When Mary Lou Met Peter Met New Haven

Call it a love story, in two acts.

Act two of the story centers on how Mary Lou Aleskie and Peter Webster came to New Haven for what they considered a temporary stay — and then grew so enamored with the city, they dug in. She came to run the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, and took it to a new level. He continued his work in other cities directing plays and operas and coaching leading opera singers, but found himself drawn deeply into his neighborhood, into the local arts scene, into the work of cops and neighbors to make streets safer and help people in need.

They fell in love with New Haven. They became embodiments of that popular buzz phrase ​“civic engagement,” aka ​“becoming part of your community and making it better.”

We ended keeping them for 11 years.

Now the couple is leaving town for New Hampshire, where Aleskie will become the director of the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College. In a parting interview on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven,” they reflected on their Elm City love affair, and how it changed them.

New Haven might never have known them if not for act one of the love story — when they met in Houston, Texas, 26 years ago. Aleskie was general manager at the time of the Tony Award-winning Alley Theatre. Webster was a New York-based actor who pitched her organization on a community outreach program. Based on their first meeting, you might not have ever imagined them marrying each other, letting alone choosing to spend time in each other’s company.

Well, at least Aleskie didn’t imagine it, when their first act got underway.

Mary Lou & Peter Fall In Love

Here’s how they recalled that act in the WNHH interview:

Mary Lou: He was one of the most arrogant insufferable people I ever met…. We met by phone mostly when I was dealing with his contract, and he was just awful. He arrived with this … sense of grandeur and superiority. That was like just having me rolling my eyes.

He was in his early forties. I was in my early thirties.

He came in [and said] he was going to do a pastoral passion play in a church in a barrio. And he had this whole graphic element that he had been thinking up that was completely counter to the brand of the organization and had ​“Death Dies — Love Wins” or something and a skull. He shows up in my office, forcing me to embrace this idea.

So he got expelled from my office.

Peter: It was actually Romeo and Juliet.

Mary Lou: Oh, right.

Peter: I proposed doing Romeo and Juliet in English and Spanish using a mix of professionals and kids. So I got an ally on the Houston parks and recreation department. We went into 10 city parks, including one that had had a horrendous riot. I had police cars roaring into one. I had people on horseback coming in to another one.

I tried to pitch this to Mary Lou. I went to her office, and she had a phone in one ear, a phone in the other ear. She was looking at a computer screen.

This is 1990. These are computers that are not as powerful as a smart phone is.

She was typing on her computer, talking to two different people. And then I came in, and I started to talk.

She said to one person on the phone, ​“I’m putting you on hold.” Then she said to the other person, ​“I’m putting you on hold.”

Then she turned to me and said, ​“I know you have something to say. Can you say it in 10 words or less and then leave my office? Because I’m busy!”

I looked at her and I thought: I love this woman.

I did it in 10 seconds, and I got out.

Mary Lou: I was glad he was gone.

The two did end up working together on that and other projects for a year. They fought the whole time. Then one night they found themselves at a Romeo and Juliet rehearsal dance at a barrio-based arts collective in Houston.

Mary Lou:They had a conga line. There was salsa music. We were expected to dance …

Peter: It was a merengue, actually, which is a really fast dance.

My wife is also a fabulous dancer — muy caliente. So we had the room filled with people from El Salvador and Guatemala and Panama and Mexico. I mean just every kind of person.

They put on the record. They thought, ​“Oh, the old white people …” Then they went, ​“Oh!” We did good.

Mary Lou: So we danced, and we fell in love.

Mary Lou & Peter Fall In Love With New Haven

And they married soon after.

Fifteen years later, Aleskie and Webster moved from California to New Haven, where Aleskie was taking over the helm of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, a high-powered position in town.

Like many talented people who pass through New Haven, they figured they would stay maybe three, four years here before moving on to their next city. Little did they know they would fall in love again — with the Elm City.

Aleskie was the more visible of the two, building the city’s trademark multi-week summer festival by expanding its dance, theater, instrumental, and multimedia events. She promoted the festival tirelessly. Her anticipated three-to-four-year stay stretched to more than a decade, until Dartmouth came calling with an offer to help redefine the university’s relationship with the arts.

Behind the scenes, Webster found himself caught up in more and more community work of his own.

“Up until we came to New Haven, Peter was making these groundbreaking site-specific multinational [cultural projects] On top of that he was a world-renowned and continues to be an important coach for opera singers. When we came to New Haven, Peter never promoted himself. He basically took that passion and took that artistry and committed it to family and community in a way that is so profoundly generous, that all of my unbelievable misrepresentation of him as an arrogant and insufferable person was overcome,” Aleskie remarked.

“We lived in Houston. We lived in California. We lived in New York. But in New Haven we learned how to really be citizens and neighbors and part of the community. That’s what’s called home.”

Within New Haven, home was Wooster Square. Webster found himself getting to know his neighbors, and his neighborhood, intimately. He got involved with Historic Wooster Square Association as well as the Downtown Wooster Square Community Management Team. As concern grew about street crime, he began attending the police department’s weekly Compstat data-sharing meeting. He became a regular, got to know the cops, became a bridge between them and his neighbors.

He befriended Peter Krause, a dedicated neighborhood walking cop who struggled with a life-threatening illness. After Krause died, Webster organized a tree planting in his memory. He helped create a ​“walk” in Russo Park in the memory of neighborhood stalwart Harvey Koizim.

Eventually Webster was elected chair of the management team. Under his gentle, focused leadership, the meetings became a model for the city. Webster included people from the block to Yale, from the police department and other city offices to arts organizations, and brought them around the table each month for a tightly run hour-long discussion. Everyone got a chance to talk; no one, even notoriously long-winded passionate advocates, ended up dominating or hijacking the proceedings or attacking anyone else.

Webster worked with neighbors and city officials to get the Conte School reopened to the community for public swims this summer. When he discovered under-recognized grassroots talent, he became a one-man promotional squad, as with his work bringing more of the community into contact with noted pencil-artist Krikko and into his museum in the Hill.

“Once you’ve engaged in New Haven you become a lifer, even if you move away, because it’s not the kind of city that you can rip out of your heart.” Webster said in the WNHH interview. ​“It’s a city that that’s part of my DNA and of my soul. So I can’t say that I’m moving away. I’m just going up the road.”

Click on or download the above audio file to hear the full farewell interview with Mary Lou Aleskie and Peter Webster on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”