William M. Hoffman (April 12, 1939 - April 29, 2017)*
William Moses Hoffman was an important and beloved figure in at least 3 communities: artistic, gay and Jewish. In each, he left an indelible mark.
Hoffman was a luminary of Greenwich Village’s Caffe Cino. The legendary “birthplace of off-off Broadway,” as it has been called, launched the careers of a host of playwrights, including Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Joe Orton and Robert Patrick. Culling this experience, Hoffman edited a pioneering anthology, Gay Plays: The First Collection.
As a playwright, Hoffman is best known as the author of As Is. In 1985 it became the first Broadway play about AIDS, following Robert Chesley’s off-off Broadway Stray Dog Story and preceding the premiere of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. As Is was a hit and is widely credited with an early and humanizing influence on public awareness of AIDS and its impact on our lives and times.
Following its run on Broadway, As Is became a film starring Colleen Dewhurst as the AIDS Hospice worker. My eyes still swell with tears when I recall the coup de theatre that concludes the play. Despite harsh condemnation of homosexuality by the church, here was a nun whose compassion for humanity leads her to share the most deeply personal ritual of her charge, a gay man dying of AIDS. Reflecting on their last exchange, she lifts up her hands to reveal her nails, fingernail-polished red. It was one of those moments that would mark Hoffman as a master of theater, and our hearts.
Perhaps the pinnacle of Hoffman’s achievement was The Ghosts of Versailles, the opera he co-created with his lifelong friend and collaborator, composer John Corigliano. One of the most prestigious events in American operatic history, this very grand opera was a world premiere commission by the Metropolitan Opera to mark the 100th anniversary of the company.
At the start of what became a stellar career, Renee Fleming, who is currently retiring from opera, played the co-starring role of Countess Almaviva. The opera recaps, comments on, and develops the stories of some of opera’s most famous and beloved characters--that jack of all arts and trades (and hearts) Figaro and those paragons (and parodies) of nobility, the Almavivas. They are the protagonists of two of the most famous and beloved operas, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. Ghosts is also the story of their creator, Beaumarchais, and the fabled Marie Antoinette, with the ghost of whom the ghost of Beaumarchais is in love. The at once historical and magical tale is deftly constructed around Beaumarchais’s lesser-known sequel to these plays, La Mere Coupable, which takes place in the throes of the French Revolution, which the earlier plays are on the cusp of. So long as there will be opera, it’s a certainty that Ghosts of Versailles will find an enduring place for itself alongside Barber of Seville and Marriage of Figaro. It’s an ideal triology project for future directors and opera companies. A Figaro cycle, like the Ring cycle.
For a life of contributions as rich and varied as Hoffman’s, this summary will perforce omit much. But mention should be made here of the work Bill did on restoring the reputation and place of the librettist. To this end, he founded a Society, Prima La Parola e Poi La Music (First The Word and Then The Music). Hoffman felt that just as Da Ponte is recognized and celebrated as the co-creator of Mozart’s operas and von Hofmannsthal of Strauss’s operas, so should his own contribution be fully recognized, a co-equality likewise championed by composer Corigliano. It was an uphill battle Bill would rarely win in traditional operatic venues.
Bill went on to write and revise other plays, many of them with gay themes, one of which, Cornbury: The Queen’s Governor, was about Edward Hyde, the mythic first governor of New York who was known to have cross-dressed. Panoramically, Bill recreates the early New York of the Dutch, Queen Anne and Indian wars. The political insights are as endless as the humor. At various points, he hoped to make the play into a musical, which tweaked the interest of Hal Prince.
There were many other projects, greater and lesser, that Bill worked on. The biggest and most recent of these was Morning Star, a musical-dramatic co-creation with Ricky Ian Gordon about the infamous Triangle Factory fire in New York in 1911, in which so many garment workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, perished. The story revolves around a Latvian Jewish family. Morning Star was a co-production of the Chicago Lyric Opera and the Goodman Theater which had its world premiere in Cincinnati in 2015.
In the interstices of this work is another issue that hugely preoccupied Bill and which colors everything he wrote: his Jewishness. In the many revisions and stagings of his play, Riga (his parents were Latvian Jews who escaped the Holocaust but most of whose relatives were murdered therein), he agonized about anti-Semitism, past, present and future. Sharing these concerns, and in this time frame of the mid to late 1980s, I wrote and published my own story of coming to grips with anti-Semitism—historical, social and internalized. This memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite, inspired Bill’s growing interest in Wagner and became the basis of many years of fevered dialogue between us.
An offspring of all this was a proposal for an opera with John Corigliano for the San Francisco Opera, a dark satirical work to be called Liebestod. Gottfried Wagner, great grandson of the composer who had written an introduction to my Confessions, was to be the dramaturge. Alas, Pamela Rosenberg, who headed the SFO at that time (early 2000’s), subsequently announced that the commission of a new opera by SFO would be awarded to the team of John Adams, Alice Goodman and Peter Sellars, The opera was Dr. Atomic.
In the midst of his work on these plays, Bill established a salon of artists and writers concerned about anti-Semitism, among whose regulars were soprano Regina Resnick, writer Phyllis Chesler, my partner Arnie Kantrowitz and me. Alas, Bill’s prophetic concerns could find him venturing farther to the right politically than some of us were comfortable with. In this frame of mind, his prototype for Lord Cornbury would be more like Rudolph Giuliani or Caitlyn Jenner than Harvey Fierstein or Divine. Even so, whenever Bill and I spoke during this last year, he seemed in clear agreement that Trump was a dangerous demagogue and authoritarian who could no more to be trusted with the fate of Jews and Israel than with any other politics, issues or peoples.
In his later years, Bill relocated to Beacon, New York, not far from Lehman College, where he directed and taught theater and did a television series of conversations with leading arts figures. There he staged original plays he wrote for the students, like The Stench of Art, as well as lesser known works by others—e.g., The Blue Monster: A fairy Play in 5 Acts” by Carlo Gozzi, the satirist whose Turandot inspired Puccini’s opera. His students loved him. There, in Beacon and at Lehman, he lived and worked with his husband, Russ Taylor. My last visit with them was in January. Bill had been suffering from increasingly serious and frequent illnesses, many of them stemming from severe arthritis and the side-effects of medications.
In my own life, his influence and role as my close friend for more than a quarter century has been inestimable.
Because so much of what he had to show and tell us foretold of the future as it recreated the past, it’s certain that the story of William M. “Hoffperson,” as he sometimes referred to himself, awaits a sequel, a Ghosts of the life and times of William M. Hoffman.
Rest in peace, Person of hope. And may your ghost haunt us forever.
*adapted from an Obituary written for Gay City News
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