He may never have become quite a household name, but Greg was playing the lead in Shakespeare’s Henry VI by the age of 22, at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. It was around this time that he met Janet, whose family had fled Czechoslovakia in 1948 and eventually settled in Chicago. Both were working with the Milwaukee Theatre at the time.
Greg went on to do a great deal more stagework in the classics, both as an actor and a director. But he found that doing voiceovers for commercials was a quicker route to paying the rent, and perhaps his greatest public visibility came through the medium of TV soap operas. He played Michael Hathaway on CBS’s Where the Heart Is from 1969 to 1973, and went on to portray Art Thompson in Ryan’s Hope in 1976.
His biggest Broadway role was as the prosecuting attorney in Nuts. Unfortunately, none of the original cast was retained for the movie version starring Barbra Streisand, and Greg himself had no inclination to relocate to California to pursue a Hollywood career. As it turned out, it was the Old World that exerted more of a siren call upon him.
In the 1990s, after the Velvet Revolution, when it was finally safe again for the daughter of a former member of the Czech Underground to revisit her homeland, the Abelses went to Prague, and Greg fell in love with the beautiful medieval city. A poet cousin of Janet’s introduced Greg into local artistic circles, beginning a longtime bicontinental working relationship. He eventually became the first American in the history of Czech theatre to direct a stage production in the Czech language: Herb Gardner’s The Goodbye People, which ran for six years. Then he directed the first production in Moravia of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which had been banned there up until the Prague Spring.
With sponsorship from PEN America and the US Information Agency, Greg was able to direct the first-ever European production of Arthur Miller’s Samizdat play The Archbishop’s Ceiling. Miller, who was a friend of Czech liberator Václav Havel, himself attended the premiere performance. Since May 2006, Greg has had a play running in Prague that “looks like it’s going to run for ten more years”: Franco D’Alessandro’s Roman Nights, which concerns the friendship between Tennessee Williams and the actress who starred in his The Rose Tattoo, Anna Magnani.
Another play directed by Greg Abels that seems destined to run forever is Ronald Rand’s Let It Be Art: The Passion and Life of Harold Clurman, which so far has played in 16 states and 18 countries. Besides being Stella Adler’s husband, Clurman was a renowned theatre critic and the first director ever to work with the young Marlon Brando.
Over the years, Greg has directed or acted in nearly 800 plays, films and television dramas — and endured over 3,700 auditions, he notes wryly. These days, he is more or less retired from acting, and doing a lot more teaching than directing. Besides the Adler Studio, he has taught at New York University, the National Theatre Institute at the O’Neill Center, the National Shakespeare Conservatory, the Warsaw State Academy and the National Academy of Prague. He is currently the master teacher of Scene Study at the highly respected Off-Broadway venue Circle-in-the-Square, but his work as a sensei and writing Zen-inspired poetry is becoming more and more of a focus as he enters his 70s. “I don’t think about retirement,” he says, “but I do think about easing off from teaching and directing. It’s more of a shifting. I have a couple more books in me, I think.”
Thus it seems likely that Greg Abels will be spending even more of his time in bucolic Gardiner in the years to come, though you still may not see him around much. “I’m essentially a private person. But I don’t use this as an enclave; I do feel part of the community,” he avers. “We appreciate the library; we contribute to the fire department. But our interaction with the town is mostly through the merchants. We come here to rest and work.”
Thanks to the Abelses’ donation to the Land Trust, Seven Meadows will contribute to the restfulness of Gardiner for a long time to come, and that suits Greg just fine. “The charm is still here,” he says, “but it’s a little less sleepy!”
