Back in 1960, just after he turned 20 years old, George Romero had his first major role in a play, Pittsburgh's first production of Jack Gelber's controversial off-Broadway sensation The Connection. The groundbreaking "play with jazz" was about a group of beatniks and jazz musicians waiting around for their heroin connection, and it broke with all sorts of conventions of style and taste. It would become one of the foundations of the modern American theater, helping to redefine what plays could be and what they could do. This production, put on at the Young Men & Women's Hebrew Assocation auditorium March 17, 19, and 20, 1960, cast Romero, he later claimed, "because I was large, my only impressive quality." Also in the cast was later longtime collaborator Rudolph Ricci. Romero played Leach, the owner of the rundown loft in which all of the action took place. At the end of the play, his character overdoses, which required Romero to use a needle and some skin-colored putty to inject himself. In 1959, the legendary Living Theater's production in NYC had brought the avant-garde theater to some level of fame among hipsters and intellectuals around the country. The Pittsburgh production premiered less than a year later, so it would have been one of the first productions anywhere outside of New York.

In a speech written later in his life, Romero recalls the revelation he felt on stage: 

"We played five performances, and each time, when I shot a needle into the silly-putty on my arm, the audience gasped. They gasped! I had the power to Make them gasp! I was hooked. I had to find a way to make audiences gasp again. But how? I'd never even had a thought about a career in the theater, or in film. I figured you'd never be allowed in, unless you were some sort of 'Born Royalty.'"

At the time, Romero was a self-confessed poor student training to be an artist at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon). In the audience for one the play's performances was the head of the Fine Arts department, Ted Hoffmann. Hoffmann, a drama teacher, was impressed by his performance and suggested Romero change his major to drama. Or, in Romero's account, he told him, "George, you're a much better actor than you are a painter." Romero agreed and became a drama student. He would never get enough credits to graduate in his new major, though he did have a small role in a student production that also featured Carnegie Tech student and future Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Rene Auberjenois. Instead, he and other young actors, drama students, and others working in andaround the theater in Pittsburgh soon began developing a more active interest in the movies. 

Romero didn't save much from his artistic career pre-Night of the Living Dead, but in the Pitt Libraries theater archives we happen to have a single archive of the YM&WHA. Of that most of the playbills and other materials are from the 1930s and 1940s, when public funding created a theater renaissance. We happen to have one playbill from the era, and it's of The Connection. 

One early biography of Romero, created along with promotional material for Night of the Living Dead, mentions not just The Connection but another landmark work of avant-garde theater in which Romero appeared in Pittsburgh: Jean Genet's The Balcony. In my research, I've found absolutely no mention in the Pitt theater archives, in searches of newspapers and magazines, or google, for that matter, of any production of The Balcony in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, let alone one that featured Romero. 

-Adam Charles Hart