Gritty, provocative new works find a home at Elephant Theatre Company, the West Coast’s answer to (and recent partner with) Off-Broadway’s LAByrinth Theater Company. As Elephant dives into its 15th season of such plays, Lindsay Allbaugh, the newly appointed ETC co-artistic director with David Fofi, isn’t afraid to ask tough questions.
Lindsay Allbaugh
Allbaugh is directing the season’s inaugural production, the West Coast premiere of Kate Fodor’s 100 Saints You Should Know, which opens May 27. It tells the tale of a priest who must reconcile his desires with his role in the church, a teenage boy confused about his own sexual identity and a young woman desperate for spiritual validation. They are brought together on one fateful night. It’s an intricate weaving of multifaceted characters with such themes as religion, sexuality, parent-child dynamics and good vs. evil.
“Simply put, it’s a group of people who all collide together in one night. They all have questions about God and faith and relationships, and each other,” Allbaugh explains. However, when tackling universally argued and sought-after subjects like faith and religion, the process of asking questions and finding answers is never simple.
Allbaugh continues, “If you’re going to ask your audience to go on this journey with you and ask these questions of themselves, as a company we had to ask ourselves the questions first and be willing to debate our own beliefs and express them out loud. So we had a lot of discussions with the cast over our own questions of faith and our own challenges and obstacles within relationships with our parents, and how those fuel us and have made us who we are, and how that mirrors what these characters are going through.”
For Allbaugh and her team, the process of discovery meant venturing out of the creative haven of the theater and putting these queries to the test out in the field. “We all went to church together. There’s a great church right by us, so we went to mass. Then we talked about what that brought up for us and discussed why people might be drawn to it.
“Several of us were raised Catholic, so we have that history among us. And if you’re not a religious person, you’re bound to ask yourself why people go to church and have this faith. We had really good debates about it, not in any sort of judgmental way but in a very inquisitive way. I think that’s where you start. You have to make it personal. The actors have to find the parts of them that are embodied in these characters in order to make it work. We are still asking those questions and discovering those moments. I suspect we will continue to do so all the way through the run.”
According to Allbaugh, the asking of these profoundly difficult, perhaps unanswerable questions was the key to choosing this play. It contains “a lot of questions asked but not really answered, which is what I like about it. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to hammer you over the head with a message about God or faith.
Kate Huffman and Marco Naggar
“It’s asking questions we’ve all asked in our lifetimes. It doesn’t try to tie it up nicely with a bow. I think it’s much more like holding a mirror up to life and allowing us to explore these very complex, dimensional characters who find answers in each other and through life experiences.” This spirit of scrutiny and discovery has become the hallmark of the Elephant’s productions.
So what is an “Elephant” play? In Allbaugh’s words, the standards are high. It starts with a rigorous selection process a year in advance. “What we’re looking for, first of all, are plays that are good for our ensemble. We know who our actors are and certainly we want works that are going to fit them. We like larger plays with multiple principal characters.
”Elephant plays are complex stories that ask questions, but you don’t feel playwrights have their hands too much in them, where they’re trying to tell you what their points of view are. Very rich human stories. We’re often looking for West Coast and world premieres. We really are championing the new American play at Elephant.”
This upcoming 2011 season is certainly no exception to those standards. 100 Saints You Should Know came personally recommended to the Elephant Theatre Company from Los Angeles’ own flagship company, Center Theatre Group, where Allbaugh works as executive assistant to artistic director Michael Ritchie. “The Center Theatre Group is so supportive of Elephant. Sometimes their literary department will come across a play they’ll hand to me and say, ‘This feels Elephant to us.’ 100 Saints… was one of those.”
Playwright Fodor is a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Roger L. Stevens Award, the National Theatre Conference’s Barrie Stavis Award and a Joseph Jefferson Citation. The play had its world premiere Off-Broadway in 2007 with Playwrights Horizons in New York.
“We’re also constantly looking for some good dark comedies,” Allbaugh adds. “That’s a hard slot to fill.” Enter Love Sick, by LAByrinth company member Kristina Poe, a graphic tale following one woman’s quest for revenge. Slated for an Elephant opening on Sept. 9, directed by Fofi, Love Sick will continue the Elephant’s bi-coastal partnership with LAByrinth, which was announced last October. According to Fofi, “The hope is that the two companies can find a home away from home with each other and bring their work to the opposite coast.” Along with the Elephant production, Love Sick will be presented later this year by Airport Bar Productions in New York.
“This season the Elephant Theatre Company is especially proud to have the first two plays of the season be the works of female playwrights,” Allbaugh notes.
Pamela Roylance and Brendan Farrell
In November, at the end of the centennial celebration of Tennessee Williams’ birth, the Elephant will stage the screenplay of Williams’ tragicomic movie Baby Doll. ” For this,” Allbaugh says, “we’re asking Joel Daavid, who is a visionary lighting and set designer, to direct and we’re very anxious to see what artistry he’s going to bring to the work.”
When looking at the body of work that has come out of the Elephant, which operates in three unassuming, sub-100-seat Hollywood venues, Allbaugh says that “what it really comes down to is quality. We’re very specific about the actors that are a part of our company, and we’ve put together what I believe is the best acting company in LA. We also work with very talented designers and continue striving to raise the bar.
“For as little money as we operate on, we try to get the biggest bang for our buck. We try to make our audience feel like when they come to us, they really are a part of something. We’re small. We have very little resources but we scrape it together. We’re scrappy but I think our audiences appreciate that. They know we’re giving everything we have to create and to tell a story that’s going to move them or make them laugh.”
In discussing her theatrical philosophy, Allbaugh draws parallels to those existential, unanswerable questions of personal relationships and religion that Fodor’s 100 Saints… deals with. “Theater itself is a communion. It’s a group of people coming together in search of an experience.
The company tries “to provide an experience you can’t get anywhere else. In theater, it’s a one-time-only performance. When you go to a play, you’re going to see that performance, and no one is ever going to see that same performance ever again. So we give everything to it and the audience in turn gets as much out of it as they can.”
**All production photography by: Sven Ellirand
100 Saints You Should Know, presented by Elephant Theatre Company, opens May 27; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7 pm; through June 26. Tickets: $20 (opening night, $30). Elephant Space, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood; 877-369-9112 or elephanttheatrecompany.com.
