Harlene Marley Theater Dedication

The Harlene Marley Theater, located on Gaskin Avenue near the North Campus Apartments and Bexley Hall, was formally dedicated on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2019. As the first woman hired into a tenure-track position in 1969 until her retirement in 2005, Marley impacted generations of students and future actors. The dedicated honored her legacy and included remarks from President Sean Decatur, Belinda Bremner '71, Kenyon's first female graduate, Professor of Drama Wendy MacLeod '81 and Nina Samaan '20 and Talia Light Rake '20, co-artistic directors of the Kenyon College Players.

Remarks by Belinda Bremner '71

"Nobody loves a smart ass."

That remains the second most memorable thing Harlene said to me.  Perhaps because she said it with such regularity. Dr. Marley, Harlene, I will do my best not to be one for the next few minutes.

I was asked to speak because I was the very first woman graduate of Kenyon. First woman with a Kenyon degree in drama. Ditto English. We both arrived in September of 1969. She was 29. I 21, a scant 8 years younger. Nothing now. Everything then. She had come from Oklahoma by way of Central Missouri State. I came from Chicago, by way of Dublin, Ireland. But Kenyon was, for both of us, for all of us that autumn, terra incognita. And yes, there were monsters here.

The drama curriculum was very different then. No dedicated "acting" classes per se. Lots and lots and lots of plays read and taught by centuries. Theory and criticism. Playwriting. The stuff that could be asked you on honors comps.

There were lessons she taught me that cannot be measured in blue books and grueling orals. Lessons I didn't know I needed but which proved far more useful than knowing the elements of a piece bien fait or the dates of the Duke of Saxe Meiningan. Most often Harlene and I were the only "girls" in those level three and four classes. As the only girls, neither of us was ever late. Neither was ever not completely prepared. Both were the first to pick out the naughty and or rude bits and to appear unshockable, unshakable. We had to prove we were tougher, smarter, faster, stronger.  No quarter was asked because we knew none would be given. We had to be, as one inelegant trustee deemed Harlene, "tough broads." 

It was tough. It was lonely. I can only imagine how much tougher and lonelier it was for her. 

But a sure antidote to loneliness is storytelling, our own and others. Steinbeck says: "We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — "Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought." We all have our Harlene stories. These are mine.

I had every intention then of being an actor and a poet — God help me. I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of being a director, a playwright, or, God forbid, a teacher. But, "Like it or not..."  that's what I also became. I survived because of the strength I learned from Harlene. I learned from her and passed on to my students (those she met and hailed as her grand students) that fundamentally you are the only one you can count on. That intelligent gets you so much farther than pretty. That "the readiness is all." I learnt that to survive all those "whips and scorns" humor is your truest and often only weapon. And most effective when turned on oneself by oneself. And who can forget her laugh? That life is, yes, beautiful but also ridiculous. And rarely what we ourselves consider fair.

Which brings me the very most memorable thing Harlene ever said to me. There was a role I wanted in a play she was directing, a play I adored and advocated for as being particularly "relevant." I didn't get it. I asked her why. I didn't understand her answer then. I really only understood it years later when the identical words came out of my own mouth to an actor I did not cast. "Belinda," she said, no doubt taking a prodigious drag on one of her omnipresent cigarettes, "Belinda, I have no doubt you would be a good Annie. Probably a great one. But that's not the production I'm doing."

There is so very much more to say of this remarkable woman, of all the remarkable women of those remarkable times but this is not the production we are doing this morning. We are remembering and saluting Harlene, the most uncommon of women. We were, in our own particular and peculiar and never to come again way "The History Girls." She gave us so very much and we are doing our damnedest to "pass the parcel." 

That's it then. All the "blah di blahdy blah." Would all her past students please rise? Now, say it with me. "Everything clear? Then go away."

Remarks by Professor of Drama Wendy MacLeod '81

In the words of Henry Adams, "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." Or her influence.  Harlene Marley arrived here with the first female students and was the first woman to become a full professor and chair a department. Yet she always downplayed the symbolism, saying that she "simply took a better job in a more congenial atmosphere at a higher salary." She taught notable actors and major directors, as well as three current Kenyon drama and film professors.  

She was insightful about people and often knew where a student was headed before they did. When she directed "The Little Foxes" in the Bolton, she understood that I was more strong-willed Regina than Birdy, the dithering Southern belle I thought I was born to play. (And she insisted that the name Regina rhyme with vagina). She told another student, who badly wanted to be an actor, that she was instead a director — and today that woman is the artistic director of a successful theater company.  
  
Whether you were her student or her colleague, she believed in you. The last time I got in trouble at Kenyon, Harlene Marley was there to have my back. I was taking a course in the modern languages department called "Women in International Literature." The provost's wife was sitting in on the course, and upon hearing that I'd written a play for my senior thesis, she invited me to speak at an upcoming creativity symposium. I gave a talk in which I said I didn't want to be a great woman writer, I wanted to be a great writer. Well it seems this was heresy, and people were calling Harlene Marley saying: "What the hell are you teaching them down there?" The provost's wife was spearheading the charge to establish a women's studies department, and I was supposed to be carrying a banner that I had somehow failed to carry.  Filling me in on what I had stepped into, Harlene told me that some will try to use you for their own agenda, but she defended my right to say what I believed. She taught me what loyalty is and the bravery required to be a writer.

I wish my critics had asked me what she was teaching us down there because she was teaching us everything. She taught us how to tell a story. That every play was about sex or money. That every scene had a cat and a mouse. She taught us how to read a play — that what the characters were saying was different from what the play was saying. Her classes offered the suspense of waiting for her long cigarette ash to fall and she taught us that feet are funny; so be careful how you angle a bed onstage. And most importantly, she reassured us that our college years would not be the best years of our lives.

She wanted us to know about more than theater — to study history and art history and classical music. She showed us that a woman could be smart and sexy, and that she didn't have to have a husband and children to lead a full life. Although she was a dedicated teacher, she headed for the airport the day the semester ended, off to see the Great Wall of China or the Iditarod. She would travel great distances to see the productions of former students and on birthdays you could expect a card written in her distinctive slanted handwriting with a black, felt-tip pen. Even after she’d retired, she came to the premiere of my play "Find and Sign." When I introduced her to the company after the show, I was afraid they were confusing her with a little old lady, when in fact she could have told them everything that had just worked or failed to work in our production. 

My first playwriting course was with Harlene and Tom, and she enthusiastically supported the idea of a playwright-in-residence. She regularly directed new plays and even directed student plays on the main stage. She served as a reader of new plays for the American College Theater Festival and returned to the Kenyon Playwrights Conference to appear in Craig Lucas’s play, "I Was More Alive With You," which became a New York Times Critics' Pick. Two Kenyon alums have sequentially won the prestigious Relentless Award for Playwriting, created by Philip Seymour Hoffman. They beat out professional playwrights and MFA's from Juilliard and Yale. Another, Will Arbery, had a play open Off-Broadway last night at Playwrights Horizons. These are extraordinary accomplishments and the fruits of Harlene's influence.

When I began to teach, she and Tom Turgeon were what I aspired to be — they were simultaneously mentors, surrogate parents, trusted readers and loyal colleagues. Both had an unparalleled sense of humor and a skepticism of cant and bureaucracy. Susanne Langer famously wrote that while we can fully know a character's arc; we can't possibly know the arc of a person's life until after that person has died. And what an arc it was. 

Her influence continues to be felt — in Hollywood, on Broadway, in theaters around the country, in our classrooms, and now in this theater where the new plays she championed will be performed.