City of Angels – No, Really!

A German visual artist’s plans to have seven helium angels hovering over Downtown L.A.

By Pauline Adamek

According to the creation myth of L.A.’s indigenous Tongva Tribe, the gods sang and danced the world into existence, and eventually placed the world onto the shoulders of seven giants, in order to protect it.

German visual artist Hans Peter Trauschke has concocted his own massive tribute to the Tongva’s seven giants, a multi-million dollar project-in-the-making called Seven from Heaven that’s equal parts spirituality and marketing. Specifically, the art installation would consist of seven helium-inflated, 120-foot tall sculptures of angels tethered to and floating over the tallest skyscrapers of Downtown L.A., possibly as early as 2015, or whenever the artist can raise the $2.5 million required to make it a reality.

Before getting to the big stuff, however, please note that Santa Barbara’s Artamo Gallery (11 West Anapamu Street) is hosting a three day exhibit of Trauschke’s works, June 5-8, Dancing Gods, which is part of his Seven from Heaven project. There’s a reception with the artist on June 5, 5-8 p.m.

Seven from Heaven is, obviously, a highly ambitious endeavor — expensive, massive and dramatic in impact. The colossal artwork has lofty ambitions.

On the project’s website, the intention behind the art installation is described thusly:

“These 120 foot tall Seven from Heaven appear like a miracle. They do something with our minds. It’s the cultural equivalent of falling in love.”

The spectacle of these giant angels levitating from our highest buildings has tourism as a distinct selling point. The installation is expressly intended “to focus the eyes of the world onto the brilliant skyline of Downtown L.A.”

The website’s description of the emotions that Trauschke’s art is intended to inspire is both exalted and slightly cryptic: “The feelings of a unique experience, a strong emotional impact, like the eclipse of the sun. It’s surprising, illogical and overwhelming in its beauty. These angels turn the whole landscape into a metaphor. They are breaking through the sphere, increasing the meaning of facts. This Angel project has a consecration of its own. These angels provoke a chaos of our usual metaphors. A kind of an avalanche of values. Seven is a perfect number. After the angels levitate above the Los Angeles skyline, they will become international ambassadors to the sister cities of Los Angeles around the world. Such as Mexico City, Vancouver, Nagoya, London, Taipei, Athens, St. Petersburg and Makati, to name a few. These angels are truly powerful and when they dance in the skies over the cities of our world, they rule not only the heavenly sky.”

To fund the costly art project is a less exalted and less cryptic discussion. Trauschke has offered shares to investors. Per the website: “We are selling 2500 shares at $1000 apiece. As an investor of Seven from Heaven Inc., not only do you make this art work happen, but you are entitled to dividends distribution based on net income generated by our merchandise line, such as paintings, models, prints, jewelry, T-shirts etc. Nearly two billion people witnessing the project in Los Angeles and its sister cities around the world — live, on TV, newspapers and on the Internet! Invest $1000 for each share and make these angels fly!”

Additionally, an Indiegogo Crowdsourcing campaign has recently been launched as the second stage of grassroots fundraising.

Born in 1965 in Offenburg, Germany, Trauschke attended Studio Theatre in Munich to study acting, directing and set-design. Since 1983, Trauschke has participated in nearly 100 theatrical and artistic productions.

Stage Raw spoke with the artist about Seven from Heaven.

Hans Peter Trauschke

STAGE RAW: Have any of your previous artworks approached this scale, or will this be your grandest art project to date?

HANS PETER TRAUSCHKE: I’ve been working in art and theater for the past 30 years. I’ve studied acting, directing and set-design in Munich and produced around a hundred theater and art productions. Seven from Heaven is the largest project to date. My most spectacular artwork until today was Waend, 1997 in Dresden, with over 180 written articles about it. It was a 1.3 Million DM project and was financed by 72 sponsors. And my theater, Engelbrot in Berlin “changed the sound of theatre in Berlin,” according to Arte TV.

SR: Who do you consider to be your artistic inspirations or influences?

HPT: I’m influenced by visions. My intention as an artist is to show possibilities and visions for our world. I’m not interested in being a mirror of the existing world. Everybody knows what’s happening out there and I don’t see the need for me to reflect it.

I plan to recreate seven [Tongva] giants in the shape of female, bird-headed angels and ask for the order [to come if] we humans would rest on their shoulders today. What we can see in some of the creation myths is that the creator gods act responsibly, and that’s why their creation becomes perfect. I like to say: Responsibility in action begets perfection.

We are responsible for many things today but it has no consequences at all for us. It’s just a phrase… We are responsible for many destructive things. And then what?”

I gather you require $2.5 million to make this project happen. At what stage is the fundraising effort?

The total installation costs are $2.5 [million] including the production of the merchandise line and I’ve raised $400k to date. Yes it’s a shareholder project. When I started the project, I was in contact with some sponsors, but they wanted to have a huge influence in the actual artwork so I decided to go a new way. I’ve worked with sponsors ever since I started making art and never took money from the state or city because I wanted to stay independent. Well, today sponsors have changed their rules and use art as a marketing tool.

You mentioned to me that next you are planning to mount an Indiegogo crowd funding campaign. What are the start and finish dates for that?

I’ve just started an Indiegogo campaign and it’s moving very slowly. [$372 out of $1 million required at the time of this article’s posting] It’s due to run for 60 days.

What is your timeline —when will the project be mounted if the required funds come through?

The plan is to start on new moon June 16th 2015 until full moon, July 2nd. After that, they will travel to sister cities of Los Angeles around the world.

Will the project still happen if investment does not come through?

Well then it just starts later. The money will come. The project is too spectacular —and, in my eyes, too important —that I won’t find the money eventually. I’ve always finished projects that I have commenced. I started work on Seven from Heavenin 2005. Now I find I’m technically able to achieve it, and that has been the most difficult part of the process. We needed to invent new materials to make it possible. It’s high-end engineering, and a work like this has never done before.

In terms of practicalities, is this project already approved by the City? What about air space traffic concerns (helicopters etc.) around Downtown L.A.?

I have the support from [former District Nine City Councilmember, representing Downtown] Jan Perry and [current District Four City Councilmember, representing Hollywood] Tom LaBonge. Two weeks ago I presented it to Mayor Eric Garcetti and am still waiting for his response. His first reaction was very positive. I think nothing speaks against it. It’s free advertising for L.A. around the world as the capital of modern art. I’ve talked to all the building owners we need on board and some of them signed up already. Others still are waiting until I have the money, but want to participate if I have it. I’ve talked to city and federal officials, organized by Jan Perry, from LAPD [Air Support Division] the Department of Building and Safety, and the FAA. They gave me different rules I have to follow. In order to obtain the final permit, we need to make a test flight and prove that everything is how they want it. The static calculation [i.e. the analysis of force and torque on the physical system in a static equilibrium] was completed by Nabih Joussef, one of the best engineers in the world. We are able to deflate the sculptures in 90- seconds in case of an emergency, or in the event that helicopters need to land on the rooftop.

I understand the angels are essentially helium balloons. Will they have an internal light source?!

That’s not certain yet… We need to make tests to find out how the helium expands with possible heat from the LEDs. I have a good feeling that it will function fine. If not, then we use spotlights from outside.

But really, how valuable is your art project to investors?

This $2.5 million investment has a $30 million marketing value. It will be seen by millions live in L.A., and nearly a billion worldwide over the news and the Internet. Tens of thousands will come to L.A. to see it live. . . . Millions of people will buy something from the merchandise lines I plan to produce. If only 0.3 % of the people who come into contact with the art buy something for $10, investors stand to double their investment —and that’s just during its time in L.A. That looks like a very good investment to me.

Trauschke’s exhibit Dancing Gods, which is part of his Seven from Heaven project is on display at Santa Barbara’s Artamo Gallery (11 West Anapamu Street) June 5-8, There’s a reception with the artist on June 5, 5-8 p.m.

