Stage lights come up on a young teenage girl.
Sitting on a couch in the library of the family manor, surrounded by leather-bound books. In her lap is A Mill on the Flossby George Eliot. And stacked on a table are novels by Jane Austen.
A fire smolders in the fireplace. Etched above the mantle is a line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:“Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks.”
Upstage, through a window, brilliant sunlight illuminates a lush garden. But the girl sits perfectly still, reading the book.
Marie Kohler grew up lonely in a grand house. She was the baby of the family, the youngest of four and a surprise to her parents. Her sister, the second-youngest, was eight years older. So when Marie had no one to play with on the 40-acre estate, she retreated to the library, built and bestowed to her family by her famous grandfather, a Wisconsin governor.
The library, along with her mother’s love of theater and literature, led Marie on a literary journey – from an English degree at Harvard’s Radcliffe College to theaters in Cambridge and Milwaukee and eventually to where she is today, a co-founder and artistic director of Renaissance Theaterworks and a leading Milwaukee playwright. Her latest play, Boswell’s Dreams,enjoyed sold-out performances and enthusiastic reviews early this year.
Kohler’s family name, of course, is tied inextricably to the Kohler Co., one of Wisconsin’s oldest manufacturers. Since her childhood, she has shared the stage with a company of ghosts and legends. Her grandfather, Walter J. Kohler, and her uncle, Walter J. Kohler Jr., both were governors of Wisconsin and company executives. Her father, John Michael Kohler III, was a Kohler vice president, and her mother, Julilly Kohler, was a successful author of children’s books, local actor and socialite.
The Village of Kohler, the American Club hotel and restaurants, Kohler-Andrae State Park, the world-class golf courses and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan all bear the family imprint.
Growing up, she says, “There was always that sense of being different. That was both a burden and a blessing.”
But in the midst of prominence and privilege, Marie Kohler straddled two worlds. She lived in a castle of a home named Riverbend along the Sheboygan River, just outside the company town. Yet she was the first Kohler to graduate from public high school rather than boarding school. She was a bookish straight-A student but also tried out for cheerleading and dated the high school football star. Though her mother and sister went to Massachusetts’ insular Wellesley College – regarded as a training ground for marriage and motherhood – Marie, in 1969, chose the politically charged Radcliffe College at Harvard instead. She was immersed in the countercultural turmoil at Harvard yet never missed class on her way to graduating magna cum laude.
Privileged, yes, but “grounded” is how family and friends describe her.
“She’s not a superfluous person,” says her sister, local developer Julilly Kohler, who was named after her mother. “She’s very clear about what’s important to her.”
Snobbery and elitism were not abided in the family. The children were raised knowing that money was not the end-all and birthright not a free pass to success. In some ways, says Marie, inherited wealth is an obstacle to personal growth.
“Outsiders looking in think it makes life easy,” she says. “And in some ways, it does. I don’t have as many bills as some people do. But it certainly doesn’t shield you against the gut struggles of life, against tragedy or unhappiness.”
Wealth has caused divisions in her family. When Herbert Kohler Jr., president of the Kohler Co. – and Forbes’102nd wealthiest American last year – attempted to devalue the family-held stock for tax purposes five years ago, Marie and her sister sued. A settlement was reached, and the stock was eventually priced at $150,000 per share.
The Kohler legacy is only one facet of her identity. When her name is Googled, Kohler, at age 54, gets far more hits as a playwright than for her association to plumbing fixtures, a sign she has come into her own.
Inspired by her mother, her interest in theater began in high school, when she formed a drama club. In college, she auditioned for a play in the Harvard Dramatic Club, got the part and won the heart of the director, Colin Cabot, a Harvard man and distant relative of Henry Cabot Lodge. The couple married a year after college and settled in Wisconsin when Kohler’s mother became ill. Cabot took a job at the Skylight Opera Theatre.
Kohler deferred to her husband’s professional ambitions, staying home to raise their two daughters while her Radcliffe classmates (including Benazir Bhutto, who became prime minister of Pakistan) pursued glamorous careers. After the birth of their first daughter, Annie, the young family moved to Europe for a year when Cabot was hired as an assistant to opera composer Giancarlo Menotti. They lived in the gatehouse on Menotti’s Scottish estate and summered with him in Umbria, Italy, where the composer welcomed such guests as Grace Kelly, Samuel Barber and Luciano Pavarotti.
“It was something out of a Hemingway novel,” says Kohler.
Returning to Milwaukee’s East Side, Cabot hired on as managing director of the Skylight while Kohler began her master’s work in English literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As she completed her degree, their second daughter, Marie Christine, was born. When the couple separated in the mid-1980s, Kohler turned her attention to acting and writing.
Kohler met actor Brian Robert Mani in 1989 while they were acting in Great Expectations.Mani, who had a young daughter, Tricia, by a previous relationship, married Kohler three years later.
