Offscript - The class clown graduates

The legacy of Sean Daniels. No, really.

During his nine years as artistic director for Dad’s Garage Theatre, Sean Daniels played numerous characters, including Cheeky Rodriguez and Captain James T. Blanket in the theater’s improvised soap opera Scandal! and, more recently, homeless Vladimir in Theatrical Outfit’s Waiting for Godot last January. But Daniels’ most effective role was probably “Sean Daniels.”

As a performer, director and community leader, Daniels proved an enthusiastic champion for new plays, improvisational comedy and fresh ways to reach young audiences. Though he cultivates a stage persona as an unpretentious slacker who snarfs hot dogs, he’s been active with such serious organizations as the Atlanta Arts & Business Council.

That energy will be transferred to California’s Bay area when Daniels takes his new position as resident director and associate artistic director of San Francisco’s California Shakespeare Theater. His announcement last Wednesday didn’t exactly come as a shock: Over the years, Daniels developed a national reputation for attracting people in their 20s and 30s to theater, so it was just a matter of time before another city wooed him away.

Daniels and seven friends from Florida State University founded Dad’s Garage in June 1995 with the intent to stage improv shows and plays of all kinds. Dad’s quickly evolved into a venue for a remarkable variety of programs, from weekly shows like Scandal! and the kid-oriented Uncle Grampa’s Hoo-Dilly Stew to live talk show “The Lucky Yates Show” and annual short play festival 8 1/2 x 11.

Daniels once described improv comedy as being the theatrical equivalent of a “gateway drug,” with its raw, off-the-cuff humor attracting younger people who associate theater with English lit homework. And many of Dad’s Garage’s stage plays emphasize speed, novelty and kooky effects. I’ve never laughed harder in my life than at the onstage car chase of Action Movie: The Play. The theater’s highly ironic, anything-goes attitude rubbed off on productions by other Atlanta companies, like The 24 Hour Plays or Theatre Gael’s hilarious version of The Canterbury Tales.

But Daniels and Dad’s tend to hit rough patches when reaching for more intellectual or emotional depth. In musicals like Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and the highly impressive Bat Boy, both directed by Daniels, you’d see superb performers alongside people who didn’t seem to know what they were doing.

Thanks in part to his own gift at self-promotion that seems self-deprecating, not self-important, Daniels helped draw attention to Atlanta as a theatrical city on the rise. Daniels points with pride at having former President Jimmy Carter attend the historical comedy 43 Plays About 43 Presidents, and talking with Monty Python’s John Cleese upon staging the premiere of the late Graham Chapman’s O Happy Day. But not everyone has been a fan: When Daniels hosted the Atlanta IMAGE Film & Video Award Gala last year, honoree Burt Reynolds took such offense at the lighthearted humor, he attempted to strangle puppet Phineas J. Monkey.

The Dad’s Garage board of directors plans to implement a national search for Daniels’ replacement and hopes to find a person by the start of the 2004-05 season in September. Of potential local candidates, might I suggest Maia Knispel? As one of Out of Hand Theater’s co-producing artistic directors, she’s got plenty of youthful inventiveness, a keen interest in more traditional theater forms and a vivacious stage persona that would fit with the job’s public aspects.

At “Cal Shakes,” Daniels will take over the company’s “New Plays, New Communities” program and seek infusions of new blood for the theater audience. Playing Brigham Young in the Wild West of Scandal!, the improvised soap opera, Daniels had the catch phrase, “I don’t care how you bring ‘em — bring ‘em young!” In retrospect, that could be Daniels’ professional motto as well.

Test drives

Every year, Horizon Theatre uses its New South Play Festival to develop scripts for future festivals. Its two current main stage productions, Her Little House and Notes from the Bottletree, both rose from the ranks of its PlayWorks series of staged readings.

The current festival’s PlayWorks readings include Multi-Dimensional Happenings at the Stone Mountain Vortex (1 p.m., June 20), a family sci-fi musical by Atlanta actor and director Heidi Cline; Sunset (11 a.m., June 26), a comedy-drama about a Muslim-American growing up in Mississippi by Atlanta actors Suehyla El-Attar and Ax Norman; and Allison Moore’s Hazard County, a darkly funny look at the impact of a TV show called “Hazard County” on the lives of a Kentucky family. (Contact Horizon Theatre, 404-584-7450, www.horizontheatre.com.)

Over the hump

The Atlanta Coalition of Performing Arts has escaped the financial shortfall that threatened to shut down the 20-year-old arts service organization. After an emergency membership meeting June 7, the group received $3,600 in donations and received a commitment from 30 member companies (including the Alliance Theatre and Fox Theatre) to raise an additional $10,000. Executive Director Kim Patrick Bitz acknowledges that the coalition still needs to pay down its $60,000 debt, but that this summer’s government grant money and membership dues, in addition to a planned second AtlanTIX half-price ticket booth in Buckhead, will improve the group’s cash flow.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com


Off Script is a biweekly column on the Atlanta theater scene.