Plagiarism and Its Discontents

Steven Drukman on academia, and on his new play at the Geffen

By Deborah Klugman

Steven Drukman

Steven Drukman is a prolific playwright whose play, Death of the Author, is currently receiving its world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, under Bart DeLorenzo’s direction. Set in modern day academia, the play explores what happens when Jeff, a professor at a prestigious university, confronts Bradley, a student whom he suspects of plagiarism. The other characters involved include Trumbull Sykes, chairman of Jeff’s academic department and Sarah, a friend of Bradley’s.

Drukman’s other plays include Prince of Atlantis (South Coast Rep), The Innocents (Asolo Rep), In This Corner (Old Globe), Going Native (Long Wharf Theatre), Another Fine Mess (Portland Center Stage), The Bullet Round (Arena Stage), Flattery Will Get You (Connecticut Rep) and several others. He is a three- time Edgerton Award recipient and has won the Craig Noel Award, the Paul Green Award, the Critics’ Circle Award, and the Alfred P. Sloan Award, among others. In past years Drukman was a frequent contributor to such periodicals as The New York Times, The Village Voice, the International Herald Tribune, and The Nation. He has served as a senior editor of American Theatre Magazine and is currently an Associate Arts Professor at New York University, where he teaches playwriting. 

L to R Austin Butler and David Clayton Rogers in “Death of the Author” (Photo by Michael Lamont)

STAGE RAW: Can you talk a little bit about what the play is about?

STEVEN DRUKMAN: Orson Bean called it an academic thriller. And that’s not a bad description of what the play is.

SR: Was it inspired by an idea or an incident?

SD: It was inspired by a real life case of plagiarism that occurred to me as a professor at NYU. The wellspring was this feeling of unrepentant glee I had when I got this [plagiarized] paper from a student I didn’t like anyway. So I now had an excuse to not like this student, and perhaps looked forward with a bit too much relish to punishing her.

What about this student didn’t you like?

She was a terrible student. At one point she invited her boyfriend into the class and they were on Facebook the entire time. And she was never really present in the room. It was no great surprise that she handed in a paper that was not only cut and pasted from a website but was not even on an approved topic. It had nothing to do with the class I was teaching.

 What happened?

We went through the steps of meeting with my [Department] Chair. She kept denying [wrongdoing] so I had no choice but to fail her.   And then I got a call from my Chair over the summer to reconsider. And because I was coming up for review I had to reconsider. That’s not what the play is about but that was my inspiration for it.

L to R – Austin Butler, Lyndon Smith (Photo by Michael Lamont)

An act of plagiarism is at the core of the plot. And the question is brought up: Do you have to know you are plagiarizing to be guilty of it?

Plagiarism is like pregnancy. Whether you know you’re getting pregnant or not, it doesn’t matter. Once you are pregnant, it is an undeniable state of affairs. Intention has very little to do with it. And that has been ever true. And it particularly has to be true now, with the Internet, when it’s so easy to lift words, sentences and paragraphs wholesale.

 Jeff, the young professor, is from a working class background while the student he is challenging, Bradley, comes from privilege. Would it be true to say that class resentment is fueling his action?

That’s part of it. There’s also partly an erotic attraction. And perhaps that feeling of relish that I was talking about: the desire to teach someone a lesson.

Can you talk about the themes of the play?

One idea in the play is the notion of academia and how that has changed and become based on the model of a corporation. Students are more like consumers. That’s a good model for some corporations; it’s a terrible one for a university. As a professor I can tell you without reservation that it has infected New York University’s educational mission. I know it has everywhere. If students can rate thumbs up or thumbs down on a professor based on really superficial criteria – it becomes a sort of buyers’ market. And we keep nudging [the university] towards a consumer model, catering to what the consumer wants. “I” can rate “you” and be anonymous, from my little cubby-hole. There’s no accountability. So that’s an important theme in the play.

 So if the university has changed, have the students changed too?

As generations are, the two young people in this play probably do not share the same values as I [when I was a student] and my co-students. When I was in school, to me, my values were such [that] I would never take a job that didn’t allow me to wear sneakers.

 Can you elaborate?

I was counterculture. We thought the worst thing you could do was sell out and be co-opted into the mainstream. Now [students] are much more ambitious. Sarah – she’s a philosophy and an English major – is extremely ambitious, and probably places more value on the fact that she took this prestigious seminar and can put it on her resume than the more transcendental invaluable prize you get from liberal arts. Which is itself an old-fashioned idea, but some of us still have that.

 Instead of being resistant to mainstream culture, their attitude is more “come and get me?”

Yes. You’re buying, I’m selling. And their language is intentionally that way. Sarah talks about her love for Bradley. She says, “I’ve invested 3 years.” She wants it to pay off.

So has this been your experience as a professor? Of course you can’t say that about everybody but……

Yes. But I have to say that in a lot of ways, they are a lot smarter than I was. I think in a lot of ways they are getting smarter and smarter and smarter. And that may be the positive side of this computer literacy and information age. They can’t write, but their intelligence seems to be growing.

 They have access to all this information.

Right. And it does make them in some specific way, smart and very canny. They don’t read many books anymore. I was one of those who loved reading. It’s still my greatest pleasure. I love writing but I would rather read than write. Most of my friends watched a lot of television. Now with the computers and whatever, they are reading even less.

 Is the play making a comment about the Internet?

I think [the play] says the Internet is dangerous. Because the Internet is a screen where we get information, we tend to make our judgments much more quickly and, I have to say, superficially — in an image-based way. A lot of the assumptions that Jeff makes about Bradley are wrong. They are Internet-age inflected. None of us is immune to that.   We’ve become this media saturated culture and it affects everyone, even idealistic young professors at Ivy League schools.

L to R – David Clayton Rogers, Austin Butler and Orson Bean (Photo by Michael Lamont)

Where do you get the ideas for your plays?

An idea is never enough for a play. I could have 20 great ideas for a play. The process of writing for me is that I become obsessed with a character of some kind. I generally start with characters that are speaking to me in some way, and need or want something very badly. And you follow their needs and wants. If you are really organically in the skin of the character, often they will tell you what the story is about. You know you have a play if you have enough things to throw in your character’s way to keep him from getting what he wants. And if you have an understanding of the stakes in that loss: In other words, what happens if he doesn’t get it? It’s all about knowing what the character must have. And then some occasion, like this occasion that happens at NYU, sparks a character you already have. Sometimes it’s a headline in the newspaper that sparks it.

 When you wrote this play, did you apply this criterion of needing or wanting to any particular character?

To all of them. [If you don’t], the audience will feel the other characters are just a device for the main character. And there is a little bit of that in the greatest of plays. Sometimes characters are just there to maneuver the plot forward. But ideally it never happens. Every moment is accounted for.

When you create characters, do they develop as you go along?

Yes, they do, and they will surprise you. It’s better to feel them than it is to know them. I know TV doesn’t work this way, but for me writing a play does work this way. You kind of feel them on a cellular level. A professor told me once: When you make a fully dimensional character, the great ones – George and Martha, Willy Loman or Hamlet or Lear – they will eventually do something that is illogical, that seems to go against their major objective. It makes them more dimensional. When you create that character, you can’t decide what that thing will be, but you have to be alive to it when the character tells you. When that happens, that’s when you know you’re on the right track. Because when it’s schematically mapped out what a character can do, [that] often that leads to a superficial play.

Death of the Author is being performed at the Geffen Playhouse, 10866 Le Conte Ave., Westwood; Tuesdays through Sundays through June 29, www.geffenplayhouse.com

A Web Series about a Shakespeare Competition?

The Long and Winding Road to Hulu’s Complete Works

By Mayank Keshaviah

“Complete Works” Episode 5

“He that will have a cake out of the wheat must needs tarry the grinding.”

