Our Town

TRIPPING ON THE “M” WORD:

In my years of work with the LA theater community, and of the probably hundreds of events I’ve planned, hosted, or participated in with my fellow LA Theatre comrades, one moment easily takes the prize for the most instantaneous, instinctive, powerful group connection — and in a situation where the stakes were heightened and in a context that only theatre people would understand.

One of my primary roles when I worked at LA Stage Alliance was to oversee the Ovation Awards program.  I hosted the annual ‘trainings’ of the 200+ Ovation voters, to orient them to the rules and the voting system for the upcoming season.

One year, maybe 2009 or so, the Ovation Rules Committee and the Board of LA Stage Alliance deliberately invited all the artistic directors in LA theatre to become Ovation voters, specifically to get their expertise in the voting pool and help the leaders of our community understand the peer-voting process.  The invitations went out, and suddenly there were nearly a hundred artistic directors on board, from theaters large and small throughout LA.

We asked them all to come to the Colony Theatre in Burbank for a special “artistic directors only” training session. Suddenly my two-hour presentation — the “Doug Show” as many voters affectionately remember it — was going to be done in one go for nearly every artistic director in town.

The presentation began, and it was going great.  I stood on the Colony stage, merrily clicking away on my PowerPoint, landing my voting-system-humor punch-lines and LA theatre rhetoric.  No sweat.

And then, in making some example, I said, “Imagine you were seeing, say, Macbeth….”

Time froze and warped in some sort of metaphysical pretzel of theatrical disaster.  A hundred artistic directors took one huge gasp, and I stood stock-still. I had just committed possibly the cardinal sin of the theater, standing in the middle of the stage in front of a room full of my most respected peers.

There was a long moment, and then, bless him, Jim O’Neill from the Rubicon Theatre leapt from his chair, ran down to the stage, and yelled “Go!  Go!  Get out!  Get out!’  His yell broke my panic, and I dropped my notes and PowerPoint clicker and ran for the door, to do the curse-banishing ritual — run outside, spin around three times, curse and spit.  I sheepishly returned to the theatre, and quietly called “May I come back?”

There was a shared bellow of laughter from the crowd, and Jim let me back inside to continue the presentation.

Embarrassing?  Yes.  Humiliating?  Perhaps.  But that feeling of a hundred artists thinking and reacting as one — all of us connected as one great theatre hive-mind?  Utterly joyous and something I’ll never, ever forget. – Douglas Clayton, Community Whiz-Kid

BRILLIANT TRACES:

Radford (second from left) in “God Only Knows” at Theatre Forty through April 20. (See New Reviews); Photo by Ed Krieger

Trying to pick one memorable moment out of so many – stretching back to the 1970s when students were still allowed to go on unofficial “field trips” – has proven to be a difficult task.

First, I love going to the theater. I know that would seem to be a foregone conclusion for someone who works in the theater, but, to my amazement, I have a fair number of colleagues who don’t like it at all — and these are directors, writers and actors. Now, I will acknowledge it is always an act of faith to buy a ticket, enter the cavern, wait for the lights to go down and hope to be amazed or moved or amused. However, I have been rewarded on so many occasions in some unlikely places — and some major venues — with pieces which covered the whole scope of performances, from Shakespeare to musical theater, dance, opera, comedy, drama – and have always felt so lucky not to have missed the opportunity to be present.

At the end of 2012, Karen Landry, an actress I had worked with at San Jose Rep in the early 1990s, was directing a piece at the Ruskin Group Theatre located at the Santa Monica Airport (see? unlikely); and I finally got myself together and purchased a ticket for the closing weekend – in fact it was the final performance.

When I got there I found it was not being performed in the regular space, but across the way in one of the warehouse buildings. When it was time for the play to begin, we trooped across the road and entered a square room that had been turned into a rustic cabin. The lights went down and the magic began: The play was Brilliant Traces by Cindy Lou Johnson with Austin Highsmith and Chad Wood — a 90-minute two-hander with a simple story about two wounded people seeking solace and understanding.

But because of that elusive combination of script and direction and interpretation, I was transformed into an invisible observer and given secret entre to the private world of these two broken souls. For that hour and a half (which seemed much shorter), I was transported thousands of miles away and allowed to witness the vulnerability of the human condition.

