If you were a teacher in grade school with both Linda Toliver and Gary Guidinger in your class, you’d quickly learn to separate the two of them to opposite corners of the room.  Even then, by the end of the day you’d probably visit your principal with the recommendation that one of the two be transferred to a different class altogether.  These two producers of 99-seat theater — including the current Day Drinkers at the Odyssey — make up a very close-knit couple. They complete each other with a comfortable congruency easy to comprehend yet difficult to categorize.

They don’t, for example, finish each other’s thoughts so much as challenge them.  Yet they seldom disagree and almost never argue.  They don’t employ a personal vernacular so unique that others are automatically excluded from their denotations.  At the same time we others have to hop to keep up with their high jinks.  They bounce in the blink of an eye from the silly to the sober and then back again. At one point in the interview after a particularly probing question they stand up and walk a few feet away with the instructions “We’ll be right back; entertain yourself for a few” and huddle like a football team of two to call their next snappy-back signal.

How did these cut-ups come together?  The question makes Guidinger’s blue eyes twinkle and Toliver’s brown eyes glisten as the memory surfaces.

Guidinger: “I was taking some acting classes with Milton Katselas, and money was always an issue to the extent I never had any.  But Milton liked me so he kept finding ways to give me breaks.  He had me meet with his class bookkeeper.  That was Linda.  We went out to dinner to discuss my financial insolvency.  The next thing I knew we had driven to the top of Mount Wilson, and I was kissing her under a full moon over the valley.  Then the next morning—”

Toliver: “Wait a minute.  That’s my part of the story.”

Guidinger: “Oh, sorry.  Go ahead.”

Toliver: “I wanted to watch the launch of the [Space Shuttle] Discovery.  This was the first launch after the Challenger disaster.  We had to be up at 5:30 am.”

Guidinger: “So I picked you up.”

Toliver: “No, I picked you up.”

Guidinger: “That’s right.  I guess you did.”

Toliver: “And we’ve never been apart since.”

Guidinger: “That shuttle going up was the launching of who we are as well.  We went up with that craft and haven’t come down yet.”

They share a high-five slap that reverberates throughout the Odyssey Theatre lobby and echoes across the parking lot like a gunshot.

Before sweet kisses or full moons or rocket blast-offs, their journeys began in similar fashions but on opposite coasts.

Toliver: “I started as a dancer in New York.  I was such a shy kid I’d run and hide when someone came to the house so my parents put me in a dance class when I was three to try to help me with that.  Of course then people would say, ‘Linda, let’s see you dance,’ which didn’t help at all.  But when my teachers in Long Island took our class to see a Broadway show, I became so enchanted I wanted to do that.  I made my professional debut at 15 with the Manhattan Rockets which toured to state fairs.  I was dancing with the [Radio City Music Hall] Rockettes at 18.  I say there are three things that sum up my feelings about the profession: I’m thrilled, amazed and honored to be a part of it.”

Guidinger: “Us kids in the neighborhood used to put on plays and make all the other kids and parents pay 25 cents to see them — just silly home-written stuff that was as much fun as anything we do today.  Then later, as a psychology major at Cal Poly Pomona, I had to choose an elective so I took acting.  Dr. Robert Gilbert, my first acting teacher, cast me in [Harold] Pinter’s Applicant.  When the audience started busting up, I loved it.  Then in the West Coast college premiere of The House of Blue Leaves I learned to play seven songs on the piano as Artie Shaughnessy.  But the incident that turned me full-scale to theater was writing a play, Hap Harper’s Blues.  I spent hours in a room by myself creating this thing.  When the school produced it, I was not by myself any more.  It became like a party about me all the time.  I felt like I was back with a family.”

With all the delight and disorder that such associations can bring.  Or as Toliver explains it, “We were part of a beach volleyball group for 17 years.  There was one guy who’d get so angry he’d hit the ball hard enough it would bounce halfway out of sight.  We’d have to wait for him to go get it.  You put up with that kind of bullshit when the dysfunction is a part of your own family.”

Fate began moving them toward a common destination.  Toliver: “I stepped off a plane in LA on January 3, 1970 intending to stay here about a year and then go back to New York.  It was such a beautiful day here compared to the chill and snow there that I changed my mind.  I later made my way to the Beverly Hills Playhouse where I became a student of Milton’s and an employee for the next 10 years.  In 1982 I auditioned for the show Durante at the Zephyr Theatre.  I met the owner of course and continued doing shows there until ’86 when I started taking over production chores.”

