Archway Theatre exterior; Photo by Steven Sabel
Seven years into his successful outdoor Redlands Shakespeare Festival, producing artistic director Steven Sabel has made the move he’d been contemplating for years. He’s testing the LA scene with his brand of histrionic Shakespeare that entertains thousands of audiences each spring at the enormous Redlands Bowl.
Having directed and starred in many gigantic, non-Equity stagings of the Bard’s plays in Redlands, he was feeling itchy for a different kind of venue and a different kind of audience. The only thing holding him back was that he had become one of the biggest fish in the small Inland Empire pond encompassing San Bernardino, Redlands and Riverside. This week, however, Sabel is celebrating the grand opening of his Archway Studio/Theatre in the downtown arts district east of Little Tokyo with a big invitational party and preview, followed soon by the premiere of his “Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers”-inspired Macbeth.
The final push to make this leap into LA began last year, as Sabel found himself turning 39, unemployed from his day job and suddenly single after a long-term relationship. Sabel wryly smiles as he recalls, “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I am getting close to 40 and I have not accomplished everything I wanted.’ I was feeling a bit sorry for myself and said, ‘I have got to make some changes. Instead of sitting here woe-is-me, no job, no girlfriend, I have to look at this as a glass half full.’ I didn’t have the distraction of a relationship or a 40-hours-a-week day job. I decided to focus all of the time I have available as a director. So I started sending my resume out to theaters all over LA. What did I have to lose?”
Steven Sabel
The previous summer, Sabel had worked with Gary Lamb and Tony Potter in Crown City Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in NoHo. He casually picked up a NoHo arts brochure. “A year later I found it and sent out my resume to every theater listed. The last one alphabetically was Zombie Joe’s Underground. I went to their website and thought it was perfect for an idea I had been working on for Titus Andronicus.” The plan was to turn Shakespeare’s immature and extremely bloody play into a gothic vampire tale. He had planned it for the Redlands Bowl, but the board of directors was a bit nervous about the concept. Sabel says, “I bounced the idea off a few people and had mixed results. A few had said it would be great in a tiny black box but terrible on the bowl stage.”
If there is a prime example of a tiny black box in LA, it is certainly Zombie Joe’s Underground. Sabel continues, “I sent an email to Zombie Joe, he called me back the next day and said, ‘Yeah, let’s work it out.’ I was thinking of the following year, after we try it at the Redlands Bowl. He wanted it NOW! So we put the show up!” Using all actors from his Redlands company, Sabel created a 90-minute version of his twilight-inspired Titus and squeezed it into ZJU a year ago. It was a critical and popular hit, so Sabel and Zombie Joe continued the partnership with two more mainstage productions: a murder mystery penned by Sabel and writing partner Mike Eastman, followed by Sabel’s new play about Lizzie Borden.
Sabel is grateful to Zombie Joe for introducing him to LA and providing such a different venue. Sabel says, “It was so different but also so wonderful because almost all the theater I had been doing for years was grand scale ginormous, in a 140-foot proscenium amphitheater with over 4000 seats. It was really nice to do something more intimate and be able to change the focus of my direction to a space where the audience is within breathing distance. Great to really focus with actors on subtlety.”
Following Lizzie Borden Sabel headed back to Redlands for his annual Shakespeare festival, which included an expanded version of his vampire Titus. But LA never left his thoughts or ambition. “I finally made the decision to go find my own space.” Sabel’s ambition was to do full-length shows, which wouldn’t fit into Zombie Joe’s signature style. “I love what he does! But I didn’t want to keep doing shows with such a tight time constriction – he wanted 75 minutes top. I hate cutting Shakespeare. I also didn’t want to do only macabre theater. I have a bucket list – Williams, Ibsen, Inge, the masters. I needed a space that could be divided into three distinct sections: a lobby, a studio and a black-box. I wanted a nice lobby, a studio because there will be a separate revenue stream – a variety of classes, especially yoga. You have to think about backstage access, bathroom for patrons and for actors. I looked at NoHo because I was familiar with the area, because there was such a concentration of theaters there.”
