Meet the Jampolises
Jampolis Cottage was the treasured summer home of Maritza Jane Reisman Jampolis, known professionally as Jane Reisman (1937 – 2017), and Neil Peter Jampolis (1943 – 2019). Their private moniker for the cottage was “Cowslip.”
The following accounts of their lives and their life together have been provided by literary translator Lisa Harries Schumann, Trustee of the Jampolis Living Trust, to whom the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia is deeply grateful. For Lisa and her brothers, the childfree Jane and Neil were like an aunt and uncle.
Maritza Jane Reisman was born in Cohasset, Massachusetts, on March 25, 1937, to Lillian Castleman and the violinist and big band leader Leo Reisman (1897 – 1961). Her childhood was spent between various boarding schools in Massachusetts and Manhattan, where her father not only recorded but also was the conductor of the inhouse dance bands at New York City’s Central Park Casino and then at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Jane went to Vassar College, graduated in 1959 with a degree in drama, and then moved to London, UK, where her professional life as a lighting designer began. Throughout her long career, she worked on lighting for theatre, opera, and dance companies throughout the US, Canada, and the world. Jane was a mentor to many design students while teaching at the Banff Centre, Bennington College, Emerson College, and the University of California at Los Angeles School of the Arts and Architecture, where she was Associate Professor of World Arts and Cultures. She was an inspiration to apprentices on many of her productions, and her amazing eye for color was noted by her professional collaborators, by those who had the delight of being in her homes, and by anyone who observed her sense of style in dress. No one else could rock a woolly lilac-purple jacket worn together with a mustard-colored leather cap like Jane did.
“Jane was in the fairy godmother mold of aunt, wanting to be sure we traveled and lived in the world she loved so much by giving us travel funds and inviting us to the rehearsals of shows and to their rent-controlled apartment—once Jane’s parents’ apartment—next to Carnegie Hall in Manhattan.” —Lisa Harries Schumann
Neil Peter Jampolis was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 13, 1943, to Sam and Beatrice Jampolis. Neil discovered his love of theater while still a pre-teen, taking the subway into Manhattan by himself to sit in the cheapest seats and absorb every performance he could. When his family moved to Arizona in his teenage years, he did his best to get back to New York as quickly as possible. He completed his studies in stage design at the Art Institute of Chicago and, by 1969, when he was in his mid-twenties, lit the New York premiere of Tennessee Williams’s In a Bar at a Tokyo Hotel. By 1975, he had earned a Tony award for his lighting design for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Sherlock Holmes. During his long career in theatrical lighting design, he worked on over seventy theatrical productions on and off Broadway and around the world; earned four other Tony nominations and numerous other awards (including American Theatre Wing Hewes Design, Drama Desk, and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards); branched into costume and set design, and also worked on numerous dance and opera productions. For nearly four decades, he was the principal designer for the modern dance company Pilobolus. Neil’s love of opera led him to work with companies in Houston, New York, Saint Louis, Sante Fe, Seattle, and Washington, DC, as well as at La Scala in Milan, at the Salzburg Festival, in London, in Vienna, and elsewhere. He also taught at the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television for 26 years, retiring as a Distinguished Professor of Theater.
“We thought of Neil as a Greek God—Poseidon, to be precise—and laughed at his impish sense of humor and his infatuation with orange Porsches, with which he raced up highways first from New York City and later in California, evading speed traps and being towed, as the orange Porsches constantly broke down.” —Lisa Harries Schumann
Jane and Neil met at a pre-production meeting for an off-Broadway production called Things That Almost Never Happen, which (manifesting its title) never premiered. That didn’t stop Jane and Neil from happening and living their lives in theatre both individually and in collaboration. Married in 1971 while working together in Sante Fe, they collaborated on many productions throughout their careers, including a Beijing production of The Fantasticks and the Broadway production of the musical Black and Blue—a musical revue celebrating the Black culture of dance and music in Paris between the First and Second World Wars—for which they earned shared Tony and Antoinette Perry award nominations in 1989.
Their most recognized collaboration was on the hit off-Broadway musical revue Forever Plaid, which has been long-running and far-reaching, with performances staged all over the world. First performed in New York in 1989, the revue is a goofy, 1950s nostalgia trip in which a high school barbershop quartet, killed in a car crash, return from the afterlife for one final gig. Forever Plaid was performed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as part of Neptune Theatre’s 33rd season (1995 – 1996), with Neil as set designer and Jane as lighting designer—and was also adapted for film in 2009, with Neil as art director and Jane as lighting designer.
Jane and Neil loved travel—both for their professional careers and of their own accord—including through Japan and China to light shows, through Hungary and Romania to trace Jane’s family roots, and to Morocco and South America toward the ends of their lives. Yet it was when they were invited to participate in the Atlantic Theatre Festival in the mid-1990s that they realized Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley was where they wanted to buy a summer home. Or, more accurately, Jane realized she wanted a home in Nova Scotia, spotted the cottage that they came to call “Cowslip” on a drive around the area, immediately fell in love with it, and decided she wanted to buy it. Neil agreed if Jane would pay for the cottage, which she did; ultimately, Neil was as much in love with Cowslip as Jane was.
They loved the light of Cowslip—now Jampolis Cottage—and loved the Minas Basin’s water and red-brown mud, the migrating birds, and the community they found around Avonport and Wolfville. In addition to working there, Neil spent time painting watercolors, Jane swam, they hosted and were hosted, and they sat on their deck looking at the expanse of sea and reading.
They championed Canadian writers to all their friends and read them avidly. They were also avid readers of classic literature—particularly Jane, who shared the passion with her brother, Karl Reisman (1931 – 2014), an anthropologist and scholar of Finnegan’s Wake. Their artistic interests also extended into off-stage music and into visual art: Neil was an amateur painter and Jane a photography tutor.
In 2003, Jane and Neil founded the Jampolis Living Trust—stipulating that Cowslip be donated to an as-yet-unselected charitable organization for the purpose of a writers’ or artist’s retreat. In 2010, they asked literary translator Lisa Harries Schumann to act as Trustee.
Toward the end of Jane’s time at Cowslip, when her body was failing her, she turned into a fish—or a dolphin, as Neil described her—whenever she entered the ocean to swim. It seems auspicious that one of the earliest known fossils of a fish growing legs and turning toward land was found in the Minas Basin off the shore near Cowslip. Perhaps Jane, as she swam fish-like out into the water and evaded her failing body, felt she was returning to the sea. She died in Los Angeles on December 1, 2017.
Neil insisted on spending his very last summer at Cowslip, flying back and forth between Halifax and Boston for treatment for his leukemia. In late October, 2019, he flew to Washington, DC, to light his last show: Maurice Sendak’s version of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. On his way back to Nova Scotia, he stopped off in Boston, where he was told the treatment wasn’t working. “That was my swan song,” he said. “But what better opera to go out on than The Magic Flute?” Neil died at his home in Los Angeles on December 15, 2019.
