November | 2013 | Intimate Excellent

New Fountain Theatre logo

The Fountain Theatre has a new website and a new logo! After 23 years, it’s time to redesign our website and revitalize our logo. Our new website is sleek, classy, intuitive, user-friendly, and easy to navigate. Our new logo blends the influence of our original lettering with a contemporary style and adds the image of our intimate seating to reflect the Fountain Theatre experience: Intimate. Excellent.

Click here and have a look at our new website. Let us know what you think. We will continue to tweak and adjust it. Your input is very important. Our website is for YOU!  

Posted in arts organizations, Drama, Fountain Theatre, performing arts, plays, Theater, theatre

Tagged Fountain Theatre, logo, Los Angeles, performing arts, theater, theatre, website

Artistic Directors Deborah Lawlor and Stephen Sachs 

Posted in actors, Arts, arts organizations, Dance, Drama, Fountain Theatre, performing arts, plays, Theater, theatre

Tagged artistic director, Deborah Lawlor, Fountain Theatre, giving thanks, gratitude, Los Angeles, performing arts, plays, Stephen Sachs, thank you, Thanksgiving, theater, theatre

by Todd London

Todd London

I’m reading Dave Eggers’ new novel, The Circle. It takes place inside a Google-like company by the same name. As the book begins, the Circle’s latest hire, Mae, tours the sparkling, communitarian campus, “400 acres of brushed steel and glass.” “It’s heaven,” she thinks.

The walkway wound around lemon and orange trees and its quiet red cobblestones were replaced, occasionally, by tiles with imploring messages of inspiration. ‘Dream,’ one said, the word laser-cut into the red stone. ‘Participate,’ said another.

There are dozens of these word-bricks, but Eggers just names a few: “Find Community.” “Imagine.” “Breathe.” And yes, you guessed it, “Innovate.”

You know where this is going. It’s not heaven at all. It’s Orwellian hell, Steve Jobs meets L. Ron Hubbard. The people are warm, brilliant, and aglow with a perfectly modulated passion, like those shiny charismatics who dominate the Ted Talks. In other words, Eggers novel describes something like the Platonic ideal of a 24/7 “innovation summit.” It’s a nightmare.

New Dramatists, New York

I’m a writer and I live and work with writers. The stone steps to the old Midtown Manhattan church that houses New Dramatists don’t have words etched in them. No one needs to be told to imagine or, since they’re with us for seven-year residencies, to find community. The domed window above the wooden entrance doors does have words, painted in gold: Dedicated to the Playwright. That’s all. We dedicate our service to their efforts and, because art leads change and not the other way around, their work cuts a slow path to the new.

Most of us there—writers, staff, board—swing between incredulity and fury at the rampant spread of this innovation obsession in the arts. So I have to confess: I come to bury innovation not to praise it.

Here’s how the siren call of innovation sounds from our church: It signals another incursion on the arts by corporate culture, directive funders, and those who have drunk the Kool-Aid of high-tech hip and devotional entrepreneurism. It announces the rise of a cult of consultancy, already a solid wing of the funding community. One New York foundation, which formerly gave out sizable general operating support, now requires each grantee to send two senior staffers to spend several mornings at the feet of turnaround king Michael Kaiser, as a prerequisite for payment and any future funding. You follow? They hire a high-paid macher to teach us how to fundraise even as they stop funding us.

The world is changing radically and so must we. That’s the agenda underlying the innovation mandate. This change agenda is actually a critique, a presumption that arts organizations are calcified, failed. Of course, most of us share this critique and believe it’s true of every company but our own. More, it implies that our companies, many five or six decades old, don’t know how to adapt.

It’s not that we’ve failed to adapt; we have adapted and adapted, twisting our adaptive muscles into shapes for this funding trend or that initiative, for the new, improved, think it, do it, be it, say it, better believe it world of organizational reorganization until we’re blue in the core values. We have lost sight of the ocean, in which we may be sinking, and keep returning to the mechanism of the boat.

Where innovation thinkers see ill-adaptive organizations, I see decades of unsupported art and artists, energy and money thrown at institutional issues, as if this can make the art relevant. I’d suggest it’s the funding community that needs to take a deep, humble look at its assumptions and, most urgently, at the human relations and power dynamics of money and expertise. Doctor, please innovate thyself.

Change is no measure of success. Do we do what we say we do? Do we do it well? If we don’t, we shouldn’t be funded. If we are worthy of funding, we have proved we’re capable of self-determination.

