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Wendy Johnson’s Not Concealing Judy Holliday or Herself

February 4, 2012 No Comments

by DEBORAH BEHRENS |  April 18, 2012

Dan Cole, Kevin Quinn and Terrence Elton in “Concealing Judy Holliday”

 

Wendy Johnson may not be an exact double of the late stage and screen star Judy Holliday, but she channels the same quixotic mix of deft comedic timing and deeply earnest artistry.

Over lunch in a booth at Los Feliz’s retro-eclectic House of Pies, Johnson offers up a spot-on Billie Dawn, the Born Yesterday role Holliday originated on Broadway before trumping both Bette Davis’ Margo Channing and Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond for the Best Actress Oscar in the 1950 film version. Last year Nina Arianda earned a Tony nomination for her portrayal of Billie in the 2011 Broadway revival.

Wendy Johnson

Johnson is equally adept at conjuring the voices of other ditzy but life-savvy dames such as Guys and Dolls‘ Miss Adelaide, Oklahoma’s Ado Annie or Audrey, the  Little Shop of Horrors’ Skid Row flower shop girl. But it is Holliday, a woman with a 172 IQ who felt trapped by the roles studio bosses and Broadway producers wanted her to play, with whom Johnson most feels a personal kinship.

Johnson spent the last decade writing and workshopping a “funny and poignant” play calledConcealing Judy Holliday that now features seven actors playing various roles with her as the titular lead. It premieres April 21 at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos and featuring PRT artistic director Marilyn Fox. Other cast members include Dan Cole, Melody Doyle, Terrance Elton, Kevin Quinn and Sarah Zinsser.

“Judy said, ‘I just need to remember to be smart when I’m at home and dumb when I’m outside’,” Johnson explains about Holliday. “That’s the concealing – ‘I have to squelch my intelligence in certain situations. I can only really be me in private.’ Even walking out on the street or when she was on What’s My Line?”

Judy Holliday on “What’s My Line” on July 5, 1953

Each week the What’s My Line? TV show’s panelists were blindfolded for its famed celebrity mystery guest segment, during which stars gamely attempted to camouflage their voices. Bennett Cerf quickly surmised Holliday’s identity despite her husky cover-up. He then asked if she would speak like Billie Dawn, as his wife had been trying to duplicate it for weeks.

“You can see the expression on her face when he says, ‘Would you do that Born Yesterdayvoice?” Johnson elaborates. “She kind of looks down and she’s like, ‘Here we go again.’ She had a love-hate relationship with the character. Anybody who has been just extraordinary in a part runs a risk of that becoming all anybody ever wants to see.”

A Forgotten Holiday

Judy Holliday was born Judy Tuvim [which suggests a Hebrew/Yiddish phrase for a holiday greeting] in New York in 1921. She landed her first theater-related job in 1938 as a switchboard operator at Orson Welles’ legendary Mercury Theatre. She also joined the Revuers, a new cabaret act featuring Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Alvin Hammer and John Frank, which got its start at Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard. Better supper clubs, an NBC radio show, and stints at Radio City Music Hall ensued over the next five years. In 1943, the group minus Frank accepted a Hollywood film offer that fell apart upon arrival. Ultimately the studios wanted Holliday but not the group. Out of loyalty, she refused to sign but relented under pressure from the others. Twentieth Century Fox cast her in small parts includingWinged Victory, directed by George Cukor, but released her in late 1944.


Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford in “Born Yesterday”

Back in New York, Comden and Green were penning what would become On the Town, and introduced her to director Herman Shulmin who cast Holliday in 1945’s Kiss Them for Me, which earned her the Clarence Derwent Award. In 1946, Garson Kanin’s new play Born Yesterdaywas in trouble because of its high-strung and unhappy star Jean Arthur who finally dropped out. Six other actresses refused the role, and Kanin sought out Holliday on a tip from a wardrobe designer.

After he convinced producer Max Gordon, Holliday stepped in with just four days to learn the part in time for the show’s out-of-town Philadelphia tryout. The critics loved her and the show opened on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in February 4, 1946. It ran for 1642 performances and remains the Lyceum’s biggest hit and longest run. Columbia Pictures paid $1 million for the film rights and proceeded to test 35 actresses despite Holliday’s stardom in the role. Studio head Harry Cohn didn’t think she had what he wanted.

Cukor signed on to direct the film version but was concurrently at work on Adam’s Rib,starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and written by Kanin with wife Ruth Gordon. The group conspired to write Holliday a supporting role in the film that would prove she had screen presence. It worked. Billie Dawn, the ex-chorus girl, went on to upset Davis and Swanson at Oscar time.

In 1952, Holliday was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to address rumors she was a communist and had lent her name to communist organizations. She named no one but became blacklisted when leaked transcripts revealed she had utilized her Billie Dawn persona to circumvent the answers. It kept her off television for three years and forced the cancellation of her I Love Lucy-type show in the pipeline. She continued to work in films until the furor died down.


