Life Defining Theatre Moments
OPC supporters enjoy a performance at the 2019 Annual Benefit at Aspen Grove Ranch in Ojai. You can spot Kerry English in the second row, center, wearing a white and navy striped shirt.
DEDICATION: DR. KERRY ENGLISH
When I first came to LA in the mid 80’s and we started the New Work Festival at the Taper, there was one constant at every single workshop and reading – there was this incredibly friendly, handsome, smart, distinguished looking, silver haired, gotee’d man in attendance. At that time, we were doing 25 new play development projects a year. So that was a lot of theatre going.
When the Taper Labs evolved and we were now doing as many as 50 new play events throughout the city, again there was one constant – this outgoing and lovely man. I asked around – who is this guy? The reply: Kerry English! And over the decades we got to know each other really well. Why? You always enjoyed seeing Kerry and hearing his response to the work and basking in his genuine, unselfish love of art and life.
Kerry was the most avid, enthusiastic, committed, engaged audience member for the many stages of new play development that I have ever, ever met. And I have been doing this for 40 years now. He showed up. He always showed up. And he knew just how to show up. Kerry was so generous in his response to the artists and their work. Always focusing on what he was learning from the play, how it was elevating him as a human being, how it was informing him as a citizen, and how as a medical doctor it was inspiring greater empathy for his many patients from incredibly diverse walks of life.
Over the years I kept seeing Kerry everywhere around town for theatre – new plays, classic plays, performance art. He was omnipresent, god-like in his ability to seemingly be everywhere at once. And I always enjoyed his thoughtful response to the work and his unbridled generosity of spirit.
As Artistic Director of the Ojai Playwrights Conference, I begged him to join our Board of Directors. When he humbly asked why, I told him that his love of theatre and theatre artists was unparalleled. He was a beacon of hope and sustainability for the theatre. A prime example of what profound support looks like. We needed to bottle his spirit of curiosity and commitment and sprinkle it throughout Southern California! And fortunately, Kerry agreed to join us at OPC. And he brought that same compassionate, kind, fierce love of theatre and theatre artists to the leadership table and inspired our whole organization.
Kerry English was to be a 2020 OPC Award Recipient at this year’s Benefit on May 2nd for his distinguished contributions to OPC and Southern California theatre. Our Benefit event was postponed, but it is our duty and responsibility to honor such an exquisite life. We will never forget Kerry – that warm smile, that enormous heart. He is one big reason why we all rise every day and labor in the fields of Southern California theatre. When you know someone like Kerry – you know why the performing arts matter. More about Kerry
In the bio that Kerry provided a few months ago for the OPC Benefit, he wrote: “In 1972, I saw Richard Chamberlain take three curtain calls as Cyrano at the Ahmanson Theatre and this LA film geek got hooked instantly on theatre. This passion endured for nearly 50 years. I discovered the play development process at Ojai Playwrights Conference in 2002 with plays by Luis Alfaro and Jon Robin Baitz, and became a regular OPC supporter from that point forward, ultimately joining the Board of Directors.”
In honor of Kerry and his love of live theatre, we bring you the second installment of OPC ONWARD TOGETHER ... featuring memorable theatre experiences by others in the OPC family.
Robert Egan
OPC Artistic Director/Producer
May 2, 2020
Jon Robin Baitz
Playwright & OPC Board Member
UNDONE AND HYPNOTIZED
I am still struck by the intensity of experiencing Peter Brook’s “Mahabharata” at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987, in what is now their Harvey Theatre, a gorgeous decrepit stripped down old palace of a house. Ten tons of red dirt were loaded onto the stage and everything seemed to be contained there during the nine hours, not including dinner break. Brook turned the longest known poem into an epic of love, responsibility and fate, and I sat there, undone and hypnotized. I knew then that after having only had two plays produced, I was going to just try and spend as much of the rest of my life in these theatres as I could. Now, sometimes intermission reminds me of that – that there’s more to face, more to come.
