Kim Huber in "The Sound of Music"

Kim Huber knows kids. She has two of her own. And she’s currently playing the world’s most famous governess turned stepmother — Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music.

This time, her do-re-mi rituals are in the service of 3-D Theatricals’ The Sound of Music, which opens this weekend at the Plummer Auditorium in Fullerton, with Tom Schmid as Captain von Trapp. But Huber’s no stranger to playing Maria or being a leading lady. Although she is perhaps best known for her turn as Belle on Broadway and in national touring companies of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, her credits read like a greatest hits list of musical theater ingénues.

Tom Schmid and Kim Huber

Huber played Maria in Houston’s Theatre Under the Stars production in December 2009 opposite George Dvorsky.  But she couldn’t sound more enthusiastic about doing it again, and in Fullerton. “The Sound of Music is certainly one of my favorite shows to do,” she says, “and Maria is one of my favorite roles. It’s so much fun and I get to play with the kids and sing amazing songs. But this production is going to be really beautiful. 3-D Theatricals has done nine professional contracts in the company…along with 18 pieces in the orchestra and all of the sets and costumes that they’ve created…It’s just going to be this wonderful production, along with all of the people I get to work with. These children are just astounding.”

Her maternal instincts play a prominent role in her life both on and off the stage these days. “I have a daughter who is 11. Her name is Paige and she’s done theater in town and plays all-star soccer, so we’re busy running her around. I also have a 2½-year-old son named Adam and he keeps me busy, too. My husband, Roger Befeler, is an actor as well. He used to star on the Broadway tours of Beauty and the Beast and Phantom, and now we’ve come back home to have a normal life and be in theater. I do theater for fun. It’s a balance to do the things we love and make some money and be home for the things we don’t want to miss.”

Kim Huber and husband, Roger Befeler

Huber is a Southern California native, and it was actually family that enticed her to trade in Broadway lights for a drop of golden sun. “I was in New York for about 10 years working, and I was pregnant with my daughter.  I was in Marie Christine with Audra McDonald at the time, so I told my daughter that she’s already made her Broadway debut. I was one of the first of my friends to have children, and I felt like I was going to be isolated. My whole family is here, I grew up doing theater here, and I decided to come back for a while. And then before you know it, 10 years have gone by. Luckily in the meantime I’ve filled it with lots of great roles and theaters around here.”

As it turns out, Huber’s homecoming was the fulfillment of a self-proclaimed prophecy. “A friend of mine told me a long time ago that I had once told him ‘I want to go to Broadway and do a bunch of shows and then come back home and do it for fun and play all the roles I’ve always wanted to play.’ I think I’ve made that come true, not necessarily consciously, but I have actually gotten to come home and play a lot of the roles that I’ve always wanted to do.”

Kim Huber, Tessa Grady, Carter Thomas, Cozi Zuehlsdorff, Hadley Miller, Jenna Lea Rosen, Jaidyn Young and Griffin Runnels

Due to their strenuous demands, a career in musical theater and having a family are often thought of as mutually exclusive by some actresses. Huber admits that priorities do sometimes come into question.  “What women in musical theater don’t know about having kids is that it’s not so much about the idea that it would impede the work, it’s sometimes even wanting the work.

“I’ll look at some seasons of things and go ‘Oh, that runs the weekend of my daughter’s school play, do I want to miss that?’ Or now with a 2-year-old, it’s about the logistics of who is going to watch him, and with my daughter it’s about who is going to get her to the things that she needs to do. My parents were really involved with my career when I was a kid and getting me to the things that I wanted to do after school, and there’s a part of me that feels it’s now my turn to put the building blocks of her life first. I think that’s what surprising to people. I’m really good friends with Shannon Warne, and we’ve really bonded over the things we’re learning about being moms in the theater and trying to balance both and be both parts of ourselves. ”

Indeed, a year ago Huber and Warne were colleagues in the new musical Having It All at NoHo Arts Center — which dealt with the conflicting demands women sometimes face.

Kim Huber in "Having It All"

As for keeping up with the physical and the vocal demands of Maria on top of everything else, Huber attributes it all to her strongest supporter. “I can do all of that because I have a really amazing husband. My husband has been really great. I actually started the run with an infection and had to get on medicine. He let me sleep and took care of getting the kids to school. It’s all about sleep, water, eating well, and having a really good ENT.”

As a child, Huber grew up in the Southern California civic light opera scene, and she remarks that working back in the theaters where she got her start has brought her career full circle.  “I grew up doing a lot of the CLOs when it was La Mirada, Fullerton Civic Light Opera – I did Annie there, also at the old San Gabriel Civic Light Opera. It was really a family, it was a place where when I wasn’t fitting in at school, I couldn’t wait to go to rehearsal and be with all of my people who were like-minded and did what I did.

Km Huber as Belle in the 1998 Broadway production of "Beauty and the Beast"

“I went to UC Irvine for their drama program, and they have that satellite program that takes students to New York. I went my junior year, and they had a class with Jay Binder, who was casting Beauty and the Beast at the time. I kind of got discovered from that. What’s really neat coming back here now, is that I’m having such a strange time rehearsing for Sound of Music at the La Mirada rehearsal hall, because it’s like all of these lives are intersecting. I met my husband doing Into the Woods at [the organization that would become] Musical Theatre West when it was at La Mirada 20 years ago  [its name then was Whittier - La Mirada Light Opera]. I’m now back in the same rehearsal hall where I met my husband. All these different parts of my life are kind of in this room. It’s really neat.”

As an Angeleno who made it all the way to the Great White Way and finds ample work here in town, Huber’s main advice to the aspiring musical theater performers of SoCal is to just get out there. “I say ‘go see a lot of shows’. Get to know people by seeing things and seeing the places that you want to work and find out how to audition for those companies. I think sometimes just being seen is a great way to start.”

On the other hand, “I’m probably not the best person to ask, because I’m not as connected as I was, as far as going to parties and meeting the people who can open those doors. I’m a homebody with my kids. If I’m not at rehearsal, I’m at home, and your circle gets smaller that way. I think the most important thing, especially in Los Angeles, seems to be that this is a very tight community. We help each other out, and so making friends with those people really helps.”

Jenna Lea Rosen, Hadley Miller, Tessa Grady, Carter Thomas, Tom Schmid, Kim Huber, Cozi Zuehlsdorff, Jaidyn Young and Griffin Runnels

Even though she doesn’t seem to be having any trouble being cast as the ingénue (after all, Maria begins the play as a 17-year-old nun), Huber isn’t one to shy away from mature roles or dread the prospect of playing them. “There are some really tantalizing roles that I would love to do, like Next to Normal. As I’m growing out of these ingénues, I’m looking forward to growing up a bit. There are some really exciting and dynamic women to play in musical theater as you grow older.”

The Sound of Music, presented by 3-D Theatricals. Opens Feb. 10. Plays Thur-Sat 8 pm; Sun. 2 pm (Added performances on Feb.19 at 7 pm; Feb. 25 at 2 pm). Through Feb. 26.Tickets: $28-56. (with special children’s prices of  $22). Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton. Parking is free in the structure across the street. www.3dtshows.com. 714-589-2770.

***All The Sound of Music production photos by Alysa Brennan

Robin Riker, Michael E. Knight, James Louis Wagner and Kal Bennett in "The Cost of the Erection"

With a career that spans more than 16 years, Jon Marans has plenty of insight about becoming a working American playwright—tips that cover healthy reality checks, the danger and wisdom of feedback, and a continual pursuit of obsessions.

Marans makes it seem easy, his demeanor kind and cordial. But don’t be fooled for a second — this playwright works for a living, which means constantly managing expectations and working through the financial and emotional ups and downs of any artistic career.

“Until the curtain comes up,” he states with a laugh, “I don’t actually believe one of my plays is even happening.”

Tavis Danz and John Towey in "Old Wicked Songs"

But Marans doesn’t have much to worry about right now in LA. A revival of his Old Wicked Songs is already open (at the Colony Theatre running through March 4), and his new play The Cost of the Erection is very close to its opening on Saturday at the Blank Theatre’s 2nd Stage in Hollywood.

He continues his lesson on the tricky business of getting produced in the theater world. “Sign the contract. But at the end of the day it still doesn’t mean anything until you’re watching your play with an audience.”

Marans alludes to how frequently projects that are in gestation fail to materialize. He has also experienced the phenomenon of close scrutiny with national attention and an almost-not-quite outcome.

In 1996, Marans’ autobiographical Old Wicked Songs was on the short list for a Pulitzer Prize.

“I think I thought I was going to change from that event,” Marans reflects, with an even keel. “But in reality you’re still just as good as your newest play.”

When the juggernaut musical-phenom Rent by the late Jonathan Larson won the Pulitzer that year—and nearly every other theater award for which it was nominated—it hardly trounced Marans’ pursuit of story or the continued commitment to his craft. The nomination alone changed his outlook.

Tavis Danz and John Towey

“It certainly gives you the confidence to explore things, if you haven’t had the courage to do so,” Marans says, describing the kind of writer he has become. “I try not to think about what’s commercial.”

Old Wicked Songs went on to be America’s second most produced play in 1997–1998 and is still produced around the world. Not bad for someone who makes his living in the world of make-believe after describing himself as being “a very serious child.”

With his plays produced multiple times around the country over the years—and after a few dabbles in television and film projects—Marans has done what very few playwrights in this country have statistically been able to achieve — Marans currently makes 100% of his living as a playwright.

What’s the key to writing a good play?

“Every play should be a mystery from the first page to the last,” Marans offers. “I feel like every play is a ride and you don’t want to take a safe ride.”

The title itself of his newest play (The Cost of the Erection) offers strong evidence against anything safe. The double-entendre in it refers to the challenge undertaken by two of the characters — competing architects working to re-imagine a design-challenged raw space in an exclusive Manhattan neighborhood. But are they competing for the professional accomplishment…or the senior architect’s wife?

James Louis Wagner and Kal Bennett in "The Cost of the Erection"; Photo by Rick Baumgartner

The Blank’s production is one of two openings for Marans’ humorous relationship tale. The same play premiered on February 3 under the alternate title A Raw Space, at the Bristol Riverside Theatre in Bristol, Pennsylvania.

As a play that challenges conventions of narrative with heightened theatrical style and experiments in time and space, Marans is grateful for the opportunity to see it produced twice and so close together with two directors, two design concepts, two completely different casts.

“It’s hard to read on the page,” he says.  “Because it’s a play about staging and design and then about people designing their marriages.”

The Blank production, directed by Blank’s founding artistic director Daniel Henning, will feature Michael E. Knight (three-time daytime Emmy Award Winner from All My Children) and Robin Riker (The Bold and the Beautiful). Actors Kal Bennett and James Louis Wagner round out the acting ensemble.

Marans describes the slow burn of his creative engine. “When I’m unable to work on something in my own life, I tend to work on it in my writing. We all have obsessions; we work them out in our work. I’m not a spur-of-the-moment kind of writer. I need to go home and think about things.”

What about constructive feedback from others?

Mark Shunock, John Tartaglia, Erich Bergen, Dennis Christopher and Patrick Scott Lewis in "Temperamentals"; Photo by Rick Baumgartner

Marans engaged both the Bristol Theater and the Blank in multiple readings of Erection after first getting to know both theaters with previous productions of his work. His comfort level with both theaters is rooted in a respectful, collaborative relationship. The Blank produced Marans’ The Temperamentals last spring.

Marans relishes any time to watch rehearsals and observe the director working with the actors, contemplate staging and challenge character motivations.

“I keep going back to Writing 101,” Marans acknowledges. “I re-write incessantly and cut a lot. I get bored. I’m always finding ways to tell the story faster.”

But even with clear development processes—readings, script-in-hand stagings, re-writes— Marans takes a wary approach to open feedback or critique. His opinion of critique is strongly influenced by one of his writing mentors, John Ford Noonan, who often discussed the perils and destructive force of feedback for writers.

“Sometimes with other writers it’s the story they want to tell instead of the story I want to tell,” Marans comments, referring to the common writing group format. “You have to make sure to hold on to why you wanted to write this story and what you wanted to say.”

Marans has found his own way to navigate feedback and workshop experiences, and to find the right dramatic solutions when he hits a road block.

