Actors and audiences -- a simultaneous organism
Five in-person productions: "Taming the Lion," "An Octoroon," "Tevye," "Julius Caesar," "Midsummer"
In the flesh. In person. Face to face.
No matter how you say it, the simultaneous union of actors and audiences in physical space is the most vital quality of “theater” – or, for those so inclined, “theatre.”
During most of the pandemic period, this phenomenon was nowhere to be found in Greater Los Angeles. A couple of productions in garages or parking lots met many of those conditions – but not the “face to face” part, because the participants remained distanced, inside cars.
But now the return to real-live “theater” is underway. Within the last month, I saw five productions that brought audiences and actors face to face in a physical space. Four out of the five began with actors directly addressing the audience, making eye contact with people who were only a few feet away – as if to emphasize that we were no longer in a virtual theater. We were in the real thing.
These re-openings of real theater occurred in the wake of mass vaccinations and the subsequent decline in COVID cases. They also coincided with the beginning of summer. Theater companies that have performed outdoors for many summers (although not in 2020) were joined by others that moved outside for the first time – because alfresco gatherings are less likely to spread the virus.
Still, I’ll start my discussion of recent theatrical adventures with the one production that was not outdoors: “Taming the Lion,” from the 99-seat Theatre 40 company in Beverly Hills, playing through August 1.
A marriage mandate from MGM’s Mayer
The “Taming the Lion” audience is seated in its usual pre-pandemic configuration, within a space that was initially designed as a storage room. If you arrive in a party of one, you might be seated within a foot or two of people you’ve never met, on your left and your right.
I was spared that scenario. By the time I arrived, a party of two -- who had been assigned seats immediately to the left of my single seat -- had already moved to a mostly empty part of the theater, on the side. This enabled me to move one seat to the left of my assigned spot, so one empty seat separated me from each of my neighbors to the left and the right.
The theater’s managing/artistic director David Hunt Stafford told me that he was confident that everyone in the room had been vaccinated, attributing this belief to conversations in the reservation process. But no one was checking the vaccination verification cards at the door — which is what Geffen Playhouse, not far from Theatre 40, plans to do when it re-opens in September.
Three days after seeing the play, I looked up the Beverly Hills COVID vaccination rates on the county’s online record; 97.1% of the city’s 65+ population (which probably makes up a disproportionate part of the theater’s audience) had been vaccinated, and 75.8% of the 16+ population. So Stafford’s confidence was probably justified.
Still, I wore a mask throughout the performance, in the interest of being able to concentrate completely on the play, without my mind wandering to the amount of antibodies within those around me.
I’m glad that my thoughts weren’t diverted away from the play. .Jack Rushen’s script is a lively account of a true drama that occurred in 1933 within the inner chambers of MGM –- that’s why “lion” is in the title -- in Culver City.
The studio’s legendary boss, Louis B. Mayer, ordered one of his biggest stars -- the gay but loosely closeted William Haines -- to marry a woman, even though Haines was living with the man who would become his lifelong partner. Mayer selected a would-be MGM star to play the bride in what would have been a thoroughly publicized real-life sham wedding.
Apart from the opening direct-address remarks by Haines (Landon Beatty) and his posthumous closing comments from decades later, Rushen tells the story in a clean, clear, chronological style. Allowed to concentrate solely on this crisis, the suave Beatty and Jeffrey Winner as the diminutive bulldog Mayer deliver commanding performances. Director Melanie MacQueen’s supporting cast is equally sharp.
However, after leaving the theater and reading more about Haines, I wonder if a somewhat looser narrative structure might have been able to incorporate a few missing chapters that sound equally dramatic. I would like to glimpse how Haines became aware of his homosexuality and accepted it years earlier, any techniques he used to maintain a “hetero” mien in his performances (we see no film clips from his work or any scenes while he was on a set), and how he coped during and after a violent anti-gay crime against him and his lover in Manhattan Beach in 1936.
