March 15, 2007

Dear Ms. Walford,

The Nov/Dec issue of the University of North Carolina alumni magazine surfaced from a pile on my desk today, and I noted with some surprise a brief mention in the class notes of Sharon Gilbert’s death last year. I had no idea she was a Carolina alum. I knew her dad when he was living in Durham, North Carolina. We tried to track Sharon down when he died in 1989, but she was no longer at the LA address he had for her.

When I Googled her today, the memorial blog popped up, and I recognized her immediately from the painting and photo on the site, having seen pictures of her when she was a child.

At the time of his death, I don’t think she and her dad had been in touch with each other for quite awhile. The information below may be of interest to Sharon's cousins in Washington, if you wouldn't mind passing it along to them. I’m not sure it’s 100 percent accurate. And maybe they can provide further information or corrections. I post Mark’s bio each year in connection with a dramatic arts award he established in his will.

I hope you will also accept my belated condolences on the loss of your good friend.

Best wishes,

Charles Blackburn, Jr.

....................................

MARK GREGORY GILBERT

1914-1989

Mark Gregory Gilbert was born on February 5, 1914, in New York City, where he spent much of his life as a writer, editor and advertising consultant. His parents came to the U.S. from Russia by way of South America. His older sister, Flora, was born in Russia on September 13, 1906. His mother was an actress and his father an editor of trade papers in several languages that circulated among the city’s immigrants. By age 12, Mark was helping to edit the papers.

His mother inspired his love of the dramatic arts. As a child, Mark talked her into taking him with her to the Yiddish Art Theatre a few blocks from their apartment to see her perform in a melodrama involving demonic possession. What he saw so alarmed him that he rushed the stage to save his mother from the leading man...and stopped the show. He wrote about the incident many years later for Showbill (July 1984).

An alumnus of City College of New York and New York University, Gilbert received a law degree but never practiced, choosing instead to pursue a career in publishing. He served as editor of the Army & Navy Review during World War II, and went on to edit a number of trade magazines in the fields of food, fashion and film.

Well-traveled, Gilbert serendipitously participated in a revolution in the mid-1950s while on vacation in Nicaragua. He was coming out of his Managua hotel when a ragtag gang of insurgents confronted him. One of them brandished a machete, demanding in Spanish, "Are you one of us?" No fool, Mark instantly replied "Si!" and was handed the weapon. "I marched about a block with the revolutionary army," he recalled in a 1981 Charlotte News interview. "Then they turned left at the corner, and I turned right." He kept the machete as a souvenir.

As a freelance writer and contributing editor for the American Salesman, Gilbert wrote more than 200 motivational articles for sales and marketing magazines. He moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, from Florida in the mid-1970s following his second wife’s death. Local theater groups produced several of his plays. He also wrote short stories and poems, winning several awards from the Charlotte Writers Club.

In the early 1980s, Mark and his widowed sister, Flora Silverman, moved to Durham, N.C., so he could be closer to the Duke University Eye Center. An ice-skating accident in childhood had damaged his eyes, sometimes causing double vision. While in Durham, they lived for the most part in Henderson Towers Senior Center on South Duke Street.

His wife, Maria "Tutti" Gilbert, preceded him in death and is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. Mark died March 16, 1989, in Durham. His sister, Flora, died August 8, 1999, in Elizabethtown, N.C.

Mark made provision in his will for the creation of a dramatic arts award now presented annually through the North Carolina New Play Competition sponsored by the Greensboro Playwrights Forum. It was his hope that the Mark Gilbert Award would "perpetuate my love of the theater in all its forms and repay in some small measure the fullness of inspiration by which a stimulating interaction with gifted and dedicated colleagues has enriched my understanding of life."

………………………

A VIEW FROM THE AUDIENCE

How I stopped the show at the ripe old age of seven

by Mark G. Gilbert

SHOWBILL, July 1984

Copyright © Playbill Incorporated, 1984

In the 1920s, a genius named Maurice Schwartz established the Yiddish Art Theatre on Second Avenue in the lower East Side ghetto of New York. A gifted actor-manager and director, far ahead of his time, he offered a rare taste of culture to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free by producing and directing and usually acting in classic plays by Shakespeare, Gogol, Moliere, Ibsen and a host of lesser ethnic playwrights.

