History has forgotten Frank Brink. In truth, few outside Anchorage knew his name while he was alive.
Brink was forty-seven years old in 1964 and carried himself with a beguiling air of total self-assurance: he moved quickly, spoke quickly, and wore his conspicuous ego about him like an opera cape. In the mostly conservative city of Anchorage, one colleague said, Brink stuck out as “the very avatar of a creative person.”
The man’s every instinct seemed to be maximally expressive. “He was naturally always staging,” a collaborator explained—subtly directing the scenes of his life. “He’d walk into a room and sit in the most pronounced area of that room.” At a time when some people in Anchorage still lived in jury-rigged starter cabins, Brink’s home, which he had designed himself and built with a friend, rose out of the woods south of town like a mid-century-modern apparition. It was the sort of jewel you’d expect to find in Big Sur or Malibu, fronted by two walls of windows cresting to an arrowhead-shaped roof. Inside, a spiral staircase wrapped around a colossal spruce trunk, and white sheepskins were spread around the orange shag carpet in the living room.
When writing or speaking publicly, Brink seldom let a breath go by without cramming it full of adverb-bedazzled stentorian flourishes. Later, he would make a documentary about the earthquake that included this sentence: “Incredible are the stories of people who have known the awful power of the earth, straining to adjust to the ever-moving forces beneath its rocky crust; stories of people who desperately fought for their lives and marveled at the unexplainable miracles that literally snatched them from death; stories of tragedy, human dignity, and bravery that symbolize the events and the attitudes of the buoyant, persevering people who survived America’s greatest natural disaster.”
This overblown aesthetic may seem at odds with the slow and plainspoken simplicity of the play he was producing that Easter weekend, but Brink had always loved Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. He called it “the greatest play ever written in America” and seemed to identify deeply with its characters and themes. Brink grew up in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, a small, isolated community that resembled the one Wilder had invented for the play. “I was raised in a poor logging camp and a poorer farm in Northern Appalachian Pennsylvania,” Brink wrote, “where I learned to love the smell of a dank cow barn on a rainy morning, and sour pine cuttings on a mill floor. Where I learned to eat molasses balls in cow feed and swamp frog thighs smoked in willow bark. Where I learned to drink silo juice strained through a loaf of bread—‘depression whiskey.’ ” Brink was the last, conspicuously accidental child in a family of five kids; his closest sibling was eight years older. The Brinks had no money—often literally not a nickel to their name. Frank was an unexpected burden on his parents, and grew up feeling like one.
As a boy, Brink taught himself to forage for ginseng roots and trap muskrats for their pelts, which he sold to Sears, Roebuck and Company. He learned to track a deer all day and kill it at night, with a bow and arrow, so that the game warden, who lived nearby, would not hear him hunting out of season. His best friends, he said, were “an old race horse, a blind sheep dog and an uneducated grandmother.” That is, he seemed to have been growing into as feral and uncultivated a creature as Huck Finn. But at some point in Brink’s childhood, someone made the mistake of taking the boy to a movie, and after that, he was devoted to the performing arts. At fourteen, he hitchhiked to New York City on the egg man’s truck because he wanted to see an opera. At eighteen, he left home for good with a battered suitcase and fifteen dollars.
When World War II started, Brink served in the navy and was shipped to the South Pacific, where he suffered through a heinous tropical disease. When his deployment was over, he vowed to settle somewhere cold. “I always had a desire…to experience the adventure of Alaska,” he explained, and he and his new wife, a New Englander named Jo, decided to try homesteading in the Eagle River valley outside Anchorage.
The Brinks found little culture in the city when they landed there in 1945. Anchorage’s first movie houses pandered to unsophisticated tastes; other entertainment included going to church, getting drunk, or fighting. In the spring of 1946, however, an army officer at Fort Richardson decided to stage a one-off production with the USO of a play called Ladies in Retirement, and Brink started turning up to watch rehearsals. The show was floundering. Eventually, the director decided to take over the male lead and find a new director to take his place. The way Brink later told the story, the man tried to recruit an aerial gunner with some acting experience named Charlton Heston, but Heston declined. Brink won the job for himself.
