Vernon Neal Weaver (1935-2021)

The Meat and Potatoes Guy, Living and Writing on His Own Terms

By Steven Leigh Morris

Neal at age 24. (Photo by Alex Bender)

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“How he lived to be almost 86 years old mystified many of us. He was a life-long chain smoker; by his own admission, he ate mainly greasy meat and dairy, and took no exercise.”

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For the decades that he was a fixture in LA, primarily as a theater critic for Los Angeles View, Back Stage West, L.A. Weekly and Stage Raw, he went by his middle name Neal. In addition to being a member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle since the mid 1990s, Neal was also a playwright and director, both in Los Angeles and New York. He was known locally as a theater enthusiast, though he could be exacting in his criticism when sufficiently annoyed. From one of Neal’s Stage Raw reviews:

“It emerges that Linda has bought the screen rights to Bro’s book, and plans to produce it with his mother as director. On the strength of no accomplishments whatever, she has become a Hollywood mover and shaker — tough, ruthless and totally self-centered. But she’s wined and dined by the heads of the major studios. Meanwhile, Albert is reduced to mowing lawns and being a gardener. And so it goes, on and on.

 “It’s true that Oscar Wilde wrote an equal amount of nonsense, and it became classic. But once Wilde launched an absurd plot, he hewed closely to logic. And that makes all the difference. A preposterous premise, executed preposterously, leaves us with nothing to believe and nothing to care about. . .”

Shortly after I was named Theater Editor at L.A. Weekly in 1998, I hired Neal to write theater reviews. He, and the entire staff of L.A. View had been laid off in 1996, after New Times Los Angeles purchased both the L.A. View and the L.A. Reader to form Phoenix-based New Times L.A. – which eventually purchased (“merged with”) and decimated L.A. Weekly, owned then by Village Voice Media in New York. Such were the soul-destroying machinations in the local alternative press when it stopped being locally owned. After L.A. Weekly curtailed its arts coverage, I hired Neal to continue writing theater reviews for Stage Raw.     

Neal died peacefully around 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 8, while being transferred from a hospital room at Providence St. Joseph’s hospital in Burbank to a hospice unit within the same hospital. At the time of his death, he was suffering from pulmonary disease, emphysema, a fast-moving bladder cancer and very possibly the aftermath of a recent heart attack. How he lived to be almost 86 years old mystified many of us. He was a life-long chain smoker; by his own admission, he ate mainly greasy meat and dairy, and took no exercise. During a months-long interval between the time he was priced out of his West Hollywood apartment and the Veterans Administration secured him affordable housing, Neal bunked in my Hollywood apartment, drawing complaints that he was chain smoking on the balcony. Eventually, he crossed the street to smoke.

His dying wish was for a cheeseburger and a milkshake, denied him by his doctors because fluid was filling his lungs and they were concerned that any intake of food or liquid could trigger agonizing asphyxiation.

“I’m dying! It’s obvious. Why won’t they just let me go?” he lamented, before adding, “They think I’m crazy.”

Fellow colleague Deborah Klugman was also in the room at the time and assured him that he was not crazy. He leaned forward in his hospital bed – not an easy task, when hooked up to oxygen – to remark in a now piping treble cleff, “Then they must be crazy!”

Deborah and I each held one of his hands. He had lived much of his life alone. His family consisted largely of the small cadre of L.A. drama critics and, to some extent, members of the local theater community. A number of his former colleagues were reluctant to speak about him because, though having worked with him for years, they felt they didn’t really know him. He told us he was grateful that he was not dying alone, as he’d expected to be, and as he’d come to accept.  

Deborah, who served as Neal’s colleague at both L.A. View and L.A. Weekly and his editor at Stage Raw, is one of several of his years-long acquaintances who conceded she didn’t really know him, but grew to admire him over the years.

“He was old school,” she says, “which means that every word matters. It’s the same for me. So we’d argue from a strong foundation of respect.”

A Life in the Theater

July 21, 1987, on Neal’s 52nd birthday. He’s outside 306 W. 38th Street, NYC, packing for Los Angeles

Vernon Neal Weaver was born on July 21, 1935 in Mayfield, Kentucky. After his graduation from Mayfield High School in 1953, he completed four years of study in the Speech and Theatre program of Northwestern University outside Chicago. Fresh out of college in 1957, Neal wasted no time getting to New York, where he wound his way into the Actors Studio. He auditioned but was not admitted as an actor. He was eventually hired (for skeletal wages) to stage manage in the Studio’s Playwrights’ Unit.

