|| home || news || filmography || stage || audio || articles || images || list || forum || fans || Brimstone || Smallville || links || guestbook || about || |
Dear Michael Ritchie, Sheldon Epps, Gil Cates, Barbara Beckley, etc. ... I don't normally address this column directly to you movers and shakers who run L.A.'s larger nonprofit theater companies. I try to speak directly to audiences. But unless one of you sees Jonathan Tolins's Secrets of the Trade soon, chances are that not many L.A. theatergoers will get to enjoy this immensely entertaining and accessible new play.
It's at one of L.A.'s smallest and therefore least accessible venues, the enterprising Black Dahlia, which can accommodate about 30 people - as long as no one is extremely fat. When I talked to Tolins early last week, only one ticket was still available for last weekend. The production is scheduled to close April 20: even if the entire run sold out, only about 900 people would see it.
Its potential audience should be much, much larger. Although it's about the maturing of a young, theater-obsessed man from ages 16 to 26, during the decade from 1980 to 1990, its appeal should extend far beyond theater fans from that era.
Tolins focuses on Andy Lipman's often conflicting relationships with his caring, overbearing parents and with a famous adult theatrical mentor. Most people have parents, and many of us are parents (including Tolins, who recently adopted four-year-old Selina with his partner, Robert Cary). Quite a few of us have either been a mentor or a mentee. Anyone who has ever been on either side of any of these relationships is likely to find something of value in Secrets of the Trade. Two weeks after I saw the play, I repeatedly laughed out loud all over again when I read the script.
For the producer of the play's next run, it's such a deal - or at least, it should be. Director Matt Shakman, a former child star, has landed a star of his own in the role of the mentor - Tony winner John Glover. Okay, he's not a movie star, but among theatergoers his name could help sell tickets. Perhaps you're leery of the fact that Tolins's Twilight of the Golds and If Memory Serves were panned in New York after receiving some encouraging reviews of their premieres at the Pasadena Playhouse. Such New York-centric thoughts, if you have them, don't help your primary audiences in L.A. or the cause of keeping L.A. writers working for the stage. But this play - which is set primarily in New York but also in L.A. and Boston - is less topical and more solidly constructed than those plays. Loosely autobiographical (but Tolins won't confirm specific parallels), it glows with authenticity.
Tolins wrote it on a South Coast Repertory commission from 1996, and it has held up beautifully over the last decade. It's Tolins's favorite of his plays.
Center Theatre Group - yes, that's you, Michael Ritchie - has a policy of occasionally finding worthy productions at L.A.'s small theaters and more or less transplanting them into the larger Kirk Douglas Theatre. Shakman's staging of Secrets of the Trade is a more logical candidate for this program than just about any other production I've seen.
In one of his darkest moments, Glover's character complains, "There's nothing left of the theater except its ability to make you feel guilty doing anything else." You captains of the far-flung L.A. theater industry could help dispel such gloomy thoughts by staging Secrets of the Trade.
Secrets of the Trade, Black Dahlia Theatre, 5453 W. Pico Blvd., L.A. (800) 838-3006. Thedahlia.com.
|| home || news || filmography || stage || audio || articles || images || list || forum || fans || Brimstone || Smallville || links || guestbook || about || |