A director's playhouse
Theatre @ Boston Court brings re-imagined classics to an intimate venue
By Jana J. Monji 08/20/2008
Boston Court was only the name of a small street in Pasadena until six years ago, when Clark Branson, Michael Seel and Tony-award nominated producer and actor Eileen T’Kaye got together to found the Boston Court Performing Arts Center. T’Kaye invited directors Jessica Kubzansky and Michael Michetti on board as artistic directors of The Theatre @ Boston Court.
Kubzansky, the 2004 winner of the LA Drama Critics Circle award for Sustained Excellence in Theatre, has directed locally at the Geffen, LA Theater Company and the Colony in Burbank and in Orange County at South Coast Rep and the Laguna Playhouse. The equally distinguished Michetti, whose direction of “Ouroboros” at Boston Court won an LA Weekly Award for production of the year and whose “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” won an Ovation Award, also directs at the Pasadena Playhouse, Actors’ Gang and Glendale’s A Noise Within.
Since then, despite the traditionalist ring of Boston, the Theatre @ Boston Court has brought gorgeously re-imagined classics or new works with lush language and production values to the small, intimate venue. Reaching out to the ethnically diverse Los Angeles area, this venue has helped build bridges of understanding between less vocal cultural enclaves, opening them with magical words like something out of the tales of the Arabian Nights.
“We don’t theme our seasons,” Michetti explained. “We try to do things that are relevant. That doesn’t always mean that it’s politically relevant to these times; sometimes they are personal plays. We do try to do plays that feel like they are saying something for our times. That doesn’t necessarily mean like trends or the front page for The New York Times. … [This season] we’re doing a musical based on Chekhov [‘Gulls’], we did a Shakespeare production [‘Othello’] and a kind of nesting dolls play based on ‘1001 Nights’ [‘1001’].”
“But really,” Kubzansky added, “[‘1001’] was about post 9/11 and that sort of folds inside how the ancient stories still have relevance today.”
In 2005, the season included David Hare’s translation of German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 “Mother Courage and her Children,” under the direction of Kubzansky. Brecht left Germany in 1933 when Hitler took power and wrote the story about the canteen cart owner trying to survive the war in exile with her three children.
According to Kubzansky, it was the only time when they considered the actor first. “I’ve known for a long time if I ever got to do ‘Mother Courage’ that I wanted to work with Camille Saviola because I think she’s a force of nature. …I really thought we needed to do ‘Mother Courage’ because we were heading into the war,” she said. “It felt so important to me to talk about that. … I felt unless I can have Camille I don’t want to do it. So that’s possibly the only time the actor has been the first consideration.”
Unlike many small theaters, Boston Court doesn’t have a resident acting company. Describing their rationale, Michetti commented, “We did make a decision early on that we were not going to have a resident acting company for a number of reasons. For a lot of theaters, that is their infrastructure and the actors are their primary asset.” Yet that brings certain challenges — “You have to tailor the choices of material to the actors you have: their types, their strengths and their weaknesses. It really limits the kind of productions you can select.”
Kubzansky added, “There would be no way for us to retain a company vast enough that we could both showcase Julia Cho’s ‘The Winchester House’ and Suzan Lori Parks’ ‘The America Play’ and Jason Grote’s ‘1001.’” Those plays addressed the East Asian, the African-American and the Middle Eastern communities respectively.
What Boston Court has become instead is a directors’ playhouse. Michetti said, “In our freelance careers, a lot of the work that [Jessica and I] did that we were the most proud of has been work where someone said, ‘What is it you’re dying to do?’ So we go to directors we’re interested in and ask them what their passion projects are. Sometimes we will try to broker a marriage between a play and a director.”
The last production in their schedule, a world premiere thriller about the race to sequence the human genome, “The Sequence,” came as a package deal. Kubzansky relates, “John Langs is a frequent collaborator of [playwright] Paul Mullin. … That’s the way we love it to happen.”
The Theatre @ Boston Court is at 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena. For tickets to “Gulls,” which closes Sunday, call the box office at (626) 683-6883 or visit bostoncourt.com.
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