Arts In LA
Meet the Artists
Hired and Happy
Annabelle Gurwitch returns to local stages in Coney Island Christmas.
by Dany Margolies
Annabelle Gurwitch is working, and she’s doing so in LA theater. To her theatergoing fans, that might come as a relief and a surprise. The writer-actor hasn’t been onstage speaking other playwrights’ words since spring 2001, when she appeared in Padua Playwrights’ production of Murray Mednick’s Joe & Betty, playing the embattled, scarred wife-mother. And why the relief that she’s working at all? One of Gurwitch’s claims to fame is her status as fired actor, thanks to Woody Allen’s dismissal of her from a one-act in New York City, an event she turned into a wicked evening of theater titled Fired.
This week she opens in Coney Island Christmas at LA’s Geffen Playhouse, playing a role she seems to find extremely comfortable and near to her. The world premiere by Donald Margulies is based on Grace Paley’s short story The Loudest Voice, set in the 1930s, as the Russian-Jewish Abramowitz family deals with assimilation into American society. Gurwitch plays Clara Abramowitz, mother to young Shirley who is asked to play Jesus Christ in her school Christmas play. Gurwitch finds the play’s themes particularly relevant post-election. “What could be more timely than to realize we are living in a different kind of America and a different acceptance and tolerance of co-existence with our differences, of having an integrated society?” the actor notes. “I love it. I’m so thrilled to be part of that—that my character gets to carry that message.”
The
actor also seems thrilled the play is set in the 1930s, an era she
feels resonates with her. She loves the language of the day, she gets to
wear great shoes, and—to bolster her feel for the times—her costuming
includes pieces of jewelry from her mother and grandmother. However,
magic seems to be at work in the present, too. First, the production is
directed by Bart DeLorenzo. “I had heard about Bart,” she says. “I
hadn’t seen other productions that Bart had directed before I came to
the workshop [of this play], but I had heard that other actors called
him ‘the wizard.’ And now I know why. He is something special.”
One more bit of magic makes her work here an even happier experience. She stars opposite Arye Gross, her former neighbor and her friend for more than 20 years. She says they have tremendous trust in each other and a shorthand in communicating, which makes them able to be playful onstage. Both actors had been cast in the play’s second workshop. Of being chosen for the role in the premiere production, Gurwitch says, “I’m assuming other Jewish television and film stars had plans during the holidays.”
Serious Roots in Serious Soil
Gurwitch says her roots are in avant-garde and experimental theater, Jacobean tragedy, and modern adaptations of Shakespeare. Born in Mobile, Ala., she grew up in Florida, but after she moved to New York she developed her current, New York accent. She played her first role in New York, at age 18, at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Later she worked with director Richard Schechner at The Public Theater, in The Red Snake by Michael McClure—an adaptation of James Shirley’s The Cardinal.
After starring in Mednick’s play and not starring in Allen’s play, Gurwitch decided upon writing as her creative outlet. “I write about the comedy of humiliation,” she says, “which luckily there’s so much of.” For example, she says the origin of her book (with her husband, Jeff Kahn) You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up is in the comedy of humiliation of being married for 16 years. Her current project is about turning 50. (One of its chapters, Autumn Leaves, is on ZolaBooks.com’s bestseller list.)
“Every actor should write, and every writer should try acting,” she says. “Writing is so hard. I now would like to take back many things I have done as an actress. I now understand things I did that frustrated writers.” By way of example, she says, “Just thinking I had a better idea of how the line should go.” And so, she promises, “I’m working extremely hard, even with my perimenopausal brain, to get every syllable of Donald’s script on the stage.” She says she feels “so much more admiration” for her husband, a writer, because she now realizes his discipline.
Bored Without the Boards?
And yet, she still felt the lure of the stage and was ready to get out of her pajamas and come to the theater and collaborate. So, this week, Gurwitch is focusing on bringing Clara Abramowitz alive on the stage.
She says the hard work in creating Clara was done by Margulies, and the hard work in getting Clara on and off the stage has been done by DeLorenzo. “He’s able to choreograph a really large vision of something,” she says of her director. Backstage during the show is “a whole other show happening,” she reports. “Twenty people onstage, two dressers, two assistant stage managers, two crew members moving furniture, the guy operating the revolving stage, there’s wigs and costumes for everything from pilgrims to Ebenezer Scrooge to reenacting the Nativity scene. It is absolute madness back there, but it’s so choreographed. Once it starts, there’s no intermission. You’re riding on and off this revolving stage, which I have to say is so much fun. Some of the cast members also help other cast members with their costumes changes. There’s no standing on ceremony.
“Our stage moves, the sets, the lights, there’s dream sequences, and
yet to be human in the middle of all that, and the way he works with the
kids, and to retain this kindness at the heart of all this chaos...”
she says of DeLorenzo. Kids? Everyone ignored the adage about working
with kids? Playing Shirley Abramowitz as a young girl is Isabella Acres,
age 11. Gurwitch describes her as an extraordinary talent.
“Sometimes it’s hard to remember she’s a child,” says Gurwitch. “She’s very intuitive. I want to be careful with her. But she really gives it right back to me onstage. [The characters] have a very contentious relationship. In rehearsals, we had fun; it’s fun to have a chance to yell at your mother. But it never carries off to the offstage. I make it a point to give her a big hug after [our scene]. Bart made it very safe for her—I think by making it fun, even in the serious aspects of the play.”
A Play for the Young and the Picky, Too
Gurwitch says aspects of Coney Island Christmas should appeal to kids: the pageants, Thanksgiving, Christmas, two little girls onstage, and adults playing youngsters. But, she notes, they will likewise appreciate the larger stories of the Depression and early immigrant life in America.
Her son, age 14, will be in the audience, and she hopes he’ll be proud, even if he tells her she’s playing herself. Earlier this year she took him to see DeLorenzo’s production of Chekhov’s Ivanov, and thus, she says, “I was able to introduce him to depressing Russian theater, so my job as a mother is almost all done. Once I introduce him to Arthur Miller, depressing American theater, my work will be done.” She says, “This is what I have to offer as a mother. What else have I got?” Seriously, how cool, and Jewish-motherish, is that? Clara should be proud.
Portrait of Annabelle Gurwitch by Dany Margolies/ArtsInLA
Gurwitch, Arye Gross, and Isabelle Acres in Coney Island Christmas, photo by Michael Lamont
With John Diehl in Joe & Betty, photo by David Weininger
With Acres, photo by Michael Lamont
Annabelle Gurwitch returns to local stages in Coney Island Christmas.
by Dany Margolies
Annabelle Gurwitch is working, and she’s doing so in LA theater. To her theatergoing fans, that might come as a relief and a surprise. The writer-actor hasn’t been onstage speaking other playwrights’ words since spring 2001, when she appeared in Padua Playwrights’ production of Murray Mednick’s Joe & Betty, playing the embattled, scarred wife-mother. And why the relief that she’s working at all? One of Gurwitch’s claims to fame is her status as fired actor, thanks to Woody Allen’s dismissal of her from a one-act in New York City, an event she turned into a wicked evening of theater titled Fired.
This week she opens in Coney Island Christmas at LA’s Geffen Playhouse, playing a role she seems to find extremely comfortable and near to her. The world premiere by Donald Margulies is based on Grace Paley’s short story The Loudest Voice, set in the 1930s, as the Russian-Jewish Abramowitz family deals with assimilation into American society. Gurwitch plays Clara Abramowitz, mother to young Shirley who is asked to play Jesus Christ in her school Christmas play. Gurwitch finds the play’s themes particularly relevant post-election. “What could be more timely than to realize we are living in a different kind of America and a different acceptance and tolerance of co-existence with our differences, of having an integrated society?” the actor notes. “I love it. I’m so thrilled to be part of that—that my character gets to carry that message.”
The
actor also seems thrilled the play is set in the 1930s, an era she
feels resonates with her. She loves the language of the day, she gets to
wear great shoes, and—to bolster her feel for the times—her costuming
includes pieces of jewelry from her mother and grandmother. However,
magic seems to be at work in the present, too. First, the production is
directed by Bart DeLorenzo. “I had heard about Bart,” she says. “I
hadn’t seen other productions that Bart had directed before I came to
the workshop [of this play], but I had heard that other actors called
him ‘the wizard.’ And now I know why. He is something special.”One more bit of magic makes her work here an even happier experience. She stars opposite Arye Gross, her former neighbor and her friend for more than 20 years. She says they have tremendous trust in each other and a shorthand in communicating, which makes them able to be playful onstage. Both actors had been cast in the play’s second workshop. Of being chosen for the role in the premiere production, Gurwitch says, “I’m assuming other Jewish television and film stars had plans during the holidays.”
Serious Roots in Serious Soil
Gurwitch says her roots are in avant-garde and experimental theater, Jacobean tragedy, and modern adaptations of Shakespeare. Born in Mobile, Ala., she grew up in Florida, but after she moved to New York she developed her current, New York accent. She played her first role in New York, at age 18, at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Later she worked with director Richard Schechner at The Public Theater, in The Red Snake by Michael McClure—an adaptation of James Shirley’s The Cardinal.
After starring in Mednick’s play and not starring in Allen’s play, Gurwitch decided upon writing as her creative outlet. “I write about the comedy of humiliation,” she says, “which luckily there’s so much of.” For example, she says the origin of her book (with her husband, Jeff Kahn) You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up is in the comedy of humiliation of being married for 16 years. Her current project is about turning 50. (One of its chapters, Autumn Leaves, is on ZolaBooks.com’s bestseller list.)
“Every actor should write, and every writer should try acting,” she says. “Writing is so hard. I now would like to take back many things I have done as an actress. I now understand things I did that frustrated writers.” By way of example, she says, “Just thinking I had a better idea of how the line should go.” And so, she promises, “I’m working extremely hard, even with my perimenopausal brain, to get every syllable of Donald’s script on the stage.” She says she feels “so much more admiration” for her husband, a writer, because she now realizes his discipline.
Bored Without the Boards?
And yet, she still felt the lure of the stage and was ready to get out of her pajamas and come to the theater and collaborate. So, this week, Gurwitch is focusing on bringing Clara Abramowitz alive on the stage.
She says the hard work in creating Clara was done by Margulies, and the hard work in getting Clara on and off the stage has been done by DeLorenzo. “He’s able to choreograph a really large vision of something,” she says of her director. Backstage during the show is “a whole other show happening,” she reports. “Twenty people onstage, two dressers, two assistant stage managers, two crew members moving furniture, the guy operating the revolving stage, there’s wigs and costumes for everything from pilgrims to Ebenezer Scrooge to reenacting the Nativity scene. It is absolute madness back there, but it’s so choreographed. Once it starts, there’s no intermission. You’re riding on and off this revolving stage, which I have to say is so much fun. Some of the cast members also help other cast members with their costumes changes. There’s no standing on ceremony.
“Our stage moves, the sets, the lights, there’s dream sequences, and
yet to be human in the middle of all that, and the way he works with the
kids, and to retain this kindness at the heart of all this chaos...”
she says of DeLorenzo. Kids? Everyone ignored the adage about working
with kids? Playing Shirley Abramowitz as a young girl is Isabella Acres,
age 11. Gurwitch describes her as an extraordinary talent. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember she’s a child,” says Gurwitch. “She’s very intuitive. I want to be careful with her. But she really gives it right back to me onstage. [The characters] have a very contentious relationship. In rehearsals, we had fun; it’s fun to have a chance to yell at your mother. But it never carries off to the offstage. I make it a point to give her a big hug after [our scene]. Bart made it very safe for her—I think by making it fun, even in the serious aspects of the play.”
A Play for the Young and the Picky, Too
Gurwitch says aspects of Coney Island Christmas should appeal to kids: the pageants, Thanksgiving, Christmas, two little girls onstage, and adults playing youngsters. But, she notes, they will likewise appreciate the larger stories of the Depression and early immigrant life in America.
Her son, age 14, will be in the audience, and she hopes he’ll be proud, even if he tells her she’s playing herself. Earlier this year she took him to see DeLorenzo’s production of Chekhov’s Ivanov, and thus, she says, “I was able to introduce him to depressing Russian theater, so my job as a mother is almost all done. Once I introduce him to Arthur Miller, depressing American theater, my work will be done.” She says, “This is what I have to offer as a mother. What else have I got?” Seriously, how cool, and Jewish-motherish, is that? Clara should be proud.
November 30, 2012
Portrait of Annabelle Gurwitch by Dany Margolies/ArtsInLA
Gurwitch, Arye Gross, and Isabelle Acres in Coney Island Christmas, photo by Michael Lamont
With John Diehl in Joe & Betty, photo by David Weininger
With Acres, photo by Michael Lamont
Tracing the ‘Long
Way Home’
Playwright John DiFusco and director John Flynn look back at a Vietnam-veteran play and forward on keeping its memories fresh.
by Melinda Loewenstein
The Long Way Home: Reflections on the Tracers’ Journey is a story for veterans, but it’s also an inspirational story for young writers. The play tells of writer John DiFusco’s journey to produce Tracers, his 1980 play about Vietnam veterans told by Vietnam-veteran actors. The Long Way Home tells of his experience as a veteran and an artist, struggling to stand firm with his vision—his story. Besides the obvious audience of veterans, it should appeal to young writers trying to make it in LA. “I can tell you about my struggle, and my struggle does have a happy ending,” says the playwright-performer. The production is enjoying a run at USVAA Theater in the AMVETS building in Culver City.
Tracers began at LA’s Odyssey Theatre and traveled to Steppenwolf in Chicago and The Public Theater in New York in the 1980s. “We were the ones that let Hollywood know, ‘Hey, this is something worth getting out there as art,’ ” says DiFusco. It is still being produced in various parts of the U.S.
John Perrin Flynn, artistic director of Rogue Machine Theatre and director of The Long Way Home,
says, “I think that art can always be transformative. You can see a
work of art—be it a painting, or a play, or a movie—and it can have a
profound effect on your life. But once in a great while a piece comes
along and it changes who we are in a much larger sense. These are the
one-in-a-million occurrences, and Tracers was one of them.”
Finding collaborators along the way
Although it’s a solo show (plus a musician), getting The Long Way Home on stage was a collaborative effort. DiFusco had been doing a lot of spoken word, so when there was an open night at Rogue Machine, he decided to do a reading of something related to Tracers as it was near Veterans Day. When DiFusco was rehearsing, Flynn happened to be in the theater and offered to work with him.
The writer had been in conversations with Keith Jeffreys, executive director of United States Veterans Artists Alliance, about collaborating on a Tracers project. When Jeffreys saw the reading, he thought it was solid material but that the show needed a chance to grow. Jeffreys says, “I was also extremely interested in getting the work in front of an audience because so much of John’s story with Tracers is about his insistence that veterans be provided with the opportunity to tell and perform their own stories and the stories of other veterans.” Flynn says he, like Jeffreys, thought it was a good story. “For me it was a way of saying thank you to John and to all the other guys who did this play, because I think it changed the world,” says Flynn.
Also in attendance at the reading was Al Keith, who provides music for the current show, as well as stepping in as a couple of characters for
DiFusco to
work with. DiFusco connected with Keith when he was looking for a
percussionist for one of his spoken-word poetry performances. Keith, who
is focused on his music career, was on the road a lot with various
bands, but DiFusco and Keith continued to work together when possible.
When DiFusco decided to bring The Long Way Home
to its current venue, Keith was the natural choice for the music
element, to bring added dimension and emotional impact to the show.
Giving direction to the journey
After the reading at Rogue Machine, DiFusco had a year before the team planned to bring the show to AMVETS. In the interim, he rewrote his screenplay version of Tracers, so when he sat down to work on The Long Way Home, Tracers was fresh in his mind. He spent several months working on the script. He says, “I act it out a lot. I find myself walking around the living room, playing the parts.”
One of the topics covered in The Long Way Home is how important it was for DiFusco to direct Tracers. But, he says, “It’s extremely difficult to direct yourself; I work by myself a lot, but it’s tough to be objective.” In addition to being one of the best directors DiFusco says he knows, Flynn was also a friend, which made it easy to ask him. “We started out doing theater together. He went off to TV and then came back, and I’m still here doing theater, so it’s a very, very easy marriage,” says DiFusco.
The script was in place when they began staging the show, but Flynn would make suggestions about the visual aspects and DiFusco would do rewrites. “It’s the director’s responsibility to enable the collaboration,” says Flynn. “So you have to have a vision, but at the same time you have to have flexibility within your vision, so that when others come along and clearly are going to contribute something that’s going to make your vision much better, you can let that happen.
“And then you can take the credit for it,” jokes Flynn. Throughout the show,
there is a slideshow with photographs of the original cast of Tracers,
photographs from DiFusco’s life, and historical pictures. Says Flynn,
“In terms of the visuals, I just wanted to provide a framework with two
thoughts in mind: for those who weren’t around when all this happened,
to give a visual reference to what the world was like, and for all of
those who were around, to give us a little jolt of nostalgia.”
DiFusco says it was challenging to dig all the photos out of storage, and Flynn was constantly asking for more pictures. But, DiFusco says, “It deepens the performance. I actually am feeling and reliving much more than I expected to; when I look at the faces of the guys and that sort of thing, it just takes me right back there.”
Although the performer has the show memorized and there is little improvising, the director gave the visuals leeway: They sync up with the performance, but not too rigidly. “We built it so it would have flexibility so we could do a little bit of improvising, as well,” he says. And, DiFusco says, “Al’s getting a little bit looser with his acting, and so we’re having a little more fun with that too.”
DiFusco has been on a long journey with Tracers, and the journey most likely will continue. He has thought about performing The Long Way Home in conjunction with directing Tracers, as well as doing something similar with veterans of more-recent conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s certainly an idea I’m interested in. How it will happen or when it will happen I don’t know,” he says.
