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Rolin on Life’s River

Playwright Rolin Jones, and the modest ambitions of his These Paper Bullets!
By Maureen Lenker

Rolin Jones (Jeff Lorch photography)

The archetypal American playwright is a man mired in alcohol and existential angst. You might expect a guy who has written for dramas, Friday Night Lights and Boardwalk Empire, and appears to have an almost exclusively navy blue, black, and grey wardrobe, to fall into this stereotype.

Yet, Rolin Jones, quickly upends expectations when he sits down with a glass of ice cold milk and a slice of strawberry rhubarb pie. The pie along with his wry smile and sharp sense of humor is disarming. Before I can ask him a question, he inquires after my health and a medical procedure that delayed our meeting.
    
The guy is as feel-good and sparklingly fun as his latest play now playing at the Geffen Playhouse, the mod musical romp, These Paper Bullets!, which transfers Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing to 1960s London.

It’s clear that others in Jones’s life recognize the warm person he is – he grew up here in Southern California, in Woodland Hills, and when he sits down, he cannot wait to share a text that he just received from his high school drama teacher expressing how much she’s looking forward to seeing his show. He pulls his phone out and reads out the entirety of the message, a tenor of affection and excitement in his voice.

He calls her “a savior,” explaining how she took him in to the high school theater program after he was kicked off his basketball team. His initial intentions for joining were less than noble: “There were a lot of gay guys and attractive girls in there, so I thought the odds were really excellent.”

But he soon found that “thespians were like a big, old second family.” He’s bursting with memories about his high school drama experiences at El Camino Real, including his frequent participation in the Drama Teachers’ Association of Southern California festivals (a rite of passage for all SoCal drama kids including this writer).

Wandering into the Writer’s Craft

THESE PAPER BULLETS!: Photo by Michael Lamont

. . . “It was a terrible play,” he says, “It was really awful. But I sat in the audience and for the first time wasn’t filled with regret and nerves and all that stuff and was like ‘eh, I did my part, they tried to do theirs, and it stinks.’ And I felt okay about it, which was a real sign, ‘Oh, maybe I should try that.’” . . .

Jones wandered from acting to directing until he found his eventual calling as a writer. “I was a really hammy, shitty actor,” he says. “Not a great scene partner, [I] was constantly looking for attention and affection from the audience instead of generosity from my scene partner, and somewhere along the way, I kind of recognized that.” Next he tried directing, but he says that “made [him] particularly miserable.”

Bouncing around various universities, Jones studied poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for a time — then, he was planning on becoming a film director. Somewhere in the midst of all this, he wrote a play. “It was a terrible play,” he says, “It was really awful. But I sat in the audience and for the first time wasn’t filled with regret and nerves and all that stuff and was like ‘eh, I did my part, they tried to do theirs, and it stinks.’ And I felt ok about it, which was a real sign, ‘Oh, maybe I should try that.’”

Eventually, Jones would study playwriting at Yale School of Drama and become a playwright-in-residence with Yale Repertory Theatre. While there, they produced his play The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow that would make him a Pulitzer Prize finalist (it premiered at South Coast Repertory here in Costa Mesa). After the success of Jenny Chow, Jones was invited to become a staff writer on Showtime’s Weeds, and he’s primarily remained in Hollywood since.

These Paper Bullets! is another production Jones wrote for Yale Repertory. Jackson Gay, who directed Jones’ Jenny Chow at Yale and on Broadway, was asked to direct a Shakespeare play at Yale Rep, but was less than thrilled at the prospect of directing a traditional comedy. Jones explains, “We just spent two nights in a bar drinking a lot, thinking about all the plays, [and] kind of came up with this dumb, generic idea. It’s not four princes, it’s four lads from Liverpool.” 


Jones decided to merge The Beatles and the fashion world of early 1960s London with Much Ado About Nothing and the idea blossomed from there. It was a lot to take on—adapting a Shakespeare play into a Beatles-esque musical and mounting it all in nine months. As Jones puts it, The Beatles and Shakespeare “are two people who probably won’t be topped and are two people who should never be approached to recreate or rewrite, so we did it anyway.”

Jones wasn’t worried about ripping off Shakespeare since the Bard of Avon was notorious for rewriting plots himself: “He gave me license to do it because that’s the way he did it, and he had some rollicking comedies and I tried to approach it the way he would. Let’s make a massive entertainment, let’s keep it light on its feet, and then let’s occasionally try to land it in some place.”

Jones also got a rock star of our own time to take on the music of the most iconic pop stars of all time. He was in the midst of finishing the screenplay for the film adaptation of American Idiot and decided to pitch These Paper Bullets! to Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. Much to Jones’ surprise, Armstrong agreed and within a few days started emailing Beatles’ songs he’d written and recorded by himself in his home.

Though Jones found many of Shakespeare’s plot devices frustrating, he relished the chance to improve upon the problematic aspects of the play, particularly the unmotivated villain and the convoluted slut-shaming conclusion.

As Jones says, “If anything screams of ‘Hey Bill, we’ve got people coming here in two days, you’ve got to write something up’ it’s that horrible plan that the reverend comes up with. I think Much Ado gets done a lot and gets favorably remembered because there’s these great Beatrice and Benedict scenes. And one of the reasons I think they stick out as really great scenes is because, I have no problem saying this, the rest of the scenes really suck. They’re really dull.”

Jones wanted to be sure to maintain an equal power dynamic between Beatrice and Benedict, which required a glamorous career for Beatrice to match Ben’s new role as a rock star. She’s now a fashion designer inspired by Mary Quant, who was instrumental in developing 1960s Mod styles and the youth fashion movement.

Lowering Expectations: Let’s Just Have Fun Together

THESE PAPER BULLETS!: Photo by Michael Lamont

. . . “Sometimes you just get far removed from why you’re doing it all, and it’s still kind of a touchy-feely human endeavor that doesn’t pay well in a world that is supposed to not respect artists in a healthy way.” . . .


While talking to Jones about These Paper Bullets!, it’s clear two things are of primary importance to him – making sure audiences have a good time and the value of group dynamics.

For Jones, it’s about returning to his high school theater kid roots: “You have to get over yourself and about trying to do art. The text from my drama teacher was so meaningful. It’s like all of us are sons and daughters of our parents, who would all be . . .so thrilled to see us doing this, being creative and all that . . . Sometimes you just get far removed from why you’re doing it all, and it’s still kind of a touchy-feely human endeavor that doesn’t pay well in a world that is supposed to not respect artists in a healthy way.”

Jones finds value in removing pretension and lofty artistic goals from the process. “When you lower the expectations, when you’re not trying to change the world with a play,” he says, “you can actually get . . . why you do it a little bit quicker because there’s a lot less ego involved.”

Coming from a television background, Jones is used to the camaraderie of the writers’ room, and he says he “feel[s] the presence of a company” in Shakespeare’s writing.

Jones has founded his own company, New Neighborhood, that he intends to use as an umbrella to produce theater, film, and television projects. The group arose out of his experiences on Paper Bullets at Yale Rep: “We got on really well in New Haven, and we drank a lot and had a lot of famous nights and had a good time on stage. And it felt the closest to what my high school theater troupe felt like, and I was like, I miss that a lot.”

That sense of camaraderie continues in the Los Angeles run—after meeting with me, Jones is heading to meet his cast for drinks on their night off.

Enjoying Good Company

THESE PAPER BULLETS! Photo by Michael Lamont

. . . “we’re not particularly intellectually rigorous, we’re not super smart people, we’re a lot of feelers. So I think it’s going to have a populist slant to it, a lot of feel good.” . . .