Judy Holliday singing “I’m Going Back” from “Bells Are Ringing” on the Ed Sullivan show

Holliday appeared in Cukor-directed films likeThe Marrying Kind and It Could Happen to You, plus The Solid Gold Cadillac. In 1956, she returned to Broadway in Comden and Green’sBells Are Ringing and took home a Tony Award. She introduced the song “The Party’s Over,” which was written especially for her. In 1960, she appeared in the film version opposite Dean Martin.

Holliday had planned to play her idol Laurette Taylor in a new drama called Laurette until she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which ultimately led to her death at age 43 in 1965.

Jumping Off the Empire State Building

That Johnson should come to play Holliday was not a linear progression. The daughter of a Unitarian minister, she was born in Cleveland but moved to Northern California’s Marin County in second grade when her dad transferred to a church in Terra Linda. She adapted Judy Blume’s young adult novel Deenie into a play that he helped type up.

“It’s about a girl who’s got scoliosis and she has to wear a brace,” Johnson explains. “She’s very popular at school and it’s about how her friends deal with it. She’s very funny. When people ask her, ‘what happened to you’ she goes, ‘I jumped off the Empire State Building.’ I thought that was really funny as a kid. So when I fell off the bars and had to get stitches, people said, ‘what happened?’ and I said, ‘I jumped off the Empire State Building’ thinking that it was just the funniest thing.”

Wendy Johnson

When she was in fourth grade, Johnson starred in an outdoor production of Heidi. “I just had in my skull from an early age that I wanted to be in a play.” She soon started studying with noted Bay Area teacher Marilyn Izdebski whose musical theater workshops for kids 8-18 are still going strong at The Playhouse in San Anselmo. Johnson wanted to be in Fiddler on the Roof and took the bus at age 11 from Fairfax to Corte Madera just to be in the chorus.

“I did Adelaide in Guys and Dolls,” she grins, then sings a few verses of Adelaide’s Lament. “That was the beginning of funny voices. The boys were really short but really good. It was a good class with really talented kids. I was in ninth grade. I think that was my last show for Marilyn.”

It wasn’t until high school that Johnson got cast in her first dramatic role — as Karen in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. “I’d been griping a little bit about musicals. I wouldn’t always get a good part because I was good at the character thing like Adelaide.  But I wasn’t really a trained singer. When I did Children’s Hour, it was like, ‘Oh, this is what I can really do.’ My mom said that to me, too. She said, ‘I know you like the singing and dancing, too, but this is really something.”

Johnson says she comes from a very creative family and that creativity is held in high regard. Her younger sister is a teacher and a published poet. Her older sister is a writer and a former textbook editor.

“My dad is also a very wonderful poet,” adds Johnson. “I’ve written poetry, then I’ve also written a lot of sketch comedy. Kind of like Judy, which is partly why I can identify with her in a way – very, very funny but then also a very deep person. There’s a poem in my play calledTwilight and Snow that she wrote in the ninth grade, and it’s a really startling poem for someone that young to have written, I think. So she definitely covered both spectrums in her life.”

Wendy Johnson and Kevin Quinn in “Concealing Judy Holliday”

In high school, Johnson went from playing the doctor in Agnes of God to Ado Annie in Oklahoma. She studied at the Marin Academy under Sharon Boucher and performed in shows like Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon as Junie before heading off to NYU and Circle in the Square. She joined a sketch comedy group called The Sterile Yak started by award-winning children’s book writer Mo Willems. She did a show at La MaMa called Collateral Damage that needed a few NYU students to be cheerleaders in a staging of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Whom Bomb.Vanessa Redgrave was featured in another.

“We were in ridiculous little outfits and we did the poem and I got to meet Allen Ginsberg,” Johnson recalls. “It was like a series of different poems or pieces. So Vanessa Redgrave was totally different from ours. I remember seeing her offstage and said, “I’m in this ridiculous little skimpy outfit.” And she goes, “Ridiculously brilliant” and put us right at ease.”

A Relentless Pursuit of Judy

After college, Johnson appeared in several NYC shows including Elevator Repair Service’s infamous 1994 Language Instruction: Love Family vs. Andy Kaufman at the Here Theater in SoHo. She also did odd jobs including a telemarketing gig that evoked shades of Holliday’s answering service character Ella in Bells Are Ringing. “I tried to mimic the voice of whoever answered the phone to make the job more fun for me.”

Wendy Johnson and Melody Doyle; Photo by Norman Scott

She married actor Terrance Elton and decided to move to LA, but a bout with Graves disease delayed her diving right in. But when fellow NYU grad and Relentless Theatre Company co-founder Olivia Honegger asked Johnson what play she wanted to do, Johnson replied The Crackwalker by Judith Thompson. The critically acclaimed production helmed by Honegger introduced Johnson to futureJudy Holliday Concealed director Cienfuegos, who was acting in it.

Johnson credits good friend actor/critic Travis Michael Holder for opening the door to Judy. “He had come see some Relentless productions and actually it’s kind of his fault that this play was born. He came to review And Baby Makes Seven and wrote, “Judy Holliday clone Wendy Johnson.” I thought, “What?” That kind of gave me the push to start finding out who she was.”