Michael E. Knight, James Louis Wagner, Kal Bennett and Robin Riker in "The Cost of the Erection"

“I have a few core friends,” he continues. “They won’t start talking about how to fix it. They’ll talk about questions and points of confusion.”

What’s the best advice for aspiring playwrights?

“If anyone had asked what I would have done differently…” Marans thinks a moment, “I would have gotten out more and made more connections with actors and directors.”

Although this shortcoming doesn’t seem to have hurt Marans at all in building a career on plays true to his own voice and inspiration, he continues to develop his producing partnerships with theaters like the Blank. Marans and the Blank will devote a week to workshopping his current in-progress play while he’s here for Erection.

“When you find people on your wavelength you want to hold on to them,” Marans comments on his relationship with the Blank.

The Cost of the Erection continues to evolve for Marans. “The play is about New Yorkers with larger than life personalities, and LA has its own such personalities,” he notes. “The LA show features a group of truly fearless actors.”

Old Wicked Songs, presented by the Colony Theatre. Plays Thur-Fri, 8 pm; Sat 3 pm and 8 pm; Sun. 2 pm. Through March 4.  Tickets:$20-42. The Colony Theatre, 555 North Third Street (at Cypress) adjacent to the Burbank Town Center. www.ColonyTheatre.Org. 818-558-7000 ext. 15.

***All Old Wicked Songs production photos by Michael Lamont

The Cost of the Erection, presented by the Blank Theatre. Opens Saturday. Plays Thu.-Sat. 8 pm; Sun. 2 pm. Through March 18. Tickets: $26-30.  The Blank Theatre’s 2^nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood. www.TheBlank.com 323-661-9827.

***All The Cost of the Erection production photos by Michael Geniac, except where noted

Lesli Margherita in "Man of La Mancha"

Fresh off her 2011 Ovation win for lead actress in a musical for her role as Kate in Reprise Theatre Company’s Kiss Me Kate, Lesli Margherita is kicking off 2012 as Aldonza in Musical Theatre West’s (MTW) revamped version of Man of La Mancha.

The recent Ovation win came as a surprise to Margherita, who recalls being exhausted at the time and convinced that she would not win. She and her husband had just gotten off a plane from her encore presentation of her Olivier Award-winning role in Zorro the Musical in Shanghai when she had to rush to the Ovations.

Lesli Margherita

“We had been flying for 18 hours. We got off the plane, I put on a dress, and I remember nothing,” she laughs. “I didn’t think I was going to win. I remember being bummed because [Reprise artistic director] Jason Alexander was presenting the award and I thought, ‘Oh that would have been cool to win and have him present it to me’,” she says. When she did win, she was shocked. “I wish I had planned out something to say. I was rambling, and I remember [band director] David O cutting me off,” she says. “It was a haze for me.”

Now, her award occupies a special but peculiar place in her entertainment center. “On the shelves we have all these Star Wars Mr. Potato Heads that friends give us because my husband and I are such huge Star Wars fans,” she says. “Dispersed among these Mr. Potato Heads are the Laurence Olivier award and of course the Ovation.”

Margherita, who has been seen in lead roles in a slew of musical productions since winning the Olivier award in 2009 for her performance in London’s West End production of Zorro the Musical, says she is thrilled to be back at Musical Theatre West. She last performed with the Long Beach-based theatrical company in Anything Goes (2006). Since then, she says, “I’ve been dying to come back.”

Lesli Margherita in Reprise Theatre Company's 2011 production of "Kiss Me, Kate"; Photo by Ed Krieger

After runs at Reprise (Kiss Me Kate and Damn Yankees) and La Mirada Theatre (Little Shop of Horrors), Margherita says what keeps her excited about Musical Theatre West is its willingness to take risks. “They’re so open to new things and to doing productions differently, which I think is so important especially now that so many theaters are closing. They’re not just playing it safe.” The helpful staff doesn’t hurt, either. “Everybody who works for them, not just the staff but the volunteers too, are so nice. It’s a real family,” she says.

When she signed on to the show, she was surprised to find out about plans to lend a different tone to the classic musical. The payoff, she says, is in the music. “They decided they wanted to change up some of the songs and some of the music to make it a little grittier,” she explains. To Margherita, the alterations clear up a problematic aspect of the musical. She always found it difficult to marry the tone of the show with her perception of Aldonza. What she calls the “beautiful, classical score” never seemed to make sense for the character, whom she has also played for California Musical Theatre’s Music Circus in Sacramento. “Aldonza is a whore,” Margherita says matter-of-factly. “Yet she’s singing these soprano opera songs. It never made any sense to me.”

To better reflect some of the show’s darker elements, some alterations were made to the arrangements by musical director Matthew Smedal. Margherita knows Smedal. Previously, he has served as associate musical director for more than 10 productions at Reprise, and as music director at venues such as Cabrillo Music Theatre, MTW, and International City Theatre. He worked closely with Margherita in both Kiss Me Kate and Damn Yankees. After seeing him in the role of associate musical director, Margherita is excited to see him spread his wings and take a larger role at MTW. “It’s about time!” she gushes. “As a musical director, he’s genius. He just thinks of music differently than other people do.”

Lesli Margherita in "Man of La Mancha"

Margherita appreciates Smedal’s input. “At Reprise, he was so invaluable to me. He always had advice.” As a friend, Smedal has appeared in Margherita’s popular cabaret show All Hail the Queen, in which he is a member of the band. “He has always come as a favor to me because he thinks it’s fun to play in the band,” she says. She is quick to praise Smedal for the alterations he made to Man of La Mancha’s orchestrations.   She says, “The things he is doing differently to change up this score are really beautiful.”

But fans need not fear a total upheaval of the original show. Margherita assures them that while the revamped score better reflects Aldonza’s darker side, she is still the character audiences love. According to Margherita’s website, Aldonza is one of her favorite roles, and all of her best elements remain intact. “She says it like it is. She’s tough. She takes no crap and I love that,” she says. An apt description—the first time we see Aldonza, she is in a brawl with a group of men. “She basically beats up a bunch of big burly men. It’s really fun,” Margherita says. In addition to her tough side, Aldonza — who’s envisioned by Don Quixote as the lady Dulcinea — also adds to the show’s theme of the “Impossible Dream.” Margherita explains, “She wants to change her life. She is all about redemption.”

Davis Gaines

Don Quixote, the impossible dreamer who inspires Aldonza to change, is played by Davis Gaines, best known for his 2,000-plus performances as the Phantom in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. He has performed the role on Broadway, in LA, and in San Francisco. Gaines has appeared in such productions as Hello, Dolly! with Carol Channing, Camelot with Richard Burton, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas with Alexis Smith.  He has also had a presence on popular television shows including Charmed and Murder, She Wrote. His resume boasts performances for five US presidents.

It’s no wonder Margherita felt nervous when she found out who her co-star was. “When I heard he was doing this, I was so thrilled. And then I went, oh crap! I have to sing next to him!” Margherita reflects, “I have seen him in Phantom, obviously, and I have seen him at benefits over the years. I was always so in awe of his voice.”  Any worries she had about Gaines were cleared up as soon as she met him. “I was afraid he was going to be one of these stuffy, arty singers. But he’s such a goofy guy,” she says.

Margherita has been blown away by Gaines at rehearsals. After hearing his rendition of “The Impossible Dream,” Margherita says she was stunned. “It’s so beautiful. People are going to be weeping,” she promises. “His acting is heartbreaking.”

Justin Robertson and Davis Gaines

As heartbreaking as his acting may be, it is equally funny. “This is a guy who is very funny, but I don’t think people see that a lot,” Margherita says. Playing Don Quixote’s sidekick Sancho Panza is Justin “Squigs” Robertson, who appeared with Gaines in MTW’s production of 1776 (2010). Margherita thinks the two make a great comic duo. “You can tell they’re friends. They’re so good together,” she says. Margherita, who knows Robertson personally, calls him hysterical. “He doesn’t have to say anything—he just gives a look and people start laughing,” she says.

Director Nick DeGruccio is a three-time Ovation award winner for direction: The Laramie Project at Laguna Playhouse and the Colony Theater (2002), 1776 at Performance Riverside (2004), and Jekyll & Hyde at Cabrillo Music Theatre (2008). DeGruccio has worked with all of the lead actors previously, which Margherita thinks serves the production well. “It really does make a difference when you’ve known people a few years. Because I know them, they can say things to me that won’t hurt my feelings. They will be really honest in rehearsals,” she says of DeGruccio, Smedal, and Robertson. “Everybody works really well together.”

Davis Gaines and Lesli Margherita

When Margherita wraps up Man of La Mancha, she won’t have too much time to breathe; she is currently in the planning stages for an all-new version of her cabaret show All Hail the Queen. “We’re basically throwing out the entire old show, which is really sad,” Margherita says. The key to giving the show new life seems to be the idea that bigger is better. “We feel like we have to go bigger and bigger. It’s huge now. Originally there were three dancers, two backup singers, and a puppet. Now we’re looking at a bigger venue, and more band members and dancers. It takes a lot of work,” she says, emphasizing “a lot.” She projects the show will be ready for staging in May.

Also coming up for Margherita is a new original web series called Sparklepuff Lazerium, which she is keeping mum on. “I am sworn to secrecy until it debuts,” she says. What she can reveal is that she will be playing the lead, Sparklepuff, and that the series will be a “science fiction spoof.” A look at the trailer posted on the series’ website suggests the show will be hilarious and somewhat raunchy. The teaser trailer boasts, “In a galaxy threatened by bad criminals, bad aliens, and other bad space stuff, only one can save it.” Cue Lesli Margherita in a tight magenta body suit, matching face paint, and a blue wig getting into various antics. Clearly, the web series will showcase her comic talents.

2012 is shaping up to be another stellar—and perhaps intergalactic—year for Lesli Margherita.

Man of La Mancha, presented by Musical Theatre West. Opens Feb 11. Plays Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 pm and 8 pm (no 2 pm performance Feb 11), Sun 2 pm (additional 7 pm performance Feb 19). Through Feb 26. Tickets: $20-$85. Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach. 562-856-1999 x4. www.musical.org.

***All Man of La Mancha production photos by Ken Jacques

Sheldon Epps and Stephen Eich

THE THING IS… “I’m staying on these few months to make sure I’m leaving the budget in good shape. During my time here, we’ve worked very hard to rectify some of the sins of the past, making some hard, courageous choices.  We closed the playhouse down and went into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. We got rid of some long-standing legacy debts that really were weighing the organization down, intruding on its ability to grow and strengthen. The last thing I want is to have that come back. One of the things I’m trying to leave with my staff is a real understanding of operating within the budget.  As far as my immediate future goes, I’m going to relax for a while.  I’m really looking forward to that. Also, I am working on a project that I’m trying to get to Broadway [TBA]. And I’ve had some overtures to do some consulting, which could be a little career of mine that I have to plan out a little bit better. I like producing plays and I’ve been able to do that a lot. Who knows, I might run another theater in the future. You never know.”  — Stephen Eich, who has served as executive director of the Pasadena Playhouse since June 2009, is stepping down as of Feb 29 but will continue in a consulting capacity through June 30.  Previously, Eich had been managing director of the Geffen Playhouse for eight years. A national search for a new executive director for the Playhouse is soon to begin…

NEWS… TV/film icon William Shatner’s one-man bio expo, Shatner’s World: We Just Live In It, “a voyage through Shatner’s life and career,” helmed by Scott Faris, is materializing at Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, Mar 10, following a three-week run at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre (Feb 14-Mar 4)…Not to be outdone, Peter Gallagher: Songs and Stories from an Actor’s Life is in for one night at Geffen Playhouse, Mar 11, benefiting Geffen Playhouse and the Actors Fund. Backed by a live band, Tony-nominated Gallagher (Long Day’s Journey Into Night) “will share a lifetime of show business experiences” and sing some tunes…Yock-meisters Billy Gardell (CBS’s Mike and Molly), Louie Anderson (Family Feud), Larry Miller (Best in Show) and Nancy Becker Kennedy (The Louie Show) are donating their talents at the Comedy Benefit For Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic (HSFC), Feb 20 at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. All proceeds benefit HSFC…Just 13 months after it first played the Hollywood’s Pantages, the 2009 Broadway outing of Chris D’Arienzo’s retro 1980s jukebox tuner Rock of Ages is returning there for one week (Mar 20-25). The all-star film version (Tom Cruise, Russell Brand, Julianne Hough, Alec Baldwin and more) hits the big screens in June.  This nostalgia rocker actually began at Hollywood’s King King Club in July 2005…And there have been some changes made since INSIDER made the Jan 17 announcement of Claire Chafee’s 1993 distaff four-hander, Why We Have a Body, helmed by Tanna Frederick, at Edgemar Center for the Arts in Santa Monica. Frederick and Barbara Bain are still in the cast, but Julie Davis and Christie Lynn are out, replaced by Cathy Arden and Lisa Pescia.  Opening date has been moved from Feb 17 to Mar 2…