New Neighborhood is part of Jones’s new overall deal with Twentieth Century Fox TV. It features writers, designers, directors, and more, all of whom are mid-career theatrical artists with impressive credits to their name.

Though the company started in New Haven, Jones hopes it will find its life in Los Angeles “because it’s the best city in the world and it’s my city that I love.”

 “There’s less competition out here and just as much acting talent,” Jones says. “So how to harness that, how to make theater right for Southern California” is one of the driving forces for New Neighborhood.

Still, it’s simpler than that – “we just kind of wanted to hang out some more with each other and that’s all it is.”

Despite the impressive track record of New Neighborhood’s members, Jones says, “we’re not particularly intellectually rigorous, we’re not super smart people, we’re a lot of feelers. So I think it’s going to have a populist slant to it, a lot of feel good.”

Ultimately, that feel-good slant is what Jones hopes audiences take away from These Paper Bullets!: “I want them to see a comedy that they laugh at and that they are surprisingly moved by. That’s it. Really simple.”

Considering that a combination of humor and thoughtfulness permeates the way he carries and expresses himself, it actually might be — really simple, that is.

These Paper Bullets! is performing at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 3 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. & 7 p.m.; Through October 18. (310) 208-5454, geffenplayhouse.com. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

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Diversity Tops the Agenda at Los Angeles Theater Network

By Jessica Salans

Kate Motzenbecker, left, Jon Lawrence Rivera, Lesley Asistio and Annette Lee (photo by Jessica Salans)

There is an evolving language in the discussion about diversity on L.A. stages. On September 13, around 30 members of the Los Angeles Theater Network (LATN), the intimate-stage advocacy “think tank” founded in 2014 by Playwrights Arena artistic director Jon Lawrence Rivera, gathered in the back bar of the Bootleg Theater to take up the diversity gauntlet.

The proceedings were peppered with the vocabulary of diversity activism: names like Black Lives Matter, the movement that was formed in support of all the lives that have been lost to cop-on-black violence; terms like “allies,” used for white activists on the racial justice and cultural diversity fronts; tactics like “shaming,” defined as being vocal about the unwillingness of large theater organizations to make long-term investments in supporting diverse productions; and conversely, “celebrating,” which is to publicly acclaim the companies that are “doing it right.”

Shaming, Rivera said, is telling directors who says they don’t want to make their show “about race” by casting it with actors of color that they are making it about race by hiring an all white cast. “Hello! It’s 2015!” he said mockingly.

The gathering’s featured star was Tim Dang, producing artistic director of East West Players (EWP), who took the floor to speak about the national rollout of his “51% Preparedness Plan” diversity campaign that he unveiled at the start of this year.

Los Angeles Theater Network talks diversity at Bootleg Theater (photo by Jessica Salans)

That plan proposes that U.S. stages need to reflect the changing demographic in the country. It notes that by 2042 minorities will become the majority in this country and sets the goal that the theater workforce and those performing on stage should be 51% people of color (POC), 51% women and that 51% should be under the age of 35 by that time.

EWP diversity liaison Leslie Ishii, who focuses exclusively on diversity solutions, offered that she believes most people want to take the initiative but many may not know where to begin. She added that when one finally does “take charge,” one offsets one’s own victimization by finding space to advocate for others.

The meeting was not without dissenters. Ann Colby-Stocking, a great actress, a brave woman and the only attendee representing performers with disabilities, pointed out that there was nothing about hiring people with disabilities in the Plan. She noted that, after receiving her MFA at UCLA in 2001, it took another ten years before another disabled person graduated from an MFA acting program at a U.S. university. “We are the most discriminated group in American Theatre,” Stalking declared.

Freelance director Ivan Rivas, a former Actors Equity Association (AEA) staffer, countered that when he worked at the union, U.S. regionals were reporting that persons of color simply weren’t turning up for audition calls in the same numbers as white performers.

That brought a quick rebuttal from Artists at Play producer Marie-Reine Velez that there is a lack of trust by persons of color and disability actors toward theater companies operated under Caucasian leadership. Velez and others cited the recent case of Boston Court, which put out a call of “all ethnicities” for last year’s smash hit Stupid Fucking Bird but then hired an all-white cast.

One area of consensus was on the importance of education — for those in the theater to educate themselves and begin the robust dialogues necessary for change.

Before adjourning, the meeting reaped at least one pledge from directors to cast persons of color and disabled actors in their shows in the coming months. “Don’t say, ‘We can try.’ Just do it!” Rivera exhorted the assembly.

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The 10th Los Angeles Theater Network Meeting:

Deep Thoughts

By Paul Birchall

Get any 10 theater people in a room for 15 minutes, and you’ll have 20 different opinions. 

In the year since the formation of Los Angeles Theater Network, the group, an informal mix of practitioners and opinion makers — and which was originally envisioned as a hands on group for finding solutions for many of the issues besetting local small theater — has gradually morphed into one of the town’s most promising, pragmatic think tanks on the topics of advocacy, marketing, and diversity. 

At the 10^th monthly meeting on May 23, held at the picturesque, art-book-filled library at the Downtown L.A. Inner-City Arts complex, the discussion ranged from how to enlarge public awareness of our thriving theater scene to suggestions on how to better connect with the communities that individual theaters serve.

Of course, the big elephant in the room is the bitter conflict between AEA minimum wage and local actors working in the 99-seat theater scene.  Any discussion of theater at this time must indeed necessarily center on the local scene’s current struggle for existence.  As group chair Jon Lawrence Rivera noted, LATN is neutral on the AEA feud, on the grounds that LATN chooses to deal with issues of advocacy and marketing instead of the casting concerns of individual companies.  Still, on their Facebook page, the group has hosted equally shrill diatribes from both sides of the issue. 

Jon Lawrence Rivera

Present at the meeting was former AEA liaison to the 99-seat theater community Michael Van Duzer, but he was by necessity constrained by the terms of his dismissal contract, and had little to say on the record about the seemingly irrational motivations behind AEA’s local power play.  He did, however, note that the theater community is in definite need of a unifying element – and he also informally opined that the inner circles of AEA’s management do not, in fact, have a working knowledge of either L.A. or its theater scene.  And this, it can be extrapolated, is indeed likely to be hampering their attempts to politically handle the situation here.

Michael Van Duzer

Ashley Steed, member of Son of Semele Ensemble and occasional Stage Raw contributor, mused that the concerns over the AEA campaign are, in some ways, a distraction – one of the purposes of LATN is to find ways of monetizing and marketing the theater scene itself. 

Ashley Steed

“When we first started,” Steed noted, “we were hoping to be focused on the engagement with city leaders, with a campaign to help with rents, visibility, and branding.”  With the community’s attention so absorbed by the Equity feud, “(Our point is) how can we move forward?  How can we focus our passion to keep the community together after this war is over?” 

More discussion turned on matters of marketing for small theaters.  Ideas thrown out mostly seemed to suggest the combining of small companies into consortiums to better orchestrate word-of-mouth media campaigns.  One notion was to take specific productions and target specific groups that might have a particular interest in the subject matter;  larger theater companies, of course, have group sales departments that have been doing this for decades, but it is unusual for small companies to have the marketing power to do this.  Local performance artist Brian Sonia-Wallace discussed his use of social media in marketing:  During his production of a show called Bike Odyssey, he reached out to Instagram users, offering free tickets to heads of bike user groups with thousands of users. 

