Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities. Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year. Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.
Martin Head is an Ovation Fellow from Los Angeles City College.
Run! Don’t walk to see Conor Mcpherson’s Shining City playing through Dec. 19 at the Fountain Theatre. I was unfamiliar with the material so I thought it might be an interesting experience to see this play entirely ignorant of what to expect. After I was shown to my seat, I immediately became engrossed in the provocative set design.
The charming and classic red brick walls, the hard wood floors and exposed water pipes gave the set the kind of character that had me thinking, “I could live in a spot like this.” There was a roll-away bed folded up in one corner of the room, a couple of book shelves, a small sofa and chair in the center, and a desk upstage left. There were two narrow, arched windows that mirrored each other on the upstage wall, one of which was bricked over. I found that curious. The set was already telling me a story and I was very intrigued.
I don’t want to give away the story. I enjoyed discovering it fresh and I think you might too. The acting and writing were exceptional. As I listened to these characters speak, it dawned on me, “That’s the way people really talk.” For example, starting a sentence and not…or moving on to a… or making uhhhh, sound to uh, help express wha-when you can’t find the, uh…you know. Something like that.
After the show I had an opportunity to sit and talk with the cast. William Dennis Hurley, Morlan Higgins, Kerrie Blaisdell and Benjamin Keepers met me upstairs in the lounge area. Much of our conversation revolved around the superb writing. William said, “We all loved the writing. It was, for me, incredibly hard to memorize but it made a lot of sense because it is how we talk. We did agree in the beginning we needed to memorize this, word for word. None of what you saw is improvised at all.”
Morlan Higgins has a 30 minute/20 page monologue (of which I was engaged at every moment). Morlan described his experience with the material, “What we had to do, a lot of times, (with all those unfinished sentences) was finish them in rehearsal. So that we knew how to communicate that we knew what the other person was saying. So therefore, there was no reason to finish the sentence.” Morlan (like William) has worked with director Stephen Sachs many times and believes that Shining is, “the best work he’s done yet.” William said, “I think he [Sachs] just keyed into the material-where he is in his life now-and what’s going on. And he just really understood the circumstances of these people so well that he was able to come into rehearsal and articulate that and help us.”
As I watched this piece and observed how these skilled performers handled this challenging material, I was awe struck and inspired. I was also reminded of how, in life, it’s not always about what we say but also what we don’t say. What I mean is…this play is… I totally…got the-recognized the complexity that made it so…Go see the play.
