We’ve all heard the old reliable clichés about a bull in a china shop or the dog in the manger or a canary in a coal mine. Theatrical pundits may soon be coining a fresh quip concerning an elephant skipping through a labyrinth.
David Fofi
New York’s LAByrinth Theater Company and LA’s Elephant Theatre Company recently announced a bi-coastal partnership they’ve brokered to bring the best of their works-and worlds-to each other’s bailiwick. It calls to mind the other famed cliché about birds of a feather flocking together.
So what similarities do these two flocks exhibit? LAByrinth, founded in 1992 by 13 actors looking for “a home where the group, for three hours each week, could engage in a variety of theatrical exercises designed to push each other’s limits and bind together into a tightly knit, uninhibited and impassioned ensemble-one in which each member is given the opportunity and support not only to act but to write, direct, produce, sweep, paint, hang lights, etc.” has produced 50 new American plays and received 12 Drama Desk Award nominations plus many other awards and nominations in its 18 year history.
The Elephant, founded in 1995 by graduates of the Cal State Long Beach Theatre Arts Program, explored and then later exploited a philosophy laid out for then young, untried playwright Sam Shepard by songwriter/theatre director/clinical psychologist/Colgate University English professor Jacques Levy who told Shepard regarding an impossible bit of staging he was writing: “Look, Sam, if you want an elephant to appear on the stage without walking on from the wings, you should just write it and see what happens from it and then see if there’s a way to do it.” Since then the company has expanded to four performance spaces, produced dozens of west coast and world premieres and been voted both “the favorite theatre company to work with” and “the favorite theatre company to see” by Backstage West for two years running.
In a joint statement the LAByrinth and Elephant companies declared they “aim to create a theatrical dialogue between the two coasts where their respective company members can enjoy a home away from home while bridging the gap between New York and LA.”
Speaking with both David Fofi, artistic director of the Elephant, and Mimi O’Donnell, one of three LAByrinth artistic directors, we learn more particulars of past goals realized and approaching ambitions for the future.
Mimi O'Donnell
Fofi spent four years in the US Navy before enrolling at California State University at Long Beach. He says, “I started off with a major in painting and drawing. When I met friends in the theatre department who invited me to see a play, it struck a chord with me because it was about Viet Nam. I changed my major right then and earned my BA in theatre. When we graduated, several of us wanted to continue doing theatre so we rented a space downtown at the Angel City Brewery which had been the Pabst Blue Ribbon factory.”
Four of them lived in the same facility where they began producing their first plays. He recalls, “The audience would come in and tell us what a nice green room we had. It was actually our living room.”
Producing on a shoestring, they sat those early audiences on beanbags and couches while operating their tech booth from their bedroom. ”Our audience,” he says, “was mostly friends. We only had a $500 budget. It was our third show before we started gearing ourselves more professionally when a friend, Darryl Armbruster, asked how the critics liked the production. We’d never had any critics and had no idea how to get any.
“He said we had to send out a press release. I didn’t even know what a press release was. Darryl helped us with that. Drama-Logue and LA Weekly came and both of them liked it. They liked our space too. No reason they shouldn’t. It was roomy; we had great fire escape access and wonderful insurance coverage. In fact our landlord later told us the only thing illegal we did was living there.”
As time marched on, so did some of those founding members, not out of disenchantment as much as a desire to move on with other areas of their lives. Fofi decided to ride the elephant awhile longer. He explains, “It was a fun couple of years, a dream come true in a way but then reality in the form of renewing insurance, obtaining rights to plays and all that stuff began to set in. The dream was winding down so it was time to wake up to work.”
At the other end of the continent O’Donnell was marching to a slightly different drummer destined to deliver her to a denouement not dissimilar to Fofi’s. She majored in fashion and minored in textile design at Philadelphia College of Textiles and Sciences (now renamed Philadelphia University) in her hometown and then tried her hand at various vocations: secondary education which included student teaching, a year as a hygiene assistant in a dentist’s office before signing on with the Arden Theatre Company and Walnut Street Theatre, both still in her hometown, as an assistant costume designer and stitcher. It wasn’t until she worked in the same capacity for Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1993, however, that the bug truly bit her.
Kate Huffman and Michael Friedman
She relates, “I had always enjoyed dealing with clothing; even though I earned my degree in fashion, I was not into marketing or developing ideas for selling a design line. To me telling a story through how you dressed someone seemed far more interesting. My experience at Williamstown where we did 10 shows of different styles, eras and genres in a really short amount of time convinced me this was the path I was meant for.”
Making her way north she joined the seven-year-old company called LAByrinth in 1999 where she designed costumes for In Arabia We’d All Be Kings by Stephen Adly Guirgis and also began her professional and personal relationship with director Philip Seymour Hoffman. She’s continued designing plays for Hoffman’s directorial efforts up to and including the recent Jack Goes Boating in both its stage and screen versions. She and Hoffman became the parents to a son and two daughters along the way as she also assumed other duties resulting in her becoming one of the triumvirate of current LAByrinth artistic directors along with Guirgis and Yul Vasquez.
She promises the group’s original mission statement remains true today. “Anyone who’s interested in joining the LAB can just show up. If you like us and we like you, we’ll work something out. Whether you enter the group as an actor, designer or director, we encourage you to try other creative areas. For example our member Tomokoh Miyagi got interested in writing through one of our classes. She wrote this 10-minute scene from her Japanese heritage that was so simple and clear and beautiful I got it right away. I said I’d love to direct it so they let me. That chance led to new opportunities for me.