Another notion mentioned, which perhaps was spurred by the discussion of site specific shows like Bike Odyssey, was the idea of bringing theater into the community and staging shows where the community is, instead of in out-of-the-way theaters.  Dolores Chavez, theater director of the Inner-City Arts Rosenthal Theater, noted that intimate theater companies are frequently going about their marketing the wrong way, trying to drag audiences to their shows, when they should instead be embedding themselves within their communities to discover what it is their audiences want to see.  “We need to build relationships with communities,” noted Chavez.  “Always, your question should be, how am I in service to my audience?  How are we telling the stories we want to tell that you, this community, wants to hear?” 

Brian Sonia-Wallace

Part of the concern, it was agreed, was the need to stop trying to compare Los Angeles theater to the theater of other cities.  Or even the need to compare theater in one part of town to another.  “Do what feels authentic to your organization,” suggested Chavez. 

Steed and Rivera floated the idea of staging a “Theaterpalooza,” a one day “convention” for numerous theater companies at one spot, ostensibly somewhere central and familiar to the general public.  Alternate notions were a general ticket for theater companies all over town, or trying to figure out a way to link local theater works to events like Burning Man. 

Peter Finlayson

It was left to Footlights publisher Peter Finlayson, a frequent opinion muse in the recent AEA conflict, to attempt to grapple with the concepts of industry-wide advocacy for the theater community to a general public.  “We need to develop the message that theater is worth going to,” he noted.  Suggesting that theater’s strongest “buy in” is the “buzz” that comes from seeing entertainment that is live. Finlayson stated half-jokingly but with a soupcon of messianic zeal, “It would be great to create the sense that theater is almost an alternative to religion.” 

The Next meeting will be during the Hollywood Fringe Festival, at a Fringe venue yet to be selected. 

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Dear Charlayne, We Are Professionals. Thanks.

The First Annual Stage Raw Los Angeles Theater Awards Nominees

By Steven Leigh Morris

Talk about “I can’t get no respect.” Charlayne Woodard and Rodney Dangerfield aside, early this year, the L.A. Weekly dumped its theater awards (honoring L.A.’s intimate theaters) after 36 years. Then the actors/stage managers’ union Actors Equity Association marches into town with a plan to decimate the availability of union actors to those same theaters. But the stage community is pushing back in a big way, and so is Stage Raw. Using the jury already assembled through 2014 for the now dearly departed L.A. Weekly Theater Awards, Stage Raw announces its first Stage Raw Los Angeles Theater Awards, honoring professional excellence in theaters of up to 99 seats for the 2014 calendar year. 

Celebration Theatre hosts the bash as a 1940s cocktail party with live music, entertainment and a post-show buffet on April 13 at Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring Street, downtown Los Angeles. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., show starts at 7:30 p.m. Even if you haven’t been nominated, you may well be next year, so come celebrate the quality and the dignity of the work that takes place in hundreds of intimate theaters across L.A. County. Tickets are $25, and can be purchased here.

Erik Patterson’s I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND at Theatre of NOTE  (Photo by Jacqui Zadik)

THE NOMINEES ARE: 

Fight Choreography

Ahmed Best, Backyard, Echo Theater Company

Mike Mahaffey, Taste, Sacred Fools Theater Company

Marc Antonio Pritchett, Disassembly, Theatre of NOTE

Video/Projection Design

Sean Cawelti, Stupid Fucking Bird, Circle X Theatre Company and The Theatre @ Boston Court

Adam Flemming and Michael Alan Hoy, The Wrong Man, The Skylight Theatre

Hana S. Kim, The Ugly One, Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.

Hana S. Kim, Bulrusher, Skylight Theatre Company

Queen of the Angels

Rebecca Metz

Adaptation

Chiara Atik, Women, Theatre Asylum

Erik Patterson, I Wanna Hold Your Hand,Theatre of NOTE

Aaron Posner, My Name Is Asher Lev, The Fountain Theatre

Aaron Posner, Stupid Fucking Bird, Circle X Theatre Company and The Theatre @ Boston Court

Playwriting

Benjamin Brand, Taste, Sacred Fools Theater Company

Sheila Callaghan, Everything You Touch, The Theatre @ Boston Court and Rattlestick

     Playwrights Theater

Kenneth Cavander, The Curse of Oedipus, The Antaeus Company

Marja-Lewis Ryan, One in the Chamber, 6140 Produtions/Theatre Planners

Murray Mednick, Villon, Padua Playwrights Productions

Tommy Smith, Firemen, Echo Theater Company

Ilana Turner, O Réjane, Bootleg Theatre

Sound Design

Christopher Moscatiello, Penelope, Rogue Machine

Cricket S. Myers, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Theatre of NOTE

Doug Newell, Foxfinder, Furious Theatre Company

Career Achievement

Jon Lawrence Rivera

Lighting Design

Leigh Allen, A Delicate Balance, Odyssey Theatre

Michael Gend, Passion Play, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Evidence Room

Travis Hagenbuch, Spring Awakening, Deaf West Theatre and The Forest of Arden

Jeremy Pivnick, Everything You Touch, The Theatre @ Boston Court and Rattlestick

         Playwrights Theater

Matt Richter, Villon, Padua Playwrights Productions

Pablo Santiago, The Brothers Size, The Fountain Theatre

Norman Scott, Henry V, Pacific Resident Theatre

Jared A. Sayeg, Cock, Rogue Machine

Costume Design

Kate Bergh, Broadway Bound, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Alex Berry, O Réjane, Bootleg Theatre

Ann Closs-Farley, The Behavior of Broadus, Burglars of Hamm and Sacred Fools

Theater Company

Jenny Foldenauer, Everything You Touch, The Theatre @ Boston Court and Rattlestick

        Playwrights Theater

Terri A. Lewis, Top Girls, The Antaeus Company

Lauren Tyler, Penelope, Rogue Machine

Set Design

Keith Mitchell, Villon, Padua Playwrights Productions

Stephen Gifford, Backyard, Echo Theater Company

Bruce Goodrich, Broadway Bound, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

DeAnne Millais, Taste, Sacred Fools Theatre Company

William Moore, Jr., I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Theatre of NOTE

Stephanie Kerley Schwartz, Stupid Fucking Bird, Circle X Theatre Company and The Theatre @ Boston Court

Production Design

Broomstick, The Fountain Theatre

Everything You Touch, The Theatre @ Boston Court and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

Penelope, Rogue Machine

Spring Awakening, Deaf West Theatre and The Forest of Arden

The Ugly One, Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.

Two Person Performance

Thomas Vincent Kelly and Sal Viscuso, A Steady Rain, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Donal Thoms-Cappello and Chris L. McKenna, Taste, Sacred Fools Theatre Company

Supporting Female Performance

Kelli Anderson, One in the Chamber, 6140 Productions/Theatre Planners

Karen Bankhead, Wedding Band, The Antaeus Company

Peggy Ann Blow, Wedding Band, The Antaeus Company

Karianne Flaathen, Top Girls, The Antaeus Company

Cheryl Francis Harrington, Wedding Band, The Antaeus Company

Anna Khaja, My Name is Asher Lev, The Fountain Theatre

Kate Maher, Everything You Touch, The Theatre @ Boston Court and Rattlestick

     Playwrights Theater

Deborah Puette, A Delicate Balance, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Supporting Male Performance

Hugo Armstrong, Backyard, Echo Theater Company

Arye Gross, Stupid Fucking Bird, The Theatre @ Boston Court and Rattlestick Playwrights

         Theater

Noah James, Broadway Bound, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Theodore Perkins, The Brothers Size, The Fountain Theatre

Joel Polis, My Name Is Asher Lev, The Fountain Theatre

Male Comedy Performance

Hugo Armstrong, The Behavior of Broadus, Burglars of Hamm and Sacred Fools

     Theater Company

Christopher Amitrano, The Motherfucker with The Hat, The Lost Studio

Alex Désert, The Motherfucker with The Hat, The Lost Studio

Shaun Duke, The Motherfucker with The Hat, The Lost Studio

Vincent Guastaferro, On the Money, Victory Theatre

Peter Larney, The Ugly One, Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.