Top photo: John Perrin Flynn and John DiFusco. Photo by Dany Margolies
Middle photo: John DiFusco with Al Keith in The Long Way Home. Photo by John Perrin Flinn
Bottom photo: The Public Theatre cast of Tracers. Photo courtesy Public Theatre
Way Home’
Playwright John DiFusco and director John Flynn look back at a Vietnam-veteran play and forward on keeping its memories fresh.
by Melinda Loewenstein
The Long Way Home: Reflections on the Tracers’ Journey is a story for veterans, but it’s also an inspirational story for young writers. The play tells of writer John DiFusco’s journey to produce Tracers, his 1980 play about Vietnam veterans told by Vietnam-veteran actors. The Long Way Home tells of his experience as a veteran and an artist, struggling to stand firm with his vision—his story. Besides the obvious audience of veterans, it should appeal to young writers trying to make it in LA. “I can tell you about my struggle, and my struggle does have a happy ending,” says the playwright-performer. The production is enjoying a run at USVAA Theater in the AMVETS building in Culver City.
Tracers began at LA’s Odyssey Theatre and traveled to Steppenwolf in Chicago and The Public Theater in New York in the 1980s. “We were the ones that let Hollywood know, ‘Hey, this is something worth getting out there as art,’ ” says DiFusco. It is still being produced in various parts of the U.S.
John Perrin Flynn, artistic director of Rogue Machine Theatre and director of The Long Way Home,
says, “I think that art can always be transformative. You can see a
work of art—be it a painting, or a play, or a movie—and it can have a
profound effect on your life. But once in a great while a piece comes
along and it changes who we are in a much larger sense. These are the
one-in-a-million occurrences, and Tracers was one of them.” Finding collaborators along the way
Although it’s a solo show (plus a musician), getting The Long Way Home on stage was a collaborative effort. DiFusco had been doing a lot of spoken word, so when there was an open night at Rogue Machine, he decided to do a reading of something related to Tracers as it was near Veterans Day. When DiFusco was rehearsing, Flynn happened to be in the theater and offered to work with him.
The writer had been in conversations with Keith Jeffreys, executive director of United States Veterans Artists Alliance, about collaborating on a Tracers project. When Jeffreys saw the reading, he thought it was solid material but that the show needed a chance to grow. Jeffreys says, “I was also extremely interested in getting the work in front of an audience because so much of John’s story with Tracers is about his insistence that veterans be provided with the opportunity to tell and perform their own stories and the stories of other veterans.” Flynn says he, like Jeffreys, thought it was a good story. “For me it was a way of saying thank you to John and to all the other guys who did this play, because I think it changed the world,” says Flynn.
Also in attendance at the reading was Al Keith, who provides music for the current show, as well as stepping in as a couple of characters for
DiFusco to
work with. DiFusco connected with Keith when he was looking for a
percussionist for one of his spoken-word poetry performances. Keith, who
is focused on his music career, was on the road a lot with various
bands, but DiFusco and Keith continued to work together when possible.
When DiFusco decided to bring The Long Way Home
to its current venue, Keith was the natural choice for the music
element, to bring added dimension and emotional impact to the show. Giving direction to the journey
After the reading at Rogue Machine, DiFusco had a year before the team planned to bring the show to AMVETS. In the interim, he rewrote his screenplay version of Tracers, so when he sat down to work on The Long Way Home, Tracers was fresh in his mind. He spent several months working on the script. He says, “I act it out a lot. I find myself walking around the living room, playing the parts.”
One of the topics covered in The Long Way Home is how important it was for DiFusco to direct Tracers. But, he says, “It’s extremely difficult to direct yourself; I work by myself a lot, but it’s tough to be objective.” In addition to being one of the best directors DiFusco says he knows, Flynn was also a friend, which made it easy to ask him. “We started out doing theater together. He went off to TV and then came back, and I’m still here doing theater, so it’s a very, very easy marriage,” says DiFusco.
The script was in place when they began staging the show, but Flynn would make suggestions about the visual aspects and DiFusco would do rewrites. “It’s the director’s responsibility to enable the collaboration,” says Flynn. “So you have to have a vision, but at the same time you have to have flexibility within your vision, so that when others come along and clearly are going to contribute something that’s going to make your vision much better, you can let that happen.
“And then you can take the credit for it,” jokes Flynn. Throughout the show,
there is a slideshow with photographs of the original cast of Tracers,
photographs from DiFusco’s life, and historical pictures. Says Flynn,
“In terms of the visuals, I just wanted to provide a framework with two
thoughts in mind: for those who weren’t around when all this happened,
to give a visual reference to what the world was like, and for all of
those who were around, to give us a little jolt of nostalgia.”DiFusco says it was challenging to dig all the photos out of storage, and Flynn was constantly asking for more pictures. But, DiFusco says, “It deepens the performance. I actually am feeling and reliving much more than I expected to; when I look at the faces of the guys and that sort of thing, it just takes me right back there.”
Although the performer has the show memorized and there is little improvising, the director gave the visuals leeway: They sync up with the performance, but not too rigidly. “We built it so it would have flexibility so we could do a little bit of improvising, as well,” he says. And, DiFusco says, “Al’s getting a little bit looser with his acting, and so we’re having a little more fun with that too.”
DiFusco has been on a long journey with Tracers, and the journey most likely will continue. He has thought about performing The Long Way Home in conjunction with directing Tracers, as well as doing something similar with veterans of more-recent conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s certainly an idea I’m interested in. How it will happen or when it will happen I don’t know,” he says.
November 9, 2012
Top photo: John Perrin Flynn and John DiFusco. Photo by Dany Margolies
Middle photo: John DiFusco with Al Keith in The Long Way Home. Photo by John Perrin Flinn
Bottom photo: The Public Theatre cast of Tracers. Photo courtesy Public Theatre
Full of Grace
Joel Jimenez earns Princess Grace Award for work with Cornerstone Theater Company.
by Stephanie Forshee
Joel
Jimenez will make his longest trip to date, and experience his first
ride in an airplane this month, all because of his acting abilities. The Princess Grace Foundation selected the 25-year-old as its George C. Wolfe Award honoree for his apprenticeship with Cornerstone Theater Company and is flying him and 24 other winners to New York City for an awards ceremony scheduled for Oct. 22.
The foundation selected Jimenez for his work and dedication to theater. “I was at work and got the call [that I won]. It was incredible, and it was amazing,” Jimenez says. “It’s just a life-changing thing. Drama in high school was never accessible to me, so to be given an opportunity like this with a lot more tools is crazy.”
The Princess Grace awards for theater, dance, and choreography honor exceptional talent for professionals and those in training across the country. With his award, Cornerstone is sponsoring a one-year apprenticeship with Cornerstone, a multiethnic, ensemble-based theater company in East Los Angeles.
“For me, it’s just like school; it’s like college and acting class rolled into one,” Jimenez says of the apprenticeship. “I’m given a pass to let me pick [the professionals in the company’s] brains. I can do whatever I want in order to secure a future for myself.”
Building potential
Even though Jimenez is an actor, he isn’t limited to discussions with just his fellow performers. The apprenticeship encourages learning from and about all aspects of the theater. “At Cornerstone, you’re constantly surrounded by renaissance people who are skilled at a lot of things,” he says.
Cornerstone’s artistic director, Michael John Garces—a recipient of a Princess Grace Award in the 1990s—was among the creative team that selected Jimenez to apply for the award. In his submission, Jimenez’s work was judged based on his acting reel, headshot and résumé, bio, and essay on how he thought the award would help him. “I think he’s an exceptional talent. He has a lot of potential in the field,” Garces says.
Garces realized that gift when he first saw Jimenez audition for Cornerstone’s Touch the Water in
2009. “He was a skateboarder in his community, he’d never done a play
before, and we wound up giving him a pretty big role,” Garces says.
“He’s got a lot of versatility and natural talent.”
Jimenez recalls that first audition at Cornerstone where he was first cast, and how nerve-wracking that experience was as he jumped into a new arena: “I was nervous, and I was really scared. But I felt like once I broke through that, everything else came a lot easier. It’s changed my life for the better.”
Aside from his acting aspirations, Jimenez also plays and writes music, and is a standup comic. “Acting and standup are my main loves in life,” he says. “That’s really what motivates me in everyday life. I wish life could be as simple as performing in front of people.”
Because of his work with Cornerstone, though, he is now considering turning this apprenticeship into training for his newfound career choice. “I just want to grow as an artist and keep growing,” Jimenez says.
Top photo: Joel Jimenez, photo by Ed Fuentes
Bottom photo: Michael John Garces
Joel Jimenez earns Princess Grace Award for work with Cornerstone Theater Company.
by Stephanie Forshee
Joel
Jimenez will make his longest trip to date, and experience his first
ride in an airplane this month, all because of his acting abilities. The Princess Grace Foundation selected the 25-year-old as its George C. Wolfe Award honoree for his apprenticeship with Cornerstone Theater Company and is flying him and 24 other winners to New York City for an awards ceremony scheduled for Oct. 22.The foundation selected Jimenez for his work and dedication to theater. “I was at work and got the call [that I won]. It was incredible, and it was amazing,” Jimenez says. “It’s just a life-changing thing. Drama in high school was never accessible to me, so to be given an opportunity like this with a lot more tools is crazy.”
The Princess Grace awards for theater, dance, and choreography honor exceptional talent for professionals and those in training across the country. With his award, Cornerstone is sponsoring a one-year apprenticeship with Cornerstone, a multiethnic, ensemble-based theater company in East Los Angeles.
“For me, it’s just like school; it’s like college and acting class rolled into one,” Jimenez says of the apprenticeship. “I’m given a pass to let me pick [the professionals in the company’s] brains. I can do whatever I want in order to secure a future for myself.”
Building potential
Even though Jimenez is an actor, he isn’t limited to discussions with just his fellow performers. The apprenticeship encourages learning from and about all aspects of the theater. “At Cornerstone, you’re constantly surrounded by renaissance people who are skilled at a lot of things,” he says.
Cornerstone’s artistic director, Michael John Garces—a recipient of a Princess Grace Award in the 1990s—was among the creative team that selected Jimenez to apply for the award. In his submission, Jimenez’s work was judged based on his acting reel, headshot and résumé, bio, and essay on how he thought the award would help him. “I think he’s an exceptional talent. He has a lot of potential in the field,” Garces says.
Garces realized that gift when he first saw Jimenez audition for Cornerstone’s Touch the Water in
2009. “He was a skateboarder in his community, he’d never done a play
before, and we wound up giving him a pretty big role,” Garces says.
“He’s got a lot of versatility and natural talent.”Jimenez recalls that first audition at Cornerstone where he was first cast, and how nerve-wracking that experience was as he jumped into a new arena: “I was nervous, and I was really scared. But I felt like once I broke through that, everything else came a lot easier. It’s changed my life for the better.”
Aside from his acting aspirations, Jimenez also plays and writes music, and is a standup comic. “Acting and standup are my main loves in life,” he says. “That’s really what motivates me in everyday life. I wish life could be as simple as performing in front of people.”
Because of his work with Cornerstone, though, he is now considering turning this apprenticeship into training for his newfound career choice. “I just want to grow as an artist and keep growing,” Jimenez says.
September 30, 2012
Top photo: Joel Jimenez, photo by Ed Fuentes
Bottom photo: Michael John Garces
Guts and Glory
Here are 20 facts (and opinions) about Zombie Joe’s Underground, in celebration of its 20th anniversary.
by Dany Margolies
1. It went from an academic ‘no’ to an artistic ‘yes.’ Exactly
20 years ago, a student wrote a play while at University of California,
Irvine. The theater department rejected the play. The student decided
to produce the play by himself. The student was Zombie Joe, who started
Zombie Joe’s Underground in a garage in Northridge, Calif. For a few
months, the going was tough. Then Joe allied with Josh T. Ryan, a friend
from their high school days at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys.
Together in that garage, they put on the rejected play, The Masterpiece.
The rest, to paraphrase one of ZJU’s signature productions, is far from
silence. The company currently resides in a storefront in North
Hollywood, where many of the performers from the first garage years have
continued appearing over the ensuing seasons. Says Joe, “Much of the
Underground’s brisk progressive style originated from the
down-and-gritty style of the DTASC [Drama Teachers Association of
Southern California] Fall Drama and Spring Shakespeare festivals—no
props or costumes allowed, and can be performed in any spot of space.”
2. Its leadership is a trio of longtime collaborators. Joe, a former child performer, has remained the company’s artistic director, producer, and leader. Denise Devin joined the company while it was in another garage, in Reseda; the actor and former professional dancer has since become its lead director. Ryan, now an actor-director and an executive producer–creator for television, has recently returned to the ZJU fold as a director of its shows.
3. The aesthetic is dark, the ethic is bright. When ZJU began, its style, says Devin, “was youthful, aggressive, somewhat violent energy.” It remains “in your face,” though the stagecraft has become so sophisticated that audiences are no longer literally touched by the onstage action. “We stopped using real guns onstage,” says Devin. Joe has described the work as “down, dirty and to the point, a Progressive Brecht/Artaudian shock-theater-of-cruelty of sorts.” Joe also claims influence by the classics. He considers himself a blocking director, working with movement and presentation to tell a story visually. But he grew up watching and loving horror movies. And yet he noticed that film and text are a layer away from contact with audience. Devin says the shock value of, for example, ZJU’s Urban Death, which has been a staple of the company’s seasons for at least eight years, “is to crack that isolation and lack of touch and reach someone on a visceral level.”
4. Tight quarters, tight shows.
“We still do a lot of horror theater. That’s our signature,” says
Devin, but she adds that the horror and violence have become more
psychological. Devin still includes realistic swordfights in her
direction. But the theater’s playing space is tiny, even by LA
standards, and the audience is one step away. Discipline and effective
rehearsal are accordingly another signature of ZJU’s work. “We’re also
fast-paced,” says Devin. “Sometimes that’s a complaint by people. We’re
not the theater where you sit there and it’s relaxed. I don’t have
anything against that, but that’s not us. We’re hard-hitting. If it’s
comedy, we deliver it with a punch; if it’s horror, we deliver it with a
punch.”
5. Speak the speech. Devin admits a little-known fact about herself, Joe, and Ryan: Each is well-versed in Shakespeare’s canon and classically trained. So if you’re an actor coming in to audition, don’t blow your Shakespearean monologue. As the company grows, it has been able to attract more-trained actors to its fold. ZJU holds auditions for almost every show but gives priority to company members who are developing seniority. In bringing on newcomers, “Ideally, what has worked best for us is when somebody comes to see a show, and then they’re interested,” says Devin. “Primarily it’s so that people will understand the kind of commitment we are requiring. That’s our biggest issue.”
6. Commitment is the plan, from actor… “Commitment. It’s what works for us, it’s what our actors are famous for,” says Devin. “You have to get out there, you have to hit hard every time. We have three weeks’ rehearsals for an hour play. So when we say come in with your lines learned for the first or second rehearsal, we’re not kidding. We honor our time. If it’s 6 to 8 [pm], that’s what we do. We’re not having coffee. So you need to know, as an actor, joining us, that that’s the requirement. You have to work that whole time. Once we set a schedule—and we will work with conflicts, but before it starts we have set a schedule—that’s the schedule we expect. The lines have to come trippingly off the tongue, and it has to happen before dress rehearsal. We will not go to the coffee shop to talk about it; it has to happen in rehearsal. Also onstage, whatever you’re doing, you have to do it. It’s not halfhearted.”
7. …through fan. Once audience members become fans of the work, they remain fans. Many stay after performances to tell the theater leadership how many shows they can recall from prior years, nowadays faithfully following company news on ZJU’S website.
8. Why Shakespeare suits the Underground. “I have always felt that Shakespeare doesn’t need a big spin: He already has pirates and death and blood,” says Devin. Hamlet, for instance, “has violence, death, ghosts, psychological trauma—all the things we love.” So whose direction brings what to the Bard? According to Devin, Ryan’s direction involves interesting stage pictures, and audiences will most likely see a dark but very humorous twist to the text. Joe’s direction is at a darker pitch, involving more movement through the playing space. Devin’s style combines movement and pace with a more traditional viewpoint.
9. Why ZJU’s Macbeth is “bloody.” In directing the company’s Blood of Macbeth,
currently extended through Sept. 28, Ryan gave it a “third-world, Arab
touch,” incorporated the role of Lady Macbeth within Macbeth, included a
chorus line of witches, and, in collaboration with Joe, trimmed
Shakespeare’s script to 55 minutes. Admits Devin of her colleagues, “One
thing I’ll say about their spins: They do get to the essence of the
play. You’ll understand it, but it won’t be on a logical level. Take all
the ‘stuff’ away, it’s about a man who kills and falls apart as a
result of that.”
10. Why its Hamlet is ham-less. “Cutting-edge for us is delving into more-traditional pieces and seeing what we can do with that,” says Devin, who directed the recent run of Hamlet straightforwardly. “It’s been so exciting for me. How can I bring our really tight ethic and our pace and our demand and still honor the play and give it big ol’ costumes?” She kept scenes not traditionally kept, thus able to offer more roles to company stalwarts. In particular, Devin kept the entirety of the play-within-a-play and its characters. “I was always, like, ‘How do we know “the play’s the thing” if all we see is actors off in the distance.’” Devin also wanted to stretch herself and the company with a two-hour production.
11. Why Urban Death. Of ZJU’s perennially revived Urban Death, Devin promises, “It’s really dark and very scary.” She notes first-timers have a “yeah, sure” skepticism about how frightening this stage production can be. “But they come out, and they’re like, I’m having nightmares for weeks,” she reports. And then those audience members return to see it again, as the production slots different vignettes into the evening. The tools of this trade include blood (stage makeup, of course), guns (all decommissioned), saws, axes. “We touch nobody,” says Devin, and we use our blackout, so the audience will sit in the dark for a while, with different noises, or there will be a flash visual. By the end, you understand why it’s urban death, how we’re so out of touch with body and mind. After we do one particular piece, most people think we’ve finally lost our minds. It’s a common event, but you see it up close and personal.”
