Brooks McNamara, 1937-2009
Brooks McNamara, 1998 (Photo: The Shubert Archive)
Brooks McNamara was the founding Director of The Shubert Archive which he guided from its beginnings in 1976 until his retirement in 1999. His intuitive grasp of the historical importance of materials discovered in Shubert crawlspaces, storage rooms, and backstage areas was crucial to the Archive becoming a major resource to theatre historians and scholars worldwide.
Brooks‘ recounting of the Archive‘s formation acknowledged the part that serendipity and timing played in its founding. Lynn Seidler, then Executive Director of The Shubert Foundation, contacted him in his capacity as a professor of theatre history at New York University and asked him to look at papers and records that had been found in Shubert theatres. Lynn recognized the value of these materials but sought advice on what best to do with them. Initially, Brooks had no idea as to the immensity of the project, but he soon realized that all 17 of the Shubert theatres had storage spaces and each room or cubby hole was crammed with scripts, costume designs, music, correspondence, business records, ledgers, and so on. It was a deluge of lost or forgotten items. Brooks recalled, for example, finding hundreds of architectural plans in a room with a skylight. Because of the fragility of the paper and the heat and humidity of the space, many of the plans crumbled in his hands when they were touched.
After surveying the collection and realizing its value and importance, Brooks proposed to Lynn Seidler, Gerald Schoenfeld, Bernard B. Jacobs, and the Shubert Board that they consider establishing their own archive. To facilitate that end, he recommended that they retain him part-time as Director to oversee the project and that they hire a part-time archivist to inventory and process the material. He suggested offering the archivist‘s position to Brigitte Kueppers, a part-time project archivist at the Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. Then Brooks had another inspiration. At NYU he had been instrumental in establishing the field of popular entertainment as an academic research area. Why not figure out a way to give graduate students an opportunity to immerse themselves in all of this unplumbed primary source material and, at the same time, provide Shubert with a readily available and knowledgeable work force? Ultimately, he decided that setting up an intern program with NYU would kill two birds with one stone. For ten years, NYU interns trooped through the archive creating order out of chaos, finding inspiration in this wonderful treasure trove, and taking their experience with them as they pursued their careers in the worlds of academia and archives. Many of Brooks‘ students and interns are now teaching in universities, creating live theatre, or preserving archival materials for future generations of researchers.
Brooks was many things: a pioneer in the study of popular entertainment as a serious academic subject and cultural signpost, a teacher, a mentor to the next generation of theatre historians, a kind and thoughtful boss to the archive staff, and a true gentleman. He left us much too soon but his legacy both in The Shubert Archive and the students he inspired will keep his memory alive.
Maryann Chach
Director, The Shubert Archive
Brooks McNamara was, I believe, the first academic to be elected President of TLA and I was the second. Since Brooks was my mentor, under whom I happily studied for my doctorate in Performance Studies at NYU and who was responsible for launching my career as an archivist/scholar, I‘ve always felt that my service as TLA President was in honor of Brooks and his pioneering work in the area of theatre archives.
Maryann Chach has written a lovely history of Brooks‘ work as founding Director and guiding spirit of the Shubert Archive which was, despite his fourteen published books, certainly his magnum opus. It was not his only archive, however. By training so many NYU grad students as archival interns--we called ourselves Shubies--he, by extension, instigated the founding of many other theatre archives throughout the country. My personal example is the Tamiment Playhouse Archive, which is part of the Tamiment Library at NYU, and the story of its beginnings is a typical Brooksian tale. I was a new Shubie happily descending the stairs in the Lyceum Theatre lobby while he was walking up. He answered my cheery greeting of "Hello, Brooks!" by asking, "Aren‘t you originally from Pennsylvania?" I said yes, and he smiled with glee, proclaiming, "Well, have I got a dissertation for you!" He had just gotten off the phone with a New York City garment manufacturer who had his own personal theatre archive in an empty storeroom. It turned out to be the records of the Tamiment Playhouse in Pennsylvania‘s Pocono Mountains, about sixty miles from where I grew up. The Tamiment Playhouse did, indeed, become my doctoral dissertation as well as my subsequent book, Every Week, A Broadway Revue (Greenwood, 1992). However, before all of that, Brooks engineered the transfer of the manufacturer‘s records to NYU, and I graduated from being a Shubie to project director of a newly created archive. This is simply one of many McNamara-to-the-rescue tales of important theatre documents that Brooks managed to valiantly salvage and place in secure, accessible archival homes.
I, of course, was not the only Shubie that Brooks turned into an archivist/scholar and, in many ways, this was his unique gift as an educator. He not only introduced us to the nuts and bolts of creating a research archive (it was actually Brigitte Kueppers who taught us how to get our hands dirty and the documents clean), but he guided us in how to use and interpret these documents in our scholarship. A fellow Shubie, Steve Nelson, who went on to create numerous theatre archives, described our collective experience most eloquently in the centennial edition of The Passing Show, the newsletter of the Shubert Archive which Brooks both founded and named in 1977:
In amongst all those boxes of memos, contracts and brown paper parcels was a picture of American theatre and the people who made it happen that was more vivid and compelling than any I‘d ever imagined. Brooks taught me the value of looking closely at what others ignored, of not being one more foot soldier in the greatest achievements‘ school of theatre scholarship, and that, finally, there aren‘t nearly as many trivial performances as there are experts with the need to trivialize. He made it OK to spend time on what I was really interested in, and showed me that (in his words) it, 'might well be that all forms of performance are serious and complex expressions of a culture‘s most fundamental concerns, and that all are worthy of study... and no apologies needed.‘ (The Passing Show, vol. 22, no. 2, B 4-5).
Brooks' spirit, passion, and expert guidance continue to be an inspiration; he will be sorely missed.
Marti LoMonaco
Immediate Past President, TLA
Chair, Department of Visual & Performing Arts, Fairfield University
Read Brooks' New York Times obituary
Last updated: January 14, 2010