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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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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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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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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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Rodriguez Boomerangs Between Two Cities

by Les Spindle | June 6, 2013

Tiffany Lonsdale and Malcom Barrett in “The Boomerang Effect.” Photo by Ed Krieger.

Dámaso Rodriguez, who has served as co-founding artistic director for LA’s ever-adventurous Furious Theatre Company since its origin in 2002, is helming his last LA production before he relocates to Portland, Oregon. He recently began his new job as artistic director for that city’s distinguished professional group, Artists Repertory Theatre.

Rodriguez’s farewell as an LA-based director is an encore production of Matthew Leavitt’s sexy comedy, The Boomerang Effect, which Rodriguez staged in its April 2012 premiere at the Odyssey Theatre. The new production of Boomerang opens Saturday at the Zephyr Theatre.

The prolific Rodriguez is quick to point out that this move by no means signals that he is severing his ties to the LA theater community. During the past few years, besides heading Furious, Rodriguez has established a fine reputation as a local freelance director. He plans to continue to do that in LA periodically, and to tap some of his colleagues among LA’s actors and designers for guest gigs at his new artistic abode to the North.

Getting Furious

Dámaso Rodriguez

Originally from Miami, Rodriguez grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, went to college at Texas A&M, and worked for a few years in Chicago. His first effort in LA was the comedy Ramblers, presented in spring 1999 at the Complex. He acted in and co-directed this original early work by the group that was to evolve into the Furious ensemble.

“We produced it in Chicago and then mounted it in LA,” Rodriguez explains. “We were working toward getting our 501(c)(3) status and starting Furious. We didn’t have much experience, and we didn’t know anyone here. We ended up sort of going our own way for a little while afterwards and then reorganized and really got it together.”

Furious Theatre was originally housed at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, a former plastics factory shared by several arts organizations rent-free. In 2003, the city of Pasadena asked all of the tenants to leave the Armory because it needed the building back. When the company’s plight came to the attention of the Pasadena Playhouse’s then-executive director Lyla White and artistic director Sheldon Epps, the Playhouse offered Furious a residency at the company’s compact upstairs Balcony Theatre, renamed the Carrie Hamilton Theatre in 2006.

The Pasadena Playhouse helped the young company in many ways, sharing its marketing resources, office supplies and much more. After the Pasadena Playhouse entered bankruptcy in early 2010 and prior to it resuming operations later that year, the arrangement with Pasadena Playhouse ended, and Furious became homeless.

Furious has continually thrived with a parade of envelope-pushing fare, garnering consistently laudatory reviews and multiple awards from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, the LA Weekly Awards and the Back Stage Garlands, among other local honors. Under Rodriguez’s artistic guidance, the ensemble company offered such well-received plays as Canned Peaches in Syrup, Grace, The Hunter Gatherers, and two heralded co-productions with Theatre @ Boston Court — Bruce Norris’ The Pain and the Itch and The Government Inspector. In 2012, Furious staged Matt Pelfrey’s fanciful superheroes play, No Good Deed, at [Inside] the Ford.

What will happen to Furious now? “There are announcements to be made shortly about us reconnecting with Pasadena Playhouse,” Rodriguez says, “and we will be producing a couple of plays in the fall and announcing an expansion of the ensemble. The thing I can really speak about is a [British] play called Foxfinder by Dawn King.” Rodriguez had planned to direct the play with Furious here in LA, he says, but the job in Portland “sort of shifted all of our plans [and] forced the company to regroup.”

Jow Fria, Jacob Sidney, John Billingsley, Dana Kelly, Jr. and Alan Brooks in “The Government Inspector.” Photo by Ed Krieger.

Rodriguez will instead first direct the U.S. (Equity) premiere of Foxfinder at Artists Rep. The production, presented in association with Furious, will open Nov. 1. Two of the four cast members will be Furious ensemble members, two others are being cast in Portland and “the design team will be kind of mixed between Portland and LA.” Furious will then reopen the play in January at the Carrie Hamilton Theatre, Rodriguez says.

(Rodriguez is committed by Artists Repertory to hire locally in Portland and “represent the best in Portland talent,” he explains, but “I like having a person or two — a designer or actor here and there — from out of town. That’s kind of my approach to the season and Foxfire is specifically going to be produced in association with Furious, so I am having the same team for both shows.”)

Opportunity Knocks

Rodriguez learned of Artists Rep’s search for a new artistic director because a friend saw a posting for the position on Theatre Communication Group’s ARTSEARCH, “and said ‘this sounds like you ought to submit,’ so I did. The deadline was the end of April of last year and then I went through this eight-month selection process. There were three phases, a phone interview in the beginning with the selection committee, then they flew me out in August. I was in the final three at the end of October and got the offer December 1.”

Rodriguez says that one reason that he was eager to apply for the position is that Artists Rep, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary season, is “similar to Furious in its origins…having six founders and being largely actor driven. It’s also very similar to Furious aesthetically to a large extent.”

Nick Cernoch in “No Good Deed.” Photo by Anthony Masters.

Rodriguez’s first season in Portland includes second or third productions of new plays, world premiere works and a rarely done classic revival. “If you look at the first Furious season, we did two American premieres and The Playboy of the Western World.” Artists Rep is also an ensemble company, albeit with a “very small ensemble” that Rodriguez is tasked to expand, he says. “They were looking for someone who can build a company of resident artists. So, on paper the two companies matched up.”

The Artists Rep facility is “quite fantastic,” Rodriguez notes, with two theaters, “both intimate — one is 220 seats and one is 164 seats. So even though it’s one of the top two sort of jobs in town in Portland for actors, they’re still able to take quite a bit of risk because the spaces are small.”

Defining a Niche

When he first moved to LA, Rodriguez did some acting that included performances with Furious during its first season. “But I had already shifted my focus to directing,” he says. “It’s been 10 years since I acted. It was like a professional decision. I saw that in LA and in regional theater, it’s difficult to be both. If you want to get those meetings with bigger theaters…and be considered for those jobs, you want to be like the directors out there working [who are] typically not actors who also direct, or vice versa. So I identified directing as my niche. I don’t miss acting in any kind of an emotional way, as ‘real’ actors do.”

Although Rodriguez has been commuting to his new job in Portland since January, he and his family won’t officially relocate until July. “It’s very tough” to leave LA, he says. “I’ve been here 14 years, I have two kids, we built a home here for ourselves, and we built a really fantastic network of friends. I have multiple artistic homes here — Furious Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse (I sort of grew up there as an artist, really) and A Noise Within. I had a relationship with that entire company at ANW. I was an intern there in 2000, and have directed four shows [there] the last couple of years. I will miss all of that. Plus I like LA.”

Emerson Collins and Jonathan Slavin in “The Boomerang Effect.” Photo by Ed Krieger.

And leaving Furious, Rodriguez emphasizes, “is huge. Very difficult, ultimately…. But the world is small,” he adds, and his position at Artists Rep “encourages me to freelance.” So, while the move “feels like a change, and it’s big,” Rodriguez hopes to stay “really connected with LA.”