12. Quality control is Job One. At least one of the leaders sees another one’s run-though the week of technical rehearsals, “to create the cleanest, tightest, highest-quality product possible,” says Joe. Says Devin. “It’s very nervous-making having Zombie in the room. In tech, you’re not always completely ready. But it is the best thing that ever happens to my shows. Every show goes through this, no matter who the director is. And if I’m not finding the right words to say, I reach out and find someone who can. After opening, it’s not constructive because I can’t change anything.”
13. The company thinks inside the box (office). Devin says ZJU aggressively builds its audiences. It has avoided becoming a nonprofit corporation, thus under no legal obligations that accompany 501(c)(3) status. All its income comes from box office. “So, if you join us, if you’re part of our company, part of that is being aggressive about making sure that the show is growing—being available for interviews, going out in the personal arena, making sure the show is known about,” says Devin.
14. A Long history of a safety Net. Says Joe, “ZJU’s webmaster Randy ‘Kernel’ Long has rooted ZJU into a rich and powerful online presence, planting seeds deep online that very few theaters give such detailed attention to.” For the past 12 years, Long has also served as ZJU’s chief sound engineer, online PR manager, and curator/historian. “He is an integral part of the ruling body of ZJU, and we would have never have seen a drop of success without his groundbreaking contributions and their painstaking maintenance,” says Joe.
15. North Hollywood ain’t Hollywood where ZJU is concerned. “We’re not doing theater so that somebody will come along and make a film of it,” says Devin. “We’re doing theater to present theater and to have a theatrical experience for people.” So while ZJU certainly understands the concept of feeding a family and paying mortgages, Devin says, LA theater may have gotten a bad reputation because its actors treat it as second-best to film and television. “We forget our top artists are about making their art, not making sure someone else can see it. Otherwise there’s no joy anyway,” she says. So if an actor commits to the run of a show, he or she will not be permitted to miss rehearsals or performances to take a paying gig. “If it’s for Martin Scorsese, probably all of us would relent a little bit. But maybe not,” she says. “You’ve got to take a stand.”
16. So what’s ZJU’s big picture? “It’s about rattling the cage, it’s about having an experience as a human being,” says Devin of the company’s productions. “It’s meant to reach out and pull people into our world. I think it makes it very exciting for audiences. They’re not used to it. They go to a film, and there’s already a celluloid layer and a big theater.”
17. Don’t just take our word for it. Local theater reviewers have found a place in their darkened hearts for ZJU. Says the fervent David C. Nichols, Los Angeles Times critic and current president of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle: “Although many an LA company goes for cutting-edge risks, often most successfully, few if any consistently demonstrate the unbridled courage and seat-of-our-pants resourcefulness of Zombie Joe’s Underground. Whether bringing Poe, Dostoevsky, and Lovecraft to grimly entertaining life, or turning Shakespeare on his head while remaining true to the Bard’s intent, Zombie Joe and his fearless forces elevate both the garage-theater ethos and their audiences—an irreplaceable troupe.” Adds Steven Leigh Morris, L.A. Weekly’s impassioned critic-at-large: “They’re smart, disciplined, and unapologetic advocates for their winking Gothic/macabre sensibility in their shoebox space, all lit by floodlights. They know exactly what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it.” And offering her thoughts on the company, irrepressible longtime critic Jennie Webb says: “I love the company’s passion, commitment, and go-for-broke (on a shoestring) investment in everything they do. There’s always sort of a scrappiness, but at the same time a precision that tells me nothing’s just slapped up—the time and caring shows. Always.”
18. Plans for the next 20 years. Among plans each ZJU leader would like to see instituted over the next 20 years are an expanded space for a larger playing area and larger house, a second space so the company hits can continue to extend; a return of LimeCat, the children’s division; dance presentations; the training of new leadership to begin taking over the company; and of course LA theater’s perpetual prayer, “staying alive.”
19. Plans for the next 20 days. Blood of Macbeth continues through Sept. 28, Fridays at 8:30pm. Down & Dirty, “a neo-retro cabaret,” plays Saturdays at 11pm through Sept. 29. The Para Abnormals, “a supernatural thriller-comedy,” plays Saturdays at 8:30pm, through Sept. 29, then Saturdays at 11pm Oct. 6–20. Zombie Joe directs Robert Riemer’s “world premiere Petrushka-esque performance extravaganza,” The Fainting Couch, Saturdays at 8:30pm, Oct. 6–Nov. 3. Devin directs Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, in a one-hour, physical-comedy style Sundays at 7pm, Oct. 14–Dec. 2.
20. How to get to ZJU. Zombie Joe’s Underground is at the southern end of the Lankershim Boulevard theater row, just north of the intersection of Vineland, Camarillo, and Lankershim.(818) 202-4120.
www.ZombieJoes.com
http://g.co/maps/7aqw5
Middle photo: Hamlet in 2012, with John Hope, Vanessa Cate, Rafael Goldstein (as Hamlet), and Philip Rodriguez.
Bottom photo: Blood of Macbeth in 2012, with Michael Blomgren (left, as Macbeth), Willy Romano-Pugh, Steve Madar, David Wyn Harris, and Roger Weiss.
Photos courtesy of Zombie Joe’s Underground
Here are 20 facts (and opinions) about Zombie Joe’s Underground, in celebration of its 20th anniversary.
by Dany Margolies
1. It went from an academic ‘no’ to an artistic ‘yes.’ Exactly
20 years ago, a student wrote a play while at University of California,
Irvine. The theater department rejected the play. The student decided
to produce the play by himself. The student was Zombie Joe, who started
Zombie Joe’s Underground in a garage in Northridge, Calif. For a few
months, the going was tough. Then Joe allied with Josh T. Ryan, a friend
from their high school days at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys.
Together in that garage, they put on the rejected play, The Masterpiece.
The rest, to paraphrase one of ZJU’s signature productions, is far from
silence. The company currently resides in a storefront in North
Hollywood, where many of the performers from the first garage years have
continued appearing over the ensuing seasons. Says Joe, “Much of the
Underground’s brisk progressive style originated from the
down-and-gritty style of the DTASC [Drama Teachers Association of
Southern California] Fall Drama and Spring Shakespeare festivals—no
props or costumes allowed, and can be performed in any spot of space.”2. Its leadership is a trio of longtime collaborators. Joe, a former child performer, has remained the company’s artistic director, producer, and leader. Denise Devin joined the company while it was in another garage, in Reseda; the actor and former professional dancer has since become its lead director. Ryan, now an actor-director and an executive producer–creator for television, has recently returned to the ZJU fold as a director of its shows.
3. The aesthetic is dark, the ethic is bright. When ZJU began, its style, says Devin, “was youthful, aggressive, somewhat violent energy.” It remains “in your face,” though the stagecraft has become so sophisticated that audiences are no longer literally touched by the onstage action. “We stopped using real guns onstage,” says Devin. Joe has described the work as “down, dirty and to the point, a Progressive Brecht/Artaudian shock-theater-of-cruelty of sorts.” Joe also claims influence by the classics. He considers himself a blocking director, working with movement and presentation to tell a story visually. But he grew up watching and loving horror movies. And yet he noticed that film and text are a layer away from contact with audience. Devin says the shock value of, for example, ZJU’s Urban Death, which has been a staple of the company’s seasons for at least eight years, “is to crack that isolation and lack of touch and reach someone on a visceral level.”
4. Tight quarters, tight shows.
“We still do a lot of horror theater. That’s our signature,” says
Devin, but she adds that the horror and violence have become more
psychological. Devin still includes realistic swordfights in her
direction. But the theater’s playing space is tiny, even by LA
standards, and the audience is one step away. Discipline and effective
rehearsal are accordingly another signature of ZJU’s work. “We’re also
fast-paced,” says Devin. “Sometimes that’s a complaint by people. We’re
not the theater where you sit there and it’s relaxed. I don’t have
anything against that, but that’s not us. We’re hard-hitting. If it’s
comedy, we deliver it with a punch; if it’s horror, we deliver it with a
punch.”5. Speak the speech. Devin admits a little-known fact about herself, Joe, and Ryan: Each is well-versed in Shakespeare’s canon and classically trained. So if you’re an actor coming in to audition, don’t blow your Shakespearean monologue. As the company grows, it has been able to attract more-trained actors to its fold. ZJU holds auditions for almost every show but gives priority to company members who are developing seniority. In bringing on newcomers, “Ideally, what has worked best for us is when somebody comes to see a show, and then they’re interested,” says Devin. “Primarily it’s so that people will understand the kind of commitment we are requiring. That’s our biggest issue.”
6. Commitment is the plan, from actor… “Commitment. It’s what works for us, it’s what our actors are famous for,” says Devin. “You have to get out there, you have to hit hard every time. We have three weeks’ rehearsals for an hour play. So when we say come in with your lines learned for the first or second rehearsal, we’re not kidding. We honor our time. If it’s 6 to 8 [pm], that’s what we do. We’re not having coffee. So you need to know, as an actor, joining us, that that’s the requirement. You have to work that whole time. Once we set a schedule—and we will work with conflicts, but before it starts we have set a schedule—that’s the schedule we expect. The lines have to come trippingly off the tongue, and it has to happen before dress rehearsal. We will not go to the coffee shop to talk about it; it has to happen in rehearsal. Also onstage, whatever you’re doing, you have to do it. It’s not halfhearted.”
7. …through fan. Once audience members become fans of the work, they remain fans. Many stay after performances to tell the theater leadership how many shows they can recall from prior years, nowadays faithfully following company news on ZJU’S website.
8. Why Shakespeare suits the Underground. “I have always felt that Shakespeare doesn’t need a big spin: He already has pirates and death and blood,” says Devin. Hamlet, for instance, “has violence, death, ghosts, psychological trauma—all the things we love.” So whose direction brings what to the Bard? According to Devin, Ryan’s direction involves interesting stage pictures, and audiences will most likely see a dark but very humorous twist to the text. Joe’s direction is at a darker pitch, involving more movement through the playing space. Devin’s style combines movement and pace with a more traditional viewpoint.
9. Why ZJU’s Macbeth is “bloody.” In directing the company’s Blood of Macbeth,
currently extended through Sept. 28, Ryan gave it a “third-world, Arab
touch,” incorporated the role of Lady Macbeth within Macbeth, included a
chorus line of witches, and, in collaboration with Joe, trimmed
Shakespeare’s script to 55 minutes. Admits Devin of her colleagues, “One
thing I’ll say about their spins: They do get to the essence of the
play. You’ll understand it, but it won’t be on a logical level. Take all
the ‘stuff’ away, it’s about a man who kills and falls apart as a
result of that.”10. Why its Hamlet is ham-less. “Cutting-edge for us is delving into more-traditional pieces and seeing what we can do with that,” says Devin, who directed the recent run of Hamlet straightforwardly. “It’s been so exciting for me. How can I bring our really tight ethic and our pace and our demand and still honor the play and give it big ol’ costumes?” She kept scenes not traditionally kept, thus able to offer more roles to company stalwarts. In particular, Devin kept the entirety of the play-within-a-play and its characters. “I was always, like, ‘How do we know “the play’s the thing” if all we see is actors off in the distance.’” Devin also wanted to stretch herself and the company with a two-hour production.
11. Why Urban Death. Of ZJU’s perennially revived Urban Death, Devin promises, “It’s really dark and very scary.” She notes first-timers have a “yeah, sure” skepticism about how frightening this stage production can be. “But they come out, and they’re like, I’m having nightmares for weeks,” she reports. And then those audience members return to see it again, as the production slots different vignettes into the evening. The tools of this trade include blood (stage makeup, of course), guns (all decommissioned), saws, axes. “We touch nobody,” says Devin, and we use our blackout, so the audience will sit in the dark for a while, with different noises, or there will be a flash visual. By the end, you understand why it’s urban death, how we’re so out of touch with body and mind. After we do one particular piece, most people think we’ve finally lost our minds. It’s a common event, but you see it up close and personal.”
12. Quality control is Job One. At least one of the leaders sees another one’s run-though the week of technical rehearsals, “to create the cleanest, tightest, highest-quality product possible,” says Joe. Says Devin. “It’s very nervous-making having Zombie in the room. In tech, you’re not always completely ready. But it is the best thing that ever happens to my shows. Every show goes through this, no matter who the director is. And if I’m not finding the right words to say, I reach out and find someone who can. After opening, it’s not constructive because I can’t change anything.”
13. The company thinks inside the box (office). Devin says ZJU aggressively builds its audiences. It has avoided becoming a nonprofit corporation, thus under no legal obligations that accompany 501(c)(3) status. All its income comes from box office. “So, if you join us, if you’re part of our company, part of that is being aggressive about making sure that the show is growing—being available for interviews, going out in the personal arena, making sure the show is known about,” says Devin.
14. A Long history of a safety Net. Says Joe, “ZJU’s webmaster Randy ‘Kernel’ Long has rooted ZJU into a rich and powerful online presence, planting seeds deep online that very few theaters give such detailed attention to.” For the past 12 years, Long has also served as ZJU’s chief sound engineer, online PR manager, and curator/historian. “He is an integral part of the ruling body of ZJU, and we would have never have seen a drop of success without his groundbreaking contributions and their painstaking maintenance,” says Joe.
15. North Hollywood ain’t Hollywood where ZJU is concerned. “We’re not doing theater so that somebody will come along and make a film of it,” says Devin. “We’re doing theater to present theater and to have a theatrical experience for people.” So while ZJU certainly understands the concept of feeding a family and paying mortgages, Devin says, LA theater may have gotten a bad reputation because its actors treat it as second-best to film and television. “We forget our top artists are about making their art, not making sure someone else can see it. Otherwise there’s no joy anyway,” she says. So if an actor commits to the run of a show, he or she will not be permitted to miss rehearsals or performances to take a paying gig. “If it’s for Martin Scorsese, probably all of us would relent a little bit. But maybe not,” she says. “You’ve got to take a stand.”
16. So what’s ZJU’s big picture? “It’s about rattling the cage, it’s about having an experience as a human being,” says Devin of the company’s productions. “It’s meant to reach out and pull people into our world. I think it makes it very exciting for audiences. They’re not used to it. They go to a film, and there’s already a celluloid layer and a big theater.”
17. Don’t just take our word for it. Local theater reviewers have found a place in their darkened hearts for ZJU. Says the fervent David C. Nichols, Los Angeles Times critic and current president of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle: “Although many an LA company goes for cutting-edge risks, often most successfully, few if any consistently demonstrate the unbridled courage and seat-of-our-pants resourcefulness of Zombie Joe’s Underground. Whether bringing Poe, Dostoevsky, and Lovecraft to grimly entertaining life, or turning Shakespeare on his head while remaining true to the Bard’s intent, Zombie Joe and his fearless forces elevate both the garage-theater ethos and their audiences—an irreplaceable troupe.” Adds Steven Leigh Morris, L.A. Weekly’s impassioned critic-at-large: “They’re smart, disciplined, and unapologetic advocates for their winking Gothic/macabre sensibility in their shoebox space, all lit by floodlights. They know exactly what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it.” And offering her thoughts on the company, irrepressible longtime critic Jennie Webb says: “I love the company’s passion, commitment, and go-for-broke (on a shoestring) investment in everything they do. There’s always sort of a scrappiness, but at the same time a precision that tells me nothing’s just slapped up—the time and caring shows. Always.”
18. Plans for the next 20 years. Among plans each ZJU leader would like to see instituted over the next 20 years are an expanded space for a larger playing area and larger house, a second space so the company hits can continue to extend; a return of LimeCat, the children’s division; dance presentations; the training of new leadership to begin taking over the company; and of course LA theater’s perpetual prayer, “staying alive.”
19. Plans for the next 20 days. Blood of Macbeth continues through Sept. 28, Fridays at 8:30pm. Down & Dirty, “a neo-retro cabaret,” plays Saturdays at 11pm through Sept. 29. The Para Abnormals, “a supernatural thriller-comedy,” plays Saturdays at 8:30pm, through Sept. 29, then Saturdays at 11pm Oct. 6–20. Zombie Joe directs Robert Riemer’s “world premiere Petrushka-esque performance extravaganza,” The Fainting Couch, Saturdays at 8:30pm, Oct. 6–Nov. 3. Devin directs Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, in a one-hour, physical-comedy style Sundays at 7pm, Oct. 14–Dec. 2.
20. How to get to ZJU. Zombie Joe’s Underground is at the southern end of the Lankershim Boulevard theater row, just north of the intersection of Vineland, Camarillo, and Lankershim.(818) 202-4120.
www.ZombieJoes.com
http://g.co/maps/7aqw5
September 17, 2012
Top photo: Urban Death, with, clockwise from left, Vanessa Cate, JoAnna Bartlin, Denise Devin, and Jonica Patella.Middle photo: Hamlet in 2012, with John Hope, Vanessa Cate, Rafael Goldstein (as Hamlet), and Philip Rodriguez.
Bottom photo: Blood of Macbeth in 2012, with Michael Blomgren (left, as Macbeth), Willy Romano-Pugh, Steve Madar, David Wyn Harris, and Roger Weiss.
Photos courtesy of Zombie Joe’s Underground
The Constant(ly Working) Gardener
Judith Ivey helms staged reading of iconic play Steel Magnolias.[show closed]
by Dany Margolies
Let’s pause for a moment to absorb the shock: This year marks the 25th anniversary of Robert Harling’s play, Steel Magnolias.
Now, let’s get back to business. A staged reading of the play will benefit Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, this Sunday, Sept. 9, at Santa Monica’s Broad Stage. Giving their talents to the occasion are actors Alexis Bledel, Frances Conroy, Jennifer Coolidge, Elizabeth Perkins, and Annie Potts.
Judith Ivey directs the reading. Her many Broadway appearances include her Tony-winning turns in Hurly Burly and Steaming (both earning her Best Featured Actress awards) and Park Your Car in Harvard Yard (Best Actress). Her film credits include Brighton Beach Memoirs, A Life Less Ordinary, Washington Square, and Mystery, Alaska. She also starred on television in Designing Women and The Critic. She has directed a dozen theater pieces across the country.
Ivey graciously took time to answer a few questions posed by ArtsInLA.com before rehearsals began.
Specifically what are you doing to punch up the comedy in this tear-jerker, and what are you doing to keep the characters from outrageousness, if anything?