My mother, who had recently emigrated to this country from South America and Russia, felt the need for cultural self-expression. She became a bit player with Schwartz’s company; then, because of her fluency in Yiddish, Russian, Spanish and eventually English, was gradually promoted to character and supporting parts, including a role in THE DYBBUK.

Theatre and moviegoers who have thrilled to the chilly exorcism dramas may not know of Ansky’s THE DYBBUK, perhaps the first tale of demonic possession made into a full-length play. Based on old folk stories, it recounts the tragedy of a young bride who was "inhabited" by a demon at the very moment of her wedding.

This tale of a disembodied soul seeking residence in the body of an innocent girl permitted an amazing range of melodrama (complete with ceremonies, incantations, religious invocations and actual struggles of a violent physical nature) that kept people petrified in their seats. Playing the part of the mother of the condemned bride, my own mother had an arduous task to perform, arriving home each night actually drained of strength and emotionally exhausted from the psychic demands of the role.

Never having been to the theatre, my sister and I often begged her to let us see her perform, but she had always refused, claiming that it might be a distraction to have her children watching her performance. That changed one Wednesday afternoon. After a particularly grueling matinee of THE DYBBUK, she came home to rest for a few hours before the evening show. It posed no problem, since we lived only a few blocks from the theatre.

My sister was spending the night with a girlfriend and I took a chance at some childish blackmail to impress on my weary mother the justice of her taking me along to what I considered a Palace of Dreams. When she argued that the play she was in might frighten me, I countered with the claim that I was afraid to stay home alone. That carried the day and she finally agreed, telling me that I had to be very quiet all through the performance, no matter what happened onstage. After all, it was only make-believe.

The beginning scenes of the play, set in a small village in a vague area of Europe, failed to interest me much. The wedding scene, carefully depicting a traditionally Orthodox Jewish ceremony, I dismissed casually as "Girl Stuff." But when the bride acted out the instant of her "possession," with appropriate writhings, moanings and supplications, my blood chilled and I sat upright in my seat, bored no longer. The play, probably overwritten by today’s standards, mounted steadily from peak to intense peak.

Though quite frightened, I did not become truly disturbed until the high point of THE DYBBUK, the exorcism in the graveyard, where the Chief Rabbi struggles, often physically, to force the demon to leave its young victim’s body. My mother was an integral part of that violent scene, trying to still the bride’s attempts to get away by forcing her back into her chair every time she surged upward.

At one point, irritated by her continuing interference, the Chief Rabbi orders his two assistants to get the desperate mother out of the way so he can continue his exhortations in relative peace. Though not a follower of the Stanislavski Method, my mother put up enough of a realistic struggle to give her stage tormentors a very hard time, which they met with additional force.

That was the point at which I made my famous theatrical debut; I reared up out of my seat and ran to the stage, screaming: "You let her go! She’s my mother, and a nice lady! Don’t you dare hurt her!"

To say that this interruption caused a sensation all its own as it affected the already raw nerves of the audience would be a rank understatement. People screamed, stood up at their seats and some even shouted their encouragement to the "brave little fellow"―me!

Frantically clawing at the edge of the stage, which was well above my head, and crying hysterically, I effectively ruined the high point of that particular performance. Realizing this, my mother finally stepped out of character and knelt down to be as close to me as possible, soothing and comforting me as well as she could from the distance between us. Within moments, a cadre of appalled ushers arrived to engulf me in their none-too-friendly clutches and carry me, still kicking and screaming, to the back of the theatre. I was ham enough to note with appreciation the applause I received from the aroused audience!

Since the great Maurice Schwartz was then occupied as the Chief Rabbi conducting the exorcism, the tongue-lashing I deservedly received was given me by Paul Muni - then acting under the name of Muni Weisenfreund - a distinction I didn’t relish until years later, when he had graduated to big stage and Hollywood roles. I remember that, although chastised, I felt no contrition. After all, I had effectively stopped the show...

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