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Getting to Know F. Murray Abraham

by Darlene Donloe | April 12, 2011

F. Murray Abraham

F. Murray Abraham has about 30 minutes to talk before he has to go to rehearsal for Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which is set to open April 14 on the Broad Stage in Santa Monica.

He’s not rushed. In fact, he talks slowly and deliberately, as if time has agreed to wait for him to conclude his discourse.Â The Oscar winner’s conversation is of both a personal and professional nature, with the gist being about the fun and joy he’s having bringing the character of Shylock to life on stage.

In Shakespeare’s play, Shylock is the controversial Jewish moneylender, who goes to court to demand the agreed-upon pound of flesh as payment from a Christian debtor in default. “Shylock represents every race that has been under the heel of another race,” explains the veteran performer. “I try to present him as a human being.”

Director Darko Tresnjak’s modern-dress Merchant was first produced by Theatre for a New Audience in New York in 2007 and revived earlier this year in New York, before going to engagements in Chicago, Boston and now Santa Monica.

Shylock is yet another memorable character Abraham has portrayed during his 50 years on stage and in television and film. Other roles include Roy Cohn (Angels in America), Omar Suarez (Scarface), Arnold Rothstein (Mobsters), Al Capone (Dillinger and Capone), Joseph Stalin (Children of the Revolution) and, of course, his Oscar-winning Antonio Salieri in Milos Forman’s film version of Amadeus.

“I love playing strong characters,” says Abraham. “Shylock is one of the greatest parts ever written.Â As an actor you have to test yourself with parts. This part is even more interesting given what our country is going through right now. People with money are treating everyone else like dirt. This is about class and justice. Why haven’t these bankers gone to jail for ruining the country?Â That’s why I love this play.”

Abraham’s enthusiasm is equally distributed among the classics. “I’m very familiar with classics,” he says. “It’s one of the things a serious actor has to know. I don’t think you can be called a great actor unless you’ve done the great parts.Â Why are they called the classics? What does it make you do as an actor? It’s hard.Â Some actors aren’t willing to do that work. It takes a lot to do a show eight times a week and be fresh. I happen to like it.Â I was born to do it.”

COMPARISONS

Tom Nelis, Lucas Hall and F. Murray Abraham

While Abraham, 71, is doing a modern version of the play, Al Pacino, his colleague and former co-star in Scarface, recently received accolades for his traditional portrayal of Shylock on Broadway.

Abraham, who went to see Pacino’s version, applauds the performance while accepting that comparisons are inevitable (Charles Isherwood in The New York Times, for example, called Abraham “the more rigorous classicist” of the two).Â “The comparisons, well, I think it’s mar-ve-lous,” says Abraham, elongating the adjective. “I like it because the public can judge for themselves. Al [Pacino] is a friend of mine. He is terrific. Shakespeare has never made a million a week until Al Pacino. It’s not a question of one is better than the other.”

Of course, Abraham agrees both versions are different in presentation, tone and texture.Â “Let me say that I prefer this version,” says Abraham. “I like whatever the concept is, as long as it works and communicates vividly and informs people.Â This version works because of what I was talking about previously, regarding the banking industry.”

Abraham admits that whatever play he’s doing at the moment is usually his favorite.Â “When I’m in the middle of one, that’s my favorite,” he says. “Macbeth was most difficult.Â I was glad to get rid of him. He was so evil. You become evil yourself.Â I’d prefer to play [Nick] Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Richard III was funny. Humor saves my soul.”

LUCKY GUY

With five decades of acting behind him, Abraham considers himself lucky.Â He’s working. In fact, he says, he works a lot.Â “As I get older, I realize more and more that I’m really lucky. I know good actors who can’t get a job. Fame is nice if it guarantees you work, but there is 90% unemployment among actors. But I always work. I’m very lucky.”

While his stage and television career has kept him busy since he won the Academy Award, Abraham has not been seen a lot on the big screen. He insists it has nothing to do with the so-called Oscar curse.Â “The Oscar is the single most important event of my career. I have dined with kings, shared equal billing with my idols, lectured at Harvard and Columbia. If this is a jinx, I’ll take two,” is a quote he gave previously regarding the legend of the “curse.”

“Yes, I said that,” says Abraham. “My line now is, “˜the only people who say it’s a jinx are the people who don’t have one.’”

“F.” HIM or BEING ABRAHAM
For years people have speculated about what the “F” in F. Murray Abraham’s name stands for. Case in point, www.imdb.com (Internet Movie Data Base) claims that he was born Fahrid Murray Abraham.

Not true, he says. In fact, according to Abraham, the “F” really doesn’t mean anything.Â “I made it up. Actually, I did it in honor of my father, whose first name was Frederick. I don’t know how it got started but somebody wrote it and everybody ran with it. The “˜F’ does not stand for Fahrid. That’s not my name. The “˜F.’ is just an “˜F.’”

Kate MacCluggage and F. Murray Abraham

As reputations go in Hollywood, Abraham’s is for being an actor’s actor. He’s been called “intense” and “serious” and doesn’t shy away from either description.Â “I am intense,” says Abraham. “I’m both intense and serious when it comes to acting, but I’m so much more.”

Intense and serious may be two words to describe his acting, but personable and quick-witted are two — OK, three — words that express his personality. “I know I’m not good-looking,” he quips. “Well, my wife thinks I’m good-looking, but you walk into a room with Pacino or [Sean] Connery and you get the sense you’ve disappeared. The sexiest man in the world? They’ll never put me on the cover for that. However, I wish you could see me, I’m extremely good-looking.” That’s Abraham’s humor.

Having appeared in a Fruit of the Loom underwear commercial, this solid thespian wants it known his comedic side has not been put out to pasture.Â “I can be funny,” he insists. “The Ritz was funny. I played a flamboyant gay man ““ during a time when very few men were flamboyant. But I’m also a lot of fun when I’m not working. I’m really fun to be around. I love to laugh. We’d laugh all day if we hung out. I’m a good storyteller. I also tell jokes.”

For proof, he asks, “What is the difference betweenÂ comedy and tragedy? Tragedy is when it happens to you.” He’s here “˜til Thursday. Try the veal.

HE GOTTA HAVE ART

Although he is an A-list actor with an Oscar in tow, Abraham chooses not to live his life in the media. You won’t see him on a lot of talk shows or read about him incessantly in the tabloids.Â He doesn’t give a lot of interviews because he’s been burned. “Some people in this profession are only interested in gossip,” he says. “That’s not of any interest to me.”

When he’s not acting, what interests Abraham? The arts. He loves museums and visits them frequently. Also, he’s “dedicated to keeping my body in shape, so I work out,” he says. And “I want to sing light opera. I think it’s time to expand a little bit. I think I can do it. I have been working with a vocal coach, studying once a week, but I vocalize every day. Even if I don’t achieve it, my voice will get better.”

THE BASICS

F. Murray Abraham

Abraham was born in Pittsburgh to Italian and Syrian parents but grew up in El Paso, Texas, where he attended Texas Western (now the University of Texas El Paso). He studied drama at the HB Studios in Greenwich Village in New York City.Â When he was living in LA’s Cheviot Hills, he met his wife, Kate Hannan, to whom he’s been married 50 years. The father of two, he takes care of his 97-year-old mother and now lives in Manhattan.

His acting career began at age 16 when he appeared in his high school production of James M. Barrie’s Echoes of the War – The Old Lady Shows Her Medals.Â He later won a $100 scholarship, which enabled him to go to college. Abraham said that without the money, he never would have been able to attend.Â “Because of the scholarship, I was given a chance to live my dream,” says Abraham, who has gone back to give commencement speeches.

He credits a teacher with turning his life around and opening up his world to possibilities.Â “Lucia P. Hutchins, my teacher at El Paso High School, is the one who saved my life,” says Abraham, who admits to being more than a handful as a kid. “She’s the one who said, “˜try this,’ meaning acting. I call it providence. I wish she could have been around to see my success. I think she’d be proud.”

GETTING IN FOCUS

F. Murray Abraham and Melissa Miller

Ever since he got bit by the acting bug in high school, Abraham has known what he wanted to do with his life.Â “I realized my life’s work early on,” he says. “Some people never discover. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. It’s like a calling. It’s a good feeling.”

Before “making it,” Abraham worked lots of odd jobs. He washed dishes, parked cars, tried to sell books, sold insurance, worked in a bowling alley and was even a cook at a pizza joint.Â But, he says, he never took his eye off the prize. “I always wanted to act,” he says. “Working, being on stage – it’s a great experience. To do what you love ““ what else is there?”

Although Abraham has experienced great success, he says he had never measured it.Â “Measuring my success, that’s a question I’ve never heard before. I suppose it has to do with work. If I’m working, I’m a success. If I’m doing something good, I’m a success. Currently I’m working on a project every great actor has done. I think if we all sat down in a room together, we’d have a lot to talk about.”

Abraham loves making a character his own. “There’s only one me in all of eternity,” he says. “ThereÂ was a time when I started out that I’d be imitative but those days are gone. Now, it’s all in my heart. It’s right here.”

For five decades Abraham has toiled at his craft ““ always consciously trying to improve. And he’s satisfied with the results. He chuckles when asked if he’s where he thinks he should be in his career. “We’re all where we should be,” says Abraham, who occasionally teaches acting for free. “I really believe that. I wish I had been here 40 years ago, though. But I feel good. The Oscar makes you feel a little relaxed. I’m not intense about fame. It was fun, now let’s move on.”

**All production photos by Gerry Goodstein

The Merchant of Venice plays Thur.-Fri., Apr. 14-15, 7:30 pm; Sat., Apr. 16, 2 and 7:30 pm; Sun., Apr. 17, 2 pm; Tue., Apr. 19, 7:30 pm; Wed., Apr. 20, 2 pm; Thur., Apr. 21, 7:30 pm; Fri., Apr. 22, 2 and 7:30 pm; Sat., Apr. 23, 2 and 7:30 pm; Sun., Apr 24, 2 pm. Tickets: $32-$135. The Broad Stage, Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, 1310 11th St., Santa Monica; 310.434.3200 or www.thebroadstage.com/venice.

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Comedy Tonight: Yes, Prime Minister, Neva, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Bob

by Don Shirley | June 17, 2013

Comedies and farces are frequently funnier if something within them provides a shock of recognition — the feeling that the writer is reflecting something that’s happening within our own lives or our own culture. Even if it’s set in a different culture, it’s still important for us to be able to trace a common human connection.

Of course the details might be exaggerated for comic effect. Carrying a concept or a situation to its logical extreme is often the best way to get laughs along with recognition. But if the play veers too far from recognition or from logic — into the realm of fantasy — the fragile connection to our own lives may be severed.

Tara Summers, Dakin Matthews, Jefferson Mays and Michael McKean in “Yes, Prime Minister.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

Yes, Prime Minister, at Geffen Playhouse, is a prime example of how a script that is set in another culture can still stir up plenty of laughs based on the shock of recognition, without tipping too far into fantasy.

The Geffen production is the American premiere of a very British play, but it isn’t just for anglophiles. The leading characters are a chief executive — in this case, the prime minister — and his closest aides, who try to control his agenda and his sources of information. If you don’t think a similar dynamic could exist in the White House or, for that matter, in private-sector executive suites, then you haven’t been paying much attention to recent or not-so-recent American history.

In the case of this 2010 play, which was adapted from a long-running British TV series, the issues these people are facing sound remarkably current — such as economic recovery from a massive crash and the fate of a proposed oil pipeline (no, it isn’t the Keystone but it also start with a ‘K’ – the oil in this case would come from the fictitious country of Kumranistan). By the way, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a map get such a big laugh in another play as I heard when a map of this proposed pipeline was unveiled on a screen during Yes, Prime Minister. I will describe it no further so as not give away the gag.

Still, even with that big laugh I just mentioned, if the subject matter sounds insufficiently “sexed up,” don’t worry. This is a farce, and the dilemma facing the characters also includes a request by the Kumranistan foreign minister for the prime minister’s office to provide some entertainment from prostitutes while he’s staying at Chequers, the prime minister’s country estate. Or course enough American politicians (and Secret Service agents) have recently been involved in their own prostitution scandals for us to sense that this is far from being an extra-terrestrial scenario.

Tara Summers and Michael McKean

In the Geffen program, at the end of an interview with the director and co-writer Jonathan Lynn (the other co-writer is Antony Jay), Lynn acknowledges that “we have made a few changes for the sake of clarity for an American audience. For instance, we added more information about the European Union, because audiences here may not be that familiar with it. The first editor of The Guardian famously said of his readers: ‘Never overestimate the readers’ information but never underestimate their intelligence.’ That’s the balance we try to strike with audiences.”

