Arts Zone : Musical Celebration of American Workers

Labor Day is just an extra day off for most people, but if you’d like to celebrate the reason behind the holiday, and catch some sunshine, and have a picnic, too, make it a day at the family-friendly Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum and see “Searching for the American Dream,” a musical theater concert honoring working Americans and their history.

The spirited show ranges from an enactment of the Green Street Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which raised an outcry over child labor laws, to portraits of Harriet Tubman, Mother Jones, Samuel Gompers, Cesar Chavez, industry barons J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and many others. It’s woven together with such songs of the times as “There Once Was a Union Maid” and “Bread and Roses.”

The special Labor Day production is the kickoff of Theatricum’s “American Stories: A Concert Performance Series,” vivid musical theater pieces about people and events in American history, especially designed for ages 8 and up.

“We try to connect with kids,” said Ellen Geer, Theatricum Botanicum artistic director. “History can be boring if it’s not alive.”

Formal clothes and formal manners are not required, either.

“People making noise is wonderful to us,” she said. “I always thought theater should be like a baseball game where you cheer and you root, and you laugh and you sigh.”

The concert series, which has toured elementary and high schools, includes “Black History in America” (Sept. 26), tracing the black experience through songs and the words of African American leaders; “The Strength of Women” (Oct. 3), about such courageous, creative and history-making women as Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker; and “The Woody Guthrie Show” (Oct. 10), about the life and times of the powerful folk singer who made “This Land Is My Land” an unofficial American anthem.

At this respected rustic canyon venue, known for its professional productions of theater classics, you can picnic before or after a show at tables under the sycamores, and the outdoor stage with its stadium seating is set against a hillside’s natural tangle. Half-price children’s tickets are available for all the adult productions, and even the chef at the What You Will take-out cafe on the premises has something for “kids who won’t eat anything,” Geer said. “He’ll make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

The theater’s bumper crop of well-received theater classics running now in repertory are Brandon Thomas’ riotous “Charley’s Aunt,” Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” Shakespeare’s comic romp “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and Shaw’s “Saint Joan.”

Geer’s father, Will Geer, best known as TV’s Grandpa Walton, started Theatricum Botanicum in 1951 after being blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. He and his wife, Herta, also an artist, opened the theater as a place where blacklisted and other actors and folk singers could perform. Those performances became a family tradition.

“Actors have to work,” said Geer, an accomplished, classically trained stage and screen actor and director. “Otherwise your voice atrophies, your way of digging for emotions, and sharing them with an audience atrophies. Wherever he went, Pop always created a space for people to work, and it was vital after the blacklist. As children, we just grew up seeing that’s what you do. We like to pass on what Pop and Mom gave to us.”

The family’s theatrical vision may have broadened to include an annual professional repertory season of classics, year-round theater classes for adults and children, and wide-scale educational outreach programs, but the communal feeling hasn’t changed.

“When families come, they communicate with each other from the moment they step out of their car,” Geer said. “They might see a stink bug, they might see a lizard. They have a place where they can sit and eat--it’s a natural experience. Then they see the material, whatever it is--a comedy, a tragedy--and they can discuss it.”

With TV or movies, “I feel we lose some of that wonderful vibration that we get as human beings.”

Geer’s two daughters, longtime stage veterans at ages 18 and 22, are continuing the tradition, both performing in “Charley’s Aunt,” which will have a special Labor Day performance, Monday at 6 p.m. Tickets will be discounted if you want to make it a double header.

BE THERE

“American Stories: A Concert Performance Series,” Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon, Topanga. Searching for the American Dream (Monday, 3 p.m) “Black History in America” (Sept. 26, 1 p.m.); “The Strength of Women” (Oct. 3, 1 p.m.). $10; children 5 and under, free. Picnic baskets welcome for before or after the show. Bring cushions for the stadium-style seating. For evening shows, dress warmly. (310) 455-3723. Advance orders from What You Will Cafe: (310) 455-7285.

https://www.theatricum.com/