Ivey: I think of Steel Magnolias as a comedy first. There is certainly tragedy by the end, but playing it for the truth is what makes it work both ways. I hope that the casting of this reading embraces that. These actresses are wonderful comediennes. I know from past experience either acting with them or directing them, that they have a devotion to “the truth,” and that is why they are so successful as actors.
What will you focus on with a shorter rehearsal period?
Ivey: I love talking about the play and the characters and their relationships for the first week of rehearsal—if time allows. Of course, in this case, we have one day of rehearsal. But we don’t have to stage it and move around and explore the physical life, so the emotional exploration is certainly possible. Again, I chose these actresses because of their talents for authenticity. I am hoping that I am right. The greatest advice given to me about directing was, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Entrusting the actors to be there for the character and the story-telling is an important element of good directing.
You directed Steel Magnolias at Alley Theatre. What did you do last time that worked so well you’re keeping it? What have you discovered about the characters this time through?
Ivey: What I hope to keep in this interpretation is the sense of community. Five of them have all grown up together, know each other very well, and the addition of Annelle allows us to get to know that small town and the “community” that they share. Given the focus of this benefit, there is a community for all of us and that’s why we relate to Steel Magnolias’ women.
Judith Ivey helms staged reading of iconic play Steel Magnolias.[show closed]
by Dany Margolies
Let’s pause for a moment to absorb the shock: This year marks the 25th anniversary of Robert Harling’s play, Steel Magnolias.
Now, let’s get back to business. A staged reading of the play will benefit Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, this Sunday, Sept. 9, at Santa Monica’s Broad Stage. Giving their talents to the occasion are actors Alexis Bledel, Frances Conroy, Jennifer Coolidge, Elizabeth Perkins, and Annie Potts.
Judith Ivey directs the reading. Her many Broadway appearances include her Tony-winning turns in Hurly Burly and Steaming (both earning her Best Featured Actress awards) and Park Your Car in Harvard Yard (Best Actress). Her film credits include Brighton Beach Memoirs, A Life Less Ordinary, Washington Square, and Mystery, Alaska. She also starred on television in Designing Women and The Critic. She has directed a dozen theater pieces across the country. Ivey graciously took time to answer a few questions posed by ArtsInLA.com before rehearsals began.
Specifically what are you doing to punch up the comedy in this tear-jerker, and what are you doing to keep the characters from outrageousness, if anything?
Ivey: I think of Steel Magnolias as a comedy first. There is certainly tragedy by the end, but playing it for the truth is what makes it work both ways. I hope that the casting of this reading embraces that. These actresses are wonderful comediennes. I know from past experience either acting with them or directing them, that they have a devotion to “the truth,” and that is why they are so successful as actors.
What will you focus on with a shorter rehearsal period?
Ivey: I love talking about the play and the characters and their relationships for the first week of rehearsal—if time allows. Of course, in this case, we have one day of rehearsal. But we don’t have to stage it and move around and explore the physical life, so the emotional exploration is certainly possible. Again, I chose these actresses because of their talents for authenticity. I am hoping that I am right. The greatest advice given to me about directing was, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Entrusting the actors to be there for the character and the story-telling is an important element of good directing.
You directed Steel Magnolias at Alley Theatre. What did you do last time that worked so well you’re keeping it? What have you discovered about the characters this time through?
Ivey: What I hope to keep in this interpretation is the sense of community. Five of them have all grown up together, know each other very well, and the addition of Annelle allows us to get to know that small town and the “community” that they share. Given the focus of this benefit, there is a community for all of us and that’s why we relate to Steel Magnolias’ women.
September 6, 2012
A Perfect Number
of Cooks
Playwright Michael Gene Sullivan stirs up a benefit for Theatricum Botanicum with his world-premiere Recipe. [show closed]
by Jean Schiffman
Best known for staging the classics, the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum is taking on a brand-new play for its “Night Under the Stars” reading to benefit the theater’s performance, new play development, and education programs.
Recipe, a political comedy, is part farce, part thriller. Its roles are designated for four white women and one younger black woman. At Theatricum’s reading, the roles will be read by, respectively, Cloris Leachman as feisty Ruth, described in the script as in her 80s, a hard-as-nails, old-school radical; Wendie Malick and Amy Madigan as Helen and Lillian, a pair of amorous lesbian lovers; Jean Smart as Janice, a spacey, overcaffeinated ex-flower child; and Lisa Bonet as Diane, a radio journalist who has come to interview this coven of mature—for want of a better description—women who meet regularly, calling themselves the Morning Glory Baking Circle for Revolutionary Self Defense.
The Circle donates the proceeds from sales of its mouth-watering, homemade pastries to revolutionary causes. An amusing enough concept, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in this carefully plotted two act with a completely unexpected ending. The play never compromises in examining—with affection, humor and respect—the characters’ belief systems.
At age 51, playwright Michael Gene Sullivan, who’s African-American, might seem to be writing far from his own experiences and affinities. But as head writer for the politically leftist San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he also acts and directs, he shares his characters’ core revolutionary spirit.
In the early days of the war on terror, says Sullivan, he heard about a group of older men and women—law-abiding, peace-oriented political activists—who’d get together regularly to eat muffins and talk about the ways they saw America going wrong. One day a younger member showed up, to their delight—but the newbie turned out to be a deputy from the sheriff’s department; it seems that when the Patriot Act was passed, Homeland Security was funded to deputize people across the country to infiltrate suspicious organizations. This group of elders was being spied on by the federal government. “That story got inside my head for a while,” says Sullivan.
Meanwhile he was working on an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 for Tim Robbins at The Actors’ Gang. Adele Robbins, Tim’s sister, complained that there was only one woman’s role in the play. Sullivan couldn’t change that, but he promised Adele he’d write a play with more roles for women.
The idea for Recipe hit him one day when he was onstage in a reading of someone else’s play—and he admits he may also have been influenced, at the time, by being the token male in an all-women’s writing group. “There were big chunks [during the staged reading] where I wasn’t talking,” he says, “so I started writing a scenario on the back of the script—actions, relationships, a matrix of how I wanted the plot to work.” From there, he went into overdrive, which is his usual method when working on a script: sometimes writing in a frenzy for 24 hours straight, sometimes taking long walks, even starting out at 11 p.m. and showing up at home the next morning. He once walked all the way across San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County and back.
“When I was writing, because I was already writing for a group of women, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m already on the edge here, I’ll write it for older women,” he says. “At every point I made choices that were the hardest: characters who are radical leftists who are not going to apologize for it. Apologizing—that’s the easy way. It makes the audience feel comfortable. But, nah. I want people to be invigorated. So every time I thought I could soften this or that, I thought, no—more so, push the comedy further, never invalidate the politics of the women. Part of that is because those are my beliefs, and part of it is that as a writer it’s the hard decision. It’s easier to have the characters question their core beliefs. And the show isn’t about that.
“It’s about, if you think the government is spying on you, what do you do when you realize they actually are?” he continues. “These characters don’t really believe it, and during the course of the play they have to come to grips with the fact that their fears are true. It’s fine to play at being a revolutionary….”
Which his characters do, in hilarious ways. In anticipation of the radio interviewer’s arrival, they hastily slap iconic photos of Che Guevara and Huey Newton on the wall, don black berets, darken the room; Helen (now calling herself Helen X) is all prepared to deliver a formal, droning speech that begins: “As you know, we in America live at the center of a vast cryptofascistic auctionocracy….” Ruth packs a knife, along with her homemade muffins, in her huge purse, whipping it out menacingly at the slightest provocation. The de rigueur two-way password to enter the always-locked door of the house where they meet is “Power to the people!” to which the response must be “Death to the pigs!” But in the end, continues Sullivan, are you willing to walk the walk and not just talk the talk? “That’s the big shift for the characters.”
For her part, Ellen Geer, artistic director of Theatricum Botanicum, was delighted to receive Sullivan’s script over the transom. “Women get things accomplished in a very different way than men, and this really highlights that,” she says. “And he’s so funny. It’s rare to find a play with mid-life women all together and relating.” It’s remarkable that Sullivan has a grasp of how women interact, she notes. He has negotiated a fine line; it’s all too easy, in our society, she believes, to take an ageist attitude when depicting older women.
Geer observes that she got the same feeling when she read Recipe as she did when she first read Harold and Maude—“to have a young man understand not just the young age but the older age too. You know how hard it is to write something that isn’t part of you.” She adds, “This is going to sound funny, but it’s almost Chekhovian—the characters are that deep, and it’s a comedy. Yet they’re funny because we all recognize them.”
The stars participating in the reading, with Joe Mantegna as narrator, loved the script. One of the women wrote Geer to say, “I’m halfway through reading this, and I want to do it.”
“This is a specific kind of political comedy,” Sullivan says, “all women, all politically informed, no need for a guy. They’re empowered.” They fight among themselves quite a bit, in many different ways and over many different issues; they’re an eccentric, contentious bunch. “But their politics are progressive.” Considering the almost 60-year-old Theatricum Botanicum’s place in Los Angeles theater history, Sullivan’s play is a perfect match for the company’s summer benefit.
of Cooks
Playwright Michael Gene Sullivan stirs up a benefit for Theatricum Botanicum with his world-premiere Recipe. [show closed]
by Jean Schiffman
Best known for staging the classics, the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum is taking on a brand-new play for its “Night Under the Stars” reading to benefit the theater’s performance, new play development, and education programs.Recipe, a political comedy, is part farce, part thriller. Its roles are designated for four white women and one younger black woman. At Theatricum’s reading, the roles will be read by, respectively, Cloris Leachman as feisty Ruth, described in the script as in her 80s, a hard-as-nails, old-school radical; Wendie Malick and Amy Madigan as Helen and Lillian, a pair of amorous lesbian lovers; Jean Smart as Janice, a spacey, overcaffeinated ex-flower child; and Lisa Bonet as Diane, a radio journalist who has come to interview this coven of mature—for want of a better description—women who meet regularly, calling themselves the Morning Glory Baking Circle for Revolutionary Self Defense.
The Circle donates the proceeds from sales of its mouth-watering, homemade pastries to revolutionary causes. An amusing enough concept, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in this carefully plotted two act with a completely unexpected ending. The play never compromises in examining—with affection, humor and respect—the characters’ belief systems.
At age 51, playwright Michael Gene Sullivan, who’s African-American, might seem to be writing far from his own experiences and affinities. But as head writer for the politically leftist San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he also acts and directs, he shares his characters’ core revolutionary spirit.
In the early days of the war on terror, says Sullivan, he heard about a group of older men and women—law-abiding, peace-oriented political activists—who’d get together regularly to eat muffins and talk about the ways they saw America going wrong. One day a younger member showed up, to their delight—but the newbie turned out to be a deputy from the sheriff’s department; it seems that when the Patriot Act was passed, Homeland Security was funded to deputize people across the country to infiltrate suspicious organizations. This group of elders was being spied on by the federal government. “That story got inside my head for a while,” says Sullivan.
Meanwhile he was working on an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 for Tim Robbins at The Actors’ Gang. Adele Robbins, Tim’s sister, complained that there was only one woman’s role in the play. Sullivan couldn’t change that, but he promised Adele he’d write a play with more roles for women.
The idea for Recipe hit him one day when he was onstage in a reading of someone else’s play—and he admits he may also have been influenced, at the time, by being the token male in an all-women’s writing group. “There were big chunks [during the staged reading] where I wasn’t talking,” he says, “so I started writing a scenario on the back of the script—actions, relationships, a matrix of how I wanted the plot to work.” From there, he went into overdrive, which is his usual method when working on a script: sometimes writing in a frenzy for 24 hours straight, sometimes taking long walks, even starting out at 11 p.m. and showing up at home the next morning. He once walked all the way across San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County and back.
“When I was writing, because I was already writing for a group of women, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m already on the edge here, I’ll write it for older women,” he says. “At every point I made choices that were the hardest: characters who are radical leftists who are not going to apologize for it. Apologizing—that’s the easy way. It makes the audience feel comfortable. But, nah. I want people to be invigorated. So every time I thought I could soften this or that, I thought, no—more so, push the comedy further, never invalidate the politics of the women. Part of that is because those are my beliefs, and part of it is that as a writer it’s the hard decision. It’s easier to have the characters question their core beliefs. And the show isn’t about that.“It’s about, if you think the government is spying on you, what do you do when you realize they actually are?” he continues. “These characters don’t really believe it, and during the course of the play they have to come to grips with the fact that their fears are true. It’s fine to play at being a revolutionary….”
Which his characters do, in hilarious ways. In anticipation of the radio interviewer’s arrival, they hastily slap iconic photos of Che Guevara and Huey Newton on the wall, don black berets, darken the room; Helen (now calling herself Helen X) is all prepared to deliver a formal, droning speech that begins: “As you know, we in America live at the center of a vast cryptofascistic auctionocracy….” Ruth packs a knife, along with her homemade muffins, in her huge purse, whipping it out menacingly at the slightest provocation. The de rigueur two-way password to enter the always-locked door of the house where they meet is “Power to the people!” to which the response must be “Death to the pigs!” But in the end, continues Sullivan, are you willing to walk the walk and not just talk the talk? “That’s the big shift for the characters.”
For her part, Ellen Geer, artistic director of Theatricum Botanicum, was delighted to receive Sullivan’s script over the transom. “Women get things accomplished in a very different way than men, and this really highlights that,” she says. “And he’s so funny. It’s rare to find a play with mid-life women all together and relating.” It’s remarkable that Sullivan has a grasp of how women interact, she notes. He has negotiated a fine line; it’s all too easy, in our society, she believes, to take an ageist attitude when depicting older women.Geer observes that she got the same feeling when she read Recipe as she did when she first read Harold and Maude—“to have a young man understand not just the young age but the older age too. You know how hard it is to write something that isn’t part of you.” She adds, “This is going to sound funny, but it’s almost Chekhovian—the characters are that deep, and it’s a comedy. Yet they’re funny because we all recognize them.”
The stars participating in the reading, with Joe Mantegna as narrator, loved the script. One of the women wrote Geer to say, “I’m halfway through reading this, and I want to do it.”
“This is a specific kind of political comedy,” Sullivan says, “all women, all politically informed, no need for a guy. They’re empowered.” They fight among themselves quite a bit, in many different ways and over many different issues; they’re an eccentric, contentious bunch. “But their politics are progressive.” Considering the almost 60-year-old Theatricum Botanicum’s place in Los Angeles theater history, Sullivan’s play is a perfect match for the company’s summer benefit.
August 20, 2012
Two Local Classics: When Is a Concept Not a Concept?
by Bob Verini
I had gleaned a bit of advance intelligence on the Antaeus Company’s Macbeth, to the effect that apparently helmer Jessica Kubzansky was going to interject the impact of a dead child on the young Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth’s marriage and later life. I was a little concerned because I am temperamentally leery of attempts to assign too much explicit motivation to the actions of Shakespeare’s characters. It has always seemed to me that it was enough for the man to be so good at detailing how people turn evil and what becomes of them; that he could be forgiven for having no compulsion to spell out precisely why they do so.
As it turns out, keeping Shakespearean motivations ambiguous proves to be the more modern choice altogether, whereas attempts to locate in backstory the source of, say, Leontes’ jealousy or Iago’s treachery usually seem like presumptuous, and often banal, incursions of twentieth century psychology, Freud and Stanislavsky divisions, onto the turf of a writer content to take human beings as they are, straight up. I hate him because he is a Christian, says Shylock of Antonio, and it seems to me that staging a play ought to require that one take that sort of assertion at face value and wrestle with its implications, rather than paper it over or weave some elaborate extratextual psychological profile to justify it.
Still, Lady M. does in fact fess up to having given suck, so there’s at least some textual support for the notion that childbirth has played a role in the development of this most peculiar Scottish family. Moreover Jessica—a dear acquaintance of mine who also happens to be highly talented and whip-smart—apparently found numerous other references in the play to the broad theme of birth and childrearing. And there’s no question that the loss of a child can unhinge even the most benign parent. So I said to myself, hey-ho the wind and the rain, let’s let ’er rip and hope for the best, while electing not to read up anything more on the play or the production idea in advance of Aug. 2, the first night I could get over to Lankershim. (I saw the combo Hurlyburlys cast in which Bo Foxworth and Ann Noble assumed the leads.) Here’s what I saw.
A little wooden cradle was set downstage center, to which the Macbeths slowly crossed from upstage with a bundle in hand and cleric in attendance. This was all a little too studied and ritualistic for my taste—a funeral can be solemn but need not be as processional as a coronation—but okay so far; clearly major emotional issues are being introduced here.
Then they put the bundle in the cradle, and a dozen or more Scottish nobles (you could tell they’re Scottish because they wear plaids and bagpipes are playing) approach the bereaved couple to commiserate. I was reminded of the heads of the Five Families doing homage to Michael Corleone at the Godfather’s funeral, especially when, two by two, they stood over the cradle facing us and gave the Roman Catholic sign of the cross. Ah, I said to myself appreciatively, here comes an excellent opportunity to introduce these characters individually. Which ones are treacherous, which ones honorable? Which are (say) going to turn into comedy relief, which become principal allies or antagonists? In how they deal with this dead Macbeth child—if reports of the production concept are to be credited—perhaps we’ll be able to infer any number of relationships, right at the outset. This promised to be exciting.
The trouble was that as far as I could see, every one of those nobles performed his obsequies with the identical rhythm, facial expression, and manner. As far as I could see, everyone was equally moved and treated the Macbeths with equal respect if not outright affection. Pair after pair of Thanes executed the same exact business until I started to wonder impatiently, why are we being asked to observe this? What is there about this world, or these individuals in it, that’s being revealed in this sequence to justify taking up all our attention and all this stage time? (Macbeth is famously the shortest of the tragedies, but not when rituals like this are indulged in. This production ran 2:45 on Aug. 2.) Yet answer came there none. At one point one of the guys failed to perform the sign and I thought, aha, maybe that’s going to signal something about him at least. But nothing came of that tiny variation, and I couldn’t tell you then or now which Thane it was.
