Offscript - Den mother
Dad’s Garage names Kate Warner artistic director
“I’m not funny,” says Kate Warner. “I’m very up front about it.” Whether Warner has a laugh-inducing personality may be no small matter at her new job. As the new artistic director of Dad’s Garage Theatre, Warner has to fill not just big shoes, but the zany, oversized clown shoes left behind by her predecessor, Dad’s co-founder Sean Daniels.
Last summer, Daniels left Dad’s Garage to become associate artistic director of San Francisco’s California Shakespeare Theater. For nearly a decade, he influenced the Atlanta scene as a likable presence with an emcee’s jokey demeanor, and was an advocate for the kind of playful stagecraft that attracts young-adult audiences.
Warner is a steady, reassuring choice rather than a flashy one. She’s been an artistic associate at Dad’s since 2003 and as a director has often proved simpatico with the company’s lighthearted aesthetic. Plus, after spending almost 10 years as managing director of Theatrical Outfit, she has firsthand experience with the challenges of making theater in an often indifferent city.
“Dad’s has safely secured national recognition,” says Warner. “I want to solidify our national reputation, to build on what we’re doing, so we’re not just a flash-in-the-pan, hip young company for a couple of years.” She hopes to find new ways to draw on the abilities of Dad’s loose-knit ensemble of writers, directors and actors, as well as to establish more collaborations with other theater companies, akin to the playhouse’s relationship with Chicago’s Neo-Futurists.
A model of how Warner can enhance Dad’s Garage might lie in her revamp of the annual short play festival 8 1/2 x 11. Under Daniels, the festival focused on the gimmick of a rigid 11-minute time limit, with visible clocks counting down the seconds. Last year Warner served as “curator” for a revised 8 1/2 x 11 that downplayed the time limit in favor of gathering new plays, both locally and nationally, unified by the common theme “Punk Rock Will Never Die.” The show found room for thoughtful commentary amid the humorous hijinks, and the troupe is hopeful that this year’s installment, subtitled “Live and Uncensored,” will strike a similar balance when it opens Jan. 20.
As a longtime Atlanta play director, Warner demonstrates creative flexibility with no defining specialty. For me, her most memorable shows were a pair of intense, two-person dramas for Theatrical Outfit: Cherry Docs, about a murderous skinhead and his conflicted lawyer; and The Island, about two black prisoners in South Africa. Warner seems uniquely qualified to help Dad’s Garage continue to emphasize fresh approaches to comedy without stinting on deep, relevant ideas. Because there’s more important things than being funny.They’ve got Balz
Kate Warner left Theatrical Outfit in November, but the playhouse has had little time to mourn her absence. At the moment, the company is frantically putting the finishing touches on its new, permanent home, the 200-seat Balzer Theater.
A historic building nestled alongside the Outfit’s previous home, the Rialto Center for the Performing Arts, the Balzer Theater previously housed Herren’s Restaurant. The theater purchased the facility in 2002 thanks to the support of Bill and Peg Balzer, who donated nearly $1.4 million to renovate the space.
Currently, the playhouse is still crowded with contractors, but Theatrical Outfit’s artistic director, Tom Key, managed to perform Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory in the unfinished space during the holidays. Theatrical Outfit officially christens the Balzer Theater with a formal dedication ceremony Jan. 21 and the gala opening night of Ain’t Misbehavin’, the Fats Waller musical revue, on Jan. 22.
A quick tour of the theater reveals the Balzer to be one of Atlanta’s most handsome and acoustically sound performing spaces. With its art deco design and exposed brick, Atlanta’s newest playhouse will, paradoxically, look the most like a vintage venue. Downtown remains an inhospitable place to visit, but the Balzer Theater will make it a little more inviting.
See monsters
In 1995, former President Jimmy Carter published the children’s book The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, which his daughter Amy illustrated. Running through Jan. 30, the Alliance Children’s Theatre production of the same name, directed by Rosemary Newcott and adapted by Ron Anderson of Rome, chronicles Carter’s tale of a disabled boy named Jeremy and his friendship with Snoog, a rambunctious sea monster.
A lot of people don’t know, however, that a true incident from Carter’s presidency inspired Snoogle-Fleejer. One of Carter’s unsung triumphs is how he brokered a peace agreement between small boys and imaginary sea creatures in 1977.
Relations between aquatic beasts and tow-headed tykes broke down in 1975 following NBC’s cancellation of “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters,” and a subsequent border dispute broke out in the land called Honah Lee. Thanks to diplomatic envoy H.R. Pufnstuff, Carter brought the two sides together for talks at Camp David, which culminated in a treaty signed by Puff the Magic Dragon and Little Jackie Paper at a White House Rose Garden ceremony. Carter’s Mutual Frolicking Accord has remained unbroken ever since.