That’s a balance that David Mamet failed to strike in November, his recent farce with somewhat similar characters but with a setting in the White House (first produced in 2008 but seen at the Mark Taper Forum last fall). Mamet’s play is obsessed with trivial situations that were seemingly detached from any real-life issues. If Mamet was trying to make the point that government leaders are too obsessed with trivia, at the expense of bigger issues, it didn’t come off that way. It seemed as if he didn’t want to reflect on real issues because he didn’t want the play to be trapped in time. But the script’s issues were so inconsequential that the play felt lifeless, no matter when it was supposed to be set or when it might be produced.

There is one other major issue that’s treated in Yes, Prime Minister, primarily near the end of the play — climate change. This is the point at which an American audience might discern a big transatlantic gap. In the play, doing something significant about climate change is proposed as a way out of the Kumranistan mess, even though this prime minister doesn’t sound as knowledgeable or committed to the subject as even Margaret Thatcher did in prescient comments more than two decades ago. Despite any wavering opinions of his own, however, he sees action on climate change as the politically viable solution — never mind whether it’s necessary.

Dakin Matthews and Michael McKean

In America in 2013, of course, most people think such action on climate change is necessary, but it’s still considered politically dangerous, primarily because the party that controls the House still has to bow down to those who deny the science. Almost unwittingly, the American premiere of this play illustrates the difference between the two systems — in the UK, the prime minister is either the head of the majority party in the legislature or at least a coalition government, while in America the legislature can still be controlled by the president’s opponents, leaving the president to rely only on scattered executive orders in order to get anything accomplished on certain subjects. If you think about this in those terms, you’ll certainly take no comfort from concluding that after all, the shenanigans in this play are ultimately British, not American.

Lynn’s cast is mostly American and mostly wonderful. The only Brit is Tara Summers, whose program bio begins with the words “British Actress.” But the cast includes a number of familiar LA theater faces: Dakin Matthews, Michael McKean (in the title role), Brian George, Time Winters, Stephen Caffrey. In the Shavian tradition, the play has a lot of words, perhaps a few too many, but I would never cut the elaborate and deliberately obfuscatory arias spoken to perfection by Matthews.

Then again, one of the funniest moments is virtually wordless, and it’s given to Jefferson Mays — also an American, though not so much an LA actor — as he self-consciously tries to tone down his look into something more casual. Known for his ability to transmute into many roles within one production (he did his multi-tasking solo performance in I Am My Own Wife for the Geffen), he remains one very consistent character here despite his brief efforts to change his look. His performance is a formidable comic concoction.

**All Yes, Prime Minister production photos by Michael Lamont.

Yes, Prime Minister, Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 3 and 8 pm, Sun 2 and 7 pm. Ends July 14. www.GeffenPlayhouse.com. 310-208-5454.

Opening at the Kirk Douglas Theatre on the same night as Yes, Prime Minister was Andrea Thome’s English translation of Neva, Guillermo Calderón’s little play in which Chekhov’s widow Olga Knipper (Sue Cremin) and two fellow Russian actors Ramón de Ocampo, Ruth Livier) are huddled together around a heat lamp in 1905, rehearsing and fretting while intimations of revolution rage outside. Fitting the size of the play, Neva was presented not in the main Douglas auditorium but rather in a small upstairs rehearsal room.

Sue Cremin and Ramon de Ocampo in “Neva.” Photo by Craig Schwartz.

The production closed at the Douglas yesterday but now moves on to South Coast Repertory, where it will play this week. From there it moves to La Jolla Playhouse for another week.

Neva made quite a splash at the Radar L.A. festival in 2011 in its original Spanish-spoken, English-subtitled version at REDCAT, from Chile’s Teatro en el Blanco. In retrospect, the reactions were probably due primarily to the unusual stage directions that apparently call for no lighting other than the heat lamp. The production conveys a shadowy, rather dreamy quality, thanks to the restricted lighting.

This is an unusual look for what is essentially a comedy about three neurotic actors worrying about their performances, their images, and about whether what they do has any meaning compared to what’s happening on the streets outside the theater. These, of course, mirror some of the concerns and moods in the work of Chekhov himself, who also considered his plays to be comedies but whose writing usually is described with words such as “bittersweet” and “melancholy.”

On second viewing, it’s hard not to compare Neva to Chekhov’s plays, and — no surprise here — the comparison favors Chekhov. Neva looks like a minor experiment more than a major original. If you lower your expectations accordingly, you might find yourself at least momentarily entranced by Neva. But a warning to all lighting designers out there — no one has that title in this production, and you may feel that the production instills professional irritation and foreboding more than dreamy comedy.

Neva, South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Wed 7 pm, Thu-Fri 8 pm, Sat 3 and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. www.scr.org. 714-708-5555. Then at La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego, June 26-30.

And now for two comedies that fly too far into fantasy for the shock of recognition to really kick in.

Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone, revived by International City Theatre, begins with the intriguing premise of a woman (Alina Phelan) in a café discovering that a fellow diner has died when he won’t answer the annoying ringing of his cell phone. This quickly turns into a comedy of manners, more or less, as the woman takes charge of answering the man’s phone, pretending that she knew him. She soon becomes obsessed with offering fictitious but presumably soothing lies to his grieving relatives about the man and his relationships to the bereaved.

Alina Phelan and Trent Dawson in “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.” Photo by Suzanne Mapes.

So far, so good, in Richard Israel’s staging — there’s nothing wrong with this production. But by play’s end we still don’t learn enough about why the protagonist takes this course of action. And Ruhl pursues a self-consciously wild narrative that takes the woman to another continent and then to the afterlife and turns the play from successful comedy of manners into unsuccessful sketch comedy.

By the way, as I was leaving for Long Beach to see Dead Man’s Cell Phone, I couldn’t find my own cell phone. So in the back of my head, while I watched this play with “cell phone” in the title, I was a little concerned about my own phone and where it might be. I’m not sure if this made me less receptive to the play. It might actually have increased my interest. But it also made me more aware that the play was from an era when people still mostly talked on their phones instead of using them to text or to check the internet. How time flies (for the record, I found the phone when I returned home).

Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s Bob: A Life in Five Acts, an Echo Theater production at Atwater Village Theatre, begins as a cartoon, not as a comedy of manners. A baby is born and abandoned in a White Castle in Louisville, only to be immediately stolen by an employee of the fast-food joint. She takes the infant and then the boy with her on an odyssey across America. As in Ruhl’s play, we have no idea why she does this, nor why she later dies. But that’s hardly the end of the play. Bob drags on as a long-winded cartoon in which many things happen for no reason, far into Bob’s adulthood.

I remember being marginally more engaged by Bob in its premiere, in Louisville in 2011 — I can’t say if that’s because the production was better than Chris Fields’ for Echo or if the play’s few charms are inevitably more fleeting the second time around. Probably the latter — the LA cast is capable enough, even if the production design isn’t nearly as lavish as Louisville’s.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone, International City Theatre at Center Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Thu-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Ends June 30. www.InternationalCityTheatre.com. 562-436-4610.

Bob: A Life in Five Acts, Echo Theater at Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 7 pm. Ends June 30. www.EchoTheaterCompany.com. 877-369-9112.

I caught only one Hollywood Fringe Festival production over the weekend, but at more than two hours (with an intermission!) it’s surely one of the longest shows in the mostly short-form Fringe fare. And it sounds as if the new Good People Theater Company that’s behind this musical at Lillian Theatre is determined to continue producing in LA, in contrast to many of the other Fringe offerings.

Dominic McChesney and Audrey Curd in “A Man of No Importance.” Photo by Shirley Hatton.

It’s the LA premiere of a musical, A Man of No Importance, which was created by the same team of Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens and Terrence McNally that turned out Ragtime.

This musical is much smaller and well, of less importance, than Ragtime, but it tells a story that gets more interesting as it goes along — in contrast to, say, Dead Man’s Cell Phone and Bob. Set in 1964 Dublin, the title character is a middle-aged bus conductor who lives with his sister. The joy in his life revolves around the plays he directs in a church hall with amateurs, but his decision to stage Oscar Wilde’s Salome sets him on a rocky road that eventually opens the door of his gay closet — with a number of grim results, although the ending feels somewhat artificially pumped up with feel-good sentiment.

While it isn’t a great musical, it’s consistently absorbing, and Janet Miller’s staging is powered by what sounds like an authentic four-piece Irish band (Corey Hirsch is the music director). Although there was an apparently last-minute substitution in one role, most of the Good People on the stage are good enough to treat the tale with the respect it deserves.

A Man of No Importance, Lillian Theatre, 1076 Lillian Way at Santa Monica Blvd. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Sat June 29 2 pm. Ends June 30. www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/1093. 323-455-4585.

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Roston Choreographs revolver as Celebration Plans a Change of Address

by A.R. Cassell | June 14, 2013

Matthew Scott Montgomery and Terrance Spencer in “Revolver.” Photo by Sean Lambert.

Things aren’t just evolving over at the Celebration Theatre, they are re-volving as the company prepares to open the premiere of Chris Phillips’ latest play, revolver. This emotional drama centers around six scenes in what is described by Celebration as “the gun-shaped city of West Hollywood”. It requires a cast of six actors (like the six barrels of its titular weapon).

revolver marks a rather poignant moment in Celebration history. It’s the final play to be produced in the space the company has occupied for almost 21 years. Citing a significant increase in rent as the reason for departing, Celebration is set to vacate the premises of its 64-seat space at 7051B Santa Monica Blvd. on July 31.

Janet Roston

For choreographer Janet Roston, who choreographed Celebration’s most recent musical Justin Love and won an Ovation award for her work in its The Color Purple, working in the current space has been quite the education. Known for its three-sided seating arrangement and rather large structural support pole stage left, directors and choreographers certainly have its inherent obstacles to contend with, particularly for a blockbuster musical like The Color Purple with a 30-member cast. “When I first came in there, I was like, ‘Oh my god, the space is so small! And there’s a pole! I just viewed it as a challenge learning how to work in such an intimate setting, with an audience around you on three sides. There was a real learning curve about that.”

Roston particularly credits Michael Matthews, Celebration’s co-artistic director and director of The Color Purple, with helping her adjust to what is typically one of theater’s biggest no-no’s. “I think he’s a visionary. He was so comfortable in that space. I learned a lot from him about not being afraid to have your back to the audience, because that’s what’s going to happen in the three-quarter space. It’s ‘backting’ — you have to make sure that the person is alive even when their back is to the audience. You have to make sure that there is a visual, not just a back. It forces you to keep things rotating and come up with different ways of using the space. Certainly with The Color Purple I really learned to use every inch of that space and not to repeat.”

While the layout of space may prove somewhat problematic to the creation of a show, Roston has also discovered that the various perspectives offered by the seating arrangement can be very rewarding for audiences. “When I watch my shows there, I really enjoy sitting in all of the different areas. I go ‘Wow, look at what I’m seeing! It’s really different from this side’.”

Though revolver is not a musical, dance certainly plays an important role in one of the six storylines. Centered around West Hollywood, with forgiveness as the central theme, the scene in question involves Jesus and Judas locked in an intense discussion while performing a very intricate tango. “The idea is that Jesus has decided Judas is the one that he wants to dance with for his birthday. This is a tradition Jesus does every year; last year he danced a waltz with one of his other apostles.” The routine should look complicated but so well-rehearsed that the two men that can proceed to have an intense discussion without thinking about the steps they’re dancing.

La Toya London and the cast of "The Color Purple." Photo by Barry Weiss.

La Toya London (center) and the cast of “The Color Purple,” choreographed by Roston. Photo by Barry Weiss.

With about four weeks of rehearsal, commencing as soon as the actors were cast, Roston began instructing them on the basics of the tango, including how to lead and follow, and then blocking the routine to incorporate where the dialogue would go. “It’s very important that the conversation is foremost, so the dance has to be second-nature. It really travels through the space. It’s fun! I just love the challenge of it. First of all, two guys dancing together is awesome and fun. I really wanted to do tango that was as authentic as I could with dancers who really haven’t studied tango. It’s not fake or clichéd tango. It’s coming from the real tango tradition.”

Roston discovered that part of that “real tango tradition” actually includes two men dancing together. “There’s actually really great footage of men dancing the tango together for an Argentinian audience and everyone shouting ‘Bravo!’ The dancers would switch who was leading and would switch their hand positions. For me it was awesome learning that there was actually this tradition of male-male tango.”

