Trees are the earth’s endless effort to reach upward, heavenward. Our tree has seen so many suns rise and set, so many seasons come and go.  We may well dream and wonder at what truth it holds,  if it had tongue to tell. Or we had ears fine enough to hear, or minds to understand.

Need strong actors [Men, 40's-50] with vocal training, emotional depth, comic timing.  Don’t need to know sign language. Rehearsals start Feb 28. 

The world premiere of a new play written and directed by Stephen Sachs, Cyrano is a modern day reimagined deaf/hearing version of  “Cyrano de Bergerac”,  adapted from the Edmond Rostand classic. Acclaimed deaf actor Troy Kotsur will star as Cyrano. The project is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

STORYLINE: The setting is present day. Cyrano is a brilliant deaf poet in a modern day city. He is hopelessly in love with a beautiful hearing woman, Roxy. But she doesn’t understand sign language and instead loves his hearing brother, Chris. Can Cyrano express his love for Roxy with his hands – the source of such deaf pride and shame? Or must he teach Chris to “speak his words” for him, to woo her? ASL becomes the language of love in this modern sign language spin on a classic love story.

Seeking VOICE ACTORS for the following roles:

To submit for audition, email: FountainTheatre1@aol.com

Have you ever watched a film and been deeply and profoundly moved,   or read a book that changed your perspective?  That is the type of impact that the play El Nogalar, written by Tanya Saracho, is having upon audiences everywhere.

El Nogalar delves into the complexities that Mexico is facing due to the drug war.  “It is topical and what is happening right now.  If you take a glass and you put it on that area and look inside, everyone is being affected by that,”  said Saracho.

The play artfully weaves through the intricacies of the Mexican caste system and how the drug war is affecting each person’s role within the societal unit.  Saracho does this in such a poignant way that the viewer is able to see and feel each character’s point of view in a personal way.  The pain and sorrow that is felt by the characters becomes universal where everyone, Latino or Non-Latino, can relate.

The play was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s  The Cherry Orchard.   The name “El Nogalar” reflects what is grown in Mexico – Pecans.  Saracho said,”My mom picked the name…, she said, ’Look it up on your internet. It can’t be cherries. We don’t grow cherries!’”

The name wasn’t the only twist that Saracho added; she made the cast mostly females.  She likes to expose, “Life from the point of view of women. “  She continued with, “Talking about Latina women and Mexican women and complicating their image is important to me.  It is also important to me to change their stereotype.”

Her vision of bringing light to the woman’s perspective began before being commissioned by Chicago’s Teatro Vista to write El Nogalar.  Twelve years ago Saracho formed an all-women’s company entitled Teatro Luna.  “When we formed Teatro Luna, we were called man haters in the press…  My writing has been criticized for that. There are enough plays for men,” said Saracho.  She contests claims of being exclusive by saying, “It is not exclusive.  It is inclusive.  I am including the female voice.”

The female voice is not the only theme expressed in her writing.  Saracho passionately explains, “I’m obsessed with class– if we are speaking thematically.  I’m obsessed by how we (Latinos) are seen as the immigrant in the U.S., and I’m obsessed with gender.”    This would not seem surprising as she was born in Sinaloa, Mexico, but grew up in the adjoining border towns of Reynoso, Mexico and McAllen, Texas.   She was entrenched in both cultures learning both languages.  She was educated in the U.S.   She attended high school in Texas and went on to Boston University to graduate in theater studies.

At Boston University her writing skills flourished.  She put up three plays for the student festival.  This, however, was not the beginning of her story telling.  “I was the one who entertained the sisters and I was always a story teller.  I liked to terrify them with “La Llorona”, a legend of a wailing women,” she laughs contagiously, and continues, “I used to tell jokes.  Now I don’t even know one joke… My grandparents would put me on the table and you would either dance or tell a poem or a joke.”