Who knows – maybe this production, so close to the current MGM headquarters in Beverly Hills, could create interest in a Haines streaming series, which could include a fuller accounting of his biography. I’m more eager to go to theaters now than I am to watch yet more TV, but I would make an exception a few years from now, in order to see more of the William Haines story.
At “An Octoroon,” thoughts of “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle”
Let’s move on to two outdoor productions from previously indoor-only theater companies.
The first significant re-opening in Los Angeles was Fountain Theatre’s LA premiere of “An Octoroon,” playing through most of September. The Fountain converted its next-door parking lot into an outdoor stage and moved its parking across the street. Expectations were high, perhaps too high, not only for the return of in-person theater but also for the play itself, a seven-year-old script that had been widely heralded by East Coast critics and by the LA Times’ Charles McNulty.
The first words in “An Octoroon” are spoken directly to the audience by “BJJ,” who immediately announces that he is “a black playwright.” BJJ’s initials are the same as those of the real “An Octoroon” playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. During the excessively lengthy prologue that follows, we learn that BJJ told a possibly fictional therapist that one of the dead playwrights he admires is the 19th-century melodramatist Dion Boucicault, who wrote “The Octoroon” (as opposed to Jacobs-Jenkins’ “An Octoroon”).
Boucicault’s “The Octoroon” was a big hit during the 19th century, with its ostensibly sympathetic look at the plight of the titular one-eighth-Black woman whose white genes aren’t sufficient to prevent her from being sold as a slave. The therapist supposedly suggested that BJJ adapt this mostly forgotten play, presumably for a modern sensibility.
BJJ (Matthew Hancock) is joined by Boucicault himself (Rob Nagle) as they prepare for a performance of BJJ’s adaptation, in which they also act. Using whiteface, BJJ plays the romantic lead, a sympathetic plantation heir in Louisiana, plus the estate’s villainous former overseer M’Closky. At one point Hancock has to fight himself in his two different whiteface roles.
If all of this sounds complicated and convoluted, it is. An irony – but not necessarily the irony -- is that the most memorable people in Jacobs-Jenkins’ play aren’t the eponymous Octoroon or BJJ or Boucicault or any of the characters they play – but rather house slaves Minnie (Pam Trotter) and Dido (Kacie Rogers), who use modern jargon to comment on these proceedings with high satire.
An even greater irony is that three decades ago West Coast audiences saw a stronger, funnier, more streamlined example of this same genre – that is, when a young Black playwright deconstructs a white 19th-century writer’s supposedly enlightened antebellum slavery saga. We saw it as LA was bleeding from the Rodney King /LAPD fiasco.
I’m referring to Robert Alexander’s “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle,” a “New Jack Revisionist” take on George Aiken’s previously popular dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which was vastly more influential (and better written) than “The Octoroon.”
I reviewed the original San Francisco Mime Troupe staging of Alexander’s play twice for the LA Times, first at San Diego Repertory Theatre and then at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood. I recently re-read the script after seeing “An Octoroon.” I advise those LA theater artists who would like to reflect on racial issues of the current moment to inquire about the possibility of presenting a revival of “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle” in the post-George Floyd era.
Full speed ahead at the Wallis
The Wallis in Beverly Hills opened its first outdoor theater event, “Tevye in New York!,” soon after the opening of “An Octoroon.” Unfortunately, it’s a solo -- in a location where even a cast of hundreds in a full-throated production of the better and more famous Tevye show, “Fiddler on the Roof,” might have had a problem competing with the noise of the surrounding city on a Saturday night in July.
Tom Dugan’s monologue is actually set on the Fourth of July, 1914, as Tevye – originally of Sholem Aleichem fame -- tells more stories from the Old World as well as a few from New York. I originally booked tickets for the Fourth of July, 2021, but that performance was canceled.
Perhaps it was a mistake to switch my tickets to Saturday July 3. The cacophony of nearby speeding (or so it sounded) on adjacent streets was so distracting that I wondered if the word had gone out on the city-street-racing circuit that tonight’s entertainment would be to encircle the Wallis and repeatedly annoy its audience. Those of us who had been watching a lot of quasi-theater on Zoom in our own homes were suddenly subjected to the torments of real-life zooming on civic thoroughfares.