This bit of advice from Pandarus in the opening scene of Troilus and Cressida is equally apt to describe the lessons learned by the creators of Complete Works, a new Hulu comedy about a Shakespeare competition that celebrates the bard in quirky and clever ways. How that show came to be, and how it made it to Hulu is the story of the independent filmmaker in the “new Wild West” of digital media.

In one sense, the show’s journey began in 2004, when its co-creator Joe Sofranko won the National Shakespeare Competition at Lincoln Center as a high school junior. He had made it to New York from Ohio, standing out from a field of over 16,000 competitors nationwide. (The show’s central character, Hal, hails from Indiana.) A year later, as a senior, Joe traveled to Miami, Florida, for the YoungArts competition, where he first met his co-creator and current girlfriend Lili Fuller, who hails from Los Angeles. The two collaborated (and dated) while studying theater at USC. They also became friends with English Lit major Adam North, the third member of the triumvirate behind Complete Works.

Fast-forward four years, through scene study classes, student productions, the formation of a dance troupe, and college graduation. Sofranko and Fuller found themselves in the same place that so many other young actors do in this town: performing in a play here and there, landing an occasional commercial and maybe even a bit-part in a TV episode. While walking home from a Coffee Bean one day, craving a more sustainable creative outlet and some control over their careers, the pair came up with the idea of creating a show about a Shakespeare competition.

Having had firsthand experience with the oeuvre, the two were interested in the backstage dynamics of an arts competition because they believed it was yet unexplored in narrative fiction.

On the Set

“When you are in these situations,” Sofranko says, “everyone’s best friends and it’s kind of like a camp, but then underneath that there’s this underlying tension like everyone’s looking to see who’s the best.”

In fact, when the two returned to YoungArts as Resident Advisors in 2013, Sofranko recalled a situation in which he was doing a bed check for one of the participants and was asked by the young man, “So, are we being judged all the time?”

Sofranko relates the anecdote because that sense of anxiety became one of the themes of the show: the idea that you don’t really know when you’re being judged, or how you’re being judged, but you really are being judged all the time.

Sofranko wrote a rough draft of the “pilot” in 2010, recalling that it was “bad” but not “bad enough” to be dismissed by North, who was initially consulted only for notes and feedback. North recalls that Sofranko at the time wanted to “make it really fast, shoot with our friends, and…get it online.”

North also mentions that at the end of their first meeting on the project, there was a moment that now “feels so fateful.”

As they were walking to their cars, Sofranko said, “This was fun” and North responded offhandedly, almost automatically, “We should do this again.” Now four years later, the three of them heartily laugh at this moment of fortuitous happenstance.

Sofranko and North worked for about a year on the script, and while doing do, the trio also began fundraising, which included an Indiegogo campaign, solicitations of friends and family, bank loans, credit cards, a contribution from ETC Theatre Company and personal funds, such as money Sofranko made from a Wendy’s commercial. Their crowdfunding campaign only raised about a fifth of the approximately $45,000 budget, so it’s not surprising that they only paid off their personal credit card bills from it this past February.

These are the slings and arrows of independent filmmaking in the digital age.

Having navigated the initial gauntlet of challenges, and having formed their production company, Kingdom for a Horse Productions, the group selected a director early in 2011, with aims to shoot that summer. They parted ways with that first director, a more experienced one, because of different visions on the scope of the project.The second was a USC friend who loved the script and gave some valuable notes, but he ended up with too many other responsibilities to be able to commit to the project. Two weeks before beginning shooting in September of 2011, the third director, who had only come on a week earlier, felt the team wasn’t ready and ended up dropping out as well. This series of unfortunate events, which left the trio deflated and upset, ended up being a blessing in disguise because, as they now realize, they really weren’t ready.

So, somewhat against their, um, will, they tarried the grinding. The next year was spent raising more money, refining the script, and finalizing the casting. Sofranko and North decided to direct the project themselves, since they understood it better than anyone they might bring in. They also began working with Dr. Gideon Rappaport, a Shakespeare scholar from San Diego who was initially approached for funding in 2011, but who ended up lending his expertise to the team, serving as the project’s dramaturge and Shakespeare coach.

Even prior to Sofranko and North deciding to direct, the show had been written around actors they knew, including Ben Sidell (as Ian), Lizzie Fabie (as Regan), and of course Fuller (as Pauline) and Sofranko (as Hal). But auditions were held for a few of the other principals such as James (played by Kevin Quinn) and Oliver (played by Chase Williamson), and for a number of the supporting roles. The story behind casting the character of Leo is particularly interesting because Sofranko and Fuller originally had in mind British actor Luke Youngblood, of Harry Potter fame, who had been their downstairs neighbor. Once the shoot was pushed back a year, however, Youngblood had moved back to London, so, just in case, they held auditions for Youngblood’s role. Alex Skinner was the first actor they saw, and he “killed it” in the audition and “had a perfect British accent” according to Fuller, so once Youngblood became unavailable, Skinner was the natural choice. The ironic thing was that Skinner had first read for them in 2011, and he had not received a callback for a year. As Sofranko puts it, “when actors say ‘I didn’t get it’…you never know.”

Joe Sofranko and Adam North

In finally shooting the show during the summer of 2012, they were “thrifty and scrappy,” as Fuller says, “but also at the same time [were] trying to have as much legit equipment as we could.” Much of the 20-day shoot took place in Ranchos Palos Verdes at a property that once belonged to Fuller’s grandmother; the remaining Southern California locations were obtained gratis through favors called in. Among the challenges they dealt with were climbing down to Thousand Steps Beach in Laguna with their equipment for the “worst day of shooting,” having to “hold for peacock” during shots because the birds that roamed the RPV property had exquisite timing, and a silk lighting screen that nearly fell onto Sofranko during a windstorm.

They learned how to make filming schedules from YouTube videos, copied other productions’ call sheets, and even built the amphitheater stage used in the show with help from friends, family, and volunteer construction workers, such as production designer Alicia Papanek. At one point, Papnek even suggested dumpster-diving to fulfill their craft services needs, but Sofranko and Fuller balked at the idea, finding other ways to cut costs that wouldn’t risk illness and disease.

After months of editing and scoring, post-production was completed in October of 2013, at which time they had 14 episodes, seven to 10 minutes in length. Because landing distribution rights through Hulu was a pipe dream, they segmented the episodes so that they could be uploaded to YouTube as a backup plan. YouTube was considered a backup because Sofranko felt the show’s subtleties would get lost in the outlandishness and white noise of the site. He really wanted an outlet that “supports attention spans.”

Through perseverance, the trio eventually garnered interest from a big-name agency, but once that agency failed to find them a landing spot quickly, it moved on from their project. Disappointed, they nonetheless willed themselves to continue, as they had come too far not to. “It took almost a year of just straight hustling every day,” says Sofranko.

Ben Sidell, Joe Sofranko and Lizzie Fabie

During that year, because the digital space was still so new and constantly changing, they often received conflicting advice as to where their show would fit best and whom they should approach. Navigating this “Wild, Wild West” of entertainment was therefore confusing. At one point, they were even advised to re-cut the show as a feature film and submit it to festivals. However, they forsook that route because of a belief in the greater reach of the Internet, whose audience was more their style. They ended up meeting former USC classmate Lisha Yakub at an alumni barbecue, and she was so excited by the project that she wanted to be their manager. They clicked with both her and their eventual agent at CAA because each of them was young, still had something to prove, and was willing to hustle: not so green that they had no clout, but not so arrogant as to dismiss a project like Complete Works.

Through persistence, they got their project into the right hands at Hulu, and after re-cutting the show into five 30-minute episodes (Hulu prefers its content longer) and after about five months of internal development, Complete Works was released on the the day of Shakespeare’s 450^th birthday, April 23, 2014, four years after the trio first began work on the project.

Looking back on their process, the creators believe digital media facilitated their getting the show distributed because a company like Hulu has an acquisitions department looking for new material, whereas a network or cable outlet would never have even considered such first-time filmmakers. At the same time, Hulu’s hallmark of quality appealed to them. It also didn’t hurt that Hulu had no similar shows in its lineup. In a way, Sofranko says, web series are a new, better version of the film festival because of the potential audience due to the Internet’s reach.