Hector S. Quintana, Young Frankenstein, DOMA at the MET Theatre

Peter Allen Vogt, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Actors Co-op

John David Wallis, Young Frankenstein, DOMA at the MET Theatre

Donald Wayne, A Family Affair, Classical Theatre Lab

Female Comedy Performance

Riley Dandy, A Family Affair, Classical Theatre Lab

Grace Eboigbe, Disassembly, Theatre of NOTE

Lauren Flans, Women, Theatre Asylum

Alison England, Zombies From the Beyond, The Visceral Company

Eve Gordon, The Ugly One, Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.

Michelle Holmes, Young Frankenstein, DOMA at the Met Theatre

Shannon Holt, The Vortex, Matrix Theatre Company

Ann Noble, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia, LGBT’s Davidson/Valenti Theatre

Channing Sargent, Disassembly, Theatre of NOTE

Lonni Silverman, A Family Affair, Classical Theatre Lab

Solo Performance

Chuma Gault, The Gun Show, Moving Arts

Ben Moroski, The Wake, Theatre Asylum

Jenny O’Hara, Broomstick, The Fountain Theatre

Comedy Ensemble

The Behavior of Broadus, Burglars of Hamm and Sacred Fools Theater Company

Disassembly, Theatre of NOTE

Meet and Greet, Elephant Theatre

Stupid Fucking Bird, Circle X Theatre Company and The Theater @ Boston Court

The Ugly One, Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.

Women, Theatre Asylum

Young Frankenstein, DOMA at the Met Theatre

Zombies From the Beyond, The Visceral Company

Sheila Callaghan’s EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH, at Theatre @ Boston Court (Photo by Ed Krieger)

Ensemble

Broadway Bound, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

The Brothers Size, The Fountain Theatre

Camp Logan, Sparkling City Entertainment, in association with Robey Theatre Company at Theatre/Theater

The Curse of Oedipus, The Antaeus Company

A Delicate Balance, Odyssey Theatre

Firemen, Echo Theater Company

I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Theatre of NOTE

One in the Chamber, 6140 Productions and Theatre Planners

The Recommendation, IAMA Theatre Company at Theatre Asylum

Top Girls, The Antaeus Company

Wedding Band, The Antaeus Company

Original Music

Matt Almos, Brendan Milburn and Burglars of Hamm, The Behavior of Broadus,

         Burglars of Hamm and Sacred Fools Theater Company

Peter Bayne, The Brothers Size, The Fountain Theatre

Doug Newell, Foxfinder, Furious Theatre Company

Duncan Sheik, Spring Awakening, Deaf West Theatre and The Forest of Arden

Choreography

Ameenah Kaplan, The Brothers Size, The Fountain Theatre

Spencer Liff, Spring Awakening, Deaf West Theatre and The Forest of Arden

Lee Martino, The Wrong Man, The Skylight Theatre

Ken Roht, The Behavior of Broadus, Burglars of Hamm and Sacred Fools Theater

     Company

Leading Female Performance

Brooke Adams, Happy Days, Theatre @ Boston Court

Rebecca Gray, Firemen, Echo Theater Company

Karole Foreman, Wedding Band, The Antaeus Company

Gina Hecht, Broadway Bound, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Rebecca Mozo, Cock, Rogue Machine

Cara Pifko, O Réjane, Bootleg Theatre

Heidi Sulzman, One in the Chamber, 6140 Productions and Theatre Planners

Inger Tudor, Going to St. Ives, Actors Co-op

Leading Male Performance

Ian Bamberg, Firemen, Echo Theater Company

Aaron McPherson, In a Dark, Dark House, Broken Hand Productions at The Matrix

     Theatre

Tyler Pierce, Everything You Touch, Theatre @ Boston Court and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

David Selby, A Delicate Balance, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Thaddeus Shafer, How I Learned to Drive, The Illyrian Players at Theatre Asylum

Patrick Stafford, Cock, Rogue Machine

Kevin Weisman, Villon, Padua Playwrights and Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Craig Robert Young, The Vortex, The Matrix Theatre

Musical Direction

John Ballinger, The Behavior of Broadus, Sacred Fools Theater Company

Chris Raymond, Young Frankenstein, DOMA at The Met Theatre

Comedy Direction Award

Tom Beyer, Disassembly, Theatre of NOTE

Marco Gomez, Young Frankenstein, DOMA at The Met Theatre

Stuart Gordon, Taste, Sacred Fools Theater Company

Gates McFadden, The Ugly One, Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.

Dan Spurgeon, Zombies from the Beyond, The Visceral Company

Stephanie Ward, Women, Theatre Asylum

Direction Award

Larry Biederman, Backyard, Echo Theater Company

Guillermo Cienfuegos, Henry V, Pacific Resident Theatre

Chris Fields, Firemen, Echo Theater Company

Shirley Jo Finney, The Brothers Size, The Fountain Theatre

Jessica Kubzansky, Everything You Touch, The Theater @ Boston Court and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

Robin Larsen, A Delicate Balance, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Alex Morris, Camp Logan, Robey Theatre Company at Theatre/Theater

Stephen Sachs, My Name Is Asher Lev, The Fountain Theatre

Laura Savia, The Recommendation, IAMA Theatre Company at Theatre Asylum

Cameron Watson, Cock, Rogue Machine

Musical of the Year Award

The Behavior of Broadus, Sacred Fools Theater Company

Spring Awakening, Deaf West Theatre and The Forest of Arden

Young Frankenstein, DOMA at The Met Theatre

Revival Production Of The Year Award (of a 20th- or 21st-century work)

A Delicate Balance, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

On the Money, Victory Theatre

Wedding Band, The Antaeus Company

Production Of The Year Award

Backyard, Echo Theater Company

Broadway Bound, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

The Brothers Size, The Fountain Theatre

Everything You Touch, The Theatre @ Boston Court and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

A Family Affair, Classical Theatre Lab

Henry V, Pacific Resident Theatre

I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Theatre of NOTE

One in the Chamber, 6140 Productions and Theatre Planners

Penelope, Rogue Machine

Stupid Fucking Bird, Circle X Theatre Company and The Theatre @ Boston Court

Taste, Sacred Fools Theater Company

Top Girls, The Antaeus Company

The Ugly One, Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.

The Vortex, Matrix Theatre

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One Musical Where the Leading Man Should Not Shine

Why Cabrillo Music Theatre’s Company is perfection

By Bob Verini

Alxander Jon leads the enesmble of Company. (Photo by Ed Krieger)

For one more weekend, through Sunday Feb. 8, there’s an absolutely smashing revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 Company in town. If you detect a note of surprise in that announcement, no offense is meant to the Cabrillo Music Theatre, which presents it, and especially not to Nick DeGruccio, who does a skillful, sophisticated job mounting the musical theater perennial. It’s just that this is probably the sixth or seventh Company I’ve seen, and not only is it far and away the most accomplished, it also brings freshness and richness to a musical I feared had passed its sell-through date.

