More free Will for L.A.

Dana GIOIA was a teenager and an aspiring writer from a working-class family in Hawthorne when he saw Tyrone Guthrie’s theater company perform “The House of Atreus,” an adaptation of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia,” at the Mark Taper Forum in 1969.

The production was “extraordinarily powerful in a kind of poetic and symbolic way,” he recalled last week, and helped steer his later career in the direction of poetry. He also remembers that the ticket cost “a significant amount of money for a high school kid” -- more than what he would spend on a date.

So when Gioia -- now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts -- got the chance to help present a Guthrie Theater production for free in Los Angeles, it “struck me as the ultimate high-quality public arts program,” Gioia said.

The Minneapolis-based Guthrie Theater will bring “Othello” to the Luckman Theater, at Cal State L.A., on Friday and Saturday. Its three performances are free.

It’s the opening salvo in an NEA-blessed but locally organized program that will create a free Shakespeare festival in L.A. for the next few months.

Informally called Shakespeare in Los Angeles Communities, the program is an outgrowth of the Shakespeare in American Communities tour the NEA launched last year. It was touted as the largest Shakespearean tour in American history, initially involving six professional companies traveling to more than 100 cities.

The tour had been billed as a way to bring the Bard to the boondocks -- or, to be more precise, “to small and midsized communities” that seldom see professional Shakespeare productions.

L.A. didn’t qualify under those terms, but Cerritos did -- even though it’s more or less in the middle of the L.A. metropolitan area. The New York-based Aquila Theatre Company, one of the original six troupes, brought its “Othello” to the Cerritos Center in March under NEA auspices, even though the agency provided only $2,500 to Cerritos -- not enough to cover discounted tickets. And the Acting Company’s “Richard III” -- part of the NEA tour -- stopped at El Camino College in Torrance on March 28 (and the following week in Riverside).

The program began outgrowing its initial mandate in other ways -- first with the addition of military bases as tour stops and then with the announcement that a second phase of the initiative, Shakespeare for a New Generation, would bring an additional 21 companies under the NEA banner for school tours in the companies’ regions.

Now, beginning with the Guthrie “Othello,” more NEA-assisted Shakespeare is in store for L.A. This round has the distinction of being free, befitting the traditional policy of Shakespeare Festival/LA, the local presenter.

Circle X Theatre, one of L.A.’s more prominent small theater groups, will perform “Henry IV, Part I” from May 21 through June 6 in the first full production at the downtown headquarters of Shakespeare Festival/LA.

In June, the New York-based Acting Company’s “Richard III” will return, this time for free as part of Shakespeare in Los Angeles Communities, with stops at the 900-seat Hart Auditorium in Santa Clarita, Freud Playhouse at UCLA, and perhaps at Edwards Air Force Base and a venue in the San Gabriel Valley.

Shakespeare Festival/LA itself will stage “Twelfth Night” in at least two outdoor venues beginning in July.

Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga is expanding its educational programming and will offer 25 free tickets for each of seven Shakespearean performances in June to groups that normally don’t go to the theater. Even the Hobart Shakespeareans, an elementary school troupe at Los Angeles’ Hobart Boulevard Elementary School, will do a performance with NEA backing.

The partnership between the NEA and Shakespeare Festival/LA began in November, when the festival’s artistic director, Ben Donenberg, who didn’t know about Shakespeare in American Communities, met Gioia while accepting an award in Washington for the festival.

Donenberg and Gioia discussed the scarcity of California venues and free performances from the NEA’s plans.

The idea of a far-flung free Shakespeare festival in the L.A. area “struck me as wildly ambitious,” Gioia recalled. So he decided to direct $50,000 in NEA funds to Donenberg’s effort. The NEA contribution now has grown to $100,000 out of a total budget of about $750,000 for Shakespeare in Los Angeles Communities.

“I’m delighted to be able to do this in my hometown, which is also this wonderful cosmopolitan melting pot,” said Gioia, who attended a Shakespeare Festival/LA fundraiser last week at the Geffen Playhouse. “Even in metropolitan areas, there are a lot of people for whom theater is not affordable or accessible,” he said.

When it was pointed out that the NEA had brought another “Othello” to the area in March, he replied, “Often different productions of the same play in close proximity have been enormously enlightening even to a jaded theatergoer like myself.”

But the NEA’s program with Shakespeare Festival/LA “is not designed for you and me,” he added. “Think of a kid who has not seen any live play.” For the Guthrie’s “Othello,” Shakespeare Festival/LA has trained 40 teachers, providing them with classroom scripts and other enrichment materials. The festival also has offered to provide as many as 33 buses for free transportation so classes may see “Othello.”

“Shakespeare is the only dramatist still universally taught in high schools,” Gioia added. He said NEA money spent on the Shakespeare programs does not mean that less money is going to support living playwrights’ work. The NEA’s overall investment in theater increased in the last year, he said, including support of 135 premieres. “We’ve added Shakespeare without cutting any of our other theater work.”

When the tour plans were announced last year, they drew some criticism from companies that felt that government money should support local troupes instead of national tours. Donenberg said he understands these feelings, because he felt disenfranchised by the Los Angeles festivals run by Peter Sellars in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, which he believed favored international talent over local artists.

However, he said the best solution is to juxtapose national companies such as the Guthrie and the Acting Company with local groups.

Donenberg brought Circle X into the project because he had seen them rehearse in his building and wanted to encourage a trained company that had never done a Shakespeare play to try one. The company, formed in 1996, has frequently produced new plays in classical settings.

Tara Flynn, director of the Circle X “Henry IV,” has staged Shakespeare with other companies, and she said most of her actors are classically trained. She acknowledged that “Henry IV” isn’t a precise fit with Circle X’s mission to do “new and rarely seen plays,” but she felt “Henry IV” had not been seen in this area as recently as other plays the company had considered.

‘A one-shot deal’

Conspicuously missing from Donenberg’s plans is A Noise Within in Glendale, which is probably the best known of Southern California’s classical troupes. Donenberg said he considered soliciting A Noise Within’s involvement but stopped when he realized its current Shakespeare offering is “Twelfth Night,” which his own company will be doing.

A Noise Within applied to the school touring phase of the NEA project but was not accepted. The company’s managing director, Todd Dellinger, said he had not received any official explanation but speculated that it was because A Noise Within concentrates on bringing students to its theater instead of going to schools.

“It’s frustrating,” Dellinger added, that “powerhouse companies” such as the Guthrie do “kind of a one-shot deal and then go away,” while “core groups that are in the community are left without sufficient funding to provide more ongoing programs.” He suggested that the Guthrie might have the wherewithal to tour even without NEA support.

But Beth Burns, the Guthrie’s director of education and community partnerships, said that although the Guthrie tours in the Midwest, it couldn’t have brought its $2-million “Othello” to California without subsidies to the presenters.

“We hope,” Burns said, “that a future Dana Gioia is seeing our ‘Othello’ somewhere this year” -- maybe even in L.A.

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Shakespeare

What: “Othello”

When: Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.

Where: Luckman Theater, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles

Also

What: “Henry IV, Part One”

When: Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m.; May 21-June 6

Where: Shakespeare Festival/LA, 1238 W. 1st St., Los Angeles

Price: Free, but donations of canned food for charity requested.

Contact: (213) 975-9891