The Pilot News - A half-century’s wait

Academy drama instructor J. Gerald Markley, says Tahse, knew that most cadets weren’t interested in theater. “He would go down to the academic department and ask for the top five students,” recalls Tahse. “His concept was, you may not be an actor, but if you see what I’m doing and can imitate me, you learn how to learn lines. My first part at age 16 was Grandpa in “You Can’t Take it With You,” with a lot of corn starch in my hair!”
Tahse, who graduated from CMA in 1948, was heavily involved with the school’s Vedette newspaper before he became editor of the Roll Call yearbook, working with another giant in Culver’s history, former Culver Citizen editor Bob Rust.
Tahse’s interest in acting soon gave way to an interest in production work in theater. “I quickly learned that most of the laughs went to character actors, which I wasn’t. You try to play the straight guy in “You Can’t Take it With You” with all these crazy people around you; you might as well phone it in! I really liked producing. I became interested in producing at the Maxinkuckee Playhouse.”
The Maxinkuckee Playhouse was and is something of a local and regional legend, and Tahse was in on the ground floor of its 1950 inception, when he met Paul Rutledge at the University of Cincinnati. Rutledge, a first year teacher at the University, worked with Tahse on several productions there, including a performance of “Dark of the Moon” which made the AP newswire when the president of the university initially forbade performance of the play. “We made a fool of him,” smiles Tahse in retrospect. “We got rave reviews.”
Rutledge and Tahse began contemplating what to do next. “We all knew summer theater,” Tahse says. “I said, ‘I know a great place for summer theater,’ and we came up here to Culver. We found that property (on East Shore Lane)…it was a bran and we were going to turn it into a summer theater! We didn’t ask anybody if we could do it: the mayor, the police. We didn’t get any building permit. We just turned a barn into a theater, and nobody said anything.”
The barn in question al lowed for 150 seats on the second floor, Tahse recalls, and a stage was built in the loft. Downstairs was the lobby, complete with refreshment stand for orange juice and cookie sales. “I went to…a department store and said, ‘I’ve got an enormous window that I need curtains for.’ It took all this material, and they gave me a great deal. It was a beautiful yellow and green, perpendicular stripe curtain.”
The two employed a student at the university as stage carpenter and scene builder, and began recruiting actors at colleges around the Midwest, placing signs for auditions for summer theater productions, no pay but room and board, which was enticement enough for many actors. “We had a good number of people to choose from. A lot of times enthusiasm and determination were replacing good acting, but the audience was with us, and then you can do practically anything.”
An extension was added to the building for bunking actors, with two other small structures added for stage people. Aggie Brown, wife of Academy mess hall waiter Roy Brown, became the Playhouse cook (“She was wonderful!” Tahse recalls fondly). A field on Queen Road was rented to act as a primitive parking lot, and the group was able to produce approximately seven plays per summer, running on one week, off the next, with performances Tuesday through Sunday.
“We didn’t sell season tickets,” Tahse notes. “It became a habit, something to do, to go to the Maxinkuckee Playhouse. The lake (attracted) guests of people in cottages and so forth, and I don’t think there was any other summer theater in Indiana that was working at that time. There was a great big spread in the Indianapolis Star at the time, a major story. We were written up in the South Bend papers and the Citizen. Bob Rust was really very good to us.”
“Paul (Rutledge) directed all of (the plays),” Tahse explains. “I did publicity for all of it. We would go out all around Argos and Plymouth and put up posters…we were nice kids; there was nothing crazy about us. No drugs, we weren’t drunk or anything like that. Everybody liked us, and there was a nice relationship between the town and us. And certainly on the east shore: you had to have their support. I think Culver was ready to do something more…I sensed we were here at the right time in terms of Culver deciding, ‘Let’s be something ourselves, and not just an appendage to the Academy.’”
Tahse says many of the theater’s seats were filled, even at six performances per week. Tickets sold for $2.50 each, though “we certainly never had a profit.” Most plays were alternating drama and comedies, but no musicals, at least not until the construction of a new, larger building housing 300 seats and a larger stage in the mid-1950s. After that, the Playhouse specialized in musicals, says Tahse. And, though Rutledge carried on, Tahse was gone by 1954, a result of his stint in the ROTC at Culver, which led to his being stationed for two years at San Antonio, Texas in the Air Force.
The Maxinkuckee Playhouse folded in 1963, with Rutledge becoming very successful and creating the theater department at the University of Cincinnati (Tahse says the two remain friends today) and Tahse moving on to New York, landing a job at the Cherry Lane Theater there as assistant stage manager and working in the box office. Eventually, Tahse was employed full time by legendary theater producer Maurice Evans (“No Time for Sergeants,” “Teahouse of the August Moon,” “Dial M for Murder,” and many more), whom he convinced to create touring companies to take hit Broadway plays on the road to smaller cities like Grand Rapids and South Bend.
By age 25, Tahse had left Evans and was working for himself producing Broadway shows, working with some of the most famous talents and best-known shows of the day. “That started my career,” he says. “I did ‘Advice and Consent,” “The Miracle Worker,’ ‘On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.’ They would call me up and give me the rights to their shows. I did 15 of them altogether.”
Tahse’s name undoubtedly garnered the most exposure to modern audiences for his work in television producing ABC’s “After School Specials,” an early television effort to be marketed to teens, says Tahse. “I wanted to do movies for TV,” he recalls. After his debut “Special,” “they offered me an exclusive contract for seven more. I produced 26 After School Specials, more than anyone, and they were all adaptations of books. And it worked.”
Stars like Rob Lowe, Felicity Hoffman, and Ben Affleck made their debut on the show, which won “all kinds of awards,” according to Tahse, who adds that the DVD sets featuring his shows are “pretty popular.”
Besides work in a number of other areas, including producing the PBS series “Wonderworks,” Tahse is currently involved in a feature (theatrical) movie. But in all those years, he never returned to Culver, though he doesn’t really know why he’s not returned to the area he last saw in 1954. “I came here on a scholarship,” he explains. “I owe the Academy a great deal. At that time, they only gave one a year, and I won it.”
“I always had a fondness in my heart (for Culver)…I’m so glad I (came back). I thought, ‘Suppose I don’t recognize anybody, and we have a hard time talking to each other. Our 27 people I haven’t seen for 60 years. There were three of us friends, and the odd thing is, we started talking to each other like we just left the mess hall yesterday, I guess because we lived so closely with each other. We were each other’s family in a broad sense.”
“It was interesting talking about our teachers. I just loved Art Hughes, John Mars, and Al Donnely. They were incredible teachers; they made me what I am. That’s what that Academy is about: those teachers and what they can do for you. I said to a couple of guys, ‘Wouldn’t it have been nice if when we were cadets, we realized what it was going to do for us. We couldn’t do that; we were busy shining shoes and that sort of thing! How lucky we were, fortunate to have so many things to take advantage of.”
The changes at Culver in the years since his departure, says Tahse, haven’t bothered him at all, even the addition 30 years ago of the Culver Girls Academy. “Girls were different, they changed the whole makeup. But I had no misgivings when I saw it.
Except, that is, the housing of girls in Argonne and Chateau Thierry barracks. Tahse smiles, “They were in my barracks!”