There seems to be no limit to her storytelling and incredible talent. In fact, El Nogalar is actually the first in a trilogy that Saracho has written.  Song of the Disappeared is the next play in the series.  It takes place on the Texas side of the border where the crime element has now infiltrated.  The last installment of the trilogy is entitled Nights.  The characters have been kidnapped and stay alive by telling stories like in the book:  Thousand Nights and One Night.

El Nogalar is so moving that it truly is a must see.  Saracho’s soulful writing leaves a profound impact on viewers.  This play has put her on the radar, and is only the beginning to a brilliant career. Saracho is definitely someone to watch for in the future.

Leah Bergman writes for Latino Weekly Review.

El Nogalar   Now Playing to March 11 (323) 663-1525     More Info

"A House Not Meant to Stand"

On April 2, L.A. Weekly will honor the best work on intimate stages in Los Angeles from 2011 at the 33rd annual L.A. Weekly Theater Awards. The Fountain Theatre has received 9 LA Weekly Theater Award nominations for plays produced in 2011.

• Revival Production of the Year – House Not Meant to Stand
• Lead Female Performance - Sandy Martin, A House Not Meant to Stand
• Supporting Female Performance - Lisa Richards, A House Not Meant to Stand
• Two-Person Performance - Bakersfield Mist (Jenny O’Hara and Nick Ullett), Fountain Theatre
• Playwriting - Stephen Sachs, Bakersfield Mist
• Production Design - A House Not Meant to Stand
• Set Design – Jeff McLaughlin, A House Not Meant to Stand
• Sound Design - Peter Bayne, A House Not Meant to Stand
• Projection Design - Keith Skretch, A House Not Meant to Stand 

"Bakersfield Mist"

The LA Weekly Awards are always a high-octane affair, sort of the “anti-Award Show”. Loud, raucous, rebellious. Each year following a different “theme”. This year, the event will be a replication of the first-ever theater awards ceremony, circa 450 B.C., honoring Dionysus, god of fertility and wine. Lauren Ludwig directs music/sketch comedy troupe Lost Moon Radio, hosts of the Greek bash at the Avalon in Hollywood.

Christa and William Wilk

We have been married for 41 years and are retired teachers who enjoy live theatre in Los Angeles.  Season subscribers to eight theatres and the Los Angeles Stage Alliance, we are thrilled to be in the L.A. area where there is always great live theatre.  We’re not limited to theatre and attend Early and Chamber Music concerts and view exhibits at local art museums.

Market grows for digital rehearsal, staging tools

There’s an app for that, as the saying goes. But an increasing number of entrepreneurial theater folk have noticed that for a lot of day-to-day legit work, there isn’t an app for that — and they’ve set about remedying the situation.

Take Jeff Whiting, the latest legiter to add the unlikely words “software developer” to his resume. As a director-choreographer who often works as Susan Stroman’s associate, he found himself slaving over exhaustive “show bibles” — detailed accounts of stage arrangements and actor movements, often totaling thousands of pages per show — so that a production can be reproduced on tour and in other incarnations.

“I’d been dreaming about ways I could make my life easier,” Whiting says. “I kept thinking, ‘This should be simple.’ It’s just there was no existing way to do it.”

Looking for a digital tool that could streamline the process, all Whiting could come up with was a jury-rigged combo of Power Point and Excel. What he really needed, he decided, was an iPad app — and so StageWrite, launching March 1, was born.

StageWrite

Whiting joins a handful of industry denizens in creating rehearsal-tool apps they’d use themselves. Two of the best-known apps for helping actors memorize lines, for instance, come from actors themselves — David H. Lawrence XVII (“Heroes”), who spearheaded the creation of Rehearsal, and J. Kevin Smith, the man behind Scene Partner.

“The dirty little secret is, if nobody ever bought the app and it was just me using it in my day-to-day life as an actor, I’d still be a happy dude,” Lawrence says.

As Whiting discovered, it ain’t easy creating and selling an app. He knew what he wanted, but guided by a friend in the tech industry, he had to seek out the Arizona-based team of programmers that he ended up hiring to do the coding.

There’s also a not-insignificant amount of money involved. Whiting, who capitalized StageWrite himself, says he had to pony up “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to bring the app to market.

