Spotlight on Felicia Hardison Londré
by Thomas Canfield
Kansas City is the
home of a highly respected, world-renowned theatre historian, author, and
educator whose encyclopedic knowledge of theatre–local, national, and
international–is matched only by her palpable warmth, ardor, and enthusiasm for
the subject. Felicia Londré, Curators’ Professor of Theatre at UMKC, is one of
the great treasures of the theatrical community, not only because of her eagerness
to share her vast expertise and genuine love of all things dramatic, but also
for her fascinating career that spans several decades.
Unpretentiousness
is a remarkably rare virtue in someone with Felicia’s abundant honors and accolades.
Because she does not boast of her impressive accomplishments, even those who
know her intimately might not realize what an interesting and varied life she
has led. Born in Fort Lewis, Washington, she was a military brat who, along with
her two sisters, lived all over the United States and later spent three years
in England. At the time of her birth, Felicia’s father, Col. Felix M. Hardison,
had just begun a career in the Army Air Corps. Already an acknowledged war hero,
he would go on to become Air Attaché to Sweden and play an integral role in
founding the Swedish Air Force.
An unconventional childhood
led Felicia to take the road less travelled in her journey through higher
education. Were she to write her memoirs, Felicia jokes that they would be
titled A Long, Slow Learning Curve, but
her divergent path undoubtedly unlocked life’s great possibilities and formed her
cosmopolitan perspective of theatre as a universal art form that transcends
cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Surprisingly, Felicia technically does
not have a theatre degree. She graduated with a B.A. in French, with a minor in
drama, from the University of Montana. A thirst for knowledge led her to complete
her degree a year early, whereupon she spent a year abroad studying French
drama on a Fulbright scholarship. Felicia subsequently earned an M.A. in
Romance Languages, again minoring in drama, at the University of Washington in
Seattle. By this time, she knew in her heart that she was destined for theatre
and pursued this goal with characteristic energy and initiative.
An integral part of
Felicia’s transition into theatre was directing two plays, in French, at the
Penthouse Theatre, the first theatre-in-the-round in the U.S., located on the
University of Washington campus. She was then awarded a doctoral fellowship in
International Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she
completed a Ph.D. in Speech. “I was getting my doctorate in Theatre, but in
those days, ‘theatre’ was still a dirty word,” she explains. “It was called the
‘Department of Speech’ because you didn’t say the word ‘theatre’ in higher education.
Officially my Ph.D. is in Speech, but all my courses were in theatre.”
When there were no
opportunities to direct in the University of Wisconsin theatre program, Felicia
arranged to direct a play in the French department; this led to two more productions
and greater opportunities. “One of my plays was Eugène Labiche’s The Italian Straw Hat in French, and it
was such a success that the Theatre Department decided to do it on the main stage
in English. Nobody wanted to direct it after me, so I was the first graduate
student in Wisconsin history to direct on the main stage,” she recalls.
Prior to coming to
Kansas City, Felicia spent six years as an instructor at a University of
Wisconsin branch campus. “That’s where I learned how to teach,” she explains. Meanwhile,
she directed, acted in, and designed costumes for several plays, although her
efforts went largely unappreciated: “I was doing daring, avant-garde
productions, the likes of which you would have seen in Paris in the 1920s, but
nobody understood.” Three additional years heading a high-pressure,
experimental theatre program at the University of Texas ended in disappointment
when she wasn’t awarded tenure. “I liked Dallas because there was a lot of
theatre,” she says, “but I didn’t publish much. I was concentrating on all
kinds of other stuff. I had a contract for my first book, but I didn’t get
tenure. And of course, when you don’t get tenure, it’s devastating. You feel as
if the world is coming to an end.”
This tragedy was
really a blessing in disguise for both Felicia and Kansas City. “Doesn’t fate
work in mysterious ways? I think the saddest thing that ever happened to me was
also the luckiest,” she remarks. Determined to move on, she frantically applied
for teaching positions during the summer of 1978: “I saw this job at the
University of Missouri-Kansas City, and saw it had the Missouri Repertory
Theatre associated with it.” As fortune would have it–and unknown to her at the
time–she already had an advocate in John Ezell, who had been her greatest mentor
at the University of Wisconsin. Having worked as a designer for the Rep, John,
who later would also become a Professor of Scenic Design at UMKC, recommended Felicia
as a new hire.