“It’s weird to be like, this is a dream, and then we made it happen,” says Fuller. In fact, about a year back, cast member Skinner had jokingly made a mock up of what their show would look like advertised on Hulu’s website and texted the picture to Fuller, who, not wanting to jinx the show’s prospects, asked Skinner not to share it. Instead, she made it the background image on her smartphone, vowing not to remove it until it became reality.

But having gone through a four-year process that led to that reality, the team learned some valuable lessons. Fuller’s advice to other would-be filmmakers would be to not “be afraid to ask questions or reach out to people, because somebody knows the answer or you’ll be able to find it, and people are willing to help.” Sofranko’s advises, “don’t sacrifice at any step of the way” in terms of quality and standards, because if you do, “you’re going to regret it when you’re editing.” He also says that “inspiration for . . . passion projects can die very quickly,” so once you get into the second or third year of a project, you need to “trust that the passion is still there even on days when you don’t feel like it.”

North’s take is to “have a little gumption and make something that you care about and be committed to quality. We took the slower route, but by taking the slower route and making something that felt like it was of higher quality, it really paid off.” Sofranko calls it the “ultimate lesson in patience and perseverance . . . especially in a world that’s very much about instant gratification.” Indeed, tarrying the grinding is what made this cake of wheat rise.

Complete Works, Kingdom For a Horse Productions, is available on Hulu

Jenny Lower reviews Complete Works on Stage Raw.

Complete Works

Hulu’s Web Comedy Series about a Shakespeare Competition

Reviewed by Jenny Lower

RECOMMENDED:

Lili Fuller and Joe Sofranko in “Complete Works”

Complete Works, a new web comedy series in five half-hour episodes, follows a young male competitor from Indiana through a high-stakes collegiate Shakespeare competition. The show is clever, funny, and packed with a young, good-looking cast. All five episodes of the show recently debuted on Hulu in time for the Bard’s 450^th birthday, and just a couple of weeks before this report found — quelle surprise — that teens today read less than they used to. For Millennials, it begs the question: to stream, or not to stream?

Perhaps the medium is both the problem and the solution when it comes to making Shakespeare relevant. Could this show, which feels a bit like Glee but with fewer misfits and more cutthroat competition, introduce Shakespeare to the latest crop of web-savvy not-so-literati? Could a desire to get the in-jokes motivate media-hungry youngsters to put down their phones and learn to navigate iambic pentameter with the same adroitness as their Facebook privacy settings?

I don’t know, but I found it engaging and entertaining.

Produced by Joe Sofranko, Lili Fuller, and Adam North, and directed by Sofranko and North, the series stars Sofranko as Hal, a Midwesterner paying his way through state technical college. Hal’s also a die-hard Shakespearephile ever since an infant encounter with the Riverside edition. On a lark, he enters the regional American Shakespeare Competition, until an accident bumps him from runner-up status to the finals in Italy. There, he falls in with his competitors, a hodgepodge of recognizable types that include the bitchy gay guy (Ben Sidell), a former child star (Chase Williamson), and a New Yorker with a resting bitch face (Fuller). For reasons not entirely clear at first, Hal gets singled out by the resident villain/ veteran competitor (Kevin Quinn), who decides to coach Hal in order to settle an old score. The cold readings begin, and we’re off.

Joe Sofranko and Chase Williamson (on the platform), and the back of Adam North

True to its name, the show offers a catholic embrace of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. There are plenty of highlights from the AP reading list (Macbeth and Othello figure heavily), but they occur alongside references to lesser-known works such as Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida. Hal’s geek-outs allow for plenty of educational side-tours, and as the competition progresses, we delve into sonnets, soliloquies, and fight choreography. The show assumes a more-than-passing knowledge of Shakespeare, but that gives it some tooth for viewers who want to turn every episode into a spot-the-reference game. Entry-level viewers who miss some allusions will still have no trouble following the plot or the jokes, and may find their appreciation deepening along with their education.

But that’s the serious stuff. Hal makes an appealing if slightly bland protagonist, and it’s easy to root for him amid his many humiliations even when, mid-season, he rediscovers his inner Kenneth Branagh and turns into an insufferable git. We can see from a mile off that he’ll fall for Fuller’s Lady Macbeth act, but that doesn’t make their mild flirtation any less enjoyable. Apart from some fantasy sequences that extend too long, the direction keeps the action moving and the comic timing spry. In one especially delicious scene, Vicki Lewis guest stars as an acting coach determined to mine (or implant) her students’ traumatic memories for creative potential.

In targeting the show to Millennials — which, it’s worth noting, may or may not be Complete Works’ intention — the bigger question might be whether the show’s conceit works against it. We’re clearly occupying rarefied territory: Hal’s passion for all things Shakespeare is cast as extreme even by his cohort’s standards. Viewers, especially young ones, may be more likely to identify with the bored drone of his high school scene-partner than Hal’s dorky earnestness. Early in the competition, Hal is even admonished to pick material his fellow students (and presumably the organizers) know. He loves not wisely, but too well.

But those viewers probably won’t stick with the show anyway, which ends on a partial cliffhanger that clearly sets up a second season. Only giddy fortune’s furious fickle wheel will determine if Complete Works returns for a second season, but if it does, maybe the show will develop a cult following among Shakespeare’s younger acolytes.

And if they don’t get a reference, perhaps they’ll google it.

Complete Works, Kingdom for a Horse Productions, directed by Joe Sofranko and Adam North. Available on Hulu.com

Mayank Keshaviah’s profile on the making of Complete Works is on Stage Raw

The Los Angeles-American Playwright, Alice Tuan

By Lovell Estell III

Photo by Patrick McPheron

“Theater is often looked upon as the ugly stepchild of film and TV,” says playwright Alice Tuan, as she emerges from a moment of quiet reflection during a dress rehearsal for her new play Hit, being presented by Latino Theatre Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center through June 22.

It is now six days to opening night and the energy and enthusiasm of cast and crew is infectious within the cavernous interior of the LATC’s Theatre 2. Tuan is upbeat and animated as she chats up cast members, makes suggestions, and snaps photos of costumes with her phone. She is thoughtful and alert, and gives the inescapable impression of being a meticulous taskmaster, a perfectionist. Her strikingly youthful bearing, soft-features, and playful smile are more like that of a teenage girl than a woman of 50. Clad in a green floral-striped print dress on this hot, windy day, she is unabashedly forthright — and even boastful — about her passion for theater, and in particular, for Los Angeles.

“I love this city,” she says. “I think of Los Angeles as the 21^st century American city, much like New York was the 20^th century American city.” “There aren’t too many places where you’ll find a play written by an Asian gal featuring a multi-ethnic cast, produced by a Latino theater company.”

Like for so many other artists, the road Tuan traveled has been filled with peaks and valleys, and more than a few detours. She received her BA in economics from UCLA in 1986 but wasn’t too interested in the field. “I always saw myself as an arts person,” she explains. Tuan acknowledges that she selected the major to make her parents happy. There was a stint as a secretary at an import/export company, a job teaching ESL in Glendale, and graduate school at Brown University, where she earned her MFA in creative writing in 1997.

Photo by Patrick McPheron

Since then, her plays have been produced in cities across the country (as well as in Toronto and Melbourne), and she has garnered an enviable cache of awards and honors, including a Dramalogue award for her play Ikebana, The Richard Sherwin Award from the Mark Taper Forum, and A Colbert Award for Excellence from New York’s Downtown Arts Project. She has also taught in China, and has chaired playwrighting workshops throughout the United States, including MFA candidates at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin and CalArts, where she currently heads the Performance Program at the School of Theater. “But,” she says emphatically, “I am above all else, a playwright.”