Eclectic Body of Work

Furious was very specific in its purpose, Rodriguez observes. “We were trying to fill a certain kind of niche [edgy, challenging fare], very easily defined. That didn’t mean I didn’t have experience or interest in all kinds of other things that evolved naturally in large part where I trained. When I interned at A Noise Within, I worked quite awhile with [director and ANW co-founder] Art Manke. I served as assistant director of a Noel Coward work, which is so far from [what] we were doing at Furious.” In 2007, Sheldon Epps named Rodriguez to the newly created position of associate artistic director at the Pasadena Playhouse. “On the mainstage, I could perhaps have done the more edgy or serious plays to bring that to the audience, but instead [Epps] challenged me to expand myself and take on The Little Foxes, The Heiress, and Orson’s Shadow, and I was really grateful that’s how it evolved.”

When the opportunities for freelance came back, Rodriguez became a working director around town. “At A Noise Within,” he says, “I got offered Coward and O’Neill, Shaw and Williams. Fantastic. I loved that.” At South Coast Repertory, he worked on the Pacific Playwrights Festival and the Newscripts reading series. At Pasadena Playhouse, part of his job while on staff was to supervise the Hothouse Play Development program and after the Playhouse resumed operations post-bankruptcy, Rodriguez produced a few more readings there.

Forced to “really define myself as a freelance director,” smaller projects came up, too, that he might not have been offered “if I hadn’t shown an eclectic background at that point,” Rodriguez says. The 2012 production of Matthew Leavitt’s Boomerang at the Odyssey was one of them. “Boomerang is a comedy. There’s some art to it, but it’s five couples, five bedrooms, and it’s fun. I love really challenging, really difficult and sometime dangerous work, but then it’s also fun to just do the kind of play that someone who doesn’t go to a lot of theater will bring a date to and enjoy. And Boomerang is like that.”

Boomerang’s Bounce

Matthew Leavitt, Del Shores and Damaso Rodriguez

Matthew Leavitt, Del Shores and Dámaso Rodriguez

How did Boomerang initially come to him? “They just approached me,” Rodriguez says. Boomerang producer Del Shores told Dany Margolies [writer and former Back Stage executive editor] that he was looking for a director, “and she recommended me and some other people.” Actor Scott Lowell, who had worked on the Showtime series, Queer as Folk, where Shores was a consulting and co-executive producer, vouched for Rodriguez, too. “Scott called and then I had an interview.”

Rodriguez notes that eight out of 10 of the cast members from the previous Odyssey production of Boomerang remain the same, as does the producing team. “We think of it as a remount,” he says. Brian Gale came on as lighting designer, but “we have the same set designer, John Iacovelli.” In addition, “we have an entire alternative cast ready to go, because the goal is to run it though the summer. We made it easy for actors to miss performances.”

Rodriguez expresses great gratitude to LA for nurturing his creative growth and his career. “I feel that the theater landscape here in LA is what must get the most credit for me getting this job. I came here and made a career by doing theater. I’m proud to be a part of this community, and [proud that] my work here warranted taking over a really significant regional theater company. It’s the wild west out here, and there’s a lot of work going on. People who haven’t been here and don’t know the scene feel like there isn’t one because it’s so sprawling.

“Those of us who have been here year after year doing work,” says Rodriguez, “all know each other and support each other and like each other. We have a real tight community. That comes through being committed to the work over time. If you do that, you have a good community, you work with really great people, do great work and you will be recognized for it.”

The Boomerang Effect, Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., LA 90069. Opens Saturday. Thu-Sat 8 pm. Tickets: $20-25. Through July 27. 800-595-4849. www.tix.com

All The Boomerang Effect production photos by Ed Krieger.

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The Art of Design: John Iacovelli Makes the Scene

by Steve Julian | June 5, 2013

The set of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Mark Taper Forum. Photo by John Iacovelli.

No theatrical scenic designer is likely to attract a bigger crowd in greater Los Angeles this week than John Iacovelli.

His Joe Turner’s Come and Gone closes June 9 at the Mark Taper Forum. His Sleepless in Seattle runs through June 23 at the Pasadena Playhouse. Iacovelli’s designs can also be seen in The Boomerang Effect at the Zephyr Theatre and in We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 at Joe Stern’s Matrix Theatre Company, two blocks from the Zephyr. Both open on Saturday.

And be mindful: it is not set design, but scenic design, a term that Iacovelli helped solidify as an Ovations Award category a couple of years ago.

John Iacovelli

“It’s been a magical two years,” Iacovelli says, leaning forward in an ample leather chair at the Pasadena Playhouse, a theater he knows well. Among other shows there, Iacovelli designed The Heiress for artistic director Sheldon Epps in the spring of 2012 followed by Lynn Nottage‘s Intimate Apparel in the fall.

Iacovelli also managed to fit in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Forum in March last year. ”Godot and The Heiress were basically at the same time,” he says, but the designs could not have been more different.

“I’d done some Beckett with Alan Mandell [who was co-starring in the Taper's Godot revival with Barry McGovern]. I hadn’t done any work on the design yet, so [director] Michael Arabian, Alan and I went to the Taper. I had this big piece of brown paper, which I still have, and I just drew a circle, the Taper stage.”

“I knew just what to do,” Iacovelli says. “I had done a production in the late ’80s that the director set in Bryce Canyon [Utah], so we had a lot of the Hoodoo architecture. I knew I needed a tree. I needed a rock. But I also needed a mound.”

Iacovelli referred to Eoin O’Brien’s book, The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland, for inspiration. “It was full of wonderful landscape photos of where [Beckett] grew up in Ireland and I saw this mound of rocks and I thought, that’s it, that’s all I need.” The result was a sparse, yet poetic set.

Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress, based on the Henry James novel Washington Square and directed by Dámaso Rodriguez, took audiences inside a large, late 19th century Greek Revivalist home, with walls in Wedgwood or Paynes Grey colors and a gracefully raked floor leading to a grand staircase upstage.

A Tisch graduate at New York University with Broadway experience on Jonathan Tolins’ The Twilight of the Golds, Iacovelli knew these houses well. “I used to walk past them along Washington Square near NYU so many times and looked inside those windows. A couple months before working on it, I called up and they let me in one of those houses. It’s now a dean’s house, and I took a tape measure. They were very patient. Everything in it was still original.”

That style, Iacovelli says, was a reaction against the Louis Comfort Tiffany “too much is not enough” scheme. As for the color, “I knew it couldn’t be a red interior like they did on Broadway. It had to be cool and comfortable.” The Heiress was ”my shot at doing the perfect box set,” he says.

The set of "Sleepless in Seattle." Photo by Imaneul Treeson.

The set of “Sleepless in Seattle” at the Pasadena Playhouse. Photo by Imaneul Treeson.

Yet in the end, it was not perfect, Iacovelli felt. “I told Dámaso recently that I know I didn’t give him the set for The Heiress that he wanted. He said, well, you gave us the set that we needed.”

