Offscript - Age before edge
The ups and downs of the 2003-04 season
When playhouses program their seasons, they constantly seesaw between tried-and-true classics and chancier new works. The 2003-04 season ultimately put more weight on the “old” end of the teeter-totter.
Most Atlanta theater leaders pride themselves on cultivating debut plays, like Actor’s Express’ artistic director Jasson Minadakis, who’s finishing up his first full season. But while the past season introduced some highly creative world premieres, in many cases the productions’ “special effects” exceeded their written words. We saw superb examples of theatrical art in the puppetry and makeup effects of Sensurround Stagings’ Geek Love, the kung fu and dance choreography of VisionQuest’s Medea: The Fury and the set and lighting of the Alliance’s faith play Leap, but their scripts didn’t measure up.
Some of the most successful local premieres seamlessly integrated their conceptual gimmicks into the dramas, like the blend of rave party, Greek mythology and Latin American politics in Iphigenia (A Rave Fable) at 7 Stages, or the tribute to silent movies in Life Goes On at Theater Emory.
On the upside, such small companies as Process Theatre and Working Title Playwrights became more active in developing and staging new plays by Atlanta writers. Theatrical testing-ground PushPush Theater relocated to Decatur, while Relativity Theatre and Not Merely Players (a company for artists with disabilities) staged their inaugural shows. The past year put the spotlight on women playwrights, with multiple works from Markie Shalloe and Lauren Gunderson, as well as the premiere of Sandra Deer’s The Subject Tonight Is Love at the Hertz Stage.
But the local scene suffered a blow with the closing of the performance and gallery space Art Farm, an incubator for companies like Sensurround, VisionQuest and Jack in the Black Box. Horizon Theatre’s New South Play Festival and Onstage Atlanta’s Hometown Playwrights Series each scaled back full productions of new plays.
Perhaps the worst setback befell The New Jomandi, which canceled the performances of its 25th anniversary season but showed a sign of life by naming Carol Mitchell-Leon as its new artistic director. To save costs, the Alliance scheduled only five main stage productions last year, but bounces back with six for 2004-05.
Atlanta theater companies frequently fared better with playwrights from the established canon. Kenny Leon founded True Colors Theatre Company, his national African-American theater company, with two highly reliable works: August Wilson’s domestic drama Fences and the beauty-parlor comedy Steel Magnolias. While Leon’s Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun received four Tony nominations, his former spouse, Mitchell-Leon, directed the same show to great success at Theatre in the Square.
When different theaters staged works by the same playwright, they used the double-headers as cross-promotional events instead of competition. True Colors’ Fences ran simultaneously with the Alliance’s King Hedley II. The Alliance’s scalding Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? overlapped with Actor’s Express’ even more scorching The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia (Minadakis’ finest show so far). 7 Stages’ lovely Waiting for Godot showed only weeks after Theatrical Outfit’s melancholy version.
The Shakespeare Tavern presented the year’s most ambitious stunt in November by staging the complete four-play “miniseries” of Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V in sequence. Events like that, compared against debut plays like the Alliance’s limp comedy A Death in the House Next to Kathleen Turner’s House in Long Island, can make world premieres seem overrated.
Out of service?
The Atlanta Coalition of Performing Arts needs an immediate infusion of funds to survive the next month. The 20-year-old arts service organization, with 146 performing arts and cultural groups as members, currently operates under a $60,000 debt, with its three full-time staffers working without pay.
Atlanta theaters would feel the coalition’s absence more keenly than audiences. The group provides resources for audition, class, employment and show schedules, and manages, with the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, Underground Atlanta’s AtlanTIX half-price ticket booth.
Funds are expected to flow into the coalition’s coffers by the end of June, when government grants become available and the group’s members pay their dues.