Abstract

The Tamiment Playhouse, located at the Socialist Party's retreat, Camp Tamiment, in Pennsylvania's Pocono mountains, became an important workshop and a major creative outlet for theater, dance, film, and television in the mid-twentieth century. Actors such as Danny Kaye, Bea Arthur, Imogene Coca, and Carol Burnett; directors Max Liebman, Herb Ross, and Joe Layton; choreographer Jerome Robbins; and writers Woody Allen and Neil Simon are a small sampling of the major entertainment figures nurtured at Camp Tamiment. Much of the original material performed at Tamiment found its way to the professional stage, Broadway, and television. All interviewees were involved in the Tamiment Playhouse, mainly in the 1950s. This collection consists of interviews containing recollections of the Tamiment summer theater, as well as discussions about the importance of the Playhouse for Broadway. The interviews in this collection were conducted between 1980 and 1988 by Andrew Horn of the Tamiment Playhouse Archives and by NYU Performance Studies graduate student Martha S. LoMonaco for her dissertation and subsequent book on the Tamiment Playhouse, entitled Every Week a Broadway Revue. These interviews are in the form of audio recordings and their transcripts. The collection also contains live recordings of shows at the Tamiment Playhouse dating from 1955-1960.