the character of Mortimer now "not really an Indian" but playing one during the "Rape Ballet" sequence. The Wild West setting was abandoned, as was most of the script. All but a few songs in the score were also jettisoned, and the staging of the play was changed to a thrust stage. Tom Jones says that the name of the play came from George Fleming's 1900 adaptation of the Rostand play, which used the name The Fantasticks. Harley Granville-Barker's book, On Dramatic Method, provided the idea of using a series of images to help weave a unifying theme to the play. Thornton Wilder's Our Town gave Jones the idea of using a narrator, the staging of Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters provided the concept of having actors sit stage-side when not acting, and John Houseman's production of The Winter's Tale and Leonard Bernstein's Candide suggested the use of sun, moon, frozen action, and incidental music. The song "Try to Remember" was added at this time. Harvey Schmidt says he wrote it in a single afternoon, after it emerged in almost complete form after a fruitless afternoon attempting to compose other songs. The revamped play appeared on a bill of new one-act plays at Barnard College for one week in August 1959. Original off-Broadway production The Fantasticks premiered at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a small off-Broadway theatre in New York City's Greenwich Village, on May 3, 1960, with Jerry Orbach as El Gallo, Rita Gardner as Luisa, Kenneth Nelson as Matt, and librettist Tom Jones (under a pseudonym) as the Old Actor, among the cast members. The sparse set and semicircular stage created an intimate and immediate effect. The play is highly stylized and combines old-fashioned showmanship, classic musical theatre, commedia dell'arte and Noh theatrical traditions. The original production was directed by Word Baker and was produced on a very low budget. The producer spent $900 on the set and $541 on costumes, at a time when major Broadway shows would cost $250,000. The original set designer, costumer, prop master, and lighting designer was Ed Wittstein, who performed all four jobs for a total of only $480 plus $24.48 a week. The set was similar to that for Our Town; Wittstein designed a raised stationary platform anchored by six poles. It resembled a traveling players' wagon, like a pageant wagon. For a curtain, he hung various small false curtains across