The final product is a tool for creating, duplicating and editing the floorplan charts that, in a show bible, give a moment-to-moment, top-down view of where and when actors and set pieces move during a show. In beta tests during his day job, he’s already found it invaluable, talking up the potential, for instance, to email jpegs of the charts to swing performers, or to a regional lighting designer in advance of a touring production’s arrival.

But creation of an app isn’t the only hurdle; creators have to market it as well.

Different apps go after different demographics: StageWrite, for example, isn’t targeted to the masses. With a pricetag of around $200, the app is pitched as a professional tool to be used by those involved with sizable productions.

So far, Whiting has found that the relatively small size of the legit community has proven a plus, tubthumping for his new product among pros he knows. Whiting says he’s also gotten early interest from Sea World, Cirque du Soleil and the Olympic Committee.

Meanwhile, Scene Partner, priced at $4.99, is aimed at a different market. Creator Smith, who pairs his community-theater acting experience with a career as a direct marketer of tech products, targets amateur and pro thesps alike, saying he’s had a lot of luck hawking the app at young-thespian conferences around the country. The $20 Rehearsal, on the other hand, is optimized for working TV and film actors, as well as for legiters.

Among Scene Partner’s several features are a text-to-speech component that allows audio playback of cue lines for actors memorizing a part. With different tools but a similar goal, Rehearsal enables the highlighting of dialogue in digital scripts and the ability to record an actor’s own lines or fellow thesps’ cues, among other functions.

The rehearsal room’s shift into the digital realm jives with a trend that has seen playscript publishing houses also making recent moves into the marketplace. Late last year, Samuel French launched an e-book service, and barely a month later, Dramatists Play Service struck a deal with Scene Partner to make e-scripts available for use with the app (available at around $10 per play).

Both Whiting and Smith have plans for a suite of tools that will help actors, directors and designers do their work. And Smith anticipates further partnerships among legiters brave enough to step into the marketplace. “I think there’s going to be a lot of room for a lot of collaboration,” he says. “We’re all trying to make a viable business out of it.”

GordonCox writes for Variety.

Ben Bradley

On Friday, February 10, 2012, the convicted killer of Ben Bradley was officially sentenced to life in prison. He will be eligible for a parole hearing in sixteen years.

The judge denied the motion for retrial submitted last month by the defense. In addition to sentencing, the judge ruled that the murderer must also pay $15,000 in restitution to the Bradley family.

The hearing took place in the Criminal Court Building in downtown Los Angeles. Present in the courtroom were Ben’s brother, Micheal Hill; the Fountain’s Deborah Lawlor, Simon Levy,  and Stephen Sachs; actress Lisa Pelikan; and theater journalist (and Fountain friend) Dany Margolies.

When asked by the judge if he wished to make a statement or had anything to say, the murderer said “No”. He was then led away in handcuffs. To spend the rest of his life in prison.

As invoked in the final line of The Ballad of Emmett Till, the play Ben was directing two years ago when he was brutally murdered:

“It is done.”

BEST THEATER: The Fountain Theatre, which housed the year’s greatest artistic achievement, a gorgeous production of Tennessee Williams’ A House Not Meant to Stand (which proved, once and for all, that Williams was never on the decline and that he could still write a play in his later years that had more life in it than the work of most playwrights working today), and the year’s dandiest commercial entertainment, Stephen Sachs’ Bakersfield Mist.

"Bakersfield Mist"

BEST PLAYS: Bakersfield Mist (Stephen Sachs); Personal Choice:  A House Not Meant to Stand (Tennessee Williams).

"A House Not Meant to Stand"

BEST DIRECTION:  Simon Levy (A House Not Meant to Stand )

BEST PRODUCTION:  A House Not Meant to Stand.