She found the extensive Judy Holliday Research Center website, read both biographies of the star as well as countless articles and documents including FBI files, which were created when Holliday was suspected of being a communist.

“The FBI files alone were over 100 pages,” explains Johnson, who printed them out. “I wanted to know everything. So I just had to read, read, read, watch, watch, watch, listen, listen, listen and then I had all this information. I started the research in like 2001, but what would happen is I would get in a play and so I’d put it on the shelf. Then I’d come back to do it. So when I say I started you know, over 10 years ago, it’s not that I was working on it every day. It’s only in the last five years that I’ve really been honing it.”

Some of the plays that distracted her include Flow My Tears, The Po­liceman Said and Small Craft Warnings at the Evidence Room; Out Of Time with nom de guerre; Sideways Stories At The Wayside School at South Coast Rep; plus They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?and Jose Rivera’s Sonnets For An Old Century at Greenway Court Theatre.

Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford and William Holden in “Born Yesterday”

Learning about Holliday was one thing, doing something with that information was another. While Honegger suggested she consider doing a one-woman show, Johnson wanted to work with other actors. When asked what surprised her in investigating Holliday’s history or the catalyst that drew her in, Johnson admits, “It’s been so long, she’s such a part of me now.”

“I think the initial kind of draw was someone so smart, so funny and so very talented,” she offers. “I was intrigued by that and then the fact that she really wanted to be taken as seriously as an actress. Some unfulfilled dreams in her life struck a chord with me. Unrealized potential. Her personal life had a string of bad relationships and poor choices. She’s kind of been forgotten, and her career was very hurt by the hearings even though she didn’t name any names. She wasn’t blacklisted but at the time on television, the sponsors didn’t want their product associated with anybody who had appeared before the Senate subcommittee.”

According to Johnson, PR man Robert Green was the one to advise Holliday to give the senators what they saw in her screen roles, not the genius I.Q. reported in the media. “He said, ‘Just play that dumb blonde’ and she did. That’s what was so fascinating about reading the FBI files because she answers questions, but in such an intelligent way. Intelligently playing dumb.”

Judy Holliday

Examples include:

Question: Are you sure Betty Comden and Adolph Green do not have Communist records?
Answer: “I am as sure of that as I can be of anybody who isn’t me.”

Question: What about the Communist-front records of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein?
Answer: “I am sure that they got into it the same way I did, because I am sure none of them are Communists. I mean if you are a Communist, why go to a Communist-front? Why not be a Communist? Whatever you are, be it.”

“She got hurt when the transcripts were leaked because people were able to read what she said. The headlines were along the lines of ‘Evil Genius Outwits Honorable Committee.’ The tragedy of her life was interesting to me but also the amount of joy that she was able to convey at the same time. How hard it was to be an super-intelligent woman in Hollywood in that day and age, and having to conceal it.”

A Trip to Venice

Johnson says she had no interest in doing a biopic on stage with a linear story line. What caught her attention were the last 12 days of Holliday’s life, where the actress drifted in and out of consciousness.

Wendy Johnson and Sarah Zinsser; Photo by Norman Scott

“What are the things a person might be thinking about?” Johnson asked. “Remembering or regretting? So I thought that kind of a swirling collage could be the format. That’s what initially helped, but because she was a very private person I needed to flush it out and read between the lines, too.”

After multiple readings with friends and numerous drafts, she did a public workshop in November 2008 at Greenway Court Theatre by invitation of co-founder Pierson Blaetz. The show had a vaudeville format then but was missing elements of Holliday’s personal life. During a subsequent reading a few years later, she asked Guillermo Cienfuegos, who had since helmed critically acclaimed productions of Vincent Melocchi’s Julia and Lions at Pacific Resident Theatre, if he would direct the piece.

They held a reading a PRT’s Co-op space featuring PRT founding member Sarah Zinsser as Tallulah Bankhead and PRT artistic director Fox playing Holliday’s mother and Laurette Taylor. Fox had been cajoled into joining the cast after seeing a previous reading and became a champion of the piece. A last-minute cancellation opened up a three-week workshop opportunity last October. The response encouraged the group to move forward into production this spring.

Marilyn Fox and Wendy Johnson

“We developed this synergy between all of us, and Marilyn really got the piece,” adds Johnson. “Judy’s mother was very neurotic, but very funny and very sweet. A complicated woman, and Marilyn’s got the kind of comic timing you cannot teach. She told me I needed a ‘rosebud’ moment in the play and that’s when I added the Laurette Taylor part. Not being allowed to play her after the cancer set in was the biggest regret of Judy’s life.”

In Concealing Judy Holliday, Johnson never leaves the stage as vignettes from the actress’s life play out in kaleidoscopic fashion, ranging from meeting her musician husband David Oppenheim to appearing before the Senate subcommittees, doing radio sketches with Tallulah Bankhead on The Big Show to writing songs with last beau Gerry Mulligan. And dealing with her mother. “So it’s funny in spots as anyone’s life is, you know? It’s very funny and sad and all over the place, just like someone’s mind would be as they lay there on morphine.”