Brink rehearsed the cast endlessly and managed to shape the scraps he’d inherited into a legitimate piece of theater. After rescuing Ladies in Retirement, he and his collaborators decided to forge their partnership into a proper community theater—the first in Alaska. They called it the Anchorage Little Theater, and Brink started planning its debut for the summer of 1946. It made sense to choose something simple, a feasible first success. He turned to Our Town.
Thornton Wilder had written Our Town in such a way that any theater company, anywhere in America, could stage it easily and cheaply. He explicitly stipulated that the stage should be virtually bare, except for a couple of tables, ladders, trellises, a bench—scenery that could be borrowed, or hammered together after a trip to the local hardware store. According to Wilder’s stage directions, there shouldn’t even be a curtain.
Brink had zero interest in such austerity, however. “When Frank first staged Our Town in 1946,” a friend recalled, “he made it a religious experience!” There was a military band blaring an overture, a choir singing, a marathon of opening remarks by civic leaders and military dignitaries, and recitations of congratulatory telegrams sent by notable people from Outside. This was Anchorage’s first real production, after all, and Brink wanted to show his new city what the theater was capable of. Then, while an air force major performed a ceremonial ribbon cutting onstage, Brink delivered a speech that, in retrospect, could be seen as an aspirational mission statement that would guide his work in Anchorage for the next thirty years. He called his talk “To Bring the Miracle of Theater.”
BRINK ENVISIONED THE VALUE of community theater similarly to how Bram, the head of KENI, envisioned local broadcasting. A functioning theater, Brink claimed, was an integral part of any thriving municipality, “as necessary as food.” And the experience of performing together—“community-wide playmaking,” as he called it—would cohere the people of that community as their city grew.
A good theater “must be truly a place to play, a place to create and re-create, a place to commune and contemplate, yes, even a place where one might have the opportunity to recognize oneself and others,” Brink wrote, “so that some of the truths still available to mankind may be discovered there.” As a director, he had an almost despotic commitment to excellence. But in the end, the quality of the production was less important to him than the simple fact of people joining together to put it on. Eventually, on his résumé, Brink would start listing himself not just as “Theater Director,” but “Community Leader,” too.
Brink went out of his way to cast his plays inclusively, drawing from nearly every demographic nook and ethnic cranny of Anchorage. His productions included students, housewives, judges, military officers, local celebrities, children, and tradespeople—everyone from the powerful to the unemployed. And though many of these volunteer actors arrived at Brink’s rehearsals exhausted at the end of a long day, he worked them hard, leaning on them to read their Stanislavsky and Uta Hagen, rehearsing them late into the night, while he paced with his clipboard and barked direction. If one of his actors seemed stuck, or wooden, Brink would simply repeat a particular line reading, mercilessly, until the actor could mimic his inflection. “There was no faking it with Frank,” one actor said. “He didn’t stand for any shtick or B.S. You had to do your sensory and imagination homework.” Another called Brink “a tyrant.” Yet his ambition was magnetic; people strove to please him. As one woman put it, “Frank Brink was the theater.”
After that first Our Town production in 1946, Brink was everywhere in Anchorage, putting on Macbeth and Hamlet, and musicals like Man of La Mancha and South Pacific. He would stage The Crucible and Robinson Jeffers’s Medea, and more avant-garde work like The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Brink’s production of The Miracle Worker, a play about Helen Keller, was so uncannily perfect, one actor remembered, that “it touched the face of God.”