My one regret from that evening was that it was closing night and I wouldn’t get the opportunity to see it again. I don’t know how it was received critically and I don’t really care. I only know how it affected me and that is what it is really all about, yes? How each individual is affected by a work of art.  At the very least, the audience laughs or cries, and at most they are prompted to think about something in a different and new way. But that in itself can change the world.—Wendy Radford

DAZED BY SUCCESS:

I’ve had many memorable moments since I arrived in LA and fell in with Sacred Fools Theater Company nine years ago. It could be the times when everything seemed to be going wrong with a show and then everything coalesced to a glorious outcome (like with Hamlet Shut Up!) or the many nights of post-Serial Killers revelry, when I was surrounded by people I loved.

I think the most indelible, however, was the success of Vanessa Stewart’s and Jake Broder’s Louis & Keely: Live at the Sahara. The show also had a troubled nascency, but it was clear when it hit the stage that it was something very special. The critics and audiences agreed and it was incredible to have our little-theater-that-could awash in praise, and audiences the likes of which we had never seen.

I had never considered the possibility of receiving awards for theater, but when the LA Weekly, Ovations and LADCC showered the show with them, it was a thrill for everyone involved. It was an unforeseen validation of all our hard work, and I’ll never forget how our ragtag crew all joined together in joyous howls every time our company’s name was announced. While I’ve had many personally memorable moments on the stage, it is this memory of our group, joined in triumph, that stands out amongst them all.–Jaime Andrews, actress

BLASTING OUT OF THE STARTING BLOCK:

“You wouldn’t have known it, but something amusing has just happened.”
–Alfieri’s opening line in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge

Of all things in a town rife with experimental performance, a moment of potentially staid narration from Pacific Resident Theatre’s production of A View from the Bridge stands out.

I rarely see revivals, especially when the play is so hallowed in the modern classic canon.  My expectations run far too high.  (I indeed place those mid-20^th century playwrights on soaring pedestals.)  And it’s often the case that the delicate first moments of a production, like PRT’s, let me know if I’ll be ducking out at intermission — getting that first note just right is so necessary and so rare.

To stack the deck even higher, in this instance, Miller’s play opens with a prologue that dares the actor to numb us immediately with a droning discourse.  But this Alfieri, played by Robert Lesser, locked eyes with each of us at once.  And although most of us knew the play, we surrendered in fear and trembling to this watchful consigliere, as he braced us for something we would never see coming.  –Patricia McKee, Director and Actor

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Causes of Theater’s Irrelevance, and What to Do About It

BY JOHN STEPPLING

In the 1960s, the West German government, under Adenauer, forged a curious ideologically schizoid relationship with young German filmmakers. The Oberhausen Manifesto sort of provided a funding frame and impetus for young directors, and a generation of filmmakers grew out of this, including Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, Straub, Wenders, and Herzog.

In 1966, the patrician Yale Law School graduate John Lindsay was elected mayor of New York. He rapidly solved the city’s transportation strike (by essentially granting the strikers’ demands) and went to work transforming urban life in America’s largest city. He did this, in part, by throwing money at the arts.

Now I mention these two developments because one never has a vibrant and relevant cultural community without either state funding, or a collective political consensus of resistance. In the U.S. today, in an era of de-territorialized power, an economy largely based on attention deficits, a surveillance state, and a compliant and quisling media, the arts have been largely reduced to either a Wall Street investment opportunity (and credibility marker, if fine arts), or a product for giant telecom corporations and studios (if film), or as adjunct cottage industries for academia (if we mean poetry and fiction MFA programs and the like). Theater is a sort of embarrassing third wheel, a pimple faced uncle with halitosis and untrimmed nose hair who keeps hanging around, and just won’t take the hint. Theater plays out where the buses have stopped running.

Now, if one is obedient enough, and socially adept, and from the correct class, then one might become one of the handful of playwrights in the U.S. who actually make a living from their art . . . er . . . craft . . . er . . .whatever. Radical work does not get produced on Broadway or make it to Lincoln Center. There is a small group of performance companies left that signify the “avant garde” (The Wooster Group, being the poster child for this) without really being avant garde, and there is a handful of grants-generating theater companies (whose sole purpose is, really, to simply generate grant funding, and often this overlaps with Academia and the white, liberal paternalistic stance toward “multiculturalism”), and there are even one or two regional writers who manage to subsist. But there is no political vision of resistance.