Johnson hopes the play will spur people to revisit or learn more about Holliday. “It’s really kind of incredible as a writer to just see this baby being born. I mean it’s an extraordinary thing to see it come to life, and not just with rinky-dink people slapping it together, but with artists who are committed and passionate. They bring me to tears,” she admits, tearing up.  “It’s really – I still can’t believe I’ve been so lucky.”

Concealing Judy Holliday, presented by Pacific Resident Theatre. Opens April 21. Plays Thur-Sat 8 pm; Sun 3 pm. Through May 27. Tickets: $20-28. Pacific Resident Theatre, 705½ Venice Boulevard, Venice. www.PacificResidentTheatre.com. 310-822-8392.

***All Concealing Judy Holliday production photos by Keith Stevenson, except where noted

Critics Pick – The Indians Are Coming To Dinner

February 1, 2012 No Comments

Pacific Resident Theatre
Reviewed by Les Spindle for Backstage
January 29, 2012

Photo by Vitor Martins

Jennifer W. Rowland’s play is billed as a comedy, but its smart literary allusions to Greek drama (“Agamemnon”) and opera (“Rigoletto”) and steadily spiraling web of despair imbue the eccentric piece with elements of classic tragedy. As the play focuses on an affluent yet troubled San Francisco household in 1984, where a lot more talking than listening occurs, the story’s backdrop is President Richard M. Nixon’s landslide election victory and the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India. The play also cleverly illuminates East-West cultural differences, yet the essence of Rowland’s themes is more personal than political. Impeccably acted and exquisitely designed, director Julia Fletcher’s rendition scores a bull’s-eye.

As the focal character, Harold Blackman, a discontented businessman in his late 60s, Michael Rothhaar parlays the juiciest part into the most moving performance. In a prologue featuring the blustery Harold in the guise of a Maharajah, the family patriarch breaks the fourth wall to share the news that he is expecting to fulfill a lifelong dream of being appointed ambassador to India. He proudly summarizes his myriad career accomplishments while stating his desire for more.

As the narrative gets underway, we discover that Harold’s 18-year-old daughter, Alexandra (Thea Rubley), is paying a brief visit from her studies at Dartmouth College. Harold assumes that she has come home to attend a dinner he is hosting for Indian government official Anil Desai (a drolly amusing Kevin Vavesseur). The patriarch hopes the evening will culminate in Desai’s confirmation of Harold’s appointment as ambassador. Alexandra, however, is focused on fulfilling her own dream. Yearning to be a professional opera singer, she is home to compete as a finalist in a competition that could earn her a job with an Italian opera company. Unfortunately, the competition happens to be the same evening as Harold’s all-important dinner, where he expects his entire family to be present.

The superb Rubley quickly earns our empathy as a daughter whose ambitious father and daffy mother (the very funny Sara Newman) are completely oblivious to her passionate devotion to her chosen field, not to mention her other emotional needs as well. Alexandra only gets a degree of understanding from her teenage brother, Christopher (a radiant Justin Preston), but he has his own problems, being a pothead with a rap sheet. Excellent support comes from Peter Chen, as the befuddled family cook, and Rikin Vasani, as Anil’s enthusiastic son, who hilariously leads the reluctant family in rounds of chants to a Ganesh statue.

The production is greatly enhanced by Tom Buderwitz’s ravishing and highly functional two-tiered set showing the main family room downstairs and three upstairs bedrooms, embellished by Leigh Allen’s evocative lighting. Keith Stevenson’s sound and Audrey Eisner’s costumes are likewise first-rate.

The script could stand some trimming. Some gags—such as one about a malfunctioning answering machine—merely distract from the narrative. Yet all in all this intelligent and affecting work is being given a superlative world-premiere staging.
Presented by and at Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd., Venice. Jan. 28–Mar. 25. Thu.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (310) 822-8392 or www.pacificresidenttheatre.com.

StageHappenings.com Reviews Barrie: Back to Back

August 29, 2011 No Comments

By: Carol Kaufman Segal for StageHappenings.com

Once again, Pacific Resident Theatre and Artistic Director Marilyn Fox brings unique and rarely produced plays to the theater. The second show of their 25th season features an evening of two plays written by J.M. Barrie, principally known for his play, Peter Pan, or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, written in 1904. The two plays, written within four years of each other, and definitely quite different from one another, still bare some universal theme.

The first play, Rosalind, directed by Dana Dewes, features Lesley Fera as Mrs. Page. We find her in the parlour of a charming cottage by the sea – far from London (beautiful set design by Nick Santiago). She has come there to relax from her rigorous life in London, and her thoughts of being middle-age, when her stay is interrupted by a young man, Charles Roche (Kevin Railsback). Roche has been on a walking tour and is seeking a brief moment of shelter from the rain. Coincidence has it that Roche knows of Mrs. Page’s daughter, a beautiful successful stage star, with whom he fancies himself in love. But as the story progresses, the dialogue between the two characters touches on passions, age, and what is real and what is not. It also features, alternately, Sarah Zinsser and Ann Bronston performing the role of Dame Quickly.