An accomplished director herself, Roston strives to go above and beyond in her role as choreographer to help director, friend, and colleague Ryan Bergmann achieve his vision for revolver. “When I’m the director/choreographer, it’s this big vision that I’m trying to achieve. But when I’m the choreographer, which I love just as much, my job is to manifest for the director. I listen to their vision and my challenge is to then deliver that to the director and possibly more. As a choreographer, I’m totally willing and happy to make the changes to accommodate the director. You have to remember that there are a million choices out there, and if you can choose one you can choose another. I don’t hold my work so precious that there can’t be changes. The challenge of trying to meet the director’s vision is what interests me.”

AJ Jones and Matthew Scott Montgomery in “Revolver”

Roston and Bergmann are headed to Austin next, where Roston will serve as director/choreographer and Bergmann as assistant director/producer of the premiere of a new musical, A Little Midsummer Night’s Dream. Set in a rock music festival (think Coachella or Bonnaroo), this stripped-down 90-minute musical of the Shakespeare classic features a score by songwriting team Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda (aka Groovelily). Roston’s choreography can also currently be seen in the currently-running musical short The Real Housekeepers of Studio City, which is part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival.

As for what’s next for the Celebration…that question remains to be answered. Roston is confident, however, that this change will bring about new and exciting opportunities. “Obviously I’m sad for them. I love Celebration, it’s like a home to me. Everyone there is so wonderful and dedicated and generous and open. But I think they’re going to come out stronger. Hopefully they’ll get a bigger and better space.” She also hopes the company can stay in its Hollywood/West Hollywood area. “Maybe this really peculiar space that they’ve been in has been explored and it’s time to go find a new one…without a pole.” She laughs.

In the meantime, Roston assures us that Celebration is leaving its legacy at the space on a high note with revolver, and giving us something to think about while the company determines what’s next. “I think it’s a really thought-provoking show. What I find really interesting about it is that it starts out as the six separate scenes but as it progresses the references start to overlap, and by the end of the show I feel like there’s a real kind of wholeness. It brings you back around; it all sort of comes together. It’s a pretty powerful show. The Jesus and Judas tango is actually probably the lightest thing. Not that it’s all doom and gloom, but it’s definitely intense.”

revolver, Celebration Theatre, 7051B Santa Monica Blvd, West Hollywood 90038. Opens tonight. Thu-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Through July 21. Tickets: $30. www.celebrationtheatre.com. 323 957-1884.

**All revolver production photos by Sean Lambert.

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Studio-Spawned Sitcom Housekeepers Survive to Sing on Stage

by Heidi Powers | June 14, 2013

Leigh Ann Smith, Lani Shipman, Ryan O’Connor, Matt Musgrove and Gabby Sanalitro in “The Real Housekeepers of Studio City.” Photo by Roger Fojas.

Growing up, I was obsessed with two things: television and musicals. My parents often talked about how I danced to The Muppet Show before I could even walk. I wore out Annie on vinyl before I turned six. So I suppose it follows logically that my first produced work — The Real Housekeepers of Studio City — is a musical about television.

When composer Joe Greene approached me with the idea of a musical about sitcom maids, I was honored, excited and a little terrified.

It had been 11 years since I graduated from University of Michigan with a BFA in theater directing, which I swiftly left behind in my move to Los Angeles, where I had spent the last several years marketing film and television by day, while using my free time to develop a big- and small-screen writing portfolio with my husband and writing partner, Tom Moore. In the little free time that remained, we listened to musical soundtracks and saw as many musicals as we were able to afford. It never occurred to us to write one, probably because neither of us had the musical skills to compose. But Joe had those skills in abundance, and he was looking for a couple of writers to develop the seed of his idea into a project that would introduce us all to the Los Angeles theater community.

Heidi Powers

The process of finding our way into The Real Housekeepers began with the idea of interviewing TV maids for a position, a la Mary Poppins. But there’s only one place in the world that could happen — a fantasy city where all television characters live. Once we realized what that neighborhood would look like, our musical was born. In our fantasy “Studio City,” the Bradys’ mod house stands next to Dorothy Zbornak’s airy abode, with Gilligan’s hut next to the Fresh Prince’s mansion. We open the show with a stroll down that street to establish this world (and our play) as a place where characters you love (and perhaps have forgotten) can open the door — literally on stage, and figuratively to your fondest memories of television.

As Joe, Tom and I developed the songs and the material, we went back and forth with ideas, lyrics and music, collaborating fluidly and excitedly as we reconnected with our old favorite shows, bringing them back to life in our script.

It gradually became apparent that our different relationships with television gave us a broad range of favorites and experiences to reference. My years watching syndicated classics on Nick at Nite alongside prime-time ’90s comedies had blurred my boundaries of TV time. Tom, who works as a reality television editor, brought a behind-the-scenes perspective of modern television and its hate-watching audiences. And Joe, who is a drag performer and a self-professed sitcom-holic, brought his love for Edna Garrett right onto the stage — he’s one of the stars in our show. From there, we started weaving a quiet commentary into an otherwise silly and playful production, illustrating how television has changed, and how it changes us. We wanted to get it up in front of an audience as quickly as possible, to see how the material worked.

Daniel Switzerland as Ethan, Lotie Moore as Nell, an Leigh Ann Smith as Olivia in THE REAL HOUSEKEEPERS Of STUDIO CITY. Photo by Roger Fojas.

Daniel Switzerland, Lotie Moore and Leigh Ann Smith

Once we heard the audience’s response to our workshop production at Celebration Theatre under the direction of Ryan Bergmann, we knew we had something special. It was humbling and overwhelming. We lost an entire song to the deadpan humor of Gabby Sanalitro in the dual roles of Consuela and Rosie the Robot. Joe’s gigantic Mrs. Garrett beehive had us pausing for more than a minute of spontaneous roaring. We had unexpected rewrites to do — in order to make room for the audience going crazy over these characters they didn’t even realize they were missing.

With no established company behind us, the three of us dug in to build the production. We were blessed with enthusiastic and talented actors — they are an embarrassment of riches, and we are so lucky to have found them all. We pulled together our separate resources — Joe from his local theater experience, Tom and myself from our film contacts. Together we created a bootstrap marketing campaign to raise awareness of our show for the Fringe Festival, and that led to making a phenomenal number of “Fringeships,” as we call them — a collection of up-and-coming theater creatives who are banding together to support each other’s work. Being a part of Fringe has meant that we have become integrated into the Los Angeles theater community more fluidly than we ever could have imagined. I’m humbled to be a part of such an exciting slate of new theatrical works.

The Real Housekeepers of Studio City, Theatre Asylum, 6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood 90038. June 14 10 pm, June 15 7 pm, June 16 4 pm, June 20 7 pm, June 21 11:30 pm, June 22, 2:30 pm, June 27 10 pm, June 28 7 pm. Tickets: $15. www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/1186.

**All The Real Housekeepers of Studio City production photos by Roger Fojas.

Heidi Powers is a mild-mannered marketing guru by day. By night she and her husband/writing partner Tom Moore fight crime (where fights=writes and crime = a portfolio of original work for stage, screen and television.)

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Columns

LA STAGE INSIDER

by Julio Martinez | June 13, 2013

Betty Comden and Adolph Green

MTG MOVES FOR SEASON 2013-14…Musical Theatre Guild (MTG) is not only going to the movies as inspiration for its four-show 2013-14 season of Broadway in Concert tuners, it is moving to Santa Monica’s 344-seat Ann and Jerry Moss Theater, on the campus of New Roads School at the Herb Alpert Educational Village, 3131 Olympic Blvd. Due to extended renovations of its previous primary home, Alex Theatre in Glendale, MTG is making a permanent move. The first event in the season, on Nov 17, is the 1953 Tony-winning Wonderful Town, wrought by Leonard Bernstein (music), Betty Comden and Adolph Green (lyrics), and Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov (book), based on their play, My Sister Eileen, adapted from Ruth McKenney‘s collected short stories of the same name that also served as the inspiration for two films and a TV series. MTG’s season continues as follows: the never-produced-in LA Death Takes A Holiday on Feb 9, 2014, created by Maury Yeston (music & lyrics), Peter Stone and Thomas Meehan (book), adapted from the 1929 Broadway play be Walter Ferris (from 1924’s La Morte in Vacanza by Alberto Casella), also the basis of the popular 1934 film, starring Fredric March; Ruthless! The Musical — satirizing all things “show biz,” music by Marvin Laird, book and lyrics by Joel Paley, on Apr 6, 2014; and City of Angels, a jazz-tinged homage to 1940s film noir, created by Cy Coleman (music), David Zippel (lyrics) and Larry Gelbart (book), on June 7, 2014. MTG also announced it will no longer be staging performances at the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks…

Joanne Mosconi

GOODBYE AVERY SCHREIBER…Founded in 2003 by Linda Fulton and named after the famed comedic actor and Second City alumnus, – formerly the Bitter Truth Theatre, located at 11050 Magnolia Blvd in NoHO — is closing. Fulton is not selling the property but leasing it to Fat Dog, a gastro pub with outlets in Hollywood and Montrose. The theater is scheduled to be torn down and rebuilt to accommodate the needs of a modern restaurant. Fulton, who created Total Improv Kids school at the Schreiber, affirms she is not closing the space out of financial concerns. Her plans include moving the school to Sherry Theater located next door. Fulton also revealed the Avery Schreiber name is not going away. Writer/thesp Joanne Mosconi is renaming her Magic Mirror Theater, at 4934 Lankershim Blvd. in NoHo, the Avery Schreiber Playhouse, beginning July 1. Mosconi affirms, “I know Linda (Fulton) is going to take some time off, but she is definitely going to be involved in projects here. We both have such a history with children’s theater and with improv. She should definitely keep going”….

Travis Preston

PREMIERES…For the eighth annual outdoor theater production in the Getty Villa’s Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater, CalArts’ Center for New Performance (CNP) will offer the premiere of Joel Agee’s translation of the Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound, usually ascribed to Aeschylus, helmed by CNP artistic director Travis Preston, with original music by Ellen Reid and jazz multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia, opening Sep 6 and featuring a five-ton, 23-feet revolving steel wheel as the focal point of the set…In Santa Monica, CRE Outreach — serving at-risk students and the visually impaired through theater-based arts programs — is premiering Dreaming in Color, scripted by and starring blind actress Caitlin Hernandez, focusing on a teenage girl who has lost her sight but still aspires to become an artist, helmed by CRE artistic director Greg Shane, opening July 6 at Promenade Playhouse…Hollywood Fringe premieres include Frank and Ava, about the affair between Sinatra and Gardner, scripted by Willard Manus, helmed by Kelly Galindo, opening tonight at 3 Clubs on Vine Street…Also debuting at this year’s Fringe, Sewer Rats at Sea, scripted by ZK Lowenfels, helmed by Aaron Lyons, which is said to walk “the fine line between realism and the absurd” in its depiction of a man and a woman on a yacht at sea, debuting June 16 at Theatre Asylum.

CIRQUE-A-PALOOZA IN PASADENA…The venerable “State Theater of California” is debuting a summer festival, featuring variety shows and Cirque-style specialty acts that will play Pasadena Playhouse’s mainstage and adjoining Carrie Hamilton Theatre, beginning July 19, co-produced and hosted by Cirque du Soleil comic act designer Stefan Haves. Cirque-A-Palooza kicks off with magician Justin Willman’s Tricked Out (July 19, 20). Frank Ferrante’s solo, An Evening With Groucho, plays one night only, July 27. Daily performances of specialty acts begin July 31, featuring magicians from the Magic Castle, mime Benedikt Negro, tap dancer/boxer Joe Orrach, clown Randy Minkler, pancake juggler Scot Neary, sword swallower Brett Loudermilk, comedic magician Tanba Tamba, hula-hoop artist Mat Plendl, commedia dell’arte troupe Grand Guignolers, and clown/magician Moonie. Performance dates and additional performers are to be announced…

LynnMarie Rink

AROUND TOWN…For the final show of its 60^th season, Musical Theatre West is reviving Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, opening 20 years to the day of this tinseltown tuner’s debut in London. Helmed by Larry Raben, with musical direction by David Lamoureux, this sojourn through the tribulations of faded film star Norma Desmond opens July 12 at 1070-seat Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach…Thesp Molly C. Quinn, who plays Susan Sullivan’s granddaughter on ABC’s Castle, is taking on the role of Sullivan’s daughter in LA Theatre Works’ record-before-a-live-audience-for-future-radio-broadcast staging of Kindertransport, Diane Samuels’ 1993 dramatization of the 1938-1940 effort to assist thousands of Jewish children to flee Nazi persecution, helmed by Jeanie Hackett, opening June 20 at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater in Westwood. The cast also includes Jane Kaczmarek, Hugo Armstrong, Shannon Lee Clair and Angela Paton…Classical Theatre Lab is reviving Trouble in Chiozza, Carlo Goldoni’s 18^th century romp through the machinations of two rival families with daughters of marrying age, translated by Robert Hoyem, helmed by Louis Fantasia, opening July 6 at Kings Road Park, co-produced by the City of West Hollywood. Admission is free…Falcon Theatre in Burbank is hosting Wrap Your Heart Around It, written, composed and performed by five-time Grammy-nominated Nashville musician LynnMarie Rink – chronicling Rink’s life-long struggles with her father’s alcoholism, her own religious beliefs, and being the 40-year-old mother of a special needs child. Helmed by Michael Kearns, with musical direction by Paul Carrol Binkley, the solo tuner opens July 20…

Michael Peretzian. Photo by John Flynn.