This brings me to Kerry English, who was so good to share intermissions with between plays at Ojai. A beer, a short talk, over the years those moments shared always struck me – his intelligence was so tuned to the wavelength of empathy that makes the main part of the transaction between an audience and a play. “Mahabharata” has a very long ending, by torchlight, with drums, it dies slowly, ends gradually, giving the audience time to settle down back to the world of the actual. It is nine hours of fire, of water, of dirt, of the elements, of Gods, and humans and enormity, and it has been a beacon, just like the theatre itself.
Jon Robin Baitz is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for Other Desert Cities and A Fair Country. He developed Other Desert Cities at OPC along with The Paris Letter, Chinese Friends and Vicuña. Robbie was honored in 2011 as an OPC Award Recipient, and currently serves on the OPC Board of Directors.
Jane Deknatel
Arts Leader & OPC Board Member
A RICH AND SAFE PLACE
I was born during a world war. My father died five years after it ended when I was eight but would have been very proud that I won a place at an all-girls school at eleven. Each year, a play was produced, something from Shakespeare or Shaw or based on Jane Austen perhaps. I had never been to a play. I had an older cousin who took me under her wing and decided that a pantomime, a musical and a ballet were in order before I was eleven. I was entranced by it all, so it was meant to be that I should sign up to ‘help’ with our annual play in my first year.
I was always the tallest in my class, and the one with the lowest voice and as a result of this, each time I was cast, it was in a male role. From my first year in school I was in every school play. I was hooked. The BBC had nightly play readings on the radio and I listened each evening as I ironed school shirts once homework was done. By fourteen I was Duke Orsini in Twelfth Night. “If music be the food of love, play on” are the opening lines. I shall never forget that night as the curtain opened, and I turned towards the audience.
Our drama teacher who directed the school plays, taught elocution to the whole school. She decided to teach me to speak like a Duke for the play. ‘Jane’ she would say ‘ it is pome-granite not pomi-granite’ and ‘one fights a dew-al while one wears a jew-al’. It was decided that for this play I needed fencing lessons too, so our gym teacher took me each day at lunchtime and put me through my paces. How could I not become besotted with theatre? It took me into another world, showed me I could do anything, be anyone.
We were divided into Houses at school and I became the producer-director of our House Play competition each year which meant scavenging for clothes and ‘stuff’ to make scenery, sewing costumes, building and painting scenery from anything we were given. It also meant I could cast myself in any role with no-one to object! One evening I was standing on the balcony in the school hall watching as a rehearsal took place on the stage. The headmistress walked by, ‘Jane’ she said, ‘wouldn’t you rather be on the stage?’. “Oh no’ I said turning to her and smiling. ‘I much prefer telling them all what to do”.
No one in my family had ever been to college, wanting to be an actor or a director, was as my mother said, ‘something to do on Sundays.” I had sensibly given up the idea early on, that I might become a painter, spending as much time in museums as my hard-earned pocket money would allow. My mother pointed out that I had to pay my own rent once I left school and those people, artists and actors, had a hard time doing that. ‘Grow up, be sensible’ was the message.
Theatre allowed an escape from the hardship of post war England, with reminders of the war everywhere, food rationing, bombed out neighborhoods and the added sadness of losing a much-loved parent. The world of the imagination was a much richer and safer place to grow up in and one that I have never left.
Jane Deknatel is a visionary leader in funding, producing and championing the storytelling arts and nonprofit arts organizations that support the critical stories that speak to our time. Jane served as Executive Director at The Broad Stage, and in 2018, was honored as an OPC Award Recipient.
David Henry Hwang
Playwright
FACES LIKE MINE
I grew up, not in a theatrical family, but a musical one. My mother had emigrated from the Philippines to study piano at USC. I started taking violin lessons at the age of seven and my sister would grow up to become a professional cellist. Although we never saw shows, my father, who was a CPA, was asked by a family friend, the actress Beulah Quo, to become the accountant for a new theatre starting in Los Angeles: East West Players. I suppose that family connection explains how my mother ended up as the rehearsal pianist for one of EWP’s earliest shows: a production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s operetta “The Medium”, transplanted from its original New Orleans setting to post-WWII Japan. When Mom went to rehearsals, she dropped my two younger sisters off with my aunt for babysitting, but as a ten-year-old, I was grown-up enough to come with her.
