Charles Portz

Charles Portz 1938 - 2011 WILLIAMSTOWN Charles Portz died at the age of 73 at his home in Williamstown on March 16 after a long illness. He is survived by his wife of 30 years, Bette Craig, and a host of sociology students who occasionally gave him a standing ovation after a particularly trenchant analysis of collective behavior and the forces opposing it. He taught most recently at MCLA in North Adams. The theatrical energy that sometimes brought his students to their feet was developed during his prior 20 plus years devoted to theater and filmmaking. Several Berkshire County residents formed part of the cast and crew of A Mistaken Charity, the film that Portz co-wrote and directed for PBS's American Playhouse series broadcast in 1987. Portz was nominated for a Writers' Guild of America award for the script adapted from Mary Wilkins Freeman's short story of the same name. The son and grandson of rubber workers, Charles Robert Portz was born on Jan. 25, 1938, in Akron, Ohio, the only child of Agnes Costick Portz and Charles L. Portz. After graduating from Ellet High School in Akron and Stetson University in Deland, Fla., Portz enlisted in the Army, serving in Germany, where he worked hard to make the football team in order to get release time from his regular duties as a medic. Most people called him Chuck, although he spent some time as C.R. during his days as a Certified Life Underwriter and group plan representative in the insurance industry. He moved to New York City and discovered a vocation for theater in Lee Strasberg's acting class at Carnegie Hall, which he used to attend during his lunch hours while he was still working in insurance. In 1973, Portz and Bette Craig (whom he met in Strasberg's class) founded The Labor Theater, a non-profit theater set up to bring theater to working class audiences in community centers and union halls in the New York City area and across the country. He spent six months in London in 1978 as a recipient of a US/UK Bicentennial Exchange Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the British Council, where he wrote a one-man play about Jack London, which he later performed in New York City and on tour. The play was filmed by Detroit public television and broadcast nationally on PBS. In addition to the many plays he wrote and directed for The Labor Theater, including Railroad Bill and The Bayside Boys, Portz wrote several screenplays during two years he spent in Hollywood, including one on the Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike and another on a Hollywood director's adventures in filming Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. Always eager for a new adventure, he worked as a cook and crew member on a salmon boat in Alaska, as a repo agent in Florida, and as a NABET lighting technician on TV commercials and movies before his ultimate adventure of going back to school at the age of 52 to earn a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His first full-time teaching job was at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota. He also taught at Montclair State University, Fordham University and Borough of Manhattan Community College. He taught under the auspices of the Civic Education Project in Kiev, Ukraine in 1996-7 and as a Fulbright Fellow in Moldova in 1999-2000. In 2001 he went back to Moldova to make the film, Bucharest Express, which has won several prizes at film festivals and will be broadcast locally on Pittsfield Community TV. FUNERAL NOTICE: Services for Charles Portz are private. The FLYNN & DAGNOLI-MONTAGNA HOME FOR FUNERALS WEST CHAPELS is in charge of arrangements.