New Leaders, New Visions: Still Fresh, Less Flesh
Celebration Theatre's MICHAEL SHEPPERD
makes the case that Los Angeles still
needs a gay theatre
By Rob Weinert-Kendt
One way to sum up the contradictions that inspire and constrain Los Angeles's small, gay-centered Celebration Theatre, now in its 28th year: A city border bisects its dressing room.
"The Celebration is split," notes Michael Shepperd, a gently towering African-American actor/director now into his second season as the 64-seat theatre's artistic director. "The offices and backstage are in West Hollywood, and the front of house and stage are in Hollywood."
The symbolism of that division needs to be unpacked, perhaps, for non-Angelenos. Apart from a thin layer of tourist landmarks, Hollywood by day is essentially a dense, unglamorous industrial park for the movie business, dotted with equipment rental warehouses, film labs and casting offices; by night it becomes a louche nightlife magnet. Tiny storefront theatres—particularly along an unlovely stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard—make up one ever-buzzing subset of that nightlife. West Hollywood, on the other hand, presents two faces: part upscale gay Oz and part pedestrian-friendly shopping mecca.
The Celebration Theatre has tended to hover in the limbo between these two L.A. extremes: on one side, the scrappy entertainment underground of small theatre, which toils nobly in the indifferent shadow of the film industry, and on the other, an increasingly mainstream urban gay culture in which theatregoing is just one of countless consumer options. This psychic split has kept the theatre oscillating unsteadily between artistic peaks and actual poverty. Until recent years, the Celebration's artistic directors had been essentially on their own, managing the space as well as the programming on a shoestring budget (it's now $275,000, up from $125,000 in 2005), and for every long-running hit that delivered a core audience of either gay men or lesbians (seldom both) as well as curious straights, there have been clunkers and orphans that struggled for audiences outside those demographics.
Another challenge is an irony that faces many mainstreaming minorities. When the Celebration was founded in 1982 by gay-rights pioneer Charles Rowland (of Mattachine Society fame), gay plays and voices were largely on the theatrical fringe, and a theatre company dedicated to nurturing and staging them clearly filled a void. But in the post-Angels in America landscape, do we still need gay-identified theatres? As Michael Kearns, who directed the 1986 premiere of Robert Chesley's Jerker at the Celebration's original space in the nearby Silver Lake neighborhood, puts it, "We have successfully managed to bring ourselves into the foreground of every medium. Does homophobia still exist? Yes—but I don't think we're underrepresented."
On the other hand, as California's gays and lesbians learned with last year's bitter gay-marriage battle over Proposition 8, the gay-rights movement still has battles ahead. And while gay themes and artists are more welcome than ever in theatres of all sizes now, the Celebration's ongoing role as an incubator and ratifier of talent—from Chay Yew to Christopher Shinn, Guillermo Reyes to Mark Ravenhill, Robert O'Hara to Cherrie Moraga—shouldn't be ignored. A case in point: Though O'Hara's sweeping Insurrection: Holding History had been developed at the nearby Mark Taper Forum in 1994, the Taper never staged it. Says Derek Charles Livingston, who was Celebration's artistic director when Insurrection became an unexpected hit there in 2002, "That makes the case for having a gay theatre right there."
The Celebration is split in other ways, as well, starting with its very name: The original mission, to celebrate the gay experience, meant that playwrights like Tom Jacobson, who later became the theatre's literary manager, initially couldn't get their foot in the door. "I was told that my plays weren't gay-positive enough—they were showing people as multidimensional, as having flaws," says Jacobson, now artistic director of Ensemble Studio Theatre LA.
That predicament changed when the Celebration's board named Robert Schrock artistic director in 1993. Schrock not only moved the company into the professional Equity 99-Seat Plan and relocated it from funky Silver Lake to its current almost-West Hollywood location; he also shifted the artistic priorities. Jacobson describes Schrock's vision as "audience-focused": "It was not, 'Let's get gay people onstage,' but 'Let's do things people want to see.'"
That populist spirit would eventually give the Celebration its most notorious hit, 1998's Naked Boys Singing!, but Schrock didn't start out with such blatant pandering. "Toward the end of the plague and the beginning of computers, my mission was to produce original plays," Schrock says. He had a list of no-nos: "I wasn't interested in coming-out plays; those are better suited to straight audiences. And I don't like plays about 'being gay.' I wanted just to represent our life experience—I wanted people to realize it's not that different being gay than being straight, that we all have the same basic needs for love and acceptance and expression."
Without being too preciously multi-culti about it, Schrock was also interested in representing a specifically L.A. vision of gay life, which meant premiering Chay Yew's A Language of Their Own and several plays by Guillermo Reyes, including Men on the Verge of His-Panic Breakdown. Addressing another Celebration split, Schrock started a lesbian writers' workshop and had a few hits with the lesbian audience (for example, Pamela Forrest's Valsetz and Pamela Gray's Supernormal Clutches), though he always had to make a special outreach effort to gay women. "I consider us two separate communities, and I also consider us all gay," Schrock says.
Schrock's tenure, which ended in 1999, defined the Celebration, for better or worse. Today, it continues its emphasis on new work and L.A. premieres—where the ambitious seasons include as many as six productions, not including late-night shows, workshops and readings. But it is also a company that's trying to run away from the success of Naked Boys Singing!
In fact, that was the mandate the Celebration board gave to Schrock's successor, Richard Israel, whose tenure included an all-male version of the Sondheim revue Marry Me a Little and the L.A. premiere of Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking. Unfortunately, Israel, now a director with West Coast Ensemble, lasted only a year. "My thought was, 'I'm going to have all these rich gays, executive producers on 'Will & Grace,' writing me checks," Israel says now. "But in L.A. there isn't a core of gay theatregoers looking to give their time and money to gay theatre. That was a really unpleasant surprise."
