Saturday, August 26, 2006
DAVID CUTHBERT

For much of the 37 years he spent teaching drama and film at Loyola University, Brother Alexis Gonzales was always returning from somewhere exotic or on his way to somewhere even more marvelous. So it wasn't all that unusual that he abruptly made his final trip a week ago at the age of 76. He just had someplace better to

"The globe-trotting Brother Alexis" is how former Times-Picayune columnist Betty Guillaud always referred to him, as she detailed his annual travels to teach at Oxford, or to serve on this jury or that at the Cannes Film Festival, or fulfill Fulbright scholarships in Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina or Bolivia. "The mad monk" was what admirers and detractors sometimes called him, along with "Bubbles" and, more recently, "The Notorious B.A.G."

Times-Picayune chief critic Frank Gagnard recognized that someone extraordinary had arrived on the local scene when Gonzales joined the Loyola Drama Department in 1970, not long after he had been profiled in a lengthy Life magazine article on "the phenomenon of Brother Alexis," who had turned around the Antonian High School in San Antonio by unorthodox teaching methods: theater and film programs that were all-inclusive, inviting teachers, parents and anyone who was interested to take part.

"He brought something to New Orleans that wasn't there before," Gagnard said, "new techniques, like open rehearsals, new playwrights, such as Jean-Claude van Itallie, whom we were hearing about but weren't seeing produced in New Orleans. He created an excitement among audiences and actors."

Alexis established the Loyola Experimental Theatre in barracks buildings that then existed in back of Bobet Hall, where he staged van Itallie's "The Serpent" and introduced Paul Sills' "Story Theatre." "He was a magical person," said Jim Arena, one of his students then, adding, "black magic, by which I mean he was also full of mischief. He was creating an explosion of creativity."

In 1971, Gonzales staged Molière's "The Miser" with Michael O'Sullivan in Marquette Theatre, re-setting the comedy in New Orleans during Spring Fiesta. Gagnard gave the staging a rave the like of which he seldom, if ever, gave anything. "It is not only recommended -- it is imperative that anyone who takes joy in theater sees this stylish and hilarious staging," Gagnard wrote. "Rich is the word for this 'Miser' -- in talent, imagination and care."

After that, Gonzales continued impressing audiences and critics with provocative productions such as "The Trial of the Catonsville Nine," a draft-resistance play written during the Vietnam War by the Rev. Daniel Berrigan; Nancy Ford-Gretchen Cryer's "The Last Sweet Days of Isaac," a rock musical set in a stalled elevator; and Peter Luke's "Hadrian VII," a comedy about a man who imagines himself to be the pope.

"Hadrian" was co-directed by Gonzales and Stocker Fontelieu at Le Petit Theatre. "He was very inventive," Fontelieu recalled, "and as curious about my reaction to his suggestions as I was to his about mine. We made a good team. In fact, it was one of the best things ever done at Le Petit.

"I remember, he screened the film 'Shoes of the Fisherman' for the cast to acquaint them with the workings of the church."

Film was undoubtedly Gonzales' abiding passion. He was an integral part of the New Orleans Media Institute and, together with John Mosier, established The Film Buffs Institute (the FBI, an Alexis joke), which sponsored film festivals and screenings of every stripe, including an annual French Film Festival.

In 1972, he brought Jacques Tati to town for the first American tribute to the director-star of "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" and "Mon Oncle." During the '70s and '80s, Loyola was the site of constant screenings of new films sent by studios to create campus "buzz," old films Gonzales sought out (the first film he remembered seeing as a child was "Dracula," "in a print that was tinted green"), foreign films that could be seen nowhere else, "200 films a year," Gonzales estimated.

At the home he shared on Calhoun Street for years with other members of the Loyola religious teaching community, Alexis would perform experiments, such as showing the 1936 and 1951 versions of "Showboat" side-by-side on his living room wall to compare the two. When the Exhibitors' Poster Exchange went out of business, Gonzales somehow managed to get hold of its entire stock, thousands of posters, which filled up whole rooms.