The second play, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, is a more touching story that takes place in London during World War I, directed by Marilyn Fox and Dana Dewes. Mrs. Dowey (Penny Safranek) and her char women friends, Mrs. Twymley (Roses Prichard), Mrs. Mickleham (Sara Zinsser), amd The Haggerty Woman (Jennifer Lonsway), are chatting away in Mrs. Dowey’s basement home. Mrs. Dowey is reminiscing about the letters she receives from her son in the service, when Mr. Willings (William Lithgow) arrives to tell her that her son is here on a short furlough and is coming to see her. She appears a bit excited, but nervous as her friends leave. When Kenneth Dowey (Joe McGovern) arrives, the reason for her actions are apparent when it is revealed that Mrs. Dowey has no son. But the dialogue between these two lonely people (McGovern with a perfect Scottish brogue), and the outcome, present a warm and tender message. (The set change is by Nick Santiago.)

As quoted from Marilyn Fox, “J.M. Barrie’s timeless explorations of age, love, longing and the search for the “impossible possibility” are unusually provocative,” and these two plays are reminiscent of just that and beautifully dramatized by a gifted cast.

Back Stage Reviews Barrie: Back to Back

August 29, 2011 No Comments

Reviewed by David C. Nichols
JULY 20, 2011

The enduring popularity of “Peter Pan” overshadows J.M. Barrie’s considerable theatrical canon, which contains a significant number of entirely viable works, however dated their dramaturgy may seem to modern sensibilities. In keeping with this, Pacific Resident Theatre’s enchanting double bill of rarely seen one-acts by the diminutive Scotsman makes a persuasive case for revisiting Barrie territory beyond Neverland.

Both plays—”Rosalind” and “The Old Lady Shows Her Medals”—explore the consequences of improbable intergenerational affection. Each turns on a secret, which Barrie reveals midway through the narrative. “Rosalind,” dating from 1914, takes its title from the heroine of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” It’s the pet role of actress Beatrice Page, whose autographed picture sits on the mantel of an English seaside cottage. Her mother (a radiant Lesley Fera) discusses the pros and cons of middle age with the boarding house landlady (Ann Bronston, alternating with Sarah Zinsser). Enter callow Charles Roche (Kevin Railsback), infatuated with Beatrice, which cues up Barrie’s central twist, turning the tables on Charles and the audience.

Under Dana Dewes’ disciplined direction, “Rosalind” doesn’t attempt to contextualize its delicate humor or antiquated terminology for 21st-century ears, which only increases its appeal. Bronston is fine in a functional role, and Railsback makes a capable foil, but make no mistake: The show belongs to Fera, whose gift for playing interior contradictions against external style is in a class of its own. In the fact of this magical turn, one understands what stage icons such as Maude Adams and Gertrude Lawrence must have meant to their audiences.

“The Old Lady Shows Her Medals,” co-directed by Dewes and Marilyn Fox, ups the ante, to first tickling, then eye-moistening effect. This 1918 parable concerns a London charwoman (the marvelous Penny Safranek) and a brusque Scottish soldier (Joe McGovern, a find), and to reveal more would be criminal. Again, Bronston, Zinsser, and Jennifer Lonsway are competent functionaries as fellow mop-wielders; William Lithgow invests the small but pivotal role of a minister with skill. Still, the heart and soul of the piece is the interaction between Safranek’s yearning maternal spirit and McGovern’s vivid filial upstart, which both actors perform as though they were inventing their roles on the spot in a transcendent dual act.

The designs are serviceable rather than ornate, particularly Nick Santiago’s bipolar set, but that’s ultimately irrelevant. What matters here is Barrie’s specific, elegant language and still-pertinent understanding of the human heart, which “Barrie: Back to Back” largely perceives and delivers. This reviewer can only hope that these wholly endearing short works represent a trend toward revisiting the author, starting with “The Admirable Crichton,” and taking off from there.

Source: Back Stage Actors Resource

LA Weekly on Barrie: Back to Back

August 29, 2011 No Comments

A Pair of Plays by J.M. Barrie
By Steven Leigh Morris, June 30th 2011

“Thoughtless follies made her low and stained her name,” says Mrs. Page (Lesley Fera), referring to her actress daughter Beatrice, in J.M. Barrie’s Rosalind, at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice. The line is telling because it’s such a perfect description not only of Beatrice but of the 14-year-old title character in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, being performed at Zombie Joe’s Underground in North Hollywood. Both productions deal with age grasping for youth through the prism of romance, and are samplings of the British cultural zeitgeist about 100 years ago.

Rosalind is the first in a pair of Barrie one-acts currently playing at PRT. Mrs. Page, who’s been waxing about the pleasure of middle age, is in the parlor of a boarding house by the sea, far from London, in the first decade of the 20th century. She’s speaking to a young university student named Charles Roche (Kevin Railsback), who’s seeking refuge from the storm outside. He instantly recognizes the photo on the mantle as the stage actress Beatrice, and protests his love of the young maiden to her mother, Mrs. Page.