The pair collaborated again on the current remount of Matthew Leavitt’s The Boomerang Effect at the Zephyr Theatre, after getting their feet wet with the play last year at the Odyssey Theatre.

Iacovelli was nominated for Ovation Awards for both Godot and Heiress, but did not win. He remains unperturbed, primarily because he has the full faith of his colleagues. Alan Mandell remembers working with Iacovelli first in 1986. He writes via email, “I usually make it a condition of any play I do that John does the set. I trust his talent, intelligence and artistry.”

Pasadena Playhouse’s Epps says in an email that Iacovelli can work skillfully in many styles, touching “all of the bases with incredible knowledge, good taste, and imagination. His great passion for the art of the theater and for the work that we do is always evident. It is never just another gig for John, even though he always has so many; he really cares about each and every project.”

Director Phylicia Rashad, whose many collaborations with Iacovelli include August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Taper, agrees. Her younger sister, Debbie Allen, first hired Iacovelli in 2001 for PBS’ The Old Settler, an adaptation of the play by John Henry Redwood. The real-life sisters portrayed siblings in the Harlem Renaissance.

“He’s a gem,” Rashad says by telephone. And fittingly, she had asked that Iacovelli be hired in 2007 when she debuted as a director at Seattle Repertory with August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. ”John was approved immediately,” she says. (Two years prior, Rashad had been a Tony nominee for her role as Aunt Esther in the Broadway run of the play.)

“Last summer,” Rashad adds, “when I went to the Goodman [in Chicago] to direct Immediate Family in the eleventh hour, the previous design was not to my liking and John came in and we had that set in six weeks. It helped the playwright [Paul Oakley Stovall] organize the play and bring more clarity to his work.”

Looking back on his design for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Iacovelli feels that his collaboration with Rashad was almost immeasurable. “I knew that by the time we were done, Phylicia owned every piece of molding on that set.” The two will pair up again this fall when they tackle August Wilson’s Fences at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.

John Iacovelli’s Scenic Design Work

"Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum
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"Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum
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"Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum
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"Waiting for Godot" scenic design sketch
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"Vincent in Brixton" at the Pasadena Playhouse
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"They're Playing Our Song" at Reprise Theatre Company
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"They're Playing Our Song" at Reprise Theatre Company
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"They're Playing Our Song" at Reprise Theatre Company
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"The Heiress" model and scenic design
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"The Heiress" scenic research photo from house on Washington Square in NYC.
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"The Heiress" scenic design model
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"The Heiress" at Pasadena Playhouse
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"The God of Hell" at the Geffen Playhouse
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"Sleepless in Seattle" at Pasadena Playhouse. Photo by Emanuel Treeson.
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"Peter Pan" at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts
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"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" at the Mark Taper Forum
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"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" at the Mark Taper Forum
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"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" at the Mark Taper Forum
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"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" scenic model
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Waiting for Godot 2
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Joe Turner 2 Mark Taper
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Waiting for Godot 1 sketch. photos by John
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Out of this world

From 1994 through 1998, Iacovelli was the production designer for the TV series Babylon 5. “We created over 350 sets,” he says, “and never left the studio.”

Television, he says, informs his theatrical work. “The best example I can give is Peter Pan with Cathy Rigby [at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts]. I was doing the sci-fi show and we had these artisans. I told them that in Peter Pan I needed a cover for a nightlight that would look like a glass shade for a sconce. And as Cathy flies around the set as Peter it can’t crack or hurt her if she flies into it. I needed something solid but made of rubber. So, like alchemists, they came up with this mold and a piece that’s still with the set today.” Iacovelli also won an Emmy Award for Peter Pan Starring Cathy Rigby on A&E.

Babylon 5 was on a limited budget, so the innovative scenic designer called upon his theatrical painting techniques. “I went to rich hues, or what we called ‘spicy brights,’ which the Star Trek shows were not using. I applied for a job at Disney Imagineering once and the guy laughed when he looked at my portfolio. I asked him why he was laughing. He said, ‘when we redesigned Tomorrowland, I told them to look at Babylon 5 because it was the only TV show with color in it’! That made me happy.”

Iacovelli is often asked to explain the difference between an artist and a designer. “My father was a fine artist in sculpture and jewelry and every manner of painting. An artist is more on a personal journey. I used to think Mondrian was a boring artist and then I went to a retrospective at the Museum for Modern Art in New York. I saw that he started painting trees that over time became geometric forms [and] that became his style. I saw his arc over forty years. Many artists have one problem they’re working on and they keep at it, over and over. You could say the sunflowers were that for Van Gogh. An artist is on such a singular journey.”

One of Iacovelli’s “Babylon 5″ sets.

But a designer, he maintains, can design only with other people.

Television, Iacovelli says, teaches one to make a decision quickly and to know that it’s the right decision. “I remember working on a show at South Coast Rep with Brian Gale [lighting designer and frequent collaborator, including Sleepless in Seattle and Waiting for Godot]. It was a very simple set in their old second stage space. A desk and chair and carpet on a turntable, but we kept tinkering with it. I was laughing because that was the same day I’d done a dozen sets on Babylon 5.”

Iacovelli recalls turning to Gale and saying, “It’s funny how we spend so much time dealing with one set here, while in television, I make a dozen a day. Then we talked about the fact that doing our work in theater allows us to make quick decisions in television. We’ve already thought through the options and know what’ll work.” (By the way, one sci-fi axiom, Iacovelli notes, is that doors hinge only on Earth.)

Getting unreal

The Heiress and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone aside, Iacovelli often aims to get away from the constraints of realism. He and Gale collaborated on the Matrix Theatre Company’s award-winning 2011 production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. “It’s such a small space, so I abstracted the set, which I never thought I would do, but the trees became metal and we used the brick back wall as a sort of industrial sky. We had grass, brick, the back porch. But the theater gives me permission to do what I don’t do in film and television, which is to not be realistic. The trees looked dangerous, a sinister quality, not like willow trees.”

Iacovelli returns to the Matrix this week for Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915, which has its West Coast premiere the same Saturday night as the Zephyr’s Boomerang opening down the street.

Even in Sleepless, Iacovelli attempted to disguise the literal. “When Sheldon suggested we have a bridge with a couple of spiral staircases, I thought, is this too much set to be in more than one place? Then, by painting everything blue and using a color treatment that he thought of, the spiral staircase at the bridge also becomes the one in the boat, and it becomes a staircase in a night club and in an airport, and I think it works. I kept all the lines very square with many boxes of projection screens around the proscenium, which allows the stage to be more of a blank page.”

The set of “Peter Pan” at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts

In that sense, Iacovelli says, the theater becomes a psychological space to support the actors.

“I just did On the Spectrum [by Ken LaZebnik] at the Fountain Theatre and we had four or five massive projectors. I worried it would overpower the story, but it really helped the dramaturgy.”