So why did New Dramatists attend an “innovation summit,” if this is all so wrongheaded, and why did we apply to EmcArts Innovation Lab? It’s simple. Funding and learning, in that order. We’re as desperate for new funding as the next guy. We’ve been known to pretzel our priorities to get some. The Lab came with money; the summit with a roomful of important funders. Can we admit this? Both have brought us new colleagues and new insights.   Continue reading

Posted in actors, Arts, arts organizations, director, Drama, Fountain Theatre, grants, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre

Tagged American Theatre, arts, change, Dave Egger, Deborah Stein, EmcArts Innovation Lab, Fountain Theatre, Francine Volpe, funding, HowlRound, Innovation, Karen Hartman, Karina Mangu-Ward, Lisa D’Amour, Los Angeles, Lucy Thurbe, New Dramatists, new plays, New York, performing arts, playwriting, Qui Nguyen, Richard Maxwell, The Circle, theater, theatre, Todd London, Young Jean Lee

by Catherine Trieschmann

The rhythm of my life as a writer has been fairly consistent the past five years. I usually incubate with a new project for a season, which means staying home and writing in between childrearing, housekeeping and wandering the grocery aisles with a make-up bag full of coupons in the middle of the night. This phase requires a decent knack for multi-tasking, but incubation is nevertheless a pretty serene time for our household. My favorite part of playwriting is writing in a room alone, as this is when I am most often surprise myself: summoning forgotten words, a repressed point of view, a turn of phrase I couldn’t have wrought with my conscious mind. I try not to judge myself.

It’s a great time of forgetting, both in writing and in family life. We watch the leaves fall off an old oak in our backyard that only appears aged, because we live on the high plains where the wind steals so many saplings. I write in the morning. In the afternoon, we gather leaves and press them into the pages of the Professor’s dictionary collection. At night, I drink tea.

Catherine Trieschmann

The hatching of a play, which occurs in a rehearsal room, has its own joys, but they aren’t particularly serene ones. All of a sudden I’m surrounded by other voices, voices not so enamored by my clever turns of phrase and who challenge the sense of things at every corner. This is all necessary and good and part of making a play better than I could have ever imagined alone, but it’s tough on my sense of equilibrium. Sometimes actors make text suggestions because they can see into a character better than I can, and sometimes they make them because they want more lines.

Sometimes I immediately have a terrific solution for a scene, and sometimes the director has to buy me coffee and insist I read a scene aloud in order to make clear that it is not her problem; it is mine. The theater tends to attract mercurial, volatile people who seem perfectly rational one day and in desperate need of meds the next. During the hatching period, I do not watch leaves fall from the trees. I do not drink tea. I battle insomnia. I thank God every night that my dramaturg believes the best place to crack a scene is at the bar, where we drink vodka.

What has become increasingly clear as the children have grown older is how the discombobulation I feel in the rehearsal room is reflected back home, when I am away. The Professor is heroic in his attempts to keep hearth and home, but when the gentle rhythms of our family life are disrupted, the children rattle their cages. During my recent trip to open a play in Denver, one child hid in a corner of the library and cut off her hair. The other became completely neurotic about her potty training and started stashing the dirty underpants behind her dresser. The smell lingers still. One child called me everyday; the other refused to talk to me on the phone at all. One cried every afternoon when the babysitter picked her up from school. The other refused to go bed at night but wandered the house until midnight, finally falling asleep on the stairs, the sofa, the kitchen floor. The Professor had to carry her into daycare every morning, asleep on his shoulder.

Part of me feels terribly guilty, of course. I hate that everyone struggles while I am away. There’s nothing more heart wrenching than hearing a plaintive voice on the telephone asking me to come home. I’m scared that when they are older, my girls will spend hours complaining to their therapists about how their mother abandoned them for her art, which, let’s be honest, is not world-changing, particularly lucrative, or great. I’m not re-inventing the form. It’s just what I have chosen to do with my particular gifts at this point in history when a middle-class woman with a willing partner has the privilege of doing so.

Another part of me, however, doesn’t feel guilty at all. This part hopes that when they’re all grown up, my girls will do the same. I hope they create art, grow cities, make scientific discoveries or religious ones. I hope they leave their kids with their partners or with their parents in order to travel to Bosnia, because they want to apprentice with a Bosnian basket weaver for a spell, and I hope they have partners who understand and appreciate the importance of Bosnian basket weaving. And yes, I hope they aren’t shitty parents who lose all perspective over Bosnian basket weaving and ignore their kids. I mean, God forbid they turn out to be little narcissists who follow every whim to the ends of the earth. But I have to believe that there’s a time and a place for playmaking, for spiritual retreat, for building a museum on a distant shore, indeed, for Bosnian basket-weaving, because whether good, great or mediocre, the act of creation is important.