Now, part of this can be laid at the feet of post-modernist theory, in the sense that modernism was seen as well past its sell-by date, and ergo the arts in general were falling into various camps of ineffectuality. Traditionally, the rise of the idea of the avant garde was in opposition to the status quo. At whatever point one chooses to see the beginnings of a cultural avant garde, there is no question that throughout the first half of the 20th century, the role of artists working in all mediums, was to critique the conformist and often totalitarian values of the state, of governments.

Which brings us to “today”. The cultural landscape is relatively reactionary on the whole. So far to the right have the mainstream political parties lurched over the last 30 years that today, Richard Nixon would be decried as a cheese-eating socialist. Now, I hasten to add that for the most part electoral politics are all just bad theater, but as a form of cultural symbol, I suppose such observations have interest. The point is, if you were to examine the coming main stage seasons at any large regional theatre (The Guthrie, Seattle Rep., The Goodman, La Jolla Playhouse, Oregon Shakes, et al) I would defy anyone to see much in the way of excitement, or, more to the point, work of genuine political destabilizing, anything that feels dangerous in any way. No, the role of institutions of any kind is to self-perpetuate. To survive. And, survival means making a profit.

As a thought experiment, if one were to overhear the proverbial water cooler dialogue at the office tomorrow morning, does one imagine the discussion in play would be from cinema or TV, or from theater? Yes, this is a rhetorical question. So much of public discourse is now enclosed within the confines of film culture, and TV product, that one cannot discuss Ukraine fascism, or U.S. torture or war crimes without recourse to Breaking Bad similes or metaphors. Or Mad Men, or Hunger Games, or Gravity, or Wes Anderson. Now this speaks, additionally, to the infantilizing of U.S. society over-all, but the point is that theater is now a museum art form, it is not a living part of organic community. And yes, of course there are honorable small theaters that try to do good work, but that is very hard, to survive as an island of artistic radicalism in a sea of neo-liberal obedience. But, this brings us back to questions of economics.

New York’s Mayor Lindsay gave money to theater artists during the “Fun City” years, and off-off Broadway was one of the results. Maria Irene Fornes, Sam Shepard, Murray Mednick, Ronnie Tavel, Cafe Cino, LaMama, etc. etc. etc. This marked the last collective radical experimental theater movement of any sort in the U.S.

When I look back on the Padua Hills Festival in Claremont, California during the 1970s and 1980s, I see the post-script to off-off Broadway — an honorable and even important post-script. It’s not an accident that funding was hard to come by despite a decade-long track record. The arts funders do not tolerate artists who want to bite the hand that feeds them, even though artists are supposed to cause offense, to anger the bourgeoisie, and to disrupt the status quo.

The New German Cinema was allowed to do what it wanted. Fassbinder could make radical sexually defiant political masterpieces with money from the government. Now, in the U.S. today, there is almost no money forthcoming from the government for artists (and do not try to blame Republicans for this, because Democrats are exactly as bad). A bit of chump change trickles down from the master’s table and is hurriedly collected by the grubby hands of those grants-generating theater companies (if we limit this discussion to theater, for now). But this is not the only reason for the deadness of American theater. There is an increasingly depressing “hobby” culture infecting young (and not so young) playwrights and actors and directors. One can’t quit one’s day job, after all. Because mostly doing small theatre means losing money. Its like artistic self-harm, cultural Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, or some sort of stage Munchausens.

Now, it seems to me there are three issues interconnected. One, and most significant, is the growing surveillance state, the post-modern police state that is 21st century America. It is more Kafka than Orwell, but either way, it furthers the reification of social relations, and embedded within this reality is the final total destruction of public education.

This brings up the second issue, which is audience. There is no longer an audience culturally educated enough to sit through say, a six hour Heiner Müller play — but really, it is more about the loss of mimetic depth (and this becomes too philosophical for the purposes of this article), the inability of audiences to really listen or look. A sub-effect of this second issue is that the ascension of irony has coincided with the rise of marketing, of a branded culture of hyper-realism. The new “snark” culture is in a zero sum game with sincerity. I suspect the last sincere artists were Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, and the Pinter and Beckett generation of theater writers, with Sarah Kane as a sort of coda. This is not to say there are not sincere and even profound writers working today, because obviously there are, but that they are atomized, isolated, and often largely invisible.

