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monologue she performed that day, she wasn’t singing. In a sense, she was declaring independence from her mother. Yet she retained one talent even as she developed the other: The tension between the lyric soprano and the comic actor had begun. While most young performers would be thrilled to have both options at the ready, Madeline’s experiences at Hofstra would exacerbate this tension, which dominated her professional life for at least the next dozen years.

    When Madeline matriculated, Hofstra College was on the cusp of becoming a university. (It was accredited in 1963, while Madeline was a student there.) A private institution and formerly a branch of New York University, located in Hempstead, Long Island, Hofstra “was a local school, almost like a community college,” says filmmaker David Hoffman, class of 1963. He played oboe and had won a full music scholarship, which in his case included not only tuition and books, but also money for food, a car, and an apartment. “Those scholarships don’t exist any more,” he says, but they and others like them at one time attracted an exceptional student body from the middle- and lower-middle classes. School administrators viewed the arts as a draw, one cheaper to develop than the sciences. When Madeline arrived, the radio and television department was new, and the school boasted enviable resources for music and theater. Even student productions might involve a full orchestra, and through the school’s connections, student musicians could obtain professional gigs in New York City. For future directors like Hoffman, Francis Ford Coppola (class of ’59), and Charles Ludlam (class of ’64), the school provided opportunities to explore and experiment, and to showcase student performers.
    At first, Madeline
didn
’
t
perform. From time to time, she wandered to the theater to see what plays were auditioning, “and I saw those actorshanging around there in bare feet and smoking cigarettes, ooh—I got out of there so fast! I mean, I didn’t feel like one of them at all, you know, and I just didn’t even have the courage to look at the callboard anyway. So, I didn’t.” Still unconvinced of her own potential, she chose to study practical subjects that could lead to steady, regular employment: She majored in speech therapy, with a minor in education. Any current or former college student with artistic inclinations will recognize these fields of study as precisely the sort that nervous parents recommend to their children (or foist upon them) as “something to fall back on.” There’s no indication, however, that Madeline’s parents pushed her toward speech therapy. The extent of their influence may simply have been her own clear-eyed recognition that, some day soon, she would have to support herself.
    Arriving at the start of the second semester, Madeline continued to live at home, and she worked off-campus in her spare time. She did well in her courses and gave little thought to theater. A drama scholarship didn’t require her to major in drama, after all, but in the fall of 1960, she discovered that the school had previously failed to inform her that her scholarship did require that she take part in productions. Now her scholarship was about to be revoked. She scurried back to the callboard, where she learned that the next play to be produced would be Elmer Rice’s
The Adding Machine
. “I said to myself, ‘What can I get in this play?’” Madeline remembered. “[N]ot what part do I
want
, but, ‘What part do I think I can get?’” She won a role, and her scholarship was secure. But her troubles with the Hofstra drama department were just beginning.
    The drama faculty at the time included Bernard Beckerman, a recognized Shakespeare scholar who provided the impetus behind Hofstra’s Shakespeare festival, performed annually on a replica of the Globe Theatre stage. His colleague Miriam Tulin specialized in scene work. An aspiring actress who’d given up her