Joe's Commencement Speech at Rutgers University

Thank you. I am honored to be with you and congratulate the Class of 2018. I know that you all are doing great things and will do more great things to add value to the human experience.

And thank you Dean (George) Stauffer for inviting me to address the graduates. I congratulate you on your remarkable leadership of Mason Gross.

I’d also like to recognize someone else I greatly admire. He’s a graduate of Mason Gross, Class of 2000, who is a visual artist who made his way into television with PBS and founded his own production company. Along the way, he’s garnered lots of awards, including eight Emmys. Most importantly, he is an artist with a conscience, focusing on how artists live and work. He’s also a really wonderful human being and he’s my oldest son, Christopher Benincasa. (Hi, Chris.)

My youngest son, Andrew, is also an artist – he is a fantastic puppeteer, animator and paper artist and he knocks Chris and I out with his artistry. But, he did not attend Mason Gross, so that’s all I’ll say about him. Except to say, that Chris and Andy’s mother and my wife of 45 years, Nancy, is very proud.

My first draft of this short speech was really a terrific public service announcement for the human service organization I manage, The Actors Fund. This speech is that but it’s also a lot more. So, let’s start with Mark Twain…

Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885. The Actors Fund was founded three years earlier in 1882. That a charity was needed to help those dedicated to the art of story-telling suited Twain. It suited him because this community, the community of which you are members, is focused on the central tenet of our lives on earth – human dignity.

First, let’s fast forward to May 7, 1907, and a Headline in The New York Times. “Actors’ Fund Fair opens with vim; Roosevelt Presses the Button and Then Mark Twain Makes a Speech.”

Mark Twain was in New York City to open The Actors Fund Fair, and President Theodore Roosevelt was in Washington, DC, ceremonially, and actually, pressing a button to electrify the Metropolitan Opera House and launch a gathering of the celebrities of the day, assembled to raise money to assist their colleagues.  Twain, dressed in his famous white suit said “You should all remember that the actor has been your benefactor many and many a year. When you have been weary and downcast he has lifted your heart out of gloom and given you a fresh impulse.”

This act of doing something like the five day 1907 Actors Fund Fair was preceded by the 1892 Fair in the then just-opened Madison Square Garden. The elaborate staging of this Fair, an actual village, was designed by the leading architect of the day,  Stanford White. The founding of The Actors Fund, and events like these, helped those in Show Business gain acceptance in Society. Until this time, most people working in Theatre were held in very low esteem, some people even considered them little more than drunks and prostitutes. 

It was great 19th Century Actors Edwin Booth, James O’Neill and Fanny Davenport, a newspaper publisher named Harrison Fiske and a producer named Buffalo Bill Cody who got together to help their colleagues and create a more accurate reputation of the artists of the day. Of course, their first effort was to band together to buy cemeteries in which to bury their dead because, astonishingly, their colleagues and themselves could not be buried in consecrated grounds owned and operated by the religious institutions of the time. 

So, as featured in Harper’s Bazaar Magazine, the Cemetery of Evergreens was established in 1887 in Brooklyn. They later added a cemetery in Valhalla, New York. The dedication of these cemeteries were very big deals and The Actors Fund still owns them, providing dignified burial plots to those in our community. 

Now, let me take you from Harper’s Bazaar to The New York Times and a man named Arthur Gelb.

Arthur was the prominent Managing Editor of The New York Times who passed away at 90 years of age in 2014. He was famous for many successes at The Times, and among them was lifting arts coverage to new heights, including the creation of the Arts Sections. His efforts further emphasized the important role the arts play in our personal lives and the world’s cultural life.

Arthur and his wife Barbara were also experts on Eugene O’Neill, the Nobel Prize winning playwright of classics like The Iceman Cometh, the most recent revival of which just opened on Broadway with Denzel Washington. Arthur and Barbara wrote about how James O’Neill and Edwin Booth bonded in their dedication to helping their colleagues. And Barbara and Arthur Gelb bonded with the arts community, helping to write a history of The Actors Fund ten years ago. They brought into focus, as did The New York Times, the collaborative spirit of the Creative Community.  Arthur and Barbara did what Twain, Booth, Davenport, O’Neill, Fiske and Cody more than a century before: they placed the artist in a position of respect in society.

This collaborative spirit and willingness to help one another reflects what the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his travels through the United States in the 1830s. De Tocqueville commented on how Americans gathered to help one another. He noted how enlightened self-interest brought people together to help one another. De Tocqueville famously said, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

And the people in Show Business show concern for one another in the most entertaining ways. The Fairs I mentioned have evolved. In 1982, ’85 and ’89, the Nights of a 100 Stars took over Radio City Music Hall with three hour broadcasts on the major television networks. Yes, it was nicknamed the “Nights of a Thousand Agents” because once Princess Grace Kelly, James Stewart, Katherine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Elizabeth Taylor volunteered, every agent in the world wanted their clients on the stage with them. It was a good example of self-interest colliding with the common good.