Between November, 2016 and May, 2017, Neal penned a six-part series of memoirs in Stage Raw under the collective title: The Seacoast of Bohemia. In his own words, here’s how things transpired for him in 1957: 

“When I arrived in New York City, fresh out of Northwestern University and a season of non-Equity summer stock, I was the greenest of greenhorns. I’d done lots of shows, at school and elsewhere, but never in a really professional context. I was star-struck, and simultaneously contemptuous of the commercial theater which had created those stars. I was insufferably high-minded, and gave short shrift to anything I thought was less than serious theater.

 “I soon learned that lacking an agent, an Equity Card, or important useful contacts made it nearly impossible to get into most auditions. But one door that was open was the auditions for membership in the famed Actors Studio. All you had to do was sign up. So I signed up. And I decided that for my five-minute audition, I’d do a scene from Strindberg’s The Father, which I had played in a workshop production. I rounded up a scene partner and went to work on it. (My scene partner was a beautiful blond actress named Nancy Forsythe, who was as naïve as I was. She said, “I always thought the theater was people like Lawrence Olivier and Helen Hayes, but all I meet are sleazy old men!”)

 “We arrived at the Studio filled with trepidation, and were told to wait in the lounge/green room till we were called. Eventually the call came, and we were led upstairs to the main studio. There were three judges: director John Stix, actress and teacher Tamara Daykarhanova, formerly of the Moscow Art Theatre, and an actor named Fred Stewart. But they were barely perceptible to us in the darkened studio. Only the stage area was lit, creating an eerie and slightly ominous atmosphere. We did our turn, and left, neither pleased nor displeased with our work. I knew my chances were slim in any case.

 “A few days later I was surprised to receive a phone call from Fred Stewart. He said that although they didn’t think I was ready for the Studio, he’d like to meet with me and talk about my audition. I was immediately suspicious, fearing he might just be a dirty old man. But it seemed unwise to turn down his offer. We made an appointment to meet at the studio in early evening a few days later. And I began to research Fred. I discovered he had played Reverend Tooker in Elia Kazan’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Reverend Parrish in The Crucible, and other respectable productions.

 “(Later he would play Natalie Wood’s father in Splendor in the Grass.)

 “When I arrived at the Studio, no one was there except Fred and me. Suspicions alerted. But far from being predatory, he was a portly, distinguished Southern gentleman with white hair and mustache, and more like a mother-hen than a predator. He went to the utility closet in the office and extracted a pair of felt slippers embroidered with pansies, and the makings of a formal tea. He put on the slippers, settled me in the library and served me with tea and cookies. It was as if he were entertaining me in his own home, and indeed, it was his real home. Then he asked me if I was studying with anyone. I told him I was looking for a teacher, and had a tentative list of prospects. He said he was not allowed to recommend acting teachers, but he’d like to add one name to my list: Michael Howard. I took that as a recommendation, and immediately started classes with Michael, and never had cause to regret it. And I felt I had acquired a friend in Fred.

Fred Stewart

 “We stayed in occasional touch over the next months, and when I received my draft notice, I called him to inform him of the fact that I wouldn’t be around for a while. He was most sympathetic, because during World War II, he’d been drafted on the same day that he’d been signed for his first show with Kazan, Jacobowsky and the Colonel. He told me to call him when I got out of the army and he might be able to do something for me.

 “Two years later, after an 18-month stint in the U.S. army in Germany, I was back in New York. I didn’t think Fred would even remember me, but he did. He said there was a job opening for a stage manager for the Playwright’s Unit at the Studio, and I should meet with Molly Kazan to talk about it. Molly was wife to the legendary Elia Kazan, and the woman who’d discovered Tennessee Williams! She was brisk but friendly, and she hired me on the spot. I was thrilled beyond measure.

Molly Kazan

 “In addition to a job (poorly paid), I would now have the glorious opportunity to audit all the classes, in the Playwrights’ Unit, the Actors’ Unit, and the Directors’ Unit. (And there was a certain enjoyment in the fact that while many actors I knew were paying through the nose to study with Lee Strasberg, he would be signing my pay-checks ($40 per week).”

Neal’s The Seacoast of Bohemia is here, in its entirety:

1. Getting Inside the Actors’ Studio
2. Judy Garland: Live at the Actors’ Studio
3. The Mad Russian and the Dane, Part 1: Rudi (Neal’s interview with Rudolf Nureyev)
4. The Mad Russian and the Dane, Part 2: More Rudi
5. The Mad Russian and the Dane, Part 3: Interviewing Rudi
6. The Mad Russian and the Dane, Part 4: Erik (Neal’s interview with Erik Bruhn)

During his years in New York, Neal also served as an actor and director during summer-stock gigs at The Playhouse (Pennsylvania), The Sharon Playhouse (Connecticut), and the Cape May Playhouse in New Jersey). He also served in Germany for 18 months in the U.S. Army, which is why, decades later, he qualified for affordable housing through the Veterans Administration.