SET DESIGN:  Jeff McLaughlin (A House Not Meant to Stand; Bakersfield Mist)

COSTUME DESIGN:  Naila Aladdin-Sanders (A House Not Meant to Stand )

THE BEST PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR: Although there are probably more actors concentrated in Los Angeles than in any other city of the world, there seems to be an ambivalence here towards the art of stage acting. First-rate actors rarely get singled out and are frequently lumped together with second and third-rate actors, to the advantage of neither. And actors – who are, after all, the life-blood of live theater – can make or break the production of a play, a fact that seems to go unappreciated. There were, for example, some performances this year which, had they been seen in London or New York, would have been considered career-transforming performances, and those performances are the ones I am giving the top place in my list:

Sandy Martin

Sandy Martin was wonderful in Tennessee Williams’ A House Not Meant to Stand ; she brought the play itself with her onto the stage the moment she made her dazed entrance and embraced its poignancy and its wackiness simultaneously.

Of course, the women Williams created were particularly memorable, and, again, in A House Not Meant to Stand , Sandy Martin had some extraordinary support from Lisa Richards and Virginia Newcomb who were hilariously funny and, at the same time, incredibly moving in small but vividly written parts – the former as a woman who refused to grow old and the latter as a girl who hadn’t yet grown up.

Jenny O'Hara

And Jenny O’Hara found a myriad of ways in which to instill dignity into the liveliest piece of trailer trash one is ever likely to come across in Stephen Sachs’ Bakersfield Mist – trailer trash with some ideas on Art that reduces an art curator to dithering.

It was, as they say, a very good year. Here’s to 2012.

Harvey Perr writes for Stage and Cinema.

 by Michelle Stephens

Friends from all over posting their hilarious reasons why you might be a theatre geek. Here’s the top 101.