At the same time he was doing all this, Gonzales was participating in the New Orleans Public Schools' Artists in Residence pilot programs, at Chester Elementary School in the Calliope housing development and Live Oak Middle School in the Irish Channel. "He was a very special, imaginative person," said Shirley Trusty Corey, now chief executive officer of the Arts Council of New Orleans, then supervisor of the school system's office of cultural resources. "And because he was, he opened up students' imaginations." She added, "As I remember, he did this work for free."

"I don't know how he did all he did," said Jay Calamia, Loyola associate vice president for financial affairs and Gonzales' friend. "The most amazing thing to me is that when I traveled with him -- to London or New York -- he knew everybody and everybody knew him. Doors just opened to him."

Gonzales' walls were covered with theatrical masks from different countries and dozens of signed photographs of the famous, some just acquaintances, but a surprising number of them friends.

He met Helen Hayes when he was a young member of the Christian Brothers on the Philippine island of Negros Occidental, where he directed her in a program of readings and apparently impressed her, since she helped secure him a Rockefeller grant that enabled him to visit every major U.S. theater company in the '60s. Hayes introduced him to Lillian Gish, whom he later lit for an appearance at Loyola. "She wanted only rose-colored gels," Alexis recalled. "She knew what she was doing."

He befriended silent-screen vamp Pola Negri, who left him a cache of correspondence, including a 1928 note from George Bernard Shaw in spidery handwriting. His theater and film friends were legion, from Patti Lupone, whom he met when she was a young member of John Houseman's first Juilliard Acting Company, to Jeremy Irons, encountered on the South American set of "The Mission," to Jane Fonda, who signed her photo, "Cut the crap, Brother Alexis."

He directed many plays by the Rev. Ernest Ferlita, for some years head of Loyola's Drama Department, the most memorable being "Black Medea" in 1976 ("Black Media," Alexis called it), with an African-American cast headed by Carol Sutton, who described Gonzales as being "so kind, so much fun and so gossipy. There wasn't anything remotely 'holier than thou' about him." Gian Carlo Menotti invited "Black Medea" to his first Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., and it also played off-Broadway.

Among Gonzales' later productions, I remember "Camino Real," with Peter Gonzales, the actor who had played the Young Federico in "Fellini's Roma," a "Macbeth" in which a trap door opened and the witches seemed to emerge from the bowels of hell. Then there was "Titus Andronicus," when Gonzales' bloody realism had audience members fainting and becoming ill.

The only time I worked with him on a theater production was the local premiere of "Mass Appeal." Bill C. Davis' comedy-drama about an idealistic young seminarian and a tippling older priest was edgy for its day, but basically a two-character, one-set play; a snap. However, Alexis liked so many of the actors who auditioned, he insisted on double-casting it. Then he wanted a Spanish-speaking cast and two actors to sign the play for the hearing impaired. We ended up paying eight actors for a two-character play.

But he was a whiz at scoring props and costumes, sending me up into the attic at Holy Name of Jesus Church on the Loyola campus for "just the right prie-dieu" and "borrowing" vestments from the priests' dressing room behind the altar.

We still needed an elaborately carved, imposing chair for the elder priest. "There are some doozies in the alcoves in the church," Gonzales said. By this time, I was hot and sweaty and a wedding party was forming inside. "Go get one," he told me.

"But, Alexis, I just can't crash a wedding, looking like this, and take a chair from the church."

"Sure you can," he said. "Don't you know your Hitchcock? 'Family Plot'? People are intimidated in church. No one will do or say a thing."

And they didn't.

. . . . . . .

CURTAIN LINES: "I've been every place I ever wanted to go and met everybody I wanted to meet. . . . The ones who last are the workers, who strive to be artists first and don't care if they're celebrities or not. And they're the ones who like New Orleans, because people here don't care who you are."

-- Brother Alexis Gonzales

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Theater writer David Cuthbert can be reached at dcuthbert@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3468.

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