Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities.  Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year.  Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.

Tyler McClain is an Ovation Fellow from Loyola Marymount University.

It’s not that I’m bad at initiating conversation with strangers - nor do I find it particularly uncomfortable - but it would be stubborn of me to deny the value of having an “in.” You know the type: knows everyone and everything, what to say and, more importantly, what not to say. Well, my mentor Dennis Smeal is my “in.” So I was a little disappointed then that he had a flat tire on Sunday before we were scheduled to see Scarcity at The Imagined Life theater, produced by needtheater and directed by Kappy Kilburn.

I had to go it alone.

Scarcity is a tough piece of American realism - the characters are lowly, selfish, cruel and the mind games they play are punishing. In short, it’s exactly the sort of drama I wish I could write.

Not to dig too deep but at the heart of the play is a young man trying to fulfill his personal intellectual promise, possibly at the expense of offending his unbelievably selfish, blue-collar parents. I have wonderful parents who’ve supported me consistently through some good, and not-so-good, decisions. Still, I could relate to the anxiety that flooded the play - the desire to just get on with life and forget about the past; as James Joyce said, “history is a nightmare” from which we’re all trying to awake.

I am haunted by American realism. I can’t think of any genre more confrontational to the ideologies of our nation. There is no other style of work that forces us to stare ourselves down with more aggressive honesty. Realism, because it attempts to be “true,” is the stuff of nightmares. When I set out to write my first play - I had envisioned a staged horror about exorcism - I quickly learned the real terror would come not from the supernatural but from the failed realities of life, the ways in which the characters had disappointed themselves and those around them.

In the end I was pleased I had seen Scarcity alone. It felt private and personal, which is exactly how I imagined it was intended. In the audience, I wasn’t posturing for anyone; I was simply lost in the action. And luckiest of all, the conversation with needtheater’s artistic directors was fascinating. Warm and charming, the team at needtheater expressed their desire to experiment and outdo themselves. It’s the sort of place that reminds you of the necessity of staged drama, the necessity of watching people perform less than 10 feet in front of you. It was also pretty thrilling to meet creative members of needtheater alone, and begin cultivating personal relationships as an individual. My second experience as an Ovation fellow was as inspiring as my first, and I look forward to getting to know the LA theater community on my own terms even more.

For more information on Scarcity or the Imagined Life Theater, click here!