are allowed to block applications you access on your iPhone, there is nothing to prevent those same corporations from censoring political speech.”

Mr. Franken and other critics say the rules come with major caveats; for instance, they would allow for “reasonable network management” by broadband providers. And they would discourage but not expressly forbid something called “paid prioritization,” which would allow a media or technology company to pay the provider for faster transmission of data, potentially creating an uneven playing field.

The F.C.C. officials also said that the order would require transparency about those network management practices. “That sunshine will help deter bad behavior,” one of the officials said. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the F.C.C. order has not been made public.

President Obama has repeatedly indicated his support for net neutrality principles, and his chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, said on Dec. 1 that the F.C.C. proposal was an “important step in preventing abuses and continuing to advance the Internet as an engine of productivity growth and innovation.”

The two Democratic commissioners, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn, acknowledged on Monday that the order was not as strong as they would have liked. But they said it had been improved this month in discussions with Mr. Genachowski, and they said they would not oppose it.

Their votes along with Mr. Genachowski’s would be enough to approve the order at the F.C.C. meeting on Tuesday.

Two Republican commissioners, Meredith Baker and Robert McDowell, are expected to oppose it. Republicans have suggested that the net neutrality rules are an example of government overreach; in an opinion piece on Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. McDowell asserted that “nothing is broken that needs fixing.”

In a statement Monday afternoon, Mr. Copps strongly disagreed. He said he wanted to ensure that the Internet “doesn’t travel down the same road of special interest consolidation and gate-keeper control that other media and telecommunications industries — radio, television, film and cable — have traveled.”

“What an historic tragedy it would be,” he said, “to let that fate befall the dynamism of the Internet.”

watching this very closely – along with so many other stories this week….

The Travel + Leisure book “Unexpected USA” explores some of the cool but lesser-known travel destinations across the country. In this excerpt, author Bruce Schoenfeld takes a closer look at why Walla Walla, Wash., is an unexpected vintage gem.

I won’t soon forget the very first meal I ate in Walla Walla.

It was 11 years ago, just as the local wine industry was beginning to boom. One of the area’s leading viticulturists, a man of some sophistication, took me to what he pointedly called “the best restaurant in town.” His quote marks hung in the air like smoke; before long, I understood why. The restaurant was a family steak house, on the model of a Sizzler but lacking the predictability of a chain. The room smelled like a school cafeteria, and the meat that arrived at our table tasted like something an office-supply store might sell.

Now you can sit at a table in Dayton, Washington, half an hour outside Walla Walla, and revel in the scent of just-picked basil. Out here in the country where Lewis and Clark waited out a winter by eating horses, owners Mae Schrey and Anne Jaso and their kitchen staff at the Weinhard Café serve up caramelized-sweet-onion tarts, pan-seared scallops, and pies that range from pecan bourbon to raspberry rhubarb. Things have come a long way from the days of the office-supply steak.

There’s an often told story, which I heard three times in less than a week, that back in the late 1800’s Walla Walla chose to be the site of the new penitentiary instead of the state capital. Local historians dismiss it as apocryphal, but it might as well be true. Until quite recently, this city of 33,000 appears to have taken pains to deflect the attention brought by its humorously euphonious name, doing little to lure visitors and exhibiting a profound suspicion toward the unfamiliar. The wheat farmers who made up the bulk of the population were satisfied to live out lives as dry and monochromatic as the crop that paid their bills, set against a faceless panorama of grain elevators, chain motels, and squat, bungalow-style houses. Even today, Walla Walla seems to have been dropped onto this corner of the southeastern Washington prairie by sheer happenstance. (The Columbia River flows nearby but plays no role in the city’s geography.) Most of downtown is still filled with buildings that look more small-town Texas than Pacific Northwest. Venture off Main Street and you’re on the set of The Last Picture Show.

Yet lately, life in Walla Walla has been transformed by the wine industry. Some of America’s best vintages are currently being made in Walla Walla, which couldn’t boast of a single commercially viable grapevine a quarter-century ago. Even as late as 1990, when tumbleweeds blew through an all-but-abandoned Main Street, only five wineries were operating here. By 2009, there were more than a hundred in the region, producing the requisite Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Merlot, but also redefining the area with Syrah and Sémillon.

The new tasting rooms that sprout from the wheat fields every month, making architectural statements with their obtuse angles and walls of glass, are attracting carloads of wine adventurers who stumble across a coveted bottle and then set out for the viticultural frontier for a weekend of tasting. The infusion of money, combined with a spirit of entrepreneurial enthusiasm, has helped remake the town. Restaurants aren’t the only manifestation of the new Walla Walla: the art scene is growing (artist Jim Dine casts his works, including one on display at the Guggenheim Bilbao, at the Walla Walla Foundry), and boutique businesses — from the organic farm and the fromagerie in nearby Dayton to the Orchidaceae nursery, which ships plants nationwide — are suddenly thriving. There’s even that ultimate validation of a burgeoning demographic: no fewer than five Starbucks dot the streets.

