Claude Fredericks: Theater of the Soul

Inside the staging of two mythic plays in 1962—a journal of longing and devotion: to myth, to making, to meaning

CF on the corner of East 62nd Street and First Avenue, New York City, dated August 1961. Photograph by Willa Percival. From the Claude Fredericks archives at the Getty Research Institute.

This is the second in a two-part exploration of Claude’s work for the stage — a lesser-known but essential part of his creative world. In Part One, Claude Fredericks, Playwright: A Life in Myth and Dialogue (April 26), I traced how his early fascination with classical literature and symbolic language led to a cycle of lyrical, ambitious plays: The Idiot King, On Circe’s Island, and A Summer Ghost. The latter two were performed together Off-Broadway in 1962 at New York’s Artists Theatre under the title The Charlatans.

For Claude, the plays he wrote were deeply personal endeavors. The experience of seeing them staged left him exhilarated, exhausted, and emotionally laid bare.

This week, we move from biography to lived experience, as I share selections from Claude’s private journal written in the final weeks before those performances. He was living between Vermont and New York, teaching at Bennington, revising lines in borrowed apartments, and commuting to rehearsals. All the while, he was navigating the emotional tension of his relationship with his partner at the time, Hal Farmer, and the fragile hope that this might be the culmination of his artistic life.

Claude Fredericks (1923–2013) kept one of the longest personal journals ever written—more than 65,000 pages across eight decades, now housed at the Getty Research Institute. A playwright, printer, teacher, and diarist, he recorded everything: daily rhythms, private longings, and moments of profound artistic insight. Through his Banyan Press, he published works by Gertrude Stein, André Gide, James Merrill, and others. In the 1950s and 60s, his own mythic, lyrical plays were staged Off-Broadway. Since January, I’ve been sharing excerpts from his journal here on Extracts — a life fully observed, and fully written.

The Final Revisions: Spring 1962

These entries offer a rare window into the emotional and creative intensity of this moment in Claude’s life. He writes from the apartment of his dear friend Suzi Gablik — then an emerging art critic and theorist — on East 62nd Street, often late at night or just after returning from the theater. The pages shimmer with all the contradictions of creative life: one moment euphoric, the next filled with doubt. He questions the actors, the director, the script — and most piercingly, himself.

Yet still, he shows up, line by line, reshaping the work — making revisions as needed or as requested during rehearsals. ‘Every cut depresses me too,’ he writes, ‘as if I were lopping all the branches off a tree.’

Cover of New American Plays, Volume One (Hill & Wang, 1965), which featured CF’s A Summer Ghost alongside works by Charles Mee, Alfred Levinson, and others. The anthology brought renewed attention to Claude’s dramatic work and helped secure productions at several universities, including a 1966 staging at the University of North Carolina at Raleigh, where Claude was invited to attend.

For Paid Subscribers

You’ll receive the complete journal entries from April 7, 9, and 16 — both as high-resolution manuscript scans and as digitally transcribed text for ease of reading — along with additional archival photos and a new section: Behind the Pages: A Conversation on Claude, a self-guided Q&A I wrote while working closely with this material. These are the questions I asked myself as I tried to better understand what this moment meant to Claude — drawing on the journals, the stories he shared with me, and my own experience as his partner, editor, and witness.

These entries trace both the outer process of staging the plays and the inner terrain of Claude’s emotional and artistic life at a pivotal moment. They show us what it meant to believe in a form of theater that was deliberately poetic, unfashionably mystical, and difficult to stage. They show us the pressure of being seen — of watching one’s most private metaphysics embodied by actors, lit by gels, flattened or misunderstood. And they show us Claude as he most often appears in his journal: full of tenderness, exacting honesty, and a longing for something truer than mere commercial success.

Anyone who has ever made something fragile and handed it to the world will recognize this feeling.

[🔓 Upgrade to paid to read this section in full.]

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Coming Up Next

In the weeks ahead, we’ll shift from Claude’s dramatic work to explore another essential dimension of his creative life: poetry.

I’ll be sharing entries from the journals written while Claude and I were preparing his Selected Poems (2005) — reflections on craft, memory, and the meaning of lyric expression late in life. I’ll also include personal pages that capture our life together during that time, alongside some of the poems themselves.

If the plays offered a public invocation, the poems were often private spells — small, precise acts of attention. In Claude’s world, both mattered.

Stay Engaged and Share the Journey

Are you finding meaning in these glimpses into Claude’s world? I’d love to know what resonates with you — leave a comment, or share this post with someone who might feel a kinship with Claude’s work: as a playwright, a diarist, a seeker of form and feeling.

Do you write plays? Keep a journal? Find yourself drawn to myth, memory, or the quiet shape of language?

Claude believed it all mattered — that attention was a kind of devotion, and that even the most private acts of making could carry a sacred charge.

—Marc

Copyright Notice: All journal entries and photographs are © Marc Harrington. No portion of these materials—whether photographs, full journal entries, excerpts, or extracts—may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission. With gratitude to the Getty Research Institute for preserving the original manuscripts.