The third factor is perhaps really part of the first, and that is economics. To produce a play decently, in Los Angeles today, in a theater of 99-seats or less, is about a $40,000 investment. That’s a low-ball figure. Now, you can expect to get back, if the show “does well” about 15% of the investment. Of course, alternatives exist; one-night hobby shows, under rehearsed, for mostly your friends, or find really, really cheap rental space in Blythe or Colton or somewhere, and put on a play in a former meat packing warehouse. This is all possible, but it cannot be done alone. I suspect, strictly speaking, it “can” be done alone, if one is committed enough, but along that path lies a great cost. Artaud said it, slavery or madness.

In Poland, during the era of Kantor’s company in Krakow, the mid-1980s, one of the things that was so striking when seeing that group was the deep investment of everyone involved. Company members weren’t running off to talk to their agent about a chance to write the new CSI:Omaha freelance episode, or to take up the staff gig for Nickelodeon’s new kid show. I know this because I spent 13- years working in Hollywood and realized at some point that without a deeper level of prostration, I was doomed. Others have lasted far shorter periods and I admire them for realizing what it took me a decade to grasp.

The U.S. government will not anytime soon fund the arts on any scale that matters. Whatever Democratic ghoul is nominated, or Republican sociopath, the results are the same. The U.S. spends $4 billion a day on defense. A day! And actually its closer to five. The NSA listens in on everything, compiles it, and hides it in that vast billion dollar refrigerator in the Utah desert. And the U.S. continues to try to overthrow foreign governments it doesn’t like. The U.S. is basically a neo-fascist state, now. So, no, don’t expect much funding for your new play.

The answer is not one-night stands. Sexual one-night stands are fun, too. I don’t know if I can really stretch this metaphor, but mounting semi-rehearsed skits in backyards or bars is like getting genital warts from that guy or girl who looked better at closing time: playwright as genital-wart sufferer.

For theater requires, and in fact is predicated upon, a space. And that space must have the capacity for ritual learning. Theater is ceremonial, in the end. It is a civic ceremony. It is not entertainment. It is for the most part the opposite of whatever they told you at the University MFA program. Think the opposite and you will be closer to the truth. I read someone recently say the playwright’s first job is to not bore the audience. No, actually the first job of the theater artist might well be to intentionally bore the audience. You think awakening from the dream is supposed to be fun?  The first job of any artist is to be serious. Within that is the avoidance of manipulation, of pandering to be liked, of dancing like the organ grinder’s monkey, hoping for spare change.

Institutional theater is on a respirator, and probably your health insurance doesn’t cover it anyway. In Los Angeles, before I left, I had a small panel discussion as an answer to the Theatre Communications Group panels being held. I was surprised at the love being shown, or at least fondness, for TCG. But then I thought, Stockholm Syndrome. Until theater artists bite those hands that provide scraps, the leftovers, then the colonizing of artistic consciousness will continue. And I get it, believe me. Without an audience, without validation of some sort, you become the cultural version of a battered child. You accept becoming collaborator, because the alternative seems too bleak. And it is. For theater to recuperate its own history, the form of stage narrative, then the creation of an audience is the first step.

Alternative education, pedagogic resistance leads to aesthetic resistance, and aesthetic resistance may lead to both an awakening, to compassion, satori, and to political resistance. It will remind us to listen and look. But it means educational rigor. There is a slightly toxic vibe in today’s playwriting workshop culture; and that is workshop as self-help, or therapy. This is not about your problems. This project of reclaiming relevance for theater is not about the commodity you write. The cult of ownership, or authorship, is beyond the scope of this article, but rigor means close reading of texts, it means sacrifice, it means seriousness. If theater (or art) is not taken seriously, then you may as well take that staff job and stop complaining.

John Steppling is an American writer, currently living in Norway

The Meaning of Tribe

CATHY CARLTON, actress-producer

Here’s a helpful translation guide for those unfamiliar with Carlton’s idiosyncratic prose, or with the players to whom she refers:

“Richie”: actor-producer Rich Werner

“Kittie”: actor-producer Cathy Carlton, the author of this story.

