Shake plays Fri.-Sat. 8 pm; Sun. 7 pm; through Sept. 5. Eat the Runt opens Aug. 10; plays Tues.-Thurs., 8 pm; through Sept. 9. Tickets: $18-22. Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood; 323.856.8611 or theatreofnote.com.

To put in context the origin of LA’s New One-Act Theatre Ensemble, now Theatre of NOTE, Ronald Reagan was in his first term as President. Cats opened on Broadway.

It was 1980 when co-founder Kevin Carr ventured south from San Francisco for a year of graduate studies at the University of California Irvine (UCI). “The first thing I noticed when I moved to LA was how cliquish theatre was. It was nepotistic with a lot of pay-to-play going on. I thought I would found my own company, with no dues, to produce one-acts,” which were, to him, “somewhat easier to produce. So there was a practical aspect but one act plays were also being neglected. They were the ‘poor cousin’ when someone couldn’t put on a full length play.”

Carr had spent years in the Midwest, near Chicago, and worked in San Francisco awhile before heading to southern California. Not knowing the lay of the land, he assumed he would want to be near downtown Los Angeles. “I rented a place on the east side of downtown, not realizing Hollywood was so far away and in the other direction.”

That seeming real estate misstep presented Carr and his fellow co-founders with a place in 1982 to premiere their first set of one acts: East LA College. “We presented Comic Relief, our first bill of one acts in March 1982. The first three playwrights we produced were John Jiler, Thomas W. Zack and Vin Moreale. I cast three actors with whom I’d gone to UCI.” Only four or five UCI graduates were among NOTE’s initial ensemble, he remembers, “but of those first 22 members, the core group instrumental in getting it off the ground with me were Kitty Felde, Marc Gordon who passed away in 2003, Melanie MacQueen, Heather Carr (now Avnieli) and Ted Parks. That was the Gang of Six.”

Melanie MacQueen remembers it well. “I had just moved to town from Arizona. I’d been here for one day when Kevin Carr contacted me to get involved in a new theatre. We had met when we did the Garden Grove Shakespeare Festival together the previous year. I met Kitty shortly after that when I played a role in John Jiler’s Ball. Next thing I knew, I was helping found a company.”

“That East LA College space was huge compared to our next home in Hollywood, the tiny Attic Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard,” says Carr. “We staged a Michael Kassin work that did so well we moved it to Fig Tree Theatre, later to East Hollywood’s Olio Theatre. When we had a chance to have our own theatre, we jumped at it and moved into a basement in downtown LA and called the space The Theatre of NOTE. That name for the physical plant morphed into the name of the company.”

MacQueen remembers Anjelica Houston performing with them and Jack Nicholson sitting in the audience – in sunglasses. It also gave MacQueen a chance to finally put to use her fine arts degree. “I painted the marquee.”

John Money

Cut to 2006. Actor friends who knew John Money was looking for a creative outlet told him NOTE was auditioning for new members. As the producer of one of NOTE’s next shows (Eat the Runt) prepares to paint the theatre floor (“I wear a few hats,” he sighs), Money explains how seasons are decided. “Our entire company polls a list of shows we’ve read throughout the year that we’d like to see. Our artistic board takes that poll and culls it to what we think would be a good fit. We then tell the company what the shows are and we ask people to step up as producers. We need them to get directors and the rest of the production staff, handle the auditions and casting, coordinating everything, really, and get people to come in and see the shows.”

It’s a tall but potentially rewarding order. “I’ve had two incredibly positive experiences in terms of what I’ve produced,” says Money. “I did a show called Film written by Pat McGowan. It was something on paper that I wasn’t sure would work. But the actual production was an incredible, very uplifting experience. Then last year I produced the noir piece Kill Me, Deadly by Bill Robens, a company member.” Eat the Runt, a comedy by Avery Crozier, directed by Tom Beyer, continues NOTE’s 29^th season.

Money keeps his indelible thumbprint on much that goes on at NOTE. He cites this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival, in which NOTE took part. “It was incredibly enriching because you saw all these different kinds of performers come together with the same amount of passion I like to see when people do theatre. It was a great experience for NOTE and for me.”

Can one not feel passion of some sort over the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? It was the haunting of that day that prompted playwright Joshua Fardon to pen NOTE’s current production Shake, directed by Kiff Scholl.

Joshua Fardon

Fardon explains the play begins in August 2002. “Each scene is a different month and the play works its way backward to September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks. The characters are affected by 9/11 but this is not a ’9/11′ play – the event is just a catalyst for a lot of their problems.”

