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.

Tyler McClain is an Ovation Fellow from Loyola Marymount University.

Glendale’s A Noise Within is a theater dedicated to the preservation of “timeless” drama through the presentation of work that will remain essential to the human experience”100 years into the future, as it was 100 years ago,” explained co-founder and co-artistic director of the theater Geoff Elliott. Though many of their featured productions are at least a century old, they remain as visually and dramatically fresh as ever, like J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World.

Playboy, which I attended last Sunday and finishes its run on May 22, is a challenge to produce, incorporating terminology that dates back to over a century ago, and living or dying by the success of its actors’ rural, antiquated Irish accents. Between deciphering foreign terminology and the not-so-simple task of just understanding what’s being said, Playboy runs the risk of being a very long evening of theater.

That it succeeds in ANW’s production wasn’t surprising. As it is a perfect combination of spot-on production design, thoughtful staging and engaging performances, the show hurries by with hardly a hiccup. What surprised me more was that due to having never seen a production of Playboy, it seems as relevant to today as any contemporary play I’ve seen.

Playboy was written in 1909 but it has as much to say about celebrity and mythmaking in the now as it does about Irish innkeeping, which is to say a lot. It’s a play about living in the company of others and dealing with what they expect of you. I can’t imagine it feeling any more relevant 100 years ago than it did last weekend.

I’m certainly not the first to say so but we live in an era of truly disposable artistic media. Between 24-hour news cycles, reality TV and the not-so-new-anymore “blogosphere,” information dissemination and entertainment as art seem interchangeable. Everyone and no one bear constant witness to everything, in simultaneity. How then, am I expected to understand the term “timeless?”

To me, timelessness means appealing now, “back then” and in the future. To Merriam-Webster, it means a “state of eternal existence.” And, allow me to speak for all of us, in theater it means something eternal to us as the viewer; something we can always see in ourselves and ourselves in it. A timeless play is a piece that reflects being alive in some way that is inseparable from the human experience, something that cannot be reduced out of our time on this planet.

In my studies as a writer, I’ve been taught to not consider things so lofty and transient as “theme” or “is this timeless?” Of course, these are my two greatest preoccupations, almost all I can think about when I feel a play beginning to take shape in my mind. Maybe it’s because I have so much more to learn but these issues make me wonder, “Am I writing for the sake of writing, or am I writing to testify that ‘I have existed. I was here.’” Am I writing for timelessness?

So this is my Problem of Timelessness. Is it not the practical goal of most (read: all) Art with a capital A to become “timeless?” Isn’t timeless synonymous with “great?” Is it not the ultimate qualifier? Perhaps A Noise Within’s noble goal of charting timeless drama runs a risk of redundancy. Unless a theater sets out to stage theatrical equivalence of reality TV shows or recognized pap, aren’t they all aiming at timelessness? It’s a lot to think about when I open a new Word document and begin to type away and, in a lot of ways, not necessarily that helpful. If writing the timeless was a science, wouldn’t we all be doing it?

As Yasmina Reza’s The Man said in her The Unexpected Man; “I wrote what I was capable of writing, not what I wanted to.”