Jeannine Wisnocky Stehlin and Jack Stehlin; Photo by Abert L. Ortega

2012 SEASON LAUNCHINGS… Founded by Dolf Ramos and Marco Gomez in 2002, DOMA Theatre Company is launching its first full season of tuners, taking up residence at the MET Theatre in Hollywood, promising to “take familiar works and give them new twists.” A six-show lineup includes: 1993 Tony winner The Who’s Tommy (Mar 23–Apr 15), wrought by Pete Townshend (book, music & lyrics), Des McAnuff (book), helmed by Hallie Barran; the Jason Robert Brown song cycle, Songs For A New World (May 11–June 3), helmed by Chris M. Allport; Jekyll & Hyde, The Musical (July 6–July 29), created by Leslie Bricusse (book & lyric), Frank Wildhorn (music), helmed by Marco Gomez; 2007 Tony-nominated, LA-set  roller skating tuner Xanadu (Aug 17–Sep 9), book by Douglas Carter Beane, music and lyrics by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar, helmed by Baran;  the Caribbean one-act musical Once on This Island (Sep 21–Oct 14), Lynn Ahrens (book & Lyrics), Stephen Flaherty (music), helmed by Gomez;  and “A surprise, Tony-Award winning musical TBA” (Nov. 2–Dec. 9)…The husband-and-wife duo, Jack Stehlin and Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin, traveled their Circus Theatricals production company through the stages of LA from 1995 to 2005, garnering acclaim but no permanent residence. In 2006, they found a home on the 2^nd floor of the mid-Wilshire Hayworth Theatre building, establishing offices, workshops and a performance venue that is still not quite ready for prime time.  While still maintaining their offices at the Hayworth, the Stehlins and their recently renamed New American Theatre will launch the company’s 2012 season at McCadden Place Theatre in Hollywood, premiering the political thriller/drama Bedfellows, scripted by Chuck Rose, helmed by Jack Stehlin, opening Apr 6.  Upcoming will be the company’s 17^th Annual Festival of New One Act Plays, also at the McCadden (date TBA).  Future 2012 plans include reuniting with director/choreographer/actor John Farmanesh-Bocca (Titus Redux) on a new re-imagined Shakespeare production (TBA) and actually having their Hayworth space viable for a fall production…

Salome Jens in "On Holy Ground"; Photo by Irene Hovey

EXTENDING… It hasn’t even opened yet but Geffen Playhouse in Westwood is stretching out the premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian, “a surreal trip that is rife with disturbingly dark humor,” through Mar 25.  Helmed by Tony winner Robert Falls, starring Ed Harris, Glenne Headly, Amy Madigan, Bill Pullman and Bess Rous, the production debuts Feb 15 at Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater…The premiere outing of On Holy Ground, scripted by Stephanie Liss, helmed by L. Flint Esquerra, starring Salome Jens, Lisa Richards and Abbe Rowlins, is sticking around through Mar 4 at the MET Theatre in Hollywood…And the interactive tuner, Cinderella, wrought by June Chandler (book) and Jane Fuller (music & lyrics), helmed by Chandler and featuring Fuller in the title role, which re-opened Feb 4 at Sierra Madre Playhouse, is extending its run until Mar 17…

Luis Alfaro

AROUND TOWN… Electricidad, 2012 Joyce Award winner Luis Alfaro’s 2003 adaptation of Sophocles’ Electra, received its West Coast premiere at CTG’s Mark Taper Forum in 2005. Now it’s having another LA outing, this time as a visiting production at Bilingual Foundation of the Arts home base, Teatro Carmen Zapata, presented by Project Twenty 12 in partnership with Homeboy Industries. Set in the gang-strewn streets of East LA, helmed by Sylvia Blush, the production opens Mar 2…And Fountain Theatre in Hollywood is launching its ninth annual presentation of Forever Flamenco! with the LA debut of Compañía Manuel de la Cruz, Feb 19 at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre…A geographically diverse stage/film/TV/new media collective, Tilted Field Productions, with members from LA, Chicago, New York and San Francisco, is collaborating with downtown LA-based Son of Semele to workshop the rock tuner, The Last Days of Mary Stuart, Feb 18-Mar 4.  Adapted from Friedrich Schiller’s massive 1800 verse play, scored by LA rockers Byron Kahr and John Nixon, helmed by Becca Wolff, production features local bands TONY and whqles…

Jacque Lynn Colton; Photo by Sherry Netherland

I WAS ON STAGE WHEN… “I was appearing in Look Homeward, Angel, playing Eliza Gant, the mother. Her son Ben has died and she is sitting and grieving by his deathbed. The other son Eugene comes in, walks close to me and says, ‘Momma, Momma please don’t cry.’ Through my tears, I had to bury my face in his hands and tell him under my breath, ‘You’re standing on my foot.’ Somehow we managed to project uncontrollable laughter as anguish to the audience.” — Thesp Jacque Lynn Colton opens Feb 10 in North Hollywood-based Group Rep’s revival of If We Are Women, scripted by Joanna McClelland Glass, helmed by Sherry Netherland…

Merced Theater (center) flanked by Pico House and Masonic Temple

INSIDE LA STAGE HISTORY…From 1848 to 1870, the City of Los Angeles makes a slow, violent transition from its previous Spanish colonial rule to the often brutal rule of law imposed by the new Anglo-based California government. Due to ongoing racial tensions and violence, LA is described as “undoubtedly the toughest town of the entire nation.” The homicide rate during these years (an average 13 murders per year) is 10 to 20 times the annual murder rates for New York City during the same period. But by 1870, there is enough of a civilized citizenry to actually consider establishing some kind of culture base in the town. William Abbot, the son of Swiss immigrants who settle in LA in 1854, decides to build a theater named for his wife, Maria Merced Garcia. Theater Merced, located at 418 N. Main, the first official stage venue in LA, designed by Ezra F. Kysor (the architect of the adjoining hotel, Pico House), opens Jan 30, 1871 with the melodrama Fanchon, The Little Cricket. The theater is on the second floor and seats 400. It is connected to Pico House so that its guests can attend performances. The Abbot family lives on the third floor, and the first floor is rented out to commerce. The Merced is the center of LA theatrical activity from 1871 until 1876, with efforts to produce Shakespeare and restoration comedy. But the tastes of the average Angeleno at the time are more receptive to minstrel shows and melodrama, including such standards as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ten Nights in a Bar Room. In 1876, the Merced is leased to J.H. Wood who renames it Wood’s Opera House, a misnomer since all he produces are boxing matches and bawdy farces. Wood is bankrupt by 1878 and the theater closes. There is an effort to re-open Merced in 1883, but it is outdistanced by new theaters such as 1200-seat Child’s Opera House (1884), the Los Angeles (1888) and the Burbank (1893). It is to Child’s (renamed the Grand Opera House) that Edwin Booth brings his company in 1888, establishing LA as a viable touring destination for East Coast entertainment. Also, the murder count has decreased considerably. The facades of Theater Merced and adjoining Pico House are still standing…

…The Julio Martinez-hosted ARTS IN REVIEW, moves to Thursdays (2:30 to 3 pm) on KPFK (90.7FM), spotlighting the best in live theater and cabaret in the Greater LA area. Upcoming on Feb 16, KPFK’s winter membership drive…

JoBeth Williams, Ann Noble and Deborah Puette in "The Fall to Earth"

JoBeth Williams knows a lot about playing tragic but resilient mothers on LA’s primary stages. Her last two outings in that arena were roles as Dinah in Jane Anderson’s The Quality of Life at the Geffen Playhouse and Harriet in Charles Randolph-Wright’s The Night is a Child at Pasadena Playhouse. The first bore the burden of a murdered teenage daughter and the second an adult son who commits a Columbine atrocity. Exhausting emotional territory to mine eight shows a week.

Director Robin Larsen knows just as much about investigating the hidden underbelly of dysfunctional families and personal relationships in LA’s more intimate spaces. Her explorations of predatory Victorian con men, elderly alcoholic parents and childhood sexual abuse have garnered nearly every recent theater award for productions ranging from An Infinite Ache and Tryst at the Black Dahlia Theatre to Four Places and Blackbird at Rogue Machine Theatre. Joel Drake Johnson’s Four Places earned Ovation, LADCC and Garland Awards.

Robin Larsen

It’s an earlier Johnson work, The Fall to Earth, that brings the two together for an Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Roxanne Hart co-production opening February 11. Ovation nominated for Best Actress in Four Places, Hart is a founding member of Rogue Machine and producer of its Rant & Rave writers’ series. This marks her theatrical producing debut.

Earth premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2004 and earned the playwright’s childhood pal Rondi Reed (Tony Award winner, August: Osage County) a Jeff Award for Best Actress. Recently, a short-run NYC production closed this past Sunday at 59E59 Theatres starring Deborah Hedwall, Jolie Curtsinger and Amelia Campbell.

The play tells the story of a Midwestern woman named Fay Schorsch (Williams) who travels with her estranged, Chicago-based, adult daughter Rachel Browney (Deborah Puette) to an undisclosed mountain state to identify the body of son/brother Kenny. There they meet police officer Terry Reed (Ann Noble) who befriends them only to become enmeshed in their dysfunctional family dynamics.

Puette, a former Chicagoan and founding member of Rogue Machine, obtained both of Johnson’s Four Places and The Fall to Earth scripts from the Windy City playwright via mutual friends in 2009.  She gave them to Larsen who was on RM’s literary committee at the time and with whom Puette had worked in Tryst as one of its co-stars. When Larsen decided to direct Four Places, she became one of its three producers alongside John Perrin Flynn and Matthew Elkins. The play’s critical success made Puette, Larsen and Hart want to team up again. But first they needed a Fay.

The “L” room

JoBeth Williams

It’s late Friday afternoon just before the second night of tech rehearsal and a scant week before opening. Williams enters the Odyssey lobby with a warm hello sans make-up, wearing a navy sweater and tan skirt. She enlists help to bring in a couple of small suitcases for use in the 99-Seat Plan production — her first, as it turns out. A few days earlier, Williams had wrapped up her duties as SAG Awards Committee Chair. The Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee was happy the broadcast was over so she could concentrate solely on the play.

Audiences know Williams best for her roles in such films as Poltergeist (1 & 2,) The Big Chill, Teachers and The Big Year as well as acclaimed performances in TV movies like The Day After, Adam, Baby M and My Name is Bill W., two of which led to Emmy Award nominations plus a Golden Globe nod. She starred in the TV series The Client and Payne, guest starred on Frasier (Emmy nom), and was recently seen in recurring roles on Hart of Dixie, Private Practice and Dexter. Behind the camera, Williams garnered an Oscar nomination for directing her first film On Hope, a 1994 short starring Mercedes Ruehl and Annette O’Toole.

Her theater credits cover both coasts, ranging from Body Awareness (Atlantic Theatre), Last Dance and Gardenia (premieres at Manhattan Theatre Club), Moonchildren, A Coupla White Chicks, Ladyhouse Blues and The Vagina Monologues in New York to The Quality of Life (Geffen, Backstage Garland Award and LADCC nomination), The Night is a Child (Pasadena Playhouse), Broadway Bound and A Doll’s House (LA Theatre Works). Elsewhere she has performed in The Quality of Life (ACT), Antony and Cleopatra (Old Globe), Idiot’s Delight (Kennedy Center), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (McCarter Theatre) and Threepenny Opera (Williamstown), plus others.

JoBeth Williams, Dennis Boutsikaris and Laurie Metcalf in the 2007 Geffen Playhouse production of "The Quality of Life"; Photo by Michael Lamont

Larsen arrives at the Odyssey in a green hoodie, cuffed jeans and UGG-style boots. After settling onto a couch in a vacant office alongside Williams, she explains that their search for Fay entailed holding informal auditions at Hart’s house late last summer. Then Hart gave a copy to old pal Williams.

