“Woman enters dragging a dead horse.”
This is the opening stage direction of an excellent, post-apocalyptic British play, which, we suspected, not a single person in Los Angeles would ever pay to see.
John & Lynn Pleshette
It was one of seven plays sent to us by the prestigious English agent Jenne Casarotto. All were literate, provocative and well-written but none quite fit the bill. Why, you may wonder, only British plays?
We have been producing a play a year since 2001 at the Lost Studio, where our revival of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker garnered an LA Weekly Award for Best Revival. As part of the Lost Studio’s Pinter Project, we went on to produce No Man’s Land, Moonlight and Old Times. Pinter is exciting, demanding, mysterious and provocative but it’s hard attracting an audience to all but his most familiar plays, which are revived fairly regularly.
Then, in 2007, on a trip to London we saw Mammals by Amelia Bullmore at the Bush Theatre. We thought it ideal for an American audience but it took us two years to secure the rights. It was worth the wait. Our 2009 production of Mammals was a huge success. The LA Times critic Charlotte Stoudt came two nights in a row. Laura Hitchcock wrote in CurtainUp: “Mammals is the funniest, angriest, most original play to hit town in a long time.” We even made money — $634.22.
Our search for a new play for the next season proved fruitless but seeing Amelia Bullmore in the hilarious revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests inspired us to produce Confusions last season. This comedy by Ayckbourn, consisting of five short plays, proved as popular as Mammals and we briefly considered another Ayckbourn.
But we really wanted to do something new for LA audiences. And American. We started searching for an American play. We soon learned, however, any play done successfully in New York is nearly impossible to option for a small theater in LA. The playwrights and their agents want to hold out for the Geffen, the Taper, the Douglas or South Coast Rep.
Mina Badie (as Liz), Craig Robert Young (as Mark) and Johnny Giacalone (as Stitch in the Penguin suit) in "I As A Penguin." Photography by Claudia Unger
Which brings us back to the woman dragging the horse. My wife Lynn Pleshette is a literary agent who represents screenwriters and authors. Christopher Hampton was interested in adapting Evening in the Palace of Reason by Jim Gaines for the National Theatre. Jenne Casarotto represents Hampton.
Lynn happened to mention to Jenne in passing we were looking for a new play to do this season. Since British playwrights are more than happy to have their plays done over here, we almost instantly received seven plays. The last was Me, As a Penguin by a young British playwright named Tom Wells who upon graduating Oxford, participated in a workshop called “So You Want to Be a Playwright.” Me, As a Penguin, Tom’s maiden effort, went on to be produced both in York and London.
It’s an odd little comedy, dark but very funny, set in the playwright’s grim home town of Hull. Lured by the siren song of “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc., Stitch leaves the safe haven of his mum’s knitting shop in Withernsea for the gay scene in neighboring Hull, where his sister Liz is about to give birth. Liz’s layabout partner Mark makes the mistake of introducing the virgin Stitch to Mad Dave, who works at the Hull aquarium but mostly takes LSD. Stepping out of his comfort zone into the penguin pool, Stitch leads Mark and Liz into uncharted waters, and the fate of one lonely penguin hangs in the balance.
So rather by accident, we have become the LA producers of British plays. We are happy to carry on this tradition with our current production of Tom Wells’ Me, As a Penguin.
Me, As a Penguin, produced by Lynn Pleshette, opens Jan. 14; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 4 pm; through March 6. Tickets: $25. Lost Studio, 130 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles; 323.960.7721 or plays411.com/me.