There’s been some criticism of the performance of Alxander Jon in the central role of Robert. I am not surprised: The character of the just-turned-35 bachelor, moved to review his life choices as he interacts with the five married couples who are his closest friends, is one of the trickiest roles in modern musicals. Nonetheless, Jon’s performance is well-crafted from first to last and his casting is a masterstroke. Here’s why:

Company, in the person of Robert, is about people who exist only in the shadow, or mirror, of others. We all know them and many of us are them: attractive, reasonably successful, seemingly self-sufficient types about whom there seems to be no much there — there past the surface. They make no splash at parties. floating in and out without a ripple. They’re present at work, but little more than present; they’re the co-workers whose names we keep forgetting, if we ever knew them at all. Yet these ciphers do have their moments: They blossom whenever they’re in the presence –- the company -– of their more flamboyant or colorful, or simply sharply-determined acquaintances.

Librettist George Furth’s Robert is a stunningly original creation, in that he’s an average Joe placed at the center of a huge Broadway musical. How often does that happen? Talk about average, the show never even spells out what he does for a living, a clearly deliberate choice. By agreed-upon consensus of him and his pals, Robert is defined solely by his roles vis a vis his “group”: my best friend. Our babysitter. Her confidante. The kids’ uncle. My flirting partner. The extra man when I need him for my formal dinners. But who is Robert?

That the question even needs to be asked, is the dramatic point of this extraordinarily rich musical play, which for years has been saddled with the useless sobriquet of “concept musical.” You know what? Every musical has a concept. Company is an impressionistic musical. Instead of hanging its events on a linear story, it gives us spot checks on a variety of vivid personalities who orbit Robert. In the course of those visits, we and he –- and in the play’s final moments, the other personalities themselves — recognize the importance of detaching oneself from other people’s existence in order to forge an identity of one’s own, as scary a prospect as that generally is.

Michael Andrew Baker, Alxander Jon and Ellissa Wagner (Photo by Ed Krieger)

The director’s job is extremely delicate here. Not only must he cast five couples embodying strong, immediately identifiable character traits – as well as three striking young women who pop into the protagonist’s life at odd times – but Robert himself is difficult to capture. He must be attractive and virile in a metrosexual way (i.e. plausibly intriguing to a wide variety of people); he must exude an air of confidence and business success; he must have great pipes (this is Sondheim after all); and above all, he must capture our interest and attention without ever overshadowing his entourage. If Robert ever becomes too charismatic, too conventionally showbiz, we lose the central attribute that dominates the story: his availability as a blank slate to those – “those good and crazy people, my friends” – who want to exploit him. In short, when Company becomes a star vehicle, it suffers irreparable damage, because Robert’s not a star, he’s a shape-shifter.

The two original Bobbys in 1970 were perfectly chosen. Dean Jones practically defined the era’s average guy vibe, and for all Larry Kert’s Broadway experience you could still imagine him lost in a crowd. But the tradition of avoiding showbiz panache was lost after the first production. The role is always cast with a conventionally strong leading man — little theaters reeling in their closest equivalent to John Raitt or Matthew Morrison, and that was always a bum steer.

Raul Esparza’s Robert, with Elizabeth Stanley, in the 2006 Broadway Revival of Company (NY Times)

But the problem wasn’t confined to little theaters. Star Company casting was quite problematic in the 2006 Broadway revival, and in a 2011 staged and televised concert. Raul Esparza and Neil Patrick Harris, respectively, were stars with a capital — showbiz phenomena who could not in their wildest dreams be convincing as average Joes. Fine actors, sure, and they can belt “Being Alive” in hoary old showbiz diva style. But asking either of these larger-than-life talents to sit on the sidelines, not to take focus, and be whatever the other characters want them to be, was and is not possible. With these charismatic stage stars as Robert, the question of why Robert isn’t married became an absurdity, and worse, the couples served no function except as wacky foils in comedy sketches.

Alexander Jon as Robert, however, is perfect casting. He sings well, looks and behaves both masculine and witty, and commands the stage as a protagonist should. But DeGruccio has recognized that Jon, precisely because he is not a conventional leading man but a character actor, is perfectly suited to portray a man whose features have yet to be filled in. He’s an average guy with the chops to carry a show on his back.

Jon is also a first-rate listener, and because his concentration on the others in his scenes is total, he garners the attention the role requires. We watch and enjoy the long-marrieds who slug it out as a substitute for food and booze (Elissa Wagner and Michael Andrew Baker), or the engaged youngsters who aren’t sure they love each other enough (Shelly Regner and Nick Tubbs). But we keep looking over to observe their impact on Robert. And that’s exactly as it should be.

Shelley Regner and Alxander Jon at Cerritos Musical Theatre (Photo by Ed Krieger)

It’s a brilliant choice, incidentally, to begin the “Side By Side” number – in which the couples celebrate Robert’s roles in their lives – with his snorting cocaine in his apartment. The drug permits his wild side to elbow away the normally sedate, polite gentleman. His high makes him suddenly, savagely aware of his friends’ maneuvers, and the number becomes an opportunity for frantic self-realization, instead of the mere vaudeville turn with which Act 2 usually opens.

The numbers throughout are genuinely acted, not just sung. Regner’s “Getting Married Today” is a triumph not just of breath control but of actor intelligence – her hysteria has a beginning, middle, and end, a marvelous little one-act play in itself. Chelsea Emma Franko, the show’s touch of Bohemia as girlfriend Marta, personalizes “Another Hundred People” as an anthem to lost hopes, just as Tracy Lore turns “The Ladies Who Lunch” into a painful exercise in self-loathing. (It’s usually sung as if the boozy Joanne is commenting on the superficiality of others; Lore makes it clear the lady is goring her own ox.)

Choreographer Cate Caplin, in another dicey assignment, brings expressive dance to the show without compromising its roles’ essentially naturalistic character. The period remains Manhattan in the 1970s, which DeGruccio and his designers respect without hitting us over the head with cheesy nostalgia. And whether it’s Cassie Nickols’ musical direction or sound designer Jonathan Burke’s doing (probably a bit of both), the vast majority of Sondheim’s devilishly clever lyrics hit the ear crystal-clear. How often does that happen?

After my visit to Cabrillo I knew more about Company, and liked it more, than ever. I am thrilled, even relieved, to have seen it done right once more, and I urge theatergoers to take the opportunity to do likewise in the production’s last hurrahs.

Cabrillo Music Theatre, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks; Thurs., 7:30 p.m.; Fri-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through Feb. 8. www.cabrillomusictheatre.com.

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In Defense of the Audience: an Apologia Pro Vita Sua

99-Seat Theater, Now and Forever?

by Myron Meisel

I come to praise the 99-Seat (Theater) Plan in Los Angeles, not to bury it, to speak on behalf of that absolutely essential component of the theater everywhere, one unrepresented at next week’s forum on the Plan and seemingly left out of the heated discussions on the issue: namely, the audience. (On January 12, the stage-actors/stage-managers’ union, Actors’ Equity Association is holding a membership meeting to discuss its intentions for the Plan. This comes on the heels of a survey taken of its Los Angeles membership.)

[Correction: the Union’s annual membership meeting is scheduled for January 12; its forum on the 99-Seat-Plan is scheduled for January 13.]

And here in Los Angeles, and in Southern California generally, we the audience have it pretty damn good. By my lights, the last dozen or more years have been nothing short of a Golden Age for range and degree of excellence in theater. That’s why it’s of the utmost importance that everything possible be done to contradict the Big Lie that will not die: that Los Angeles suffers from a paucity of innovative and excellent work, a bigotry masquerading as a fantasy that our scene is predominantly comprised of vanity productions for actors seeking representation and recognition, road shows and local efforts of unrealized good intentions.