Compared to the
thriving metropolis of oil-rich Dallas, Kansas City in the late seventies appeared
to be a rather old-fashioned backwater. Felicia’s first impression of UMKC was
of “a sleepy little university in this sleepy, little-big city.” But the grace
and charm of Dr. Patricia McIlrath, chair of UMKC Theatre and founder of the
Missouri Rep, immediately won Felicia over: “She was an amazing person who had
built a professional theatre from the ground up, starting at zero in a city
that hadn’t had much theatre for a very long time. She had done it virtually
singlehandedly, but she was never boastful. There was no ego about her. She was
so outgoing, thoughtful, and other-people oriented. She was an instant mentor
and friend. She was so nice, helpful, wonderful, and loveable to everyone–every
actor at the Rep, every student, every faculty member. She was instant
inspiration to anyone whose life she came in contact with.”
Dr. Mac’s unique
talent for finding opportunities and nurturing individual talent led her to
create a dramaturgy position at the Rep, and Felicia became one of the first
full-time faculty members in the nation to have an officially-designated
affiliation with a professional theatre. This position, which she held for 22
years, enabled Felicia to move beyond her academic theatre formation. Not only
did she learn the ropes of professional theatre, but the support and freedom Felicia
was given allowed her to discover her true calling as a theatre historian.
Today, Felicia’s
distinguished credits include over 60 scholarly articles, 25 journalistic
publications, 100 book and theatre reviews, and 14 books. She has written
approximately 18 original plays and translated 11 more from Russian, Spanish,
and French. An ambassador of theatre throughout the world, Felicia has
travelled, lectured, conducted research, and attended conferences throughout
Europe, as well as in Russia, Japan, and China. On one trip to Russia, she saw
26 plays in only 18 days! Every visit abroad has become an opportunity to bring
the world of theatre back to Kansas City and to enrich the lives of her
students.
In 34 years at
UMKC, Felicia has taught a vast array of theatre and interdisciplinary courses.
Today, she instructs a rotation of courses in world theatre history, specializing
in American, French, Russian, 19th-20th century theatre history, and
dramaturgy. Her lectures are accompanied by slides–many taken during her world travels–that
bring theatre history to life. Whereas graduate students in most theatre
programs are assigned a somber regimen of theory, Felicia’s students have the
rare opportunity to read and discuss great plays.
The extra effort
Felicia puts into making an impression on her students is just one of many
qualities that makes her so special. Students are often surprised to receive
gracefully-penned “thank you” cards for something they have done. Last spring,
as a capstone to a French theatre history course, Felicia and her husband Venne,
a French instructor at UMKC, held a French tea in their home. At the suggestion
of a student, the attendees costumed themselves as their favorite figure from
French theatre history. Felicia’s daughter, Georgianna, a professional costume
designer, created a costume for Felicia modeled on the legendary photograph of
Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Hamlet holding a skull. The Londrés also have a
son, Tristan, who is an administrator at Metropolitan Community College, and
six grandchildren.
Beginning in 1990, Felicia
transformed scholarly research on two books, Shakespeare Around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar Revivals (1986)
and Shakespeare Companies and Festivals:
An International Guide (1995) into opportunities to lobby for the creation
of a Shakespeare festival in Kansas City. Twenty-two years later, as Honorary
Co-Founder of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, she still presents a
show talk before the performances in Southmoreland Park. An unabashed Oxfordian,
Felicia admits that arriving at what many see as a radical conclusion on the
authorship of the plays was the result of a reluctant process. “I was happy
with the Shakespeare we had. I didn’t want to hear about it. I liked the
Stratford legend,” she says.
At the prodding of
her husband, Felicia agreed to read Charlton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare, albeit with a highly skeptical
mind. “I read the whole 800 pages and said, ‘This is worth knowing about.