“Roxanne’s a very good friend of mine,” Williams explains.  “We’ve known each about 25 years now and she said, ‘I have the script. I think it’s wonderful, but I’m not sure it’s a part that you’ll want to play.’ So I read it and was just fascinated by it. I loved the dialogue. I really like his writing. It feels very real and very human. She’s a very complicated character.”

“All of his characters are very complicated,” interjects Larsen. “You think you’re getting one thing and then you’re not.”

“It [the script] was a real challenge,” Williams admits. “Roxanne said she wanted to do it with Robin and Deborah. Would I come in to read with Deborah for her and Robin? I said ‘Sure why not?’ so I went to Roxanne’s house and we read it.”

JoBeth Williams, Ann Noble and Deborah Puette

“And she was perfect,” smiles Larsen.

“Then Roxanne called me,” Williams continues, “and said, ‘Well, we don’t have a theater yet but will you hang with us until we find the place to do it?’ and I said, ‘sure.’”

Williams suggested both the Geffen and the Odyssey, having seen Annie Potts perform in AfterMath at the latter last year. One of her sons had also interned at the theater for a senior class project. “I’ve seen a number of things here and most of what I saw I thought was well done.”

They read the play for the Odyssey’s artistic director Ron Sossi and associate artistic director Beth Hogan who agreed to produce it with Hart. At the time they weren’t sure which of the Odyssey’s three theaters would be available. It turned out to be the L-shaped one where Potts did her show.

“I liked that L shape, it’s a challenge,” Larsen offers. “It’s intimate in a way that the others aren’t.”

“I do, too,” adds Williams. “I thought it was a really nice space when I saw Annie’s play. As Robin says, it feels so intimate and I thought, ‘Well, that would be really a good match with this piece.”

Chicago to Cauldrons

JoBeth Williams and Deborah Puette

In between these two outings with Johnson, Larsen also helmed another Chicago playwright’s work — Keith Huff’s Pursued by Happiness at Road Theatre Company. When asked if she has an affinity for that city’s particular voice, Larsen replies, “it’s kind of circumstantial.”

“I love what’s coming out of there, but playwrights from all around are doing this kind of character-driven work,” she explains. “Joel writes stories about multi-dimensional, mercurial characters that I like. An acting teaching of mine used to say it’s not pretty but it’s human. And they’re in very charged, life-changing situations so that’s appealing to me. You can sort of mine it for lots of good stuff.”

“You sure can!” laughs Williams. “It just keeps revealing more and more and more as you work on it, which is fascinating. I mean that’s what actors love or I think most actors. I do. You take a piece and you don’t immediately have it all. You have to keep exploring and digging and digging and digging. I think this is the kind of play and the kind of character where you know, until our last performance, I’ll still be finding stuff and digging. And not all writing is like that. There’s a lot of facile writing around.”

Lisa Rothschiller, Roxanne Hart, Ann Gee Byrd and Tim Bagley in the 2010 Rogue Machine Theatre production of "Four Places"; Photo by John P. Flynn

“The ‘what you see is what you get’ kind,” adds Larsen. “Joel’s work is not like that. And it all adds up. It’s so complicated, right?” She looks to Williams. “It’s so complicated and you’re dealing with, as in Four Places, a family dynamic where there is so much history. So at any given point, something could not add up and yet it all adds up. The more you keep digging the more you find it just makes sense. So he’s created this world and this family history that’s complex and wonderful. And good for the mining you’re talking about.”

“It’s deceptive when you read it,” agrees Williams. “There’s a certain veneer of civility to it and when you start exploring beneath that, all this cauldron of stuff is going on. That’s what’s fun. Robin certainly pushes me to keep digging and poking which is great because that’s what a good director does.”

Williams’ character is no warm-milk-and-cookies mom. Fay’s “I can take it” mantra uttered when contrasting herself with her Vietnam War vet husband or in the face of disturbing news reveals a slightly borderline personality operating beneath the surface to keep her family under control and emotionally stunted.

Sybyl Walker and JoBeth Williams in "The Night is a Child"; Photo by Craig Schwartz

In a 2009 LA STAGE Times interview, Williams contrasted her two previous LA stage mom roles: “I think the reason that I’ve been attracted to Dinah in A Quality of Life and Harriet in this [The Night is a Child] is that I’m trying to figure out in my own mind, if anything happened to my kids, how would I deal with it…Harriet is trying to move forward. She doesn’t have Dinah’s sunny-ness. Dinah is always trying to see the good side of things. Harriet has taken a step away from Boston where the events happened and come to Brazil to try to find herself. She has to continually confront the past, but it’s her movement of letting go that I find fascinating.”

After listening to her remarks uttered nearly three years ago, where does Williams see Fay fitting in with these women?

“I think Fay is the most complex of all three,” she replies. “The most complicated and for me, the least likable to play because I am a mother. Some of the things that Fay does are horrifying to any sort of reasonable mother, but I also understand her need and her desperation. We’ve talked about is there mental illness involved? I don’t know if you would define it as mental illness. I think she’s one of those people who has a hair trigger, who wants to be in control of everything so that it goes the way it’s supposed to be and people do what they’re supposed to do.”

Deborah Puette and JoBeth Williams

Williams admits there’s a certain amount of this in her and other mothers. “I understand it. Even after they’re grown, you want to still help your kids and make sure they’re going down the right path. I think when Fay’s not able to do that, she erupts and she erupts and gets it all out.  There’s a certain amount of remorse but mostly she just thinks things should go back to the way they were. That there’s love involved — I did it because I love you. So in that way I can relate to her. I can’t actually relate to committing violence, but I can understand when you reach that place and the snakes are coming out of your head!”

Climbing Everest

Labeling the play is no easy task. “Harrowing yet often hilarious” is how the Odyssey and other theaters have marketed it. So is it a dark comedy?

“I wouldn’t say it’s a dark comedy, I would say…” Larsen starts to reply.

“No, I don’t think it’s a comedy but it’s got humor in it,” overlaps Williams.

“I think it’s a tragedy with comedy!” laughs Larsen after her.

JoBeth Williams, Ann Noble and Deborah Puette

“Right,” agrees Williams. “One of the first things I said to Rachel when we were working was there’s a classic description of how to do Chekhov — rehearse it like a tragedy and play it like a comedy. I think that this has a similar sort of feel to it. You have to find all of the underbelly of it and then you have to have the cover behavior.”

“I told you guys the first day of rehearsal what I thought the theme was – ‘what comes around goes around,’” says Larsen to Williams in response to a reading of verses from a Philip Larkin poem used in a prior production that included the lines: man hands down misery to man and don’t have kids yourself. “Yes, it’s very much that. I’m very interested in the parent-child relationship and how you pass things down. I’ve written a few screenplays with very similar themes. In the Fall to Earth, Fay has two children that she’s screwed up. Rachel gets out and survives. Kenny doesn’t.”

For Williams, the role has been particularly challenging not only because her character drives the play but because this is her first foray into LA’s intimate theater scene.

“I came in kind of naive,” she admits. “I didn’t know that the rehearsal days were short. I thought it would be like it was at the Geffen or at the Playhouse. So I was kind of stunned, as Robin knows, at the end of the first week when I realized that there was considerably less rehearsal time than I had thought there would be. And there’s a lot of lines!” she laughs, then turns quiet.  “And a lot of turns. A lot of hairpin turns. And so I think that that’s been hard for me to try and get all of the words and the blocking and everything in my head and — still continue to find the moments and the behavior. But it’s happening so I just have to trust it.

JoBeth Williams and Deborah Puette

“It was a little daunting. After two weeks, I was kind of like, ‘Oh my God, this is Everest.’ But it’s good. We have to keep testing ourselves always I think. It’s too easy to get comfortable. I may go kicking and screaming,” she laughs, “but obviously there’s something in me that keeps attempting these things. That’s what made me want to be an actor — this kind of work.”

“It feeds your soul,” adds Larsen.

“Yes, that’s where the goodies are,” says Williams, nodding. “And I love that the play is about three women, you know? We don’t have enough of those stories on stage or on film. The Help was sort of a breath of fresh air.”

Style and Collaboration

From the outside it appears that Larsen is drawn to direct plays with deeply flawed and complex characters rather than the occasional comedy.

“Somebody said it to me once,” she offers. “That I was sort of bubbly or whatever but that she could tell by the material I liked to work on that the opposite was true.”

Deborah Puette and JoBeth Williams

“You like those because you’re an intelligent, feeling and passionately curious person, which any artist should be,” interjects Williams. “If you’re only interested in doing light comedy that’s one thing, but if you’re interested in really exploring the human experience, that’s another.”

“You know what I think acting and directing and all of these storytelling positions are?” posits Larsen. “We’re communicators of the human experience, and the human experience again is not always pretty. It’s very often not.”

“Right, more often than not,” says Williams.

Director Larsen admits her favorite thing is collaborating with actors. “Yesterday was the first day of tech and I got very excited. My husband said, ‘It’s the first day of tech, isn’t it?’ So I love putting it all together, too — the visual and the sound elements — but to come in and explore with actors, their characters and tell the story, that’s the thing. It’s always a challenge to make it riveting or interesting. I think that comes from very specific behavior of two or three or how many people up there acting very specifically so that we understand it and engage.”

So is there a Robin Larsen style an audience could identify?

“Well, the performances have to be superb,” she laughs. “Every one. What is my style? Acute, is that the word I want, in the design and that it’s a clear story from beginning to end. And every element adds to that in communicating the human condition.”

“Makes sense to me,” Williams concurs.

The Fall to Earth, presented by Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Roxanne Hart. Opens Feb 11. Plays Wed Feb 29, Mar 14 and 28, 8 pm; Thur Feb. 16 and 23, Mar 8 and 22, 8 pm; Fri-Sat 8 pm; Sun 2 pm. except Sun Feb. 12 and Mar 18 at 7 p.m. only. Dark March 9 through March 11. Closes April 1. Tickets: $25-30. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 South Sepulveda Boulevard, West LA. 310-477-2055. www.odysseytheatre.com .

***All The Fall to Earth production photos by David Colclasure

Samiyah Swann, Yvette Saunders, Darlene Bel Grayson, Michelle Campbell and Mystie Galloway in "For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf"

Los Angeles, 2009.  I had just moved back from 10 years of living in New York.  While I had worked quite a bit in Los Angeles theater before I moved to New York in 1998, if you’re out of the scene for more than six and a half minutes in this town, you gotta start over.  So, I began the arduous task of making connections, schmoozing and calling on my old connections for new jobs.

Shortly thereafter, I was hired by a now defunct pay-to-play house to direct a production of Twelve Angry Men. This show was of little interest to me but, I figured, it’s a gig, it’s a credit, go for it.  So I did.  Very soon into the process and prior to casting, I was contacted by the owner of the theater company.  He asked me if I had ever heard of For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange.  I had not.  He then asked me to get a copy and read it, then share with him my impressions of the show.  He tagged that statement by telling me he was planning to produce it and wanted to move me from 12 Angry Men to For Colored Girls…if I liked the show.  I agreed to check it out, and promptly did so.

J.C. Gafford

I was stunned after I read For Colored Girls. In my 20-plus years of doing live theater both here in LA and in New York, I had never come across material like this.  The words were so gritty yet eloquent, so penetratingly deep yet light and jovial in places, so profound yet simple.  The play presented such a powerful and timeless commentary on the state of black womanhood in our country — I was instantly hooked.  At the same time I found myself challenged too.

How, exactly, am I — a non-black, non-female person –  going to do justice to this astounding piece so heavily entrenched in black culture and womanhood?  I had no idea at the time, but I was so moved and inspired by the piece that I agreed to do the show anyway.  This launched me into a three-year journey that culminates with the production opening Friday.

We went into production on For Colored Girls, making it all the way through casting and the beginning of the rehearsal process.  I knew that I would have to rely heavily on my actresses for the piece to work.  I took a less dominant role in favor of a more collaborative one, as we created version 1 of the show.