EXTENDING…In downtown LA, Beautiful, Jozanne Marie’s chronicle of her challenges in life as a Jamaican woman, helmed by Geoffrey Rivas, is extending through June 23 at Los Angeles Theatre Center…The West Coast debut of Christopher Shinn’s Dying City, helmed by Michael Peretzian, is staying put at Rogue Machine through Aug 5…Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers, Michael Lluberes’ retelling of JM Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, helmed by Michael Matthews, is reaching to June 30 at Blank’s 2nd Stage Theatre in Hollywood…And to no one’s surprise, the “energizer bunny” of LA theater, The Rainmaker, scripted by N. Richard Nash, helmed by Jack Heller, is extending again, through Aug 31 at Edgemar Center in Santa Monica.

Actors Forum Theatre

INSIDE LA STAGE HISTORY…Born in the Bronx, Audrey Marlyn starts singing and dancing at age six. She gets her professional start at age 14 when her father, vaudeville entertainer Charlie King, adds her to his act. Audrey soon finds her way to Broadway, making her debut in the musical, Crocodile Island. Married at 17, she and husband Mike Singer go west on their honeymoon and decide to make LA their new home. Not losing sight of her love for live theater, Audrey Marlyn Singer founds Actors Forum Theatre in 1975, converting a tin building located at 3365 ½ Cahuenga Boulevard West to a small theater with the help of friends. Selective in its output, Actors Forum produces notable stagings of Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story (1977) — starring then artistic director Shawn Michaels – the melodrama The Fortunes of Farley (1981), William Inge’s Natural Affection (1981) and Bud Freeman’s What To Do ‘Til the Saviour Comes (1983). When the building is sold, Audrey and her husband relocate to the NoHo Arts District in 1994, purchasing the building at 10655 Magnolia Boulevard. After a year of renovations, the 45-seat Actors Forum Theatre opens with the play, Monique. Singer continues to produce an eclectic range of stage fare, including The Great Sebastians, The Boyfriend, Fireflies: Wizards of Magic, Messin’ With Destiny, and A Hatful of Rain. In August 1997, Actors Forum hosts the premiere of the solo It’s Me! Dad, written by and starring KNBC weatherman Fritz Coleman. In 2006, Singer helms the premiere of actor Don Scribner’s autobiographical solo, Two Rooms in the Valley, which is subsequently made into a film (2008). Actors Forum Theatre is also an actors group consisting of from 14-25 members, holding weekly workshops led by Audrey Marlyn Singer.

Julio Martinez-produced and hosted Arts in Review, celebrates the best in LA-area theater and cabaret, Fridays (2 to 2:30 pm) on KPFK (90.7FM). On June 14, Martinez spotlights Larry Cedar, Lisa Cole and Bill Ratner – performing in solo plays that are making their debuts at Hollywood Fringe Festival.

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First Person

A Young Playwright’s Survival Strategy Might Require Ramen

by Nicole Acton | June 13, 2013

Kahyun Kim and Sterling Beaumon in “Survival Strategy.” Photo by Marcus Efron.

When I set out to write a play about a burn survivor, I knew I had chosen a tricky subject, and more than that, a subject to which I felt a personal responsibility. My mother was burned at the age of 18 and is now the executive director of the Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors, a national non-profit. While I’ve written plays about a lot of difficult subjects — school shootings, miscarriages, Alzheimer’s — this is the only one with which I’ve had a personal connection.

Survival Strategy is about a young boy who was burned in a fire that killed his younger brother. It’s a story of blame, forgiveness, and most of all, healing. It’s influenced by my own life, my own experiences, and because I am connected to the community I’m writing about, I felt an immense sense of responsibility to do it justice.

Nicole Acton

It’s an honor to have the play produced as part of Blank Theatre’s Young Playwrights Festival. This is my third year participating in the festival, and I’m thrilled that I’m closing out my run as a “young playwright” with a play in which I’m so personally invested. My last year with the YPF feels like the end of an era, and maybe because of that, I’ve been thinking a lot about my evolution as a writer.

When I was 11, I wrote my first “novel.” It was definitely the product of an 11-year-old mind, one cliché on the heels of another. There was a prophecy, there were several sword fights, and even a “Luke, I am your father” scene. But the novel served its purpose. I fell in love with writing, and I haven’t stopped.

At 16, I convinced my mother to send me to Interlochen Arts Academy, a boarding school in northern Michigan where I could major in creative writing. I spent hours picking out my classes. I wanted to take everything. I took a class on fairy tales, a class on the concept of fate in literature, and of course, Introduction to Playwriting. I thought it would be fun, maybe improve my dialogue for my fiction…but I never imagined that it would become my passion.

When I got the call from Daniel Henning about the 2011 Young Playwrights Festival, I was 40 feet off the ground in a tree. Luckily, I didn’t fall out of the tree when he told me that I was a winner, and that I would get to travel to Hollywood and participate in the professional production of my play. I had all but forgotten I had submitted to the competition, but suddenly it was all I could think about.

I was 17 when I came to the Blank for the first time, and sitting in rehearsal for my play Lockdown, I knew that there was no going back. I was in love. I was in love with the energy, the intensity, the collaborative process. I threw myself into that process, listening raptly to my mentor as she explained a playwright’s role in rehearsals, watching the actors make discoveries about the characters, getting to know them better than I did. I watched my director transform my play into theater.

John Lacy and Sterling Beaumon

And the first night that I had an audience, nearly a hundred people sitting in the dark laughing and crying because my words, I didn’t just love it. I needed it.

Now, two years later, I’ve returned to the YPF for the final time. I am a different person than the kid up in the tree. Because of the Blank, I know what I want to do. I’m in college now, majoring in theater, happily avoiding thinking about the likelihood of a future characterized by ramen and Salvation Army clothes. I’m doing what I love, and I’m doing it because at the age of 17, I had an opportunity that most kids only dream of.

Each year I’ve returned to the Blank, I’ve gotten more and more out of the process. I’ve embraced my role as a playwright. I’ve started to find my own voice. I’ve learned what makes a play good, and more important, what makes a play producible. My three years with the Blank have given me the opportunity to meet incredible actors, brilliant directors, and other young writers, but primarily they have given me an incurable love of theater. As I look back at the last three years of my life, I couldn’t be more grateful to all the people who make the Young Playwrights Festival possible. They may never know the impact they have, but I’ll remember the experience for the rest of my life as the thing that turned me into a playwright.

Survival Strategy, Blank Theatre’s 21st Annual Young Playwrights Festival, Stella Adler Theatre, 2nd floor, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., LA. 90028. Opens June 13. Plays Thu-Sat 8 pm; Sun 2 pm. Through June 16. Tickets: $14-$20. www.TheBlank.com. 323-661-9827.

**All Survival Strategy production photos by Marcus Efron.

Nicole Acton is a three-time winner in Blank Theatre’s YPF, a 2012 Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and a winner of the 2013 Young Playwrights, Inc National Playwriting Competition. She was a Level 1 finalist in the NFAA’s YoungArts competition, and her fiction has been published in One Teen Story.

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Features

Alina Phelan Taps Dead Man’s Cell Phone

by Samantha Mehlinger | June 12, 2013

Alina Phelan and Trent Dawson in “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.” Photo by Suzanne Mapes.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone has been in previews for two nights when cast member Alina Phelan walks into Brew Haus Coffee & Tea, a small establishment in downtown Long Beach, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and patterned kerchief. Her grip is very strong, and she laughs about initially walking past the shop while talking on her cell phone — ironic, considering the play has a lot to do with cell phones running our lives.

After grabbing what looks to be an iced tea from the coffee bar and remarking on the day’s news flashing up on the TV in the corner, she sits down to chat about her leading role in Sarah Ruhl’s play at International City Theatre (ICT), just blocks away.

The Michigan-bred actress grew up watching her father in community theater and memorizing the cast’s lines, which she silently mouthed from the audience during rehearsal. “It was creepy, I’m sure,” she says with a laugh. Phelan maintains that her childhood acting ability was “awful,” but, she remarks, “If you start young enough, you can be awful and nobody will remember.”

Alina Phelan

She kept at it, attending Western Michigan University and then transferring to CalArts. What she eventually learned, she says, is “You have to get out of your own way in order to be real and in the moment.” To explain this somewhat cryptic advice, she provides an example of a role she had in college. “I was flicking flowers at Nina,” she says of Chekhov’s The Seagull, “and I just did it because that’s what I would do.” She reflects, “Every once in a while you get those moments that are so true.”

Since graduating from CalArts, Phelan has been a busy actress. She took home a Garland Award for her role as Hamlet in Hamlet: The First Quarto at Theatre of NOTE (of which she is a member) and was Ovation-nominated for Family Planning, Chalk Repertory’s site-specific production. She was also part of a long-form improv group called Those Meddling Kids, who she says have now all grown up to have their own kids.

Phelan also has voice-over and film credits, with roles in Shrek and The Chronicles of Narnia. TV roles have included parts on ER, Lie to Me, and The Young and the Restless, among others.

For ICT’s production of Dead Man’s Cell Phone, she plays Jean, who becomes frustrated when a man at a café refuses to respond while his phone rings incessantly, disrupting her thank-you-card writing. The title provides a clue to why he’s not answering.

So why does Jean pick up the phone? And why does she not only continue to answer it, but start making calls on it to the point where she is tying up all the dead man’s loose ends?

“I think it’s something that happens instantaneously and on a guttural level,” Phelan says.

Answering the phone is the inciting incident for the character, she says. “She sees somebody die.” The actress, whose freckles you can see without all the stage makeup, starts to speak a little more deliberately. “She is the only person to witness his death,” she says, then as her light brown eyes start to water, warns, “I’m going to cry now.”

Phelan recounts how an actor friend recently passed away. “He died on the street somewhere. He didn’t have any information with him. So we didn’t know about it for like three days.” Playing Jean puts her in the place of finding someone who has died — as someone must have done for her friend.

Alina Phelan, Trent Dawson and Eileen T’Kaye

“I came to the first table reading and we were all chatting, then all of the sudden I’m bawling, the same thing I’m doing now. Because I would do anything to know who the person was who helped him in that moment. Because I would have asked how he was. Was it fast? Was he in pain? All these things you think about.” She laughs and cries a little at the same time.

“I think I wish I were a little bit more like her,” she says of Jean. “She just basically goes on this journey to better these strangers’ lives that she doesn’t know. She’s made it her mission to make sure that whoever this dead guy was, she’s going to make sure his memory lives on in the people he left behind. Even though she has no idea who he was.”

Phelan talks fondly of her character’s actions — taking the phone of the dead man (whose name is Gordon) and connecting with his close family members. Although, she admits, the lengths Jean goes to do so — pretending to have known him and even at one point taking a plane to South Africa — are “a little bit crazy.” And, she adds, “I think she feels important” managing his affairs.

It’s clear Phelan is used to living with and playing the character at this point. As she continues to explain why Jean fascinates her, she switches between referring to her in the third and first person. She recounts Jean’s reasoning for operating Gordon’s cell phone despite having disavowed using them in her own life: “No way. Like, his wife’s not getting it. Not his mother. Because it’s my job. It’s my mission. I am going to honor him.”

Despite the obsession, Phelan contends, “That’s what’s so sweet about this play. These people who are so lost and so disconnected will believe anything because they are desperate for it, and they are desperate to know that person loved them.”