The most pertinent line of the script was this, as Tevye fretted about the danger of the newfangled vehicles that were appearing on New York streets: “Oh, these automobiles? You’d think the road was built for them!” But I don’t think that anyone in pre-pandemic times would imagine that the patio at the Wallis was built for a solo show on a Saturday night.
In Topanga, the Bard is back
We normally don’t have to worry about intrusive noises at Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, even though it, too, is outdoors. It’s in sylvan Topanga, in a glen that is accessible from Topanga Canyon Boulevard but not adjacent to it. Occasionally you might hear a distant vehicle, but the overall decibel level is a lot lower than it would be outside the Wallis at the same time.
The Theatricum re-opened last weekend, after taking 2020 off because of COVID, and it was wonderful to re-enter its glen and respond to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Both scripts are abridged, with no intermissions.
Like the other productions discussed, above, Ellen Geer’s new staging of “Julius Caesar” opens with a direct address to the audience. The Soothsayer/Narrator (Gerald Rivers) speaks words not written by Shakespeare -- at the end as well as the beginning. The purported goal is to enlist the spectators into thinking of themselves as “citizens.”
At least a few of the theatergoers, but hardly the majority, received paper cue cards with appropriate responses that they could feel free to shout in response to Caesar’s first appearance (“Give us your blessing, Caesar!”) and/or at the conspirators (including, among other imprecations, “Hang them!”).
No one suggests adding the name “Mike Pence” after the word ”Hang,” and none of the actors are dressed like the thugs who invaded the Capitol on January 6. But in the current political context, it’s easy to think about the invasion of the Capitol while watching “Julius Caesar.”
After all, the play depicts the prelude to the upcoming replacement of the Roman republic by the Roman empire; the dictator Caesar is offered a crown, and the mob apparently approves. Does anyone doubt that Donald Trump would relish the idea of John Roberts or Kevin McCarthy handing him a crown and dubbing him Emperor Donaldus Caesar?
On the other hand, the actor who plays Caesar here (Mark Lewis) is not made up to look like Trump, as happened in a controversial New York production in 2017. We can safely assume that no Democratic senators in 2021 DC are conspiring to assassinate the ex-president. Still, gently suggesting cross-era parallels is more engaging than simply mounting one more conventional rehash of the original play.
“Midsummer” is the only production of the five that are discussed here that doesn’t begin with direct address to the audience. The Theatricum stages “Midsummer” just about every year, so it holds few surprises for loyal audiences. This year the dialogue breaks into song, briefly, more often than in most versions, but these sung moments resemble tentative recitative, not big production numbers. Lisa Wolpe, known for creating and running Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, plays Oberon, who remains mostly manly.
I wonder why “Midsummer” opened at a 4 pm matinee, considering the title’s subsequent emphasis on “Night’s Dream.” If you prefer a more nocturnal atmosphere, the Theatricum also offers “Midsummer” performances that start at 7:30 pm.
One of the Theatricum’s primary assets, in just about every production, is the expanse of its stage – not only the main stage, but also smaller satellite platforms on each side, in the back, or even in the aisles. In this “Midsummer,” Hippolyta (Oyemen Ehikhamhen) demonstrates her Amazonian prowess by shooting an arrow into the upstream part of the glen, also known as stage left. In the virtual theater I saw over the past 15 months, no one ever shot an arrow.
Theatricum directors have a lot of experience using their giant canvas. Now – after we’ve been huddling indoors for so long – is a great time to explore its extensive possibilities.
Update
In my first (and most recent) Angeles Stage, which posted on June 19, I noted that “Since the late Diane Rodriguez left CTG in 2019, no Latina or Latino has been a part of CTG’s ‘artistic team’ as listed on the CTG website.”
Today, July 14, CTG announced that Luis Alfaro, who is one of LA theater’s most honored playwrights — and a Chicano — would join that team as an associate artistic director.