The couple’s backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. Mani is from a farming community of 350 in northwestern Illinois. Both parents were factory workers. Unlike Kohler, Mani never finished college. Instead, he worked summer theater in the Midwest before moving to Milwaukee in 1984 to join the Professional Theatre Training Program at UWM.
Today, Mani and Kohler live a block from Lake Park; an office over the garage is Kohler’s writing studio. They also own a summer home in Spring Green, where Mani is a member of American Players Theatre.
Kohler’s outlook hasn’t always been sanguine. While living in the East, Kohler and her first husband had become friends with Al Franken, also a Harvard student at the time. Cabot produced a few plays Franken had written. Years later, Kohler recalls, Franken visited the couple in Milwaukee with a group of young comics in tow – cast members of “Saturday Night Live.”
“I felt out of the loop,” says Kohler. “I felt that I’d given up on any ambition, that it wasn’t happening in Milwaukee. I felt a little envious of that other world.”
She doesn’t feel that way anymore. “Now I’m just fine visiting New York and living in Milwaukee. I really love this city and feel more whole here than if I were in Manhattan.”
As Kohler’s star has risen, so has the star of Milwaukee’s Renaissance Theaterworks. Last spring, coming off of a hit season and feeling growing pains, the company moved into the Broadway Theatre Center.
Renaissance grew out of a women’s theater festival in 1993 at the now-defunct Theatre X. “Initially, people thought we did jousting,” laughs Jennifer Rupp, one of the five founders, all women.
“We basically didn’t know enough to know that it was a really bad idea,” says Susan Fete, another co-founder. Putting on shows was a thrill, but writing a budget and running a company was serious business. From the start, each founder has donated her time to the company without pay.
Kohler’s last three plays have been produced by Renaissance. Each leans heavily on literature for plot, setting and characters. In fact, she opens two of her plays with a woman reading a book.
“Marie has an extraordinary mind and a multitude of knowledge of literature,” says Madison-based Norma Saldivar, director of Kohler’s last three plays. “She sees the world through a much more expansive manner than most. She can correlate something she sees in the world with her literary experience.”
For Boswell’s Dreams,Kohler drew from a book she found long ago in the family library, London Diary,James Boswell’s bawdy tales of his sexual feats. She explores the rapport between the young Boswell and Dr. Samuel Johnson – poet, author of England’s first dictionary, one of the most famous Englishmen of the 18th century and the subject of a biography by Boswell. Kohler’s play tells a story of lust, social standing and, ultimately, the value of the written word.
In Counting Days (nominated for the American Theatre Critics Association’s “Best New Regional Play” award in 1995) Kohler pairs a contemporary divorced woman who is stumbling into middle age with 1920s writer Katherine Mansfield, who is dying of tuberculosis. The woman, an empty-nester named Mary Kniesen, eventually finds her footing by reading Mansfield’s journals and “conversing” with the writer.
Kohler admits there’s a bit of herself in Kniesen; she was a floundering empty-nester after her divorce from Cabot. But the play is not autobiographical. “She’s pretty lost; I wasn’t quite as lost,” says Kohler.
Renaissance Theaterworks showcases the work of local women in theater – from Colleen Madden’s tour de force performance of 24 characters in The Syringa Tree to Angela Iannone’s portrayal of Diana Vreeland in Full Gallop to direction of Skin Tight by longtime Milwaukee Rep actor Laura Gordon. But the casts include men and women, and performances resonate among both genders.
Mani has acted in three of his wife’s plays, including the part of Johnson in Boswell’s Dreams.“I do enjoy her plays; they’re a blast,” he says.
But like others, he has pushed Kohler to set her next play in contemporary times, possibly drawing on her own background. “Marie so completely knows the literary world. She is like an encyclopedia sometimes,” he says. “I don’t want to call it a crutch, but she leans on that. I would like to see her freefall more.…”
Kohler expects that her next play will be contemporary. “I’ve started work on a play about someone close to me who has struggled with emotional problems,” she says.
It’s not that she has been preoccupied with the past. “I have never wanted to live in other times,” she says. But there’s a lot to be gained from history and literature. The worlds of George Eliot or Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield or James Boswell can enlighten anyone willing to enter.
“I’ve always looked for answers in books,” says Kohler. “When I was a child, I came from a very cultivated family, and I went to a school where kids’ parents didn’t pass high school. In a way, my calling has been to bridge high culture with popular audiences.”
Four years ago, Kohler went to her director, Saldivar, looking for advice. She read passages from two works in progress – a contemporary non-literary play and a play about Boswell.
“Which one should I finish?” Kohler asked.
“Do the contemporary play,” Saldivar said. But Kohler chose Boswell.
Still, Saldivar was not disappointed.
“What a romantic idea to be able to touch history and to flesh it out,” Saldivar says. “Yes, they’re literature. Yes, they stretch the mind. But, you know, that’s not too bad.”
Kurt Chandler is a Milwaukee Magazine senior editor.