To reveal more of the plot is to ruin a vital twist on which the themes of theater, role-playing and willful deception hang. Suffice it to say that Mrs. Page knows Charles well, more than he knows her, and the callow youth eventually finds himself smitten with the woman almost old enough to be his mother, who has “disappeared” into an enthusiastic middle age in her private life and yet remains eternally 29 in a stage life she shares with her daughter.

In fact, she finds herself summoned to London, in the course of the action, to jump in and play Rosalind in As You Like It.

Typical of drawing room comedies of the early 20th century, the play’s launch taxes patience in the attention-deficited 21st century. The house matron, Dame Quickly (Sarah Zinsser), chats amiably and lackadaisically with Mrs. Page for several minutes before the incident of the visitor becomes an issue, revealing the gentility of an earlier time and place. But things start to spark when it becomes clear that Mrs. Page is largely goofing off with the young man, and that who an actress really is, deep down, is something of an enigma. Charles reveals the telling detail of keeping Beatrice’s photograph in his wallet, directly next to that of his late sister.

Barrie’s older brother died as a child, throwing their mother into such a depression that Barrie would dress in his brother’s clothes and impersonate his whistling in order to console his mother, who said her dead son would remain a child forever. From this, Barrie’s Peter Pan emerged.

Dana Dewes’ staging gathers strength from the quality of Fera’s decorous Mrs. Page, who bursts into a gently mocking smile with the flick of a wrist, showing ridicule and compassion in a single breath. It also comes from the effect Fera has on Railsback’s haughty young student, whose swagger keeps getting kicked in the knees.

The Old Lady Shows Her Medals rounds out PRT’s rendition of cougarville. Set in a 1917 London basement home, as World War I rages, it concerns a quartet of British maids, known as charwomen (Penny Safranek, Roses Prichard, Sarah Zinsser and Jennifer Lonsway), one of whom has been corresponding with and sending cakes to a Scottish soldier in the Black Watch brigade who shares her last name, though they’re not related and have never met. The play is not only about her need for a son, but her need to be connected to the larger campaign of her nation.

Ushered down the stairs by a local reverend (William Lithgow), the brash Scot soldier (Joe McGovern), on leave, at first chastizes the old woman for being deluded and misrepresenting her situation and station. What emerges is tender, sentimental Oedipal romance, fueled by Safranek’s Mrs. Dowey and her defiant refusal to take any of soldier Kenneth Dowey’s insults seriously. Rather, her offensive so charms the orphan Scot that, after a night at the theater (of course), he winds up on his knee, proposing that she be his mother. The play flips the taboo into the sentimental, largely with hefty doses of wit.

McGovern is quite the wonder as Kenneth, bringing a hearty honesty to lines such as, “Being Scotch, there’s almost nothing I don’t know,” and when asked how he single-handedly took half a dozen prisoners, he responds, “The usual way. I surrounded ’em!”

Marilyn Fox’s staging pulls the plays expository ropes tautly against the stained green wallpaper of Nick Santiago’s set.

LA Times Critic’s Choice: Barrie’s Magic Doubled

August 29, 2011 No Comments

 

Growing up—or not—and the power of imagination to transcend life’s hardships were the touchstone themes of playwright J.M. Barrie. Though chiefly remembered as the author of “Peter Pan,” his plays often spoke to more sophisticated adult sensibilities with flights of whimsy grounded in sober realism. The soulful empathy and compassion of Barrie the man were recently portrayed in the film “Finding Neverland,” and Pacific Resident Theatre beautifully evokes those qualities in a pair of one-acts billed as “Barrie: Back to Back”

Finding the timeless appeal in neglected works from classic literature is this company’s forte. These playlets from the early 1900s are essentially two-handers (albeit with a fine cast of incidental characters) about hidden identities and unexpected human connectedness.

The opener, titled “Rosalind” in a sly nod to Shakespeare’s heroine, is set in a seaside boarding house where summer guest Mrs. Page (Lesley Fera) has retreated to embrace the cozy comforts of being middle-aged. The unexpected arrival of a young man on a walking tour (Kevin Railsback) who happens to know (and is in love with) Mrs. Page’s daughter, a glamorous stage actress, prompts some sharp-witted exchanges and rueful confessions about aging, the blindness of infatuation, and the differences between theatrical artifice and genuine feeling.

“The Old Lady Shows Her Medals” delves deeper into unfulfilled longings with a World War I-era encounter between an elderly charwoman (Penny Safranek) and a Scottish infantryman (Joe McGovern, sporting a hilarious pitch-perfect brogue) who’s on leave from the trenches. McGovern’s flustered grappling with Safranek’s feisty defiance infuse their chemistry with quirky charm, culminating in a brilliantly offbeat—and touching—proposal.

Both pieces are built on surprise plot twists that could easily come across as corny and maudlin. Co-directors Marilyn Fox and Dana Dewes deftly keep the focus on Barrie’s tough-minded, unsentimental insights into the human heart: above all, the bittersweet recognition that even our most magical connections are fleeting, and all the more precious for it.

