LOS ANGELES: Now entering its 30th year, the Fountain Theatre has announced a celebratory 2020 season of dynamic premieres and events.
“Thirty years ago, when we first entered this theatre and stepped onto its stage, we knew we had found it—a place to call home,” said co-artistic director Deborah Culver and Stephen Sachs in a joint statement. “Since that April three decades ago, our charming haven on Fountain Avenue has been home to thousands of artists and millions of patrons. Fountain plays are now performed worldwide and seen on TV. Our flamenco concerts are first-class. Our outreach programs change lives. Our legacy is noteworthy. And our future looks bigger and brighter than ever.”
The season begins with the world premiere of Stephen Sachs’s Human Interest Story (opening Feb. 15). Sachs will also direct this timely drama about homelessness, celebrity worship, and truth in American journalism, featuring Rob Nagle as a newspaper columnist who is laid off when a corporate takeover downsizes his paper, and whose plot to retaliate entangles him with a homeless woman (Tanya Alexander).
Slated for spring is the Los Angeles premiere of If I Forget, to be directed by Fountain producing director Simon Levy. In this viciously funny, unflinchingly honest portrait of a Jewish family and a culture at odds with itself, a liberal Jewish studies professor reunites with his two sisters to celebrate their father’s 75th birthday.
Summer brings the L.A. premiere of An Octoroon by 2016 MacArthur fellow Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who won the Obie for this radical, incendiary, and subversively funny riff on Dion Boucicault’s once-popular 1859 mustache-twirling melodrama set on a Louisiana plantation. Judith Moreland directs.
Another noteworthy L.A. premiere closes the season in the fall: Caryl Churchill‘s Escaped Alone, a caustically funny and surreal afternoon of tea and calamity.
Also at the Fountain in the coming year are Forever Flamenco, an ongoing monthly series; a 30th anniversary gala titled Hollywood Dreams, to be held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on June 27; Walking the Beat Hollywood, a pioneering arts education program for inner-city high school youth and police officers; and The Candidate, a stage adaptation of the 1972 paranoid thriller that will serve as the Fountain’s third annual celebrity reading at Los Angeles City Hall, Oct. 22.