Instead, the true delusion is that so many people of good will, of otherwise substantial culture, and of hopeless ignorance believe that Los Angeles theater begins and ends with the relatively few institutional houses, the official temples that serve as standard-bearers for brand name live performance. Every real music devotee knows that the action is in the clubs and not the arenas, though perhaps patrons of classical music are not so aware that tremendous activity thrives outside Disney Hall and the L.A. Opera.

In fact, there are far more functioning theaters in Los Angeles than in New York or Chicago and, I suspect, London, mounting far more shows, upward of 500 annually of professional productions with runs of two weeks or more. Is that too much theater? Naturally, just as too many bad movies open in the summer, and too many awards contenders open in the last quarter. For that matter, not unlike the misperception of the local theater, most moviegoers remain unaware of most of the best films of any year (when they get here at all) because they come and go with such unheralded rapidity, even faster than the short runs mandated by the 99-Seat Plan.

The point should always be: is there enough good theater in Los Angeles? My answer is a resounding “yes,” and virtually all of it is due to the unprecedented creative freedom empowered by the 99-Seat Plan. Los Angeles has been universally recognized as a major world metropolis for some time now, yet it is still prone to the inferiority complex Chicago managed to shake off. (That bias is obvious on the Board of the L.A. County Museum of Art, for another example.)

The snooty, unfounded condescension toward the town because of its mass entertainment business might have had some legitimate traction with the arrival of the New York playwrights, newspapermen and novelists, mostly journeymen themselves, who migrated here at the advent of the sound era to work in the talkies (and later, in series television), and felt so deeply compromised to need to assert that their past, at least, continued to remain preeminent. As recently as 40 years ago, there may still have been some discernible vestiges of an aesthetic backwater, though by then the movies that had been so reviled had already been reevaluated as exemplars of the finest cinematic art. But given the present-day evidence, these persistent, yet pernicious, provincial attitudes merely betray lazy stereotyping, inappropriate to apply to the dynamic cosmopolitan culture of contemporary Los Angeles, which is represented at its very best by its vital theatrical life.

Let me put it another way: before I started writing about the theater, for at least a decade I had attended live performances, mostly theater, an average of four times a week. I was a dedicated audience member and still consider myself above all to be one. For the last four years, I’ve been going five times a week, and it is rare that I encounter a show that is not at least worthy of attention, if not admiration. You may find that hard to believe – I did, too, but experience has made a believer out of me. Despite inadequacies, most local shows I choose to attend do offer that ineluctably real experience of being live and shared, moment by fleeting moment, a reason I like to sit close, where I can see directly into the players’ eyes. It’s not a genuinely intimate encounter if they can’t spit on you.

Is there a lot of bad work out there? Uh huh. But with a little familiarity with the scene, it is possible for an alert theatergoer to avoid most of it. (One must except hapless critics on assignment, bless them for the effort.) As with the other arts, you follow the people whose instincts you learn to trust. (An early trick I discovered was to track the best sound designers, since they appeared to have the most reliable taste in material.)

Usually in assessing the local scene, out-of-towners (and too many folks who have only dipped their toes in the pool instead of plunging in) cite a half-dozen highly worthy companies, and they are not wrong, just woefully incomplete. By my reckoning there are a goodly two dozen or more committed groups capable of substantial work (and many more not wisely dismissed), and that dedication costs them dearly in every way except the soul-nourishing satisfactions of caring deeply about personal expression and collective effort, and of sharing that with their public. And in part because so few people are paying attention, freedom’s just another word for nothing else to lose.

Los Angeles’s troupes are especially distinguished by their ambition and daring, most particularly in the face of such threadbare budgetary resources. Very little they do has the remotest connection to movies, television or celebrity, though the ethos demands understanding tolerance for those who must take those paying gigs that make the truer work possible.

Those resources they do have are an abundance of talent, though – directors, designers, stage managers, even (heaven help us) producers – and there is never any excuse for bad acting where there are so many gifted performers willing to sacrifice for the privilege of putting their abilities to their highest and best use. Indeed, the most elusive and difficult element inevitably remains a good text.

Actors, like everyone else in the arts, deserve to make a living and are irrefutably entitled to protection from the depradations of unfair or unscrupulous treatment. That’s a proper role for a guild or union to play for its members’ collective benefit. Do abuses occur? Indubitably. But like Reagan’s Welfare Queen, the errant anecdote does not suffice to indict the substantial benefits of a wildly successful and indispensible program.

As a most appreciative member of the audience, my conviction remains: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Above all, don’t fix it by breaking it. The sorely mistaken misapprehension that better-paying gigs will materialize by choking off the liberty of Equity members to choose to work on a basis that provides them with other compensating fulfillments conjures up memories of unrealistic demands closing the bakery rather than expanding the pie.

Unlike coal miners in the 1970s U.K., no one is being compelled to work for what are unquestionably inadequate fees.  (The same goes for everyone else engaged in the hapless noble enterprise, not excluding journalists.) My impression is that many of the most vocal opponents of the 99-Seat Plan neither participate in nor partake of it, but they are most eager to flaunt their lack of awareness, to propound their prejudices, and above all, to deprive those who care deeply about the opportunities it affords from that avenue of self-expression. Self-righteous people love the chance to compel everyone else what to do as they dictate.

I worry also that with an impressive new headquarters building in the region that there may be an irresistible compulsion for Actors’ Equity Association to feel itself be seen to be doing something, when in large measure the system in place remains of incalculable benefit not only to its members but most especially the community and the culture at large. Tweaks need to be administered with a lapidary hand.

There ought to be unabashed civic pride in our local theater community, which, thanks to the vision permitted by the 99-Seat Plan, I would not consider the lesser of any other city in the world. I do the legwork and see for myself. If others did, they could readily encounter what they have been missing. But like most of the other traditional arts, theater is of course fated to fade, as our identity becomes inexorably expressed solely as dictated by the niches we are deemed to inhabit (as access to information supposedly expands, marketing considerations deem it essential for our interests to contract). Let’s just not hurry it along, and relish the fruits of this most invaluable innovation for as long as our artists can sustain it. It’s a wonderment not to be dismissed.

There’s an exchange in one of my favorite musicals, On The Town, when a female Manhattan cabbie (it’s wartime) tells her passenger, a sailor on leave, when he reads out of a dated guidebook telling her to take him to the long-shuttered Hippodrome: “I may not have 5000 seats, but the one I’ve got is a honey. Come up to my place.”

Our 99 seat theaters comprise a genuine sweet spot. Come up to our place.

Myron Meisel was the founding film critic for the Chicago READER and the Los Angeles READER. He is also an award-winning film-maker. Most recently, he was The Hollywood Reporter‘s theater critic. Meisel is currently a regular contributor to Stage Raw. 

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On Daniil Kharms and Robert Wilson in L.A.

The Old Woman

By Myron Meisel

All images are from The Old Woman, photos by Lucy Jansch

One of my seminal experiences in 40 years of Los Angeles theatergoing was the single performance in 1977 at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre of the first local exposure to the work of Robert Wilson, I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating, a collaboration with Lucinda Childs. Beyond being transfixing and innovative, it embodied a transformative vision for a total theater in which every constituent creative element – movement, text, light and sound and set design, tempo – was marshaled toward an unique sense of charged space and time. (Regrettably, a planned 2012 revival at REDCAT failed to materialize.) Obscure yet ineffably precise (and refreshingly, uncharacteristically brief), hallucinating not only heralded Wilson as a talent to dominate the next several generations (even if mostly abroad), but also created the sort of giddy excitement in unalloyed experimentation that has come to be a hallmark of the Los Angeles theater scene over the decades since.