In fact, Fardon says the words “nine-eleven” are never spoken. Yet “it has a very direct and profound effect on their lives. As a writer, I felt it’s obviously a terribly sensitive subject to write about. For me to write directly about 9/11 would have been hugely difficult but at the same time I felt there was such a change in the Zeitgeist of the world: I think of life being before September 11, 2001 and after. So I felt obligated to address those things.”

Fardon decided to follow a bunch of flawed people around a world that had suddenly changed. “I wanted to experiment with characters that were not heroic at all or equipped to handle that change.”

Like most people, Fardon sat mesmerized in front of his television that Tuesday morning nearly 10 years ago. “My mother called me and I clicked onto the Internet and saw that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. I called out to my wife at the time and told her the same thing had happened with the Empire State Building in the ’40s. Then I turned on the TV and began to realize the enormity of the whole thing. We sat there, devastated.”

Fardon felt the change long before setting Shake in Manhattan. “I felt as if I entered a parallel universe after that. The event happened in the exact middle of my life, if I live to be the average age of a guy. I feel a naiveté the world shared is now gone. There’s this lingering sense of paranoia, the idea this kind of catastrophe that once was limited to science fiction is real. There’s the capability of all of us to experience profound loss and sadness and that it could happen any time.”

It isn’t only the paranoia that strikes Fardon. “It’s the idea of what happens in the airport now. In a weird way we’re being denuded by taking off our clothing. No matter who you are or how comfortable you are with flying, there’s still that sense something that was unthinkable before could happen again.”

Worse, “I feel we’re all walking around with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is another reason I felt compelled to write this play. Even if you were in Colorado or somewhere else and saw it on TV, you couldn’t watch it and not have it leave a devastating effect on your psyche. I think most of us have compartmentalized and gone on with our lives. But the point of plays and art is to make us aware of what we’re made of. I feel like right now, everyone who lived through it, is changed.”

Actors, directors and producers often joke or commiserate about feeling spent by a production. Yet a spirit keeps theatres like NOTE alive. How? John Money laughs at the question. “You ask as I’m getting ready to open a show. I wonder what has managed to make it all come together because it does seem to be wielding out of control. In the end I believe it’s the passion people have for what we do. We have a democratically run company, a lot of personalities, but we all share love of theatre and making it the best we can do.”

Hiwa Bourne and Alina Phelan in "Shake."
Photo by Darrett Sanders.

And at the core of most democracies is capitalism. It’s hard not to snicker when Money looks at the challenges that lie ahead. He says they never change. “It’s always rough keeping the finances moving along. It makes you become smarter about how you get and spend your money. And making sure everyone in the company keeps their enthusiasm for what we do. It’s hard working in this town and doing something that doesn’t necessarily pay.”

NOTE’s original co-founder Kevin Carr remembers why he left the company after about four years. “It’s the question, ‘What is the difference between being NOTE’s artistic director and NOTE’s janitor?’ The answer is, ‘There is no difference.’ By the time we got our own space, I was the producing artistic director and Kitty Felde was the producing managing director and it was so much work. It seemed like it was all producing and very little artistic stuff and it cost a lot to keep the thing afloat, modest as our productions were. I know Kitty and I both lost personal funds. By the end of my tenure, I had all of my worldly possessions stored under the seating area and I was sleeping in the theatre. That’s when I knew it was time to move on.”

MacQueen’s memory jibes. “Kevin and Kitty were Peter and Wendy for all of the theatre and they worked really hard to keep us going.” Felde is Washington DC correspondent for 89.3 KPCC and has worked in public radio for the past couple decades. She demurred to Carr and McQueen for comments about NOTE.

Carr bookended his work with NOTE by doing Shakespeare, performing at what is now the Orange County Shakespeare Festival. He played Iago in Othello at the Globe Playhouse in West Hollywood for which he received a Drama-Logue Award. He also did improv. “A few years later I founded a company in London called Marginal Bard. I conceived, directed and acted in Hamlet Improvised and followed that up with Impro Lear and McSlick, a gangster gumshoe spoof of the Scottish play. My partner Alan Marriott and I also did the histories – 8 plays, 5 kings, 2 actors, one hour, no kidding.”

Carr once was described by company member Russell Fear as the “Father of NOTE” because he conceived the company in 1982, named it and fathered it into existence. Years later Carr would adopt a child from China. He notes with a deep smile, “I am, yea verily, a full time dad. And I’m happy Theatre of NOTE has succeeded – I am extremely grateful and more than a little proud.”

Feature image of Troy Blendell and Joe Egender in Shake by Derrett Sanders.

Article by Steve Julian.