In 1947 Harold Clurman wrote of Laurette Taylor: “The death of our finest actress…should not go without comment. The perfunctory tributes of the press were dismaying. Perhaps little more could be expected from a theater which has lost all sense of tradition and all ambition beyond that of profit-and consequently all dignity.” He goes on to describe Laurette Taylor’s acting in exquisite and aching detail. Underneath it all is a warning to a society mad for profit, which spawns a mindless money-grubbing entertainment industry, an industry cut off from art, from the depth of humanity, and from the deeper social and cultural functions of the theater. Clurman concludes: “Laurette Taylor’s life was tragic. Her appearances in the past fifteen years were so infrequent that when she arrived in The Glass Menagerie most people spoke of her as a discovery. She had made a ‘comeback’. But Laurette Taylor’s fate in this regard is very similar to that of many other players-particularly actresses-beaten by the brutal anarchy of our stage. It would be dolefully instructive to draw up a list of the really talented actresses-living and dead- who have been unconscious sacrifices to our mindless theater.”
Tennessee Williams, in his tribute to Laurette Taylor said, "There was a radiance about her art which I can compare only to the greatest lines of poetry, and which gave me the same shock of revelation as if the air about us had been momentarily broken through by light from some clear space beyond us."
In the 2004 documentary Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There by Rick McKay, several Broadway veterans such as Harold Prince, Charles Durning, Uta Hagen, Marian Seldes, Kaye Ballard, Maureen Stapleton, Fred Ebb, Nanette Fabray, Martin Landau, Maureen Stapleton, June Havoc, and Gena Rowlands nearly unanimously rank Taylor's stage performances as the most memorable of their entire lives.
And yet, for many, the name Laurette Taylor has little meaning.
We knew we wanted to honor those in our community that have given of themselves to so many, yet so many of those that have given so much may not necessarily be the ones appearing on magazine covers or billboards. They work, they give, and we're better for it. And now we choose to celebrate them.
The 2009 Laurette Taylor Award Honoree - Tom Oppenheim and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting presented by Tovah Feldshuh at the Inaugural Benefit at The Sage Theatre
