Offscript - Location 3
Aurora gets new digs; Academy Theatre debuts new space
A house may not necessarily be a home, but a permanent playhouse gives a theatrical troupe a place to hang an identity. Atlanta theaters like Out of Hand manage to stage lively, idiosyncratic work without owning a space, but the companies with actual buildings can have higher profiles and deeper roots in their communities. Currently three theaters are remaking their personalities with changes of address.
The most quiet yet most historic move is Academy Theatre relocating from its offices in Fulton County to a new, 200-seat playhouse in Avondale Estates. Founded by Frank Wittow in 1956 as the Southeastern Academy of Theatre and Music, the Academy served as a pioneering company for nearly a half-century. Atlanta’s theater scene would literally be unrecognizable without the Academy, which trained a generation of artistic leaders, including Kenny Leon (founder of True Colors Theatre and before that, artistic director of the Alliance Theatre), Jeff and Lisa Adler (Horizon Theatre), John Stephens (Theatre Gael) and Mira Hirsch (Jewish Theatre of the South).
In 1990, the Academy switched its emphasis from main stage productions to educational programs and school tours. The Academy will continue its school-oriented programs at the new space, a renovated printing company, but will also begin staging productions outside the educational system, i.e., for everybody. The Academy inaugurates the new space with a co-presentation of Aurora Theatre’s romantic period piece Enchanted April, April 14-17. According to managing director Lorenne Fey, the academy hopes to mount similar co-productions with more outside-the-Perimeter playhouses in the future.
Meanwhile, Aurora Theatre, having out-grown its current space on Duluth’s Main Street, plans to move to a new theater in Lawrenceville. Though the playhouse will remain at its current space through its 2005-06 season, Aurora’s board of directors has voted to move into a 100-year-old Methodist church on the Lawrenceville Square in December 2006. Both Duluth and Lawrenceville ardently courted the playhouse, but artistic director Anthony Rodriguez says the latter space afforded the most possibilities for future growth and quipped that Aurora can use the building’s huge, working bell tower to mark the intermissions.
Possibly no local playhouse offers a better combination of physical intimacy, comfort and slick production values than Theatrical Outfit’s new Balzer Theatre downtown. Having rented space in recent years at the 14th Street Playhouse and Rialto Center for the Performing Arts, Theatrical Outfit got the Balzer rolling in January with Ain’t Misbehavin’. I first saw the space in action with the comedy The Foreigner (playing through April 24). The 200-seat house gives the audience the proximity of a small, cozy playhouse, even though The Foreigner’s set approached the scale of an Alliance main stage production. Even the sound system impressed with its clear, rumbling thunderclaps and explosions.
As much as you can enjoy the Outfit’s cosmopolitan new environs and The Foreigner’s energetic young actors (including Jon Benzinger, Joe Knezevich and Scott Warren), the 20-year-old play remains a tired, oft-produced war horse. Larry Shue’s admittedly cheerful comedy, concerning a shy Englishmen treated with fascination and fear by rural Georgians, ultimately trivializes issues of xenophobia that could be sharply relevant to America after 9/11.
Without facing the commercial pressures of filling up the cavernous Rialto, perhaps Theatrical Outfit can stage more exciting, surprising material.
Honor rollSeveral Atlanta artists need to make room on their trophy shelves. April 4 marked the presentation of the first Suzi Bass Award, inaugurated in tribute of popular Atlanta actress Suzi Bass, who died of melanoma in 2002. The new group’s executive committee, chaired by Gene-Gabriel Moore, inaugurated the honor by presenting Kenny Leon the first annual Spirit of Suzi Bass Award for an individual’s lifelong service to Atlanta theater. In October the group plans to bestow a slate of performance-based awards along the lines of the Tonys.
Leon received recognition from outside Atlanta when True Colors’ production of Tambourines to Glory (which premiered on the Alliance stage last summer) received six nominations for Washington, D.C.’s Helen Hayes Award for last September’s production at the city’s Lincoln Theatre. Presented by the Washington Theatre Award Society, the Helen Hayes Awards ceremony will be May 9.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced that playwright and Emory University senior writer-in-residence Jim Grimsley is one of eight authors receiving the $7,500 Academy Award in Literature.
Finally, the Center for Puppetry Arts’ associate artistic director Jon Ludwig has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy for Best Director in a Children’s Series for “The Book of Pooh,” the Disney Channel’s series about A.A. Milne’s honey-addicted teddy bear.
Hot Ticket Relativity Theatre Concern’s “New Director Series” presents an evening of one-act comedies: “The Jellybean Prescription” and “Tira Tells Everything There Is to Know About Herself.” Through May 7. Whole World Theatre 3rd Space, 1214 Spring St. $20. 404-502-6655. www.relativitytheatre.com.