Drawn From Life
'Blips' plague high-concept Padua Hills Playwrights Festival
By Don Shirley
The Padua Hills were alive with the sound of theater. In most of the summers between 1978 and 1995, adventurous L.A. theatergoers made at least one annual pilgrimage to the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival.
It was a wayfaring event, taking place at 11 locations in 15 seasons. And even after you found any particular edition of the festival, you didn’t settle down in one place. Patrons walked from one makeshift stage to another, usually under the stars, in order to see short, site-specific, new plays. The scripts were often elliptical, stylized and not entirely accessible. But the festival itself was more memorable than most of the plays it produced. At its best, it created a buzzy sensation of being on the cutting edge of American theatrical culture.
In 2001 Padua Playwrights was revived as a producing organization, but not as a festival. Since then, it has produced plays that often share stylistic traits with those from Padua’s glory days. But most of them are staged inside conventional small theaters, in no particular season. Without the festival umbrella, the plays don’t feel nearly as distinguishable from any number of other plays in L.A.’s teeming small-theater world.
For three weeks, however, some of that old festival feeling is back, in the form of Padua Playwrights’ A Thousand Words,
co-produced with LaDADspace. No, this event isn’t outdoors, nor does the audience trek from one play to another. But it’s not in a same-old, same-old venue, either.
It’s at Art Share L.A., in the way-cool loft district east of Little Tokyo. The audience walks into a gallery and starts examining the art. Then, just before curtain time, we enter a small theatrical space, take our seats, and the art is brought to us. Each of nine short plays was inspired by a work of art, and these inspirational pieces are shuttled out to serve as the backdrop for the actors – or, in one case, as an integral part of the set.
Actually, last Saturday the procession of the art pieces didn’t quite work out according to plan. Three of the nine that were pictured in the program didn’t appear on stage, for a variety of technical reasons. In two of those cases, another work by the same artist was substituted.
As in the old festival days, the total experience was greater than the sum of its parts and blips. We again caught that feeling of being very close to creative minds at work, in both the theatrical and the purely visual arts. And let’s not forget the nuanced artistic fusion of the theatrical designers, Dan Reed (lighting) and Gwendolyn Stukely (costumes).
Some of the nine plays are considerably more communicative and apparently more finished than the others. On the serious side, Phinneas Kiyomura’s Woods took us into a meth lab in the backwoods and into the backstory memories of an estranged father (Mike Wiles) and daughter (Niamh McCormally). This is the play in which the corresponding art piece, Lilli Muller’s “Transformation,” served as a part of the actual set instead of just as a backdrop. Its appearance is timed to coincide with the climax of the play, and it is indeed a transformative moment.
Both Wiles and McCormally also appeared in the first play, Chris Kelley’s Piece, but in this case they’re looking at an offstage painting that we can’t see. We do, however, get to see the painting that purportedly inspired Kelley, Matt Aston’s “Portrait (Miranda)” which aptly conveys a personality similar to that of the character played by McCormally.
The evening’s comic highlight is certainly Sharon Yablon’s Look Up, in which a real estate agent (Tina Preston) shows off a house in an Irvine gated community to a disillusioned husband (Gregory Littman), wife (Lisa Denke) and son (Jack Littman). It’s brilliantly balanced between the lucid and the elusive.
A Thousand Words, Art Share L.A., downtown L.A. (213) 625-1766.
Published: 06/18/2008
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