Much of Tuan’s work focuses on the Asian-American experience, and she has worked closely with East West Players, the city’s premiere Asian-American theatre troupe. Her principal motivation for writing was that she didn’t see enough portrayals of the Asian-American experience, or as she puts it, “I didn’t see myself in the culture.”

Tuan’s first play was Last of the Suns, an attempt to make sense out of what she defines as the schizophrenia of growing up American in a Chinese household. “My first lessons in playwriting were from the self-imposed challenge of writing the first draft in six months…by rewriting this play 13 times, I went through the back door of learning how to write plays, not through structure, but through intuition and play, and a need to vent.”

Ajax (por nobody) Tuan’s tale about porn actors and actresses, is, to trot out an old cliché, a horse of another color. Tuan says, unreservedly, that it “scared the shit out of me.” When she wrote it, she felt that she had brought “evil into the world, so I stuck it in the drawer for two years.” Arts Critic Wayne Brenner of the Austin Chronicle called it “a sick and twisted work of brilliance,” going on to colorfully describe it as “funny as hell, in a perverse, utterly bleak sort of way, like a malignant tumor that forms itself on your genitals in the shape of a smiley face.”

One of her more recent plays, Cocks-Crow is about Americans trying to start a business in Shanghai, but they encounter difficulties because they don’t understand Chinese business practices While she was in China in 2008, she learned that NoëlCowardwrote Private Parts in Shanghai in 1930 while bedridden with influenza at the Cathay Hotel, so Tuan calls her second Shanghai work Private Rivals, and updates Coward’s play with a divorced western couple, who are now with Chinese people. The action unfolds in the same Shanghai hotel. (The play was commissioned by Yale Repertory Theater, and was workshopped in New York last December.)

Justin Huen, Taylor Hawthorne and Kahyun Kim in Los Angeles Theatre Center’s production of Alice Tuan’s “Hit” (Photo by Ed Krieger)

Hit has been a long time in the making. The play was commissioned in part by New York’s Public Theater and was completed in 2003. Being a Los Angeles-centric work, it has not one center, but many.

“I wanted to write a play where there were characters of different races involved in an intense drama together, not just the usual mix of color without meaning. I started by writing five scenes where each scene had some sort of hit in it; hit by a car, hit on by an older woman, hit of a joint, a hit in the eye.”

Director Laurel Ollstein, herself a playwright, performer, and veteran of the early Actors’ Gang, says the project has been a joy, a great collaboration, and she is very excited about it. It’s a play which Tuan says holds a mirror up to our times.

So what does the future hold for this self-described “Los Angeles-American? Writing more new plays, and rewriting those unfinished plays in the drawer. “I plan to continue my thoughts about Los Angeles, trying to observe and think of it anew — I am interested in ‘Uburbia’ — the über suburbs, and also how culture and literature might be a part of the living pulse of the city, not just tract houses and malls (the cathedrals of our time).”

Hit is being performed at the Los Angeles Theatre Center through June 8. (866) 811-4111, www.thelatc.org

Read Steven Leigh Morris’s review of Hit on Stage Raw

Digital Dionysus

Acorn TV’s Theatreland

By Terry Morgan

Ian McKellen as Estragon in “Waiting for Godot” at Theatre Royal Haymarket (Photo by Sasha Gusov, Courtesy Acorn.tv)

England’s National Theatre is screening its productions in movie theaters, to great success. Plays and theatrical documentaries are available on DVD and/or streaming, and companies such as L.A. Theatre Works are recording plays available on CD, radio and the Internet. For a theater lover, there are more opportunities than ever before to see or hear productions one couldn’t attend in person. This column will be taking a look at these different venues for enjoying theater, beginning with, appropriately enough, a backstage documentary about putting on a show.

Theatreland is an eight-part series following a few months in the life of the Theatre Royal Haymarket, a venerable institution located in London’s West End that dates back to 1720. During the period of time chronicled, the TRH puts on a hit Waiting For Godot starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, and prepares to launch a production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The star factor is intriguing enough, but what makes this documentary special is its focus on everyone that makes a show happen, from the marquee names to the housekeepers who dust the lights.

The series begins with rehearsals for the Beckett play with director Sean Mathias, as theater manager Mark Stradling hurries to prepare the aging Theatre Royal for months of sold-out houses. This entails everything from selling tickets and training the ushers to, literally, keeping the theater from falling apart. Days before the show moves in, a leak rots the roof over one of the dressing rooms, requiring the roof to be torn out and the entire room to be redone. The seats, a century old, must be checked and repaired daily. Then there’s the updating of the plumbing in the bathrooms, done by a cheerful father-daughter team, the latter of which opines of a toilet, “Famous bums are gonna love that.”

Courtesy Acorn.tv

The production has its press night, and everybody waits for the response of the critics. “The first night is like an operation,” says Simon Callow, who plays Pozzo in the show. “You know you have to have it, and you feel better afterwards.” The critics generally praise the production, but find it a bit too comedic. The production sells out its run anyway, and the series then examines the challenges of keeping a show running. One of the more fascinating episodes focuses on an understudy and what that job is like, and the thrill when he finally gets to go onstage.

The actor-stars are covered here, but not at the expense of the rest of the production team. Stewart finds learning his lines for Godot to be far more difficult than any Shakespeare play he’d done, and he sees a ghost onstage during one of the performances. McKellen, surprisingly if touchingly, weeps uncontrollably after the final show. Callow bitches about Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright (in the audience) being in his sightline. But the show belongs to people such as Tony Brunt, master carpenter, who takes the filmmakers through countless odd hallways and rarely trod rooms, the guy who hoists a new Union Jack on press nights and knows the Theatre Royal probably better than anyone. When asked if he misses the shows when they close, he says no, he likes a change. And the fabulous invalid moves forward.

As Godot nears the end of its run, Mathias is in rehearsals for Tiffany’s, and is changing gears from serious drama to big, glitzy spectacle. The set will be three stories high, with huge movable fire-escape staircases being specially constructed. Star Anna Friel is nervous just coming off American TV to do a play on the West End, but she’s more nervous having to learn how to play the guitar for the production. Oh, and also there’s a live cat in the show, which has an understudy. Finally, Godot closes and Tiffany’s moves in: goodbye, hello, and the cycle of stage life completes another rotation.

The documentary’s director Chris Terrill keeps things breezy and informative, highlighting the faded grandeur of Royal Haymarket Theatre. Theatreland is currently available for streaming video on Acorn.tv. It’s $4.99 per month to use the site (which is primarily full of British TV programs) but the first month is a free trial. Playing Shakespeare, another documentary featuring actors such as Stewart and Judi Dench, will be added as a streaming option in June. Theatreland is also available for purchase as a DVD, and the Acorn site (acornonline.com) features many more theatre DVDs for purchase.

It’s become a tired trope to write about how the theater is dying, or that something or someone will save it. Heedlessly, the fabulous invalid continues to swan about. In fact, there are more ways now to access theatre than ever before.

Theatreland, directed by Chris Terrell (Acorn.tv)

How Tweet It Is

Attention Must Be Paid (to Social Media)

By Gregory Crafts

On April 8, 2014, at 12:06 a.m., on the heels of the L.A. Weekly Theater Awards, a small group of LA theater folk (three of us, to be precise, plus a few unwitting helpers) accomplished something. For a brief, shining moment lasting approximately half an hour, the LA Theater signal pierced the veil. #LAThtrAwards trended.

Take a second. I’ll let you steep in that for a moment.

Okay. Okay. I know. I can hear you asking already, “So what? What’s the big deal? You got a hashtag to trend for a few minutes. So-frickin’-what? Who cares?”

Well, if you’re reading this, you care. Or rather, you should. Here’s why.

Los Angeles has a vibrant, thriving theater community. There’s great work going on, and lots of it. Dozens and dozens of companies mount full seasons in houses of all sizes: old plays, new plays, red plays, blue plays, plays of all shapes and styles.  On any given weekend, there’s somewhere between 50 and over 100 productions going on throughout the Southland. In my neighborhood of North Hollywood alone, there are more theaters per square block than anywhere else in the country, save New York.

