The job was ‘Oklahoma!'

Press, 22 October 1980, Page 16

The job was ‘Oklahoma!'

She was young in 1943, poor, and incredibly blueeyed, and she needed that job. The woman was Agnes de Mille. And the job was .“Oklahoma.” “I was very poor and desperate,' and I wanted that show,” she remembers even now with passionate i intensity. "So I signed a contract with the Theatre Guild — it was $l5OO for the job, no royalties, take it or leave it.” Four-weeks of-rehearsal-later, the result was American musical comedy history.

' In spite of the continuing effort she must make to counter the after-effects of a near-fatal stroke she suffered in 1975, Agnes de Mille has once again helped bring "Oklahoma.” back to the stage. In a .redent major production of the show' Miss de Mille’s choreography had been recreated by Gemze de Lappe. But is is still her show, and she is proud of her. contribution. Sitting in the book-lined living room of the New York, Greenwich Village apartment she inherited from her mother, Agnes de Mille reminisces, her bright ’ eyes blazing. Dressed in chic, pink linen, she casts her cane aside and talks freely.

Miss de Mille’s movements are hampered, but her spirit is not. Using her left arm to recreate (almost) her dance movements (her right leg is encircled by a clear plastic

brace and she has no feeling in either her right arm or leg), she traces the air to make her points. Agnes de Mille revolutionised Broadway with her “Oklahoma.” choreography. She did away with endless chorus lines; she blended ballet techniques into the fabric of complex musical comedy, created a new way of advancing the story line, and getting in and out of musical numbers.

But she wasn’t aware of the significance' of what she was doing at the time. “I’d been to very few musicals. They cost $2.50 to $3 a ticket. I just went ahead and did the best dances I could. I loved the score. But there were so many things in my dances which I thought were .bad.”

Miss de Mille credits Oscar Hammerstein with thinking of her to graph "Oklahoma.” “He had seen my recitals several times, and had'liked them. He told toe ‘l’ve got to use you, but I really don’t know . how.’ And then I did ‘Rodeo,’ and. it was an overwhelming hit. I was dancing it, and I was- pretty funny, you know. There were 22 curtain calls.”

In the box at the New York Metropolitan Opera House where the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo had staged “Rodeo” that night, were Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rogers, and

Theresa Helburn, of the Theatre Guild. “They got the message,” Miss de Mille recalls, dryly. She had recently returned from England, where she had been living for several years. In 1937 she had helped form a ballet troup called Dance Theatre’. In the early 40s she put on a series of ballets at the American Ballet Theatre; and, did a series of her own recitals. Unable to get a staff job with the Ballet Theare, she was living off her mothers savings in a barely furnished studio apartment on East 9th Street. She has never, never reconciled herself to the inequitous way she was paid for “Oklahoma.” “You know,' they said, ‘oh well, it opened the doors.’ And it did. I got much better terms for everything else except ‘Carousel,’ which was the same management.” “Paint your Wagon,” is the- musical which she feels has some of her best dances, though she still finds the book confusing. Since her stroke, Miss de Mille.- has also helped to rehearse all her recently mounted ballets. In hospital She started a book, “Where the Wings Grow.” Two more books are in progress; a huge history of dance in America, and the story of her stroke. Her recovery is astonishing. She describes the

experience of the. loss of control of her arm and leg as “though a plug had been pulled out and with it goes all the memory in the muscles.” It took her about a. year to be able to hold her right arm straight out in front of her.

“It isn’t just that you can’t do things with your arm. Lt has a life of its own and it’s very disagreeable. In the. beginning it wavered, danced and jumped, it' had wild jerkings and would thrash out in the middle of the night. It was really very obstreperous. I used to lose it under the bed covers and find it and say, ‘now you be good, you be quiet, and don’t move’.” Most frightening of all, there was “that terror of losing your wits again — not to know what day it is, not to know who you are, no't to be able to speak.”

Her rehabilitation, in her early seventies, is a tribute to Miss de Mille’s determination. She was saddened to have to give up the new dance company she had just started. It would have been her first permanent association with a company.

Throughout it all she has had the support of her husband, Walter Prude. But ironically, he as well as other important men in her life, have not been supporters of her art. Her father, William de

Mille. was absolutely opposed to her even studying dancing (“All./he men were at the time. It was thought of as a form of prostitution”). His brother — her Uncle Cecil B. de Mille. the film producer — would never give her a job. “My father and my . husband were men who were, I. think, subconsciously jealous of my work. The commitment of an art is a very powerful thing.

“1 can’t do any active work when my husband’s in the house. Sometimes 1 go into the Other room, but he doesn’t like it. .He gets very nervous and feels he should be doing something. My husband knows he couldn’t do certain things or it would have stifled me. And I can’t stop, period. He knows I lie in bed thinking up this and that.” The interesting question about Agnes de Mille has always been how she would have developed if she had been officially connected to a dance company. “I would have done a lot more work,” she says now, “And I probably wouldn’t have written. . .

I get great happiness from writing. It saved mv life.”