September 04, 2003
Vintage Orpheum Theatre
plays host to roving Shakespeare staging.
by Rob Kendt
The reason we have artists is because they perceive things most of
us don't--from the poignancy of unheard melodies on a Grecian urn to the story
of America retold in the rise and fall of a newspaper tycoon, from the way a
piano can be made to evoke running water to the otherworldly energy conveyed by
anarchic webs of dripped paint.
Maybe actor/producer/force of nature Tamar Fortgang isn't L.A.
theatre's answer to Keats or Welles, Ravel or Pollock. But Fortgang had the
unique vision, while on a tour of Downtown L.A.'s historic theatre venues, to
see the high-ceilinged lobby of a dilapidated movie house as--what else?--a
street in Padua, Italy, and thus the perfect setting for an environmental
staging of Shakespeare's problematic battle of the sexes, The Taming of the
Shrew.
Now, nearly three years after Fortgang had her flash of insight,
that historic theatre, the Orpheum, has undergone a sparkling $3 million
renovation, and a cast of 22 is set to open a new production of Shrew there under
director Alec Wild this weekend. As if that weren't ambitious enough, this Shrew won't be a
traditional proscenium version. Instead, audiences of around 80 viewers will
follow the action, staged variously in the basement, in the lobby, and on the
stage of this opulent former movie/vaudeville house.
The small audience not only makes the roving part of the staging
feasible, it also keeps the show within Equity's 99-Seat Theatre Plan.
Oh, and Fortgang is, natch, the titular shrew, Kate. It's a dream
role, she said, and one that cuts close to home for her.
"Kate is hard because she's so close to me," admitted
Fortgang, sitting in the back doorway of the theatre in a baseball cap and
jeans. "As a strong woman, I have been called a force, which is meant to
be positive, and in a negative sense I've been called abrasive."
An intense, alternately impish and tough woman with short, dark
hair and an easy, ironic smile, Fortgang can't help but hurl her whole self
into her work, and she knows that not everyone can take the body blow. But
there's a disarming new tone of circumspection about her when she discusses
Kate's controversial arc from willful defiance to abject submission to her
lover Petruchio. Has Fortgang been tamed, too?
"No, but I do find that the more I mature and soften and
learn to communicate with others, the more I don't lose my spirit, and things
that I want get accomplished," she said. She recalled acting coach Larry
Moss telling her, "You're going to get a lot pressure to soft-soap
yourself. But every woman who's made it has an edge--Julia Roberts, Michelle
Pfeiffer, they have an edge, but it's in how they present it, the whole
package, that wins people over."
So how did Fortgang win over the players for this ambitious Shrew? Steve
Needleman, who inherited ownership of the Orpheum from his late parents, Jack
and Annette Needleman, had been open to offers since his theatre hosted last
year's Theatre LA Ovation Awards (it will host this year's, as well, on Nov.
23).
"Part of hosting that was hoping selfishly that someone would
give me a phone call," Needleman said. "Having most of the members of
the theatre business in the building, I thought someone would see the Orpheum
as a place to do a show."
His phone stayed stubbornly quiet. He figured that the Orpheum's
large seating capacity (2,058), which would necessitate a full Equity contract
and extensive audience promotion, might have put off L.A.'s small theatre
producers. Admittedly the theatre's location may still be considered a
liability, despite concerted efforts by farsighted developers to revitalize
Downtown's historic core with mixed-use housing, retail, and live/work spaces.
So, in the absence of any big-money offers, Needleman began
looking for a creative use for the building. He recalled, "I ran into a
very intense, strong young woman, Tamar Fortgang, who pitched her thoughts
forward for The Taming of the Shrew. It wasn't what I would have
originally thought of, but it was creative, and it would showcase the venue in
a different way and in a way that was unique to L.A. theatre."
He is generously waiving rent but not all production costs.
Fortgang estimated that the show's budget will come in at $30,000. It's a
gamble for all concerned, but especially for landlord Needleman, who admitted
that the "hard dollars" to lose have been turning away comers,
including a Duran Duran concert, during the show's five-week run.
But, said Needleman, "Going into this, I was aware that I was
doing it for the art itself, for something really creatively spectacular.
Because I'm not on the regular theatre or concert circuit, it gives people a
chance to come in and see the theatre. That's worth turning on the lights to my
venue."
He also has a more personal agenda. Needleman recalled that the
last live theatre run at his family's theatre, in the mid-1960s, was a tour of
Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. "I used to hear my father talk
about how much he wanted to see live theatre return to his stage," said
Needleman. "So this is partly a way of honoring my parents."
Honoring Shakespeare's original intent is the agenda of director
Wild, a tall, young-looking professor at the University of Massachusetts in
Amherst who directs Shakespeare around the country. He was sold on the project--his
first in L.A.--by Fortgang's "power of persuasion" and by the chance
to work on the "readymade Shakespeare set" of the Orpheum. His
approach to the Bard, he said, is rooted in his scholarship.
"One of the assumptions when I start a Shakespeare play is
that this is a culture so far removed from our own," Wild said, sitting
cross-legged near the lip of the Orpheum stage, looking out on its lush red
theatre seats, box seats, and detailed ceiling work. "I try to read the
play from a Renaissance perspective and figure out what's going on in
Shakespeare's time. Then I start to make choices about how to communicate those
insights to a contemporary audience, as opposed to finding gimmicks. I'm very
much not a gimmick director."
So don't expect Shrew set in the Wild West or Little Italy--or
one in which the famous "wooing" scene degenerates into a wrestling
match ˆ la Burton and Taylor.
"It's a great scene, and it's so profoundly a meeting of the
minds," said Wild. "It's so steeped in Renaissance language that it's
sometimes incoherent for a modern audiences, so directors get through that by
staging it as a brawl. But in the stage directions, Petruchio never strikes;
she strikes him and he restrains her."
Of course the toughest pill for contemporary audiences to swallow
is the denouement, in which the firebrand Kate publicly submits to Petruchio's
male authority. This scene is often played ironically, as if Kate is
play-acting--or conversely, as if her spirit has been hideously shattered and
the patriarchy has triumphed again. For Wild, neither interpretation is true to
the text.
"Irony is an escape for contemporary productions of Shrew, as if Kate
doesn't really mean it, and I think that's unfair. That's not what's going on
in the play," said Wild. "I don't see Kate as someone who's beaten
Petruchio at his own game. And a production that concentrates on the misogyny
misses something; it's like saying Freud applies to Hamlet. The question
is how to play that last scene. Is it possible in 2003 for Kate to make a real
discovery in that scene that's valid? That these two come together at the end
should be satisfying on some level, that she's finding her place in that
society. If not, it's time to put the play on a shelf."
Clearly for Wild this remains an open question, even if the answer
is uncomfortable.
"I think the play can provoke, and I don't shy away from
that," he said. Indeed if Wild, Fortgang, and Needleman were the sort of
people who shied from a challenge, the show would not go on. In that they
typify L.A. theatre's most potent secret weapon: untamed creative spirit.