In between these larger productions, Brink also produced flurries of one-acts, staged readings, variety shows for Fur Rendezvous, and Alaska’s first radio dramas on KENI. Brink even managed to lure a few stars to town, like Boris Karloff and Will Rogers Jr., often to reprise roles they’d originated on Broadway. He wanted to give audiences in Alaska—which is to say, his own pool of actors—an appreciation for the magic true artists could conjure. When Karloff starred in Arsenic and Old Lace in a school auditorium in 1957, the people of Anchorage called him out for eleven consecutive curtain calls. “He projected a sense of solicitude and tenderness that went beyond ordinary courtesy,” Brink wrote. Karloff ultimately donated his fee for the production back to the theater and, at the cast party, told Brink he wanted to leave him with a personal thank-you gift as well, but could not think of anything meaningful. Brink asked the maestro for his shoes: “To have the shoes of the first great theater talent to walk on the Alaskan stage would be the most wonderful gift I can think of,” he told Karloff. Fifty years later, a distant relative of Brink’s would find one of those shoes in her father’s attic in Ohio, track down Karloff’s aging daughter, and mail the shoe back.
By the end of the 1950s, Brink had hit his stride. Then, in 1960, came his opus—an epic of Alaskan history, which he wrote himself, called Cry of the Wild Ram. The play took three and a half hours to perform and the list of its cast and crew stretched across four pages of the program. Soon, Brink was busily adapting it into an even bigger production—a musical version, despite the fact that he did not play a single instrument or read music himself. (A colleague would sit beside him as he worked, transcribing his humming and whistling.) He tasked his wife, Jo, with stitching more than two hundred costumes. Another collaborator had to figure out how to build a harpsichord. As for the quality of the play, one crew member remembered, “It was so damn long. I had mixed feelings.”
Cry of the Wild Ram told the story of Alexander Baranov, the Russian trader who shipwrecked on a remote Alaskan island in 1790 and was subsequently promoted to run the Russian American colonies for the czar. Baranov would wind up governing Russian Alaska for almost twenty years. By the end, he was miserable. “Baranov didn’t want to be here, either,” Brink’s longtime collaborator, Robert Pond, pointed out. Brink, he added, probably identified with him.
In fact, it became easy to wonder what Brink was doing in Anchorage—why he’d stayed so long, and whether he was truly content there, artistically. Brink had tried to break into the New York theater scene as a young man, before going to war, but rarely spoke about that brief period of his life. An acquaintance later remembered how “overwhelmed” Brink had seemed in New York; beneath all his erudition, he was still “a naïf,” the man said—“the most sophisticated primitive I ever knew.” Brink landed a few jobs, but seemed to find the competitiveness of Manhattan intolerable. He left without ever truly testing whether he had the talent to make it. “That weighed on him,” said Robin Niemann, a close friend. What Brink was building in Anchorage was monumental: not just the Little Theater, but a broader culture of the arts blossoming around his example. Still, it was tempting to see his perfectionism, and the self-serious ostentation of his productions, as springing from some insecure or over-compensatory craving for something bigger—or, more poignantly, from regret.
By 1964, the so-called Golden Age of Anchorage community theater that Brink had catalyzed during the previous decade had withered and collapsed. For a time, there’d been five separate theater groups in the city. But now, after a confluence of artistic disagreements and fund-raising difficulties, only one was standing. It was an incarnation of Brink’s original Little Theater, though it was without a building of its own, or even reliable access to a theater in which to stage its work.
Brink had taken a job on the inaugural faculty of Alaska Methodist University in 1960. The teaching gig offered him stability. It also provided him with a new, hassle-free home for his plays: a 233-seat circular lecture hall in the college’s central building, Grant Hall, with a small stage built into one end. The room had concrete walls, and no scenery shop or backstage to speak of; an actor who had to exit one side of the stage, and reenter a subsequent scene from the other, was forced to walk outside and scamper around the exterior of the building in the cold. It wasn’t quite a theater, in other words, but it was all Brink’s—a place, like he’d always wanted, where he was free to create and play.