Eventually the grieving parents were left alone, and I looked forward to the payoff, the moment when this lengthy pageant would link up to the play we all know. Would the mother start to go nuts right then and there, leaving a helpless Macbeth to realize what a handful she would be thereafter? Might it be dad who became unhinged, or perhaps impotent and lost like Ashley Wilkes when his plantation in Gone With the Wind gets razed? Or maybe both would lose it, such that the next time we saw them their awful murderous trajectory would seem frightfully inevitable? I began to fancy that perhaps the couple would turn into a Dark Ages version of George and Martha, starting to mime an infant that they would keep alive in their most private moments.
I wasn’t redirecting the play, mind you; I was just thinking of the possibilities and what might be made of them. What I didn’t expect at all was what I saw—namely, just some blubbering, keening Lady walking off in husband’s arms. That was it: a display of standard issue grief. And by the time the couple returned several scenes later, they were in the standard issue mode we’ve seen in dozens of past productions (he tortured, she feral) and not at all, as far as I could see, illuminated or affected by that which they had suffered in that graveyard.
I couldn’t help but think of the last major instance I can recall of art’s focusing on how parents deal with a dead child. In Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, a baby climbs out a window while the parents are making love. Though I found that picture pretentiously hollow and inadvertently risible, it sure didn’t take tragic loss for granted: If you recall, actors Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg went completely off their rockers, eventually leading to a self-cliterectomy for her and testicles nailed to the floor of the tool shed for him. No one would want this or any other Macbeth to go to such extremes. But surely if you’re going to write in (or bring out) a dead child for the lead couple, you have to pull out the stops and explore at least some of the farther reaches of their despair. The dead baby idea may have helped the actors internally but for me, at least, it remained a notion that did nothing to animate the action.
There was a lot to like in this Macbeth, and I plan to see it again with the other Macbeth and Lady just to see whether the passage of time and the alternate performers make a difference. But much of the production struck me as a set of ideas pushing up against each other, rather than a fully integrated concept, and there’s a crucial distinction there.
One night later I took in Heartbreak House at Theatricum Botanicum, and while I can’t be sure, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that helmer Ellen Geer had taken some inspiration from Harold Clurman’s production notes in his On Directing textbook, where he defines as the play’s spine to get the hell out of this house—thus driving Shaw’s bleakest contemporary comedy into the realm of bleak farce. Farcical Geer’s version was, yet always real, and with the comedy heightened as comedy of manners needs to be heightened. For instance, William Dennis Hunt was positively Biblical as the somber patriarch but his line readings were achingly funny; and Melora Marshall channeled the vain, throaty gurglings of Joan Greenwood as she purred her way to controlling every guest’s action. It interested me that both Macbeth and Heartbreak House ran just a few minutes under three hours, but even though Macbeth is a breathless text and House a windy one, it was the latter that flew by on angel’s wings. The key difference, in my estimation, was that the Shakespeare was built on original ideas but conventional behavior, while the Shaw left the ideas alone and just concentrated on creating unconventional behavior.
Top photo: Bo Foxworth with Fran Bennett, Elizabeth Swain, and Susan Boyd Joyce in Macbeth. Photo by Daniel Blinkoff. Bottom photo: William Dennis Hunt and Mark Lewis in Heartbreak House. Photo by Miriam Geer.
by Bob Verini
I had gleaned a bit of advance intelligence on the Antaeus Company’s Macbeth, to the effect that apparently helmer Jessica Kubzansky was going to interject the impact of a dead child on the young Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth’s marriage and later life. I was a little concerned because I am temperamentally leery of attempts to assign too much explicit motivation to the actions of Shakespeare’s characters. It has always seemed to me that it was enough for the man to be so good at detailing how people turn evil and what becomes of them; that he could be forgiven for having no compulsion to spell out precisely why they do so. As it turns out, keeping Shakespearean motivations ambiguous proves to be the more modern choice altogether, whereas attempts to locate in backstory the source of, say, Leontes’ jealousy or Iago’s treachery usually seem like presumptuous, and often banal, incursions of twentieth century psychology, Freud and Stanislavsky divisions, onto the turf of a writer content to take human beings as they are, straight up. I hate him because he is a Christian, says Shylock of Antonio, and it seems to me that staging a play ought to require that one take that sort of assertion at face value and wrestle with its implications, rather than paper it over or weave some elaborate extratextual psychological profile to justify it.
Still, Lady M. does in fact fess up to having given suck, so there’s at least some textual support for the notion that childbirth has played a role in the development of this most peculiar Scottish family. Moreover Jessica—a dear acquaintance of mine who also happens to be highly talented and whip-smart—apparently found numerous other references in the play to the broad theme of birth and childrearing. And there’s no question that the loss of a child can unhinge even the most benign parent. So I said to myself, hey-ho the wind and the rain, let’s let ’er rip and hope for the best, while electing not to read up anything more on the play or the production idea in advance of Aug. 2, the first night I could get over to Lankershim. (I saw the combo Hurlyburlys cast in which Bo Foxworth and Ann Noble assumed the leads.) Here’s what I saw.
A little wooden cradle was set downstage center, to which the Macbeths slowly crossed from upstage with a bundle in hand and cleric in attendance. This was all a little too studied and ritualistic for my taste—a funeral can be solemn but need not be as processional as a coronation—but okay so far; clearly major emotional issues are being introduced here.
Then they put the bundle in the cradle, and a dozen or more Scottish nobles (you could tell they’re Scottish because they wear plaids and bagpipes are playing) approach the bereaved couple to commiserate. I was reminded of the heads of the Five Families doing homage to Michael Corleone at the Godfather’s funeral, especially when, two by two, they stood over the cradle facing us and gave the Roman Catholic sign of the cross. Ah, I said to myself appreciatively, here comes an excellent opportunity to introduce these characters individually. Which ones are treacherous, which ones honorable? Which are (say) going to turn into comedy relief, which become principal allies or antagonists? In how they deal with this dead Macbeth child—if reports of the production concept are to be credited—perhaps we’ll be able to infer any number of relationships, right at the outset. This promised to be exciting.
The trouble was that as far as I could see, every one of those nobles performed his obsequies with the identical rhythm, facial expression, and manner. As far as I could see, everyone was equally moved and treated the Macbeths with equal respect if not outright affection. Pair after pair of Thanes executed the same exact business until I started to wonder impatiently, why are we being asked to observe this? What is there about this world, or these individuals in it, that’s being revealed in this sequence to justify taking up all our attention and all this stage time? (Macbeth is famously the shortest of the tragedies, but not when rituals like this are indulged in. This production ran 2:45 on Aug. 2.) Yet answer came there none. At one point one of the guys failed to perform the sign and I thought, aha, maybe that’s going to signal something about him at least. But nothing came of that tiny variation, and I couldn’t tell you then or now which Thane it was.
Eventually the grieving parents were left alone, and I looked forward to the payoff, the moment when this lengthy pageant would link up to the play we all know. Would the mother start to go nuts right then and there, leaving a helpless Macbeth to realize what a handful she would be thereafter? Might it be dad who became unhinged, or perhaps impotent and lost like Ashley Wilkes when his plantation in Gone With the Wind gets razed? Or maybe both would lose it, such that the next time we saw them their awful murderous trajectory would seem frightfully inevitable? I began to fancy that perhaps the couple would turn into a Dark Ages version of George and Martha, starting to mime an infant that they would keep alive in their most private moments.
I wasn’t redirecting the play, mind you; I was just thinking of the possibilities and what might be made of them. What I didn’t expect at all was what I saw—namely, just some blubbering, keening Lady walking off in husband’s arms. That was it: a display of standard issue grief. And by the time the couple returned several scenes later, they were in the standard issue mode we’ve seen in dozens of past productions (he tortured, she feral) and not at all, as far as I could see, illuminated or affected by that which they had suffered in that graveyard.
I couldn’t help but think of the last major instance I can recall of art’s focusing on how parents deal with a dead child. In Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, a baby climbs out a window while the parents are making love. Though I found that picture pretentiously hollow and inadvertently risible, it sure didn’t take tragic loss for granted: If you recall, actors Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg went completely off their rockers, eventually leading to a self-cliterectomy for her and testicles nailed to the floor of the tool shed for him. No one would want this or any other Macbeth to go to such extremes. But surely if you’re going to write in (or bring out) a dead child for the lead couple, you have to pull out the stops and explore at least some of the farther reaches of their despair. The dead baby idea may have helped the actors internally but for me, at least, it remained a notion that did nothing to animate the action.
There was a lot to like in this Macbeth, and I plan to see it again with the other Macbeth and Lady just to see whether the passage of time and the alternate performers make a difference. But much of the production struck me as a set of ideas pushing up against each other, rather than a fully integrated concept, and there’s a crucial distinction there.
One night later I took in Heartbreak House at Theatricum Botanicum, and while I can’t be sure, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that helmer Ellen Geer had taken some inspiration from Harold Clurman’s production notes in his On Directing textbook, where he defines as the play’s spine to get the hell out of this house—thus driving Shaw’s bleakest contemporary comedy into the realm of bleak farce. Farcical Geer’s version was, yet always real, and with the comedy heightened as comedy of manners needs to be heightened. For instance, William Dennis Hunt was positively Biblical as the somber patriarch but his line readings were achingly funny; and Melora Marshall channeled the vain, throaty gurglings of Joan Greenwood as she purred her way to controlling every guest’s action. It interested me that both Macbeth and Heartbreak House ran just a few minutes under three hours, but even though Macbeth is a breathless text and House a windy one, it was the latter that flew by on angel’s wings. The key difference, in my estimation, was that the Shakespeare was built on original ideas but conventional behavior, while the Shaw left the ideas alone and just concentrated on creating unconventional behavior.August 4, 2012
Top photo: Bo Foxworth with Fran Bennett, Elizabeth Swain, and Susan Boyd Joyce in Macbeth. Photo by Daniel Blinkoff. Bottom photo: William Dennis Hunt and Mark Lewis in Heartbreak House. Photo by Miriam Geer.
‘Paradise’ Recrafted
A good creative team knows how to collaborate on a new musical—and when to toss out a favorite song.
by Melinda Loewenstein
Cliff Wagner, Dan Bonnell, Bill Robertson, and Tom Sage
Cliff Wagner didn’t set out to write a musical. Initially, he just wanted to give his band a new way to perform—something to set them apart from the sea of musicians. But what developed was The Book of Mormon’s Bluegrass-Country cousin—a more-intimate, more-accessible, less-traditional musical that’s witty and politically incorrect. Paradise—A Divine Bluegrass Musical Comedy is a foot-tapping musical comedy that tells the story of a traveling preacher bringing a reality show to a poor rural town to bring prosperity and build a new mega-church.
Wagner, whose band was on Fox’s Next Great American Band in 2007, came up with the initial idea and wrote all the music. He envisioned it as something along the lines of Hee Haw and reached out to his friend Tom Sage to write sketches. As the two began collaborating, Sage suggested writing a throughline story. Wagner put the pieces together: story plus music equals musical.
“And we’re like, ‘No, I hate musicals. We’re not writing a musical,’” says Wagner. But they were, albeit a different sort of musical. Luckily, Bill Robertson (Sage’s writing partner) and director Dan Bonnell (who was a “chorus boy” in musicals with Shirley Jones and Tommy Tune in New York) were fans of the genre.
Brecht and Bluegrass
What Wagner didn’t like about musicals was using songs as dialogue. But he wanted the music to be part of the story. So the band sits onstage and, “although not a character, they’re there,” Wagner says. Bonnell says, “This to me feels more in the realm of like a Brecht or a Kurt Weill kind of musical, where you’ve got scenes going on and then oftentimes characters will just break the moment and kind of step out of the scene, and we have a song that is related to the moment but not as necessarily dramatically engaged at the moment, and then we jump back in and move forward.”
Robertson notes that in his mind “Boom to Bust” (which opens Act 2) is the only true musical number. The rest are songs—“everyman” songs that Robertson hopes are playing in audiences’ heads as they leave the theater, which was exactly Wagner’s intention. “Something that is catchy, that is memorable, that has a good beat, that has a good melody,” says Wagner.
Robertson was working on a few other projects when Sage approached him about joining Paradise. Sage told Robertson he was working with Wagner on a project similar to Hee Haw, Robertson says, “And I went, ‘Knock yourself out.’” But Sage wouldn’t give up, and eventually Robertson agreed to listen to some of the music. It won him over. With writers onboard, Wagner turned his focus to the songs, letting Robertson and Sage take charge of the script. Wagner had been building sets at the Ruskin Group Theatre for a couple of years, so he asked Ruskin managing director Michael Myers if he’d like to read the musical. Myers suggested putting up a staged reading, and then it was time to talk about a director. Robertson and Myers came up with Bonnell’s name independently. “The fates were taking care of me that day,” jokes Bonnell.
“Dan coming in actually helped Tom and myself become even better writers, bottom line,” says Robertson. Bonnell, who has directed many new plays, was able to look at the project with fresh eyes and help pose questions that shaped the story. Wagner also thinks the creative team’s shared sense of humor has helped make the collaboration work. But, says Robertson, his favorite part was when “we would go to [Cliff] with an idea and say, ‘We need this type of song to drive the story, these characters are involved, this is what they’re dealing with…’ and he would take it and run off, and in about a week we’d get a song, and it would literally encompass everything we’d been talking about that helped to drive the story.”
Collaborating, Changing, and Chucking It Out
The creatives weren’t the only ones collaborating. The actors were involved, as well, and some of them, including Kristal Lynn Lockyer, were involved from the first reading on. The casting process wasn’t necessarily easy, though, says Bonnell: “We were looking for a very specific style of voice and people who kind of had musical comedy chops, but weren’t locked in to that style.” But Robertson adds, “We’re very blessed with the cast.”
And because it was a new musical and they weren’t handing the actors pre-existing scores, the actors reportedly were pleasantly surprised to discover that Wagner was willing to change the keys for them and even change the songs for them. “There was no hard and true melody. It’s like if you feel something, sing it,” says Wagner. “That’s part of the simplicity of the music, which also makes it more human.”
Also enhancing the collaboration was every participant’s openness to change. “Nothing seems entrenched in stone,” says Bonnell, “I think it comes both out of the music being improvisational and the comedy writing which is very fast and loose and off the cuff and very, very fluid.” Everyone on the team was willing to let go of something if it wasn’t working and try something new. Bonnell says, “They’re comfortable enough in their point of view that they’re willing to say, ‘Sure, let’s try it,’ and out of that there comes this great sense of collaboration and trust.”
Robertson agrees that his and Sage’s backgrounds in sketch comedy had taught them to be flexible and change things that weren’t working. However, Robertson notes, even when a writer knows a joke needs to go, it can be hard. “When we write a joke and it works and then we realize it doesn’t drive the story…the two of us [Sage and Robertson] will look at each other and go ‘Oh, alright, let’s let it go.’ But it is kind of like we’ve birthed something and then we’ve got to give it back.”
For Wagner, letting go of one of his favorite songs because he needed something more upbeat for the scene was tough, but, he says, “I really couldn’t disagree with it either.” Throwing out things that didn’t work served the final goal of creating a solid, funny musical, so everyone was willing to let go a little. And ultimately, Wagner says, “We didn’t necessarily take ourselves that seriously and we like other people not to, either.” In the end, he says, they just want people to come to the show and have a great time.
Middle photo: Marie-Francoise Theodore, Michael Rubenstone, Kristal Lynn Lockyer, and Robert Craighead. Photo by Agnes Magyari
Bottom photo: Jason Rowland, Jonathan Root and Elijah Rock. Photo by Agnes Magyari
A good creative team knows how to collaborate on a new musical—and when to toss out a favorite song.
by Melinda Loewenstein
Cliff Wagner, Dan Bonnell, Bill Robertson, and Tom Sage
Photo by Agnes Magyari
Cliff Wagner didn’t set out to write a musical. Initially, he just wanted to give his band a new way to perform—something to set them apart from the sea of musicians. But what developed was The Book of Mormon’s Bluegrass-Country cousin—a more-intimate, more-accessible, less-traditional musical that’s witty and politically incorrect. Paradise—A Divine Bluegrass Musical Comedy is a foot-tapping musical comedy that tells the story of a traveling preacher bringing a reality show to a poor rural town to bring prosperity and build a new mega-church.
Wagner, whose band was on Fox’s Next Great American Band in 2007, came up with the initial idea and wrote all the music. He envisioned it as something along the lines of Hee Haw and reached out to his friend Tom Sage to write sketches. As the two began collaborating, Sage suggested writing a throughline story. Wagner put the pieces together: story plus music equals musical.
“And we’re like, ‘No, I hate musicals. We’re not writing a musical,’” says Wagner. But they were, albeit a different sort of musical. Luckily, Bill Robertson (Sage’s writing partner) and director Dan Bonnell (who was a “chorus boy” in musicals with Shirley Jones and Tommy Tune in New York) were fans of the genre.
Brecht and Bluegrass
What Wagner didn’t like about musicals was using songs as dialogue. But he wanted the music to be part of the story. So the band sits onstage and, “although not a character, they’re there,” Wagner says. Bonnell says, “This to me feels more in the realm of like a Brecht or a Kurt Weill kind of musical, where you’ve got scenes going on and then oftentimes characters will just break the moment and kind of step out of the scene, and we have a song that is related to the moment but not as necessarily dramatically engaged at the moment, and then we jump back in and move forward.”
Robertson notes that in his mind “Boom to Bust” (which opens Act 2) is the only true musical number. The rest are songs—“everyman” songs that Robertson hopes are playing in audiences’ heads as they leave the theater, which was exactly Wagner’s intention. “Something that is catchy, that is memorable, that has a good beat, that has a good melody,” says Wagner.
