Theater historians believe Anonymous wrote several plays, from ancient Greece into the Middle Ages, including a 15th Century work called The Summoning of Everyman, or just Everyman.
Anonymous has also made the staging of plays possible, donating cumulatively millions of dollars to theaters around the world and across the country, including Everyman in Baltimore.
Hundreds of Marylanders have contributed to the professional theater Vincent Lancisi established in 1990. Their names appear in the programs given to the audience with each production.
But one of Everyman’s most generous and consistent patrons in the early days of the theater was Anonymous.
Reflecting recently on his 35 years as Everyman’s founding artistic director — and his decision to retire at the end of next season — Vinny Lancisi mentioned how a Connecticut woman helped him pay the bills back when he first started producing plays.
“She helped in a big way back when it was a real struggle for us,” he says. “And I never knew who she was.”
The woman consistently refused any public acknowledgement of her gifts. Lancisi estimates that she contributed at least $250,000 to Everyman over 22 years. Her generosity was vital at the start.
In 1990, Lancisi needed money. He planned to produce his first play in a church in Charles Village. He went looking for loans to pay for rent, cast, crew, lights and other equipment.
“I’d moved to Baltimore and I’d been pounding the pavement trying to raise money,” he says. “I mean, imagine me, a guy just out of graduate school who doesn’t know anything, going into a bank. The people at the bank said, ‘So tell us, where is Everyman Theatre?’ And, of course, I said, ‘Well, actually, we perform in different spaces.’”
The lack of a permanent home was a non-starter for every loan officer Lancisi met.
“They thought I was homeless,” Lancisi says. “They thought money from a loan would never make the stage.”
One day, the phone rang in Lancisi’s apartment in Bolton Hill. It was the father of a college chum, a fellow theater major. The man was an established financial advisor in Florida and had heard from his son of Lancisi’s difficulties.
“I took the call in my office, which was my bedroom,” Lancisi says. “He asked, ‘How much would it cost you to do your first show?’ And I made up a number. I said $10,000. He said, ‘All right, I’ll be back in touch.”
The man called the next day to say he had the 10-Large for Everyman, the new theater company could count on it.
Lancisi suspected that the man was being personally generous or that his company was making the gift. But that was not the case. The man was advisor to a couple in a wealth class he called “blue collar billionaires.”
They were not billionaires, of course, but wealthy from a lifetime of saving and investing. The woman’s husband had been a pharmacist in Connecticut. The couple did not have children, just a niece they didn’t like. They had invested in blue chip stocks — IBM, for instance — and over the years made more money than they spent. The couple had retired to the Tampa area.
When the husband died, his widow was advised to donate some of the couple’s wealth to nonprofits. The woman agreed.
While expressing no preference for a particular charity, she liked the idea of making a big impact for a small organization. In fact, she insisted on that, telling her advisor: “I don’t want my money to go to some big organization where it goes into some administrative black hole.”
In Baltimore, Lancisi established Everyman’s nonprofit status. The first major gift would come from Anonymous. The theater would receive $10,000 but with conditions.
“I was told, ‘You can never know who she is,’” Lancisi recalls. “‘This is a woman who lives under the radar. She said, ‘I don’t want anybody to bug me.’ I said, ‘Okay.’”
Lancisi assembled a scrapbook from Everyman’s start-up: Photos of actors with notes to their “anonymous angel,” thanking her. The financial advisor passed it along, but Lancisi never heard from the woman.
“The years went by and I still didn’t know who she was,” he says.
The woman was not known to be a patron of the arts. Funding the start of a new theater in Baltimore had never occurred to her, but what a huge difference she made. The annual donations from Anonymous paid year after year for the rent and utility bills after Everyman found a home at 1727 North Charles Street, a converted bowling alley.
“It was always a struggle for us to keep a roof over our heads,” Lancisi says. “That’s why our anonymous angel was so important.”
Lancisi’s company staged plays at 1727 Charles for 18 years before moving to its present location on Fayette Street in 2013.
Her financial advisor kept Anonymous informed of Everyman’s development. She never came to Baltimore, never saw an Everyman play. But she died knowing that her donations had made a real difference in the arts here.
After the woman’s death, Lancisi wanted to name his main theater after her. But her financial advisor nixed the idea. “That would be the last thing in the world that she would want,” he said. “She wanted anonymity from day one.”