So, why, then, do we find ourselves trapped inside The Fishbowl^TM. Perhaps you call it “The Echo Chamber.” Maybe, in your mind, our theater is not of a place, but of a habit, one where we as a community keep passing the same $20 bill around to one another as we see each other’s work or fund each other’s Kickstarters. There’s a prevalent notion that the only people going to see theater regularly in this town are other theater people.

Now, I don’t think that’s entirely true, but I do know that I can’t sell out 18 performances over six weeks in my own theater of only 40-seats. In a city with 3.85 million people, that’s shameful. But it’s true, and personally, I think it’s because we, as a community, have failed to break into our city’s greater collective consciousness.

Simply put, a very large percentage of L.A.’s population has no idea we even exist. And those who do haven’t been given a good enough reason to care about us . . . yet.

Recently, in March, 2014, I was approached by someone who had a plan to change that. A Facebook message popped up inviting me to coffee on Saturday. Also invited was my recent acquaintance Thomas Bigley, Associate Producer at the Porters of Hellsgate. Our host was Kevin Delin; playwright, columnist for Bitter Lemons, and all-around rabble-rouser, and he had an idea.

We met, Mission: Impossible-style, in the back of a coffee shop in NoHo. Kevin’s pitch was simple: Find a crack in The Fishbowl^TM and break through it. His plan was detailed, but simple, with three basic objectives:

1)     To have the hashtag #LAThtrAwards trend worldwide. 

2)     To have people follow any and all Twitter accounts associated with LA theater. 

3)     To start turning LA theater actors and companies into recognizable brand names. 

I know, I know. You want to know what’s the big deal about a trending hashtag?

Well first, consider this: Los Angeles boasts the sixth largest population of Twitter users in the world. That’s a lot of potential audiences. The more you tweet, the more other Twitter users will find you and follow you. This is great for theater companies and artists because it exposes more people to our work and potentially translates into larger audiences.

Now, trending hashtags reflect important events and occurrences that are happening right now that a lot of people are talking about or interested in, something important that @JoeTwitteruser should look at immediately, and it provides him a way to not only jump right into the middle of the conversation, but also identify who the major players are (see #3 above) and connect with them directly (see #2). It can increase the garden-hose flow of conversation about theater in L.A. into that of a water main.

Need a non-theater example? Check out #RedSox during a game. Or the hashtag for your favorite television show when a new episode is on. Or the #Oscars.

Back to the story. Tom and I signed on. We had a lot of work to do. Our target event was the LA Weekly Theater Awards, being held at Exchange L.A., downtown on April 7. The irony was, none of us could actually be at the award show. But the beauty of the Internet is that we didn’t have to be there to participate. In fact, it was advantageous that we weren’t.

An associate registered the @LAThtrAwards handle. They planned on running the account night-of, and providing general coverage throughout the evening. Bitter Lemons’s editor Colin Mitchell gave us an assist by putting up a tweet-box for the hashtag on the front page of his website. Thomas and I engaged the ground-troops in our respective circles – folks we knew would be at the Awards and could provide their unique first-person perspectives via Twitter. That’s when we hit our first bump, and it was a shocker.

LA Theatre folk talk a lot about cooperation. They talk a lot about wanting to break through The Fishbowl^TM and reach out to populations beyond it.

But when it came to getting our own community to jump on board with this, I was surprised by the amount of apathy.

“What’s the point?” one very influential and respected LA theatre person asked me over drinks in the dimly-lit back room of a Hollywood dive bar. “It’s not going to do anything.”

That sentiment was echoed by several others I approached, and honestly, I was disappointed. I had expected better.

Sure, getting a hashtag trending would be no magic bullet; it was supposed to be just a first step in reaching out and changing perceptions.

If we wanted our work, our art, our passion to catch the collective eye of our city, we needed a stronger, sustained and more organized stream of interactions and data showing to all of Los Angeles exactly what our community had been doing, right under their noses. So we left the nay-sayers behind, and marched on.

A few foot soldiers agreed to help cover the action that night from inside Exchange L.A.. Plus, I had a secret weapon – a social media dashboard through which I could run five different Twitter accounts all attached to my name.

The day of the show, a couple of casual tweets were posted back and forth amongst the people “in the know” using our hashtag. That was the warm-up. That evening, I sat down in my theater in NoHo, where I was supervising auditions for an upcoming production, with my laptop fired up and tethered to my phone for Internet service. Then, the fun began.

Our team began firing tweets off, trying to reach others who were there at the event, in the room. We were asking questions, throwing up shout-outs to friends, offering congratulations to nominees, etc.  This is where we hit the second bump in the road.

Apparently, nobody on Verizon’s network could get a signal in the venue. Awesome. There went 90% of our people on the inside. That’s fine though, because we were determined to make it work, even if it meant that I had to tweet back-and-forth with myself using two different accounts.

We were also lucky. The social media manager for Zombie Joe’s Underground had a signal, and since they were hosting the event, they were tweeting it like nobody’s business. Our crew latched on to them, and we were all off to the races.

I tweeted furiously between auditioning actors, popping back-and-forth between the five different account tabs in my dashboard like a game of frenzied whack-a-mole. “That was great! Thank you for coming.” Tweet-Reply-Favorite-Retweet. Tweet-Reply-Favorite-Retweet. “Next actor, please.” Repeat ad nauseum.

The team at Zombie Joe’s Underground provided pictures and a running commentary of the events. We provided the cheering section. Over time, others began to interact and get in on the action. Suddenly, I wasn’t talking to myself anymore. As it turns out, that was a good thing because my batteries gave out, both on my laptop and on my phone. Being in the middle of auditions, there was no place convenient for me to plug in to recharge. I was out of the game.

I got home late that night, plugged in and messaged the rest of the team to find out what I’d missed. Kevin had some early statistics back: 1.34 million impressions of the #LAThtrAwards hashtag. Impressive, especially considering that we’d achieved that with only about a dozen accounts using the one hashtag regularly throughout the night, and none of them had more than a couple thousand followers. Of that list, our team made up the majority.

We sat and talked for a little bit about what worked and what didn’t. Turns out, as the revelers inside Exchange L.A. who’d been blocked by the Verizon blackout were leaving the event, they popped back on the grid (mostly to complain about the lack of signal in the venue). At 12:06 AM, I logged on to my personal account to see if people were still tweeting on the hashtag. That’s when I saw it.

We’d done it, and with only about a dozen hardcore Tweeps using the tag regularly throughout the night. And you know what? It was pretty easy. But that’s not the most mind-blowing part.

No, the most mind-blowing part was who we managed to it without: No Stage Raw. No LA Stage Alliance. No LADCC. No Bitter Lemons (and Colin was there!) Here’s proof!

Yes, that’s Colin Mitchell (center) having a fine time at the L.A. Weekly Theater Awards with Moses and a Zombie  (Photo by Tim Norris)

Even some of LA Theater’s biggest influencers only tweeted a handful of times. But most disappointing was the anemic coverage from the LA Weekly themselves. They contributed a total of three tweets during the event. Three. That’s basically nothing, when it’s your own awards show.

If a handful of us could crack The Fishbowl^TM, a whole community working together can shatter it. So, with that in mind, I offer the community a challenge:

The Hollywood Fringe Festival opens next month. It has its own hashtag. #HFF14. Learn it, love it, tweet it. The Hollywood Fringe Awards are June 29^th. The #LAThtrAwards hashtag will be used again that night. I want to make that hashtag trend again (and #HFF14 while we’re at it). Let’s take another run at Kevin’s tri-fold plan and see what it gets us, this time with more people behind it.