Robertson was working on a few other projects when Sage approached him about joining Paradise. Sage told Robertson he was working with Wagner on a project similar to Hee Haw, Robertson says, “And I went, ‘Knock yourself out.’” But Sage wouldn’t give up, and eventually Robertson agreed to listen to some of the music. It won him over. With writers onboard, Wagner turned his focus to the songs, letting Robertson and Sage take charge of the script. Wagner had been building sets at the Ruskin Group Theatre for a couple of years, so he asked Ruskin managing director Michael Myers if he’d like to read the musical. Myers suggested putting up a staged reading, and then it was time to talk about a director. Robertson and Myers came up with Bonnell’s name independently. “The fates were taking care of me that day,” jokes Bonnell.
“Dan coming in actually helped Tom and myself become even better writers, bottom line,” says Robertson. Bonnell, who has directed many new plays, was able to look at the project with fresh eyes and help pose questions that shaped the story. Wagner also thinks the creative team’s shared sense of humor has helped make the collaboration work. But, says Robertson, his favorite part was when “we would go to [Cliff] with an idea and say, ‘We need this type of song to drive the story, these characters are involved, this is what they’re dealing with…’ and he would take it and run off, and in about a week we’d get a song, and it would literally encompass everything we’d been talking about that helped to drive the story.”
Collaborating, Changing, and Chucking It Out
The creatives weren’t the only ones collaborating. The actors were involved, as well, and some of them, including Kristal Lynn Lockyer, were involved from the first reading on. The casting process wasn’t necessarily easy, though, says Bonnell: “We were looking for a very specific style of voice and people who kind of had musical comedy chops, but weren’t locked in to that style.” But Robertson adds, “We’re very blessed with the cast.”
And because it was a new musical and they weren’t handing the actors pre-existing scores, the actors reportedly were pleasantly surprised to discover that Wagner was willing to change the keys for them and even change the songs for them. “There was no hard and true melody. It’s like if you feel something, sing it,” says Wagner. “That’s part of the simplicity of the music, which also makes it more human.”
Also enhancing the collaboration was every participant’s openness to change. “Nothing seems entrenched in stone,” says Bonnell, “I think it comes both out of the music being improvisational and the comedy writing which is very fast and loose and off the cuff and very, very fluid.” Everyone on the team was willing to let go of something if it wasn’t working and try something new. Bonnell says, “They’re comfortable enough in their point of view that they’re willing to say, ‘Sure, let’s try it,’ and out of that there comes this great sense of collaboration and trust.”
Robertson agrees that his and Sage’s backgrounds in sketch comedy had taught them to be flexible and change things that weren’t working. However, Robertson notes, even when a writer knows a joke needs to go, it can be hard. “When we write a joke and it works and then we realize it doesn’t drive the story…the two of us [Sage and Robertson] will look at each other and go ‘Oh, alright, let’s let it go.’ But it is kind of like we’ve birthed something and then we’ve got to give it back.”
For Wagner, letting go of one of his favorite songs because he needed something more upbeat for the scene was tough, but, he says, “I really couldn’t disagree with it either.” Throwing out things that didn’t work served the final goal of creating a solid, funny musical, so everyone was willing to let go a little. And ultimately, Wagner says, “We didn’t necessarily take ourselves that seriously and we like other people not to, either.” In the end, he says, they just want people to come to the show and have a great time.
March 6, 2013
Middle photo: Marie-Francoise Theodore, Michael Rubenstone, Kristal Lynn Lockyer, and Robert Craighead. Photo by Agnes Magyari
Bottom photo: Jason Rowland, Jonathan Root and Elijah Rock. Photo by Agnes Magyari
Paradise — A Divine Bluegrass Musical Comedy.
Ruskin Group Theatre. Feb. 8–Mar. 30. 3000 Airport Ave., Santa Monica. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. $25. (310) 397-3244.
www.ruskingrouptheatre.com
goo.gl/maps/C92Wl
Ruskin Group Theatre. Feb. 8–Mar. 30. 3000 Airport Ave., Santa Monica. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. $25. (310) 397-3244.
www.ruskingrouptheatre.com
goo.gl/maps/C92Wl
The Woman Who Writes Operas
Meet O-Lan Jones, one of LA’s most-intriguing composers.
by Dany Margolies
The
term Renaissance woman may fit O-Lan Jones in several ways. Actor,
writer, sound designer, opera composer—Jones takes on eccentric roles
and tasks and creates with inspiration from across the globe and through
the ages.
She may look familiar from dozens of screen roles, having delivered such memorable lines as “Trample down the perversion of nature!” as Esmeralda the organist in Edward Scissorhands, and “My name’s not Rosie, it’s Mabel!” from Natural Born Killers.
LA theatergoers may know her from dozens of stage roles over the years—including Wesley Walker’s Wilfredo at 2100 Square Feet and Mark Taper Forum, and Beth Henley’s Abundance at South Coast Repertory. We have certainly heard her compositions, perhaps when she created music for Murray Mednick’s Mrs. Feuerstein for Padua Playwrights in 2001 or Ken Roht’s “99-Cent” show Pageant of the 4 Seasons at Bootleg Theater in 2006. She served as artistic director of a production of “mini-operas” under the umbrella title String of Pearls.
But notably she has been an opera composer over the decades, and now it’s time for a retrospective. Tomorrow night, The Theatre @ Boston Court presents O-Lan Jones: 20 Years of Theatre and Music. There and then, the audience will hear nine songs from a handful of her productions.
“I have an idea of a story that must be told,” she says of her process. First come the words, then she’ll write the music. She admits to having tried the reverse. “But, for me, it feels more organic and filled out if I start with the word—the rhythms of the speech or poetry.”
Hitting the Wall
Possibly, her unique musicality comes from creative freedom. She had no academic training. “My grandmother was a prodigy,” says Jones. “She could hear a tune and figure it out when she was 2. I think music is in the genes.” Jones has no recollection of being taught to read music. Over the years, she learned to notate music and early in her career, as she says, “depended on the kindness of various musical directors.”
One might think academics look down their spectacled noses at her lack of
formal
training. Not at all, she says; most have told her she was lucky not to
have the schooling. “Some have told me I have a freedom of expression
that they had to struggle to get their way back to,” she reports. “I
know how to find the principle of a thing if I listen to it enough. I
can tell what the scales are, the common intervals in melodies, the
rhythms.”
The talent enabled her to compose her latest opera, which premiered earlier in 2012, The Woman in the Wall. Jones wrote it in medieval modes for period instruments. For audiences not intellectually connected with medieval music, Jones made sure the opera resonated emotionally. “There is meaning in melody,” she says. “If I am connected to that meaning when I’m writing something, it resonates with people who are hearing it. I have no interest in that kind of music where it’s one bizarre note following another—it’s intellectually interesting because it has a strange shape to it but it isn’t connected to feeling. We’re hardwired for some kinds of harmonies that satisfy.”
For example? She was driving when she first heard the music of Arvo Pärt. “I had to pull over and listen and hear who it was—it was so perfect. Sometimes it’s just a couple of notes, but they come from someplace. They connected to an understanding and experience.”
A solid backbone is essential to a song or aria, she insists, otherwise its basic nature is never clear, no matter how much the composer “dolls it up” with instruments and voices. Another musical pet peeve of hers seems to be bad imitation. She claims to be able to spot lack of originality or, conversely when the composer has connected with his or her music. Likewise with acting, she deplores the “fifth cousin twice removed” of gesturing that imitates bad acting but has nothing to do with real-life behavior.
Real Sounds, Imaginary Lands
Someday, soon, she hopes, she’ll work from site to song, traveling to fascinating
places
and writing based on feelings they inspire. Whether monoliths and
Neolithic mounds in Europe, or Luray Caverns in Virginia, she could
foresee being prompted by these places to create new works. Meantime,
she recently returned from France where she hopes to revive The Woman in the Wall at
the abbey on the island of Mont San Michel, the building that helped
inspire the opera. “I wanted to go to [there] to let it know I was still
here,” she says. On the trip, “The first day I went through the whole
tour of the place, I was in awe and happy, it had made such a strong
impression. I was wandering through and taking pictures. The second day,
I thought,
‘I know the whole tour. I can run ahead of the crowd and sing my head
off in the rooms.’ And I did. Just to warm the place up, so it knows I’m
coming.’”
She transacted a bit of business in France, too, at meetings with potential producers there for Wall. One of her main goals these days is to attend to business. She is currently creating a position at her company, Overtone Industries, that will ensure her works will have lives after their premieres. Her next producing project after this concert is to do a local revival of a 2010 work, Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands—which boasts a collaboration of 32 artists.
A Woman and Her Own Walls
These operas, along with The Woman Who Forgot Her Sweater—a fairy tale in which the heroine must triumph over trials, which debuted in 2001 at Inside the Ford—take Jones years of work.
“I want to build lasting works of art, not torn from the headlines, so it’s meaningful hundreds of years from now,” she says. “If it’s going to be good for hundreds of years, it’s going to be good for 10, so take your time” creating it, she explains. Wall and Songs and Dances each took about seven years from idea to production. “If it’s a big idea, it takes time to gestate, to reveal itself even, to reveal all of its aspects, I don’t think they all have to take that long, but that’s just been the case so far.”
She has learned even deeper lessons over the years. “For many years, like so many women, my ambition has been questioned by so many others,” she says. Ambition, it’s like a dirty word. So I am now feeling no qualms about how big my ambition is. I know that part of what’s required is promoting what I’ve got that’s already been created. The new creations are a given, but part of what’s not a given is that inner stance—that this is what I’ve got, and I know people enjoy it, so I’m going to spread it around all over the place.”
Spontaneity Does Not Vitiate
Adding extra charm to the Boston Court concert, she’ll debut the Spontaneous
Combustion
Choir, her group of singers who create on the spot. Inspi-ration comes
from such assistance as pieces of a poem pulled from a box. When one
chorister improvises a melodic line, others can join in to support it,
and perhaps the audience will eventually join, “following a few simple
rules laid down by me,” Jones says in a schoolmarm voice. “It’s a
birthright to make up music together.” She has worked with these singers
on or off for five or so years, just for fun. “Beautiful things show
up, and it’s such a gift,” she says. “It’s a magic trick because you
start with nothing. And then something grows. It’s completely dependent
on each person’s sensibility.” These musicians are trained, but Jones
insists the effect can be achieved without trained voices. The work
began when she was coaching actors who were afraid of singing and afraid
of singing in harmony.
Looking back over 20 years of her own works, she has observed a growth in her understanding of music. Some of her early pieces now prompt her to say to herself, “That’s cute, and I know what you meant,” but it’s not making the retrospective concert. She observes a consistency in the subject matter of her pieces: “penetrating where we are, and expanded consciousness.” From Wall, one of the concert pieces is about the dead trying to get through, without much of a voice, to the woman. From Sweater, Jones is including music about the lioness goddess and “the mighty powers of attitudes and beliefs that can eat you up from the inside.”
Jones also suggests she nowadays writes more-balanced orchestrations and more-complex harmonies, “and things that can be understood without seeming complex.” She adds, “I don’t like it when you hear the effort of the singer trying to sing the damn stuff. Even though it took me two months to write one of these songs, the result feels understandable and effortless. I have to do the hard work, the singers and musicians have to do the hard work, and all the audience has to do is receive it.”
If Jones has her way, that’s something audiences can plan to do for even more decades to come.
Top photo: O-Lan Jones at Mont San Michel, France
Second photo: The Woman in the Wall, photo by Emily Brooke Sandor
Third photo: Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands
Bottom photo: The Woman Who Forgot Her Sweater
Meet O-Lan Jones, one of LA’s most-intriguing composers.
by Dany Margolies
The
term Renaissance woman may fit O-Lan Jones in several ways. Actor,
writer, sound designer, opera composer—Jones takes on eccentric roles
and tasks and creates with inspiration from across the globe and through
the ages.She may look familiar from dozens of screen roles, having delivered such memorable lines as “Trample down the perversion of nature!” as Esmeralda the organist in Edward Scissorhands, and “My name’s not Rosie, it’s Mabel!” from Natural Born Killers.
LA theatergoers may know her from dozens of stage roles over the years—including Wesley Walker’s Wilfredo at 2100 Square Feet and Mark Taper Forum, and Beth Henley’s Abundance at South Coast Repertory. We have certainly heard her compositions, perhaps when she created music for Murray Mednick’s Mrs. Feuerstein for Padua Playwrights in 2001 or Ken Roht’s “99-Cent” show Pageant of the 4 Seasons at Bootleg Theater in 2006. She served as artistic director of a production of “mini-operas” under the umbrella title String of Pearls.
But notably she has been an opera composer over the decades, and now it’s time for a retrospective. Tomorrow night, The Theatre @ Boston Court presents O-Lan Jones: 20 Years of Theatre and Music. There and then, the audience will hear nine songs from a handful of her productions.
“I have an idea of a story that must be told,” she says of her process. First come the words, then she’ll write the music. She admits to having tried the reverse. “But, for me, it feels more organic and filled out if I start with the word—the rhythms of the speech or poetry.”
Hitting the Wall
Possibly, her unique musicality comes from creative freedom. She had no academic training. “My grandmother was a prodigy,” says Jones. “She could hear a tune and figure it out when she was 2. I think music is in the genes.” Jones has no recollection of being taught to read music. Over the years, she learned to notate music and early in her career, as she says, “depended on the kindness of various musical directors.”
One might think academics look down their spectacled noses at her lack of
formal
training. Not at all, she says; most have told her she was lucky not to
have the schooling. “Some have told me I have a freedom of expression
that they had to struggle to get their way back to,” she reports. “I
know how to find the principle of a thing if I listen to it enough. I
can tell what the scales are, the common intervals in melodies, the
rhythms.”The talent enabled her to compose her latest opera, which premiered earlier in 2012, The Woman in the Wall. Jones wrote it in medieval modes for period instruments. For audiences not intellectually connected with medieval music, Jones made sure the opera resonated emotionally. “There is meaning in melody,” she says. “If I am connected to that meaning when I’m writing something, it resonates with people who are hearing it. I have no interest in that kind of music where it’s one bizarre note following another—it’s intellectually interesting because it has a strange shape to it but it isn’t connected to feeling. We’re hardwired for some kinds of harmonies that satisfy.”
For example? She was driving when she first heard the music of Arvo Pärt. “I had to pull over and listen and hear who it was—it was so perfect. Sometimes it’s just a couple of notes, but they come from someplace. They connected to an understanding and experience.”
A solid backbone is essential to a song or aria, she insists, otherwise its basic nature is never clear, no matter how much the composer “dolls it up” with instruments and voices. Another musical pet peeve of hers seems to be bad imitation. She claims to be able to spot lack of originality or, conversely when the composer has connected with his or her music. Likewise with acting, she deplores the “fifth cousin twice removed” of gesturing that imitates bad acting but has nothing to do with real-life behavior.
Real Sounds, Imaginary Lands
Someday, soon, she hopes, she’ll work from site to song, traveling to fascinating
places
and writing based on feelings they inspire. Whether monoliths and
Neolithic mounds in Europe, or Luray Caverns in Virginia, she could
foresee being prompted by these places to create new works. Meantime,
she recently returned from France where she hopes to revive The Woman in the Wall at
the abbey on the island of Mont San Michel, the building that helped
inspire the opera. “I wanted to go to [there] to let it know I was still
here,” she says. On the trip, “The first day I went through the whole
tour of the place, I was in awe and happy, it had made such a strong
impression. I was wandering through and taking pictures. The second day,
I thought,
‘I know the whole tour. I can run ahead of the crowd and sing my head
off in the rooms.’ And I did. Just to warm the place up, so it knows I’m
coming.’”She transacted a bit of business in France, too, at meetings with potential producers there for Wall. One of her main goals these days is to attend to business. She is currently creating a position at her company, Overtone Industries, that will ensure her works will have lives after their premieres. Her next producing project after this concert is to do a local revival of a 2010 work, Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands—which boasts a collaboration of 32 artists.
A Woman and Her Own Walls
These operas, along with The Woman Who Forgot Her Sweater—a fairy tale in which the heroine must triumph over trials, which debuted in 2001 at Inside the Ford—take Jones years of work.
“I want to build lasting works of art, not torn from the headlines, so it’s meaningful hundreds of years from now,” she says. “If it’s going to be good for hundreds of years, it’s going to be good for 10, so take your time” creating it, she explains. Wall and Songs and Dances each took about seven years from idea to production. “If it’s a big idea, it takes time to gestate, to reveal itself even, to reveal all of its aspects, I don’t think they all have to take that long, but that’s just been the case so far.”
She has learned even deeper lessons over the years. “For many years, like so many women, my ambition has been questioned by so many others,” she says. Ambition, it’s like a dirty word. So I am now feeling no qualms about how big my ambition is. I know that part of what’s required is promoting what I’ve got that’s already been created. The new creations are a given, but part of what’s not a given is that inner stance—that this is what I’ve got, and I know people enjoy it, so I’m going to spread it around all over the place.”
Spontaneity Does Not Vitiate
Adding extra charm to the Boston Court concert, she’ll debut the Spontaneous
Combustion
Choir, her group of singers who create on the spot. Inspi-ration comes
from such assistance as pieces of a poem pulled from a box. When one
chorister improvises a melodic line, others can join in to support it,
and perhaps the audience will eventually join, “following a few simple
rules laid down by me,” Jones says in a schoolmarm voice. “It’s a
birthright to make up music together.” She has worked with these singers
on or off for five or so years, just for fun. “Beautiful things show
up, and it’s such a gift,” she says. “It’s a magic trick because you
start with nothing. And then something grows. It’s completely dependent
on each person’s sensibility.” These musicians are trained, but Jones
insists the effect can be achieved without trained voices. The work
began when she was coaching actors who were afraid of singing and afraid
of singing in harmony.Looking back over 20 years of her own works, she has observed a growth in her understanding of music. Some of her early pieces now prompt her to say to herself, “That’s cute, and I know what you meant,” but it’s not making the retrospective concert. She observes a consistency in the subject matter of her pieces: “penetrating where we are, and expanded consciousness.” From Wall, one of the concert pieces is about the dead trying to get through, without much of a voice, to the woman. From Sweater, Jones is including music about the lioness goddess and “the mighty powers of attitudes and beliefs that can eat you up from the inside.”