“Bickie”: actor David Bickford

“Lynnie”: actress Lynn Odell

“Scottie”: actor Scott McKinley

“Noon”: actress, teacher, co-artistic director (Ghost Theatre Company) Katharine Noon

“Seldis”: director, co-artistic director (Ghost Theatre Company) Mark Seldis

“Rivera”: director/artistic director (Playwrights Arena) Jon Lawrence Rivera

“Bobby”: actor Robert Lane

“John”: actor John Allore

“Fitzy”: actor Tom Fitzpatrick

“Jahnke”: actor/performance artist John Jahnke

Carlton refers to one of the annual performance marathon fundraisers held at, and for, Hollywood’s Theatre of NOTE, on Cahuenga Boulevard. She currently lives in Massachusetts, where she grew up.

Luis Alfaro

“I saw him first at that Notey-ist of NOTE events, the Marathon. A freewheeling fundraiser held in January, the Marathon is a series of performances by guest artists usually starting in the early afternoon and going into the wee hours. The weirder the acts, the better, for us at NOTE. (I remember one year, some of us on the Art Board huddled to figure out how to get the blood off the floor).

“Richie, long time Marathon producer, started booking people at Thanksgiving. That one year, he buzzed about excitedly ,“Kitty, I got [writer-performer-poet-teacher, MacArthur Foundation “genius” Luis] Alfaro.” Me, swamped with admin and press stuff, for the company was all “yeah yeah, Alfaro, good , uh huh.”  I had heard of Luis Alfaro, all the cool kids seemed to know him and I think he was fancy pants at the Taper at the time, but I had never met him or seen his work.

“Day of  — between 11 p.m. and midnight. More people than should be are crammed into that black box on Cahuenga. Luis shambles onstage and puts a full bottle of tequila and a shot glass on the small table next to him. We look around at each other (well, this will be easier to clean up than blood.) And he starts to talk.  And drink. Every two sentences, it seems, he takes a shot. We were mesmerized.  I don’t remember the specifics of the monologue, but I still burn remembering the overall feeling. He spoke of his family, of Los Angeles, of his students, his commute, of crawling out from under, of food, of community, of what we have to do to get by as artists, all the while slugging that entire bottle of tequila. He got loud and passionate; we got loud and passionate.  I remember thinking “how the fuck is it possible that this scruffy, beautiful Latino man can make sense of the world to this little white girl from the North Country. And how the fuck can he do it downing that bottle of tequila? Is this daddy gonna stay on his feet?  Oh yes.

“That night, he spoke of his tribe.  I looked around at my tribe then and, though I am now far away, I still do.  Bicky on my left, Lynnie down front, Scotty in the back. I thought of the others in my orbit, Noon, Seldis, Rivera, Bobby, John, Fitzy, Jahnke, and I was just a bit less adrift.

“It’s a gift to be able to tell a story using an outside action distracting the audience.  (I have since seen him tell a similar tale while stuffing himself with Twinkies.) The story remains the same, and I never forgot it.

“Fucking Luis Alfaro, man.  Nice get, Richie.”

Dancing in the Dark

JOHN POLLONO, actor-playwright

John Pollono, performing in his own play Small Engine Repair  at Rogue Machine. The play subsequently transferred to Off-Broadway.

“My favorite L.A. Theater moment happened in 2011 when we first opened Small Engine Repair as part of the late night series at Rogue Machine Theatre. It was a 10:30 p.m. show, we were about 10- minutes in when the power went out in front of a sold out house. For the first moments, Michael Redfield and I performed by the light of his iPhone. We kept thinking that tech director David Mauer (in the audience that night) would flip the circuit breaker — we didn’t know that the whole block had lost power. Instead, he made sure that Jon Bernthal made his entrance holding two flashlights. As the show chugged onward, whenever a character left stage to “use the bathroom” in the story, he would return with a lamp or a candle of some kind. We just kept slogging forward, knocking over bottles and chairs, not wanting to be the one to break the fourth wall and say ‘okay folks, this is ridiculous.’

“When Josh Helman made his entrance, we steered him away from the broken bottles and played to the pool of light in the center of the stage. By that point, flashlights had been distributed to the members in the audience and they were aiming them like weak spotlights on all the action.