He says a producer recently described a space to him as an actors’ theater. “I thought, well, if you can show me where the designers’ theaters are, I’ll sign up. All theaters are actors’ theaters.” But, Iacovelli adds, “the reason we’re here is for the performers and performance, not just because we want to do a beautiful set.”

Getting real

Iacovelli, who has received the LA Drama Critics Circle award for Lifetime Achievement in Scenic Design, calls himself a visualizer, not a day dreamer. “Gosh that’s a hard word. What is day dreaming? I do go in and out of consciousness, I notice. I know that in my head, I have to see the set first before I can draw it. It sounds a little California and a little goofy, but I sometimes imagine the set coming to life on the stage. What does this wall look like, in my head, and then I draw it on paper. My life is pretty much a day dream, being in the theater.”

That life takes Iacovelli to the University of California Davis where he is on the Design Faculty, Department of Theatre & Dance. He is also a visiting professor at the Shanghai Drama Academy.

Epps appreciates Iacovelli’s support in all of their work together. “He is certainly one of my most valued collaborators, and a very special gift to my own theater and to the entire LA theater community.”

“I feel like the job of the designer is to help the director and the whole team to create an environment,” Iacovelli says. “Part of that job is to show them what you’re going to give them. It can’t be a surprise on opening night, so here’s a model, a stage design, a rendering. This is what I’m promising you and this is what I’ll deliver. Of course, there has to be collaboration with costumes, lighting and sound, but I feel that journey is the fun part.”

We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest 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

The Boomerang Effect, Village Green productions at Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., LA 90046. Opens Saturday. Thu-Sat 8 pm. Tickets: $20-25. Through July 27. 800-595-4849. www.tix.com

Sleepless in Seattle, Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena 91101. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 4 pm and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm and 7 pm. Through June 23. Tickets: $64-$145. 626-356-7529. www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., LA 90012. Wed-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2:30 and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. Through June 9. Tickets: $20-$75. 213-628-2772. www.centertheatregroup.org

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An American Journey with BOB

by Robin Migdol | June 5, 2013

Tara Karsian, Rich Liccardo, Jeff Galfer, Michael McColl and Hutchi Hancock in “BOB.” Photo by Megan J. Carroll.

An unlikely pair of offerings at a White Castle fast food restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, inspired playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb to write BOB: A Life in Five Acts.

While working at Actors Theatre in Louisville, Nachtrieb noticed that the White Castle between his hotel and the theater was advertising a “romantic” Valentine’s Day dinner, complete with white tablecloths, candles and table service.

Just below that offer on the restaurant’s marquee, another note designated the restaurant as a “safe place,” which Nachtrieb took to mean that, similar to the child protection service offered by fire stations and hospitals, unwanted babies could be left there.

Thus the character of Bob and his life story were born.

Chris Fields and Peter Sinn Nachtrieb.

“Looking at those couple things – Valentine’s Day at White Castle, and you could also dump your baby there – sort of sparked for me, ‘There’s a great beginning for a story on a classic American character,’” Nachtrieb says from his home in San Francisco.

BOB: A Life in Five Acts begins a four-week run on Saturday, produced by Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre. The play was originally commissioned by South Coast Repertory and received a staged reading there in 2009 before premiering at the Humana Festival for New American Plays in 2011.

Nachtrieb, whose plays have been widely produced Off-Broadway and at theaters around the country, is best known locally through Furious Theatre Company productions of his unsettling Hunter Gatherers (2009) and the 2010 LA premiere of his apocalyptic romantic comedy boom, TCG’s most-produced (non-holiday themed or Shakespearean) play in the 2009-10 season. This year, Nachtrieb was named playwright-in-residence at Z Space in San Francisco as part of a Mellon Foundation-funded program. His upcoming works include The Totalitarians, commissioned by the National New Play Network.

In an episodic, picaresque-style narrative, BOB tells the story of a man born and abandoned in a White Castle bathroom on Valentine’s Day, who travels across the United States, determined to make something of his life and become a “great man.”

Nachtrieb says that Bob is a bit more of an optimist than he should be, considering the circumstances of his life and the various obstacles that get in the way of his desire to become well-known and respected.

Jud Williford

“As the play goes on he gets more and more frustrated. He has big dreams and big ideals and does not want to let go of them. He is obsessed with being great,” Nachtrieb explains. “Not just being a good person — he’s not going to settle for that. He’s someone who wants to be known; he just doesn’t know how to do that or what that is.”

A recurring theme of the play is Bob’s obsession to “do something worthy of being on a plaque,” Nachtrieb says, and the play questions how “greatness” should be measured. Is it really about having your name chiseled onto a plaque or getting a hospital wing named after you, Nachtrieb asks, or is the definition more subtle, perhaps based on relationships and connections with other people?

Over coffee in Studio City, BOB director Chris Fields makes it clear that while the play tackles heartfelt themes, it is also a seriously funny piece.

“This play is like Monty Python morphed with Looney Tunes with a little Zen Buddhism,” Fields says. “It’s so amusing that you don’t trust it at first, [as if] it’s too much fun, it’s too silly and silly can’t be that good. And I think it is.”

Jeff Galfer plays Bob, while four other actors play the nearly three dozen characters that appear and reappear throughout Bob’s life (the ensemble members are double cast). Fields compares the play to stand-up comedy, since characters address the audience and, with 70 scenes, the narrative is extremely fast-paced.

Adding to the “whimsical” nature of the show is Fields’ decision to make all props representational — in other words, simply painted on cardboard.

“There’s a bed made out of Kleenex, there’s a flea circus, there’s a Chevy Malibu,” Fields says. One sequence depicts Bob and his adoptive mother Jeanine on a road trip across the country with Jeanine pointing out different landmarks. This posed obvious challenges for staging. “How do you do that in a car, talking about places the audience can’t see? I’m not going to give it away,” Fields teases.

For the audience, Fields says, BOB offers a refreshingly simple and positive message: You’re okay. It’s a dramatic departure from shows that Echo Theatre Company has produced in the past, he notes.

Hutchi Hancock and Jeff Galfer

“The last play we did [A Family Thing] was a brutal, urban, gritty drama and we got great reviews and we sold out,” Fields says. “To tell you the truth, I sat there and I went, ‘This play is so unforgiving.’ Ultimately it was about redemption, but the pain in the play — you know tsuris [Yiddish for trouble or aggravation]? It was just too much.”

BOB, on the other hand, has a reassuring quality that Fields hopes will give audiences the confidence to accept that they are fine the way they are, without fame or fortune. That everyone is “someone.” Hopefully, after watching BOB, he says, some may be encouraged to treat people more kindly and appreciate what they have.

“All that stuff knocking around in your head, you don’t need that stuff really. You’re fine,” Fields says. “You’re gonna go home, you’re gonna read a good book, you got a cat you might love, a dog, you’re going to call your boyfriend, have a cup of coffee with your girlfriend. It’s okay.”

BOB: A Life in Five Acts, Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theater, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village, 90039. Opens Saturday. Fri-Sat 8 p.m., Sun 7 p.m. Through June 30. Tickets $25. www.EchoTheaterCompany.com. 877-369-9112.