Next at the helm was Livingston, an actor with a background as a political organizer, who accordingly brought a more pointed edge to the programming. At his best, he combined that agenda with a frothier aesthetic: Running concurrently with Insurrection was Pinafore!, Mark Savage's sly update of Gilbert and Sullivan to the Bush-era don't-ask-don't-tell military. It ran for nine months—and all without nudity.
"Everyone talks about Naked Boys Singing!, but for me, the show that could exist nowhere else but the Celebration was Pinafore!," recalls David C. Nichols, a critic for the Los Angeles Times who's followed the Celebration for several years. "In a way, it felt more Gilbert and Sullivan-ish than most productions of Gilbert and Sullivan. That kind of insouciance in programming, coupled with the inventiveness of presentation—it was delicious."
Delicious for audiences, maybe, but the artistic staff was starving: As Livingston explains of his decision to leave after five years: "It was a one-man show, there was no money, and I was in debt."
A few months later, in early 2005, his successor, Michael Matthews—a twentysomething transplant from Chicago—found himself "standing alone in the building with a set of keys," as he puts it. What to do with this venerable but scruffy, debt-ridden little theatre with the damnably happy name?
Matthews's solution was a mix of bold leadership and delegation. He created the position of managing director to run the place day-to-day so that he could focus on the artistic side, and he started an ensemble company, including but not limited to actors, members of which donate time to help with daily operations. Aesthetically, he strove for a "more of a Chicago-edgy-storefront-theatre feeling," which meant not only new plays but unlikely choices: an all-male Bacchae, with future artistic director Michael Shepperd as Dionysus; local premieres of Christopher Shinn's Four and Philip Ridley's The Fastest Clock in the Universe; a revival of The Children's Hour.
Oh, and no swinging dicks, thank you very much.
"When I started there, I did not want any nudity in any of the shows," Matthews says. "The theatre had the reputation for little nudie-boy plays. I wanted to do shows that meant something to me—that we were passionate about." This direction was not, to put it lightly, a popular choice among Celebration's core gay-male audiences. As Matthews remembers, "I would get a phone call at the box office every week, it seemed, asking, 'Is there nudity in the show?' "
It was into this mixed-blessing environment that Matthews, after three years at the helm, invited a fellow Chicago émigré, Michael Shepperd, to take the reins. An actor as comfortable in classical roles as in musicals (he has voiced Audrey II in a number of Little Shop of Horrors productions), Shepperd admits that he didn't think twice about taking the job: "I had to think about it about five or six times. I've been artistic associate before but this was going to be something different. I think in a circular way and this is a very linear job. I call it my midlife crisis: Most people go out and buy a red convertible. Instead I said, 'I'm going to take over a small nonprofit theatre.'"
And though Shepperd concurs that he hears a similar where's-the-beefcake refrain from some longtime audience members, and though there's still plenty of sex, if not rampant nudity, on the Celebration stage—the early summer heat rolled in with a revival of Edwin Sanchez's Trafficking in Broken Hearts, and onstage now is Joe DiPietro's Fucking Men—Shepperd is eager to take the Celebration in other directions.
"We need to make sure we're not just doing theatre for upper-middle-class, middle-aged white gay men," Shepperd says. His second season reflects outreach to several complementary constituencies. It kicked off in July with an out-of-the-box crossover hit, a revival of Altar Boyz, and rounds out the year with Fucking Men and Tom Eyen's camp-fest Women Behind Bars, as well as a late-night revival of Justin Tanner's Oklahomo! Early next year is All About Esther, L. Trey Wilson's all-black spin on All About Eve, and Jay Paul Deratany's topical Haram Iran, about teenage boys on trial in Iran for kissing. Finally, there's a new musical of The Women of Brewster Place—not an obviously gay story, but one in which a lesbian couple figures prominently as an emblem of a loving relationship within an embracing community.
That last notion—of affirming family and community ties—signals an important priority of Shepperd's. As a married gay man with two adopted kids, he represents the powerful generational shift that's behind some of Celebration's new focus.
"We started doing some family programming, with two shows geared toward gay and lesbian families," says Shepperd. "Many baby boomers from 10 years ago remember this as the theatre that did Naked Boys Singing!, and they now have six- or seven-year-olds. We have to educate them that while we're very proud that we were the first producers of Naked Boys, it's not that theatre anymore." Reaching out in yet another direction, the Celebration also started a theatre course for senior citizens, taught by Shepperd himself, culminating with a performance of writing by the seniors. "There are a lot of stories out there that need to be documented," he says. "This is our mission: to tell the stories of people who have lived through 50 years when they couldn't tell those stories."
These are heartening reminders of the reason the Celebration began in the first place, and why it's still needed. But mere representation doesn't cut it on the mainstage anymore. As Richard Israel put it, "It was enough in 1981 to see a gay show just because it was a gay show; it could be crap. That's not the world we live in now." As several sources pointed out, audiences in the Internet age hardly need to go to the theatre to see naked bodies.
Kearns, who staged an anniversary production of Jerker a few years back, reflects on the challenges and opportunities Shepperd faces at the Celebration. "In the 20th anniversary version of Jerker, I cut all the nudity and concentrated not on the sex but on the bonding," Kearns says. "That's where we're at—looking at each other as brothers as opposed to sex objects. That's why the identity of the Celebration needs a makeover. It's not going to be easy—nudity is what the audience wanted and what they paid for. They have to be allowed to be encouraged and stimulated to go beyond that box, but it's risky."
If a company can't take risks with 64 seats on the sun-bleached border of Hollywood and West Hollywood, where can it? That a gay theatre has been laying it on the line for decades, with no signs of slowing down, is cause for celebration.