Wilson’s subsequent experience in Los Angeles has not been happy: His landmark work commissioned for the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival, the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, failed to be mounted for lack of funding and has never been fully realized (and the Pulitzer Prize jury that selected it for the Drama award was overruled by the governing board). Until his original 1976 breakthrough rendition of the Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach was revived last year here on tour, Wilson had mostly been seen locally in the comparatively commercial guise of Puccini or The Black Rider, in which his transcendental mannerisms could often lapse into ennervated retreads of his now patented style.

Still, the famously measured Wilson can make his most formidable impression when he appears to strike quickly, as illustrated last weekend by two blink-and-they’re-gone performances at UCLA’s Royce Hall of The Old Woman, and flashed out with the star presences of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe. It was as transporting and convulsively stimulating as that one-night-stand of hallucinating had been, eerily echoing that show’s repeating monologue motifs and uttered essences, only bolder, more brilliant, staggeringly richer and more mature. For the usually stately Wilson, this might as well have been conceived on steroids, or stronger substances, though in its clear-headed puzzlements, it is wise and deep as well as expectedly resourceful.

This season alone, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance has already dealt out not merely world-class but life-remembering pieces from Peter Brook and Simon McBurney, yet Wilson’s fancy-free adaptation of The Old Woman from the barely known Russian martyr Daniil Kharms, apparently a set of tossed-off bagatelles and asburdist vaudeville riffs, strikes me as an incomparable masterpiece, a crowning achievement for the 70-year old enduringly enfant terrible.

Superificially another exercise in quizzically minimalist feints at magical effects, The Old Woman projected a maximalist ambition for themes so outsized, they encompassed a dizzying array of existential concerns, not least the elemental threats of hunger, the specter of an intrusive state, and the ability to endure even with an omnipresent propensity for arbitrary violence towards others, and ultimately, even towards oneself.

Kharms, the nom-de-plume for an ostentatiously dandyish son of an anarchist rebel associated with the terrorist group that assassinated Czar Alexander II, came of age with the Bolshevik revolution and quickly became one of its renegade targets for persecution, finding inadequate refuge even after limiting his published material to successfully popular children’s works. Aligned with both the Futurists and the Formalists, he dabbled with anti-rational language and a poetry of pure sound, often self-contained in snippets of nonlinear anecdote. Finally consigned to imprisonment in a Leningrad mental institution, he is believed to have starved to death early during the Nazi siege. Most of his substantial work was never exposed during his lifetime. Rather, it was salvaged after his death by friends, and only surfaced as samizdat (Soviet dissident work) in the mid-1960s “thaw,” not to be published officially until the Glasnost era, and essentially remaining untranslated in English until a bare decade ago.

In short, ideal lapidary material for Wilson’s peculiar alchemy, and as adapted (in English, Russian, French and Spanish) with subtly sensitive craftsmanship by his frequent collaborator, Darryl Pinckney, Kharms’s highly distilled verbal spasms and stillborn comic mannerisms dovetailed gracefully with Wilson’s penchant for stuttering silences and incomplete lunges at meanings that never quite emerge.

Despite appearances to the contrary, none of this can properly be called “nonsense”. The incompleteness of expression is part of the eloquence of suggestion.

Wilson’s orchestration of the spasmodic utterances with stunning coups of primary colors in the maniacally precise deployment of lights, props and the choreography of body motion and hand position created a pure illusion of effortlessness, despite the fanatically demanding physical and verbal challenge, an unfailingly graceful embodiment of unstinting jauntiness asserted against overwhelming despair.

Every element here proved indispensible, because of the endlessly allusive cohesion among them, all operating in disciplined concert. So, too, the rigors visited upon the actors were Promethean, and thankfully these celebrity talents were beyond protean to their task. Neither was intended to be a character in any accepted notion of psychological specificity; indeed, they were meant simultaneously to contrast in bulk, inflection and manner, yet to remain in some sense integral to one another, distinctive personalities yet not separate beings, dance partners in a synchronous music hall act.

Baryshnnikov eschewed any bravura to concentrate on the inherent fluency of beauty in the very simplest of gestures: The less he does, the more potent its impact. His speech harmonized with and amplified his physical skills. And rather surprisingly, he revealed a pleasant, if thin, baritone singing voice that all but dared creative people everywhere to fashion a classically-styled man-about-town musical comedy around him. He managed to be brilliant while utterly self-effacing, and never in theater, movies or television has he acted to such astoundingly multi-faceted effect. This performance vehicle was light years beyond his Man with a Case at the Broad earlier this season.

Dafoe, for his part no stranger to avant-garde avoidance of limning motivations, achieved an impact altogether different. In his white-face makeup and unruly hair, sporting a variety of accents, he was only occasionally recognizable either visually or vocally. In limiting so severely Dafoe’s established pallette, Wilson conferred a liberating opportunity for the actor to extend his range with flexibility and surprise. This was work even more impressive than in the Wooster Group’s The Hairy Ape or the film Shadow of the Vampire, achievements that were probably necessary groundwork for this kind of collaboration in which he and Baryshnikov retained their novelty while sustaining an intricate complementary mechanism as flesh-and-blood cooperative machines.

Though neither Beckett nor Ionesco could have possibly have been influenced by Kharms’s work, unexposed as it was, clearly they drew from a similar vein of influences, and as inspirationally conveyed by Wilson’s interpretation, Kharms might well stand pridefully within their company, visionary innovators yet mindful heirs of Chaplin, Keaton and the Surrealists.

Unless one is inextricably wedded to the conventions of the prevailing ideologies of established dramaturgy, The Old Woman represents all that one can hope for theater to be capable of.

Royce Hall, UCLA (closed). Presented by Center for Art & Performance (CAP UCLA). Costumes: Jacques Reynaud. Light design: A.J. Weissbard. Sound design: Marco Olivieri.

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Buderwitz Rules!

Set designer Tom Buderwitz offers 25 rules of scenic design. Some can even be applied to life in general:

1. Form Follows Function.

This is the single most important thing Allen Cornell taught me about Scenic Design at Adelphi University. This adage stems from the Architectural world, but it is 100% applicable and paramount for stage design. You can’t decide what it looks like before you solve how it works. This is rule #1 and it gets broken all the time. A pretty set is worthless if the actors can’t move right in it or if it doesn’t make sense or if it doesn’t flow properly. You must work out the “machine” of the design first. I can make anything look good but I can’t make it function correctly without figuring out it’s mechanics. How the actors inhabit it. How they move and live in it. How it functions from scene to scene. How it can be blocked? The look, shape (form) it will take on must come after how it works (functions).

2. Less is more.

Mies van der Rohe’s Architectural motto also applies to all sorts of other areas of design. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify. If you can do without it, do without it. Learn to erase. There is always a part of the design process where I use my eraser. It is an important tool. Use it! Use only what you need and give the rest away. Negative space is almost always as important as positive space.

 3. Treat your first read of the play like going to the theatre.

Respect it. Have reverence for it. Your first read should be a pure experience. Don’t cheat it. Make time for it. Make sure you can fully focus on it. No distractions. Treat it like that very important first date. You get one chance for a first impression.

 4. Research, Research, Research.

You can almost never have enough research. And keep researching. You might be in tech and discover a gem of research and can still find a way of including it. Don’t just Google your research either. Get some books. Go to a Library. Read! I don’t always have a reason why for including some bits of my research. Sometime things just feel like they belong.

5. God is in the details

Also attributed to Mies van der Rohe, this is another gem. Make the details count. Design soars with the right details. Know your material (research) and make specific choices and execute them thoroughly. Your work will be elevated. John Ezell was always the best at this. Every detail was always right and complete. His designs were consistently brilliant because of it.

