Theatre Banshee draws its final curtain
It’s the end of an era for Theatre Banshee, the respected nonprofit professional theater company that has called Burbank home for the past 20 years. Due to a “sudden and massive increase in our rent,” said Artistic Director Sean Branney in an email, the company that specialized in works by Irish playwrights is closing the doors of its venue on West Magnolia Boulevard as of Dec. 1.
Reached by phone last week, Branney was clearly emotional, but, he said, “it being Thanksgiving week, I find the heartbreak of the situation is leavened with gratitude that we had such a remarkable venue in which to create theater and bring together the wonderful theater artists here in Los Angeles with the audiences who enjoy the kind of work we did there.”
The recent decision by Actor’s Equity Assn. to no longer waive its jurisdiction over Los Angeles’ theaters of 99-seats or fewer that use professional actors — a decision contested in a suit filed by Equity members in October in federal court — didn’t play a part in the closure, Branney said, although “having the AEA thing …as a factor for small and independent producers just makes it harder. It hasn’t impacted us yet, but it is looming on the horizon for everybody.”
Theatre Banshee’s history is both personal and professional. Branney and Co-Artistic Director Leslie Baldwin met at CalArts while earning their MFA’s, married in 1992, and started Theatre Banshee in 1994, after a two years of being in “not so good productions,” Branney said.
“I had just come off being in the worst ‘Othello’ imaginable, and we said, there’s got to be a better way to do this.” He and Baldwin teamed up with two other couples to start their own theater company, “and then the Northridge earthquake happened. One couple moved away, then the other couple divorced. So we were left standing and we said, let’s see what it takes to do this.”
In 1995, fledgling Theatre Banshee launched with a well-received West Coast premiere of “Eclipsed” by Patricia Burke Brogan, a playwright from Galway, at what was then the Gene Bua Acting for Life Theatre. (Twelve years later, the venue officially became “The Banshee.”)
With works as diverse as the Los Angeles premiere of Marina Carr’s haunting “Medea”-inspired “By the Bog of Cats,” and the company’s beautifully realized original and reprised “stage documentary,” “Mine Eyes Hath Seen” — a human chronicle of the Civil War based on the words of the men and women affected by the conflict — Banshee productions over the years earned multiple L.A. Drama Critics Circle, LA Weekly, Back Stage West and Ovation awards and nominations for excellence.
Indeed, besides the company’s varied productions of Irish plays, Theatre Banshee had sterling successes with such classic American works as John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” (“For a show that suffers at the hands of well-meaning high school casts nationwide,” Branney observed, “I think a lot of audiences were stunned to see how powerful and timely ‘The Crucible’ was.”)
But Branney is already looking forward to the next chapter. He and Baldwin are developing an original new play that, when finished, the couple plan to take to the Galway Arts Festival, and then hope to take on the road.
“I’ve got family in Northern Ireland,” Branney said, “and we thought it would be fun to take a Banshee show over there. Now that we’re not operating a venue, a project like that becomes feasible.
“We’ve also had a couple of other theater companies that have reached out to us,” he added, “so I think we’ll look around at the landscape and see if bunking up and sharing a space might make sense for us. It’s unlikely, due to the cost, that we’d immediately go and seek a new space. We’re not going to rush into anything.
“I do come back to a sense of gratitude, though,” Branney said. “So while I’m sad, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to make great theater in Burbank.”
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LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.