East West Players was then housed in a church basement in Silver Lake. I remember mostly lurking in the dark, trying to keep quiet and out of the actors’ way. I recall the story being scary – about a fake séance which possibly becomes a real one, and a medium descending into alcoholism and madness. Eventually, the rehearsal period ended. I believe I saw at least one of the actual performances, and then the production was over. I never thought much about “The Medium” again for many years.
Eventually, I came to realize the importance of what I saw: a groundbreaking production directed by the iconic actor-director Mako, who would go on to direct my first play at the Public Theater in NYC. I witnessed actors and singers with faces which looked like mine; Asian Americans as actors, designers, and artistic leaders. Perhaps this helps to explain why, when I got to college and became interested in writing plays, the notion did not seem so strange to me, even at a time when Asian American playwrights were almost non-existent.
The power of theatre can be measured in the productions that knocked us out and changed our worlds when we saw them. But live theatre can also act more quietly, planting thoughts and feelings which transform us over time, whose impact we may not grasp for many years. Perhaps the time I spent in the shadows of a basement at Bethany Presbyterian Church in Silver Lake made it possible for me to dream the life that I now lead.
David Henry Hwang’s stage works include Tony Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist M. Butterfly, Chinglis, and Yellow Face. His newest work is Soft Power, a collaboration with composer Jeanine Tesori. David was one of the featured artists slated to participate in the 2020 OPC Benefit. Photo by Gregory Costanzo
Dana Delany
Actor & OPC Board Member
ONCE AGAIN 13
In 1969 when I was 13, I read a review in The New York Times about a new musical Off-Off Broadway called “Dames at Sea.” It was a send up of 1930’s movies like “Gold Diggers of 1933” and the review was a rave. And boy did I want to see it.
Even though it was 1969 and movies like “Bonnie and Clyde” were showing the real violence of the Depression, I was a young girl in Connecticut who came home from school every day and watched “The 4:30 Movie” on TV. I knew every word to “Singing in the Rain,” “An American in Paris” and yes, “Funny Girl,” which had opened the year before. I was not of my time.
My mother took me in on the train to ‘The City’ and we saw “Dames at Sea” at the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street. I sat in that tiny theatre in sheer bliss. It might have been a trifle but it was every dream of mine come true. And the young actress playing the Ruby Keeler part was perfection. Innocent, sly, funny with the voice of an angel. She had moxie. She proved that anything was possible if you just worked hard enough and led with your heart. She was going to be a star! And Bernadette Peters certainly is to this day.
Well, my dreams did come true and two years ago I was in a new play at what is now called the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street. It was a Saturday matinée performance of “Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties.” Even though I had a blast doing the play, it had been a slightly off show that afternoon. Sometimes that happens. I walked home along Christopher, scurrying past people with their programs, determined to have a better show that night, when I spotted the red curls. It couldn’t be. Yes, it was. My heart jumped as passed by. I debated turning around and saying something to this wonderful person who gave me so much joy and hope in that tiny theatre nearly 50 years ago. But what if she didn’t like my show? I decided it didn’t really matter and kept walking just thrilled with the serendipity of it all.
During the virtual Sondheim 90th Birthday celebration this past week, I once again found Bernadette Peters giving me and the whole world hope. There is still a sense of “can do” community spirit, even with the theatres dark. As she sweetly sang “No One Is Alone” a cappella, looking right into the camera, I was once again 13 and everything is possible.
Two time Emmy winning actor Dana Delany is known for her starring roles in the hit TV shows China Beach, Desperate Housewives and Body of Proof. Dana was honored as an OPC Award Recipient in 2012, and currently serves on the OPC Board.
Gideon Jeph Wabvuta
Playwright
NINTH HEAVEN
If you are a regular theatre goer one thing you learn to do is lower your expectations because not every play you watch is going to be good. But once in a while you strike GOLD! A few years ago, I remember going to the Mark Taper Forum for a play I barely knew, “Head of Passes” by Tarell Alvin McCraney. I’m a big sucker for biblical adaptations so when I found out it had been taken from the book of Job, I was in.
