Paul Mellon Arts Center
At the dedication of the Paul Mellon Arts Center in 1972, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Choate alumnus Edward Albee ’46 christened the spectacular I.M. Pei-designed facility “an auditorium of ideas.” Today, as the Arts Center enters its second quarter century, the description seems as apt as ever. Few secondary schools can boast an arts curriculum as distinguished and varied as Choate Rosemary Hall’s.
The arts at Choate are exactly what they should be—bedrock curricular, not co-curricular or extracurricular. “I truly believe the arts and the Arts Center are the heart and soul of our community,” says Paul Tines, Executive Director of the Arts Center. " As an arts educator it’s my job to make sure students are continually seeking, discovering, and digging underneath to discover the artist from within. You have to make the arts an everyday experience. Art nourishes our souls, balances out our daily lives, asks us to pause and reflect. We should be surrounded by art, and moved by it,” adds Tines. Those who have lived, shared, and learned the arts at Choate have always known this to be true: opportunities to partake in visual and performing arts have long been among the school's strengths.
“Choate provided me with a wonderful appreciation for the theater and my first inspiration to become an actor,” says Michael Douglas ’63. Douglas, and actors Glenn Close ’65 and Jamie Lee Curtis ’76, have highly visible alumni profiles. But a broad spectrum of Choate graduates have had an impact on the American cultural scene. Among them, film and stage actor Paul Giamatti ’85, whose film “American Splendor” (2003), received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance International Film Festival, and Lauren Ambrose ’96, starring in the HBO series “Six Feet Under.”
George Negroponte ’71 is one of the few living artists to have his work included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He served for a decade on the Visual Artists Panel of the New York State Council for the Arts and recently completed a stint as Visual Arts Lecturer at Princeton University. He is president of The Drawing Center in Soho. His commitment to the arts took root in Wallingford and has transcended the often narrow world of the individual artist. Negroponte’s political activism has also been a vital part of his work. “At Choate I learned a kind of political language I'm applying in life. Artists today are not just making work, but paying some attention to cultural issues,” says Negroponte.
The connection between the arts and culture is a vital one. In our classes and public productions, we constantly wrestle with the challenges of self-definition and community in such productions as A Raisin in the Sun and Whose Life is It Anyway? In concerts and in class, our student musicians are challenged to reach beyond the merely popular and deeper than the merely facile. One has only to listen to a chorus trained by choral director Ralph Valentine ’62 or an ensemble coached by music teacher Philip Ventre to experience the spiritual force of music.
Although Nina Crothers Nangle ’83 had been a student of the violin since age four, Choate brought a new dimension to her playing. “Under the direction of Philip Ventre, I learned about ensemble playing, about listening to the other players in the group,” she says. Since 1989 she has been teaching violin and chamber music at Turtle Bay Music School in New York; she is currently chair of the string department as well. She also maintains her Wallingford ties as concertmaster of the Wallingford Symphony Orchestra, Choate’s orchestra-in-residence.
Earlier graduates like Douglas, Negroponte, and Stephen Bogardus ’72, whose Broadway performance in Love! Valour! Compassion! won him a Tony nomination and Obie award, didn’t have the benefit of the Paul Mellon Arts Center. Bogardus honed his talent on the creaky stage of the beloved Old Gym, now the John Joseph Student Activities Center. The folk duo Tom Logan ’68 and David Batteau ’68, who were a house institution at The Bottom Line in Greenwich Village in the ’70s, started out playing their guitars in the damp basement of Gables House. Batteau is now a songwriter for recording artists such as Shawn Colvin and Dolly Parton.
A rallying cry for the arts was sounded when Headmaster Seymour St. John ’31 officially dedicated the Arts Center in 1972 with the words, “We have liberated our musicians and artists from basements and attics all over the campus . . . We hope now that no student will leave our campus without having been touched by the arts.” Twenty-five years later, the Arts Center is now a laboratory as well as showcase for the arts.
Edward Albee wrote his first play while a student a Choate. In that tradition, student playwrights direct and actors present new works each year in the annual spring Student Playwriting Festival. From the Improv Company to the Spring Musical to the various One Acts produced throughout the year, students have opportunities to present their works in progress. Playwright Ben Kessler ’97, a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, had two original plays produced on the Main Stage at Choate—Blue Suits, a backstage glimpse of a rock singer, and Maniac, a play based on a 1934 movie adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat. Says Kessler, whose budding talent was nurtured here, “In the arts, good faculty aren’t a luxury, they are essential.”
In addition to a Summer Arts Conservatory that offers concentrated five-week study in theater, playwriting and screenwriting, digital video, and visual arts, there is an Arts Concentration program offered during the school year. Students who are chosen for the Arts Concentration program have individually crafted schedules, with arts classes every term in concert with courses selected from Choate’s rich curriculum.
The commitment to the arts continues to grow here on campus, within and beyond the walls of the Paul Mellon Arts Center , Choate Rosemary Hall’s “auditorium of ideas.”
Peter Richmond ’71, a staff writer for GQ magazine