What about you? How do you balance working away from home with providing consistency for your kids? How do you feel about it?

Catherine Trieschmann is a playwright living in Kansas with her husband and two children. Her play The Most Deserving can be seen this year at the Denver Center Theater for Performing Arts and off-Broadway with the Women’s Project Theater.  This post originally appeared on Howlround. 

Posted in Acting, actors, Arts, arts organizations, Drama, Fountain Theatre, new plays, parenting, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre

Tagged actors, artist, Arts education, balance, Catherine Trieschmann, childrearing, Fountain Theatre, HowlRound, Los Angeles, new plays, parenting, performing arts, plays, playwriting, theater, theatre

Manuel Gutierrez at ‘Forever Flamenco at the Ford’

If you were fortunate to be at our summer gala concert Forever Flamenco at the Ford at the 1200-seat John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, then you remember the explosive dancer Manuel Gutierrez. His show-stopping passionate dance style was unforgettable.  Well, good news. He’s back! Manuel Gutierrez will now be joining the already stellar lineup of Forever Flamenco this Sunday, November 10 at 8pm , at the intimate Fountain Theatre.

The show this Sunday night, led by the artistic direction of percussionist Joey Heredia, was already promising to be exciting and innovative with the inclusion of jazz musicians Pablo Medina (piano) and Oskar Cartaya (bass).  Joining them will be dancer Mizuho Sato, guitarist Kai Narezo, singer Antonio de Jerez and singer/guitarist Jose Garcia. Tickets are going fast. You don’t want to miss this one! 

Now in its 11th smash year, Forever Flamenco is a Los Angeles phenomenon.

“Once a month at the Fountain Theatre, Deborah Lawlor presents Forever Flamenco, an assemblage of the greatest flamenco artists anywhere.”   – Stage and Cinema 

Percussionist Joey Heredia.

Forever Flamenco Sun Nov 10 8pm (323) 663-1525  MORE

Posted in Arts, arts organizations, Dance, dancer, flamenco, Fountain Theatre, Music, performing arts, singer, Theater, theatre

Tagged Antonio de Jerez, Deborah Lawlor, Flamenco, flamenco dancing, flamenco guitar, flamenco music, Forever Flamenco, Forever Flamenco at the Ford, Fountain Theatre, Joey Heredia, John Anson Ford Amphitheater, Jose Garcia, Kai Narezo, Los Angeles, Manuel Gutierrez, Mizuho Sato, Oskar Cartava, Pablo Medina, performing arts, theater, theatre

Enjoy this new promo video for our acclaimed production of The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer. Our exclusive Los Angeles revival directed by Simon Levy has earned rave reviews, overwhelming audience response, and has been extended to December 15th by popular demand.

This promo video was created by our friends and colleagues at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).  GLAAD amplifies the voice of the LGBT community by empowering real people to share their stories, holding the media accountable for the words and images they present, and helping grassroots organizations communicate effectively. By ensuring that the stories of LGBT people are heard through the media, GLAAD promotes understanding, increases acceptance, and advances equality.  

GLAAD’s LGBT Los Angeles theater site shares info on plays that bring LGBT characters and plotlines to life that insure accurate depictions of LGBT people and issues.

The Fountain Theatre production of The Normal Heart has been hailed “brilliant” and “outstanding” and a “must-see”. It is highlighted as a Critic’s Pick and is Ovation Award Recommended. Broadway World exclaims, “This production at the Fountain Theatre certainly exemplifies that great theatre is alive and well in Los Angeles.”

The cast features Verton R. Banks, Bill Brochtrup, Tim Cummings, Matt Gottlieb, Fred Koehler, Stephen O’Mahoney, Ray Paolantonio, Lisa Pelikan, Dan Shaked and Jeff Witzke.

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Extended to Dec 15th! (323) 663-1525 Get Tickets Now!

Posted in Acting, actors, AIDS, Arts, arts organizations, director, Drama, Fountain Theatre, Gay, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre

Tagged actors, Bill Brochtrup, Dan Shaked. Jeff Witzke, Fountain Theatre, Fred Koehler, gay, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, GLAAD, Larry Kramer, LGBT, LGBT community, Lisa Pelikan, Los Angeles, Matt Gottlieb, performing arts, plays, Ray Paolantonio, Simon Levy, Stephen O’Mahoney, The Normal Heart, theater, theatre, Tim Cummings, Verton R. Banks, video