At the same time, gifted winemakers and resourceful businessmen are streaming in, seeking America’s next great viticultural region or simply a fresh start, filling those once empty parking spots. Raised in Seattle, Nina Buty studied art history at Walla Walla’s Whitman College, then left to travel the world. By chance, she married a local oenologist — Caleb Foster, who’d worked at the pioneering winery Woodward Canyon — and returned in 2001 to help him create Buty Winery, in a concrete hut beside the Walla Walla airport. Plans for a showcase facility with a sculpture garden are off in the future; for now, all resources go into the wines. Foster’s oenology texts share shelf space with Buty’s art books, and their crisp Chardonnays and dense Cabernet- and Merlot-based blends serve as both commercial products and Buty’s artistic statements. “In a sense, making a wine is just like building a sculpture,” she says.

As she steers into the parking lot of the Foundry, where works by Deborah Butterfield are displayed beside Chuck Ginnever’s bronze castings and the works of local sculptors, Buty tells me she never thought she’d live in Walla Walla once she left Whitman. “Creativity has always been here, but before now the ideas were only sustainable for a month or two,” she says. “Restaurants would open with all kinds of ambition, but they couldn’t stay in business for long. Now, with the influx of money, and people who have come to Walla Walla to enjoy the wine, we’ve reached a critical mass.”

Walla Walla may not turn into another Napa, because the closest big city, Seattle, is a five-hour drive away over a mountain pass (whereas Napa is only an hour’s drive from the Golden Gate Bridge). But it does seem poised to become America’s second destination for wine tourism. Dayton’s Weinhard Café, downtown’s Backstage Bistro, and the Whitehouse-Crawford — which reinvented Washington dining east of the Cascades when it opened in 2000 — have recast restaurant meals here from rudimentary pit stops to something you can plan a night around. What you ate, and the wine you drank with it, are now prime topics of conversation during coffee breaks at businesses around town. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that many of those businesses are wineries.

The first Walla Walla wine I tried, back in the early nineties, was Rick Small’s 1988 Woodward Canyon Cabernet Sauvignon. At the time, it struck me as the best American bottling I’d come across that wasn’t from California. Then I uncovered one of Gary Figgins’s Leonetti Merlots, a wine that had been just a rumor to me for years, and several impressive releases from L’Ecole No. 41, which is set in an old schoolhouse in nearby Lowden, Washington. I was a believer.

Small and Figgins, Army Reserve buddies, started Walla Walla’s wine industry as a glorified home-economics project in the late seventies. They began on a modest scale, trucking in fruit from other parts of the state, not having any notion that Merlot and Cabernet would actually flourish amid the wheat and sweet onions. They made wine in Walla Walla only because they lived in Walla Walla. But L’Ecole’s Martin Clubb, the son of a Texas oilman, has a business degree from MIT. He’d spent time in Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. What, I couldn’t help but wonder, had brought him here?

It turns out that his wife, Megan, has century-old Walla Walla roots that run deeper than the oldest vines. Megan’s father, Baker Ferguson, was running Walla Walla’s biggest bank when he started L’Ecole in 1983. He soon learned that you can’t manage a winery as a hobby — not a successful one, anyway. So he dangled the possibility of an eventual position at the bank to lure his daughter home from San Francisco, where she had a high-powered finance job, and told her to bring along that husband of hers to handle L’Ecole.

Clubb took to the wine business, and soon L’Ecole was thriving. But the transition from San Francisco was a struggle for the Clubbs. Walla Walla seemed smaller than its 33,000 inhabitants, in part because nobody new ever moved in. “It was the kind of place,” Clubb recalls, “where, if you dialed a wrong number, you knew the person who answered the phone.”

The change happened so fast, locals like the Clubbs didn’t see it coming. First, two wineries set up tasting rooms on Main Street. Then, the once glamorous Marcus Whitman Hotel, built by a civic consortium in 1927 as a local showpiece but converted to subsistence housing in the late seventies, was restored by a Walla Walla organization headed by cell phone millionaire Kyle Mussman. His group gutted the interior, creating a hotel and conference center. The guest rooms had handcrafted desks, DVD players, two-line phones, terry-cloth bathrobes, and a higher level of luxury than the area had known. Until the first 75 deluxe rooms opened in February 2001, Walla Walla had had few visitors, only aspirations.

In retrospect, the Marcus Whitman Hotel was the tipping point. Today, the property isn’t always full, or even close to it, and the service doesn’t quite reach the level of the appointments. (By appearances, half the staff is still enrolled in high school, and breakfast — even on weekday mornings — means a visit to a nearby Denny’s.) But its mere existence signifies that local money has faith in the city’s future. Watching the stream of well-heeled hotel guests during one of the several formal tasting weekends held each year at area wineries, it’s impossible for Walla Walla residents not to think of themselves as shareholders in a stock destined to rise.

All week, I’ve been holed up at the Inn at Abeja, a three-cottage and two-suite bed-and-breakfast in a restored farmstead a few miles east of downtown. My split-level suite has Wi-Fi, a CD player I haven’t had time to use, and several hundred channels of DirecTV. The bookcases are stuffed with authors I actually want to read, from David Sedaris to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the cabinets are stocked with Riedel stemware to show off the local wine. At breakfast on my first morning, I found fresh mango chunks awaiting me, and juice that had been inside the orange moments before. Lucinda Williams was singing on the sound system, and poached eggs and warm bread were headed my way. I could have stayed there all day.

Excerpted from “Unexpected USA.” For more from Travel + Leisure, click here.

Copyright © 2010 American Express Publishing Corporation

A lovely enticement to visit Walla Walla – from the Today Show. Thanks to Tim for passing it on to me.