During the rehearsal process, problems arose between me and the producer. I can’t go into the details here, but I began to suspect that the production was doomed. I consider myself to be an excellent collaborator, but sometimes I will not compromise.   I found myself hopelessly in love with the piece and quite dedicated to doing it in a way I felt would do it justice.  The cast agreed with me, and that version was never produced.

Michelle Campbell, Nia Witts, Yvette Saunders, Samiyah Swann, Mystie Galloway, Darlene Bel Grayson and Monica Quinn

But I was then left with seven actresses who had paid several hundred dollars each to be in For Colored Girls…  I also had, I felt, a potentially great rendition of the show!  This all left me with a huge sense of responsibility and indebtedness to these talented ladies who had committed so much of their time and hearts to bring this emotionally demanding show to life.  I was determined to find a way to produce this show not only for them, but for me.  While there are several shows I’d like to do and some I really want to do, this show – I had to do.

Weeks and months elapsed. Then in early 2010 I was hired by Los Angeles Valley College as a “Professional Expert” to produce a festival of six original one-act plays written by students of the department. Because I was now temporary staff, had earned my AA degree right there in the department, and because then-department chairman Pete Parkin was my earliest mentor and knew I could direct a play, I was allowed to do For Colored Girls…there.

We did so with a minimal budget that came out of my pocket, without a choreographer, and I did the set and sound design as well.  Though we lost two actresses a week before opening (one due to being hospitalized after an asthma attack and one that I let go) we put on an excellent show.  Although I did feel that I had given the actresses who had paid for the experience of doing the show the opportunity to do it, I still envisioned a bigger production.  I still didn’t feel that I had done the piece the justice and honor it deserves to a degree that was settling for me.

Samiyah Swann, Mystie Galloway, Yvette Saunders, Michelle Campbell and Nia Witts

In April 2011, my friend Jules Aaron hired me to design lights and set for a new show he was working on, at a theater where he and I had worked together previously when it had been owned and operated by another entity.  I become acquainted with the owner of the theater and we bonded instantly and intensely.  I approached her about becoming the artistic director for the 2012 season as well as doing For Colored Girls… She agreed to bring me in and to do the show, especially because she had planned to focus the 2012 season on the celebration of women.  How better to kick-off such a season than with For Colored Girls…?

So now, I’ve put together the production I had envisioned from the get-go.  It is a bittersweet thing, because though I’m very proud of the show and had a blast working with everyone involved, this production does represent the end of my journey with this piece.  I seldom, if ever, do a show more than once, and though this show certainly deserves to be the exception to my no-repeat policy, it is most likely that I won’t do it again.  So it is from this bittersweet place that I bid you an echo of Ntozake Shange’s sentiment after she left the show when it was on Broadway: “I am on the other side of the rainbow/picking up the pieces of days spent waitin for the poem to be heard/while you listen/I have other work to do.”

For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf, presented by the Lyric Theatre. Opens Friday at 8 pm. Plays Fri-Sat, 8 pm. Through March 17. Tickets: $20. The Lyric Theatre, 520 N. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles 323-960-1055. www.plays411.com/forcoloredgirls, www.Goldstar.com, www.LAStageAlliance.com.

***All For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf production photos by Richard M. Johnson

J.C. Gafford earned top honors at LAVC, CalArts and NYU. He has since become a successful director and designer, working with such notables as Ronn Moss, Michael T. Weiss, Rex Smith, Derf Reklaw, and Richard Kind, and at such theaters as LATC, Stella Adler, Merkin Concert Hall, and Provincetown Playhouse, among many others.

Terry Davis and Lindsey Ginter in "Sarah's War"

Sarah’s War started as a one-act play set in a diner.

In early 2003, the writers’ group at Pacific Resident Theatre decided to do a collective show. Each writer would choose an article from the newspaper and set it in a diner: one set, six short plays called Diner Times.

Around the same time, I was directing a reading of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata as a global day of protest against the impending invasion of Iraq. At a meeting to discuss what we would do with the money we raised, someone suggested we send one person to Iraq as a human shield.

I raised my hand.  What’s the good of protesting when the government just ignores us? We need direct action. We need to stop this catastrophic mistake our government is making in our names. “I’ll go,” I said.

Marilyn Fox, our artistic director, said, “No Val, you can’t.  Think about your parents.  You can’t do that to them.” She had a point and the idea was dropped, but it made me think: Why is my life worth more than an Iraqi’s? Why should my family matter and their families not at all? What about our larger family… humanity? Why are we fooled again and again by the words: security, them, us, mushroom cloud, defense…. madman…. yellow cake uranium?

Valerie Dillman

On March 20, 2003 we bombed Iraq –  “shock and awe.” I felt a deep sense of shame and disgust.  I continued to go to antiwar marches, and I started seeing signs with photos of a young, blonde, peace activist who had been killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting home demolitions in Palestine.

Her name was Rachel Corrie.

This would be my newspaper story for our collective night of theater. The short play Rachel’s War opened in May of 2003 and played for three weeks at the co-op space at Pacific Resident Theatre.

But Rachel’s story stayed with me, and with the membership of PRT.

“I’d love to know more about the family” …“It would be amazing to see what happened to her in Palestine”… “What about the guy who drove the bulldozer, what’s his story?”

Yes, what about all of that: the family, the International Solidarity Movement [the group that brought Corrie to the Middle East], the Palestinians, the Israeli bulldozer driver?  And then there was the reaction from the press. The Rachel Corrie story was not a part of the larger, “we must defeat the evildoers” Iraqi war narrative, so it was mostly buried. When a story did appear, it was often followed by vile comments about her death.  It made me angry and also curious. Why was Rachel’s death such a threat?  Why are we so afraid to look at the truth?

Sarah’s War is fiction inspired by a true story, which is why I changed the title. I imagined what the families’ reactions were based on my own experiences, and the story of the bulldozer driver was pure invention. My theater family helped shaped the play during readings and rehearsals. Several lines are from their unique perspectives. I wanted all sides honored for their complexity and intelligence. I don’t agree with many things my characters say, but I respect their right to say them.

Dina Simon and Abica Dubay

The play My Name is Rachel Corrie, a one-woman show based on Rachel Corrie’s emails and journals was produced at Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga last summer. From one of Don Shirley’s LA STAGE Times articles about the production, “Even British journalist Katharine Viner, who compiled the Rachel Corrie script from Corrie’s writings (with actor Alan Rickman), said that the script is ‘a one-sided view of the conflict’ in a 2005 interview with the LA Times. ‘Rachel didn’t live in Israel, she lived among Palestinians. But to balance it up would have been crazy theatrically’.”

My play attempts just that. It is about Sarah’s world and the effect her life and death had on people. It’s about her parents’ struggle to weed out the feelings of regret and blame and find the truth about their daughter’s death while facing the personal and political fault lines that exist in every family. It’s about the bulldozer driver — a young man in the Israeli peace movement coping with his father’s death from a suicide bomber. It’s about the Palestinian families affected by the occupation. And it’s about Sarah. I imagined this courageous, idealistic woman confronting the overwhelming reality in Rafah, dealing with the members of the International Solidarity Movement… her tragic death.

The cast of Sarah’s War has wide difference in opinions about politics, and I am honored that they bring their points of view to this play.

I look forward to some interesting talkbacks.

Sarah’s War, presented by Freedom Theatre West. Opens Feb.11. Plays Thur- Sat at 8 pm; Sun. at 3 pm. Through March 18. Tickets: $20-30. Hudson Mainstage Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. 310-657-5511. www.Plays411.com/sarahswar

***All photos by Jordan Elgrably

Valerie Dillman is a writer/actress. Her plays include the full-length Sarah’s War and the one-acts Hedda Lives! and First Lady. She also wrote and directed the short film Fascinating, which premiered at the Sedona International Film Festival. She is currently working on a satire of the Morning News.

Amy Ellenberger and Tobie Windham in "Slither"

Just over three years ago, five graduates of UC San Diego’s theater MFA program –  Jennifer Chang, Ruth McKee, Hilary Ward, Larissa Kokernot and Amy Ellenberger — pooled their collective talents to create a theater company, eager to make their artistic mark on Los Angeles. The plan was to create outside of the normal box-like spaces of most 99-seat theaters.

They began with a production of The Three Sisters at the Masonic Lodge of the Hollywood Forever cemetery, where they discovered their company’s name in the graveyard. Ellenberger recalls, “We got the idea from a gravestone in the cemetery that just has the word CHALK on it with a box of chalk at the bottom so you can write on it.  We thought this would be a good metaphor for theater. You create something, then erase it, then create something else. We also have a fun tagline of ‘erasing the stage’ that helps express the idea of erasing the proscenium in unconventional spaces and bringing the audience closer to the action.”

Now in the midst of its eighth production, Chalk Repertory Theatre is well on its way to fulfilling its mission to be “intimate, relevant, and accessible.” And the company is back at the cemetery with the West Coast premiere of Slither, a history of women and their theological as well as secular relationship with snakes.

Playwright Carson Kreitzer, Director Casey Stangl; Photo by Jeff Galfer

Intertwined stories follow first woman Eve, a Cretan priestess, a snake-handling preacher’s wife and a carnival snake dancer named Fanny Lou. The latter is portrayed by founding member Ellenberger, who describes her excitement about the production. “When you walk into a Chalk show you are going to experience an event. It’s not a passive experience. It is very inclusive. It is happening all around you. You are always a part of the environment. This particular play has several themes: religion, beginning of man, evolution of women. There is kind of a revival meeting feel to the play, so putting it in a cemetery lends itself to that.”

Playwright Carson Kreitzer has been examining historical themes of women and power for years. Her research took her to some unexpected places. “I became fascinated with carny snake dancers in the depression era. I had done a previous play called Freak Show and researched all kinds of abnormal shows in circuses and carnivals. The snake dancers absolutely fascinated me and that became the kernel of this new idea, which carried me into Slither.”

But far from exploiting the freakish nature of a relationship between women and snakes, Kreitzer is hoping audiences will be moved to see the historical straitjacket that has bound women for so long. “I want people to be talking about the play afterwards, weighing what they think rather than feeling they have come out with a message. I want people to be thinking about our history and how power changes and how things change over time. The world we are born into is not the only way the world works. This is right now. This is the way the power balance is right now. I certainly have been trying to figure out male-female relationships. I came in through the tail end of the ‘Free to be You and Me’ generation. The people I came up with at least knew we were supposed to be trying, knew we were supposed to be making it better. But I feel that the pendulum has swung rather disturbingly in the other direction — all this stuff about princess toys and girl-specific Legos.”

Inger Tudor

Though there are male actors in the play, Kreitzer is not penitent about giving the male characters some short shrift. “It is not a traditional play. There are a lot of protagonists. All these women’s stories are important. The men play multiple roles. And in the way that often female characters are portrayed simply as either good or bad, either Madonna or whore, there is a little artificial division going on with the male characters. It is something I could justify to myself. I am swimming upstream — we have so many centuries of the guy being the important one in the story.”

Slither started in Minneapolis, where Kreitzer had emigrated from eight years in New York City through a Jerome Fellowship that brought her to the city’s esteemed Playwrights’ Center. She became acquainted with Casey Stengl, artistic director of Minneapolis’ cutting-edge Eye of the Storm Theater and was invited to create an entry for the company’s Seed the Storm festival. She explains, “They were five- to 10-minute ideas. Rather than having a reading (it seems playwrights are offered nothing but readings) this was a chance to see a little piece of your play actually happen. After the seed festival, we decided we wanted to go ahead and do the full play. We applied for an NEA-TCG playwright residency grant and got it – that supported my life while writing the play and going to all the rehearsals and being a constant part of building that first production.”

The 2003 production was extremely successful. When Stangl dissolved the Minneapolis theater and moved to Los Angeles, she looked for a place to continue working on Slither. But she more immediately became involved in other projects, beginning in 2005 with Barbra’s Wedding at the Falcon Theatre. She gradually built a career here that included such recent highlights as the West Coast premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or the vibrator play at South Coast Repertory in 2010 and last year’s double-cast musical version of Noel Coward’s Peace in Our Time for Antaeus.

Cast members Lina Patel, Inger Tudor, Teri Reeves, & Amy Ellenberger; Photo by Jeff Galfer

At the same time, she was a friend of Chalk founding member Larissa Kokernot, and when Chalk was created, Stangl knew she had found the right company for Slither. “I really love their commitment to both classic and new work, but more than that I love the non-traditional space aspect of the work. I thought Slither in particular would lend itself to this Hollywood Forever space.”