**All BOB production photos by Megan J. Carroll.

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Navigating Inner Space: NASA’s Starcrossed Love Triangle at Son of Semele

by Amy Tofte | June 4, 2013

“Starcrosser’s Cut.” Photo by Joseph Tepperman and Ariana Petrojvic.

Perhaps the love triangle is common in fictional tales because so many people can relate to it—no matter what your level of education, social standing or career path. At one time or another, any one of us might be the rejected, the rejecter or the new love caught in the middle.

Astronaut Lisa Nowak became one of America’s most notorious jilted lovers of one such triangle in 2007. She was charged with attempted kidnapping and later attempted murder after driving over 900 miles and confronting her romantic rival Colleen Shipman, a fellow female astronaut, at an Orlando airport. After that confrontation led to Nowak’s arrest, police found items in her possession suggesting that she might have had nefarious plans in mind for Shipman, but the most severe of the charges against Nowak never stuck.

Inspired by Nowak’s police interview transcripts, writer/director Joseph Tepperman and composer David Dominique sought to understand the common human elements in this story as they created their new play, Starcrosser’s Cut, premiering Thursday at Son of Semele Theater.

David Dominique

Tepperman and Dominique first met as musicians, both playing trombone with the Los Angeles band Bodies of Water that utilizes instrumental sections with sometimes unconventionally large numbers. In 2010, Tepperman’s libretto for the opera Tongues Bloody Tongues (a collaboration with the “mobile attack band” Killsonic) was matched with Dominique’s music for a workshop performance at REDCAT’s NOW Festival. Victoria Looseleaf of the LA Times stated at the time that the opera in progress successfully “…soars on wings of absurdity.”

After working together on Tongues, Tepperman and Dominique knew that they wanted to pursue another project together. Tepperman read the released Nowak interview transcripts and was drawn to further understand her motivations, as well as the larger implications of a highly educated and ambitious woman committing a seemingly senseless crime of passion that would ultimately destroy her professional life.

In Starcrosser’s Cut, a character called “Lisa” attempts to understand and navigate recordings of her own words with detective “Camuso” as witness and interrogator. Exploring American aspects of career ambition (particularly in the high-pressure world of the NASA program) juxtaposed with simple human frailty, Tepperman and Dominique hope the story will resonate with themes beyond the sensational headlines that Nowak provoked.

“[The play] is not overly sympathetic…in fact, it’s highly fictionalized,” says Dominique. “In some ways it’s really a projection of how [Nowak] would like the detective to see it…a meditation on how any one of us might be in this situation.”

“And it’s not trying to whitewash the feelings of the intended victim,” adds Tepperman. “It really is that any one of us is capable of something like this.”

Joseph Tepperman

Starcrosser’s is not opera. There is no sung text. But its creators are connected to the importance of sound, both music and language, in the execution of the story. Dominique’s score is performed live by four musicians in the intimate Son of Semele space, using musical themes and variations to support the play’s two actors, Shawn Lockie and Tom Colitt.

“The music is subordinated in a way,” says Dominique. “You can almost think of the music alongside the two characters…the music is like another character.”

The musical theme and variation concept is also reflected in the character’s dialogue through the repetition of ideas and perspectives. In dramatizing the Nowak transcripts for the stage, Tepperman drew on his own long-held interest in the art of cassette tape recordings. His past solo pieces have utilized cassette tapes and recorders in performance, exploring the manipulation of this tactile form of recording as opposed to the less cumbersome, slick technology of digital devices.

Adding the influence of Samuel Beckett’s 1958 one act, Krapp’s Last Tape, Tepperman describes how the manipulation of language through a recorded form can suggest the erasure of history itself as the spoken past is transformed right in front of an audience. Manipulation of this kind seemed to occur when even Lisa Nowak, inside the interrogation room in 2007, could not be convinced of some of the charges against her. She simply did not understand it or refused to believe it.

But Tepperman and Dominique wanted their depiction of the Nowak case to be couched in compassion for the human condition, rather than a paparazzi delight in its running off the rails.

“The tabloid side is avoided,” says Dominique. “The sensational side is almost inherent in presenting it at all. But if [our production] has a position in any way, it comes from a position of compassion.”

As a duo, Tepperman and Dominique might consider themselves musicians more than theater artists at this point in their careers, but the fruition of this project already has them thinking ahead to more theatrical work created specifically for the stage. Tepperman feels that this first foray into full-blown theater gave him a new appreciation for clarity in his storytelling, which grew while the script progressed as an adaptation of the police transcripts.

Lisa Nowak, Colleen Shipman, and William Oefelein

The team also believes that working in the intimate Son of Semele space has not only served the process, but also the final product. As musicians and performers, both have experienced much larger venues with bigger audiences. But Son of Semele creates what Dominique describes as “an economical space” in which to create “an epic narrative,” something that Tepperman has seen in other performances by the Son of Semele ensemble.

The Nowak case ultimately ended with her plea deal to lesser charges and her eventual dismissal—along with the third party of the triangle, astronaut William Oefelein—from NASA’s space program. It was the first dismissal of its kind in NASA history and led to the creation of the agency’s current code of conduct. Oefelein and Shipman are now married; the record of Nowak’s criminal proceedings has been officially sealed by the court. The truth of what really happened among the three may never be known.

“What we’re really doing is showing different ways that Lisa Nowak could have gone,” says Tepperman. “She could have died in space at some point…but also, if an ordinary person had committed a crime like this, would she have been treated differently?”

Starcrosser’s Cut, presented by Hanistarot in association with Son of Semele. Son of Semele Theater, 3301 Beverly Boulevard, LA. 90004. Opens Thursday. Thu 8pm, Sat 8pm, Sun 4pm. Through June 16. Tickets: $12-$18. www.starcrosserscut.com.

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Dream Interpretations: Gypsies in Greece and Bee Gees in Burbank

by Steven Sabel | May 31, 2013

Ensemble of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at New American Theatre. Photo by Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin.

From disco-dancing fairies to mystical Gypsies of 1930s Greece, the summer theater season wouldn’t be complete without multiple interpretations of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to quench our appetite for the Bard’s most beloved comedy.

Two of the season’s first Midsummers are opening within the next week at Odyssey Theatre and the Falcon Theatre. Both productions put a distinctive twist on the play and follow a completely different path to telling the classic story.

Mystical Gypsies

“Our production is magical and dangerous. It’s not light. It has some grit,” says director Jack Stehlin of the New American Theatre production of Dream, opening tonight at the Odyssey.

Stehlin and his ensemble are returning to the Odyssey after a “hiatus away” for some years, and the teaming has “never been better than it feels right now,” says Stehlin. “There’s a new recognition of the value of our collaboration.”

New American Theatre dramaturg Alfred Molina and Stehlin have reworked the concept of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in an attempt to mirror the strife between the classes of society in 1930s Athens, Greece.

