KPFK to Broadcast Series of Multicultural Stage Plays

Six of Los Angeles’ most recent cultural stage plays will be broadcast in radio form over KPFK-FM (90.7) during the coming months.

As part of a special series, the North Hollywood public radio station has brought in original cast members to perform before the microphone. Each play represents a different faction of Los Angeles’ multicultural population.

“The only problem was in selecting only six productions,” said Sharon Rosewoman, an independent radio producer who worked on the series for KPFK. “There are many plays that are very good, but they are very visual and didn’t translate to the ear. What I selected was based on content. The plays needed to be literate and have something important to say.”

Among the first broadcasts will be Alan Drury’s “The Man Himself,” a one-man production filled with the musings of a British working-class type. Ian Ruskin will reprise his Stages Trilingual Theatre role, which Times’ reviewer T.H. McCulloh called “deliciously comic, heartbreakingly sympathetic.”

Other plays that have been recorded for broadcast include:

* “Bricktop”--the story of Prohibition jazz baby Ada Smith, a musical that was at the Inner City Cultural Center in August and follows the life and times of black entertainers of that era.

* “The Mission of Mother Jones”--a one-woman drama, starring Deborah Marsh, about the Irish woman who organized miners in Pennsylvania and West Virginia at the turn of the century.

* A 30-minute monologue by Manazar Gamboa from Daniel Martinez’ “Ignore the Dents,” which he describes as a micro urban opera Times’ music critic Martin Bernheimer wrote that this “communal sociopolitico-musico-theatrical extravaganza” suffered from “much noise, little harmony.”

The KPFK series is also scheduled to include productions of Luis Valdez’ “Soldado Razo,” which was at the Japan America Theater last summer, and Dan Seymour’s Burbage Theater production of “A-Bomb Beauties,” based on the true story of 25 Japanese women who were disfigured by the bombing of Hiroshima and later brought to the United States by a group of philanthropists to undergo reconstructive surgery.

Some of the plays were slightly rewritten for radio. The project was funded by a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs grant.