Archway Theatre's studio stage; Photo by Steven Sabel
It was his new girlfriend, yoga master and business associate Annie Freeman, who suggested the downtown arts district. “We started looking. The space we’re in is one of the first we looked at from the outside, but we walked past saying, ‘God no!’ It was dark with street art everywhere. We kept looking in that district. There is a lot of development there with a great demographic of very affluent young people. Lots of restaurants are popping up, but there is nothing else. We determined that the space would name itself. We looked at a building that we fell in love with. It had these gorgeous vines. We said, ‘This is it, and we’ll call it the Vines.’ But they wouldn’t lock into anything more than a one year lease. Finally we decided to look at the space we’d rejected. It’s near all these great restaurants. We walked in and it was perfect. Three different spaces divided by 17-inch brick walls with these beautiful brick arches.”
After months of preparation, Sabel and Freeman are ready to open. The mission of the theater? “To make money!” Sable is laughing but semi-serious. “You have to sell tickets and make money or you won’t stay open.” (So far, the theater is not operating on Equity’s 99-Seat Plan, but Sabel plans to start using the plan after Macbeth.)
“The yoga practice will help along with acting classes and yoga for actors,” continues Sabel. “We will teach Acting for the Stage, which a lot of LA actors don’t know a lot about and need to. Agents will tell actors go build your resume while you’re waiting for calls and television auditions, go act. So they audition for live theater, but often they have no theater skills.”
Mostly, however, Sabel is thirsty to continue his exploration of the classics with fascinating twists. He has long been anxious to try an even darker than normal twist on Macbeth, which is opening the theater this month. “I knew it would never work on the bowl stage. It is based on Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. My original idea was Lord and Lady Macbeth as the two leading characters from that film. Right from the beginning you have the Sergeant come out and tell the story of how Macbeth took this guy and ‘unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps / And fix’d his head upon our battlements.” This is a bloody guy. And Lady Macbeth — she’s just wicked. She drives the play. I have always seen it all about her desires and passions more than his.
Rob Foley in "Macbeth Shakespeare's Natural Born Killers
“Stone’s whole point was to stab at society because of the way we fixate on celebrity criminals — how out of control that can be and how unhealthy that concept is. These two were the celebrity criminals of their time – they become king and queen for god’s sake. My thought was also to parallel the idea of their addiction to power and addiction to blood lust and their addiction to drugs. My original idea was to make the witches street pushers. I even thought of him going to them and them injecting him to give him hallucinations. That’s where I was headed. I gave the idea to my graphic designer. She sent me this email back with this idea of the witches as three ‘naughty nurses.’ Not exactly where I was going, but it sparked in my head – how do I convert the drug idea into something different from heroin or cocaine. I started thinking about them being sociopathic killers. These two people are mentally diseased, they suffer from hallucinations, they are delusional, sociopathic, crazy! So I took that with the idea of nurses and said, ‘not nurses – orderlies. Orderlies in a mental hospital. So the entire play is set in Dunsinane Asylum.”
Meanwhile Sabel is keeping to the dark side in the Inland Empire as the Redlands Shakespeare Festival presents its annual fund-raising event, The Haunted Grove, in which patrons file through a grand estate and are accosted by Shakespeare’s greatest villains, ghosts and ghouls. Each year the event features wine, food, classic haunts, music, and vignettes featuring the Bard’s most notorious villains, monsters and tortured characters set in and about the orchards and gardens of a private estate in Redlands’ posh south side. Guided tours are 90 minutes long and conducted over two evenings in October.
Macbeth: Shakespeare’s Natural Born Killers, presented by Archway Studio/ Theater. Opens Oct. 27. Runs Thurs.-Sat. 8 pm; Sun. 2 pm. Through Nov. 27. Tickets: $15. Archway Studio/Theatre, 305 South Hewitt St., Los Angeles. www.archwayla.com. 213-237-9933.
Redlands Shakespeare Festival Seventh Annual Haunted Grove Experience, Saturday, Oct. 22 and Sunday, Oct. 23. Tour sizes are limited and reservations are required. Adults only. Not suitable for children. Five tour times each evening: 6:30, 7, 7:30, 8, 8:30 pm. Tickets: $45. Send check and indicate reservation date and time request to: RSF Haunted Grove, PO Box 546, Redlands, CA 92373 or call the information hotline at 909-335-7377.