Jack Stehlin

In Stehlin’s production, the fairies capture “a Gypsy element that was prevalent in 1930s Greece,” he says. “They represent a flamboyance and flair that eliminates the darker tones, and blends out of the darker aspects of 1930s Greece.”

“They provide us with room for possibility that there is mysticism and something magical in the world,” he says. In approaching that magic from a director’s point of view, “you don’t highlight it. You don’t gloss over it. You embrace it.”

To Stehlin, the key to that embrace comes through the way in which the mortal characters in the play depict the effects of the mythical love spells cast over them. “We are attempting to capture the aspects (of the spell) that will allow the reality to form. The true possession of the spell of love.”

Stehlin and Molina work together to blend Stehlin’s “more organic” approach to the development of the characters with Molina’s expertise in the structure of the text of the play.

“I’m the luckiest guy in the world doing Shakespeare right now with Fred (Molina) on board,” says Stehlin. “You can’t beat Fred’s knack for the architecture of the text.”

That architecture is Shakespeare’s attempt to provide actors with “a structural path to living it organically,” Stehlin says. The path serves as “the final destination” of the actors “experiencing the story playing them” — as opposed to them playing the story. “The distance between the text and the experience is reduced through the rehearsal process.”

During that process, Stehlin has encouraged his cast of 21 actors from the New American Studio Ensemble to “receive the play.”

“My goal, whether we achieve it or not, is to create a moment on stage that is relevant to people’s lives,” he says. “We’re receiving the play, and hopefully it is passing through us in a viable and believable way.”

Stehlin embraces the play’s humorous elements while also exploring its social aspects of community connection, human reception of joy, and the experience of love, he says. “It’s about the freedom of love — to be alive and rejoice in it.” He seeks to create a “recognizable experience (for the audience) in an intimate and passionate way.”

Chelsea Povall. Photo by Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin.

The play’s rustic characters help create that experience.

“They are this idyllic group of actors who find true joy in what they do without competition, envy, self-interest, or resentment,” Stehlin says. “It’s not a bad thing to ask our community — artistic community and overall society — are you capable of joy?”

“The reception of joy is key to the human experience, and the experience of the play,” says Stehlin.

Disco Fairies

At the Falcon, “it’s a new take on an old subject that we’re redoing,” says Rick Batalla, explaining Troubadour Theater Company’s A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream.

Batalla is a founding company member of the Troubies, and an original cast member of their ’70s disco take on Dream, which returns to the Falcon after a 12-year absence since the production was first performed there in late 2000 and early 2001 (following a production at Miles Playhouse in Santa Monica and two Orange County venues earlier in 2000).

In any concept production of Dream, the audience delight in the play can hinge greatly upon the depiction of the story’s mythical characters. Choices about how to play Oberon, Titania, and their royal train of fairy folk, including the mischievous Puck, can be the essential key to bringing a company’s vision of its Dream world to life.

“Our fairies are defined by things that rhyme with fairy,” notes Mike Sulprizio, another founding company member of the Troubies, and an original cast member of A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream. Among the names used are Scary Fairy, Dairy Fairy, and Very Fairy.

Even the members of the Troubies’ band help fulfill the disco element as a wildly costumed chorus of super ’70s performers, incorporating the Saturday Night Fever music of the Bee Gees, says Sulprizio. “Each one of them is defined very quickly,” says Batalla.

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.

But this year’s edition of the show isn’t merely a re-creation of the original production, “We are always topical, so we have to update accordingly,” Batalla says.

“The songs are arranged differently as well, and the show has been completely re-choreographed,” says Sulprizio.

New designers bring a new look and enhanced production values to the show, especially in the costuming, says Troubie veteran Lisa Valenzuela.”I was a regular at the Goodwill in the old days,” she adds. She first started with the Troubies’ Dream as a foley artist and now portrays multiple characters in the new production.

“We used to shop for all of our own costumes,” confirms Batalla. In incorporating new production values, great care is taken to maintain the essence of the original Troubie charm. “We’re charming. Maybe you’ve noticed,” Batalla says.

“The people who work with us know what the Troubies are all about,” adds Sulprizio.

Troubie shows blend Shakespeare’s text with a musical theme and mounds of improvisational comedy. No two Troubie performances ever come off exactly the same.

Batalla: “At any moment, whatever we rehearsed can be thrown out the window.”

Sulprizio: “On very few of our shows does (director Matt Walker) rein us in.”

Walker decides on the portions of the Bard’s text that will remain intact. Songs from the musical theme are inserted along the way through the creation/rehearsal process.

Valenzuela: “We kind of all say, ‘this song might be better here than there’.”

Sulprizio: “When we choose the music, it’s all about how the title works and sounds.”

Batalla: “The challenge becomes making it work.”

Valenzuela: “And then we change the lyrics to make it work, and it becomes a win-win.”

Batalla: “I’m going to throw in an extra ‘win’ there.”

Matt Merchant and Matt Walker. Photo by Chelsea Sutton.

They describe their approach to the company and the works they produce as “very Elizabethan” in its likeness to the way a traveling troupe of actors might have worked in Shakespeare’s era. The goal is to find that even mix of humor that appeals to groundlings and the upper classes alike, says Sulprizio. “It’s very true to the original structure of Shakespeare.”

“While we goof around, there’s [still] a moment when we have to be true to the text,” says Batalla. “The stuff that you remember — those iconic moments — are untouched.” So the comedic rewards are twofold — “hitting that joke that Shakespeare wrote centuries ago, and making it work, and getting the laugh — and the improv of a newly discovered joke.”

The disco theme, combined with topical references, opens the door to new humor as Shakespeare’s entendres are “massaged into the disco element” for a new connection to the Bard’s bawdy style, says Sulprizio.

The Troubies aim for “non-stop laughs,” says Sulprizio. “There are no lulls — just what’s necessary to keep going on,” he says.

New jokes are developed every minute, even during interviews about the show. If a new joke falls flat during performance, the Troubies have their “outs,” including signature lines of self-deprecation, and “foul flags” that can be thrown to the stage at any time for “unauthorized ad-libbing.”

Sulprizio: “We can’t lose. We’re just having such a great time. It’s infectious,” he says.

Batalla: “I need to hand out penicillin after every show.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., LA 90025. Opens tonight. Fri-Sat 8 pm, select Sundays. Through June 30. Tickets: $25. newamericantheatre.com. 310-477-2055.

A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream, Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank 91505. Opens June 7. Fri 8 pm, Sat 4 pm and 8 pm, Sun 4 pm and 7 pm through July 7. Tickets: $27-52. FalconTheatre.com. 818- 955-8101.

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Arch Focused on the Story Arc in Sleepless in Seattle

by Jessica Koslow | May 31, 2013

Tim Martin Gleason, Joe West and Chandra Lee Schwartz in “Sleepless in Seattle.” Photo by Jim Cox.

If things had gone as planned for the musical version of Sleepless in Seattle at the Pasadena Playhouse, writer Jeff Arch would be celebrating the show’s one-year anniversary this month. Instead, the musical, directed by Pasadena Playhouse’s artistic director Sheldon Epps, with music and lyrics by Ben Toth and Sam Forman, opens this Sunday and runs through June 23.

