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.
Joe Tower is an Ovation Fellow from UCLA.
William Dennis Hurley loves the Fountain Theatre. “They treat actors well,” he says. After all he would know because Hurley’s just finishing an extremely successful Los Angeles premiere of Conor McPherson’s most recent play Shining City. He did so right here. In Hollywood. In this very space. At this very theatre. And it was a great show. Whew.
This is good news. Because I’ll tell you, my mentor Johnny Clark and I were having a conversation about this very thing at the Starbuck’s down the block before going to see the play and we were asking ourselves this question: Is there good theatre in Los Angeles? Now, I know it sounds pejorative and if the answer is no it’s going to be a jagged pill to swallow. But it bears asking. Any one of the hundreds of fresh-faced hopefuls with the last of their savings in a shoebox and their car packed to the dome-light with all their worldly possessions ought to ask themselves this very question before they start rolling into Tinseltown off the interstate from Ashland, Oregon or Upstate New York or Omaha, Nebraska. Or wherever we come from. Because theatre is where it all starts. And as it stands, in the cultural mosaic of this particular metropolis, the great behemoth, film and television, happens to be the loud, boisterous older brother to local theatre’s slightly bashful, charmingly timid baby sister. Justifiably so. Film and television is a huge personality; raucous, funny and he tells a good, bawdy joke. Theatre, meanwhile, with big brother grabbing all that attention, is saddled in the corner playing with her dolls alone. And this is disturbing.
But the production of Shining City put me at ease and the conversation afterwards, with veteran actor Hurley-whose own success in film, television, and theatre includes work on NYPD Blue, The Practice, Over There, to name a few, as well as the world premiere of Athol Fugard’s Exits and Entrances-further assuaged my fear that theatre in LA is artistic Vietnam. After the performance he told me, in the theatre’s quaint, bohemian café upstairs, that the Fountain not only knows how to put on good theatre, it knows how to put up good theatre. Start to finish. And they’ve been doing so for almost 20 years. “It’s the collaboration,” he says. From acting to sound design to front-of-the-house management, Hurley says this theatre is a truly aware we’re all in this together, trying to stage something great.
Philosophically, I have to admit this seems to be a rare attribute to find in a city built around a Walk of Fame. However, it’s a philosophy that has paid off because Hurley and fellow cast members-including the regional hero Morlan Higgins, who plays the lead opposite Hurley-have gotten rave reviews for this performance. And to see the cast and crew interact post-show, in the café, mingling and hollering over beers and cups of wine, smiles of satisfaction on their contented faces, seem as happy with their work offstage as they are with their work on it. And that, my fellow theatregoers, is reason enough to sit back, order another Corona and rest assured that in some corners of this star-studded media Mecca, theatre is still good.
