Woodhouse Playhouse: A Space For Living And Performing

Although the Elizabethan-style Woodhouse Playhouse in East Hampton is enjoying its 100th anniversary this year, anecdotal evidence suggests that many village residents know little if anything about it, even its location. That may be because the building at 64 Huntting Lane is the least visible of all the Tudor-like ones that were built by East Hampton’s legendary philanthropist and arts patron Mary Woodhouse, a group that also includes Guild Hall and the East Hampton Library.

Among them, the playhouse, as it’s informally known, seems the most significant architecturally, the design of Francis Burrall Hoffman Jr., a wealthy, socially prominent “gentleman’s architect” at the forefront of the village’s emergence as a premier summer colony, according to Anne Surchin and Gary Lawrance’s book “Houses of the Hamptons.”

The dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Robert A.M. Stern, called the playhouse “the most perfectly preserved of the Woodhouse family properties.” And now, celebrating its centennial as a private residence, its owners, Dr. Richard Brockman, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia and a playwright, and his wife, Mirra Bank, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and stage director, say they are excited about “going ahead by looking back.”

That means commitment—both joyous and “serious,” they said—to the playhouse’s original role as a theater and drama school, as well as being “magnificently respectful” of its history, when they tweak areas to accommodate their year-round presence, adding heat and A/C— though not in the unheated Great Room, as they call it, trusting the massive fireplace to do the job. (It does, if keeping the hall on the chilly but authentic side.)

The sensitive touches made to the playhouse over the years recall an earlier time when owners of grand houses considered their homes works of art as well as places to make art; a time when painters had studios in or attached to their residences; a time sought-after architects came with credentials that reflected substantial European training in fine arts and sculpture; and a time when salons regularly featured classical music as part of an evening’s dinner.

The playhouse’s Great Room still boasts an Aeolian-Skinner organ that in its heyday was said to be an engineering masterpiece, designed to meet the demands of “the entire library of European and American historical and modern organ music, whether written for the church, the theater or the symphony hall.” The organ was in thematic harmony with the music-playing gargoyles attached to the Great Room’s heavy wooden beams. Mrs. Woodhouse could play the organ. And did. And so did the conductor Leopold Stokowski, reportedly finishing up a performance one night of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by praising the room’s acoustics.

There are gems in the Woodhouse Playhouse, and they are worshipfully preserved.

“You do what is needed to keep it vital and sound,” Dr. Brockman said. “This place has deep roots.”

The Brockmans inherited the house, with its 75-foot-long Great Room, 30-foot gabled peak and church-like nave, from Dr. Brockman’s father, David, and stepmother, Elizabeth, who had bought it from Mrs. Woodhouse in 1958. Mary Woodhouse herself, whom Dr. Brockman has waggishly referred to as “a sort of de Medici,” made the first radical change to the Great Room in 1947 when she walled off the stage at one end to make a bedroom for herself.

She also had a kitchen and maid’s quarters put in at the other end of the room, these two areas constituting the wings of the original structure. A few years later, David and Elizabeth Brockman remodeled and enhanced the wings, making the residence far more livable with two additional bedrooms and baths, both artfully fitted upstairs. Another enhancement they made, Dr. Brockman and Ms. Bank pointed out, was to install a massive, centuries-old European spiral staircase that was “sited into” Mary Woodhouse’s bedroom area, a gorgeous wooden swirl of carved designs.

The Brockmans are pleased that they have preserved and enhanced both house and lawn in the spirit of the playhouse’s history, noting that a pool they added—a necessity for rental—keeps to the grounds’ overall low-key tonalism. They also redid the kitchen and adjoining area and added an upstairs bedroom with fireplace and en suite bath adjacent to the organ loft and organ works, turning attic space into cozy rooms with picture-book vistas. Outside, stone and brick pathways meander along decades-old wisteria and canopied glades on the property’s 2.8 acres.

It’s the Brockmans’ music and theater programs at their residence, however, that particularly honor the legacy of Mrs. Woodhouse, who had the playhouse built as a present for her actress-inclined daughter Marjorie’s 16th birthday. From that start, the playhouse attracted famous visitors, including John Drew, his nephew John Barrymore, Isadora Duncan, The Westminster Choir, Ruth St. Denis, Metropolitan Opera greats, and all manner of artists, famous and infamous, who followed, among them Norman Mailer, who shot scenes on the property for his wild indie film “Maidstone,” and Joseph Papp, Tony Randall, Eric Portman, Claude Rains and a host of musicians and art patrons.

The heritage continues. Under the auspices of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Brockmans in 2005 created the Playhouse Project, a series of year-round programs that provides free “musical mentoring, education and performance opportunities” for middle school and high school students on the South Fork by way of master classes in classical music. The project is unique in that it serves youngsters in the off-season. The “mandate,” said Ms. Bank, is to reach the kids who live on the East End who see only a frantic and expensive art scene during the summer that has “nothing to do with them.”

In recent years the Woodhouse Playhouse has also served as a workshop, rehearsal and artist-in-residence space for visiting actors and musicians involved in Dr. Brockman’s plays, and the grounds have also accommodated fund-raising charity dance recitals. In addition, just recently the Brockmans have been talking with a well-known actor who has a home in the Hamptons about putting on readings of Shakespeare’s history plays at their residence, the realization of which would be, in his words, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”