BOMBSHELL, the musical within the television show SMASH, was on stage for one-night-only and was not a broadcast event. The 2016 crowd-funding campaign for this fundraiser topped-out at a million dollars and we turned to merchandise for those in the lottery who did not score tickets.

These fundraising events stand-out because of their grandness but underscore a simple fact: Artists choose a life path which does not guarantee financial rewards and, more often than not, artists must form networks to help one another.

On the night before the Academy Awards, the Oscar nominees gather to raise funds for The Motion Picture & Television Fund.

Two nights before the Grammys, the music industry gathers to pay tribute to music icons for its charitable arm, Musicares. In 2013, it was New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen.

The Actors Fund is central to these network of support for artists. 

You know what you do is important for the soul. But you should also know that it’s essential to our economy. While you help define our society, you also drive it. Yes, you inspire hope and lift our spirits, especially in difficult times, but it is fact, proven over and over again, that healthy economies are closely tied to thriving cultural landscapes. We see it in communities from coast to coast, and around the world. We see it right here in New Brunswick where a new performing arts center is being built next door.

But, despite the fact that the arts account for 4 point 2 percent, or more than 763 point 6 Billion Dollars, of the United States Gross National Product - a larger share of the economy than transportation, tourism, agriculture and construction – incomes are generally modest for artists. In years past, artists were twice as likely to not have health insurance as the average American, which is why Jerry Stiller went to work to create health care opportunities ranging from free health care to subsidized health insurance, why Bebe Neuwirth founded The Dancers’ Resource to help dancers in every way possible, and why George Clooney stepped-up to help when the film and television industry was shut down during the Writers’ Strike. It’s why Calista Flockhart, a graduate of Mason Gross, did a one-night-only fundraising reading of All About Eve with colleagues like Kirk Douglas, Angela Lansbury, Carl Reiner and Stockard Channing, why Lin-Manuel Miranda’s HAMILTON and every other Broadway and touring company adds special performances for The Actors Fund – even a matinee of CAROUSEL on this coming Monday and a midnight performance of THREE TALL WOMEN a week from today - and why Christopher Radko, the prolific designer of beautiful glass-blown ornaments, designed this one for the 125th Anniversary of The Actors Fund.

Now, here’s where you and Mark Twain come back into the picture, because artists - in everything they do - everything that you do - express the Human Condition and in expressing the Human Condition, dignify it.

You have a lot in common with Mark Twain who turned Huckleberry Finn’s world upside down in considering the fate of a slave named Jim. You know the story: Aunt Polly tried to “civilize” him with certain, accepted values of the time. The problem for Huck was that Aunt Polly’s values conflicted with his sense of humanity. In deciding to not surrender Jim to his slave owner, he said, “Hell, I guess I’m going to hell.” Mark Twain, in his lecture notes, proposed that “a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience” and goes on to describe the novel as “…a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat”.

In your lives as artists, your talent will drive your heart which will create your art. How you tell a story – whether you’re on stage, in the music pit, back or front of house, before or behind a camera, at an editing deck, sculpting or facing the proverbial blank canvass, composing or writing – how you tell the story will be meaningful. It will cause contemplation. It will help shape opinion and it will drive emotion. It will also entertain.

But, while you’re creating art, be sure to take care of yourselves, financially and physically. And this is the real public service announcement: The Actors Fund can help you do just that, while you are telling stories which matter. 

At The Actors Fund, the efforts of Mark Twain and everyone else I’ve mentioned today and more, has built housing for seniors and working artists, efforts which also embrace the communities in which these residences are built. It’s quality housing where young and old, aged and ill, can live together.

Their efforts have created financial assistance programs and career centers, and services developed specifically for artists working in various disciplines. Our programs and services are designed to help people in every state and territory of the United States.

Their efforts are being carried forward by remarkably talented and caring people like the Chair of The Actors Fund, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and the heads of the major unions, theatres, associations, studios and leaders in philanthropy who understand the important roles artists play in the world.  

On Monday, we’ll honor four of them: Uma Thurman, Kenny Leon, Chita Rivera and Warren Beatty.

But now, are you ready for it?  It’s our website: actors fund dot org. And, using a special portal on our website at actors fund dot org slash free membership, you will become a member of The Actors Fund, for everyone involved in creating and telling the stories which dignify the human condition. You’ll gain access to workshops and invitations to special events. You’ll also be able to navigate this website to find other organizations designed to serve artists.

Please think of yourselves, no matter what medium you are working in, as actors, because back in 1882 – 136 years ago - some bold, talented and caring people decided to band together to help one another. I encourage you to do the same.

Thank you for committing yourself to be artists. I wish you the very best.