If we could generate 1.68 million impressions of the #LAThtrAwards hashtag recorded during the L.A. Weekly Theater Awards and immediately after it, generated by about a dozen Twitter accounts, imagine the results can we get when there’s a hundred Tweeps singing the same bird song at the same time? What kind of attention can that garner us across the city?

Finally, I specifically call out LA Stage Alliance, Stage Raw, the LADCC, Bitter Lemons, LA Weekly, Backstage, and the LA Times (yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, Mr. McNulty): Cover the Fringe and its awards, even if it just means you’re sending an intern with a smartphone. Have them post a pic and a tweet announcing each winner, using the hashtags. Let’s see what happens. There’s a cultural movement happening right under your noses. You guys struggle just as much as we do for an audience. The key is to be there when things happen, and to be the relevant, authoritative voice. You have the opportunity to do that now.

Let’s work together and make it happen.

Gregory Crafts is a playwright, producer, and Managing Director of Theatre Unleashed.

Vaulted Ambitions: Stories From Where We Were to How We Got Here

Re-Discovering The First Negro Classic Ballet

BY MINDY FARABEE

First Negro Classic Ballet on beach, the Joseph Rickard Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

The annals of dance have all but passed over Bernice Harrison, despite the 10 years she spent as a standout among the 35 members of the First Negro Classic Ballet (FNCB), a pioneering early 20^th century company here in Los Angeles.

James Truitte and Bernice Harrison, the Joseph Rickard Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

In 1951, New York’s Metropolitan Opera hired a former Angeleno named Janet Collins on as a full-time dancer, making her the black person to earn that honor, and thus ensuring her a visible legacy that still resonates today. “Janet Collins is often referred to as the first African-American prima ballerina,” said cultural historian Kenneth Marcus. “Bernice Harrison beat her by six years.”

FNCB wasn’t the country’s first black ballet troupe — in the 1930s, a few such companies fleetingly sprang up in New York, Chicago and elsewhere — but the L.A. collective distinguishes itself as by far the era’s most successful, for a decade (1946 to 1956) performing to much acclaim around the West Coast, and even internationally. Determined to claim their place in a rarefied world still conspicuous for its lack of diversity, the collection of individuals who formed the FNCB show us something about how ordinary people grapple with the arc of history.

“It’s one of those human stories in my line of work that makes it more fulfilling,” said Sue Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts at the Huntington Library, which houses the troupe’s archive.

Jospeh Rickard, the Joseph Rickard Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

The FNCB was founded by the choreographer Joseph Rickard in 1946, when Los Angeles had no permanent ballet company at all — a situation in which the city has often found itself.

At the time, Los Angeles did have an established history of innovative modern dance, however, according to Marcus. A mini-Gold Rush of artistic talent had been spawned by the film industry. “So already in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, the city has a serious dance culture in place,” Marcus said.

An experimental thread ran through this culture, and it was in this climate that one of those Hollywood choreographers — Lester Horton — created here one of the country’s first multi-racial modern dance companies in 1932. (Another aspect of the climate of the day: The 1993 documentary on Horton is called Genius on the Wrong Coast, after a 1967 article by New York Times dance critic Clive Barnes discussed why Horton wasn’t better celebrated in his lifetime.)

It was into this milieu that, in 1938, Rickard came west from Ann Arbor, Michigan, also intrigued by the idea of breaking into Hollywood. What he actually got was a gig at the Paramount Pictures mailroom, but that same year, Bronislava Nijinska, sister to ballet legend Valslav Nijinsky, arrived in town and set up shop as a ballet teacher. Rickard, who had never studied ballet up to that point, signed up for classes. By 1943, he mastered the art well enough for Nijinska to help him land a stint dancing professionally with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. But like so many Angelenos, what he really wanted to do was direct.

Many ballet troupes of the time danced to pre-recorded accompaniment. Rickard felt he had a better idea, and when he went down to Central Avenue, famous at the time as a mecca for musicians, looking for someone who could play live for his troupe, he met Claudius Wilson, a young classically trained pianist from New Orleans. Wilson came to LA from New Orleans, a southern immigrant also lured by the promise of the movie industry but just as much looking to escape a stifling legacy.

Claudius Wilson at piano, the Joseph Rickard Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Between the 1890s and the 1960s, the U.S.’s black population engaged in a Great Migration, during which six million people left the rural South for urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest and Western United States. From the 1940s on, L.A. became a major destination for many, who were attracted by the region’s booming economy and were floated largely by $11 billion in defense contracts. Southern California also had a reputation for having a relatively less racist environment than many parts of the country. Relatively — From the 1920s, restrictive housing covenants legally segregated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, until the U.S. Supreme Court struck them down in 1948. Still, in 1910, prior to the covenants, black Americans in Los Angeles enjoyed the highest rates of home ownership in the country, and by 1930 half of the state’s black population called L.A. home. As a consequence, in the first half of the 20^th century, the city enjoyed a flourishing culture akin to the artistic outpouring of the Harlem Renaissance.  Thus, there were suddenly a good deal more potential ballet dancers on the scene. And there was also no shortage of stereotypes against those of color.

Marcus, a history professor at the University of La Verne who has published several articles on FNCB, interviewed three of the company’s dancers prior to their deaths as well as various surviving members of Rickard’s family. He’s written of how one of the dancers, Marion Spencer, reported being informed early on that “black women were not built for ballet.” Rickard himself was well aware of the prejudices—he got the idea to form his company while at a Beverly Hills ballet studio on the day a black woman brought her young daughter in to inquire about lessons. She was firmly redirected to a nearby tap dance school.

That woman was Bernice Harrison, and when Rickard tracked her down and offered to enroll her daughter in the school he had just decided to form, he soon learned that Harrison herself harbored dreams of learning to dance ballet. As someone who had also stepped up late to the bar, he discovered in himself a talent for teaching adults, and so the FNCB was born.

According to Marcus, the company was regularly lauded for its creativity, its humor and its grace, as well as for its dramatic ability. Originality quickly became another of its signatures. For rather than stage one more version of Giselle or endless The Nutcrackers, FNCB early on began to create entirely new ballets, with strong story-lines and high production values, provided pro bono, courtesy of Rickard’s Hollywood connections (for instance, Paramount Pictures’ art director pulled double duty as FNCB’s primary set designer). Known as a particularly gentle and easygoing man, the musician from New Orleans, Claudius Wilson, forged a working relationship with Rickard that formed the basis of the company’s success. In hiring him, Rickard had unwittingly gotten a budding composer as part of the deal. Together, they developed works like Harlot House, based on an Oscar Wilde poem; and Rasin’ Cane, a story about Southern sugar-cane farmers that integrated the romance of classical music with jazz elements, and a style that incorporated African-American themes. “There wasn’t a lot of precedent for black ballet composers,” said Marcus. “There’s no question Wilson was a path-breaker and one of the unsung heroes in LA music history.”

Yvonne Miller, Ted Crum, and Roberta Rhinehart, the Joseph Rickard Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

During the company’s heyday between 1951 and 1954, the troupe performed frequently at high profile venues such as the Redlands Bowl, the Ramona Bowl and Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theater, for audiences black, white and racially mixed—sometimes as the first African-American artists known to grace those stages. They traveled to Bakersfield, to San Francisco, and the UK, financially by the skin of their teeth.

“The dancers brought incredible energy and commitment and skill,” Hodson said. “Most of them worked all day as train conductors, porters, housecleaners. They would come after work, and dance and learn techniques and choreography for the love of it.”

Lacking significant financial backing throughout their existence, the company survived by living nearly hand-to-mouth. Rickard himself not only at times drove an ice-cream truck to make the rent, but also economized by living in the ballroom. Harrison, the company’s prima ballerina, sometimes had to tow her children along to rehearsal in lieu of paying a babysitter.

Tucked away inside the Huntington’s vaults sits a copy of one of Wilson’s scores, bound in corrugated cardboard and held together by tape. “That one got to me,” Hodson said. “They had no resources, and they danced to critical acclaim.”