Kreitzer was immediately on board with the project, though other obligations made it impossible for her to be part of early rehearsals. She smiles as she says, “I can tell you I would not have been comfortable with anyone else playing around with and re-arranging my script while I was not there. But because it is Casey and we built the play up together, I felt very safe with these trusted compatriots and thrilled I could come out and be a part of the later work. A whole set of changes had to be made for this production in this space. Casey and the cast have been working and sending new ideas to me in Minneapolis.”

Stangl is very enthusiastic about the play’s place in the world of gender politics. “It’s about whoever is the victor gets to tell history. Women have often not come out on top, so visions of their stories have been told in a certain way. This is a sort of re-imagining of some iconic female figures, trying to upend the traditional idea of women and snakes being in combination and trying to open that up both to good and bad, fun and sexy and not shameful.”

Stangl was highly involved in the development of the piece. “I consider myself a dramaturg director. It’s one of my strengths. With new work I am most interested in finding historical connections. Carson is also a director herself and has a very theatrical mind. She has a good feel for the directorial process. We have a good rapport about being able to talk about what we think is working and what isn’t. It’s been a pretty easy collaboration.”

Amy Ellenberger and Tobie Windham

The biggest challenge was moving the play from a traditional proscenium theater to a large open space. “Certainly in this space, we are trying to make a virtue of what we had. We can’t do traditional exits and entrances with people suddenly appearing. We’re experimenting more with people being on stage almost the whole time – watching each other’s stories so it’s more overlapping and intertwining, which is definitely in the piece. We are doing even more of it than is written. Mainly, though, it has four fantastic roles for women. It’s very theatrical and alive. I love the idea of the gender politics re-telling the story, and it is just fun to collaborate with the actors on finding a way to find connection between characters.”

Kreitzer is pleased with the changes. “It’s a different piece environmentally. Mostly it’s been the order of things. In the play as written, we spend more time with two of the main characters and then switch to the other two. Casey felt that in this space we needed to do all four stories intertwined and I absolutely agreed.”  So does she keep the changes for future productions or go back to the original? “That’s very interesting and something I am going to have to look at. In this version I am able to add some monologues for one of the characters.  I wanted it in but wasn’t able to find a place. It is going to be very tempting to keep this version.”

Slither, presented by Chalk Repertory Theatre. Opens Feb. 10. Plays Fri-Sat, 8 pm; Sun, 7 pm. Through March 4. (No performance Sun. Feb. 26.)  Tickets: $20.  Masonic Lodge, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood. www.chalkrep.com. 877-435-9849.

***All Slither production photos by Tom Ontiveros

Ruth Weisberg

This week LA STAGE Times is presenting coverage of the 31st International Association for Jewish Theatre Conference via posts from regular contributors Cynthia Citron and Rachel Fain. To read previous conference posting, click here.

Day 3 of the conference examined “Witness & Responsibility.” The day was sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, and all events were held at USC. The morning presentations focused on the Shoah, or Holocaust, and included a performance by Stacie Chaiken, Next Year in Jerusalem, based on the testimonies of Shoah survivors, and a conversation with Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, titled “The Art of Witness—a meditation on testimony and story-making.”

Artists Panel: Metabolizing Testimony and Artistic Expression

Laurie Woolery, Velina Hsu Houston, Stacie Chaiken, Betsy Salkind and Ruth Weisberg

The day’s first panel featured a conversation with artists who engage with first-person testimony and historical artifact as raw material for their work. The panelists were comedian, author, and activist Betsy Salkind; Laurie Woolery, director, playwright, and associate artistic director of Cornerstone Theater; painter Ruth Weisberg; and playwright Velina Hasu Houston.

Moderator Chaiken started the panel off by providing a bit of context in relation to the morning’s Holocaust-based presentations. “Every testimony,” she said, “is a creation along the lines of what we [artists] create.” The panelists work from testimony—their own or someone else’s—about a catastrophe, personal or universal.

Houston explained that she was born in Japan, and the bombings of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were a living part of her childhood. Her early plays dealt with different aspects of World War II. To create these works she conducted interviews, first with her mother and later with 49 Japanese women in Kansas. Houston creates her “story medicine” by absorbing all her notes and tapes of these interviews, and then putting it all aside to write.

Laurie Woolery

Woolery started out in theater leading workshops with kids. They shared stories through improvisation, and she was struck by their truth and honesty. She would tell them, “Your story is worth telling, because I’ve never heard it before.” In her work with Cornerstone, Woolery creates plays based on the experiences of particular communities. People from the dramatized groups “bring the expertise of their community and their stories,” she said, “and Cornerstone brings their expertise in art making.”

Salkind uses her comedy to comment on the power politics in our society as it relates to child abuse, particularly child sexual abuse. She writes from her own experience, although sometimes she doesn’t even realize it. “We hold parts of the memory for each other,” she explained. “There are a lot of experiences that we may not remember, for good reason … so it’s very important for the community to tell us about ourselves.”  Salkind read and displayed images from her book Betsy’s Sunday School Bible Classics, which tells the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Lot from the points of view of the women and children. Many in the the audience laughed as they absorbed the horror of characters whose experiences are usually ignored.

Painting by Ruth Weisberg

Weisberg grew up in Chicago and long held a fantasy of living at the Art Institute of Chicago. She bears out that fantasy through her art, re-enacting her own and imagined experiences on the canvas. “It isn’t imitation or copying; there is a way to absorb influences and make them your own,” she explained. To illustrate this idea, Weisberg first showed the painting “Interrupted Reading” by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot—part of the Art Institute’s permanent collection and a favorite from her childhood. She followed that up with images from her series that grew out of the Corot. These showed Weisberg’s daughter posed like the woman in the Corot, Weisberg holding a postcard of the Corot while talking to her daughter, and other permutations, each one adding another layer to the re-enactment.

When the conversation turned to the responsibility of the artist and truth versus storytelling, shades of the earlier Shoah testimony discussions emerged. Chaiken told a story about showing her adapted testimony performance to a friend who said, “I’ve known you all these years and you never told me.” Chaiken was confused. “About what?” “Your grandmother,” he replied. She explained that the piece wasn’t about her own grandmother; it was based on testimonies from the Shoah archive. Chaiken’s friend was angry with her and found the work dishonest.

Betsy Salkind

Salkind’s comedy is based on her own testimony—actual events from her life. She feels that, although nothing is universal, it is her responsibility to present her story in a manner her audience will understand, and as a comedian, she knows instantly if it works. Salkind starts with light and easy material to develop trust and connection with her audience before going into deeper, more challenging material. She tries to provide “laughs with substance,” and acknowledged that her work is “not complete until it’s seen” by an audience.

Woolery tackled a question about “docudrama.” She explained that she feels a huge responsibility to the communities she works in. “I am the keeper of these stories,” she said. But she finds that by not using individuals’ words directly—as is done in docudrama—the community members have the freedom to contribute without becoming too vulnerable. Their words and experiences are digested and become part of the play. This, inevitably, introduces a bit of herself into the play. “Bringing yourself can feel indulgent,” Woolery advised, “but it will unlock it [the play] in some way. You can’t be afraid to reveal yourself.”

“You use yourself as a lens,” Chaiken echoed. “What else do you have to use?”

Velina Hasu Houston

Houston pointed out that even the Greeks and Shakespeare used historical events as the basis for stories, filtering them through their own experiences and points of view.

AFJT president David Chack jumped into the conversation. “I think there’s a problem in taking a historical moment and translating it into art or into theater and being honest about it.” He noted that the artists on the panel were all tremendously respectful of their sources and emphasized their own imprint on the material, but he expressed concern about stories prefaced by statements of truth—“The story you are about to see is based on true events” sort of thing—which imply objectivity, when, in fact, art is always subjective.

Dan Leshem, USC Shoah Foundation Institute associate director for academic outreach and research, said that many Holocaust survivor documents include the preface “What you’re about to read is true” — and often continue with “even though at times I don’t believe it.” He postulated that perhaps the statements are less about trying to hide artifice, but rather are “a question of memory,” an inability to fully express the experience.

Weisberg called art a “vessel for meaning” and wondered, “What do people do who aren’t artists? Where do they put their meaning?”

Producers Panel: Engaging, Including and Challenging our Communities

Ron Sossi, Selma Holo and Joe Stern

After a sack lunch, the conversation continued with a conversation with Ron Sossi, artistic director of the Odyssey Theatre, and Joseph Stern, artistic director of the Matrix Theatre. Selma Holo, director of USC’s Fisher Art Museum, moderated.

Holo started out explaining that, traditionally, museums have been nothing but fourth wall—all barriers—but modern museums are striving to be more like theater. They are trying to create deeper engagements and a sense of community. She described her visit to the Memorial de Shoah in Paris, which was designed to create an emotional and visceral impact. She saw hundreds of police officers leaving the museum’s auditorium and learned that they were there to learn about the role the police played in World War II, so that such a thing will not happen again.

Sossi founded the Odyssey Theatre 43 years ago to produce work that is provocative in subject, style, or both. The alternative and experimental plays that he showcases are “too specialized for the media.” He has resisted growing the Odyssey larger, because then “we’d have to become more populist.” Sossi explained, “I’d rather do quality for the few than shit for the millions.” He tries to stack his season with ⅓ original works, ⅓ international plays, and ⅓ re-imagined “classics.” He has a particular interest in timeless political questions and metaphysical or existential topics. Sossi likes to keep the audience guessing and is currently planning a “theater in the dark” production.

Joe Stern and Ron Sossi

Stern is an actor-turned-producer. He works in both theater and film/TV and is interested in works that address social issues. The Matrix began as an actor-oriented theater, committed to the dignity and artistry of the actors. There was no board—no “money people”—so they made all the decisions themselves, creating high quality work. That said, in the last few years, Stern has refocused his goals.

He set out to do three provocative plays about race in one year, but scheduling difficulties have stretched the series over three years. The plays were Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond, Neighbors by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and a multiethnic version of the Arthur Miller classic All My Sons (which is being remounted later this month). He sees theater as a healing act for both the actors and the audience and hopes to start a dialogue, form a community. At the same time he believes, “You’re doing something wrong if someone doesn’t walk out at intermission.”

Sossi expected members of the Jewish community—those beyond his regular subscribers—to come out for Way to Heaven, a play about the making of Nazi propaganda set at a concentration camp, but generally speaking, they didn’t. In talkbacks, he found three reasons: 1) people have OD’d on Holocaust stories; 2) young Jews want to be identified by more than just the Holocaust; and 3) it’s too painful for the older generation. Stern had a similar experience with African-American audiences at his race plays.

Both producers have noticed a ghettoization of audiences. They noted that most theaters in town have some success drawing niche audiences to particular plays, but they seldom come back for shows not targeted to their racial or ethnic group. Holo said museums face the same problems. Everyone agreed that in order to create art-loving adults, attending art events must be part of childhood experience.

Rachel Fain’s second grade teacher predicted she’d be a high school dropout, because she wrote pages and pages every week and thus failed to finish her alphabet stories. Her teacher was wrong. Since then, Fain has spent nearly 20 years working in LA theater. She started as a stage manager, technical director and producer in 99-Seat Plan houses, and did an 11-year stint on staff at Center Theatre Group in production, new play development and finally education, where she created nearly three dozen play guides for students and adults. Today she is a freelance writer and editor, and much better at meeting deadlines. www.rachelgfain.com

***All photos by Elaine Siegel

Sam Daly, Kieren van den Blink and Adam Harrington in "Mine"

Bekah Brunstetter’s Mine is billed as a “universal coming of age” story and coincidentally stars Kieren van den Blink who, each day, admittedly is coming of age.

“There is this story about John Lennon that’s often told,” she says in a rapid voice, her fingers near a cup of frothy jasmine tea outside an East Hollywood coffee shop. “He was in school and the teacher asked him what he wanted to be in life and he said ‘happy.’ She said ‘you don’t understand the question’ and he said ‘you don’t understand life.’ I am a lover. I love people. That’s just how I popped out of the womb.”

Love, she adds, begets love. And success. “I think because I love so much, I generally have been quite fortunate, but it always has to start with the truth. I can’t do anything that I don’t really believe in, if I want to succeed.”

