What We Did on Our NYC Vacation, and the Charlies!

What We Did on Our NYC Vacation

As the crow flies, the distance between Los Angeles and New York is approximately 2,449.79 miles. As we fly, on the other hand, New York is somewhat more distant, the miles being considerably dearer for mere mortals without expense accounts or a Stage Raw travel budget than they are for birds.

L.A. on 42^nd Street

Playwright Donald Margulies and Bart at KTCHN (Photo: Bill Raden)

So imagine our relief when we chanced by the Glass House Tavern off Times Square to find veteran stage director Bart DeLorenzo of Evidence Room fame holding court over a table of fellow L.A. stage exiles. Never mind that chance had a helping hand from Bart himself, who had texted us earlier that day that more than our terrible thirst might be slaked by a Glass House stop — namely that a dirty vodka martini (or three) might offer a solution to our quandary of how to make this week’s Stage Rows more  L.A.-relevant as we natter on self-indulgently about our seven days in NYC.

Outside the Acorn on opening night (Photo: Bill Raden)

Bart, of course, was in town putting the final touches on his Off-Broadway transfer of last year’s Odyssey hit Annapurna to the Acorn Theater in a co-production with The New Group. While the show represents a homecoming of sorts for co-star and Broadway veteran Megan Mullally (Grease, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Young Frankenstein), Stage Rows was surprised to learn that it would mark the NYC debuts of both Bart and Mullally’s costar Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation).

L.A. transplant Deirdre Murphy and L.A. lighting designer Michael Gend get convivial (Photo: Bill Raden)

Matching us glass for glass was stage manager Deirdre Murphy, who said she took advantage of the Off-Broadway transfer of Heathers: The Musical, which had a three-week tryout last September at Hollywood’s Hudson Backstage, to permanently relocate from Los Angeles, and Annurpurna lighting designer Michael Gend, who blamed his New York gig for skipping out on the LA Weekly awards, where his compatriots from last year’s Matrix production of We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 took this year’s LAWee for Production of the Year.

Dakin Matthews & Bart DeLorenzo at Times Square’s Glass House (Photo: Bill Raden)

Then, as the conversation drifted to the uncanny number of Los Angeles theater folk currently drawing paychecks in the vicinity of the Great White Way, in an even more uncanny bit of timing that might have been straight out of a DeLorenzo production, in walked Antaeus co-founder and L.A. stage éminence grise Dakin Matthews for a nightcap following a performance of the Broadway musical Rocky, in which Dakin essays the Burgess Meredith role of Mickey, the beleaguered boxing trainer desperate for his shot at the big time. The show, Dakin reports, seems to be holding its own in the wake of a critical drubbing by Ben Brantley and is pinning its hopes on robust houses when the tourist season begins in earnest next month.

It was no coincidence, however, when we found ourselves seated next to Dakin at the Annapurna premiere, as we had shamelessly cadged tickets from Bart at a moment when his defenses were laid low by the combination of expatriate bonhomie and whatever they were mixing at the Glass House bar. We are happy to report that the show seems a somehow bigger and crisper and altogether more satisfying production than its Odyssey incarnation. Part of the “bigness” might have stemmed from the fact that Thomas A. Walsh’s battered Airstream set had magically stretched since its Odyssey run to fill the Acorn’s more commodious stage. But to our minds, Megan and Nick’s chemistry had acquired the kind of Lunt-Fontanne dimensions needed to power Sharr White’s personality-driven drama about the destructive self-absorption of even great egocentric artists.

Bart, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullaly and the boys of The New Group do the step-‘n’-repeat at KTCHN (Photo: Bill Raden)

Afterwards, when we again bumped into him at the Annapurna after-party buffet down the street at KTCHN, Bart expressed his own satisfaction over the show even as he prepared to catch a return flight to LAX later that night to begin rehearsals the following day on the new Steven Drukman play Death of the Author, which is set to open at Geffen Playhouse on May 20. As if to round out the exquisitely coincidental L.A.-ness of the evening, Bart then introduced us to boyishly professorial playwright Donald Margulies, whose own Daniel Sullivan-helmed premiere of his new play The Country House is set for a June 3 opening at the Geffen, where it will overlap Death of the Author. The shows mark a reunion of sorts for Margulies and Bart, who worked together on the Geffen commission of Margulies’s Coney Island Christmas that Bart directed in 2012.