Trent Dawson and Alina Phelan

The play, which received its Southern California premiere at South Coast Repertory in 2008, often goes off into what Phelan calls “weird fantasy sections,” such as a “cell phone ballet,” but the actress is definitely on board with playwright Ruhl. She notes how some sections, like the ballet, have unusual stage directions. Ruhl gives several options for the scene and then writes “or you can not do it at all.”

“I don’t think she had any rules in her head when she was writing this,” Phelan observes. But she’s fine with that. “I like risky theater. That’s my bag. I like that ICT is doing this. I think that caryn desai, the artistic director, made a really good decision,” she says, referring to including the play in ICT’s season. “It’s maybe not going to be everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s in the right place.”

Phelan is also a fan of Richard Israel, who is directing. “I looove him,” she gushes, adding that she has known him for some time. “I was so excited when I saw he was directing this straight play.” Israel is best known for directing musicals and comedies, or some combination thereof, with recent credits including Once Upon a Mattress (Cabrillo Music Theatre), Avenue Q (DOMA Theatre Company), and The Full Monty (Third Street Theatre). A co-artistic director of the dormant West Coast Ensemble, he is a recipient of the LA Drama Critics Circle Milton Katselas Award for career or special achievement in direction.

“He knows how to get you clued in,” Phelan says of Israel’s directing. “I think because he was and is an actor, he knows how to get you there. He also serves the play.”

Between the cast, the theater, the director, and Ruhl’s construction of the play itself, Phelan is one happy actress. “I’ve had the best time. I think it’s a beautiful space. Completely professional, from the tech staff to the artistic direction.” And, she adds, “I have my own dressing room! When does that happen?”

Dead Man’s Cell Phone, International City Theatre, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Thu–Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Ends June 30. Tickets: $38-$45. ictlongbeach.org. 562-436-4610.

**All Dead Man’s Cell Phone production photos by Suzanne Mapes.

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First Person

The Devil Made Me Do It

by Aaron Lyons | June 12, 2013

Ruth Fox, Carlos Flores, Kevin Katich, Hank Doughan and Aaron Lyons in “The Devil and Billy Markham.” Photo by Wry.

The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein was, and remains, the favorite book of my youth. Silverstein has an amazing body of work (fun fact: he wrote “A Boy Named Sue”), and his works have inspired hope and tears, laughter and reflection throughout my life. For each of my life’s mile-markers, he has a corresponding text that mirrors it. The Devil and Billy Markham is where I am at mile-marker 0039.

The Devil and Billy Markham was originally published as a poem in Playboy Magazine in 1979, and a stage adaptation of the poem later appeared alongside David Mamet’s short play Bobby Gould in Hell under the title Oh, Hell!.

Aaron Lyons

Upon reading the script, my first thought was “It’s wicked awesome! I must do this show. The story, the characters, the poetry and the humor resonate to my core.” That was eight years ago. The desire to perform this “epic dirty poem” never went away, but how could I stage it effectively? Devil is a one-actor show, in rhyming couplets, in six chapters.

Solo shows are challenging enough when the actor performing wrote the piece — or if it speaks to a political, social, or spiritual issue for the performer, even though someone else wrote it. Devil has none of these elements (on the surface). I was afraid that, if I performed it, it would come off as a “Hey, dig me, look at all these characters I can do” piece. I was afraid of The Devil, I was afraid of feeling like a masturbatory LA actor, and I was afraid that I couldn’t pull it off. For eight years these fears kept me from following through.

And then, in 2011, during the critically acclaimed Pulp Shakespeare, two of my co-stars (Brett Colbeth and Gowrie Hayden) asked me if I wanted to co-found Zenith Ensemble, a production company that would challenge us to push the limits of our “artist comfort zones” and tackle the projects that send chills down our spines. Too often I had found that even though I put 100% into a project, it rarely challenged me to grow as an artist. Brett and Gowrie certainly challenged me, by asking me to direct (for the first time in more than a decade) Zenith’s debut production of Rise, by Cal Barnes for the 2012 Hollywood Fringe Festival.

The Hollywood Fringe Festival is an amazing community, and it has proven to be a safe place to take risks. But the question still remained…did I really want to do a solo piece? Definitely not. Well, maybe. Yes. No, definitely no. But if there was a way….and yet….

On the one hand, like most actors, I love the give and take of performing with others, the feeling of being onstage and getting something new, giving it back, and helping make the moments shine in their immediacy. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to separate the characters and divvy them up among several actors. I wanted to push myself to play all of the characters, from the Narrator, to the “down and out” Billy Markham, the Devil, God, and Scuzzy — an aging hustler. And besides, it is written as a solo show. There had to be a way to do this piece within an ensemble.

Aaron Lyons

Just do it. I’ll find a way to make it work. Hollywood Fringe, here I come.

I asked a trusted friend, Amanda McRaven, to direct. We thought about collaborating with a dance company; they could move around the stage to a instrumental Tom Waits playlist I had compiled years earlier while I told the tale of Billy gambling with the Devil. But none of the companies I approached seemed to gel with the idea. I secretly had another idea of telling the tale of how the “Devil burned Billy’s soul, but Bill singed the Devil’s ass” with aerialists, acrobats, clowns, and fire performers. I even entertained the notion of telling the tale of the good vs. evil within every one of us through the use of puppetry and shadow play.

And then, as if Shel himself whispered in my ear, “live band” rang out. All at once my fear disappeared. I could perform one of my favorite pieces, challenge myself with a scripted solo show, and be able to play with other performers. Amanda loved the idea and assembled an incredibly talented, playful and generous group of musicians and one extremely graceful and sexy dancer. The last elements came into place when we secured the 3 Clubs Cocktail Lounge as our venue, and the amazing Paula Higgins on costumes.

So hear I am, at mile-marker 0039, no longer calling this a “solo show.” It is a true collaboration of rhythm and music, poetry and physicality. I am grateful to have waited eight years to realize this dream. I can’t imagine it any other way.

The Devil and Billy Markham, 3 Clubs Cocktail Lounge, 1123 N. Vine Street, LA 90038. June 16 and 23 6:45 pm, June 19 and 26 8:15 pm. Tickets: $12. www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/1227.

**All The Devil and Billy Markham production photos by Wry.

Aaron Lyons is an actor, director, writer, editor, painter, cook, landscaper, handyman, and run-on sentence enthusiast. Being born in Ringling Brothers’ Circus has given him an incredible sense of wanderlust and desire to tell stories; the only place he could find that would satisfy these two soul-satisfying urges was in the theater, where he has been a struggling artist ever since. He has performed in 48 states, nine countries, and four dimensions. The most important lesson he has learned in all of his travels is: “When traveling, ask the locals where their favorite restaurant is, and you can rarely go wrong.”

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Features

Yes, Jefferson Mays Is In His Prime Time

by Les Spindle | June 11, 2013

Tara Summers, Dakin Matthews, Jefferson Mays and Michael McKean in “Yes, Prime Minister.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

In luxurious governmental headquarters, political dignitaries and their dutiful underlings grapple with assorted crises, such as a debt-ridden economy on the brink of collapse, illegal immigration, and more, as they attempt to forestall inevitable media scrutiny. Is this a news update on the current US political scene? Not quite. The setting is Great Britain, as the fictional hubbub is related in the US premiere of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s farcical satire, Yes, Prime Minister.

This West End stage hit, based on a popular British television series, opens at the Geffen Playhouse’s Gil Cates Theater on Wednesday, featuring a notable cast — Jefferson Mays, Stephen Caffrey, Brian George, Dakin Matthews, Michael McKean, Tara Summers, and Time Winters.

Mays previously appeared in the Geffen’s 2005 LA premiere of Doug Wright’s biographical solo play I Am My Own Wife, staged at the Wadsworth Theatre in Brentwood. The actor repeated a role that earned him a Tony and several other awards. (The play was originally developed, pre-Broadway, in 2001 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Page to Stage workshop.) Mays’ other acclaimed Broadway credits of recent years include Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, Pygmalion, and Journey’s End.

Wild and Woolley

Jefferson Mays

In Yes, Prime Minister, “I play Bernard Woolley,” Mays begins, during an interview in the Geffen green room. “He’s the principal private secretary to the prime minister. This is a play about government, not about politics. It’s about how things work and who runs the show. It’s been such a revelation to me, because you think you know who the British are, and their government, but [the US] government wouldn’t be what it is if it weren’t for the British government. Ours is an extension of that, and a reaction to it. It’s Alice in wonderland. It’s crazy.”

Matthews plays the permanent cabinet secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, while McKean appears as the prime minister. Mays explains, “This is a Jeeves and Wooster relationship, but with two Jeeves and one Wooster.” (Mays’ reference is to the comedic butler-servant characters appearing in P.G. Wodehouse stories and novels; they served as the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s and Alan Ayckbourn’s 1975 musical Jeeves — which, in a revised version called By Jeeves, played the Geffen in 1997).

He continues, “We [Woolley and Appleby] are permanent, we don’t change, we are the government, a couple of Oxonians in public school-educated class systems, who keep the mechanism working. These vulgarian politicians come in for a few years, but they’re short-time help. We are the British help. Whereas, in the US, it’s a system of checks and balances between the judicial branch, legislative branch , and executive branch, this is sort of between the Bertie Woosters of government and the Jeeves [the butlers], who keep the thing going. So there’s great comic potential in that relationship. My character is caught between his duty to the senior civil servant and his duty to his prime minister.”

He describes the play as “a comedy, and I would say a farce at points. That’s the way I like working the most, because it’s building a machine. The work is so specific. It’s like doing a really complicated math problem. Jonathan Lynn is fantastic, like Beethoven conducting his own symphony. He’s extraordinarily specific, and it’s like working with a great conductor. He literally sits there and says ‘this passage goes faster, or slow down here.’ He has built in passages.”

The first British TV version of this story (originally called Yes Minister) began in 1980. It was re-dubbed Yes, Prime Minister, for its 1986 revamp. The most recent television version opened in Britain this January. The stage adaptation has thrived in tours throughout England since its 2010 debut.

Dakin Matthews and Michael McKean in “Yes, Prime Minister.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

“The play is now having a second life, with a new cast,” Mays remarks. He believes the Geffen production will resonate with current news headlines. Yet he admits, “I was a little leery at first, thinking this was so Anglo-centric. But all government is fundamentally the same. The comic subject matter, I think, doesn’t change at all, but Jonathan’s a news junkie and he’s not above putting in things that are currently going on in the world. But he’s also uncannily anticipating what’s going to happen. He sort of foresaw the hung Parliament in Britain right now, and there are allusions to drones and things that will ring a bell with us.”

Mays says that the material is “different from the original in that it happens now. But it’s the same in terms of characters and relationships.” The actor was aware of the show when this role was offered to him but says he still hasn’t seen any of the TV versions. “I met Jonathan a couple of years ago, and he asked if I would read Bernard, in a staged reading, and I said yes, and I asked, should I go and look at the TV show? And he said no, just treat it as a new play.”

Broadway Bound

Mays, who is married to actress Susan Lyons, is originally from Connecticut. He has resided in New York since the early 1990s. He studied at Yale and in the graduate drama program at UC San Diego, appearing in La Jolla Playhouse productions and working with artistic director Des McAnuff. For several years, he was also a member of Anne Bogart’s SITI program, which he believes gave him invaluable training. He has a number of television and film credits, but his career focus has largely been on the stage.

Mays is excited to return to Broadway this fall in Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, a musical set in Edwardian England, which is based on the Roy Horniman novel Israel Rank and its classic 1949 film adaptation, Kind Hearts and Coronets. Directed by Darko Tresnjak, the new musical, with book by Robert L. Freedman and score by Steven Lutvak and Freedman, had an acclaimed premiere last fall at the Hartford Stage and earlier this year at the Old Globe in San Diego, in a co-production between the two companies.

Jefferson Mays as Lord Adalbert D’Ysquith and Lady Hyacinth D’Ysquith and in the 2013 world premiere of “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” at The Old Globe. Photos by Henry DiRocco.

According to Mays, full casting for the Broadway production is now underway. He is set to reprise his lead role of a possible duke — ninth in line to inherit that title. He also plays this gentleman’s eight rivals, each of whom meets with a suspicious demise. “I play all of the roles that [Alec] Guinness played in the film,” Mays asserts. In the Los Angeles Times review of the Globe staging, Charles McNulty wrote that it’s Mays’ “prolific originality that gives A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder its liftoff.”

