Professor Perloff is renowned for her expertise in the lives and work of modernist poets: William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound. In a Stanford alumni magazine interview, Carey credited her mother with her own lifelong interest in literature. In 1986 she turned 27, and was tapped to become the artistic director of the Classic Stage Company (CSC)-an off-Broadway theater known for its revivals and adaptations.

“Ant’ny,” as she calls him (always with a grin), followed her to New York, where she first landed a job at a secretary of the International Theater Institute, before moving on to become Joseph Papp’s casting assistant at the Public Theater. In her production there of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Bed Bug, she ended up casting her future husband, Anthony Giles, a British scholar of the Soviet Union. The ‘Madames’ had newspapers, schoolbooks and notebooks, and I would hear Carey in her room, playing by the hour, and saying in a low voice, ‘Now, Hanse, what’s the answer to this question?’ Or she’d have them recite things, and then she’d correct them-‘No, no, walk left to right.’”įor two summers during her Fulbright years, Carey directed plays at the Edinburgh Festival. She would set them up in her room and make them furniture out of paper, or umbrella stands out of Tampax holders. “She hated Barbies but always loved her Madame Alexander dolls. Marjorie Perloff, professor emerita of English at Stanford, would say in an interview about Carey: Her mother claims to have seen this coming. Here, however, things began to take an unexpected turn: she began directing plays. Then came a Fulbright to Oxford, to further her classical education as a graduate student. Perloff was already getting her hands dirty on archaeological digs in the American Southwest. She was studying Latin and Greek–and the history of the civilizations which had spawned those languages–from afar. The pair of them looked at the dioramas and wondered about ancient mysteries.īy the time she’d become an undergraduate at Stanford, that dream had taken further shape. She was, instead, trekking once a week to the Smithsonian with her father-an armchair archaeologist. When Carey Perloff was a little girl in Washington, D.C., she wasn’t dreaming of a life in the theater.

Beautiful Chaos by Carey Perloff