1. Someone tells you they are doing Cherry Orchard and you ask them which translation.
2. You have baby proofed with gaffers tape . . . that you bought yourself.
3. You’ve used gels to decorate your house.
4. You don’t giggle when someone says “dramaturgy”.
5. You go to a live theatre production and spend more time checking out the set and lighting design than actually watching the actors perform.
6. You start thinking about which family members would be perfect for certain roles?
7. You don’t have any other color of clothing other than black (more for the techies, but…)
8. You have a set of “good blacks.”
9. When purchasing a vehicle, it’s hauling capabilities is an important factor.
10. Your drag name is Jack Brace. True story.
11. That is nearly the exact reason I have a truck. That, and I look cool in it!
12. When young children start playing with toys you have in your office, the first thought that goes through your head is “Don’t touch the props!”
13. You do a hang and focus when you move to new digs. Hey, man, side light makes cellulite disappear.
14. You get a Christmas card from Menards.
15. You refer to moving as load-in.
16. You’ve used stage directions in conversations with regular people.
17. A large majority of the music on your iPod/iPhone is either Broadway show tunes or sound effects.
18. When shopping for clothes, you regularly use the excuse that you bought it because it will make a great costume piece.
19. You can’t get over the continuity problems in movies cause you know better!
20. You have scoops in the kitchen and house lights in the dining room.
21. You’ve used your own furniture in a show. (Double points if you’re sitting on said piece of furniture right now.)
22. When family members tell you that you have 5 minutes to preform some arbitrary task and you respond with “Thank you five!”
23. Instead of loose change in your pocket, you have safety pins and screws.
24. When you reference all the major events of your life based on what shows they were between? “Well . . . it was after Foreigner but before Shakespeare.”
25. When you can change from one outfit to another in 30 seconds or less, in the dark, and you don’t really care who is standing next to you.
26. When your character shoes ARE your dress shoes.
27. When you have scissors that are not allowed to cut paper.
28. When you can measure correctly using your own body parts.
29. When you don’t know the last name, place of employment, relationship status, address or history of the people you are spending 20 plus hours a week with, and despite only having met them 10 days ago consider them your best friends!
30. When in your head, you count 5, 6,7, 8 before beginning a task.
31. When you feel lucky that about once a month you get free drinks for opening night.
32. When “move in” and “strike” have nothing to do with a new house or a union protest.
33. When you buy hello kitty duct tape because silver is boring.
34. When you practice your lines out loud–in the grocery store.
35. You refer to vacation as “dark week.”
36. When someone says, “a monkey can do it” your first thought go straight to lighting panel.
37. When you have a storage room in your basement to store stuff that you MIGHT need for a show SOME DAY.
38. When you quote lines from a show you did 15 years ago and your fellow nerds laugh.
39. In preparation for a date you plan set, lighting, and sound.
40. You decorate your house with props and dressing from shows you’ve worked on.
41. When you refer to any stage show by one word, rather then the entire title: “Fiddler, Mattress, Dolly”.
42. You have your own make-up kit.
43. You’re pets are named for Shakespeare characters, or your cats are actually from the musical Cats.
44. When you find yourself in a restaurant…. at midnight.. in full make up… and you are a guy.
45. When you start looking at yourself in the mirror the morning after,  thinking… “more cheeks.”
46. You discuss your dumpster diving treasures with pride.
47. When you tell anyone that comes into your unkempt house that you are in “show mode”
48. You’ve slept at the theatre because there was “no point in going home”. Or at least seriously considered it.
49. You find yourself reminding people that adhesive without pressure is a waste of time.
50. If the timeline of your life is based around what show you were in and not what year it was.
51. You put off getting a haircut/dying your hair/shaving because auditions are coming up and you don’t know what the director will want.
52. When someone asks what your favorite Shakespeare play is and you make them qualify “Comedy, History, or Tragedy.”
53. You can shut down any request for your time or need for your help by saying “I can’t, I’m/I’ll be in Tech.”
54. You do it for free.
55. When you complain about how much time the show is taking up and then a week after it’s over you’re looking for a new show to do.
56. You know why copied scripts are considered theatre contraband. You know exactly how you will look when you get old, because you’ve done the make up and seen the future.
57. You can’t remember your social security number but you can remember lines from a show you worked on in 1994.
58. When you say the script had an “industrial accident” in the copier.
59. You know where they keep the “good” tape.
60. When you can tell people’s shoes size just by looking at their feet because you have seen so many feet that you “just can tell.”
61. When you have more black clothing in you wardrobe than anything else. You can Never have too much black, right?
62. Your prompt book is better organized than your checkbook, your office, or your purse/wallet combined.
63. You find yourself “cheating out” at parties when a group gathers to talk.
64. You can quickly navigate a stage full of walls, platforms, and multiple hazards in pitch black (that you’ve only worked on for a week) but still stub your toe on the way to the bathroom at night.
65. You wish you could wear contacts instead of glasses so you could see on stage.
66. You go see a play by another company because you’re thinking of doing it.
67. You wait for all the local theatres to put out their season announcement before planning vacations.
68. A director has had to personally talk you down off the ledge at least once.
69. You’ve had to personally talk a director down off the ledge at least once.
70. You question the director’s choices in virtually every movie you watch.
71. You secretly think movie makers have it a lot easier than theatre people. (Multiple takes, my ass!)
72. You read play scripts for fun.
73. You know how to “find your light.”
74. You weight everyone you meet for potential stage talent.
75. You’ve dated someone during a production that you would probably never date outside the theatre.
76. You consider how you’ll “deliver your lines” during normal conversation.
77. You search of sub-text in other peoples remarks.
78. No matter how many shows you’ve got under your belt, you still get nervous for auditions.
79. Your family knows your lines as well as you do!
80. You spend you’re lunch hour for a month memorizing your lines.
81. You start listening to the soundtrack to a musical months before auditions.
82. You have nightmares about opening night and you’ve got the lead but you’ve never been to a rehearsal and you don’t know your lines.
83. You refer to a break in any activity as intermission.
84. What happens in the green room stays in the green room.
85. Additionally, what happens in the booth, stays in the booth.
86. If you can quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail you might be a theatre geek.
87. As a techie, you can’t wait for tonight’s headset chatter.
88. You can’t help pointing out every show that each piece of scenery has previously appeared in.
89. You think McGyver was an amateur.
90. You’ve hung posters so many time that areas businesspeople know you by name.
91. You are shameless in your pursuit of free publicity.
92. You have worn underwear under your underwear onstage.
93. You know first hand why they say never work with children or animals.
94. You sit online and wait for people to respond with all their definitions of theatre geekdom.
95. As your kids get older you begin to eye them for potential roles in shows.
96. You take pride in the fact that you can add items to the list of theatre geekdom. ;^)
97. You’ve raided the toy box for props.
98. You’ve sustained at least one major show related injury, and proudly tell the story.
99. You have fixed a costume while trying to keep 7 kids quite while changing you costume while watching for your next scene…
100. You know what it means when they say “… as long as it looks good from 20 feet away…”
101. In spite of the stress, the problems and the headaches, heck sometimes because of them, some of the best times of your life took place backstage, onstage, and at rehearsal.