“A musical is new territory for me,” says Mays, “but I did an Encores! production of Of Thee I Sing [in New York] in which I didn’t even sing. It’s extraordinary. I may never want to go back. Plays are such heavy lifting. Act one, scene one tends to be a lot of exposition and trying to get people on board, but in a musical, you sort of step out on this magic carpet, the overture strikes up, and bears you aloft. It’s intoxicating.”

Yet Mays eventually offers a qualifier regarding his debut as a musical comedy star. He tells of an experience in 2008, shortly after he had starred as Prof. Henry Higgins in a Roundabout Theatre revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Following that run, Mays was summoned to take over the role of Higgins in the play’s classic Lerner and Loewe musical version, My Fair Lady, at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, because the actor slated to do the role dropped out at the last minute. Mays says he “knew all the lines, so I stepped in. It couldn’t have been a better introduction because you start out speaking, and you end up singing.”

He adds, “Higgins is such a wonderful role. I would love to do that again. I was talking to Jonathan about that the other day. It’s funny because in America, our knowledge and expectations about Pygmalion are so affected by My Fair Lady…People would say ‘what, you don’t do that — this is where you sing the song.’ It’s amazing because [Alan Jay] Lerner, who did the lyrics for the musical, used so much of Shaw, the play is now kind of a disappointment to an American audience. It’s quite different as a musical and, I think, as heretical as this sounds, My Fair Lady is a greater work of art.”

Dakin Matthews, Jefferson Mays, Michael McKean and Corey Brill at the April 1, 2012 opening night curtain call of “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” at Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. Photo by Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.

In Pygmalion, he continues, “Shaw was writing Higgins as himself, and he didn’t permit him to go places where he was not comfortable going — too close to his own character.” Lerner “humanized Higgins and gave him the possibility of caring for this other person. And then it’s so beautifully structured. You have this wonderful arc, whereas Pygmalion doesn’t allow him much of a change. Eliza is the one who goes through this transformation. And they also flesh out the makeover aspects of it in the musical. There’s not a scene devoted to that in the play.”

He adds a personal anecdote: “My parents had opening night tickets to see My Fair Lady in the 1950s, and ended up giving them away to friends. They asked, ‘Shaw as a musical? Couldn’t possibly be.’”

Mays says he has thoroughly enjoyed his other Broadway performances. In The Best Man (Gore Vidal’s 1964 play about a contentious presidential race), “oddly enough, a lot of the cast members from Yes, Prime Minister — McKean, Dakin and I — were in that company as well, so we spent about seven months together on Broadway last season. It’s lovely. That happens more often as you age. Working with people who you worked with before shaves off two weeks of rehearsals. You have some sort of working vocabulary to work with people, so it’s lovely to see some old friends.

“I played a character named Sheldon Marcus in The Best Man, sort of a sap who comes in with a compromising piece of information in Act II. It was a small role, but it was fun. Another very pertinent play. We were all joking the other day that we seem to do political plays with lots of furniture.”

John Ahlin, Jefferson Mays and Boyd Gaines in the 2007 Broadway revival of “Journey’s End” at the Belasco Theatre. Photo by Paul Kolnik.

He calls his lengthy run with I Am My Own Wife — initially developed in San Diego, followed by the Broadway run, then on tour — “ a great adventure and very fulfilling artistically.” He also speaks highly of his experience appearing in the 1928 drama Journey’s End in its 2007 Broadway revival: “I saw the play when I was 10 years old at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. It’s a play that a lot of Americans are not familiar with, because it’s never done. But it’s a great war play.” He adds, “It’s not a preachy play. It doesn’t wear its politics on its sleeve. It wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s written by R.C. Sherriff, who’s a survivor of the Great War, and it’s based on his own personal experiences as an officer in the trenches in France. All the characters are people he knew. He had written a memoir that had never been published. It was sort of a memorial to his fallen comrades. The play was a deeply moving experience. We got along famously as a cast. And we all got blown up at the end. I just remember being so affected by that play. To have this opportunity to do it on Broadway was something I had never anticipated happening.”

What’s Next?

Regarding future ambitions, Mays remarks, “I think a lot of people advise you to have a list of things you want to accomplish — roles that you want to do. But I love the element of surprise, in which you get waylaid, in which a director will come up and say ‘You know what, you should really play this.’ Look at I Am My Own Wife. It’s crazy. Who ever would have thought they would play a gay 65-year-old East German transvestite? So I always love it when other people get excited for me to do things.”

He elaborates. “I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of different things to do. I think being typecast is the worst thing for an actor, though there are a lot of actors who make a career out of that. And I know some actors will tell their agents, ‘I don’t go out for that sort of thing.’ But the joy of being an actor is the transformation. I like the other shoes you get to walk in, the other thoughts you get to think.”

Jefferson Mays in “Yes, Prime Minister.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

Speaking of transformation, “I wish theater makeup would come back,” he adds. “I was looking at a book the other day that was astonishing. Think of it. If you’re in a repertory company, or something, in order to keep your audience engaged, you have to transform yourself — putty in the nose, putty in the jowls. It makes sense and I’d love to bring all that stuff back.”

Despite Mays’ busy schedule this year, he has one additional iron in the fire that’s a very personal project: “I’m starting to work on another one-man show, which I didn’t think I’d ever do again. Solo shows can sometime be a lonely experience, and you get involved in theater to spark ideas with other ideas and play onstage, but this is a project based on the works of Shakespeare. I’m in the process of reading all of his works. It’s not going to be Gielgud’s Seven Ages of Man, but something like that idea. A friend and I are going to see what leaps out and then craft some sort of evening. But that’s sort of a long-term project. It would be nice to have something kind of portable that you could carry around and do.”

Meanwhile, he’s anticipating the opening of Yes, Prime Minister: “I’m fiendishly curious how it’s going to play for an American audience…It’s extremely British, but we love the British. Plus there are lots of slamming doors, and I think the relationships are extremely funny, and the set is lovely, adorned by French doors and sofas. I think it will have great resonance.”

Yes, Prime Minister, Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood 90024. Opens Wednesday. Tue-Fri 8 pm. Sat 3 and 8 pm, Sun 2 and 7 pm. Tickets: $47-77. www.geffenplayhouse.com. 310-208-5454.

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The Katrina Comedy Fest Celebrates Triumph in Disaster

by Robin Migdol | June 11, 2013

Deidrie Henry (center), Travis Michael Holder, Jan Munroe, Judy Jean Burns and L. Trey Wilson in “The Katrina Comedy Fest” at the Lounge Theatre as part of Hollywood Fringe Festival 2013. Photo by Rob Florence.

Think of Hurricane Katrina, and the images that probably come to mind are wind and rain pounding the flooding streets of New Orleans, people standing on rooftops waiting to be rescued, or the cleanup process that dragged on for years.

But according to The Katrina Comedy Fest, tales of destruction, chaos and suffering are not the only ones to emerge from the storm. The play tells the true stories of five individuals who survived Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and through each person’s resilience and positive outlook, the tragedy itself gets a decidedly more uplifting spin.

The Katrina Comedy Fest premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2010 — it was one of four non-musical plays cited for overall excellence by a panel of Fringe judges. It makes its West Coast debut at the Lounge Theatre as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival through June 30.

Rob Florence and Misty Carlisle

Playwright Rob Florence is a longtime New Orleans resident and historian. He owns and operates Historic New Orleans Tours, has authored several nonfiction books about New Orleans and teaches playwriting at University of New Orleans and Tulane University. His next play, Holy Wars, will be produced at the Bayou Treme Center.

Florence, director Misty Carlisle and five of the six cast members have gathered at the Cat & Fiddle restaurant — which Carlisle chose because its outdoor patio reminds her of New Orleans’s French Quarter — to discuss the play and its themes.

Florence says he didn’t want to write about Hurricane Katrina for a long time because the experience was so traumatizing, but he began to take issue with the kinds of stories the mainstream media were reporting about how the people of New Orleans had weathered the storm and its aftermath. He says too many of the stories were negative, focusing on crime and painting residents as partly to blame for the trouble the city faced.

In fact, Florence’s early versions of the play took a similarly dark tone. But he wasn’t happy about it.

“Initially some monologues were really brutal,” Florence says. “That wasn’t an accomplishment because you swing a dead cat in New Orleans and you hit 45,000 really depressing Katrina stories. That’s easy. What was surprising were these triumphant, funny stories, like situational comedy.”

The five main characters in the play are based on real people, all friends of Florence except for one who was a friend of a friend. Each actor plays one main character as well as supporting characters in the other four stories.

Deidre Henry as Antoinette

Deidrie Henry plays Antoinette K-Doe (alternating performances with Peggy Blow), wife of legendary New Orleans blues musician Ernie K-Doe and the owner of the Mother-in-Law Lounge, a haven for New Orleans musicians. Antoinette (who died in 2009) sheltered her neighbors and granddaughter during the storm on the second floor of her establishment. Florence calls her “a living surrealist” who “doesn’t ask you to do stuff, she tells you.”

Henry says she was attracted to The Katrina Comedy Fest’s concentration on people’s kindness and courage during the storm, which were generally obscured in media coverage. Like Florence, she had never heard such inspirational stories from Katrina.

“I’d never heard of the kindness. Just the length of time and the steps people took and how quick the water rose and where they were and how they got out,” she says. “I wanted to get into this woman’s body, and I wanted to get into her mind and experience that whole adventure with her.”

Judy Jean Berns as Judy

Judy Jean Berns plays Judy, a “strait-laced” woman with pet ferrets who becomes fast friends with a group of tattooed, pierced kids, “who she never would have had anything to do with before,” Berns says. Travis Michael Holder describes his character Rodney as the play’s comedic relief. While trying to get his elderly parents to safety, Rodney grows increasingly aggravated by his cranky mother. He’s got a “Mario Cantone vibe” about him, Holder says, and the real “Rodney” actually spoke one of Holder’s monologues in the play.

Jan Munroe describes his character Sonny as a take-charge kind of guy, who always comes up with a plan of action and marches forward even through adversity. “He seems to be very practical, in the moment, unfazed,” Munroe says. “I don’t even think he’s horrified by this. He’s taking it in stride as part of what is happening to him.”

Travis Michael Holder as Rodney

L. Trey Wilson’s character Raymond, an artist who lives predominantly on the street, doesn’t just take the storm in stride — he actually views Hurricane Katrina as a positive event in his life because he gets to travel and have an adventure.

Wilson says he believes that art heals, whether the tragedy in question happened yesterday or nearly 10 years later. The Katrina Comedy Fest offers a chance at healing from Katrina even if the memories are still painful, he says.

“To have someone witness it and tell your story as a way of healing, whether it may be what you felt or what someone else felt, it makes you feel like you’re not as alone,” he says.

And while there’s still a sense of outrage in America about what happened, in the play, Munroe points out, “there’s very little outrage, which makes it interesting.”

L. Trey Wilson as Raymond

“These five people didn’t have time to be outraged. They were living it,” Carlisle adds. “Today everything is built on conflict and sensationalism, so it’s nice to finally be a part of something where it is inspirational and people do survive. They’re not negative about it, they’re not bitter about it, and they all still live there and they all still love their home.”

Florence and the cast hope theater companies keep The Katrina Comedy Fest in mind and perhaps stage it in honor of Katrina’s 10th anniversary in 2015. But even if it’s not produced again, the play already seems to have had an impact.

Holder, who teaches acting at the New York Film Academy’s Los Angeles campus, says he brought his students to see the play’s first preview. Echoing a sentiment probably shared by many who remember watching television coverage of Katrina almost eight years ago, one student from Brazil said she had never seen this side of the storm.

“She said, ‘I never heard these personal stories, I never had a personal connection to it. I think of Katrina and I think of people on the roofs, people in the water, but this is the first time I’ve put human faces to it,’” Holder says. “I think that’s really valuable.”

The Katrina Comedy Fest, Lounge Theater, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd, Hollywood. Wed-Thu, Sat-Sun at 8 pm. Through June 30. Tickets $15. www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/1350. 323-469-9988.

**All The Katrina Comedy Fest production photos by Rob Florence.

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Columns

Adapting Saturday Night Fever, Shakespeare and Seneca

by Don Shirley | June 10, 2013

Here they come. In LA theater, summer is now known primarily for two annual phenomena — lots of alfresco classics and of course the flood of indoor Hollywood Fringe productions. Summer hasn’t even begun, technically speaking, and the Fringe doesn’t officially open until this week. But some of the Fringe productions are already up, and the Theatricum Botanicum has officially launched the outdoor classics season.

