On Peter W. Culman's 10th birthday, his godmother took him to see his first Broadway show -- "Where's Charley?" -- the musical in which the late Ray Bolger sang "Once in Love with Amy" with the audience.
"There's a story there," Mr. Culman says, launching into one of many tales he tells over lunch in the sunny kitchen of his Roland Park home.
About a decade ago, he explains, he picked up a magazine profile of Bolger in a dentist's office. "The interviewer asked him what prompted him to sing 'Once in Love with Amy' with the audience, and he said, 'Well, at a matinee there was a young redheaded boy who stood up and started singing with me.' "
Slathering peanut butter and jelly on pumpernickel -- his favorite sandwich -- Mr. Culman, 53, laughingly admits he can't be sure Bolger was referring to him, but at the same time, he does have red hair, and he distinctly remembers that he stood up and sang, "and [Bolger] stopped the show and the audience joined in."
That epiphany may have led Mr. Culman to choose a life in the theater, a life whose last quarter century has been spent as managing director of Center Stage -- a longer tenure than any other managing director in the history of American regional theater.
But above and beyond the impact of Ray Bolger, Mr. Culman ascribes his dramatic leanings to the inherent theatricality in his Irish-American upbringing. "I came from a family of Irish raconteurs and they were all telling stories all the time," he says. And when he describes the house in which he grew up, he might just as easily be describing a stage set -- a pair of connected East Side Manhattan brownstones that also housed the family bridal gown business and his uncle's doctor's office.
Nor can he discount the influence of the Catholic Church on his career -- not the pomp and circumstance, mind you, but the spirituality that is always with him. As Donald N. Rothman, a former Center Stage board president, puts it, Mr. Culman's faith extends beyond Catholicism -- he also has faith in the theater.
For Mr. Culman, theater is a vocation. The most obvious proof is his 25th anniversary as chief administrator of Center Stage. This past Monday the event was honored with a surprise party whose lineup of speakers was headed by the acclaimed South African playwright Athol Fugard. And, as part of the tribute, the nearly 400 guests were treated to a rendition of "Once in Love with Amy" -- though this time Mr. Culman didn't join in.
Why has Mr. Culman lasted at Center Stage when managers at other theaters have not? In a word -- "objectivity," says Peter Zeisler, director of the national Theatre Communications Group, which presented Mr. Culman with its distinguished service award earlier this year. "In many cases ego gets in the way. People get confused and think they are the institution, in which case it's time to move on or get rid of them. That's never happened with Peter and therefore his continuity of service has been a blessing. . . . He has not shaped [Center Stage] in his own image."
Mr. Culman has maintained his objectivity by pursuing a range of interests that are catholic in the broadest sense of the word and that hark back to a childhood spent in an eclectic, accepting atmosphere that summons up the setting of one of Center Stage's past productions, "You Can't Take It with You."
The third child of a German Lutheran stockbroker and an Irish Catholic mother -- who gave birth to him when she was 44 -- Mr. Culman essentially grew up in a household of adults. His father, who died of leukemia when Peter was 10, was home the last three years of his life. The shipping department of the family bridal business, Kathleen Inc., provided a kind of after-school day care for the young Peter. Not only did he learn to pack dresses, he also learned to get along with a diversity of people -- a "little U.N.," he calls the department, which was manned by an Orthodox Jew, a Hispanic and a black.
His early education was under the auspices of the Sisters of Charity; a few years ago he paid a visit to his middle school, St. Ignatius Loyola. Everything but the nuns' habits looked the same. The new principal -- dressed in a plaid skirt -- pulled out his file and asked, "Have you amounted to something? Are you still a disciplinary problem?"
He says he earned this reputation because he was forever questioning the answers to the Baltimore Catechism. This inquisitive tendency has not only stuck with him, it is one of the elements that nourishes him spiritually and enhances his value as a teacher, according to the Rev. Robert F. Leavitt, S.S., president-rector of St. Mary's Seminary and University, where Mr. Culman has been an adjunct professor of homiletics, or preaching, on and off since the early 1970s.
"He's a person who's restless always to keep posing questions and provoking new thoughts," Father Leavitt says. "I think he's a very hungry person, spiritually hungry. Other people seem spiritually fed. It's almost like the more you feed Peter, the hungrier he gets."