“Afterwards, gathering out in front of the theater in the darkness with the post-show crowd (power wouldn’t be restored until the next day), we finally reacted to the whole damn thing. Kevin Spacey was there that night (of all nights!) and he told us about something similar happening to him in London and how they all forged ahead too. Seems like everyone has a crazy theater story like that. Thing is . . . while we were in the middle of it, we were imagining the story years later: ‘The lights went out and we performed by flashlight . . . and it was the most connected, organic performance I ever experienced.’

“But we all felt the complete opposite — we barely stumbled through.

“Not sure what this says about L.A. theater audiences, but gathering out there in front after the show, we realized that a big chunk of the audience thought the blackout was scripted. Someone even approached me and recommended that we write it into the text.”

What Actors Do

SHARON YABLON, playwright

“I would have to say my most memorable moment in LA theater was my introduction to the folks at Cinda Jackson’s Lost Studio about 20 years ago. I had just reluctantly moved back to LA from San Francisco and was planning on moving to New York to get a job in publishing. On a whim I decided to take a playwriting class at UCLA Extension, and playwright Kelly Stuart was a sub one session. I liked the writing exercises she had us doing, so I asked her if she knew of any playwriting groups that met. She told me to go down to the Lost Studio Saturday mornings and bring a few pages of new work, because actors just showed up.

“I didn’t know what to expect when I first climbed those stairs. There was actor and orator Mick Collins sitting at the center, talking about Communism. When that calmed down, writers started to have actors read their work, including Mick who is a great actor. Writer-actor Joe Goodrich (who now lives in New York), playwrights Guy Zimmerman and Wes Walker were there – people I still greatly respect and collaborate with. Peter Schaaf, Jeff Phillips, Tom Waldman, Charmaine Cruz and Mickey Swenson to name a few, were some of the actors.

“When it was my turn I gave someone my first scene, it was about a piano store owner who had a hooker living in the back of the store. When I first heard the actors bring the writing to life – without any direction or notes – it was like magic, and that’s my moment!

“I started to go every Saturday. There was so much incredible work and conversation about theater generated in that room over the years. Michael Farkash was also one of the writers whose work I was first introduced to. I’m still saddened by his death. His mind was so zany and macabre.”

Reflections on Zoe Caldwell

JOHN ACHORN, actor

Caldwell in Master Class
Photo by Joan Marcus

“Because of my activity with Antaeus Company, and my participation the year earlier of Chekhov’s The Wood Demon at the Taper, I was offered an audition and subsequently a part in Master Class starring Zoe Caldwell [who played aging opera star Maria Callas as an exacting sadistic voice teacher].

“First of all, Ms. Caldwell is a First Lady of the stage. She was a gracious, if precise, personage.  She was sexy even in her age – perhaps it was her sense of being open and, in turn, wanting her audiences to be open to their humanity; I think it gave her a sense of control in tandem with a sense of total spontaneous generosity.  Fascinating.  I wasn’t really close to her in any way, yet she gave me a feeling of being both integral and apart, without being disparaging.

“I played the Stagehand, a small role of the four roles in the play.  Audra MacDonald was in the show straight off her breakthrough performance on Broadway in the revival of Carousel. People clamored to come backstage to give their regards to the cast.  I was a bit in the shadows. During the previews, I would come out at intermission to dress the stage, and one night an usher asked if I was actually in the play.

“I met Angela Lansbury after opening night – she was congratulating the director David Loud et al, wandered by my dressing room, looked in and said (slightly astonished that she was speaking to me perhaps) “You were quite good too, very well done.”

“One evening, after the opening brouhaha was over and the run was on, there was suddenly this high-pitched humming sound that filled the theater, which at first we thought was the audience-headphone system going haywire.  It continued off and on throughout the performance. By the second act, when we thought it was over, it came back, and Ms. Caldwell turned to the audience and said, ‘What shall we do about this?  I’ve never experienced anything like this before!’  She actually, still as Callas cum Caldwell, offered them to come back to a different performance – ‘or should we carry on?’ A resounding assent to carrying on ensued — even with a sound irritating all concerned.  She had them in the palm of her hand.

“She is truly the most remarkable actress I have ever known.”