Michelle Stephens

Michelle Stephens hosts the blog The Theatre Professor

Samuel French, Studio City.

To those of us in the Theater World, the Samuel French bookshop is the Apple Store for theater geeks and professionals. The one-stop shopping mecca for theater books, scripts, casting notices, dialect tapes, and all things Broadway and beyond. The 182 year- old company has two stores in Los Angeles (Studio City and Hollywood), shops in New York and London, and markets theater books and scripts online worldwide.

The Samuel French bookstore in Studio City will close its doors on Feb. 20.

The Ventura Boulevard location, which opened in 1986, will add its remaining stock to French’s larger store at 7623 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.

French is framing the closure as “consolidating”. Phrases such as “combining” and “join forces” are being used in lieu of the word “close.”

Feels a bit like a company saying it is “downsizing” instead of “laying people off”.

“I’ve always thought of the stores as one stock,” manager Joyce Mehess explained. “So we’re combining them; the Hollywood store will have everything that the customer is looking for.

“The book business has changed so much that we don’t need the two stores,” Mehess said. “And the stores are only four-and-a-half miles from each other, just over Laurel Canyon.”

Samuel French

Mr. French  started his book company in New York in 1823. The first store in L.A. opened downtown in 1929. That moved in 1947 to the Sunset Boulevard building, which Samuel French Inc. owns.

Modern market forces, of course, had some impact on the decision to vacate the rented Studio City space. But the dire state of the brick-and-mortar bookstore business in the Amazon.com age wasn’t necessarily the key reason for this consolidation.

“There is no denying the fact that consumer demand has changed dramatically over the past decade, first with the popularity of e-retailers and second with the advent of eBooks,” Samuel French Inc. Director of Operations Kenneth Dingledine said in an email.

“Although our stores have been impacted by this shift, because of the preferences of the professionals in our niche industry, we are not experiencing declines in sales to the same degree that other book stores may be experiencing.

The consolidation will let the bookstore upgrade its facility, offer more author events and expand hours, Dingledine continued.

The Hollywood store has recently been repainted and installed new lighting, Mehess said. She also plans to open the Sunset location from noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays, when it’s traditionally been closed but Studio City has been open.

That was cold comfort to some Ventura Boulevard customers.

“It’ll bum me out if I have to go to Sunset,” 16-year-old Reseda resident Tyler Melville said while picking up a Sam French edition of “Biloxi Blues” for a production he’ll be in at Champs Charter High School.

“It’s sad to see a store closing, especially when it’s so convenient for a lot of us, being right next to CBS Studios here on Radford, where a lot of us actors are currently employed,” added Burbank-based Brandon Larkins.

Others were more resigned to the new situation.

“This is my go-to place when I need things for acting preparation,” said Woodland Hills actress Renee Suran. “I live in the Valley, so this is obviously much more convenient for me than Sunset. However, I do go over there frequently, so ultimately, I guess, it doesn’t matter.”

As a kind of parting gift, a huge stock-reduction sale is now underway at  Studio City. Everything 50% off or more!  If you’re looking for that hard-to-find copy of your favorite play or musical, now’s the time to swing by the Studio City store and grab it. Bring a tote bag and stock up your shelves at home.

And bid farewell to an old theater friend in the Valley.