‘Medea’ Is LA Weekly Awards Queen

The biggest surprise from the annual LA Weekly Theater Awards ceremony last week was that “Reefer Madness!,” the little musical that cleaned up at last fall’s Ovations Awards and this year’s Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards, failed to complete its attempt at a triple crown, winning only one award.

Instead, the champ at the LA Weekly ceremony was “Medea: The Musical!,” which took four honors, including musical of the year. As one can surmise from the exclamation point in the title, “Medea” operated at about the same level of seriousness as “Reefer Madness!”--and even in the same building, the Hudson complex on Theatre Row.

The Odyssey Theatre did well too: Its winners included the two-part epic “The Greeks” as production of the year; Steven Berkoff’s “Shakespeare’s Villains” as top solo performance; and acting awards for Beth Hogan (“The Greeks”) and Jon Cryer and Leland Crooke (“900 Oneonta”).

The runner-up in the vote totals for a single show was “Dutchman,” at Theater at the Improv.

Besides “The Greeks” and “900 Oneonta,” other shows that won two awards each were “The Conception,” “Scenes From an Execution” and “No Orchids for Miss Blandish.” Sacred Fools’ production of “The Adding Machine” was named 20th century revival of the year, and Paul Mullin of “The Louis Slotin Sonata” and John Fisher of “Medea: The Musical!” tied for the playwriting award.

Despite a couple of moments of nudity, the ceremony at Los Angeles Theatre Center seemed more subdued than usual. Interminable introductions of each award presenter didn’t help.

Sacred Fools performed a clever introductory paean to L.A. small theater, befitting a program that restricts its regular awards to shows in theaters with fewer than 100 seats. So it was slightly incongruous when Ellen Geer, who runs the mid-sized Theatricum Botanicum, accepted a career achievement award by emphasizing the importance of paying the performers. This is a concept that is generally foreign to the world of sub-100-seat theater.

PULITZER WINNER: This year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama for “Dinner With Friends” “feels like a career award,” winning playwright Donald Margulies said last week, “like it’s for a body of work that people have acknowledged.” Which is not to slight this particular play. It “will become my most popular play,” Margulies predicted. In its account of two couples whose long friendships with each other deteriorate along with one of the two marriages, “it seems to have struck a zeitgeist chord.”

After a Louisville premiere, “Dinner With Friends” received its second production at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa in the fall of 1998. It was there that director Daniel Sullivan first staged the play; he later took it to off-Broadway. The SCR staging was “absolutely crucial to the development of the play,” Margulies said.

Other “Dinners” are already being planned at a variety of theaters. Margulies said that “something’s in the works” for an L.A. production, declining to be more specific. A spokeswoman for the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego confirmed Margulies’ word that talks are underway for a production there next winter. But Margulies said he has no desire to take “Dinner” to Broadway.

At South Coast, which commissioned Margulies’ two previous Pulitzer finalists (“Sight Unseen” and “Collected Stories”), “there’s always a commission for Donald here, whenever he wants to write something new,” artistic director Martin Benson said. He noted that “Dinner With Friends” was, by the standards of previous Margulies works, “a logistical nightmare” that required four sets covering six locations. But he added that the play handles familiar themes of midlife crisis “in such an uncliched, unique, tender way.”

“Donald’s one of the best rewriters I’ve ever worked with,” said South Coast dramaturge Jerry Patch, “nudging this, fixing that.” For the South Coast production, Margulies cut up two separate dialogues, one between the two women and one between the two men, and put them on stage at the same time, going back and forth between them in an “antiphonal” style, Patch said.

One of the Pulitzer jurors, former Los Angeles Times critic Laurie Winer, said that “Dinner With Friends” was the jury’s unanimous first choice. The runners-up were August Wilson’s “King Hedley II,” which is scheduled to play the Mark Taper Forum Sept. 14-Oct. 22, and Suzan-Lori Parks’ “In the Blood.” Parks was recently appointed to direct the new A.S.K. Theater Projects Writing for Performance Program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.