And though the seminary and the theater might not seem to have much in common, Father Leavitt explains, "The act of preaching is much like being an actor -- it's self-involving. You can't stand up there and recite stuff from memory, you have to make it your own. Peter is committed to that kind of teaching."
This parallel is at the heart of Mr. Culman's approach to theater. "The engagement that occurs in the theater between the actors and an audience is not that different from the engagement that occurs in good worship," he says.
However, the notion of a career in the theater didn't firmly take hold until his undergraduate days at Williams College. After failing physics, he admitted to the dean that he'd always wanted to sing and dance in a musical, and the dean suggested he channel his energies into producing a freshman revue. By his senior year, he was president of the dramatics society, and at graduation he shared the school's top drama prize.
Senior year was also when he met his future wife, Anne LaFarge. Mrs. Culman -- currently vice president of the Abell Foundation -- recalls that he was a good conversationalist and "very involved in the theater." Most importantly, she says, "We had a spiritual compatibility -- somewhat magnetic. Particularly in college, when you're going through so much spiritual questioning, it's nice to find a kindred spirit."
Despite this, theater is not Mrs. Culman's first interest, nor has it been taken up by either of their two sons -- Sean, an intern at an architectural firm in Washington, and Liam, a senior majoring in history at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y.
However, before Mr. Culman settled down and began raising a family, he saw a bit of the world. After college, he spent a year in the British Isles receiving his first and only taste of commercial theater, primarily as an apprentice to London producer Stephen Mitchell.
He returned to the United States with letters of introduction to several prominent American producers. One of these was to Baltimore native T. Edward Hambleton, a pioneer of off-Broadway theater, co-founder of the legendary Phoenix Theater and the man who eventually brought Mr. Culman to Center Stage.
Mr. Hambleton gave him a job at the Phoenix, where he helped establish the theater division of the New York State Council on the Arts. Then the military intervened, and, through what he describes as "a fluke," Mr. Culman spent 18 months in Taiwan as a Chinese linguist with the Army Security Agency.
Following his discharge, he went to work at Virginia's Barter Theater. He was serving as managing director by the time Mr. Hambleton recommended him to Center Stage, which was then struggling with its fifth season.
"One of the things certainly that I'm most proud of is having had the good sense to take Peter on at the Phoenix and then bring him to Center Stage," says Mr. Hambleton, who put the Culmans up at his Timonium home until they found an apartment.
But there were tough times ahead. At the end of his first season, Mr. Culman was literally passing the hat during intermission. By 1974, the theater -- then located on North Avenue -- was enjoying what looked to be its most successful season yet when it was accidentally burned to the ground.
"In a funny way, the fire made us," Mr. Culman says referring not only to the public awareness it created, but also to the award-winning, two-stage facility that Center Stage now occupies in the former site of the Jesuit-run Loyola College and High School on Calvert Street.
There's no question that Center Stage has come a long way under Mr. Culman's leadership. Besides helping the theater maintain a nationally recognized, high artistic standard, he guided it through a successful $13 million capital campaign, part of which paid for the innovative, upstairs Head Theater. He is also largely credited with keeping the theater in the black for the past 14 years.
The theater is soon expected to name a replacement for artistic director Stan Wojewodski Jr., who left the post after 14 years to head the Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre. Mr. Culman is looking forward to the inevitable change new artistic leadership will bring. "I hope it will have a huge impact," he says.
After all, he is quick to point out, "I should be able to drop dead tomorrow and Center Stage should continue to thrive. . . . Center Stage isn't about management, it's about artists."
THE CULMAN FILE
Born: May 30, 1938, in New York City.
Family: Married to the former Anne LaFarge since 1964; two sons: John LaFarge Culman (called Sean), 26, and William Salisbury Culman (called Liam), 23.
Education: Graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in with a bachelor's degree in English.
Last performance that greatly impressed him at a theater other than Center Stage: Sir Alec Guinness in "A Walk in the Woods" in London. "I was completely caught up in this person because it was so non-acty. The reality of what he was doing was taken to a depth I had not seen before."
Hobbies: Poetry, bridge, ballroom dancing, bird-watching.
Comments by playwright Athol Fugard in honor of his 25th anniversary at Center Stage: "After 36 years of making theater, I am more passionately in love with it, proud of it and more passionately informed with faith in it than at any time in the past, and I know that is probably something you could stand up and say for yourself."