Henley’s Late Date
When Beth Henley’s newest play, The Debutante Ball, premieres this month at South Coast Repertory, it will be the fulfillment of an unofficial “date” the playwright has had with the Costa Mesa company since 1979. At that time—just before Crimes of the Heart was to net her nationwide attention and a Pulitzer Prize—Henley participated in South Coast’s Playwriting Unit. Anxious to support a promising young voice, the theatre was ready to offer Henley a commission. Then Crimes, her first full-length play, won a competition at Actors Theatre of Louisville and a flurry of new productions followed. “It was decided that under the circumstances a commission would be like carrying coals to Newcastle,” comments SCR literary manager Jerry Patch. “But we’re very pleased finally to be working with Beth on what we think is her most assured, most economical play yet.”
The history of The Debutante Ball stretches back a number of years as well. When interviewed just as Crimes was about to open on Broadway in 1981, Henley revealed that she thought her next play would take place at a debutante ball. Other projects, including The Miss Firecracker Contest and The Wake of Jamey Foster, intervened, however, and the play didn’t get finished until last season, when it had its first workshop reading at South Coast.
The play shares certain elements with Henley’s previous works: It is set in a small town in her native Mississippi and revolves around the somewhat bizarre characters that make up one extravagant southern family. But The Debutante Ball is also a departure for Henley and, perhaps for that reason, she looks at the opening as “really scary.” She calls the play “more baroque and maybe not as accessible as Crimes of the Heart,” and her director Stephen Tobolowsky concurs.
“The play digs deeper into the same territory,” he notes. “It’s a black comedy about what people will do for love, and during the course of a mother and a daughter coming to terms, a lot of hates and terrible secrets surface. The fact that it’s set on the night of this daughter’s debut underlines the gap between our fantasies of magic, of luxury and the real harsh reality of human decay.”
Featured in the South Coast production are Joanna Miles and Kurtwood Smith as the matriarch and patriarch of the offbeat brood, and Phyllis Frelich (late of Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God and The Hands of Its Enemy) as a deaf niece.
The Debutante Ball runs April 9-May 12.
—Laura Ross
Locked In
The memoirs of a man who spent virtually his entire adult life behind prison bars, In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott, inspired several stage adaptations, beginning with Adrian Hall’s for his Trinity Square Repertory Company. With further adaptation and direction by Robert Woodruff, that script went on to be produced at Taper, Too, the second stage of Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, earlier this season. Then it was on to Australia, where the play was judged the highlight of the Festival of Sydney. And now In the Belly of the Beast returns to the aper, this time graduating to its mainstage where it will run through May 14. Featured in the cast are Andy Wood, Andrew Robinson as Abbott and Carl Franklin—all members of the Taper’s original cast.
Crooked Cleric
Seattle Repertory Theatre artistic director Dan Sullivan “gets into the act” as Timoteo, a character in Machiavelli’s The Mandrake that Sullivan calls “a particularly nasty priest which I began to see as very suitable to me.” The Mandrake and Brecht’s The Wedding formed a February-March double bill that occasioned Sullivan’s first shot at acting and directing simultaneously—and his first acting roles in more than 10 years. A troupe of nine actors performed both plays. When some of his fellow company members found it difficult to distinguish between Sullivan’s acting moments and his directorial comments, he hit upon a solution: He held up one finger to show when he was acting, two when he was directing and three for both. Sharing his double confessional are Lori Larsen as Sostrata and Elizabeth Hess as Lucrezia.
Rolling Along
When asked recently about his goals for the La Jolla Playhouse, artistic director Des McAnuff replied that he’d like to “unite all the exploration that’s gone on in the theatre over the last 20 years.” A tall order perhaps, but if the newly announced 1985 season is any indication, the company’s making considerable headway in that direction.
The season opens in June with a revised version of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical Merrily We Roll Along, which, in its earlier incarnation, made a brief appearance on Broadway in 1981. The new production, for which both Sondheim and Furth will be in residence at the Playhouse, reunites Sondheim with director James Lapine, who wrote and directed the acclaimed (and still running) Sunday in the Park with George.
Bertolt Brecht’s rarely performed A Man’s a Man will follow, under the direction of Robert Woodruff. With two productions of Shakespeare featuring “new vaudeville” performers such as the Flying Karamazov Brothers under his belt, Woodruff should feel right at home with his leading man: Galy Gay will be played by comic virtuoso Bill Irwin.