This is all to say, at the time of the earthquake, Frank Brink was essentially starting over. Putting on Our Town again—scaled back this time, as Thornton Wilder intended—seemed like a sensible first step.
OUR TOWN DEBUTED AT the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, in January 1938. Within three years, it had been performed by amateur theater groups in nearly eight hundred different communities and every state in the union but one (Rhode Island). By 1964, it was an icon, a classic. And yet it was also on its way to becoming “the most misunderstood and misinterpreted of American plays,” as one New York Times critic put it: “a pioneering work of experimental theater” disguised as a sappy slice of small-town life.
The unnerving strangeness of the play hits you right away, first with the glaring absence of scenery, and then when the Stage Manager character appears and speaks the first lines right at the audience: “This play is called Our Town. It was written by Thornton Wilder”—and so on. But even beyond his immediate breaking of the fourth wall, there’s something disruptive and irreconcilably weird about the Stage Manager as a narrator. He interacts with the characters onstage as easily as he does with the audience, but doesn’t seem to be wholly part of either world, or situated in any specific time. Instead, we discover, he’s endowed with a kind of breezy omniscience about the past and future, able to see the full sweep of time around each present moment that unfolds onstage. Just minutes into Act I, for example, as the sun rises on the small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and a character named Dr. Gibbs returns home to his wife from an overnight house call, the Stage Manager interrupts the couple’s conversation to explain to the audience how and when each of those characters in the kitchen behind him will eventually die. “Mrs. Gibbs died first,” he says.
It’s startling, morbid, eerie—and it happens again and again. The play keeps lavishing lapidary attention on the most mundane details of people’s lives, only to be undercut by the Stage Manager’s asides about their deaths. Other times, he goes on odd tangents about the vastness of the universe, or the breadth of recorded history, against which this relatively tiny drama, and these individual people, barely register. The play keeps toggling our focus between the everyday and the cosmic. Those lives, and everything we see happen in that town, come to feel both infinitely rich and infinitely fragile.
From there, a kind of ambient bleakness gradually consumes the play. Nothing evil or cataclysmic happens. The people onstage just live their lives. Yet the drama slowly turns wrenching. (Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that by the time she left the theater she was depressed “beyond words.”) One critic would identify Our Town, ultimately, as a story about “how mankind confronts overwhelming disaster.”
The play centers on two teenagers in Grover’s Corners. George Gibbs is the innocent, somewhat lunkheaded son of the town’s only doctor. Emily Webb is the bright and introspective daughter of its newspaper editor. They are next-door neighbors. We watch them do their homework, fall in love, get married, grow up. The story’s outlines are generic, and Wilder highlights that ordinariness in a way that’s almost cruel.
The first scene, for example, opens on an ordinary morning in Grover’s Corners. On the bare stage, George’s and Emily’s mothers pantomime lighting invisible stoves in their adjacent houses, readying invisible breakfasts for their kids before school. The milkman leads an invisible cow down their street, making invisible deliveries. When Act II starts, we’re shown the same routine—except now, three years into the future, the paperboy who enters is the little brother of the paperboy we saw in Act I. The point is, existence in Grover’s Corners has always been like this: over time, the rhythms of the community subsume individual lives. Even the oldest tombstones in the cemetery, the Stage Manager explains—and some are more than two centuries old—bear the same last names as people walking around town now. Zoom out, the Stage Manager is saying, and all the moments of our lives appear fused into one endlessly repeating cycle. Even in the middle of George and Emily’s wedding ceremony, the Stage Manager turns to the audience and confesses, cynically, that he’s seen hundreds of weddings and isn’t particularly impressed with this one. “Almost everybody in the world gets married—you know what I mean?” he says. Later, he adds, “Once in a thousand times it’s interesting.”