Kieren van den Blink

Born in Silver Spring, Maryland but raised near Princeton, New Jersey, van den Blink attended Peddie High School, where the student to teacher ratio was 6:1, with three male students to every coed. It was a stable and nurturing environment. And a support system became unexpectedly important to her, when her mother died during her senior year.

She took a year off and then chose the women’s college, Barnard, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where she created a literary society.

“I subscribe to Joseph Campbell’s way of living. He says ‘follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where once there were walls.’ “  When she answered an ad for a place to live in New York City, the woman who had placed the ad introduced van den Blink to her daughter — who worked at the William Morris agency and facilitated an appointment for van den Blink to interview at the agency as a potential actress client.

Before her, that day in 1997, sat a table full of agents, she remembers. “I was there ostensibly for pilot season, but one of them asked if I had done theater. I hadn’t. So, of course, I said yes!”

Van den Blink quickly found herself on Broadway as an understudy in The Diary of Anne Frank. “I’m half Dutch. My dad was in the camps. That play meant something to me.”

She took over the role of Margot in Boston after Rachel Minor was injured. Back in Manhattan, she returned to understudying Margot, Miep and Anne. She appeared 18 times as Margot and five as Miep. Her cast mates included Linda Lavin, George Hearn, Harris Yulin and Natalie Portman.

A scene from the 1997-1998 Broadway production of "The Diary of Anne Frank"; Photo by Joan Marcus

Van den Blink says she and Portman remain close friends despite living on opposite coasts. “After Anne Frank, I stepped away from theater and from New York City. I think leaving was my saying ‘I don’t think I can do what I need to do for my soul in New York.’ It pushes you to be successful. It shoves you out the door and puts a spotlight on you and says do it.”

Los Angeles, on the other hand, was far more agreeable during the years after her mother died. “LA’s like, it’s okay, we’ll all be 70, so spend some time in the sun. And it lets you breathe a little differently. I need both environments, but at that time in my life, with my mom’s passing, I felt like my skin was unzipped and I didn’t want to be shaking like that in Manhattan.”

When Portman was in Los Angeles to film Anywhere But Here with Susan Sarandon, van den Blink joined her. “I was at the Chateau Marmont with Natalie, reading scripts that weren’t mine. Milk shakes. Ping pong. But I decided to take some years off from acting. I went to a writers’ conference and got a grant from the Ford Foundation to write my first book. I’ve always had a bifurcated existence.”

Over the next 10 years she studied at Oxford and, back in Los Angeles, wrote five children’s books: Boom, Sniff, Ouch, Yum and Ow. “The publisher lost its money. The books are all written. Now I just need someone to come in and get them in print.”

Omar Wilkes and Jade Lane in the Little Beast Theatre Company production of "Billie Jean In The Graveyard"

Eventually the urge to return to theater became overwhelming and she became Lulu Brud’s producing partner at Little Bird in 2008. Over the next two years, she and Brud discovered they were becoming competitors more than partners (“We were both actresses”), and they would be better off if they split up and if each of them acquired a more business-minded person as a partner. They parted ways in the fall of 2010, and van den Blink opened Little Beast Theatre Company that December.

“Little Beast because of [the William Golding 1954 novel] Lord of the Flies. Always the English major.”

But while she and Brud were co-producing one-act plays, van den Blink asked Michael Weller, whom she knew in New York, to put her in touch with female playwrights. Bekah Brunstetter was his star student. Van den Blink found Brunstetter’s style especially apt for her own generation of women.

“I really feel that Bekah has her fingers on the pulse of how our generation talks. There’s a distractedness about us. There’s a searching. You might ask how I feel and I might go off into a metaphor that seems silly and gauzy but, to me, it’s edging toward the truth.”

Bekah Brunstetter

Brunstetter (House of Home at Williamstown; A Long and Happy Life upcoming at Naked Angels) is a New York New Voices Fellow through the Lark Play Development Center and was the 2011 playwright in residence at the Finborough Theater in London. She had studied under Weller at the New School for Drama in Greenwich Village and happened to be in Los Angeles in 2008 when van den Blink was producing one of her one-act plays.

“I got to see it and see Kieren in it,” Brunstetter says by telephone on her way to MTV, where she is writing on Underemployed, a new show created by Craig Wright. “I write a lot about a certain type of young woman who’s very confused about her life and loves language and speaks rapidly before thinking about she’s saying,” Brunstetter says. “Kieren is very good about tapping into that. This lady that pops up in a lot of my plays is essentially me. I put myself into imagined situations that I’ve been terrified of being in or have been in before and I get a chance to say what I wish I’d said.”

A do-over.

Van den Blink looks back to July 2008 — when she first worked with Brunstetter. “We did a one-act of hers (I Have It) in a festival. It was a 20-something couple meeting on a blind date. And the girl is extremely vivacious and quirky and funny. I read it and related to her writing.” She vamps, jumping from one thing to another without any focus and without finishing a sentence.

Adam Harrington and Kieren van den Blink in "Mine"

“It’s very hard to memorize that kind of writing but it’s really beautiful because it’s so much like life. We had a benefit performance in 2008 and one of our playwrights is very close friends with Alec Baldwin. He invited Alec to our show and he came. Natalie Portman had come too and we were outside and my best friend, who was there, runs out and says ‘Alec Baldwin wants to talk to you!’ I couldn’t believe she was saying this.”

Van den Blink tells of going inside and seeing the star of 30 Rock. “He was there holding his satchel, looking very professorial and says to me ‘I love your work.’ I told him we were so happy he was there, how much it meant to us. He asked if I’d ever do Saturday Night Live and I said that I just want to work. He said ‘I think Lorne Michaels would love you.’ I was flown out a week later and tested.

The thing about SNL, she says, is that no one gets on the show unless someone goes off the show. “So it came down to me and one other person. I didn’t get it. In fact, I’d just been released a week and a half before I answered a Craigslist ad for a place to rent. The woman answers the door, and she tells me she’s moving because she got a gig at Rockefeller Center and I said, wow, I just tested there.”

The story slows down, as if van den Blink is still trying to believe it. “You know how you have a beautiful camera lens and it goes from fuzzy to crisp? I thought, ‘She’s the one who got the part instead of me. And I’m in her apartment.’ I’d never looked for a place on Craigslist ever before and I haven’t looked for a place there ever since. I made the connection, and she said that Alec even asked her how she got it and not Kieren?”

Kieren van den Blink and Adam Harrington

Baldwin, she says, has become an angel in her life, professionally and personally. So has Ashton Kutcher. He saw van den Blink in Brunstetter’s Happy Birthday/I’m Dead in 2009 — Sam Daly, who’s co-starring in Mine, was also in it. Kutcher “liked it so much that we’re developing it into a short film with [Kutcher’s production company] Katalyst.”

She met Kutcher about five years ago through a friend of Portman’s. “Natalie was living in New York but her friend was out here, studying Kaballah with [Kutcher’s former wife] Demi Moore. [Portman] asked if I was interested in going and I said I was. Very much so.”

Van den Blink describes the Jewish philosophy as “opening up your head and taking a vacuum cleaner to it.”

As one who “always wants to grow,” she read Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People when she was 16. The step into Judaism, she says, began with a realization she found herself too often apologizing to God.

“I had grown up in a Presbyterian church in the ‘80s, so there were still hippies and banjos but I would always be saying I was sorry to God and wondering why. It’s like I was 12 again. I mean, God already knows I’m flawed just by virtue of being born, so why am I apologizing for it? I’m sick of apologizing! At Kabbalah, everyone just wants to get over their ego. Everyone just wants to get better. I work on it every day.”

Kieren van den Blink and Sam Daly

Like Annie in Mine, van den Blink continues to come of age. Kabbalah, a small movie project, another Brunstetter play, perhaps another TV show (she appeared in the TV series Tyranny in 2010 and provided a voice in Wolverine and the X-Men.)

It is all possible now. “I come from a strong family of women. My sister went to Wellesley, but when I was young I had never been inspired or compelled to express myself and know that I truly could do anything. I’d felt success was buried deep in the pages of The Great Gatsby and saved for Jay Gatsby. I didn’t believe it could be me.”

Mine, presented by Little Beast Theatre Company. Opens Feb.9. Plays Thur-Sat 8 pm; Sun. 7 pm. Through March 11. Tickets: $20. The Elephant Lab Theatre, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. https://www.plays411.net/mine. 323-960-7788.

***All Mine production photos by Chris A. Peterson

Photo by Elaine Siegel

This week LA STAGE Times will present coverage of the 31st International Association for Jewish Theatre Conference via daily posts from regular contributors Cynthia Citron and Rachel Fain. To view other postings, click here.

To paraphrase a very old joke: seven Jews sat down at the table to express 14 different opinions…

In fact, they were the opening panel convened by the 31^st annual conference of the International Association for Jewish Theatre, beginning Sunday at UCLA Hillel’s Dortort Arts Center to discuss “Jewish Theatre: Reflecting and Shaping a Shifting World.”

Moderated by Rabbi Ed Feinstein of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, the panel included Jamie Pachino, playwright and screenwriter; Stephanie Liss, playwright, TV writer and documentary producer; Herb Isaacs, director/producer of the West Coast Jewish Theatre; Ronda Spinak, artistic director of the Jewish Women’s Theatre; Michael Halperin, playwright, TV writer, and novelist; and Naomi Pfefferman Magid, arts and entertainment editor of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.

Their specific topic was “Comedy and Drama of Ethical Values in Jewish Theatre,” but like the Jews in the joke quoted above, their comments were multi-focused.

Ronda Spinak, Rabbi Ed Feinstein, Jamie Pachino, Michael Halperin, Naomi Pfefferman Magid, Herb Isaacs and Stephanie Liss

Pachino began with a comical answer to Rabbi Feinstein’s opening question, “What makes a Jewish play Jewish?”

“It depends on how it was killed,” she said.  “Or, if you cut the very end of it.”  And finally, “If the playwright starts out to write one act and by some miracle it turns into eight.”

Halperin followed up with “We are the mythmakers.  We have a mythological approach to stories.  The American myth deals with individuality and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, whereas the Jewish approach is communal—working together in community.”

Feinstein asked, “Where does Israel stand in creating myths?”  “Israel created a myth and morphed it into a universal idea,” Halperin responded.  “And an idea needs to be universal or it will not travel.  For example, Fiddler on the Roof is a big hit in Japan because the Japanese identify with the characters and the story.”

“But the focus has shifted since 9/11,” Liss said.  “The focus shifts as the world changes.”

“Israel is not the myth any more.  The kibbutz movement is dying out.  Things have changed,”  Spinak said.  “It’s important for us to look forward, not back—to reflect not what we were, but who we are today.”

“Jews have gone through so many phases in the world,” Halperin said. “Alienation, assimilation, acculturation, chameleon changes, and finally mainstream.“

Photo by Elaine Siegel

“I think we’re still ‘the other’,” Liss said.  “We haven’t fully assimilated.  How do we become who we are meant to be in this world?  How do we live with ourselves?”

“I once asked a rabbi why Jews don’t talk much about heaven,” Pachino said.  “He said because we believe in doing good on earth because it’s the right thing to do, not because we want to get to heaven.

“But to respond to Rabbi Feinstein’s question, we can’t just write about Israel, we have to write about people.  An audience has to have a stake in the conflict, go through catharsis, make a connection.”

“The audience wants revelation in the context of relationships,” Halperin added.

“As writers we’re given permission to explore all sides,” Liss said.  “People are hungry for this.”  She cited her play On Holy Ground, in which two women in Israel, one Palestinian and the other Jewish, try to resolve their conflict — the Palestinian woman’s daughter, a suicide bomber, had killed the Jewish woman’s daughter.  “The jihadist culture is a culture of death,” she said.

“There are three sources of drama in contemporary Jewish life,” Rabbi Feinstein said.  “They are the changing perception of Jewish women, the way the Jewish community deals with non-Jews, and faith—what happens to faith in this culture?”

Herb Isaacs, Jamie Pachino and Ronda Spinak

“There are so many voices not heard in today’s plays,” Spinak said.  “For example, Persian Jewish women.  Or women who have converted.”

Naomi Pfefferman Magid agreed.  “The theater needs to be diverse.”