Third on the summer agenda will be a new play by Michael Weller, author of such works as Moonchildren and The Ballad of Soapy Smith. Entitled Ghost on Fire, the world premiere is the first in what the Playhouse hopes will be a series of playwright commission projects. Ghost on Fire continues Weller’s interest in chronicling the course of the ’60s generation; it centers on two college friends, a film director and a cameraman, whose lives have changed when their paths cross many years later.
Bringing the season to a close in September will be Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, directed by McAnuff.
Joint Purchase
The Center Theatre Group of Los Angeles, in collaboration with UCLA, has purchased Hollywood’s Huntington Hartford Theatre, establishing a nonprofit corporation to “acquire, renovate and operate” what is considered one of the best proscenium legitimate theatres in the West.
The Huntington Hartford, owned and operated for the last 20 years by the Southern California Theatre Association, will be renamed the James A. Doolittle Theatre in honor of the Association’s founder and general director. It will be used for productions of the Center Theatre Group’s two resident companies, the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre, and by UCLA’s Center for the Arts and Theatre Arts Department. The formation of a joint corporation by CTG and UCLA represents the reestablishment of a relationship begun in 1959 with the creation of The Theatre Group at UCLA—a professional company in residence on the UCLA Westwood campus until its 1967 move to the Los Angeles County Music Center.
Richard E. Sherwood, CT’s board president, and UCLA chancellor Charles E. Young have expressed the hope that the arrangement will provide a unique training opportunity whereby aspiring theatre professionals can interact with seasoned company members.
Renovations on the 1,038-seat house are in progress, and programming details will soon be announced, in anticipation of a June opening.
Long-Distance Runners
While Broadway’s A Chorus Line splashily breaks record after record (this summer it will complete its 10th year), two shows quite distant from the Great White Way are quietly breaking records of their own.
Stephen Wade’s one-man Banjo Dancing, called by one critic “an enduring Washington institution along with the White House, the Lincoln Memorial and the inaugural parade,” has been entertaining D.C. audiences at Arena Stage’s Old Vat Room for over four years, making it by far the longest-running show in that city’s history. On Jan. 25, Wade jigged his jigs and plunked his multifarious banjos for the 1,000th time at Arena, and still he shows no sign of wearing out his welcome.
Meanwhile, Chicago’s Organic Theater Company has just reached the four-year mark with E/R Emergency Room, the only company-developed theatre piece ever to be adapted as a television situation comedy. To celebrate the milestone, Elliott Gould, Conchata Ferrell, Shuko Akune, Bruce A. Young and other members of the cast of CBS-TV’s version of E.R. traveled to Chicago’s Forum Theatre to perform in one matinee of the stage play. Akune and Young were members of the original Organic cast before joining its TV incarnation.
Alternative Action
A mainstage series just isn’t enough-or so lots of theatres seem to think, as they continue to produce alternative bills of fare at their “Downstages,” or “Stage Il’s” or “Cabarets.” Some companies, such as Baltimore’s Center Stage, sandwich a second series of plays in between its mainstage offerings so that one space can do double-duty. A similar arrangement has just been made by A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, so that its 19-year-old touring Young ACT Company can perform its first resident subscription series.
Beauty and the Beast, adapted by ACT producing director Gregory A. Falls, opened the series, followed last month by Suzan Zeder’s Step on a Crack. A new version of The Odyssey, adapted by Falls and Kurt Beattie, concludes the series this month. As is its tradition, ACT’s mainstage series closed up shop for the year after its annual production of A Christmas Carol, making way for the young people’s series.
In the Midwest, Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s 99-seat warehouse space known as the Court Theater is in the midst of its 11th season of eclectic and innovative work. The series opened in February with Macbeth “Rehearsed,” director Nick Faust’s process-oriented production of the Shakespeare work in which the play changed nightly, based on audience feedback. Rhumba for 8 in 12 E-Z Lessons, a world premiere comedy by Illinois playwright George Freek, runs through April 7 under Kenneth Albers’ direction, followed by Them, two short plays by Jean-Claude Grumberg directed by Eric Hill. Finally, in May, Albers will play the role of an Australian speech therapist and secret transvestite in Steven J. Spears’ The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin.
New York’s City Stage Company has just this season spawned its own offshoot, known as C2C: City Second Company. The first half of this Monday night reading series was devoted to English-language plays not previously performed in this country, but the program has since branched out to include commissioned and new translations, and works being developed for CC’s next season and be-yond. Upcoming C2C readings include Jules Verne: Le Voyage Extraordinaire by French playwright-director Roger Planchon, translated by CSC artistic director Christopher Martin; History of New York by Washington Irving; and Hellfear and Damnation by 19th-century Viennese satirist Johann Nestroy.