Overcoming the Odyssey Theatre’s Closed-Door Policy

RHONDA ALDRICH, actress

“I was in a production of Happy Birthday, Tina Marie by Craig Thornton at the Odyssey Theatre. I played a former child star and had all these scenes where I relived my past roles.  I was constantly changing costumes.  Most of the changes were backstage, but for the last one I had to exit and change in the dressing room. Then I had to make this big entrance on a pogo stick — I was coming on to kill my mother (Sandy Martin) with the pogo stick and to sing a song called “The Rats are my Friends.” I raced out of the dressing room to the theatre’s backstage door, but someone had locked it while I was in the dressing room – and there was nobody backstage anywhere.

“I can faintly here Sandy through the door throwing her lines at me like ‘Where the hell are you!’ and I just start pounding on the door.  Sandy keeps on talking and walks over to the door and throws it open – I pogo on and the rest is a blank!”

Editor’s Note: History: First comes the experience, and then the  recording of it. Though theater is an ephemeral art generally, it’s more mercurial in L.A. than in other burgs, since so little of it gets recorded, so much of it is forgotten. This is the first in a two-part series of moments remembered people who either recorded them professionally, or engaged in an activity best described by actress-director Jillian Amenante: “Putting on a play in L.A. is like trying to build a snowman in Florida.” — SLM

A Delicate Balance

BY ROB WEINERT-KENDT, formerly, the editor of Back Stage West, contributor to the Los Angeles Times, currently associate editor at American Theatre Magazine in New York.

There’s a lot of bad theater in Los Angeles — that everyone knows. It is a condition as unchangeable as the weather. That there is also great theater in Los Angeles — truly, as great as anywhere in the world — not everyone seems to know, but it is a well-kept secret I once held dearly and fought, in my way, to uncover and to proclaim from whatever rooftop I could find.

One winter night I recall in either 1994 or ’95 encapsulated the steep range of L.A. theater as I saw it, from dreadful to transcendent, flea-bitten to angel-kissed. I showed up at Hollywood’s most notorious rat-trap, the Complex, to review a revival of Leonard Melfi’s Porno Stars at Home, and found it to be so dispiritingly awful that I decided as I drove home down Santa Monica Boulevard that I wouldn’t even be able to file the negative notice it deserved. Then my spirits lifted as I checked the time and realized I could still make it to the 10:30 performance of Justin Tanner’s Party Mix at the Cast Theater, just a few blocks away on El Centro Blvd. I’d already seen the show as part of the historic eight-play repertory of plays by Tanner – a writer of nimble comedies and L.A.’s one-time answer to Molière. Though Party Mix was arguably the flimsiest of a bunch that included the raucous Pot Mom, the tart Bitter Women, the punchy Zombie Attack, and above all the pitch-perfect Teen Girl, as a palate cleanser Party Mix hit the spot — and for a chaser there was a can or two of cheap beer in the thatched open-air lounge next to the theater.

Indeed, while I relished the extracurricular scenes that formed around such L.A. theaters as the Actors’ Gang, Evidence Room, and Theatre of NOTE, that late-night recourse to the Cast’s Party Mix is the only time in all my theatergoing years that I was able to use a good play to immediately purge the vibes of a bad one. On such delicate balances are my memories of that town, with its harsh and vivid contradictions, ever poised.

Fascism and Its Discontents

BY RON SOSSI, director, producer, founder of Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Adolph Hitler

One of the most memorable theatrical moments for me occurred during the Odyssey’s “devised” production entitled The Adolph Hitler Show (1984)

The interactive piece had the audience entering the theater after the intermission to find that a majority of the cast were dressed like Hitler Youth and were singing one of their songs in front of giant film projections of Hitler speaking. One audience member totally lost it and ran up to the platform where the actors were singing and grabbed an actress by the neck and tried to throttle her, and needed to be pulled off.

(Most of the audience thought this was part of the production.)

It was revealed at the end of the show that the “attacker” was actually the KPFK critic! Post-show he requested to chat with the cast in order to apologize and discuss his reaction. Meanwhile, I stood in the doorway of the former Odyssey building where one could see both the stage and the lobby at the same time. As the critic was spilling out his guts about his family’s loss in the Holocaust, a chubby young woman, whom I had seen earlier with a plastic-wrapped book under her arm, had gathered a few listeners in the lobby and was extolling the virtues of Nazism to them, while brandishing Mein Kampf. I observed the two scenes happening simultaneously and thought,  THIS is theater!