Some Little Places to go to Where They Never Close

Lest we give the impression that we spent our entire vacation above 23rd St., we’d like to serve notice that we also took in a stately if traditional Threepenny Opera by Martha Clarke at Atlantic Theater and had the honor of getting blown off by David Byrne’s publicist (such is the renown of Stage Rows in NYC) for comps to Here Lies Love, Byrne’s acclaimed Imelda Marcos-in-a-disco musical at the Public.

That was before we headed downtown to Grand St., where Abrons Arts Center restored our faith in the vibrancy and diversity of New York’s avant-garde stage scene with playwright-director Richard Maxwell’s mesmerizing staging of his most recent play Isolde, a dryly funny examination of the ineffable divide between the lofty aspirations of high art and the earthy pragmatism required to bring it to light.

Tony Torn (right) and unknown friend post-show at “Ubu Sings Ubu” (Photo: Bill Raden)

The most pleasant surprise of our trip turned out to be running into our old friend Tony Torn, whose inspired Ubu Sings Ubu was also playing at Abrons. Tony is an old veteran of Dar a Luz, the experimental performance company founded in Los Angeles by the late, great Reza Abdoh. After Reza’s tragic death in 1995, Tony went on to become a member of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric company at St. Mark’s Church.

Tony confirmed that Abrons is having what he called “an incredible season.” Before Ubu and Isolde, it hosted Julie Muz‘s sold-out Beauty and The Beast, and before that was Pig Iron Ensemble‘s Twelfh Night, which also became a critically acclaimed smash.

For Ubu, Tony and poet Nicole Peyrafitte ran Alfred Jarry’s original French text through Google Translate and then “musicalized” the results by mashing the “adaptation” together with live covers of the ‘70s punk band Pere Ubu. As the Macbeth-like despot Pere Ubu, Tony is a hilariously brutish overlay of Mussolini, Curly of the Three Stooges and Dave Thomas in a show that brilliantly recuperates the prankish radical punch of Jarry’s symbolist text by (re-)plugging it into the angry anarchic dissonance of its namesake band. All that and Tony rocks to boot!

Kinda free, kinda wow! Charlie!

Nyla Arslanian, Martha Demson (grasping her coveted Charlie) and Joe Spano at the 28th Annual Charlie Awards (Photo: Michael Schwartz)

On our return to the bosom of the Left Coast, we were pleased to see that Los Angeles culture did not entirely grind to a halt during our absence. One of the most promising signs of resilience came on Sunday at the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. That was when the Hollywood Arts Council belatedly honored the Open Fist Theatre and its Artistic Director Martha Demson with one of its annual Charlie Awards for significant contribution to the theater arts. Which is an understatement in the case of Martha and Open Fist.

The timing of the award couldn’t be more propitious. Both Open Fist and Celebration Theatre — two of the city’s most respected small stages that until recently anchored the opposite ends of Santa Monica Blvd.’s fabled Theatre Row — made headlines last year for being the latest victims of rising rents tied to commercial real estate development and gentrification that has been steadily pricing longtime theater companies out of Hollywood.

For the presently itinerant Open Fist — whose identity has been traditionally tied to a permanent home — the Charlie nod is more than a boost to flagging company morale. The event brought Demson together with Hollywood’s political elite — the likes of Councilmember Tom LaBonge and Congressman Adam B. Schiff — best equipped to open doors for Open Fist and to stem the flight of legitimate stages from L.A.’s longstanding cultural corridor.

The theater company turns 25 this year, and Demson says that she remains determined to celebrate its birthday in a permanent home in Hollywood. And while she says there have been some encouraging leads, the most promising development has been commitments from powerhouse companies like Celebration and Rogue Machine to partner with Open Fist in acquiring a property and transforming it into a three-company theater center. Whether the lucky neighborhood for that cultural jewel turns out to be Hollywood or, say, Atwater, remains to be seen.