There I was absorbing the opening of the play, trust me, I was in ninth heaven because here was kitchen sink theatre that was beautifully weaved, the characters filling the stage and slowly revealing their deepest and darkest secrets. I remember just staring in awe as the house started to fall apart as water poured in. I am convinced the world around me disappeared as I watched the whole house collapse and all that was left was Phylicia Rashad who played the matriarch of the family. I had been told countless times in theater history that theatre and religion can be spoken in the same breath. Finally, I was experiencing it.
I was taken to church as I watched Phylicia Rashad deliver what felt like a thirty-minute monologue to God! I didn’t know I was weeping until I felt my shoulders shake and my glasses cloud. To this day I remember watching this godly woman glide and deliver her monologue with water up to her knees and one solitary chair where she finally sat waiting for God! This was church, this was life and to this day I shiver when I think about that.
Gideon Jeph Wabvuta’s play writing credits include The Master’s Shoe, developed at the Almasi African Playwrights, and Mbare Dreams, developed at Ojai Playwrights Conference. Gideon is a member of the OPC Artistic staff, working with the OPC Youth Workshop program.
Roy Conli
Producer & OPC Advisory Board
AMADEUS
In 1979, early in my career, after having trained at a leading theatre school and having had some success with employment, I began to question the viability of a career in the theatre. I had been fortunate, to that point, having had the opportunity to work with some amazing artists and having been involved with some impressive productions. But for some reason (perhaps parental murmurs from the past), the confidence that led me to a life in the theatre faltered. It was time to re-evaluate my life choices.
And what better way to do so than an extended hitchhiking tour through Europe. For four months, I reveled in my youth and freedom, traveling from renowned cities to the furthest outskirts of Europe, engaging with people from around the world. But always with this nagging sense that I must somehow use this time of discovery to find a new purpose – a new direction. I was exhausted when I returned to London at the end of my journey. The trip had opened me up to so many incredible experiences, but as for an earth-shattering revelation that might clarify my future endeavors, no luck. I was lost.
I had very little money left, but theatre in London was relatively cheap in those days. I bought a standing room ticket to the Royal National Theatre’s newest play called "Amadeus.” Standing in the rear of the orchestra of the Olivier Theatre the purpose and clarity I had been searching for revealed itself. I was about as far as one could be from the stage - but I was transfixed. I could hear every word distinctly, connect with every intention deeply and understand every nuance. Peter Hall’s masterful direction and Simon Callow’s incredibly over-the-top depiction of Mozart were memorable – but it was Paul Scofield’s precise, effortless, subtle performance that reignited a love that I had been trying to escape. The elegance and artistry of that production reignited my passion for the power of theatrical storytelling. It helped coalesce my years of training into an understanding and appreciation of how craft can transcend to art. Shortly after, I returned to the States and continued pursuing my theatrical career.
Roy Conli is an Oscar-winning film producer with Walt Disney Animation Studios. A long-time OPC supporter and advisory board member, Roy served for many years as the OPC Managing Director.
Regina Taylor
Playwright & Actor
EXCERPTS FROM THE PLAY THAT CHANGED MY LIFE
I landed outside the Public Theater – 1999 – after seeing their production of Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse of a Negro” directed by Carolyn Jackson – feeling haunted, angered, saddened and cathartic wondering how I arrived to this moment outside the theatre on La Fayette street suppressing a primal need to HOWL. And wondering how could I find the proximity of her depth in my own writing. No one writes like Adrienne Kennedy. Just as you recognize Miles Davis by the ear, Kennedy has one of the most unique voices of the American stage.