Wilder was fixated on this kind of vulnerability: the way time inevitably swallows all of us. He remembered visiting a few mundane archeological sites while living briefly in Rome: the tomb of a typical first-century family, the ancient plumbing on the Palatine Hill. “And ever since,” Wilder wrote in a preface to Our Town, “I find myself occasionally looking at the things about me as an archeologist will look at them a thousand years hence.” He walked around New York wondering how they would interpret the bronze wall plaques that had survived the disappearance of the city’s brownstones—the ones reading TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE or NIGHT BELL. The minutiae of daily life begins to look very different if you spiral forward in time and glance back: somehow, every scrap feels both precious and meaningless. “An archeologist’s eye combines the view of the telescope with the view of the microscope,” Wilder explained.
In Our Town, he wanted to bring that way of seeing to the stage. The Stage Manager explains this outright toward the end of Act I. A new bank is being built in Grover’s Corners, he notes, and they’re sealing a time capsule in its cornerstone to be dug up a thousand years in the future. The Stage Manager expects that they’ll put a copy of the Constitution and a Bible in the time capsule, but worries those documents won’t reveal the texture of ordinary life in town—“real life,” he says, like the stories we’ve been watching onstage. After all, the Stage Manager explains, “Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’m is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts…and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney—same as here.” So the Stage Manager decides he’ll put a copy of this play in the time capsule, too: Our Town by Thornton Wilder.
Suddenly, the Stage Manager starts talking to those people a thousand years in the future. His logic here is convoluted, but sound: knowing that he is a character in Wilder’s play himself, he knows that what he says to us, in the theater, will be preserved in the script for those future humans to read. “So—people a thousand years from now,” he says. “This is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”
It’s among the most famous passages in Our Town—a kind of existential credo whose mix of determination and desperation echoes the feeling in Anchorage in 1964. The Stage Manager is saying: Remember us. Recognize us. It’s one community’s simple insistence that it mattered, made urgent by a suspicion that, ultimately, it might not matter. In other words, the overwhelming disaster everyone in Our Town is confronting is irrelevance: a creeping awareness that no matter how secure and central each of us feels within the stories of our own lives, we are, in reality, just specks of things, at the mercy of larger forces that can blot us out indifferently or by chance.
The ground is moving under Grover’s Corners, shrugging people off—not in a sudden and violent spasm, like it would in Anchorage that Good Friday, but in the steadiest, most predictable way imaginable: by pushing away from them, traveling forward in time.
Every once in a while, the earth rears up and shakes. But it’s always, always spinning.
BRINK’S OUR TOWN CAST, in March 1964, was a motley cross section of greater Anchorage. There was a silver-haired middle school English teacher, an African American prizefighter who worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, an aging maintenance man, a plumber, a handful of kids, a young navy veteran who’d auditioned mainly to meet girls, and a young gay man with coke-bottle glasses named Bob Deloach who’d been acting for Brink since he was a boy, latching on to the director as a kind of surrogate dad. (“Frank had a gift for seeing the hurt in people,” his friend Robin Niemann would later explain, “partly because he had some of his own.”) Mr. Webb, the newspaper editor, was played by a tradesman named Chick Sewell, who’d been roped into his first Frank Brink production by his wife six years earlier. Sewell had initially seemed irredeemably stiff as a performer, reciting his lines as though he were a schoolkid reading a report. But Brink had worked the man over into a proficient character actor.
Brink had also taken one big and unexpected risk with his casting. To play the lead, Emily Webb, he had recruited Susan Koslosky, an Alaska Methodist University freshman with no prior acting experience. Koslosky was a third-generation Alaskan from one of the state’s earliest pioneer families. She was eighteen and stunning, with dark eyes like a doe and a tall tangle of brown hair; a year earlier, she’d been crowned Miss Fur Rendezvous at the annual winter carnival, then first runner-up in the Miss Alaska pageant. Brink saw Koslosky as radiating a kind of fragility and innocence—exactly what he wanted for Emily—and bet on her to carry much of the play’s emotional weight. He considered her inexperience an asset. She would bring that guilelessness to the role.
