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:

 

 

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