When some of our people stepped down from leadership positions, I stepped up. We had company voting after much discussion and some pretty intensive interviews. Stephen, Yul and I share the artistic chores now along with Danny Feldman [formerly with LA's Reprise Theatre Company] who is our managing director. We each bring something different to the table in terms of balancing the company in healthy, creative ways. Everything informs everything else. One of our lighting designers recently said he’d like to try his hand at set design. We’re certainly going to let him.”
Back in California Fofi was developing another Elephant Theatre mantra of “making it real, keeping it real and keeping it coming.” He wrote two plays, Warmth and Doubt and King of Clubs, but hesitates to don the mantle of dramatist as he believes, “I’m not skilled at storytelling. I’m much better at building behavior for an actor which helps me work well with writers.”
He admits too, “Administrative structure is not my strong suit. We wouldn’t be here without Lindsay Allbaugh, our producing director, and Don Cesario, our managing director who is another founding member. Producing theatre is a sometimes thankless, always financially challenging proposition so by Lindsay, Don and others paying close attention to our business plan, it frees me to pursue our artistic goals.”
Tim McNeil and Melanie Jones
He talks about one production a few years ago when the theatre’s efforts did not remain thankless. ”We did Tim McNeil’s Anything about a Mississippi widower and his transvestite neighbor. One of the coolest things that happened during that run was a thank-you note I got from a transgender person who said, ‘When I came to the theatre, people turned away from me in the lobby. After the show people made eye contact with me and smiled. Thank you for that experience.’ Those are the moments we do this for, those moments when we give an audience something they can’t get from movies or TV.”
When he read In Arabia We’d All Be Kings by Guirgis, he wanted it but remembers, “It took awhile to get the rights. I talked on the phone with Stephen about it at some length, and eventually we ran it out here for 12 weeks. Stephen never made it out for the run. He did though have 10 or 12 LAB members out here who saw it and reported back to him without me knowing they were even in the audience. I think they may have been saying to themselves, ‘Let’s see how this LA guy tanks this play.’ Afterwards they seemed amazed I’m not from New York. One guy said to me, ‘I’m a good friend of Stephen’s. I’m gonna tell him what an amazing job you’ve done with his play.’ That led to further conversations with Stephen.”
The recognition honoring the play’s west coast premiere didn’t hurt either. It won four Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards plus best direction and best ensemble at the Back Stage Garland ceremonies. This encouraged more phone conversations between Fofi and Guirgis which in turn led to their eventually meeting face to face over coffee in both LA and New York, prompting the suggestion of a potential liaison between their companies.
“The genesis was us talking to each other,” says Fofi, “and realizing how the philosophical beliefs of our companies melded and wondering if we could somehow continue an ongoing collaboration between our companies and our cities. We decided we could. And should.”
Alejandro Furth and LeShay Tomlinson Boyce
O’Donnell agrees, “When Stephen told us what he and David had been discussing, it seemed like a natural progression for us. We have 115 company members with about 25 to 35 already in LA pursuing film and TV work so that’s a healthy percentage of our members already in your town. It would be an added ingredient for them to have a space to continue exercising their stage chops while there. And we can provide a similar space and encouragement for those Elephant Company members who come our way. This seemed like the right time. The question became: how do we make this happen?”
The answer arrived in the trifecta of Guirgis, Hoffman and O’Donnell again operating respectively in the positions of playwright, director and costume designer for The Little Flower of East Orange, a big 2008 success for LAByrinth which starred Ellen Burstyn and Michael Shannon. In its first production outside New York Fofi will direct it here with Melanie Jones in the lead. At the same time two other LAB members, writer/ performer Carlo Alban and director David Anzuelo, will present the world premiere of Intringulis, a solo play on how Alban’s family journeyed from Ecuador to the US. These two plays will run in repertory at the Elephant beginning Nov. 6.
If this sounds like a top-heavy arrangement in favor of LAByrinth, Fofi assures Elephant will get its due. ”I definitely want to ship them something of ours by this time next year. I’m thinking maybe the transvestite play Anything or Parasite Drag by Mark Roberts which was a hit for us earlier this year. Or maybe we’ll come up with something entirely new to give them a taste of our challenge of the elephant, that component of a written script too difficult to stage but we find a way to stage it anyway. Our name conjures theatrical daring, invention and imagination.”
LAByrinth meanwhile keeps moving forward with an off-Broadway premiere of member Melissa Ross’s Thinner Than Water which O’Donnell will direct as she delegates costume design to still another member and yet a new play from the prolific pen of Guirgis called, in its bowdlerized form, The MF With the Hat. (The MF in question is not Mama Fanny.)
O’Donnell believes, “Everything the set and lighting designers say to me helps clarify the play in my mind. They’re pushing me to think like a director. I haven’t met with my costume designer yet so I don’t know how she will push me,” she adds with a laugh.
Given Fofi’s track record with the work of Guirgis, it may be only a few months before this new hat is modeled on our shores, an idea to which Fofi is not averse as he observes, “We have this whole New York versus L A dynamic people love to talk about. I don’t think artists on either coast have that attitude; it’s the critics who do. One of my goals is to share our art with other cities. I want to direct plays in other cities, not just my own. I’d like to see us launch a national process of spreading great theatrical art all over the country.”
Who knows? If every dog has its day and even a cat can look at a king, if worse comes to worst at first blush it might not be such a cock and bull story to imagine an elephant wandering through a labyrinth making us theatrically richer than Croesus.
Production photos by Joel Daavid.
The Little Flower of East Orange, produced by Lindsay Allbaugh, Tara Norris and Greg Borrud for Elephant Theatre Company; opens Nov. 12; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7 pm; through Dec. 19. Tickets: $25-$30. The Lillian Theatre, 1076 N. Lillian Way, Hollywood; 877.369.9112 or elephanttheatrecompany.com.