Though I loved reading her plays – it wasn't until I sat in the theatre that night and experienced her play - “Funnyhouse” live – that I fully appreciated this most eviscerating, visceral and experiential writer. Kennedy grew up a middle-class Negro child in Cleveland Ohio in a neighborhood of immigrants in the 30’and 40’s. Kennedy’s mother, Etta Hagabrook was light-skinned black woman. Her dark-skinned father was a social worker. Both card carrying members of the NAACP. Her father who was very vocal against racial inequality sounded like Martin Luther King to young Adrienne. In school Adrienne excelled in the classics and Latin. She loved Virgil. Van Gogh, Bette Davis, Lena Horn. Light-skinned young Adrienne always kept her hair pressed straight and was taught to never speak what was on her mind but to always say what was “correct.”
She began writing as a child. “Scribbling what my parents said. Their entire conversations. Scribbling alone in my room . . .” After graduating from Ohio State (where Blacks were not allowed to major in English) with a degree in elementary education, Kennedy married Joseph Kennedy. After his return from Korea, he worked on his PhD at Columbia University in New York City where Kennedy took writing classes. “I couldn’t get my work published. Twenty years of doing it. I felt I had failed. Two and a half novels yet I couldn’t get anything published.” In her twenties Kennedy was imitating Lorca, Tennessee Williams, Pushkin. “If I could just add more Charlotte Bronte . . . I had pent up paragraphs, constantly being unhappy with what came out.”
At the age of twenty-nine Kennedy took a trip to West Africa with her husband, “I got on that ocean liner, the Queen Mary. I was writing as soon as I got on that ship. It all seemed to take focus.” Kennedy and her husband traveled through Ghana and Nigeria. She was proud of letting her hair “go back” for the first time to its kinky roots. A transformation was happening deeper still. A discovery of her other selves. A change in how she saw herself and her work. On that boat trip, between continents, America and Africa, she embraced her past, her history, digesting the language of the Western writers, synthesizing the structures of African theatre – its mask work, transformative rituals, incantatory language and surrealistic style. She had a completed play when they sailed back home on the ‘United States’. That play – “Funnyhouse of a Negro.”
“Funnyhouse of a Negro” testifies to an American culture of violence. Like Albee, Kennedy bravely brings taboo subjects into the theatre. The play explores incest, miscegenation, racial genocide and female oppression years before they would be freely staged elsewhere. Kennedy’s main character, Negro Sarah, is an Alice Through the Looking Glass - who sees herself in the distorted mirror of a nightmare America where black is evil. Kennedy’s Sarah is always in the same New York room that becomes other rooms from London to Africa. The room, lined with funhouse mirrors, are all in her mind. She is surrounded by her fractured selves that represent male/female, colonialists/colonized, black/white, savior/denouncer.
Attracted to and rebuffed by all sides, Sarah can’t put the pieces of the mirror together. She fears recognizing her self. “Funnyhouse” is filled with dark wit and rage as this chorus of voices take over Sarah’s mind and tongue. She is a colored girl who dreams of being white and commits suicide. She loses her head and hangs herself. Kennedy writes this play years before Ntozake Shange's revelatory “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough.” Ntozake's play embraces this Sarah and all the little colored girls who have been on the edge of their existence – however Ntozake reveals a pathway of redemption through their own eyes.
Kennedy’s canon of work resonates as the lone and often arduous sojourn of the artist searching for self by way of their own unmistakable sound. A singular sound that cannot be denied or stifled. Through her work Kennedy has discovered that sound and created her own continent and language that I entered into on that night at The Public. Viewing Sarah in “Funnyhouse” – was to view a soul laid bare – a biopsy with all the biting humor and pain on display – guts and all – spilling out on the stage. I wanted to look away but couldn't look away as all the ugly grey matter usually hidden – oozed through the burrowed holes in her skull.
And though I didn't want to recognize her – even though I wanted distance myself – her humanity was inescapable.
And even when I wanted to embrace her – her bones jutted out like sharp razors.
And even when sudden hiccups of laughter of recognition escaped my clenched throat – at the same time a growl of pain would displace my stomach.
And I'm thinking – this is what it's like to write outside the margins . . . free.
This is what it's like to own one's voice.
Regina Taylor is the award-winning writer of the musical Crowns and a Golden Globe-winning actress for her leading role in I’ll Fly Away. Regina was one of the featured artists slated to participate in the 2020 OPC Benefit.