Fame and Misfortune in Pasadena:

BY JEANIE HACKETT – actress, director, teacher

Pasadena Playhouse, scene-painters on the stage
Photo courtesy of Pasadena Playhouse

My most memorable moment in LA theater had to be my first, when I came from New York to play Louka in Shaw’s Arms and The Man for the grand re-opening of the Pasadena Playhouse [https://pasadenaplayhouse.org]  in 1986 – finally putting on a play after 17 years of lying dormant. But in absolutely no way were the theater gods with us.

Saturday’s opening night curtain went up over 45 minutes late — thanks to a plethora of pre-show parties and celebrations. 8 p.m. came and went, and another 15 minutes passed, and then a half hour with no call to “places.” We actors bounced off the walls backstage, syphoning off our creative steam scampering around front to gape at the spectacle of the after-party setup: klieg lights, silk tents, an orchestra worthy of the LA Phil (maybe it was the LA Phil), scores of huge potted palm trees (air-lifted in? or have I embellished with the years?), an army of caterers, lookie-loos lining the perimeter, not to mention a chorus line of men and women in police-officer costumes diverting all traffic to the Inland Empire. This pre-fab scenic wonder completely dwarfed anything on our stage. Shaw’s comedy of ideas about love and war paled next to what was happening in the parking lot across the street.

Finally our audience staggered to their seats a little before 9. They found not a moment to their liking. Nor did the critics.

Richard Thomas and John Rubinstein and Carole Shelley and Dylan Baker and Rex Robbins and all the rest of the cast but especially me were — spectacularly! —  less than the hoopla going on around us. At the party after the show, I’m not sure anyone even registered that we, the cast, were actually there. Certainly no one made mention of it. The whole thing was a marvelous excuse for a Hollywood extravaganza — and in this company, Shaw’s Raina and her Chocolate Soldier were clearly extras.

Fame and Fortunate in Pasadena

BY FRENCH STEWART, actor

French Stewart in Stoneface
Photo by Shaela Cook

I’ve always looked at theater as farming. You start with something small and you grow it. You work. You sweat. You grow it. And also there’s a lot of hoe action. Thank you!

I started my farming career in Pasadena when I was 19. I was an usher at The Pasadena Playhouse. I graduated from The American Academy of Dramatic Arts  [https://aada.edu] in Pasadena.  My hero Buster Keaton used to party there. It’s honestly my favorite city. My most meaningful stretch of land.

Sometimes theater is nurtured in an 800-seat gazebo with sizable subsidies. But, more often than not, it’s grown somewhere else. It flowers from a crack in the 99-seat pavement or some black box closet with a grow lamp. In Burbank no less!

My wife (Vanessa Claire Stewart) and I started growing Stoneface, a play she wrote about Buster Keaton, in February of 2010, from our home pavement at east Hollywood’s Sacred Fools Theater — a barn we dearly love, and soil my wife and I had previous luck with. She, with Louis And Keely: Live At The Sahara, which she co-wrote and performed in – it moved on to an eight month run at The Geffen Playhouse; and me, with Jamie Robledo’s Watson https://www.sacredfools.org/mainstage/10/watson/ and Justin Tanner’s Voice Lessons https://www.sacredfools.org/mainstage/11/voicelessons/, both of which are enjoying an extended life.)

Stoneface was a different beast. We worked abnormally hard and fought through a long, hot, summer drought (the Fools’ air con went down). But we did six months total. All in tweed. Stinky, stinky, tweed. With our faithful friends working for free. We also got really banged up physically. A long road to hoe indeed.

Vanessa and I spent the next year trying to shop it to a larger market. Our plan was to keep the charm of our little garden while also seeking a larger grow house.

I’ll turn the tractor around.
Here’s the really lovely thing. The thing I love, anyway.

The central theme to Stoneface is that eventually, you get a break in the weather. And it broke for us. Rain came, in the form of a call from Sheldon Epps and the good people of The Pasadena Playhouse. Lovely gardeners.

That meant everything to us. Best day ever.

Weather changes. How ‘bout them apples?

I’ll stop.

[Stewart will star as Buster Keaton in Stoneface at the Pasadena Playhouse, June 3-29.]

Next week: stories by John Pollono, Cathy Carlton, John Achorn, Sharon Yablon and Rhonda Aldrich