First Negro Classic Ballet ephemera, the Joseph Rickard Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

One particularly high point came with a 1950 performance at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium. “One cannot overemphasize that 1950 concert,” Marcus said. Twenty-five hundred people packed the house. Igor Stravinsky, Paul Henried and the conductor Bruno Walter all attended. Famed screenwriter Ben Hecht, also on hand that night, wrote Rickard a glowing (albeit a bit dated) letter after the performance, which the troupe parlayed into promo material. “That recognition puts them on the cultural map,” Marcus said.

First Negro Classic Ballet ephemera, the Joseph Rickard Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Hecht, who would later be blacklisted in Europe for his fervent support of Jewish militants, had been an active campaigner for civil rights since the 1920s. Many progressives saw in FNCB a glimmer of the future that millions would soon take to the streets clamoring for, as the arts were seen as a powerful venue for manifesting equality. “It speaks to a hopefulness of the age,” said Marcus. “There was this idea that we can draw from the talents of anyone in this city. It was a golden age in LA arts.”

First Negro Classic Ballet ephemera, the Joseph Rickard Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

FNCB’s status as pioneers did little to shield them from a wearying barrage of indignities, such as on a trip to Santa Barbara when no hotel would take them in, necessitating city residents put them up for the night. And when the end came, it came swiftly and callously: In 1956, the company moved to New York after being asked to merge with the New York Negro Ballet, a well-funded troupe in need of talent. Almost immediately upon their arrival, NYNB’s primary backer died suddenly, and both organizations disbanded.

Company member James Truitt went on to dance with Lester Horton’s company and helped co-found the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company.  Diane Gordon, the troupe’s one white ballerina, was invited to join the MET.

By all accounts an unassuming man, Rickard continued to dance and to teach, but with little fanfare. “Unlike Balanchine, he shunned the spotlight. He did not call it the Joseph Rickard Dance Company,” said Marcus. “If he had, I think his life would have been very different.”

Passed over consistently in dance histories, Rickard made the gift of his papers to the Huntington just days before his death in 1994. Hodson’s letter of acknowledgement was read out to him in his hospital bed.

Wilson, meanwhile, remained in New York, where he lived until his 60s, last seen working at the Roosevelt Hospital in Hell’s Kitchen. He died, possibly by his own hand, without ever having been interviewed.

Dancer Ardie Allison also went to New York, where he became a nurse. Company star Graham Johnson, fed up with American racism, moved first to France and then to Spain. “From there, I heard he became a monk in Asia,” Marcus said. “Who knows.”

Harrison, the prima ballerina who inadvertently sparked the whole project by walking in to that Beverly Hills studio, entirely and abruptly faded from view after the company folded. “She basically disappeared,” Marcus said. “That’s a tragedy in this story.”

Theaterholics Unanimous

L.A. Stage Day, 2014

By Pauline Adamek

L.A. Stage Day, 2013

On Saturday, May 17, local theater folk will be congregating at California State University, Los Angeles from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. for the second annual LA Stage Day, a festival for the greater Los Angeles performing arts community. LA Stage Day was conceived of and created by the Los Angeles Stage Alliance.

No, the purpose is not to confess our addiction to theater as part of a 12-step program away from theater and towards common sense. The aim is to bring together stage artists, designers, arts leaders, administrators, students, vendors and patrons for a day of workshops, mini-lectures, panels, and the opportunity to engage in networking at an outdoor bazaar.

Some of the categories to be explored are Arts Philanthropy, Directing Actors in Dialogue Roles, Applying for Local Grant Programs, Digital Marketing, Engaging with Government Agencies, A Director’s Role in Team-Building, and more. Access to these events comes with the $40 admission fee. A private Marketing Master Class led by Jim Royce (formerly of Center Theatre Group) and Joseph Yoshitomi (formerly of the Geffen Playhouse) will also be offered for an additional fee of $75. (Admission to the outdoor bazaar is free, and open to the public.)

Scheduled speakers are Bill Ahmanson, Sheri Biller, Danielle Brazell, John D’Amico, Castulo de la Rocha, Amy Edlin Kramer, Olga Garay-English, Jim McCarthy, Joy Meads, Nina Ozlu Tunceli, Seema Sueko, Pamela Vanderway, Craig Watson, Renae Williams Niles, Laura Zucker, and more.

A full schedule of activities can be found on the L.A. Stage Alliance website.

Stage Raw will have a booth at the bazaar. Meet us in person and tell us what kinds of stories and events you want us to cover.

JUST THE FACTS, MA’M:

Saturday, May 17, 2014
Check-in @ 9:30 am
10:00 am – 6:00 pm

Location:
California State University (Cal State), Los Angeles
5151 State University Dr
Los Angeles, CA 90032

Parking: Follow signs for Lot C or Lot 5. A daily parking pass is $6.00 and can be purchased at machines in the parking lot.

Public Transportation: Go to metro.net for more information.

Tickets to Symposia: 

$40.00*

Purchase here:

*If you are a current LA County Arts Commission OGP grantee, you may be eligible for a 50% reimbursement scholarship for General Admission and the Marketing Master Class. Please contact grants@arts.lacounty.gov to find out more.

Full information and schedule at lastagealliance.com/lastageday

The L.A. Stage Day Bazaar is free and open to the public. If your organization would like to reserve a table to distribute materials, there is a $15 setup fee.

Questions? Contact events@lastagelliance.com.

Full information and schedule at lastagealliance.com/lastageday

https://www.calstatela.edu/

Charles Marowitz (1934-2014)

BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS

A prominent figure in local and international theater has died. Charles Marowitz worked with Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he founded the Open Space Theatre in London. Marowitz’s many plays include his 1987 Sherlock’s Last Case, performed on Broadway starring Frank Langella. He also wrote Murdering Marlowe, about an imagined loathing between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

In addition to co-founding Encore Magazine, published between 1954 and 1965, Marowitz is the author of numerous books on the theater, including a collection of essays about theater in the 1980s, Alarums and Excursions, and How to Stage a Play, Make a Fortune, Win a Tony and Become a Theatrical Icon – the title should suggest Marowitz’s wicked sense of humor.

He worked extensively as a playwright and director at Bill Bushnell and Diane White’s Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre on Oxford Avenue (current home to the MET Theatre) before LAAT moved downtown to become the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Marowitz took over from Jack Viertel as head critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner until the Examiner ceased publication in 1989. (In 1985, Viertel was hired by Gordon Davidson to be a dramaturg for the Mark Taper Forum.)

L.A.’s theater scene in general, the policy of double-casting roles (so actors can abandon theater productions for TV/film roles that pay better than acting in stage plays), the sheer number of plays routinely staged in Los Angeles during the 1970s and 1980s, and the quantity of celebratory reviews published by his peers, were all topics of his blistering critiques. His uncompromisingly cutting views of local people and institutions earned him the reputation of L.A.’s resident gadfly.

“The Taper and the LATC have to be fiercely assessed because they are the standard bearers–and at the moment the standards are falling somewhere around their knees,” Marowitz told the L.A. Times in 1990.

That same year, Marowitz founded the Malibu Stage Company. He was removed as Artistic Director of that theater in 2002.

On learning that news, Jeff Marlowe wrote the following letter, published in the L.A. Times:

“As an actor who has worked extensively with the Malibu Stage Company, I was shocked when I returned from a recent trip to London to learn of the board’s termination of Charles Marowitz as the company’s artistic director.

“Far from being fired, Marowitz should be honored as one of Los Angeles’s and Malibu’s greatest artistic treasures. An artist and a visionary who is an absolute joy to work with, he is a true professional, and he brings with him an unparalleled wealth of experience. With more than 30 books published, his work is taught at universities worldwide, and he’s credited with a unique vision for contemporary theater. If Charles Marowitz’s term as artistic director of the Malibu Stage “falls prey” to the current board’s “medicine,” then both Malibu and Los Angeles will miss out on one of the greatest theater practitioners alive today.”