Guidinger: “I so enjoyed what I did at Cal Poly that I went on to get my MFA in theater at UC San Diego with Beth Hogan and several others of that generation.  Then in 1977 I acted here at the Odyssey.  Ron [Sossi] cast me and Beth in An Evening of Dirty Religious Plays.  I feel like being here now is a homecoming for me.  You know how theaters have ghosts?  Well the ones here are friendly ghosts.  I talk to them which makes me appear even crazier when I get caught at it.  But I love having the different stages here too for my canvas.”

His first canvas entered his life shortly after attempting to resolve his debts for acting class but settling for a kiss and a lifelong commitment instead.  He joined Toliver at the Zephyr, where they dived into a two-decade job of producing the work of LA writers and actors.

Over those decades they produced Joe Keyes’ and Rob Elk’s Bob’s Holiday Office Party, Jim Brochu’s and Steve Schalchlin’s The Last Session and The Big Voice: God or Merman?, a Del Shores trilogy (Southern Baptist Sissies, The Trials and Tribulations of a Trailer Trash Housewife and Sordid Lives), Elliott Shoenman’s AfterMath with Annie Potts [which transferred as a guest production to the Matrix Theatre], the solo works of Lynn Manning, Luis Alfaro, Michael Kearns, Amy Hill, Eric Trules, Burke Byrnes, Colin Martin and Edie McClurg, plus a half dozen by Justin Tanner: Procreation, Space Therapy, Teen Girl, Wife Swappers, Voice Lessons and [Day Drinkers, which opens August 27 under the direction of Bart DeLorenzo.  They spent a total of 23 years at the Zephyr and have now operated out of the Odyssey for one year.

Guidinger: “When commitment happens, time vanishes.”

Toliver: “Well it’s like you said.  It’s like water flowing down a toilet.  At first it swirls around slowly.  Then as it gets closer to flushing on out, it starts swirling faster and faster.”

Guidinger: “That’s not a very pleasant image.  Why don’t we call it a spiral instead?  We all live in our own spiral, and age makes the spiral whirl faster.”

Toliver: “[On leaving the Zephyr] we’d reached the point where we needed to go, although I didn’t realize until after we left how isolated we’d become over there.”

Guidinger: “It gave us a remarkable sense of floating.”

Toliver: “It may have seemed like floating to you.  I felt like I was in a hurricane.”

Guidinger: “Well it’s sort of a kite string theory.  You fly a kite by holding onto that string and guiding it.  It’s only held up by being held down.  Once the string is cut, you drift without visible forms of support.  That’s what I meant by floating.”

Toliver: “I think it’s like that quote from [the painter] Joan Miro that goes ‘You have to get your feet firmly planted on the ground in order to jump in the air’.”

Guidinger: “That’s what I just said in a slightly different way.  That’s just my kite theory.”

Toliver: “No, it’s not.  Or if it is, you probably saw it posted on my refrigerator. . . .A mint anyone?  Take a white one.  They’re the mints.  The red ones are Advil.”

Guidinger: “When we see people spin off from something we produced on to some further success for themselves, we remember a little piece of what got them started.  It’s a kick in the ass when that happens.”

Toliver: “We’re a launching pad for so many actors and writers.”

Guidinger: “I don’t particularly enjoy directing, although I’m pretty good at it.  I like producing.  The fun for me is putting together the whole package.  And I continue to design the sets because I’m such a cheap bastard.”

Toliver: “The state of theater ebbs and flows.”

Guidinger: “It does.  The health of theater is dependent on the people doing it.”

Toliver: “That’s right.  In every theater in America we all face the same issues in our section of the entertainment field.  You take a couple in Long Island.  By the time they pay a sitter, drive in to New York to see a Broadway show, eat dinner at a nice restaurant and buy their tickets, they’ve spent almost $400.  The freest form of theater in terms of the material presented is in our 99-seaters.  We have no huge corporate sponsors to answer to, so we don’t have to censor or adapt the message in any way.  We can offer a much broader voice than toeing a corporate line.  We can concentrate on the work and listen to that voice.  That’s why what we do is so important.”