However, before these phenomena inundate the theater scene, let’s pause for a glance at three classics that have been innovatively adapted for indoor stages.

Lisa Valenzuela, Rick Batalla and Mike Sulprizio in Troubadour Theater Company’s “A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream” at the Falcon Theatre. Photo by Chelsea Sutton.

First and foremost, Troubadour Theater Company has revived A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream. Born in 2000 but significantly revised for 2013, this blend of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy and the disco-era strains of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack opened at the Falcon over the weekend. The laughter has already reached fever pitch.

In many productions of Shakespeare’s Midsummer, the laughs hit their apex by the end of the third act. We see the four lovers chasing each other through the woods, accompanied by Puck’s interventions and the transformation of Bottom into an ass. After the lovers’ fates are resolved and Bottom is back to normal, the last extended segment of Midsummer — the fifth act, when the mechanicals perform their play about Pyramus and Thisbe for the three couples — can feel protracted and repetitive in lesser productions.

The Troubies get all the expected laughs — and then some — in the traditionally funniest part of the play. Those who know the Troubies need to know only that Rick Batalla plays the vain Bottom, Beth Kennedy plays the geeky Helena, Troubie director Matt Walker plays Puck and Quince, and Katherine Malak plays a hard-edged Hermia. Tyler King makes his Troubie debut as Lysander, throwing himself into the physical stunts with aplomb. A former Troubie favorite, Joseph Leo Bwarie, returns to the Troubies after a long absence devoted to touring in Jersey Boys, in the role of a Demetrius who’s as vain as Bottom. Sondheimaniacs will appreciate a couple of allusions to Into the Woods. On opening night, an audience member in the first row, dubbed “Yellow Pants” by the Troubies, contributed to the general comic mayhem, but who knows how he’ll be replaced at subsequent performances.

The company didn’t break for the intermission until just before that potentially anti-climactic fifth act. Immediately I wondered how the Pyramus and Thisbe material could possibly fill what feels like the entire second half of the show.

Matt Merchant and Matt Walker. Photo by Chelsea Sutton.

I need not have worried. The peak of this production’s hilarity occurs after the intermission. I won’t give away too many of the gags, but I’ll say that the one device that sticks most clearly in my brain is an ingenious lion costume, designed by Sharon McGunigle and worn by Walker.

Also, in terms of simply revving up the audience, the rendition of Leroy Green’s and Ron Kersey’s “Disco Inferno” — one of the few songs from Saturday Night Fever that wasn’t written by the Bee Gees — probably hasn’t been topped in Troubie history. For that matter, Eric Heinly’s four-piece band and Molly Alvarez’s choreography propel the entire the entire production with irresistible drive.

Two wonderful cross-dressing performances occur in this production — the tall Rob Nagle (also one of the artistic directors of Antaeus Company) as Thisbe and the short Lisa Valenzuela as Starveling. Nagle not only gets some of the funniest sound-effects-aided screams I’ve heard in a Troubie show, but he has also brought his pug dog Roosevelt into the action, as he did last year in Two Gentlemen of Chicago.

I’ll be surprised if anything else I see this summer tops the ingenuity and sheer entertainment value of A Midsummer Saturday Night Fever’s Dream.

A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream, Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank. Fri 8 pm, Sat 4 and 8 pm, Sun 4 and 7 pm. Closes July 7. www.FalconTheatre.com. 818-955-8101. Also at the much larger, less intimate La Mirada Theatre, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada, Fri July 14 8 pm, Sat July 15 2 and 8 pm, Sun July 15 2 pm. www.lamiradatheatre.com. 562-944-9801.

Seneca’s Hercules Furens is one of those classics that most of us have never seen on a stage. It’s considered a classic primarily because of its antiquity rather than because of any consistent presence in the modern theatrical repertoire.

Not Man Apart is introducing it to us at Miles Memorial Playhouse. NMA is the group best known for its highly choreographed adaptations of rather obscure Shakespeare plays — Pericles Redux at the Kirk Douglas and Titus Redux, also at the Douglas and later at LATC as part of Radar L.A.

John Farmanesh-Bocca and Catherine Galanti in “Hercules Furens.” Photo by Natalie Fong.

John Farmanesh-Bocca adapted and directed Hercules Furens and appears in the titular role (but in the cast list in the program, he uses the name John F. Bocca). He also choreographed, along with fellow cast member Jones Welsh and “NMA Co”. And he’s one of the sound designers, along with Adam Phalen, but the recorded music they use isn’t attributed in the program.

Titus Redux explored post-traumatic stress disorder among American soldiers, using a contemporary setting. Hercules Furens continues that exploration, but this time the setting is the same as that of the original myth. The cast wears costumes associated with ancient Greek/Roman myth, and the choreography uses imposing positions that sometimes look like ancient sculptures becoming animated.

In this version, the half-mortal Hercules completes his heroic labors — ridding the ancient world of a dozen scourges – only to be lured by the scheming wife (Natacha Roi) of his immortal father Jupiter into momentary madness, during which he unwittingly kills his own wife and two children. That’s the PTSD link.

But the play actually seems more contemporary in an earlier scene, in which the Theban usurper Lycus, who has just deposed King Creon, woos the dead king’s daughter — Megara (Courtney Munch), the wife of the absent Hercules. Played by Randolph Curtis Rand, Lycus wears a ridiculous-looking “turban” that makes him an almost funny caricature of a villain, and he uses no-nonsense phrases that sound brutally modern, with no apparent regard for how the gods might judge his actions.

In only this scene did the production resonate with me as Pericles and parts of Titus Redux did. Apollo Dukakis plays Amphitryon, Hercules’ foster father who witnesses Lycus’ abuse of Megara and later tries to provide a path forward for the grieving Hercules; his perspective also provides a path for modern audiences to enter the story more fully.

The rest of the production is well executed, but the herculean labors seem somewhat pre-packaged and predictable, compared to the scene mentioned above, in which we’re not sure what might happen next. And with a running time of only 65 minutes, Hercules Furens occasionally looks more like a Classics Illustrated comic book than an actual classic.

W. Lochridge O’ Bryan in “Richard III.” Photo courtesy of Zombie Joe.

You might say the same thing about Denise Devin’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III for Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group. She has edited the Bard’s second longest play down to only an hour.

I don’t object to the severe editing per se. I’ve felt that many other productions of Richard III were too long and repetitive. And while seven out of 10 cast members play more than one role in Devin’s staging, which can lead to some confusion, I’ve never seen a Richard III in which the story remained crystal-clear at all times.

No, the problem here isn’t the brevity — it’s the relative lack of imagination. In my previous visits to Zombie Joe’s, I’ve found visual flourishes that made me think anew about the material, even if it was as familiar as a Poe story or Macbeth. Not so with Devin’s Richard III.

I do, however, applaud the casting of such veteran LA avant-garde actors as Tina Preston and Lee Kissman in this Richard III. It’s fascinating to watch cutting-edge actors from an earlier generation work with their present-day counterparts.

Hercules Furens, Miles Memorial Playhouse, 1130 Lincoln Blvd., Santa Monica. Thu-Sat 8 pm, Sun 5 pm. Closes June 23. www.notmanapart.com or www.brownpapertickets.com.

Richard III, Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre, 4850 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fri 8:30 pm, Sun 7 pm. Closes next Sunday. Zombiejoes.homestead.com. 818-202-4120.

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First Person

Hollywood Narcissism in Me Love Me

by Brandon Baruch | June 10, 2013

Sto Strouss and Benjamin Durham in “Me Love Me.” Photo by David Offner.

I was working in New York a few years ago, and the stage manager, upon learning I was born and raised in Los Angeles, asked me, “So wait a minute. You’ve lived in Hollywood your entire life, and you’re not a vampire?” I had to explain to her that native Angelenos aren’t vampires. If anything, we’re the Transylvanians in the pub at the bottom of the hill, warning tourists “Don’t go up there after dark!”

I should pause here to say that I have many incredibly talented and successful friends who work in theater, film, and TV, and I have great respect for the work they do and the professionalism with which they do it. But I’ve also met a couple of people who would push their own mothers in front of a train to advance their careers, and that’s who Me Love Me is about.

The story of Me Love Me is simple — an out-of-work actor with a drug problem meets his own biological clone. The two men embark on a tear of booze, drugs, and clone-sex, leaving his girlfriend to pick up the pieces and try to move on.

Brandon Baruch

I wanted to write a play about Hollywood narcissism. I mused on different ways to explore this theme, all the while wondering what might be the purest form of self-love I could create. I remembered that many years ago, a friend and I had casually bandied around a script idea about a man who meets his own biological clone. It was perfect! What better way to express self-love than by sleeping with your own clone? I reached out to my friend and received his blessing to pursue the idea.

In July 2012, I had a meeting with three very talented actors. I pitched them my story idea and told them I wanted to premiere a play in the 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival. We brainstormed the concept for an hour, then went our separate ways for a few weeks to ruminate. We started meeting Sunday mornings in a lovely park in Hollywood, where we workshopped the story and characters of Me Love Me through improvisational games and exercises. I filmed these rehearsals and used them as inspiration to develop the script for Me Love Me. For the first six months of rehearsal, Benjamin Durham and Sto Strouss took turns playing both the character of Tuck and Tuck’s clone (affectionately named “Cluck” for “Clone Tuck”). Ben and Sto do not particularly look alike, so it was important to me that both men contributed equally to the creation of both characters so they could develop a mutual vocabulary of movements and speech patterns. Lizzie Adelman created the role of Gemma, Tuck’s wearied and beleaguered girlfriend.

Over the next six months, I often brought in new script pages for the cast. Early drafts of the script were difficult to write, but as we continued to workshop, the characters’ voices started to become very clear in my head. It was also helpful that I actually got to meet these fictional people as I started writing for them. If I ever wondered how a character might respond to a certain situation, I could ask him.

Looking at our final product on stage, it’s clear that the actors also benefited tremendously from our workshop process. By the time we open in the Hollywood Fringe Festival, my cast will already have been playing these roles for nearly a full year. The depth and detail they bring to their performances is staggering.

Sto Strouss and Lizzie Adelman

Early on in our story development process, I introduced the element of drug addiction into our plot. Addiction plays a large role in much of my writing. I won’t try to hide my agenda — Me Love Me is, to an extent, a condemnation of my characters’ lifestyles and choices. But whereas originally, I intended this play to be a subversive and biting satire, as the script continued to develop, it became clear that I was actually writing a tragedy.

One of the most interesting (if difficult) parts of this writing process has been learning to empathize with and understand the loneliness and emptiness from which my characters seek desperate relief. Me Love Me is an intentionally funny play, but it’s grounded in a very real sadness which makes it different from anything I’ve written in the past.

In retrospect, I originally created the character of Tuck Whitney to be a punching bag. I was working through some residual frustration with a friend whose cocaine and alcohol habits had effectively ended our relationship, and I enjoyed finding new ways to knock the character down. But over time, as I started to care for him more, it began to feel like a slow-motion train wreck. I found myself looking for ways to save him, knowing his redemption ultimately wasn’t in the cards.

In January 2013, we performed our script for the first time in front of an audience in the form of a semi-staged reading. I invited my most intelligent and opinionated colleagues, and after the reading I received a lot of very smart feedback on the script. This reading was also where I first captured the attention of Marc Warzecha, who has directed the premiere of the play, in the Hollywood Fringe Festival.

Sto Strouss, Benjamin Durham and Lizzie Adelman

I met Marc when we worked together at the Kirk Douglas Theater in November 2012 on The Second City’s A Christmas Carol: Twist Your Dickens. Marc directed the production, and I was his lighting designer. I have incredible respect for Marc’s work and also his process. His contributions to the project shaped the play in ways I never would have thought to explore.

The final three months of rehearsal were a very different type of development. Having locked down the script, the next task was to explore every facet of these characters’ personalities. The script we created is very tricky, because the story is often outrageous and farcical, but the characters need to seem human for the play to have any real impact. Despite its clone plot, I have never considered Me Love Me to be a work of science fiction. I was never interested in how the clone came to exist (don’t worry, there is an explanation in the play — I just don’t think it’s an important element of the story.) I always wanted this play to be a story about realistic people reacting to unrealistic situations.

I hope our Hollywood Fringe Festival production is only the first of many developments for Me Love Me. We created something dark and funny and strange and tragic and beautiful, but there’s still so much room for us to grow. After the Hollywood Fringe, we’re headed to FringeNYC in August to reprise our production. I would like to continue finessing the script with the goal of sitting down in a theater for a six-week run this winter.