Pinstripe Polonius
Aidan Quinn is Hamlet and Del Close a particularly business-like Polonius in Wisdom Bridge Theatre’s contemporary interpretation of the Shakespeare classic. The seventh collaborative effort between director Robert Falls and set, lighting and costume designer Michael Merritt, Hamlet has broken box-office records for Wisdom Bridge in its extended-run engagement. Close may be familiar to some as founder and director of Chicago’s Second City improvisational troupe, and former “acting coach and house metaphysician” for NBC-TV’s Saturday Night Live.
Over There
February was Black History Month, and to mark the occasion, Detroit’s Attic Theatre presented Wedding Band, Alice Childress’ exploration of the cruelty and heartbreak of prejudice. Set in the racially split South Carolina of 1918, the story concerns the struggles of a pair of lovers, one white, one black. Under the direction of Bob Wright, the cast included Joy Kelly in the central role of Julia. At the Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick, N.J., Black History Month was celebrated with performances of Laurence Holder’s one-act When the Chickens Came Home to Roost, featuring Roger Robinson as the idealistic Malcolm X and Thomas Martell Brimm as Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad. Israel Hicks directed.
Into the Past
A team of archeologists, including Veronica Castang and Joe Barrett, race against time and progress to save ancient Indian burial mounds before they are lost forever to the rising waters of a man-made lake in the Virginia Stage Company’s recent production of Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders. VSC artistic director Charles Towers, actors from the production and guest speakers—experts on archeology and anthropology—joined Sunday matinee audiences for after-show discussions during the drama’s run.
From Philly to St. Louis
Three full-length plays and five one-acts—all world premieres—comprise this year’s season at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays. The ambitious schedule for the company’s fourth season, which runs April 18-June 8, sandwiches together four consecutive two-week runs, complete with after-performance discussions with the authors and several seminars addressing issues related to new play development. The plays are Side Effects, a head-on confrontation between a school psychologist and a delinquent student, by Bayldone Coakley; Split Decision, Kevin Heelan’s drama set in the world of professional boxing; A Woman without a Name by Romulus Linney, set in turn-of the-century America and dealing with women’s struggle for spiritual freedom; and five short plays presented in one evening under the umbrella title Sky Readers. The evening includes the title play by William Wise, Laurence Klavan’s Smoke, Janet Neipris Wille’s The Agreement, Mark St. Germain’s Strikes and William Bozzone’s Buck Fever.
The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis has been producing “theme seasons” in its Studio Theatre, and the current motif is war: its victors, victims, evils and injustices. The series led off last fall with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, followed by Emily Mann’s Still Life; its newest and final offering is Mann’s Annulla Allen: Autobiography of a Survivor, a play which predates Still Life and was created using a similar documentary technique. Mann met the real Annulla Allen in London and recorded her history over the course of several sessions. “I was deeply moved by her narrative because it depicted a time in Europe when my own relatives were murdered during the course of Hitler’s drive for world domination,” remarks Mann. Yet, she insists, “It is not a breast-beating play. It lets you know the horror of the Nazis but at the same time that horror is seen through the eyes of someone who survived without bitterness. It is a life-giving play.” Annulla Allen, which premiered on the Guthrie’s second stage and was Mann’s first play, runs through April 7 in St. Louis, under the direction of Timothy Near.
Batter Up
A new baseball musical steps up to the plate April 23 as the fourth and final production of the Goodspeed-at-Chester Theatre’s inaugural season in Chester, Conn. The Dream Team, with music by Thomas Tierney, lyrics by John Forster and a book by Richard Wesley, is set in the post-World War II years when black baseball players were first admitted to major league teams. Dan Siretta will direct and choreograph.
The company, a “second stage” for the nearby Goodspeed Opera House, founded to produce new musical works, opened its Norma Terris Theatre last July with Harrigan ‘n Hart, which has since opened and closed on Broadway. It was followed in October by Mrs. McThing and in December by A Broadway Baby.
Meanwhile, the Goodspeed Opera House, devoted exclusively to revivals, has announced its 1985 season, which opens April 17 with Cole Porter’s You Never Know. The George Abbott-Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick musical Fiorello! will follow, and Jerome Kern’s Leave It to Jane is being considered for the third and final revival of the season.
