This week’s column was supposed to be a paean to theatrical productions in the Baltimore region, but I developed a distracting fixation in the process: The fact that the theater at Oldfields, the all-girls prep school in northern Baltimore County, is named after the late British actor David Niven.
I have never heard David Niven mentioned among other stars of stage and screen who emerged from these parts or settled here, and there’s been a bunch, including Francis X. Bushman, Dorothy Lamour, André De Shields, Jada Pinkett Smith and Divine.
David Niven? He was that nattily-dressed fellow who was all hello-darling and goodbye-old-chap in a variety of black-and-white movies from the 20th Century.
What, in the name of names, is his name doing on a theater in Sparks Glencoe?
What can I tell you, friends? I get hung up on such questions. It’s a professional hazard. Please bear with me as I report my findings.
The Oldfields theater, with brick walls, timber trusses and comfortable seating for about 180, doubles now as home to the region’s newest theatrical company, Manor Mill Playhouse. That creative enterprise results from a partnership between the 158-year-old private school and Manor Mill, the artistic hub located a few miles away in an 18th Century grist mill in Monkton.
I saw the company’s first production last fall, a solid rendering of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” but came away with that question: David Niven?
Why is the theater at Oldfields named after that dandy fellow with the pencil moustache?
David Niven starred in motion pictures dating back to the 1930s. He was a pal of Errol Flynn, another actor with a pencil moustache, and starred with him as a World War I fighter pilot in “The Dawn Patrol” in 1938. Niven appeared in war movies as well as drawing room dramas, spy films, spoofs and screwball comedies. He was a leading man, described often as debonair, witty and charming. (Sometimes the adjective “handsome” was attached to Niven, but I never quite got that.)
He won an Oscar for best actor for his role in “Separate Tables” in 1958, but is probably best remembered as Phileas Fogg in “Around The World in 80 Days” from two years earlier. Niven was famously host of the 1974 Academy Awards telecast when a naked man, a streaker, ran across the stage. “Probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life,” Niven remarked, “is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.”
The actor, who was also an accomplished writer, worked into the early 1980s even as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, took a toll on his body and his voice. He died in 1983, at age 73, at his home in Switzerland.
Two sons survived him. One of them, James Niven, better known as Jamie, had married a Philadelphia debutante named Fernanda Wanamaker Wetherill in 1968.
The couple’s announcement in The New York Times mentioned that Miss Wetherill had “graduated from the Oldfields School in Glencoe, Md. [in 1963] and attended the Sorbonne in Paris.” It also mentioned that her summer debut at a lavish coming-out party in Southampton, New York had ended with “an unfortunate incident” at a nearby beach house that prompted her parents to cancel her introduction to Philadelphia society the following December.
So that’s some of the back story that helps make the connection, through marriage, of Niven to Oldfields.
Jamie Niven, a New York businessman and philanthropist, gave a challenge grant towards building the David Niven Theater. The theatre resulted from a conversion and renovation of what used to be a gymnasium in 1988. It’s a pleasing space with good sight lines for the audience, and its location on the Oldfields campus provides something unusual in the region — a theater in a bucolic setting. Manor Mill’s collaboration with Oldfields — arranged by Ansley Smithwick, the head of school, and Angelo Otterbein, the mill’s proprietor — will bring to the campus visitors who’ve likely never been on the grounds of the exclusive school.
The next production, “Shorts: An Evening of One-Act Plays,” takes place over four days in early April. There are three plays within “Shorts,” each with a different director. “The Actor’s Nightmare” is a comedy by Christopher Durang, directed by Vanessa Eskridge, who directed “Our Town” in October. The second play is “Trifles,” a crime drama by Susan Glaspell, directed by Matthew Sean Mitchell; and “The Most Massive Woman Wins,” a play about body image by Madeleine George, directed by Chloe Brush and Emily Decker.
Disclosure: Vanessa Eskridge was the executive producer of Midday on WYPR when I was its host, and she has performed in my plays at the Baltimore Museum of Art. But that’s not why I wrote this column. It was that David Niven thing.
I loved David Niven, both as an actor and a human. I think it’s a great name for a theater!
Dan, now you have to get to the bottom of this: “…her summer debut at a lavish coming-out party in Southampton, New York had ended with “an unfortunate incident” at a nearby beach house…”
David Niven’s granddaughter also attended Oldfields in the late 1980s.