-– Philip Brandes

Marilyn Fox in LA Stage Times

August 26, 2011 No Comments

Here is a great piece on Marilyn Fox and the PRT. Enjoy!

Marilyn Fox Leads 25th Season at Pacific Resident Theatre

by Gary Ballard | June 29, 2011

“I try to pick plays [that] I’d want somebody I love – to watch,” declares Marilyn Fox, artistic director of Pacific Resident Theatre, addressing her method of selecting material to present on her stage. Barrie: Back to Back is currently running on PRT’s main stage.

Fox is on the move, with all the attention and overlapping of tasks that her responsibilities running a theater company regularly entail. When she murmurs in an aside, “Do you have a straw?” she then hastens to explain in this phone interview, “I’m driving as we speak. I’ve just picked up my sister Marcy whose car broke down, and she bought me an iced coffee.”

Questioned about her sister’s involvement in theater, she replies, “No, Marcy majored in psychology at UCLA so she didn’t catch the [theatrical] bug from me. In fact I probably caught it from her because she got me interested in Shakespeare and writing as a girl.”

That interest defines, labels and guides Fox to this day, motivating her in a constant search for illuminating drama and rewarding her with a sense of accomplishments. She says, “I’m proud PRT is celebrating our 25th anniversary season this year. Being an actual theatrical company of [close to] 100 members is a gift proclaiming both our longevity and our growth. We have a rare situation because we have two venues – our main stage for our season and our co-op space for our developmental works, where we cannot say no to an actor who wants to get in there and work on bringing a script to fruition. Actors hear that ‘no’ far too often in their careers. With that space in our company they won’t hear it. Once they book the space, they’re free to explore the story and format they want. And they can work a long period of time tinkering with it to get it to their specifications.

“That’s how Julia came about. Vince Melocchi is a 20-year company member who wrote a hit for us a few years ago called Lions. He developed Julia from the freedom of experimenting with it in our second space. It too became a hit.”

A bit of an understatement there. Julia traveled to New York from PRT by request. Fox tells how: “Elysabeth Kleinhans owns the 59E59 Theaters in New York as part of her Kleinhans Theatrical Foundation where she has three stages to fill. She actually came out here to see our production of Becky’s New Car for a possible transfer to her facilities. She liked it okay but became more intrigued with Julia and felt it would play well for her audiences. She invited us to bring the show there as part of [59E59’s] Americas Off Broadway Theater Festival. It turned out to be a comparable space to ours. Our stage is a bit deeper but not as wide. Theirs is wider but not as deep. The audience size is almost the same. As a result I think the show worked a little better in their space, because their audience had the intimacy to conjure the illusion of sitting inside the coffee shop where the story takes place. I think that made them more invested in the story. I saw the performances deepen and the play itself grow to new levels. All in all it was beneficial to our members, because they treated us with the utmost respect and it was financially equitable.”

When questioned about the oft-repeated East Coast/West Coast rivalry or jealousy, Fox answers, “It didn’t happen. I think it’s either been widely exaggerated in the past or it’s now a true part of the past and not the present. We have so much theater in LA that it’s undeniable. The biggest difference between us, I think, is in New York, theater is an industry. Here it’s not. Here it’s much closer to pure passion. But Elysabeth’s team treated us so well I’m looking forward to establishing a further relationship with them and hope we can take more of our productions there.”

No stranger to extended runs and the transfer of plays from one venue to another or across state lines, Fox praises one particular production as the premiere platform propelling her to pursue the performing arts with passion. “In 1993 we worked on [Clifford] Odets’ Awake and Sing! in our workshop space. I played Bessie Berger, the mother, even though I was only in my 30s. At that time Odets was not being done-any of his plays-that often. I think we helped change that. Also at that time we couldn’t open the play on our main stage, but I was madly in love with it, so the director Elina de Santos and I convinced Ron Sossi to let us stage it at the Odyssey. It ran for a year. It went Equity. [Fox won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle lead performance award] We spent four years taking it around the country. It was eventually done at Lincoln Center without us, but I consider Elina and myself as producers in effect, if not in fact, because we brought it to their attention. Now who knows? Maybe it was just happenstance. Still I like to believe our production woke them to the play’s merits.”

Any conversation with Fox inevitably leads to a lively-and loving-discussion of Gar Campbell, who taught a Monday night acting class at PRT with Fox for 20 years and who died at 64 in 2007. Campbell was one of the founders of the legendary LA avant-garde troupe, the Company Theater, in 1967, but according to Fox, “Gar hadn’t planned on a theater career at all. He studied math and science and graduated with the intention of becoming an engineer with no desire or interest in pursuing anything theatrical. That changed when a pretty girl wanted him to audition for the part of John, the Witch Boy, in Dark of the Moon. He got the part. The rest of us got a fantastic theater guy who had a totally scientific left brain approach to solving problems which came in quite handy for the stage. He could flay a script like a sushi chef. I was lucky enough to spend 27 years with him. He was one of the greatest theater men there ever was and was totally an LA theater man. He had the opportunity more than once to relocate his talents to another city for greater [monetary] compensation but never did. To this day I think we honor his memory by trying to cook up a scrumptious stage feast and telling our audience ‘come look at this’.”