Agit-Opera
It’s a commonplace that popular hits breed sequels, and superheroes make for popular hits. First there were the Star Wars trilogy and Superman I, Il and III—and now there’s Factwino.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe, long noted for its own particular brand of extravagant political satire, presented its first Factwino epic, Factwino Meets the Moral Majority, in 1981, followed the next season by Factwino vs. Armageddonman. And in February Factwino: The Opera was born. The impetus for creating an operatic tale for the unlikely superhero (an erudite street person named Sedro Wooley, endowed with the amazing ability to make people think), came in the form of an invitation. The Mime Troupe was asked to be the first theatre company to participate in the 15-year-old Festival of Political Song in East Berlin. In preparation for the festival, playwright Joan Holden and the troupe condensed the first two Factwino plays into one two-hour work, updating the political material and adding seven new songs. Though Holden felt some concern about reaching a European audience with a play performed in English, she concluded that comedy seemed a most accessible international language.
From East Berlin, the Troupe took Factwino on a tour of West Germany and Switzerland, landing back in San Francisco in mid-March, just in time for Sedro Wooley and friends to continue their battle against ignorance in performances at the Victoria Theatre. The latest Factwino epic runs through April 21, with an American tour in the works for future months.
Lovers
Jonathan Hogan, left, and Jonathan Hadary are a gay couple attempting to deal with the threat of the AIDS crisis in William M. Hoffman’s new play As Is, running through April 21 at Circle Repertory Company in New York. The drama, a co-production of The Glines (the group which brought Torch Song Trilogy to Broadway), was directed by Rep artistic director Marshall W. Mason, who has staged other Hoffman works Off-Off Broadway in the years since he and the play wright met as early members of Caffe Cino and Cafe LaMama.
Life Goes On
British playwright Louise Page has barreled onto the American scene with premieres of two works: her Salonika is currently running at the New York Shakespeare Festival featuring Jessica Tandy, and Real Estate just completed a limited run engagement at Arena Stage in Washington. Exploring the shifting terrain of family alliances as a woman returns home after a 20-year absence, Real Estate featured Jeffrey Hayenga and Stanley Anderson as the men who kept the homefires burning.
Briefly Noted
Tristan Tzara, the acknowledged father of the Dada movement, claimed that Dadaism was conceived (in 1916) to be incoherent, idiotic, scatological, holding nothing—and everything—sacred. Like the original experiments of Tzara and his colleagues, John W. Wilson’s recent Dada performance workshop at Denver’s Changing Scene was interdisciplinary, encompassing poetry, theatre, dance, music and sculpture. A lobby full of neon sculptures and found obiects led to a variety of performance segments—including a recitation of the French alphabet by Wilson, Hitler jokes told in vaudeville style by the comedy team “Merz und Schmertz,” a semi-nude dance and a dance performed by a metal hoop, a Ring Lardner play about water lilies, and a film called Fecundation. The whole event was titled D D Dada Denver, and like Dada’s original post-World War I European audiences, Denver theatregoers approved: the run was extended.
In mid-February, a time when Americans traditionally celebrate the accomplishments of their most illustrious Presidents, the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles had other ideas. It opened the West Coast premiere of Rap Master Ronnie, a satiric musical cabaret devised by composer Elizabeth Swados and Garry (“Doonesbury”) Trudeau. Taking tuneful stabs at everything from the distribution of surplus cheese to the poor (“I don’t care if it’s cheddar or cream/ just pass me a slab of that American dream”) to President Reagan’s media image (*We want Ron/ The cat’s pure sex/ He’s the man who signs your monthly welfare checks”), the show originated at New York’s Village Gate just before last fall’s presidential election, and promises to find a West Coast audience in the ex-governor’s home state.
Is it possible that funeral parlors are threatening to overtake kitchens as a favored setting for American plays? Joe Sears and Jaston Williams set several of Greater Tuna‘s wildly comic scenes in this unlikely locale, and Phoef Sutton’s Burial Customs, which recently premiered at Washington D.C.’s New Playwrights’ Theatre, carried us coffin-side once again. Most recently, Lansing’s Boars Head: Michigan Public Theater premiered None of the Above by Detroit playwright Peter D. Sieruta, a comic love story set in a Dearborn funeral parlor. In Sieruta’s play, no one is dying and business is dropping off—and the mortician’s son isn’t at all sure that he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps. Comments the playwright, “There is a distinct Detroit sensibility. Things just aren’t as disturbing to Detroiters as they might be to other people.”
Kenneth Arnold’s She Also Dances, which recently had its New York debut at Theater of the Open Eye, is a particularly challenging play to perform. Its two characters are a wheelchair-bound woman and a gymnast-dancer who is never still for a moment, performing many of his scenes on parallel bars. The subject matter of the work is similarly daring in that it confronts the subjects of sensuality and sexuality in relation to the disabled. The play was first performed at the O’Neill Theater Center and then went on to production at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., before bowing on the Open Eye stage.