“Had the show we had last year at this time been put up, it wouldn’t have succeeded,” says Arch, who wrote the original story and co-wrote the screenplay with director Nora Ephron and David S. Ward for the 1993 romantic comedy film. “We knew there were problems. There were some not-quite-there moments, and some this-is-just-the-wrong-direction moments. The book and story have stayed true. The musical treatment and direction of the story have changed, but all for the better.”

Arch and his business partner David Shor, the musical’s producer, have been the only two consistent players in the project’s eight-year history.

Jeff Arch

“No one told me it was going to be eight years,” Arch says. “If they said, eight years, three directors, three music teams, hijacking attempts and rewrites like you can’t believe, I might have said no. Thank God I didn’t know.”

Arch sits in the Makineni Library upstairs from the Pasadena Playhouse. At first glance, you might mistake him for Richard Dreyfuss. It’s the end of April, and this is where he’ll be six days a week until opening night. Despite the show’s setbacks to get here, he’s overjoyed with the current cast and creative team and already dreading the day the show closes.

In 2008, the American Film Institute listed Sleepless in Seattle as the tenth best romantic comedy of all time. It’s a love story about two people who don’t meet until the final scene. Sam is a widower and single father living in Seattle. Annie is a reporter in Baltimore who is engaged to Walter. When Sam’s son, Jonah, convinces his father to talk about how much he misses his late wife Maggie on a radio talk show, scores of women fall in love with Sam, including Annie. She writes him a letter suggesting the two meet at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day.

Eight years ago, when David Shor found out that Sony Pictures and Arch equally owned the stage rights to Sleepless in Seattle, Arch was game to make a musical. He just didn’t plan on spending the next eight years trying to get it to the stage.

“There were times — when money came in and people were saying this isn’t going to work for us,” says Arch, “that I offered, and said ‘if it’s the book, if it’s me, I’ll go, if that’s what it takes to get this thing to the next level.’ But nobody took me up on it.”

Since the night in January 1990 when the idea for Sleepless in Seattle first came to Arch, who was a karate teacher in Virginia at the time with two young children, the story has always been like the third kid in his family. And “a parent just doesn’t insist on things when they’re not what the kid really needs,” says Arch.

“I needed to be led by someone who has musical theater in their blood,” he continues. “And they have staging instincts like I have story instincts. They know how to translate [the story] into a moving, singing, blended thing on stage.”

The role of director has changed over the years, from Joel Zwick to Lonny Price and now Sheldon Epps. The musical team switched hands from Oscar- and Grammy-winning writer-composer-lyricist Leslie Bricusse to the team of Michelle Citrin, Michael Garin and Josh Nelson to the current duo of Ben Toth and Sam Forman.

Joe West and ensemble

“We’ve had some really low moments,” says Arch. “One-and-a-half years ago, I had to strip out all of the music and refashion the book with no music cues. I broke the script into 18 scenes that absolutely had to happen for this story to be understood. [We got] a new music team and a new director. The new music team survived the process, the director didn’t. I knew all along Sheldon is the guy. Just like it happens in the story — when it’s the one, you know it’s the one. With Sheldon, we’re finding the musical moments more organically.”

Ben Toth and Sam Forman sort of popped up out of the blue. They had heard about the Sleepless in Seattle project and decided to musicalize a scene from the movie. Their agent submitted the audition song to Arch and Shor.

“They musicalized the first phone call scene from the movie and did a great job,” says Arch. “I talked to [Ben] on the phone, and we were talking about a different scene, and he played music for it. I could see we were each other’s voice. We are each other’s musical sounding board. He respects the story. Everyone on this show seems to get it that we’re all at the service of the story. It’s a comforting thing. It’s not always like that. Most people are pushing their own agendas as far as they can.”

Arch didn’t actually meet Toth until March. They wrote the whole show together on Skype from three to four different locations at any given time. In the musical, 80-90% of the material is new, even though to Arch, it doesn’t feel that way.

“To have the same characters to write for 20 years later is just incredible,” Arch says. “I was 35 with an infant and 4 ½-year-old. Before, it was about how I needed to convince myself that you could live a destiny instead of a life. So I wrote this story. I didn’t have any idea that that’s why I was writing it, but that’s where I was in my life. I had done everything all three characters had done. [The story is about] two people who meet on top of Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day, but underneath it was this whole thing that I had done: shrugging off a normal life, stepping off the cliff, not knowing if there was going to be something to carry me or not. And 20 years later, I did the same thing, and the story was here waiting for me. I’ve created hundreds of characters since then, but nothing like those three. They’re part of me.”

Tim Martin Gleason and Chandra Lee Schwartz

Sleepless in Seattle touches on themes of disappointment, heartbreak and having to find a way out of it. According to Arch, the musical is like a 90-minute therapy session.

“There’s a spell it puts people in,” says Arch. “All the years I was failing at this thing [screenwriting], I was asking the wrong question. I was asking, how can I write movies and get famous so that people will think that I’m fascinating and do lots of interviews? That’s called being in your 20s. With this one [Sleepless in Seattle], I asked a different question the night I thought of it. How do I get two people in Finland to walk out of a movie theater holding hands?”

Arch hopes his “Sleepless” magic extends to the theatergoers at the Pasadena Playhouse. “I want to create the kind of thing where they don’t want to step off the curb when this thing is over because they don’t want to break the spell,” Arch says.

“I want to get in your brain. I want to get in your DNA. Make you take the leap. Don’t settle. Honor yourself. All of the things I did, and it paid off. There’s not a lot you can tell me about what’s impossible. I wrote a love story where the people don’t meet. And it got made. And it’s a hit. Tell me what’s impossible.”

Sleepless in Seattle, Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena 91101. Opens Sunday. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 4 pm and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm and 7 pm. Through June 23. Tickets: $30-$145. pasadenaplayhouse.org. 626-356-7529.

**All Sleepless in Seattle production photos by Jim Cox.

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Navigating Next to Normal in the Wake of Personal Loss

by A.R. Cassell | May 30, 2013

Bets Malone, Eddie Egan, Keith Bearden (top), Alex Mendoza, Tessa Grady and Robert Townsend in “Next To Normal.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

You know what they say about people living in glass houses. Walking into La Mirada Theatre and sneaking a glimpse at the two-story fractured glass set of Next to Normal, the old idiom immediately comes to mind. The Pulitzer- and Tony-winning musical opens at La Mirada this weekend, helmed by director Nick DeGruccio and starring Bets Malone and Robert Townsend.

Penned by Brian Yorkey, with a score by Tom Kitt, Next to Normal tells the story of the Goodman family — seemingly typical upper-middle class suburbanites. Naturally, as the title would suggest, things are not quite so “normal” for the Goodmans, who struggle with issues of mental illness, suicide, addiction, loss, and survival. It’s an emotional piece, to be sure, particularly for the husband and wife characters, Diana and Dan, but actors Bets Malone and Robert Townsend sound equal to the task.