In 1975, Neal founded his own theater company on West 38^th Street in New York, the Meat and Potatoes Company, which staged 92 production in its 12 years. Neal’s long-time acquaintance Cathy Carlton was in New York during the tenure of Meat and Potatoes, and recalls what a hot ticket item Neal’s theater was. She tried and was unable to get an audition there.

“Just out of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I sent many a picture and resume to him for whatever he was casting.  In my mind’s eye I still see the manilla envelope with his name, Meat and Potatoes, and the address (somewhere west 30’s, if I recall.) My bright-eyed, young, new and shiny actor self never got an audition with them.

“Fast forward 30 years, Los Angeles, I was acting, producing and serving as PR person for a few theater companies, namely Theatre of NOTE and Ghost Road. Neal and I became acquainted (I would spot him in the lobby and that manilla envelope would flash before my eyes) talking before shows about our early New York days.  (I never mentioned the-not-calling-me-in thing.)  He was happy to know I remembered his company back then. 

“He was a fixture in New York and in L.A. He loved the theater, he loved what the kids were doing and everybody liked and respected him. He was a kind, gentle presence for us.”

Upon learning of his death, Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe (respectively the artistic director and executive director of City Garage Theatre in Santa Monica), contributed the following statement:

“He always came to the theater very early, smoked a cigarette outside, and then sat to chat with us. What was wonderful about him was that he was a real theater person. We often talked about the fact that he had run his own company so he understood how difficult it was to do the kind of theater we were doing. He was a deeply thoughtful critic, and wrote with intelligence and insight about the work, drawing on a depth of experience that few critics have. He was also very funny. And sarcastic. Which we liked. Au revoir Neal.”

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“If the phrase “still waters run deep” was ever true about a person, it was true of Neal Weaver. Never have I known a person so placid on the surface, yet so fiercely opinionated just below.” — David Mermelstein

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On the day he died, his long-time friend, Terri Price, an actress from Meat and Potatoes Company, flew in from the East Coast to see him. (Neal had given her power of attorney over his possessions.) But she arrived too late to see him awake. 

Later that same day, after Terri had left the hospital, Neal’s editor at L.A. View, David Mermelstein, had shown up and followed his gurney as it was being moved from his hospital room into the hospice ward. He had noted to himself an alarmingly low blood pressure reading, he says. In the hospice room, David observed considerable “stethoscope activity” going on by a number of a nurses. One of them asked David how he thought Neal looked.

David, a writer and editor, did what he’s been doing for decades – choosing his words carefully.

“He looks . . . different,” David said. His meaning was understood by all, and soon confirmed.

That night, David penned his own reflections on his associations with Neal.

“If the phrase “still waters run deep” was ever true about a person, it was true of Neal Weaver. Never have I known a person so placid on the surface, yet so fiercely opinionated just below.

“I first met Neal when he came to what was then the Village View – later, the Los Angeles View – as a theater critic, where I was, on and off, the section’s editor.

“Neal was the senior voice in our little department of critics for the life of the View, which ended in July 1996. He had seen more theater, by far, than anyone in our section, and written and directed plenty of it, too.

“Neal was always generous in his criticism – often too much so for my taste. I frequently encouraged him to be harder on actors, directors and playwrights. He rarely, if ever, heeded my counsel.

“I recall once getting a review of his, which, as usual, was impeccably written. Yet I was dissatisfied. I wanted something more critical, and told him so. As I handed Neal back his review, he stared at me across the desk – his eyes fiery even as his face remained impassive. And then, right in front of me, he tore his review to shreds and calmly walked out of the View offices, not saying a word. We later patched things up, I’m happy to say, though I no longer recall who gave way!

“In the days after the View’s end, when both Neal and I worked as critics at L.A. Weekly, I saw him regularly both at the theater and at the regular meetings convened to discuss the Weekly’s annual theater awards. Our conversation was always stimulating and frequently sent me in search of shows that Neal recommended and I would otherwise have missed.

“With the passing of years, my encounters with Neal were fewer, but I was always pleased to run into him at the theater, and I eagerly sought his knowing opinions – coming to believe, rightly or wrongly, that Neal had gotten tougher in his old age, though perhaps it was the other way around, and I had instead grown more tolerant.

“Our association rekindled recently, as Neal’s health went into serious decline. Though it had been years since we’d seen each other in person, it felt as though no time had passed at all. We spent not a moment “catching up,” but instead dove right back into discussing the merits of this or that play or actor and recalling, with fondness, old times.

“I feel lucky to have been among the group of dear friends who got to share some of Neal’s last hours, knowing that he died – as he had lived, and reviewed – on his own terms.”