Jones also suggests she nowadays writes more-balanced orchestrations and more-complex harmonies, “and things that can be understood without seeming complex.” She adds, “I don’t like it when you hear the effort of the singer trying to sing the damn stuff. Even though it took me two months to write one of these songs, the result feels understandable and effortless. I have to do the hard work, the singers and musicians have to do the hard work, and all the audience has to do is receive it.”
If Jones has her way, that’s something audiences can plan to do for even more decades to come.
October 19, 2012
Top photo: O-Lan Jones at Mont San Michel, France
Second photo: The Woman in the Wall, photo by Emily Brooke Sandor
Third photo: Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands
Bottom photo: The Woman Who Forgot Her Sweater
Hurt’s So Good
John Hurt on scripts, career advice, and conflict resolution.
Interview by Dany Margolies
Legendary British actor John Hurt has made a career from an impressively wide range of characters. He has played crazy emperor Caligula (I, Claudius) and savvy wand purveyor Ollivander (the Harry Potter films). He has played broken (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and heartbreaking (The Elephant Man). In 2011 he starred in the short film Sailcloth, in which an athletic Hurt silently steals our hearts.
He is currently in our city, taking on Beckett’s one-man, retrospective, regretful masterpiece, Krapp’s Last Tape, at Kirk Douglas Theatre.
This interview was conducted via telephone earlier this year.
You’ve indicated you prefer being handed a script and told to go for it, rather than minutely examining its meaning for a long while.
Hurt: That’s how I like it. Sometimes it’s essential that you have some sort of backstory, and sometimes it doesn’t help you at all. The script has always been my springboard—being able to go further, take it to the next round and physicalize something.
Your son wants to act. What do you tell him?
Hurt: He has murmured that, on more than one occasion. Whether or not he’ll get round to it, I don’t know. Have I offered advice? I’ve said, ‘Well, if you really decide that it’s a passion, I’ll do what I can to help you, but until you decide that, I’m not going to say a word about it.’ I don’t think there’s any point in becoming an actor unless you have a passion for it. I wanted to act from the age of 9 and had no idea how to go about it at that time.”
When you were starting, what kind of career did you imagine you’d have?
Hurt: Oh, good heavens, I had no idea I that I would ever make films. The pledge I made to myself was that if I became an actor, I would be prepared to stay in repertory theater for the rest of my life. If I could tell myself that I was prepared to do that, then I could say I will do everything I can to get into the theater. But then we weren’t too concerned with things like stardom at that time.
How did you get your first jobs? Did you audition?
Hurt: I never got a single job from an audition. I don’t know how I got into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I went up [forgot my lines] about 20 times in the main speech for the audition for that. I’ve never been any good at being tested. I was never good at exams, and I was never good at auditions. I could read [for a role]. I’d read for a part anytime. But I hate being tested.
How do you handle “conflict resolution” on a set or in stage rehearsals?
Hurt: It’s very tricky, that. If you can spin a little spell, that’s probably the best way. If you can charm somebody into another area…. But if you’re really, really having trouble with somebody, it might be something to do with what you would consider to be stupidity, and if it’s to do with stupidity, you can’t beat it. You have to ride it out.
Were you ever intimidated working with another actor or director?
Hurt: I was certainly intimidated working with Orson Welles [in A Man for All Seasons]. Or when I first worked with Olivier or with Gielgud. They were intimidating, to me. You just get on with it, pull yourself together.
You’ve worked with the greats. What do you now notice in young actors that’s particularly good?
Hurt: We’re all links in a chain. Everything develops. You can’t judge anybody else by your standards. I think there are some fantastic actors now, coming up, and I think there’s a greater understanding of film than there was, certainly, in my youth, in this country [the UK]. Not so much in the States, because you have so much more possibility in order to practice the art of film. But in this country, in my youth, the stage was their No. 1 thing and film made a bit of money on the side. I think now people really do appreciate film as an art in itself, at its best, and it’s a very legitimate medium, at its most ordinary.
How do you decide which roles to take on?
Hurt: I judge writing, scripts, just like I was an examiner. I try not to do anything that in my examination gets less than 50 percent. Every now and again you come across a script which is in the high 90s, which is very rare.
What’s the most important lesson you learned over your career?
Hurt: There is something you learn about professionalism. People talk about being on time, but to me the thing that you learn about being a professional is you have to be able to do the work even when you really don’t feel like it.
Top photo: John Hurt in Krapp's Last Tape, photo by Richard Termine
Bottom photo: in Sailcloth
John Hurt on scripts, career advice, and conflict resolution.
Interview by Dany Margolies
Legendary British actor John Hurt has made a career from an impressively wide range of characters. He has played crazy emperor Caligula (I, Claudius) and savvy wand purveyor Ollivander (the Harry Potter films). He has played broken (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and heartbreaking (The Elephant Man). In 2011 he starred in the short film Sailcloth, in which an athletic Hurt silently steals our hearts.
He is currently in our city, taking on Beckett’s one-man, retrospective, regretful masterpiece, Krapp’s Last Tape, at Kirk Douglas Theatre.
This interview was conducted via telephone earlier this year.
You’ve indicated you prefer being handed a script and told to go for it, rather than minutely examining its meaning for a long while.
Hurt: That’s how I like it. Sometimes it’s essential that you have some sort of backstory, and sometimes it doesn’t help you at all. The script has always been my springboard—being able to go further, take it to the next round and physicalize something.
Your son wants to act. What do you tell him?
Hurt: He has murmured that, on more than one occasion. Whether or not he’ll get round to it, I don’t know. Have I offered advice? I’ve said, ‘Well, if you really decide that it’s a passion, I’ll do what I can to help you, but until you decide that, I’m not going to say a word about it.’ I don’t think there’s any point in becoming an actor unless you have a passion for it. I wanted to act from the age of 9 and had no idea how to go about it at that time.”
When you were starting, what kind of career did you imagine you’d have?
Hurt: Oh, good heavens, I had no idea I that I would ever make films. The pledge I made to myself was that if I became an actor, I would be prepared to stay in repertory theater for the rest of my life. If I could tell myself that I was prepared to do that, then I could say I will do everything I can to get into the theater. But then we weren’t too concerned with things like stardom at that time.
How did you get your first jobs? Did you audition?
Hurt: I never got a single job from an audition. I don’t know how I got into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I went up [forgot my lines] about 20 times in the main speech for the audition for that. I’ve never been any good at being tested. I was never good at exams, and I was never good at auditions. I could read [for a role]. I’d read for a part anytime. But I hate being tested.
How do you handle “conflict resolution” on a set or in stage rehearsals?
Hurt: It’s very tricky, that. If you can spin a little spell, that’s probably the best way. If you can charm somebody into another area…. But if you’re really, really having trouble with somebody, it might be something to do with what you would consider to be stupidity, and if it’s to do with stupidity, you can’t beat it. You have to ride it out.
Were you ever intimidated working with another actor or director?
Hurt: I was certainly intimidated working with Orson Welles [in A Man for All Seasons]. Or when I first worked with Olivier or with Gielgud. They were intimidating, to me. You just get on with it, pull yourself together.
You’ve worked with the greats. What do you now notice in young actors that’s particularly good?
Hurt: We’re all links in a chain. Everything develops. You can’t judge anybody else by your standards. I think there are some fantastic actors now, coming up, and I think there’s a greater understanding of film than there was, certainly, in my youth, in this country [the UK]. Not so much in the States, because you have so much more possibility in order to practice the art of film. But in this country, in my youth, the stage was their No. 1 thing and film made a bit of money on the side. I think now people really do appreciate film as an art in itself, at its best, and it’s a very legitimate medium, at its most ordinary.
How do you decide which roles to take on?
Hurt: I judge writing, scripts, just like I was an examiner. I try not to do anything that in my examination gets less than 50 percent. Every now and again you come across a script which is in the high 90s, which is very rare.
What’s the most important lesson you learned over your career?
Hurt: There is something you learn about professionalism. People talk about being on time, but to me the thing that you learn about being a professional is you have to be able to do the work even when you really don’t feel like it.
Top photo: John Hurt in Krapp's Last Tape, photo by Richard Termine
Bottom photo: in Sailcloth
Being on View
Playwright Henry Murray journeys from Greek structure to modern predicaments with his premiering play.
by Melinda Loewenstein
Henry Murray photos by William Scalia/ArtsInLA.com
Following in the poet’s footsteps, playwright Henry Murray explores the profound effect a single decision can have on the course one’s life in his new play, as well as in his own life. “I’ve often thought in subsequent years that my life might have been very different had I gone to New York and I might have had more of a career on the stage as an actor and I might have gotten to my writing sooner; but one of the points of the play is you don’t get more than one choice. You make your choice and you live that life,” says Murray, and he has done that. His decisions have brought him to his artistic home, Rogue Machine theater company, where he is about to debut his play Three Views of the Same Object. It takes place over a 24-hour period and weaves together three stories to show how three choices in the same scenario can result in three different conclusions by the play’s end.
Murray didn’t set out on the path to a writing career. In college, he studied theater with a focus on acting and directing. He landed his first professional job as an actor at the Nashville Children’s Theatre in Tennessee, where he also taught modern dance and mime. A few years later, he headed west to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career, but, says Murray, “I always wanted to be a writer, and I ended up having some short stories published, and I wrote a novel that got me an agent.” So he combined what he loved: theater and writing.
Despite his passion for writing, and a deep love and knowledge of the theater, the road hasn’t always been smooth. When his novel wasn’t published, he turned his full attention to playwriting. His play Treefall, inspired by an image that came to mind as he was falling asleep, tells the story of three boys living in a world nearly destroyed by environmental disaster. After writing it, Murray felt it had a chance of going somewhere. His instincts were right; the critically successful play not only won him a fellowship, which he used to produce a staged reading, but also eventually led to him finding a home at Rogue Machine.
From East to West
Playwright Henry Murray journeys from Greek structure to modern predicaments with his premiering play.
by Melinda Loewenstein
Henry Murray photos by William Scalia/ArtsInLA.com
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” —Robert Frost
Following in the poet’s footsteps, playwright Henry Murray explores the profound effect a single decision can have on the course one’s life in his new play, as well as in his own life. “I’ve often thought in subsequent years that my life might have been very different had I gone to New York and I might have had more of a career on the stage as an actor and I might have gotten to my writing sooner; but one of the points of the play is you don’t get more than one choice. You make your choice and you live that life,” says Murray, and he has done that. His decisions have brought him to his artistic home, Rogue Machine theater company, where he is about to debut his play Three Views of the Same Object. It takes place over a 24-hour period and weaves together three stories to show how three choices in the same scenario can result in three different conclusions by the play’s end.
Murray didn’t set out on the path to a writing career. In college, he studied theater with a focus on acting and directing. He landed his first professional job as an actor at the Nashville Children’s Theatre in Tennessee, where he also taught modern dance and mime. A few years later, he headed west to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career, but, says Murray, “I always wanted to be a writer, and I ended up having some short stories published, and I wrote a novel that got me an agent.” So he combined what he loved: theater and writing.
Despite his passion for writing, and a deep love and knowledge of the theater, the road hasn’t always been smooth. When his novel wasn’t published, he turned his full attention to playwriting. His play Treefall, inspired by an image that came to mind as he was falling asleep, tells the story of three boys living in a world nearly destroyed by environmental disaster. After writing it, Murray felt it had a chance of going somewhere. His instincts were right; the critically successful play not only won him a fellowship, which he used to produce a staged reading, but also eventually led to him finding a home at Rogue Machine.
From East to West
Murray invited producer John Perrin Flynn (now artistic director of
Rogue Machine) to attend the staged reading at Santa Monica Playhouse.
Flynn says he was so inspired by the play that he wanted to direct a
production of it. Because few theaters were producing new work at the
time, Flynn decided to form Rogue Machine to serve this purpose. Murray
became one of its founding members, and Treefall became the first of the plays Murray would premiere at Rogue’s home, Theatre/Theater in West Los Angeles.
The play has since been produced at multiple other theaters and will open at American Theater of Actors’ Sargent Theater in New York the same week as Three Views of the Same Object premieres here.
From Inspiration to Reality
The inspiration for Three Views of the Same Object came from a real-life encounter with an elderly couple. While driving in Santa Monica Canyon, Murray saw a woman on the curb clutching her mailbox. After pulling over to help her, he could see that she had fallen and had scabs on her legs. He helped her back to the house, where her husband opened the door. He was in a wheelchair. “It was sort of a horrifying situation, but it was a gift to me as a writer,” says Murray. He turned that event into a 10-minute play. After letting it sit for a few years, he decided there was still more story in it. So he began developing it into a full-length play. Although there are similarities between the two versions, Murray says the full-length play is not just an expanded version of the short, it’s a re-conceptualization of the story.
One of the more-challenging parts of the writing process for Murray is the first draft. “You’re still defining the parameters of the work, so you don’t know how big a play it is, you don’t know how many pages it’s going to be, you don’t know if you’re going to end up cutting characters or changing situations,” he says. And with this play, breaking from traditional form presented him with unique challenges. Murray says he’s not sure exactly where the idea to split the story into three different realities came from, but once he’d made that choice a new set of challenges arose. “It became a mental game about what is similar about these three stories and what is different and how do I orchestrate that on the page? It became a game of compare and contrast.”
Figuring
out how to make the transitions between scenes smooth was also a
puzzle. If one actor portrayed the woman in all three realities, how
would she change her appearance and costume between one variation and
the next, and how much time would that take? So Murray settled on the
solution of using a different actor for each reality, which saves time
and makes it easier for the audience to follow the different storylines.
(The Rogue Machine production actors playing the role are Anne Gee
Byrd, K Callan, and Nancy Linehan Charles.) Part of the inspiration for
the three-views format was the tradition of Greek plays that were
performed over a three-night period. While keeping with the contemporary
form, Murray says, he wanted to bring back the idea of subplots that
shed light on the main plot, either by resonating with or providing a
stark contrast to it, “so that there could be resonant versions of the
same story happening at the same time, but in a much shorter form,” he
explains.
From Awards to Rewrites
But even after deciding on the form and writing a draft, work remains to be done. Seeing the creative growth of a project is one of the highlights of the process for Murray, who takes a very hands-on approach to the development process and values workshopping as part of that process. “I love actors, but I also love the directors and designers and the people who run the show,” he says. And thanks to input from many people throughout the process, the play has evolved a great deal from its first draft. Three Views of the Same Object was first produced in Bloomington, Ind., after winning the Woodward/Newman Drama Award, followed by the 2012 Holland New Voices Award, which resulted in a staged reading at The Great Plains Theatre Conference. Murray took the feedback he received from those productions and rewrote for the Rogue Machine premiere. Less than a month from the opening, Murray was still making “micro-changes” in the dialogue during rehearsals.
Although he would like to return to novel-writing in addition to his plays, he’s happy in the theater and is already working on another play. Flynn says he won’t let Murray stop writing plays. Murray is pleased that more theaters in L.A. are producing new plays since Rogue Machine was founded to encourage just that. He says, “The future of the theater depends on new plays being written.”
The play has since been produced at multiple other theaters and will open at American Theater of Actors’ Sargent Theater in New York the same week as Three Views of the Same Object premieres here.
From Inspiration to Reality
The inspiration for Three Views of the Same Object came from a real-life encounter with an elderly couple. While driving in Santa Monica Canyon, Murray saw a woman on the curb clutching her mailbox. After pulling over to help her, he could see that she had fallen and had scabs on her legs. He helped her back to the house, where her husband opened the door. He was in a wheelchair. “It was sort of a horrifying situation, but it was a gift to me as a writer,” says Murray. He turned that event into a 10-minute play. After letting it sit for a few years, he decided there was still more story in it. So he began developing it into a full-length play. Although there are similarities between the two versions, Murray says the full-length play is not just an expanded version of the short, it’s a re-conceptualization of the story.
One of the more-challenging parts of the writing process for Murray is the first draft. “You’re still defining the parameters of the work, so you don’t know how big a play it is, you don’t know how many pages it’s going to be, you don’t know if you’re going to end up cutting characters or changing situations,” he says. And with this play, breaking from traditional form presented him with unique challenges. Murray says he’s not sure exactly where the idea to split the story into three different realities came from, but once he’d made that choice a new set of challenges arose. “It became a mental game about what is similar about these three stories and what is different and how do I orchestrate that on the page? It became a game of compare and contrast.”
Figuring
out how to make the transitions between scenes smooth was also a
puzzle. If one actor portrayed the woman in all three realities, how
would she change her appearance and costume between one variation and
the next, and how much time would that take? So Murray settled on the
solution of using a different actor for each reality, which saves time
and makes it easier for the audience to follow the different storylines.
(The Rogue Machine production actors playing the role are Anne Gee
Byrd, K Callan, and Nancy Linehan Charles.) Part of the inspiration for
the three-views format was the tradition of Greek plays that were
performed over a three-night period. While keeping with the contemporary
form, Murray says, he wanted to bring back the idea of subplots that
shed light on the main plot, either by resonating with or providing a
stark contrast to it, “so that there could be resonant versions of the
same story happening at the same time, but in a much shorter form,” he
explains. From Awards to Rewrites
But even after deciding on the form and writing a draft, work remains to be done. Seeing the creative growth of a project is one of the highlights of the process for Murray, who takes a very hands-on approach to the development process and values workshopping as part of that process. “I love actors, but I also love the directors and designers and the people who run the show,” he says. And thanks to input from many people throughout the process, the play has evolved a great deal from its first draft. Three Views of the Same Object was first produced in Bloomington, Ind., after winning the Woodward/Newman Drama Award, followed by the 2012 Holland New Voices Award, which resulted in a staged reading at The Great Plains Theatre Conference. Murray took the feedback he received from those productions and rewrote for the Rogue Machine premiere. Less than a month from the opening, Murray was still making “micro-changes” in the dialogue during rehearsals.
Although he would like to return to novel-writing in addition to his plays, he’s happy in the theater and is already working on another play. Flynn says he won’t let Murray stop writing plays. Murray is pleased that more theaters in L.A. are producing new plays since Rogue Machine was founded to encourage just that. He says, “The future of the theater depends on new plays being written.”