Along her journey through the PRT ranks, Fox not only rose to become artistic director of the company but also gained renown for her hands-on directorial chores as well. She was nominated by the LADCC for directing both Golden Boy and Playboy of the Western World and won the group’s directing award for Ondine in 1993 and last year’s The Browning Version, in addition to picking up another performance award from the Circle for her lead role of Lady Torrance in Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending. She also won the LA Weekly Career Achievement Award in 2004.

So which brings her the greatest satisfaction, acting or directing? “Both are quite special,” she maintains. “As a director it’s an honor to guide a group of actors through a field sowed with the seeds of a great playwright’s mind. But the difference for me is I have such a love of acting it becomes an even greater honor to be the person to vibrate the words of a notable soul, to become the conduit through which his ideas can flow. It’s more than an honor when I pull it off successfully. It’s a miracle I can feel circulating through my very being.”

Right now Fox is guiding rather than vibrating as she shares directorial duties with Dana Dewes on Barrie: Back to Back, a bill of two one-acts by J. M. Barrie, including The Old Lady Shows Her Medals and Rosalind, which serves as the second show of PRT’s 25th season. This production came about because, as Fox explains, “I’ve wanted to do an evening of Barrie for a very long time. I always find myself shocked by the honesty in his writing. His work comes to us like a present in a pretty package, almost like a child would get at a birthday party, but when you open the present, you find it has a secret hidden inside and then another secret inside that one and on and on like Chinese boxes nested inside one another. These two plays mirror each other with a core of similarities where something is denied and another character has to get past that denial. I’m deliberately speaking in generalizations, because I don’t want to give away the secrets Barrie worked to create.”

Sir James Matthew Barrie stood tall in the literary world despite topping the scales at only 5’1″ or 5’3½”, according to different sources. As a novelist he shared a contemporary readership with Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. He had personal friendships with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. He enjoyed a long correspondence with Robert Louis Stevenson although the two never met in person. He and Arthur Conan Doyle co-authored an opera entitled Jane Annie, or The Good Conduct Prize. He was knighted during the reign of King George V. He recited stories to the Duke of York’s young daughters,who became Princess Margaret and the present Queen Elizabeth II. But after all the name-dropping has faded into the yellowing pages of history, J. M. Barrie is remembered today as the creator of the character Peter Pan and the play that bears the same name.

Fox, who has done her homework, shares her thoughts on what made the writer tick. “All the great authors in history are incomparable. You can’t begin to compare any of them with each other because each one brings a unique way of looking at the world to his craft of writing. Barrie, for example, talks about things other people don’t talk about. He was one of 10 children. When his older brother David died in an accident when Barrie was only six years old, Barrie’s mother became inconsolable over the loss. He started to dress in David’s clothing and copy his mannerisms and speech. His plays were later filled with the theme of the child who never grows up. They expressed the love and longing for a mother, the fear of aging, the ecstasy of being in spiritual flight, the allure of staying forever young. They were witty, intelligent and funny, but at their core each play carried a little nugget from the soul. They affect me in the profoundest way in that I don’t consider myself a woman. I think I’m really an old girl.

Kevin Railsback and Lesley Fera in “Rosalind”
“He wrote his play Rosalind as a tribute to his wife, the actress Mary Ansell, who retired from the stage after they married in 1894. Barrie later divorced her on the grounds of infidelity in 1909. H. G. Wells tried to encourage the couple to stay together.”

Dewes, the other director of Barrie: Back to Back, began her acting/singing career at age five in Atlantic City variety shows. After Dewes directed The Valiant for PRT’s co-op space, she served as assistant director of Fata Morgana and worked as associate director on last year’s The Browning Version, so this marks her third collaboration with Fox, who says, “I can’t take credit for Dana. She was a long-time student of Gar’s. Her success comes on a direct line from Gar’s teaching through all her hard work for PRT.”

Concerning the process of determining what steps she will engage to take a play from page to stage, Fox elaborates, “We pick material that’s calling to be done. We deliver to an audience what needs to be delivered. The main thing that needs to strike me is its authenticity. I read a lot of wonderfully intelligent scripts with a beginning, a middle and an end, but they’re not imprinted with the playwright in them. I don’t feel he was impelled to write it. I don’t care whether it was just written yesterday or 100 years ago. I don’t want just a clever idea. I want it to come out of the entrails of the writer with a human element or a deep intelligence that has to fight its way out of that person’s life. If not, it feels hollow to me. When I’m reading something or watching something, I want to remember that we’re human. I want that element to touch me that makes me remember it.”

Beckoning with Barrie: Back to Back, Marilyn Fox is betting baguettes to bulldozers that Pacific Resident Theatre will win bravos once again.
nt Theatre will win bravos once again.