I am very proud of what Me Love Me has become. I believe we’re telling a story that has never been told, and I hope audiences enjoy riding down the slippery slope with Tuck Whitney.

Me Love Me, Fringe Mainstage at Open Fist Theatre, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood 90038. June 14 7:30 pm, June 15 2 pm, June 18 9 pm, June 23 6:30 pm, June 26 10:30 pm, June 29 3 pm. Tickets: $15. www.hollywoodfringe.org.

**All Me Love Me production photos by David Offner.

Brandon Baruch is a director, playwright, and lighting designer. His original plays include Out of the Vat and into the Fire, The Defamation of Helen Keller, Penguin Pan, Deicide: a Sorta Musical and Top That! Los Angeles lighting design credits include The Second City’s A Christmas Carol: Twist Your Dickens (Kirk Douglas Theatre), Lost Moon Radio — America (South Coast Rep Studio Series), A Kind of Love Story (Sacred Fools Theater), Spring Awakening (Arena Stage at Theatre of Arts — Ovation Award nomination) and the 33rd and 34th Annual LA Weekly Awards (Avalon Hollywood). Brandon is the company lighting designer for Lost Moon Radio and the staff lighting designer for the Hollywood Fringe Festival.

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Matrix Theatre Company Explores Little-Known African Genocide

by Deborah Behrens | June 7, 2013

Daniel Bess, Rebecca Mozo. John Sloan, Phil LaMarr, Joe Holt, Julanne Chidi Hill in “We Are Proud to Present…” Photo by Jillian Armenante.

Mounting a seriocomic play that employs actor exercises as a metatheatrical device to explore racial genocide takes guts for any producer.

Unless you’re Joe Stern, whose Matrix Theatre Company has garnered both critical acclaim and numerous awards for such consciousness-raising productions as Stick Fly, Neighbors and a multiracial All My Sons.

This time Stern has chosen 31-year-old Brooklyn-based playwright du jour Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915. Directed by Jillian Armenante, the play has its West Coast premiere this Saturday. The cast features Daniel Bess, Julanne Chidi Hill, Joe Holt, Phil LaMarr, Rebecca Mozo and John Sloan.

Joe Stern and Jillian Armenante

“For me, this is part of a dialogue that I started four years ago,” Stern explains, seated on the Matrix stage one morning last week. “The first part was showing upper middle class African-Americans and their lives in the theater and giving that playwright [Stick Fly’s Lydia Diamond] a voice. Because the plays we were getting were mostly ghetto plays. In [Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’] Neighbors, we showed the whole historical perspective, including the slavery and minstrel show antecedents that are still with us. We also dealt with something that was very controversial, which was black self-hatred, and that disturbed people.”

For Arthur Miller’s classic, All My Sons, Joe and Kate Keller were played by black actor Alex Morris and white actor Anne Gee Byrd. Their son Chris was biracial, the neighbors were both Latino and white, while the children of Joe’s business partner were Asian. Stern says he tried to make it an inclusive experience for more than just white audiences.

“I didn’t change the language,” he clarifies. “I didn’t change the year and we tried to create a neighborhood for now. So it was very deliberate. It wasn’t just ‘throw a bunch of races against the wall and see where they land.’ We had a great playwright who basically wrote a great tragedy, so that everybody could be inside the play and not just look at it and say it’s just about white people.”

We Are Proud debuted in spring 2012 at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre followed by a second mounting last fall for New York’s SoHo Rep. Both were directed by Eric Ting. The Matrix is the play’s third production, with others scheduled for Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington D.C., Company One in Boston, Available Light Theater Company in Columbus and InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia.

In Drury’s play, six actors (3 white and 3 black) come together to devise a work based on the little known Herero and Namaqua Genocide of 1904-07. It was considered the first genocide of the 20^th century and was a precursor to both the Holocaust forty years later and the mass slaughter in Rwanda in the 1990s.

Joe Holt, Daniel Bess, John Sloan, Julanne Chidi Hill, Rebecca Mozo and Phil LaMarr

In his book When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani writes: “There is a link that connects the genocide of the Herero and the Nazi Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide. That link is race branding, whereby it became possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience.”

The sad historical saga that pitted German colonists against the Herero tribe (and later the Nama), involved land and cattle confiscation, the attempted building of a railroad with slave labor and a subsequent rebellion that led German general Lothar von Trotha to vow to exterminate them: “I will destroy the African tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge, which will remain.”

Von Trotha drove the tribe into the Omaheke area of the Kalahari Desert, where wells were then poisoned or patrolled, and anyone caught crawling back was bayoneted, including women and children. Only a labor shortage stopped the killing. Survivors were put in concentration camps where medical experiments were regularly performed. By 1907, only 15,000 Herero remained out of an original 80,000.

“The Germans sent out postcards of themselves packing the skulls of Herero tribespeople who had died [on Shark Island],” says Armenante, seated on the stage across from Stern. “As if to say, ‘Look what we’ve accomplished here.’ They were very popular in Germany.”

Fictional letters written by German soldiers to their families form the basis for the We Are Proud actors’ thoughtful but ineffectual attempt to theatricalize the horrific event. Parsing this skimpy and one-sided source material eventually escalates racial tensions between the white and black cast members. The play raises the issue of how subjective racial filters can consciously and unconsciously color the recounting of history and the truth.

Early 20th Century postcard showing German colonialist soldiers packing up skulls of Herero tribespeople who died in Nambia’s Shark Island Concentration Camp.

“Where are the Africans?” asks Actor 2/Black Man. “I think we should see some Africans in Africa.”

In a talkback for the SoHo production, playwright Drury explained that she was “trying to shine a light on a particularly brutal piece of history that not a lot of people know about, but I was also hoping to write a play about race that didn’t make me want to die. There are lots of plays about race that allow you to leave the theater and congratulate yourself for not being racist. I think that is pointless. I wanted to create a play that allowed the people participating in it to talk about it without falling into politically correct scripts.”

Directing a Play About Genocide

For Matrix director Armenante, the play represents the latest project in a theatrical career known for producing, directing and writing material with thought-provoking themes. The former Circle X Theatre Company co-founder and artistic director is the force behind such multiple award-winning productions as Love Loves A Pornographer, Laura Comstock’s Bag-Punching Dog, Un Flagrante Gothico and Great Men of Science, Nos 21 & 22, often in collaboration with her partner Alice Dodd.

A former member of Seattle’s Annex Theatre, where she also ran a gay theater ensemble called Alice B, Armenante moved to LA to appear in the 1998 Mark Taper Forum production of Cider House Rules and received an Ovation Award nomination for lead actress. She started Circle X prior to the first Taper rehearsals, and the new company’s production of Great Men of Science led the intimate theater Ovation nomination totals with seven the same year. In 1999, Stern cast Armenante in his television series Judging Amy, where she played Donna Kozlowski for six seasons.

The two have wanted to do a play together for some time. “I have been interested in exploring genocide for years,” Armenante explains. “Six years ago I actually traveled to Namibia. I was walking around downtown Swakopmund and going into shops that were selling Second Reich helmets and swastikas. I was confused at the time because I thought I was going to the lovely African desert and instead they were selling wiener schnitzel. Seeing these two cultures collide in real life and walking around sauerkraut houses in the middle of Africa was a little jarring and alarming for me.”

Phil LaMarr

When Stern sent her Drury’s play, Armenante says she found it amazing that while in Swakopmund, she saw no buildings that honored the memory of the revolt and massacre that had occurred there 100 years ago.

“In researching this play and knowing about the Herero uprising as they called it — and having experienced a lot of other sort of genocide museums — I pay a lot of respect to that,” she emphasizes. “It seems like there’s so many things going on with racism. Why is this particular genocide not remembered? There are many cultures in which genocide is not remembered or counted for some reason, be it economic or cultural or whatnot. That’s what attracted me to the piece. Like, why do some count and why do some not?”

Armenante had an opportunity to fly to Iraq in the middle of the rehearsal process. She says she fought hard to be taken to Halabja where a genocidal massacre of Kurdish people occurred in 1988. Saddam Hussein dropped chemical bombs over civilian neighborhoods killing an estimated 5,000 people with an additional 7,000 to 10,000 injured. It is considered the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian population in history.

Armenante brought back a “very graphic” and “badly made” video to show the cast. They watched it together on a projector set up for the show. She admits that the images were nightmarish.

“It became a conversation that was just more immediate because they’re people who are like us,” she explains quietly. “They’re people who were alive while we were here. They’re people who were eliminated in their steps, on their front yard, holding their children. It wasn’t Pompeii.”

And yet, says Armenante, no one in the room had heard of Iraq’s Bloody Friday. “Not a single person. So we had that dialogue, that this is still occurring today, that it’s not a tribe 100 years ago. Grounding the play away from its funny little actor moments like ‘No, come on you guys, this is serious’ to something concrete was very forceful in the rehearsing of this.”

Having Room to Explore

Daniel Bess, Joe Holt, Phil Lamarr, Rebecca Mozo, Julanne Chidi Hill and John Sloan

The action in We Are Proud alternates between the actors rehearsing and presenting vignettes of their findings, often in a seemingly improvisational and comical manner. That’s because playwright Drury, a fan of ensemble-created text, has intentionally left open wide sections of the script for the actors and director to devise or inhabit their own reactions. The play was written as her graduate school MFA thesis at Brown University.

In a recent New York Times interview by Rob Weinert-Kendt, Drury gave credit for the play’s style to a historiography class taught by Brown professor Patricia Ybarra.

“She has people do class presentations about serious subjects, and these undergraduates always did them either super-irreverently or super-earnestly,” Drury recalled. “You’d hear students being like, ‘I, as a white man, cannot ever understand the pain,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, just say what you’re talking about.’ There was so much fear in speaking with authority, which I could really relate to.”

So how has the process been for Armenante and the Matrix cast? “This is the kind of theater I was sort of weaned on,” the director notes. “I left a very commercial theater program and ended up studying in London where my world just sort of shattered. I went from being a New York actor to seeing people sewing themselves inside stockings. Much more exploratory. Working at early Riverside Studios. This is more my wheelhouse of what I love to work in, and it’s rare to be able to get this opportunity in the world of commercial theater.”

More than half the cast consists of Antaeus Company members whose focus is presenting classical plays. Holt, Bess, Mozo and Sloan are all seasoned interpreters of Shakespeare and Shaw, Coward and Pinter. But they, and fellow cast members Hill and LaMarr, are thankful for the opportunity to perform in this collaborative way, Armenante says.

Phil LaMarr, Julanne Chidi Hill, Rebecca Mozo and John Sloan

“Even this week they have each taken me aside and in their own way, said, ‘I cannot be grateful enough to be able to do this kind of work and bathe in our own impulse and instinct,’” she says. “I think they all know how fortunate they are to have such a good piece and to be able to work in a way that they generate and get to mess with.”

Everyday Racism

So can the well-intentioned ever get beyond their racism? Is polite social dialogue simply a mask for a simmering subliminal outrage? Or as director Eric Ting posed in a Victory Garden Theater audience video: “With our sound bite lifestyle, how do we not fall prey to superficiality? What does it mean when we tackle big things from a two-dimensional place?”

“These six characters are really no different from us, in the sense that we all think of ourselves as PC to some extent,” offers Stern. “We give it lip service at Starbucks or at dinner tables, and spend more time in social intercourse mixing it with political intercourse. Basically that’s the narrative of the play, which is that they come to consciousness with their known or unknown demons and it just escalates. Then history just repeats itself. And they’re just like you and I.

“The audience knows from the beginning that there’s an elephant in the room and they watch it evolve.”

For Armenante, art remains a crucial vehicle for facilitating behavioral change by advancing social and political awareness. “I was a 14-year-old when I got to see [Pablo Picasso’s] Guernica and the fury of the nostril of that horse,” she offers. “If I wasn’t affected by that art, I wouldn’t have known that Hitler bombed a village. So through art and through exploring these things, stories can get told and a conversation can continue. I don’t know that I’d sit in a Starbucks…and be like, “Yeah, how about that Herero massacre, eh? You know what I mean?

“So I think it is the duty of artists to bring this into discussion.”

We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915, Matrix Theatre Company, 7657 Melrose Ave, LA 90046. Opens Saturday. Thu-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Through August 11. Tickets: $30. 323-852-1445 www.matrixtheatre.com

All We Are Proud to Present… production photos by Jillian Armenante.

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