“We want to take the audience on a journey,” Spinak said.  “Make them laugh.  Make them cry.”

“The playwright has a responsibility to be true to himself,” Isaacs said.  “Do producers have that responsibility, too?  If he is willing to take chances, are you ready for truth in theater?”

The rabbi then asked Isaacs to make the case for Jewish theater.  Why should anyone fund it?

“The first question is,  Are we doing quality theater?” Isaacs responded.  “You need us and you need to help.  We tell your story.”

“We are telling your story to the world,” Liss added.

But, as always, the rabbi had the last word.  “You want to know where to put theater and how to fund it?” he asked.  “Move it into synagogues!”

Ed Asner and his wife; Photo by Elaine Siegel

Earlier on Sunday, the Conference paid tribute to actor Ed Asner at a celebratory luncheon.  Asner was honored for his long history of service to the theater and to social justice causes, and for his generous support of the Arizona Jewish Theatre and young emerging playwrights.

Later that evening conference participants were treated to An Evening of Jewish Theatre, consisting of solo performances of classic Jewish set pieces and modern one-acts at the Santa Monica Playhouse, followed by Insomniac’s Delight, 70 minutes of music, monologues and mischief presented by Parlor Performances producer Jeannine Frank.

DAY TWO: Monday, February 6 — Montoya on Jewish Theater Reflecting and Shaping a Shifting World

On the second day of the conference, Richard Montoya of Culture Clash gave the keynote speech.  Culture Clash’s work is largely based in Chicano-Latino culture, but Montoya, who had a Jewish great-grandmother, has also been exploring the Jewish part of his culture for many years.

“I’m on a journey,” he said.  “I want to find grace in a violent world.”

Richard Montoya; Photo by Elaine Siegel

“The Sinaloa drug cartels are in L.A.,” he noted. “The apocalypse is all around us.”  His books and plays were on the reading lists of ethnic studies classes that have been banned in Arizona. He said he  “drives to Westwood with a passport,” and he pulled it out of his pocket as proof.

Claiming Gordon Davidson as “his spiritual father,” he said, “political theater is good business,” and noted that Culture Clash had sold out at UCLA’s Royce Hall.  “My political theater is an act of love,” he added.

“I have professional A.D.D.,” he said, “and I’ve been doing Jon Stewart for 28 years.  Art and politics are inextricably woven together,” he continued, as he discussed his play Palestine, New Mexico, which was produced at the Mark Taper Forum in December 2009.  One of the themes of that play was a particular Indian’s belief that his tribe was actually Jewish.  “Isolated people have reason for kinship,” Montoya said.

He noted the influence of the Spanish culture on Jewish culture and the similarities of the “magical realism” of Spanish-language authors and the Midrash, the ancient Hebrew commentary on the scriptures.  “We have something to teach each other,” he said.  “One culture steps into the footprints of another.  My Sephardic roots have a progressive Jewish core, even though people tell me ‘You’ll never be Jewish—you’re not Ashkenazi.’”

New Directions in Jewish Performance

David Chack

Later in the day, the discussion of ethnic identity continued with a panel consisting of David Chack, president of the Association for Jewish Theatre and artistic director of ShPIel Performing Identity in Chicago; playwright Wendy Graf; Aaron Henne, playwright and director of Theatre Dybbuk; and Tali Tadmor, composer and Six Points Fellow.  The moderator was playwright Emilie Beck.

To the question of how they incorporate their religion into their plays, Graf noted that she doesn’t have a “traditional Jewish response” in her plays, but overlaps responses from many cultures.

Henne said his hybrid performances, which include dance and music, myth and mysticism, are a Jewish “investigation,” rather than a “response.”  As a Jewish writer “it’s where I come from, but it’s not exclusive.”

Tadmor said she provided a “nuanced response.  We can express in art what we can’t politically.”

And Chack noted that “we respond to our history and culture, and it’s all about survival.”

The question was raised, “What makes theater Jewish?  Is it too Jewish?  Not Jewish enough?  Written by a self-hating Jew?”

Graf responded, “There are all kinds of Jewishness.  Porgy and Bess is not about Jews, but [its music] was written with a Jewish voice, George Gershwin’s.  And the same goes for West Side Story [written by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim].”

Emilie Beck, David Chack, Wendy Graf, and Aaron Henne

Chack added, “It’s one minority telling the story of another minority.  It deals with assimilation, and we are a part of that.”

But can someone who isn’t Jewish write Jewish art?  The consensus was that that art provides a fresh perspective and interplay between cultures.

Henne, whose work combines movement and speech, noted that this is a “new direction in Jewish performance,” which was the title of the panel discussion in which they were all engaged.  “In the meeting of the two the tale is told,” he said.

Graf suggested that playwrights ask “new, different questions and let the audience answer them.  Be controversial, take a chance,” she advised.

“Artists are subversive,” Chack said.  “They are always looking for sharper, edgier ways to tell the story.

“My characters lead me,” Graf said.  “It’s instinctual—what comes from your heart.”

“Our challenge is to share what we have with others,” Henne concluded.  “To provoke dialogue about things in our society, to have a sense of inquiry, not an agenda, to share the history, the memories, and the experiences we have in common.  And to celebrate the culture.  Our stories have so much to share.”

***All photos by Cynthia Citron except where noted

Evan Brenner as Buddha

“I found myself discouraged by the confusing and contradictory array of Buddhist teachings, so I set out to discover what I perceived to be the source of the Buddha’s teaching. I became deeply engaged in the sūtras, which are really quite dramatic and work extremely well just as a story. I had a ‘eureka’ moment: what if I did the Buddha as a one-man play — in his own words, taken directly from the sūtras?”

Writer and actor Evan Brenner is talking about the origins of his innovative solo, which presents the life of the Buddha as related by the great religious teacher in the first person. This is not a stuffy religious tale — the Buddha’s life stands among the great archetypal adventure stories in history.

John C. Reilly

Acclaimed actor John C. Reilly directs the West Coast premiere of Buddha – A Fantastic Journey, at Bootleg Theater for a limited weekends-only run during February.

The man we know as the Buddha lived in Northern India around 500 BC and introduced the teaching known as Buddhism. Centuries after his death, the extensive oral history of the movement was written down and carried throughout Asia, becoming the taproot for all Buddhist traditions. These texts are known as sūtras.

Writer/performer Brenner brings edited selections from these texts to the stage, framed in an unusual and personal context, as he enacts the extraordinary life of the man from start to finish.

About the performer.

Evan Brenner

Brenner majored in drama and religion at Vassar College, then received a masters degree in dramatic writing at Loyola Marymount University. His writing and directing credits include both film (The Riddle, Two Bits, and Dr. Fisher) and television (America’s Most Wanted and Little Bill.)

As an actor, he appeared in the films The Deep and Dreamless Sleep, Two Boneheads, West Side Evan, Spare Me and Waking up Crazy.

Brenner has practiced meditation and studied Buddhism for more than 20 years and since 2003 has pursued canonical sūtra studies in the Therevada tradition. He is particularly interested in the Buddha’s life as an expression and example of spiritual struggle, achievement and ongoing challenge.

Shaping the story.

Describing how this play came about, Brenner recalls, “About five years ago I found myself in the midst of a personal crisis, which was just the garden-variety raising of questions about the meaning of life. I believe our life is an adventure for all of us, and one of the interesting things about adventures is that you often get to a crossroad, and if you don’t go on the adventure, there’s a tremendous amount of suffering.”

The actor had studied Buddhism and Eastern religions academically and casually for almost a quarter century. “I wanted to break open and re-examine my meditation practice and go back to it in the purest form, in order to really understand it.” Brenner says he realized he had always been a bit confused by what his meditation practice really was about, so he decided to read the original texts and accounts of the Buddha’s life and teachings.  “I wanted to get the straight dope – go back to the roots.”

Evan Brenner

Brenner says he began reading the ancient texts Known as The Pāli Canon. These are among the first written records of the words and teachings of the Buddha.

“The Pāli Canon is about 10 linear feet of books,” Brenner reveals. “It’s a lot of material. I read a lot of that, but there’s much that you can eliminate that is not relevant to his life, such as the sections about the disciplines. For example, they have a long list about animals that they ask that the monks not have intercourse with! In essence, I pulled out just his life story.” Apparently the first version of the play ran close to 4½ hours. “I then pared that down to tell it in an hour and a half, so it would tell his life story from beginning to end.” Brenner says that Buddha’s life is not all that neatly extractable, but he thinks he got close.

Brenner recalls seeing Alec McCowen stage a famous theatrical recital of the Gospel According to Mark, the King James version. “It’s very dramatic,” Brenner enthuses. “It’s wonderful – it’s filled with emotion and he stands up on the stage and does the whole thing verbatim. I saw this right when I had been reading all these ancient Buddhist texts and I thought, why not do the life of the Buddha as a one-man play? It’s all there!”

Adds Brenner, “The problem that I then faced was that there is no real ‘Gospel of the Buddha.’” The Gospels about Jesus were extracted by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who were all purported eyewitnesses to these historical events. Brenner found he didn’t have the same kind of material at his disposal. Instead he had to fashion a story from a vast range of texts.

Evan Brenner

During the writing process, Brenner decided that if the writers of the ancient texts said that Buddha said something, then he probably did. He then converted the texts into a monologue of Buddha speaking in the first-person voice, because he “felt it would be more engaging.”

Over the past four years Brenner has performed his show on about 200 occasions. He workshopped the play for two years before premiering it at Boston Center for the Arts in 2009, as well as staging it at a couple of little theaters in the area. Following the Boston production, Brenner has toured with Buddha to performing arts venues around North America including Pittsburgh and Denver. The show also played at Barouche College in New York in the fall of 2009.

A reclusive director.

Preferring to lurk behind the scenes, director Reilly declined to be interviewed for this article.

However, Brenner says that “when John saw the show, he was riveted by the adventure aspect of the story.” And Brenner enthusiastically describes his collaboration with Reilly.  “John’s really transformed the play,” the actor explains. “He’s moved it from a concept of just one man telling this life story as the Buddha to – now it has become so much more dynamic.”

Reilly brought the influences of Story Theatre, as pioneered and developed by Paul Sills, into Brenner’s show to maximize its theatricality. Says Brenner, “In this way I’m able to assume many different roles in the play.” He explains that he did portray different characters when he previously performed his one-man-show, but not to the extent that the pair has now achieved.  Reilly has gone to great lengths to draw out the different personae contained within the story. “There’s more of Evan as a more liquid character who can occupy different characters with much more intensity,” Brenner says. The process involved some judicious tweaking of Brenner’s script.

Evan Brenner

Reilly has also radically altered the staging from a formerly sparse, static and simple setting of a living room inhabited by the central performer to a less tangible setting. Now employing a scrim upstage, Reilly enlisted François-Pierre Couture to design a lightscape of shadows and intense, abstract colors. A scrim is used for projection of images to indicate settings such as a palace and a setting sun, when required to illustrate the story. “It’s going to be much more immersive, dramatically,” Brenner laughs with delight. “I’m now [situated] in a blank canvas that is painted by light on the scrim.”

To complete the transformation, Reilly introduced an element of live music, with two musicians — Jaeger Smith and Sheela Bringi — performing on a bansuri (a haunting bamboo flute) and tabla (an Indian drum) on stage.

Adds Brenner, “I’m totally excited. It’s great. As a director, John’s notes on acting are – he really knows all this stuff about acting that I didn’t really know about. Stuff like operative words and insights into the craft of how to perform as a stage actor. He certainly tuned that up.”

Brenner adds that there is much more of a sense of fun and levity in the show now. So, is he having more fun, with Reilly around? “Yeah. It’s going to an entirely new place and it’s great to be on that journey with him.”

Brenner adds that the process has been a delight. “John’s playful and he’s one of the smartest people I have ever met. I don’t know where he comes up with these ideas, but it’s just one wild, imaginative theatrical idea after the other.”

Buddha – A Fantastic Journey, presented by Bootleg Theater. Opens Feb. 10. Plays Fri-Sat, 7:30 pm. (No show Feb. 24). Please note early curtain time. Through Mar. 3. Tickets: $30.00. Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., LA. 800-838-3006. www.thebuddhaplay.com.

***All Buddha – A Fantastic Journey production photos by Phoebe Sudrow