User:Engelbach

Jerry Engelbach (1943, Dayton, Ohio) is a musician and visual artist, formerly based in New York City, now living in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México. Born Gerald Stanley Engelbach, he later legally changed his name.

Early Life

Engelbach was born in Dayton, Ohio, during World War II, to Theordore and Irene Englbach (nee Somers). After his father was drafted into the Navy, the family lived at the U.S. Naval Base at Pensacola, Florida. Following the War, they moved to the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York, where Engelbach's younger bother, Robert Jay Engelbach, was born, and in 1949 they moved into a new house in a recently developed area of Queens, New York.

Education

In the post-war period the Baby Boomers greatly swelled the childhood population of the country, and Engelbach attended several schools newly built to accommodate them. At Martin Van Buren High School in Queens Village, NY, he was the cartoonist for the school newspaper and his senior class Yearbook, and art editor of the school's literary magazine. He composed songs for and performed in his senior class show, won local contests for logo design and a traffic safety poster, and at graduation received school medals for excellence in art and in speech.

While in high school, during the summers he worked for his father's custom slipcover and drapery business, running an overlock machine and cutting slipcovers.

At the age of 15 he began to teach himself piano, and, after leaving High School, at 17 joined a band, playing gigs in New York City and in the Catskills.

He was one of 60 out of 300 competitors to secure a place at the tuition-free Cooper Union in Manhattan, where he studied art and wrote a music column for the school newspaper.

In 1963 he left Cooper Union without securing a degree, and studied music, briefly, at Juilliard under Peter Schickele, who later achieved fame as the persona of the bumbling composer P.D.Q. Bach.

Later he studied poetry with José Garcia Villa at The New School and acting with Anthony Mannino at the Drama Tree and with Theodore Mann and Gladys Vaughn at the Circle in the Square.

The 1960s

In 1963 he married fellow Cooper Union student Marjorie Kramer, and they opened the Fifth Street Gallery on New York's lower East side, where in addition to paintings and drawings they showed the work of notable photographers, including Nat Finkelstein and Dave Heath.

At this time he became an observer of the "New Thing" music scene, meeting many of New York's up and coming young jazz players. He hung out with Marzette Watts, jammed briefly with Pharoah Sanders, and lent a trumpet to Don Cherry for a concert when the latter hocked his own horn to support a growing drug habit.

In the summer of 1964 he worked as an ice cream seller for Bungalow Bar and Good Humor.

After Engelbach and Kramer separated in 1964, they closed the gallery and he became manager and sometime piano player at the Al Sirat Coffee House on Manhattan's East Fourth Street, across the street from the avant-garde theatre La Mama. The Al Sirat, owned by actor Bill Baron, was a popular hangout for aspiring and accomplished artists, musicians, actors, and writers, including Shirley Stoler, Roderick Thorp, and Earl Robinson.

In 1964, Engelbach began a relationship with Fern Levine, who later became a successful designer of hand-woven goods. They lived for several years on New York's Lower East Side, and in 1968 became pioneer loft dwellers on Broome Street in Manhattans's Soho district. The couple separated in 1970, and Engelbach moved into aother loft on Centre Street, where he obtained one of New York City's Artist-in-Residence (A.I.R.) permits, which legalized loft living for qualified applicants.

From 1965 to 1968 he was heavily involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, joining first the Committee to Aid the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and later the Spartacist League.

In 1967 he became the manager of One-Two-Kangaroo, a store in Greenwich Village that featured imported toys and numbered among its regular patrons many celebrities, including Anthony Perkins and Jerry Orbach. When the store's owner Stephen A. Miller became president of Creative Playthings, a leading producer of educational toys then owned by CBS, Engelbach became the company's Manager of Marketing, commuting from Manhattan to Princeton, New Jersey.

Early Theatre Work

In 1968 Engelbach began studying acting at the Drama Tree, the studio of Anthony Mannino, a journeyman actor (no relation to a contemporary younger actor of the same name) who had taught at Herbert Berghoff's studio and had trained many successful performers. Engelbach subsequently studied at the Circle in the Square Theatre School.

In 1970, while continuing to work for Creative Playthings, he joined the Classic Stage Company (CSC) as an actor and musician and worked there on and off until 1975, playing a variety of small roles as well as the recorder, drums, and harmonica in many plays, including Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Twelfth Night, and a stage version of Moby Dick, and was one of the leads in Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter. During the last period of his time at CSC he was also the company's production manager and musical director, composing music for productions of Woyzeck, Miss Julie, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night.

Writer and Editor

Engelbach left Creative Playthings in 1973 and while still associated with CSC became a free-lance copy editor, working on many books for Drama Book Publishers, Macmillan, and others. He had a long-term free-lance job writing and editing articles for Encore: American and Worldwide News, a news monthly with a black perpective founded and edited by Ida E. Lewis, who had been the first editor-in-chief of Essence Magazine. Encore's executive publisher was Bill Whiting, who had been the only still photographer granted access by the prisoners during the Attica Prison uprising in 1971.

Soho Repertory Theatre

In July 1975 Engelbach, along with another Drama Tree student and fellow assistant director at CSC, Marlene Swartz, who was originally from Dallas, Texas, founded the Soho Repertory Theatre ("Soho Rep.") The two built a 100-seat performance space in a ground floor storefront in a loft building on Mercer Street in Manhattan's SoHo district.

Soho Rep became one of three off-off-Broadway theatres devoted to the production of classical plays, along with Christopher Martin's Classic Stage Company and Eve Adamson's Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre.

Engelbach, with Swartz, produced over 100 plays, directing a score of them, designing sets and lights, designing mailing pieces and programs, and playing and composing music. Many young actors started their careers at Soho Rep. Two notables were Kevin Spacey and Kathleen Turner.

For several years Engelbach reviewed under graduate and graduate theses for the Playwriting Department at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he also taught several classes in acting and directing.

Engelbach wrote successful proposals for grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, while Swartz successfully solicited grants from private foundations. Engelbach left the theatre in 1989 to do computer-assisted design.

In 1985 Engelbach appeared briefly in one film, the indie Chain Letters by Mark Rappaport.

Soho Rep's audience was mature and eclectic. Among its many subscribers were notables Congressman Major Owens, singer Peter Yarrow, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg co-defendant Morton Sobel.

Computer Design

In the early 1980s Engelbach became interested in the new personal computers, and acquired a Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, and Soho Rep became one of the first small theatres to computerize its correspondence and mailing list database.

In 1988, he began a relationship with designer Margaret Lee, who introduced him to the Macintosh Plus computer.

TO BE CONTINUED

Music Career