Guidinger: “Hey, if it ain’t fun, we don’t do it.”

Toliver: “We just want the audience to be willing to take the ride, to see another point of view.”

Guidinger: “And to not come in with that attitude of ‘Okay, entertain me.’  They can bring too much to the table and not be available to the work before them.  Expectations can breed discontent.”

Toliver: “I like it when people leave the theater feeling good.”

Guidinger: “You know what I love?  I love sitting up in the booth during a show and looking down on the audience and the actors at the same time.  It makes me feel like God.”

Toliver: “I don’t think you should be saying that.  It makes you sound conceited or arrogant.”

Guidinger: “No, I didn’t mean the God but more like the ancient gods.  Look, when I build a one-inch scale model of a set, I can stand above it or move around from side to side and look down on what I created.  That’s the same feeling I get watching from the booth.”

Toliver: “Of course in theater that audience becomes a whole other character just as exciting as the ones on stage.”

Guidinger; “Exactly.  And something about sitting just 10 feet away from the faces you’re watching makes for a richer experience than TV or film.”

Toliver: “And let’s don’t forget the richness of language.  That’s why we like Justin Tanner.  We spent years liking his stuff, and when he lost his last home at Third Stage in Burbank, we wanted to take him on.  He writes dialogue that skewers everybody, but it doesn’t hurt.  He’s a worthy voice.”

Guidinger: “His work is sometimes dangerous.  It’s challenging to an audience to hear it.”

Toliver: “He makes you squirm.  He makes you look at something in a whole new way.”

In his latest, Day Drinkers, Tanner unveils an account of early morning regulars at a dive bar who are boozing and bruiting their backstories into a bacchanalian baptism of boasts.  Guidinger, with help from his daughter Meghan Adkins in town from the Bay Area, is currently putting finishing touches on the bar where the drinks are downed and the secrets shared.  He and Toliver meanwhile are searching for still a newer venue to stage Tanner’s Voice Lessons after successful productions of it at the Zephyr, Sacred Fools and New York’s Studio@Theatre Row.

Guidinger: “When we did Voice Lessons in New York, we were five stories up in this complex.  They could hear the laughter all the way down in the lobby.”

Toliver: “Management petitioned us to caution our audiences to exit quietly from the play because they were still laughing and discussing it so loudly it disturbed the other shows in the building still in progress.”

Wherever they mount it next, they want to keep their dream cast of Laurie Metcalf, French Stewart and Maile Flanagan intact.  But while they troll for that next site, they’re moving ahead with other plans for a new show by an emerging playwright.

Toliver: “We have a play Joan Beber wrote when she was 76.  She’s 77 now, and this will be her first produced play.”

Guidinger: “She graduated from the USC writing program at 60 so it’s taken her 17 years to reach this point.  It’s called Hunger: In Bed with Roy Cohn.  He was the attorney who worked with Joe McCarthy during his hearings and also prosecuted the spy case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”

As for other speculations on the future, the couple has no radical plans of deviating from the course they’ve thus far traveled.

Toliver: “My baby brother died at 43 from ALS, the same disease Stephen Hawking has.  He spent a lifetime working at a job he hated.  I think that contributed to his getting that disease.  I’m thankful I don’t hate what I do.”

Guidinger: “If I can keep the country laughing, that’s my job.”

Toliver: “Laughing and thinking.”

Guidinger: “And feeling.”

It’s not hard to believe Linda Toliver and Gary Guidinger will keep on laughing, thinking, feeling and kissing and sharing those kisses with us—at least on a creative level—for many full moons left to come.

**Day Drinkers, AfterMath and Voice Lessons photos by Ed Krieger

Day Drinkers, a world premiere by Justin Tanner, produced by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble with Linda Toliver and Gary Guidinger, opens Sat. Aug. 27, 8 pm through Sun. Oct. 9. Wed. (9/21 & 10/5 only), Fri., Sat. 8 pm, Sun. 2 pm.  Wed. and Fri. $25.00; Sat.and Sun. $30.00.  [Post-show discussions available for groups of 15 or more by calling the box office]  Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 South Sepulveda Boulevard, LA (one block north of Olympic Blvd.) 310-477-2055. www.odysseytheatre.com.