Bets Malone, Robert Townsend and Nick DeGruccio

Knowing that rehearsal time would be brief, Townsend and Malone began preparations and character study for this piece well in advance, having several sessions with director Nick DeGruccio on their own personal time. “The show is almost completely sung through, so it’s a different monster to show up on the first day of rehearsal and have already worked on it, than to just start learning it at that point, because of all the music involved,” explains Malone.

“I told them it’s a short rehearsal period, so as much as you can familiarize yourself with the show, the better,” DeGruccio adds. “And these guys came in knowing so much of the show, so we were able to get right to work.”

The character of Diana suffers from bipolar disorder. DeGruccio conducted ample research on the subject, which he shared with the cast. “I made them actually watch someone getting ECT [electroconvulsive therapy]. We talked a lot about that, a lot about the meds. I actually know quite a few people who are medicated, so I talked to them a lot. I have talked to a friend who is definitely bipolar, so I did a lot of research that way and talked to people who are going through it, and I know the authors of the piece did the same thing. They really took their time, they really did want to be correct and honest when they talked about mental illness. Yes, it is dramatized a bit in the sense of the amount of memory she loses, but it’s really right on the money in terms of the medications and the procedures that go along with someone with this type of mental illness.”

DeGruccio and the two actors unanimously feel that they have a responsibility to humanize and be informative about mental illness with this piece. “One thing that Nick said the first day of rehearsal, which I think is one of the most brilliant things that got said out loud, was that there aren’t any villains in this piece,” offers Malone. “Because the stakes are really high, there is a lot of arguing and a lot of hurt feelings. It’s very high emotion, but there is no bad guy. Everybody is just trying to survive and to figure out how to help each other survive. I hope people can walk away from the piece being a little more tolerant and a little less finger-pointy about what makes somebody tick on a daily basis. I think that is an important message of the show — just put yourself in their position, and maybe thank God that you are not in their position sometimes.”

Bets Malone and the cast of “Next To Normal.”

Malone calls the assembly of this particular group of actors a “serendipitous” turn of events, as many of performers in this bunch, as well as DeGruccio, have recently been coping with loss, which is another theme of the piece. Perhaps most heavily felt among all of them is the death last year of John Bisom, one of L.A.’s popular musical theater actors, who was a personal friend of Malone, Townsend and DeGruccio. For Malone in particular, that loss has been present throughout the process of this show from the very beginning.

“The theater community lost a really wonderful person last year,” she says. “It was a mental illness situation, and it ended up being a suicide situation. So for the audition, I was channeling all of that in a very therapeutic way to try and figure out how to get on the inside of someone who was suffering so terribly with this kind of illness and what he would be going through. His partner really bore the brunt of that entire illness. Working on the piece, I developed so much compassion for the person that stands by the sick person, and now my heart is breaking for the well person. So it’s been a fascinating process that way.”

“I lost my brother a year and a half ago,” adds Townsend, “And another cast member has lost a family member as well. So we are tapping into these experiences to really help us. It’s therapeutic too on a personal level, because we are dealing with some rough emotions. It comes from a very honest and natural place because this is so fresh for some of us. I am very thankful I am part of this experience because it’s helping me deal with things and discover things about myself. It’s wonderful, but in a sad but lovely way.”

That’s not to say that the atmosphere inside this group is all gloom and doom. Far from it. “Believe it or not, we laugh a lot in rehearsal. It’s a very fun group of people,” admits DeGruccio. There is also a palpable feeling of excitement and perhaps just the slightest bit of pressure and anxiety to rise to the expectations as the first company to present this popular new musical in Southern California since a production based on the Broadway original played the Ahmanson in late 2010. “It’s a lot of pressure being the show that everyone wants to be in,” says Malone. “You want to be worthy of the toy you get to play with and everybody gets to watch you play with.”

Tessa Grady, Alex Mendoza, Eddie Egan, Robert Townsend, Bets Malone and Keith Bearden.

According to DeGruccio, none of the parts was pre-cast, but it has helped tremendously with establishing trust and character dynamics that all three of them have worked together previously. Malone and Townsend played Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd in Moonlight Stage’s production of the Sondheim musical last fall in San Diego County. “That show was stepping out of our comfort zones quite a bit,” Malone confesses. “So I was elated when he called and told me he had booked [Next to Normal]. I am so lucky because he was a rock for me last summer and we are going to go through this whole journey holding hands. I love that.”

“It’s so emotional — you want to be able to trust implicitly the person you are with,” Townsend continues. “And it’s the same situation with Nick. He has directed me in some emotional shows as well. I feel safe with him, I feel he is going to guide us into telling the story very truly and to hopefully make people think and connect.”

For DeGruccio, the process of developing this show, which is so character-driven, has many parallels to the material itself. “The big thing about going at this show…it’s real easy to go for a result or to go for what we know to work on stage. What we have been trying to do here is really build a house. We start with a foundation and start searching and start really layering in the emotional qualities of the scenes and all the events that are going on in the show. And of course, they were totally up for it.”

For those familiar with Next to Normal, one can’t help but wonder about the toll these dramatic performances — the role of Diana in particular — take on the actors. While confident in his leading lady and the rest of his cast, DeGruccio does admit that the journey leaves its mark. “Bets is really good at checking it at the door. She knows where she needs to go, she has to prepare herself for it, and Bets is one of those actresses that can tap into her emotions. It’s gonna take a lot out of them, this cast. I mean, they were shell-shocked after our first run-through. I said ‘You people look like you went through war’. And they did. They had gone through a war. All of them. It’s not an easy show. Right now we are having fun in tech, but once you get on the train, you don’t get off until it hits the station. ” Actually, on second thought…

“It’s a roller coaster, not even a train.”

Next To Normal, La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, 14900 La Mirada Blvd, La Mirada, CA 90638. Opens Friday. Wed-Thu 7:30 pm, Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 pm and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Through June 23. Tickets: $20-70. www.lamiradatheatre.com.562-944-9801 or 714-994-6310.

**All Next To Normal production photos by Michael Lamont.

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"Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum

"Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum

"Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum

"Waiting for Godot" scenic design sketch

"Vincent in Brixton" at the Pasadena Playhouse

"They're Playing Our Song" at Reprise Theatre Company

"They're Playing Our Song" at Reprise Theatre Company

"They're Playing Our Song" at Reprise Theatre Company

"The Heiress" model and scenic design

"The Heiress" scenic research photo from house on Washington Square in NYC.

"The Heiress" scenic design model

"The Heiress" at Pasadena Playhouse

"The God of Hell" at the Geffen Playhouse

"Sleepless in Seattle" at Pasadena Playhouse. Photo by Emanuel Treeson.

"Peter Pan" at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts

"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" at the Mark Taper Forum

"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" at the Mark Taper Forum

"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" at the Mark Taper Forum

"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" scenic model

Waiting for Godot 2

Joe Turner 2 Mark Taper

Waiting for Godot 1 sketch. photos by John

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