September 10, 2012
Treefall photo: Brian Pugach, Brian Norris, West Liang, and Tania Verafield
Henry Murray photos copyright William Scalia/ArtsInLA.com
Henry Murray photos copyright William Scalia/ArtsInLA.com
GUEST ESSAY
Thinking and Rethinking Athol Fugard’s The Blue Iris [show closed]
by Bob Verini
Some of my colleagues in the critical community have carped at, if not downright dismissed, Athol Fugard’s The Blue Iris, currently in its U.S. premiere at Hollywood’s Fountain Theatre. As far as I can make out from reviews of this production directed by Stephen Sachs, they complain that (a) the scope is too narrow for an artist of Fugard’s stature, (b) the script overrelies on exposition, and (c) the theme is just not compelling.
(a) Most artists in their golden years (Fugard is 80 this year) tend to retrench; they pull away from the giant subjects they tackled in their youth to work in miniature. Of course Fugard has always worked in miniature (how many
of his plays have ever involved more than three characters? I can’t think of a one offhand). But if the political content and humanistic rage that fueled Master Harold and Boesman and Lena and My Children! My Africa! have cooled, who can be surprised or begrudge him? Especially since his major activist goal, the destruction of apartheid, has been achieved. I have a hunch that South Africans might be able to find political meaning if not downright allegory in The Blue Iris; when I try to do so, I strain.
But so what? It was always fallacious to pin Fugard down as a solely, or even primarily, apartheid-obsessed writer. His most important political acts were always in the productions—the insistence on mixed-race casts, for instance, in his native South Africa. Throughout his work, he has always had as much interest in the complexities of the human condition generally as in the moral and legal corruption of his beautiful, wretched homeland. Anyway, the explicit weaving in of the supernatural element—the spirit of the dead wife returning (no spoiler; her presence is announced in the program and is played by Jacqueline Schultz)—is something new for Fugard. Even at 80, he’s still experimenting with form.
(b) The house a man built—the pride of his life—has just burned down, causing a fatal heart attack in his beloved wife, and he has to pick through the rubble. If there was ever an occasion for sharing memories and the trotting out of backstory, it’s this one. In times of family tragedy there is a tendency for the mind and mouth to roam over well-trodden soil: “Remember when dad was hosing down the basement windows but mom had taken them off, so he was really hosing the screens and the whole basement got wet?” Everyone within earshot has heard the anecdote a thousand times before, but it’s told as if it were a surprising revelation. With the exception of a couple of lines that seemed forced, I found nothing in the “exposition” Morlan Higgins and Julanne Chidi Hill shared that didn’t sound like believable reminiscence, prompted by all the once cherished possessions now melted or charred with ash.
(c) An elderly man discovers that all of his assumptions about his wife and home have been faulty, that he may have constructed his life on a lie. What could be more shattering to him than that? How can one not empathize deeply? I ached at farmer Robert’s gradual realization of how blind he’d been, and I was moved to think that the only reason he was able to learn how shaky his foundations were was that the house had been destroyed to leave the literal foundation exposed. That’s pretty good stuff for an octogenarian playwright.
The principal theme of this play, as I see it, is the disjunction between appearance and reality, as exemplified by the titular flower that is exquisitely beautiful but contains enough poison to kill a herd of cattle. Obviously this is far from a novel theme. But I find much novelty in how it’s worked out here—in the way, for instance, the wife’s beautiful painting is judged to be fatally flawed, or the housekeeper’s devotion turns out to have a very different underside.
There’s much more to The Blue Iris than meets the eye—a statement true of flower and of play.
Photo:Jacqueline Schultz and Julanne Chidi Hill.
Thinking and Rethinking Athol Fugard’s The Blue Iris [show closed]
by Bob Verini
Some of my colleagues in the critical community have carped at, if not downright dismissed, Athol Fugard’s The Blue Iris, currently in its U.S. premiere at Hollywood’s Fountain Theatre. As far as I can make out from reviews of this production directed by Stephen Sachs, they complain that (a) the scope is too narrow for an artist of Fugard’s stature, (b) the script overrelies on exposition, and (c) the theme is just not compelling.
(a) Most artists in their golden years (Fugard is 80 this year) tend to retrench; they pull away from the giant subjects they tackled in their youth to work in miniature. Of course Fugard has always worked in miniature (how many
of his plays have ever involved more than three characters? I can’t think of a one offhand). But if the political content and humanistic rage that fueled Master Harold and Boesman and Lena and My Children! My Africa! have cooled, who can be surprised or begrudge him? Especially since his major activist goal, the destruction of apartheid, has been achieved. I have a hunch that South Africans might be able to find political meaning if not downright allegory in The Blue Iris; when I try to do so, I strain. But so what? It was always fallacious to pin Fugard down as a solely, or even primarily, apartheid-obsessed writer. His most important political acts were always in the productions—the insistence on mixed-race casts, for instance, in his native South Africa. Throughout his work, he has always had as much interest in the complexities of the human condition generally as in the moral and legal corruption of his beautiful, wretched homeland. Anyway, the explicit weaving in of the supernatural element—the spirit of the dead wife returning (no spoiler; her presence is announced in the program and is played by Jacqueline Schultz)—is something new for Fugard. Even at 80, he’s still experimenting with form.
(b) The house a man built—the pride of his life—has just burned down, causing a fatal heart attack in his beloved wife, and he has to pick through the rubble. If there was ever an occasion for sharing memories and the trotting out of backstory, it’s this one. In times of family tragedy there is a tendency for the mind and mouth to roam over well-trodden soil: “Remember when dad was hosing down the basement windows but mom had taken them off, so he was really hosing the screens and the whole basement got wet?” Everyone within earshot has heard the anecdote a thousand times before, but it’s told as if it were a surprising revelation. With the exception of a couple of lines that seemed forced, I found nothing in the “exposition” Morlan Higgins and Julanne Chidi Hill shared that didn’t sound like believable reminiscence, prompted by all the once cherished possessions now melted or charred with ash.
(c) An elderly man discovers that all of his assumptions about his wife and home have been faulty, that he may have constructed his life on a lie. What could be more shattering to him than that? How can one not empathize deeply? I ached at farmer Robert’s gradual realization of how blind he’d been, and I was moved to think that the only reason he was able to learn how shaky his foundations were was that the house had been destroyed to leave the literal foundation exposed. That’s pretty good stuff for an octogenarian playwright.
The principal theme of this play, as I see it, is the disjunction between appearance and reality, as exemplified by the titular flower that is exquisitely beautiful but contains enough poison to kill a herd of cattle. Obviously this is far from a novel theme. But I find much novelty in how it’s worked out here—in the way, for instance, the wife’s beautiful painting is judged to be fatally flawed, or the housekeeper’s devotion turns out to have a very different underside.
There’s much more to The Blue Iris than meets the eye—a statement true of flower and of play.
August 30, 2012
Photo:Jacqueline Schultz and Julanne Chidi Hill.
Storied Dads
Gary Grossman, Tony Abatemarco, and Michael Kearns guide plays through the birthing process.
by Dany Margolies
Gary Grossman, Tony Abatemarco, and Michael Kearns
The trio heading the INKubator program at Katselas Theatre Company just might be willing to nurture that twinkle. But you’d better be prepared to face ample constructive criticism and a little fatherly nagging.
Renowned theatermakers in their own rights, Gary Grossman, Michael Kearns, and Tony Abatemarco established the INKubator program in January 2011, along with Susan Krebs. Its purpose, says Abatemarco, was “to give voice to and a venue for new work because we felt that a lot of the big institutions were starting to cut back on development.”
Grossman, as producing artistic director, and Kearns and Abatemarco as co–artistic directors of KTC, collectively bring dozens of years of experience to the program. Each has worked as an actor, director, and writer. “And now we’re in the daddy role,” says Kearns. “We’ve reached an age where nurturing is part of our artistry. We are the parents of this theater community.”
If they feel paternal, they can well be proud of the progeny they’ve attracted. Grossman estimates 500 artists have participated since INKubator’s inception—including actors Jon Tenny, Mary McDonnell, Helen Hunt, Stephanie Zimbalist, and Deborah Ann Woll, and directors Jon Lawrence Rivera, Richard Hochberg, and Randee Trabitz.
And the three are proud of the children who left the nest for other climes. Last year, for example, John Fleck’s Mad Women ran at La Mama in New York.
A Good Start in Life
So, where to begin developing that twinkle? Visit KTC’s website’s “call for artists” page. Your idea will be assessed but so will your passion, says Grossman. “We’re not looking for perfection,” says Kearns. “But if it’s producible, if it looks like it has potential, we’ll say, ‘Okay, let’s go ahead, let’s find a director, let’s find the actors, let’s set a date, and let’s start the process.’” There is no charge to the artists at any stage of the work.
Don’t, however, expect a trophy just for showing up in this program. “We’re smart in who we bring in here,” Grossman emphasizes. “Unless we’re sold that the person is going to be able to do the work or really wants to do the work, we’re not going to waste our time. If we’re going to sit in a reading, we want a payoff, and it’s not just to produce your show. There are plenty of other theaters that are doing these kinds of series where they can do that: put it up and invite grandma and grandpa and go out of there saying, ‘Look how good I am,’ and have them all raise $30,000.”
The three admit that initial concepts they lean toward will have social and/or political resonance—some sort of conscience, says Kearns. But, he adds, “We are also looking for comedies.”
Precocious Kids and Late Bloomers
Under the trio’s nurturing care, the pieces are assessed at every stage, and nothing goes up before its time. Says Grossman, “We’re not under the gun to produce anything. I got trained by Milton [Katselas]. We spent nine months getting Romeo and Juliet together before it went up for the critics.”
Rewrites might be called for as late as the weekend of a performance. A writer can be expected to listen to notes, head into an adjacent room, and crank out new pages within a day of a performance. Sometimes a script needs a setup, sometimes a character needs an introduction. Why doesn’t this get resolved earlier? As the trio insists, no writer can direct his or her own work, and no director can notice everything. So another director and Grossman will watch a final rehearsal and give notes.
Good dramaturgy takes several eyes on a project, they say. In one instance, Kearns stepped in as director, and he and the young writer-performer worked on the piece for almost a year. At its preview, says Kearns, “It was a mess. A great mess. There was a show there and a great performer there, but it needed work. So, six more weeks of intensive work. Then the show [was scheduled for] Sunday, and, on Friday, Gary said, ‘Well, that ending….’ He made some of the most insightful comments—because at some point the director can’t see it and the performer certainly can’t see it. So [the writer] and I literally went in the other room, and he rewrote three pages, and 48 hours later, he performed those three pages and the rest of the script, and he hit it out of the ballpark. That’s INKubator. That’s what a piece has to go through to find itself.”
Listen to Dad(s)
Once a script has been honed on the page, it’s time to hear it. “All of us have found through these years of developing work—others and our own—for playwrights to hear their work in front of an audience, that’s really the most important next step of development,” says Abatemarco. “You can sit in front of your computer screen and work ad infinitum, but it’s really necessary for an audience to respond.”
Adds Grossman, a reading in your living room might not provide you with adequate feedback. Still, he emphasizes the nonjudgmental nature of INKubator. “Nothing against critics, but this is a safe space,” he says. So the program offers its own living room to playwrights, though in this case that living room is one of the two KTC theaters: the Skylight and Beverly Hills Playhouse.
As the best dads would say, it’s KTC’s living room, so Grossman insists hosts and visitors behave respectfully in it. Even after a production, the three “grab onto these things and stay with it,” keeping very much in touch with the writers after they are sent away to finish, edit, rewrite, add to, or completely reconceive their scripts.
For the ‘Bigger’ Kids
More-experienced playwrights might want to apply for KTC’s Playwrights Lab. Other development programs at KTC include a solo-show class, taught by Abatemarco and Kearns. The two also work with “elder” writers.
When they are readying their own works for production, Kearns and Abatemarco don’t hesitate to take the constructive criticism, if not needing the nagging, from each other and from others. Among other projects, Abatemarco’s Beautified experienced the INKubator crucible before the play earned a run this summer, and Kearns is continuing development on a production already given a showing: In Heat In Hollywood, by David Trudell.
Up next for KTC, seven world premieres from the company’s PlayLab will run in repertory in August at Skylight Theatre. Seven directors and 35 actors contribute to the productions, scheduled for afternoons through late nights. And you can bet the dads will be watching over each of them.
Gary Grossman, Tony Abatemarco, and Michael Kearns guide plays through the birthing process.
by Dany Margolies
Gary Grossman, Tony Abatemarco, and Michael Kearns
Photo by Dany Margolies
So
you’ve got an idea that’s still a twinkle in your eye. How do you turn
it into a production worthy of a theatrical staging, a paying audience,
and perhaps a critical acclamation or two?The trio heading the INKubator program at Katselas Theatre Company just might be willing to nurture that twinkle. But you’d better be prepared to face ample constructive criticism and a little fatherly nagging.
Renowned theatermakers in their own rights, Gary Grossman, Michael Kearns, and Tony Abatemarco established the INKubator program in January 2011, along with Susan Krebs. Its purpose, says Abatemarco, was “to give voice to and a venue for new work because we felt that a lot of the big institutions were starting to cut back on development.”
Grossman, as producing artistic director, and Kearns and Abatemarco as co–artistic directors of KTC, collectively bring dozens of years of experience to the program. Each has worked as an actor, director, and writer. “And now we’re in the daddy role,” says Kearns. “We’ve reached an age where nurturing is part of our artistry. We are the parents of this theater community.”
If they feel paternal, they can well be proud of the progeny they’ve attracted. Grossman estimates 500 artists have participated since INKubator’s inception—including actors Jon Tenny, Mary McDonnell, Helen Hunt, Stephanie Zimbalist, and Deborah Ann Woll, and directors Jon Lawrence Rivera, Richard Hochberg, and Randee Trabitz.
And the three are proud of the children who left the nest for other climes. Last year, for example, John Fleck’s Mad Women ran at La Mama in New York.
A Good Start in Life
So, where to begin developing that twinkle? Visit KTC’s website’s “call for artists” page. Your idea will be assessed but so will your passion, says Grossman. “We’re not looking for perfection,” says Kearns. “But if it’s producible, if it looks like it has potential, we’ll say, ‘Okay, let’s go ahead, let’s find a director, let’s find the actors, let’s set a date, and let’s start the process.’” There is no charge to the artists at any stage of the work.
Don’t, however, expect a trophy just for showing up in this program. “We’re smart in who we bring in here,” Grossman emphasizes. “Unless we’re sold that the person is going to be able to do the work or really wants to do the work, we’re not going to waste our time. If we’re going to sit in a reading, we want a payoff, and it’s not just to produce your show. There are plenty of other theaters that are doing these kinds of series where they can do that: put it up and invite grandma and grandpa and go out of there saying, ‘Look how good I am,’ and have them all raise $30,000.”
The three admit that initial concepts they lean toward will have social and/or political resonance—some sort of conscience, says Kearns. But, he adds, “We are also looking for comedies.”
Precocious Kids and Late Bloomers
Under the trio’s nurturing care, the pieces are assessed at every stage, and nothing goes up before its time. Says Grossman, “We’re not under the gun to produce anything. I got trained by Milton [Katselas]. We spent nine months getting Romeo and Juliet together before it went up for the critics.”
Rewrites might be called for as late as the weekend of a performance. A writer can be expected to listen to notes, head into an adjacent room, and crank out new pages within a day of a performance. Sometimes a script needs a setup, sometimes a character needs an introduction. Why doesn’t this get resolved earlier? As the trio insists, no writer can direct his or her own work, and no director can notice everything. So another director and Grossman will watch a final rehearsal and give notes.
Good dramaturgy takes several eyes on a project, they say. In one instance, Kearns stepped in as director, and he and the young writer-performer worked on the piece for almost a year. At its preview, says Kearns, “It was a mess. A great mess. There was a show there and a great performer there, but it needed work. So, six more weeks of intensive work. Then the show [was scheduled for] Sunday, and, on Friday, Gary said, ‘Well, that ending….’ He made some of the most insightful comments—because at some point the director can’t see it and the performer certainly can’t see it. So [the writer] and I literally went in the other room, and he rewrote three pages, and 48 hours later, he performed those three pages and the rest of the script, and he hit it out of the ballpark. That’s INKubator. That’s what a piece has to go through to find itself.”
Listen to Dad(s)
Once a script has been honed on the page, it’s time to hear it. “All of us have found through these years of developing work—others and our own—for playwrights to hear their work in front of an audience, that’s really the most important next step of development,” says Abatemarco. “You can sit in front of your computer screen and work ad infinitum, but it’s really necessary for an audience to respond.”
Adds Grossman, a reading in your living room might not provide you with adequate feedback. Still, he emphasizes the nonjudgmental nature of INKubator. “Nothing against critics, but this is a safe space,” he says. So the program offers its own living room to playwrights, though in this case that living room is one of the two KTC theaters: the Skylight and Beverly Hills Playhouse.
As the best dads would say, it’s KTC’s living room, so Grossman insists hosts and visitors behave respectfully in it. Even after a production, the three “grab onto these things and stay with it,” keeping very much in touch with the writers after they are sent away to finish, edit, rewrite, add to, or completely reconceive their scripts.
For the ‘Bigger’ Kids
More-experienced playwrights might want to apply for KTC’s Playwrights Lab. Other development programs at KTC include a solo-show class, taught by Abatemarco and Kearns. The two also work with “elder” writers.
When they are readying their own works for production, Kearns and Abatemarco don’t hesitate to take the constructive criticism, if not needing the nagging, from each other and from others. Among other projects, Abatemarco’s Beautified experienced the INKubator crucible before the play earned a run this summer, and Kearns is continuing development on a production already given a showing: In Heat In Hollywood, by David Trudell.
Up next for KTC, seven world premieres from the company’s PlayLab will run in repertory in August at Skylight Theatre. Seven directors and 35 actors contribute to the productions, scheduled for afternoons through late nights. And you can bet the dads will be watching over each of them.
July 25, 2012
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