There’s something here worth taking into consideration.’ It really shook up my
ideas, but I wasn’t ready to commit.” She then read a biography of Edward De
Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. “It’s funny how you
resist, you resist, you resist, and suddenly some trivial thing turns on a
light bulb, and you say, ‘Okay, I give up. I accept.’ From then on, I was
reading with a different point of view–more open-minded, looking at all the
possibilities, but trying not to be too locked in too early,” she says.
An earnest
desire to share her revelations about the new meanings she was discovering in
the plays met with a severe warning from her academic colleagues: “‘Don’t do
this. You’ll ruin your career. None of
your work will be taken seriously if you keep pursuing this’,” Felicia recalls.
In the end, however, she had to be true to herself as a scholar and acknowledge
the preponderance of evidence. “It was rather daring that I came out of the
closet as an Oxfordian!” she remarks. As a standard bearer for the cause, Felicia
has been debating the authorship question since 1991. Each fall in Kansas City,
she presents a persuasive, meticulously-researched authorship lecture, which
she also has taken on the road across the U.S. and to Beijing, Budapest, Tokyo,
and London. “How can any intelligent person not see?” she asks passionately. “Once
you do the homework, if you take the trouble, it’s so obvious.”
Felicia’s
other books include studies of individual playwrights, such as Tennessee
Williams, Tom Stoppard, and Federico García Lorca; comprehensive histories of
world and North American theatre; and a guide to dramaturgy. Her fifteenth book
will be a history of French and American theatre artists in World War I. However,
she considers The Enchanted Years of the
Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theater, 1870-1930 (2007) as
her most important work. This award-winning book chronicles the lively,
entertaining, rich history of theatre in Kansas City’s golden age and is a
must-read for anyone interested in the glorious history of our city’s early
theatre.
Her research
on this book led Felicia to found the Patricia McIlrath Center for Mid-American
Theatre, the only archive in the surrounding region devoted specifically to live
local theatre. “My dream was to start an
archive to preserve play programs, posters, and reviews,” she says. “What I
really wanted to do was preserve everything about Kansas City theatre history.”
The McIlrath Center is also a repository for photographs, clippings, albums,
and recordings that might otherwise be lost, since theatre is such an ephemeral
medium. Both students and researchers in the community use the collections, and
Felicia regularly fields inquiries from people seeking information on an array
of subjects.
Regarding the current state of local theatre,
Felicia is adamant about our need to produce more classic and contemporary
foreign plays. She points out, for example, that Kansas City missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to mark the 100th birthday of Tennessee Williams last season by not
producing any of his plays, and she is even more vehement about the
provinciality of our offerings. “There’s a world of
great contemporary drama out there, and Kansas City doesn’t see it! Don’t we
care what’s being written in France, and Spain, and Russia, and Germany, and
England, and Australia?” she asks. Disturbed also by the overall decline in
excellence manifested in virtually all aspects of our culture, Felicia is
outraged at the closing of the University of Missouri Press, the publisher of The Enchanted Years of the Stage, which has
recently dealt “a great body blow to the University of Missouri” and typifies the
lowering of cultural standards.
In late
spring of 1962, the week before Felicia graduated from Montana State
University, she took a solitary night stroll to a group of glaciated rocks
positioned on the campus. At the time, John Glenn had just become the first
person to orbit the earth. Sitting down, she peered up at the stars twinkling
in the sky and experienced, “a feeling of
endless potential and possibility in the life that lay mysteriously ahead of
me. And yet I was completely aware of my insignificance as a mere speck in the
cosmos of space and time. Complete serenity enveloped me as I contemplated the
mysteries of past and future and the great infinity beyond our planet, and as I
murmured to the stars about the unknown ways in which my dreams might play
out.”
Felicia would not
return to the Montana campus until 36 years later, when she received the
university’s Distinguished Alumna Award. Later that night, sitting in the exact
same spot, she looked up at the same stars and realized that John Glenn had just
returned to outer space. “I still delight in the cosmic click telling me that
all my world travels and experiences over the years had somehow taken me to
just where I needed to be at precisely the right times,” she recalls. For both
of them, divine providence had melded with a trust in their own determination
to be open to adventure, to enjoy the journey, and to offer something worthwhile
to the world.
Thomas Canfield is an instructor of Theatre, English,
and Humanities at UMKC and National American University.