In Koslosky’s mind, this air of virtue was merely a persona she had scrupulously crafted, or built up like scar tissue over her wounds. Koslosky’s parents separated when she was three years old. She saw her father only occasionally, when he came to argue with her mother about child support. Her mother, meanwhile, seemed emotionally unwell: sometimes she was loving; other times she’d snap at Susan ruthlessly, calling her worthless or a slut. To cope, and to prove her mother wrong, Koslosky had gradually affected a kind of divine poise. She got active in student government. She represented Alaska at a youth conference at the White House at age fourteen. She turned herself into a beauty queen. Then she enrolled in Frank Brink’s speech and drama class in her first semester at AMU. She had never before met someone who seemed so genuinely free and comfortable with himself. She decided to try acting herself.
Unfortunately, Koslosky wasn’t particularly good onstage. Brink had to push her, relentlessly, through the early rehearsals for Our Town that winter, and his dissatisfaction with her left her feeling dejected and trapped. One evening, they were rehearsing a scene between Emily and her father in Act II—a turgid but emotionally loaded conversation before he gives her away at the wedding. The scene had to be played subtly. Koslosky wasn’t getting it. Suddenly, Brink exploded at her from the back of Grant Hall, shouting over the heads of the rest of the cast. “I don’t believe you!” he screamed at her. “I don’t believe you!” She hadn’t convinced Brink that this man standing next to her was her father.
What happened next surprised Koslosky: someone screamed back at Brink. What surprised her, specifically, was that she was the one screaming. How could she believably relate to her stage father, she shouted, if she didn’t know what it was like to have a real father? Once she was done screaming, she started crying. Brink sent everyone else out on a coffee break and walked her down the hall to his office, to talk.
Koslosky told him everything. She explained how cripplingly inauthentic she felt—not only as an actor, but as a human being. Nothing she did was unselfconscious or unrehearsed, she told him. She’d even worked up a rigorous protocol for conversations on dates, a list of appropriate, enchanting things to tell a boy on a first date, a separate script for second dates, and so on. She knew Brink was asking her to reach inside herself for this role. But she worried that her mother was right and there was nothing inside.
Brink responded quickly, without hesitation. He told Koslosky that he saw a real person under her veneer—a person of value—even if she didn’t. That’s who he’d cast as Emily, and who he wanted to see step forward in this play and be expressed. Decades later, at age seventy-two, Koslosky would explain: “To survive my childhood, I had to become invisible. That was the first time anyone actually recognized me. The first person, ever, to acknowledge me was Frank Brink.”
From then on, Koslosky devoted herself to the production—and to Brink. When the earthquake struck, she was with her younger sister at home on Twenty-Third Avenue, waiting for her mother to return from the grocery store and drive her to the theater for their Friday-night performance. It was two and a half hours before curtain time, but she already had her stage makeup on, and her hair in the long braid she wore for Act I. When the quake was over and her mother got home, Koslosky stood in front of their rattled house arguing with her, adamantly, that she still needed a ride to the theater, right away. Frank Brink was counting on her, Koslosky insisted, and she would not be talked down. Just trust me, her mom kept saying, today is different: the show didn’t actually have to go on.
Brink himself seemed to have the opposite reaction to the earthquake. He was driving home for a rest before curtain time when the Seward Highway cracked open in front of him. The pavement on one side of the breach dropped abruptly by a foot or more, then the two halves started to twist and scrape against each other.
Unlike so many others in Anchorage, Brink seemed to understand the momentousness of what was happening right away: his dramatic imagination was equipped, or maybe even predisposed, to recognize that, during those four and a half minutes, he was passing fitfully through some severe inflection point in history. Normal life was disintegrating around him. There would be no community theater that night; his community’s very idea of itself was now under threat.
“Even in those moments while the earthquake was still shaking the earth,” Brink would remember, “watching the road sandwich and scissor itself and break open, I kept thinking: ‘What will Alaskans do now?’ ”