Theater in the Park Brings Classics Up to Date

Elizabethan morality, Greek tragedy and French and English comedy are coming to a Culver City park this month during the city’s outdoor festival of classical plays.

The Theater in the Park series at Paul Carlson Park kicks off this weekend with “Dr. Faustus,” Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-Century tale of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil. Subsequent weekends will see Euripides’ “Alcestis,” Moliere’s farce, “The Imaginary Invalid,” and Francis Beaumont’s comic “Knight of the Burning Pestle.”

Sponsored by the city’s Human Services Department, the free festival began three years ago when Anne Laskey, a Westside director, approached Culver City with a proposal to stage classical plays. She chose Culver City because she had previously acted in a city-sponsored play at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium and because “being a small city, there’s not a lot of bureaucracy and red tape to go through.”

The city this year is donating $600 and rehearsal space in two recreation centers and paying for printing, postage and lumber for the productions, Laskey said.

35 Actors

Auditions, advertised in local newspapers and on flyers posted at colleges and libraries, were held in early July. The 35 actors selected, who are not paid and who fill about 55 different roles among the four plays, have been rehearsing furiously ever since, said Laskey, artistic director and co-producer of the series.

In real life, the actors range in age from 10 to about 50, and include actual actors, as well as writers, waitresses, accountants, clerks and a pastor, Laskey said. Most of them are Westside residents.

Linda Israelson of Culver City, at 5 feet, 10 inches tall, will try to persuade audiences that she’s George the Dwarf in “Knight of the Burning Pestle.” She waitresses in Santa Monica and has had jobs as an extra in movies and commercials. Having acted in Theater in the Park before, she says she enjoys performing in the “wide open space” of the outdoors.

The Rev. Frank Ramirez, who plays a psychiatrist in the festival’s modernized version of “Alcestis,” a quack doctor in “Invalid” and a merchant in “Knight,” sometimes has had to juggle two different rehearsals per night. “It gets confusing to keep track” when he has to switch from slapstick comedy to Greek tragedy in one evening, he says. “I have to ask, ‘Who am I right now?’ ”

Father-Son Act

Ramirez, a theater-arts major in college who continued working on plays during his seminary studies, says this is his first acting role in seven years. A Shakespeare fan, he attends Oregon’s Shakespeare festival in Ashland every year. The love of Elizabethan theater, he says, has rubbed off on his 10-year-old son, who also landed roles in “Knight.”

The congregation at Ladera Church of the Brethren in Ladera Heights is amused with their pastor-actor, Ramirez says. He considers the acting, along with running and free-lance writing, another activity that “takes me totally away from the ministry” and “keeps me from burning out or doing something like Oral Roberts or Tammy Bakker.”

The festival, Laskey says, aims to bring theater to “some people who aren’t used to seeing theater” and to win over those who, with a groan, remember plodding through Shakespeare and Sophocles in high school English classes.

To spice them up, “Alcestis” and “The Imaginary Invalid” will be thrust forward in time to the present, Laskey said. In “Alcestis,” written in 438 BC, a king’s wife volunteers to die for him, and Heracles battles Death to rescue her. Shifted to 1989 Beverly Hills, “the king is a major studio executive, the wife would be the starlet who’d give up her career to have his children, and Death would be a typical high-powered drug dealer,” Laskey said.

Modern Plot Twists

In “The Imaginary Invalid,” about a hypochondriac who tries to marry his daughter into a family of doctors, Paris of the 1600s becomes Los Angeles of today. The daughter wants to wed a young rock ‘n’ roll music teacher “who speaks in Valley talk,” said stage manager Diana Utech. The father’s choice, “a real nerd of a doctor,” is called a “dweeb,” said Utech, who is also a department store saleswoman.

Classics can be “funny, moving, bawdy,” Laskey says, describing “Knight,” written in 1607, as “on the level of the Three Stooges go Elizabethan.” In the play, a grocer and his wife interrupt a play and insist on substituting its scenes and lines with their own and casting their assistant, Ralph, as the leading man. Ralph is cast as a Don Quixote-type knight who tries to save damsels in distress; meanwhile, the real actors try valiantly to continue their show.

Laskey and co-producer Richard Stone chose the plays based on their length and whether they could be whittled down to an hour’s playing time. Another factor was whether they could be pulled off in a park. That meant complicated sets, costumes, lighting and atmosphere were out, she says.

“Very quiet plays don’t work, because (in the park) there are wild parrots that screech, ice cream trucks, kids having birthday parties. So you need something that doesn’t rely on a lot of mood.”

“Dr. Faustus” will be presented Saturday and Sunday; “Alcestis” on Aug. 12 and 13; “The Imaginary Invalid” on Aug. 19 and 20; and “Knight of the Burning Pestle” on Aug. 26 and 27. All performances start at 2 p.m. at Paul Carlson Park, at Motor Avenue and Braddock Drive.

THEATER IN THE PARK

Sat-Sun: “Dr. Faustus.”

Aug.12-13: “Alcestis.”

Aug. 19-20: “The Imaginary Invalid.”

Aug. 26-27: “Knight of the Burning Pestle.”

All performances start at 2 p.m. at Paul Carlson Park, at Motor Avenue and Braddock Drive. Admission is free.