6. There are no arbitrary choices.

None. Arbitrary choices are lazy. Arbitrary choices stand out like a sore thumb. Don’t ever let them happen. Think everything through. Where did it come from? Who bought it and why? Why red? How long has it been there? Be specific, never vague. An actor shouldn’t make an arbitrary choice and neither should a designer.

 7. Design the truth.

 Hold honesty above everything else. The truth is paramount. Make sure what you design is truthful. Is it the right space with the correct elements? Does it answer the questions in the text? Is it the right world for the play? That’s huge. Again, is it the right world for the play? Does it fit to the text? It had better. Is it a viable space? Does it make sense? Do the actors feel right within it? Is there the right amount of room to move (not too much, not too little). Your design must speak to the essence of the playwright’s play.

8. Don’t impose on the play.

I see this a lot. Designers impose a look or quality onto the play that doesn’t support the text, doesn’t illuminate. Don’t do it. This is bad design and it is rampant. It is not only bad it is rude, lazy and sacrilege. Do the work of getting at the root of the play. It has a core. It has an essence. Each play has an emotional center. Your design must match it. Don’t stick something onto a play that doesn’t belong there.

9. Be nice to the crew.

That means everyone. We are all working for the same goal and there is no room for ego, attitude, or any lack of kindness. Don’t be a jerk. You will or will not get hired again based on three things 1) Did you do good work? 2) Did you stay within budget? and 3) Were you nice to work with?

10. There are no problems, only opportunities.

I hated this one when I first heard it (Jack Shouse, PCPA summer ‘90). I thought it was a cop out. Of course there are problems. But I finally realized what Jack meant is that it is no good looking at them as problems. So What? Your budget just got cut. That material isn’t in stock any more. The dates just got pushed up. What are you going to do now? Sulk over a problem? It is an opportunity for something different. Something you haven’t thought of yet. Maybe even something better. Embrace the situation. Be creative. Design.

 11. Keep learning.

Hey, nice degree you got there. Now put it away. You’re in school for the rest of your life. Keep reading. Keep pouring through books, studying artists, discovering artists. Stay the student. Stay hungry. You don’t know it all and you never will. Keep a thirst for knowledge. Learn something new everyday.

12. Make it your own.

At Brandeis, Patton Campbell used to say “There is nothing new under the sun. Everything has been done before. It’s how you filter it into your version that counts.” All artists borrow ideas, inspiration. Don’t plagiarize. Don’t copy. Be inspired by someone else’s work. Add onto it. Extrapolate off of it. Put “you” into it. Combine it. Filter it. Process it and make it yours.

13. Trust your gut.

Your first instincts are almost always right. That’s why I always like to sketch right after reading a new play. I want to capture my gut instinct. Those images formed in my minds eye when reading will hold a lot of the essence. Trust that instinct.

 14. Go back to the text.

If you get stuck, go back to the source. If the playwright is worth her (or his) salt the answers will all be there. Go back to the text anyway. Know it inside out. Know it to quote it. Get inside it. Your choices will all be better, truthful and honest from knowing your source material.

 15. Design the entire play.

Another cop-out of set design is the designer who focuses the design on the one main set (70% of the play) and throws away the two sets (smaller scenes) that are just as important. The world of the play is ALL of it. The playwright wrote it for a reason. Design it equally. Does every scene feel like it is a part of the same whole? Does it all fit together? Does it form one world? Make it so.

16. Procrastinate wisely.

We all do it. And it isn’t always bad. Do it wisely. Know when to let it be in your head and when to get it on paper. Design needs air to breath and time to grow. Learn how to ruminate a design but don’t over do it. How is it after a good night’s sleep? Do you still feel the same way about it? Know when to let it breathe. Sometimes it needs the time to percolate before you commit to it. Just don’t over brew.

 17. Sleep well and exercise well.

Nothing better than designing when well rested. Running or bike riding is a great way to work out design ideas. The mind focuses. The brain processes really well then. Clarity forms. Don’t believe me? Try it. Do yoga. Invert. Also take some time off. This seems obvious, but you have too. The creative brain must have time off, time away to refresh, restock, recharge. Take a vacation. Go to the mountains, Go to the beach.

18. Surprise yourself.

Step into the abyss. Don’t just rely on what you know that works. Experiment. Get out of your comfort zone. Be daring. Shock yourself. As Jacques Burdick used to say “Make the unfamiliar, familiar. Make the familiar, unfamiliar”.

19. Have a muse.

 Get inspired. Find one. Find two or three. If I get stuck, I can always put on Mozart. Something in his work elevates mine. Always has. The same goes for Vermeer, Nirvana, Hector Guimard, and Al Hirschfeld. Find your favorites. Have some go to sources for creative inspiration.

20. Love playwrights and actors.

I can’t imagine designing scenery and not loving playwrights and actors. I love plays. I wish I could write them. I can’t. I can’t act either, but I’ve been doing this long enough to spot really good writing and acting. It is amazing when it is done right. It is also easy to spot the bad writing/acting too. Be a connoisseur of good plays, playwrights and good acting, actors. The same goes for good directors. It will make you a better designer. Go see a lot of plays.

21. There will always be someone better than you.

I love this one. Really there will and that is okay. Always strive to do your best but keep some humility. It will keep you hungry and working to do better.

22. Draw, Draw, Draw.

Get off the computer and draw. Draw anything. Sketch people. Sketch your research. Sketch your dog. Sketch your chair. Keep pencil and paper at hand. Doodle. Draw on napkins, whatever it takes. Keep doing it. Get it onto the paper. Practice makes perfect. Howard Bay instilled this in me. Drawing is the connective tissue between the design brain and reality.

23. Learn to let it go.

Do not fall in love with your work. It is not precious. It is expendable. Every set will be taken down and thrown away someday. Get used to it. Learn to give things up for the greater good. Design is a process and theatre is collaboration. Often someone else’s idea(s) are better. Embrace change. Learn to adapt. Be open to suggestion(s). Think through all the possibilities. You will become a better designer.

24. Study other scenic designers.

I wouldn’t be the designer I am today without loving and absorbing the designs of other designers. Robert Edmond Jones, Jo Mielziner, Boris Aronson, and Ming Cho Lee are designers whose work I find ever inspiring. The same holds true for Tony Walton, John Lee Beatty, Santo Loquasto, and Ralph Funicello too. Keeping up with what other designers do helps me stay on my toes. Respecting others work is part of the great honor of being in the Theatre.

25. Have fun.

 It is called a play. Make sure you play in the process. If you wanted a boring job you could have done a million other things. Enjoy your work. Make jokes. Laugh. Smile. You get to create theater today!

 Tom Buderwitz has designed for South Coast Repertory, Center Theatre Group, Geffen Playhouse, Pasadena Playhouse, Intiman Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Denver Center Theatre Company, Laguna Playhouse, Chautauqua Theater Company, Arizona Theatre Company, San Diego Repertory, Artist Repertory Theatre, The Antaeus Company, Reprise Theatre Company, The Theatre @ Boston Court, P.C.P.A. Theaterfest, Riverside Theatre, Florida Studio Theatre, Rubicon Theatre Company, Rogue Machine, Deaf West Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre LA and A Noise Within, among many others. Tom has been honored with four L.A. Stage Alliance Ovation Awards (24 nominations) and three L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards. For television, Tom has designed specials and series for every major broadcast and cable network and has three Emmy Award nominations and an Art Director’s Guild Award nomination. www.tombuderwitz.com