A Feisty Company’s Gaelic Coup

Chalk it up to the luck of the Irish and a lot of hard work. The Celtic Arts Center, one of Los Angeles’ longest-lived culturally specific arts organizations, had fallen on some hard times. The group’s Hollywood venue burned, it lost a beloved company leader, and its ranks had dwindled.

But now the Celtic Arts Center is making a comeback, launching its first full theater season in its new Valley home, with a revitalized and fast-growing membership to boot. According to the center, the roster has rebounded from fewer than 70 to more than 300, and it’s still climbing.

On top of that, the organization has now scored the kind of artistic coup that would be the envy of venues many times its size, securing the rights to a play by Marie Jones, best known for the Tony-nominated Broadway and West End hit “Stones in His Pockets.”

Opening this weekend is the L.A. premiere of Jones’ “A Night in November,” performed by Northern Irish actor Marty Maguire and directed by Tim Byron Owen. The Celtic Arts Center’s theater season will continue with “The Secret Life of Constance Wilde” by Thomas Kilroy, “The Lonesome West” by Martin McDonagh and a one-act play festival.

The stroke of good fortune of getting the rights to “A Night in November” is not lost on those in charge at the Celtic Arts Center in the Valley Village neighborhood of L.A. “She’s a produced playwright on Broadway, nominated for three Tony Awards last year,” says artistic director Barry Lynch, an actor who was one of the center’s founding members. “We’re a 49-seat theater in Valley Village, California--not even Los Angeles. It’s Valley Village, California!”

Naturally, it didn’t hurt that Maguire and Jones were friends. “She gave me my first professional acting job in 1986,” Maguire says. “I auditioned at Marie’s company, Charabanc Theatre in Belfast, and that was the start of my relationship with her.

“I think because it was me who was performing it, Marie gave her blessing,” he continues. “[She was] considering bringing back ‘A Night in November’ with a huge star. But God love Marie, she’s kept her feet on the ground. It went from being maybe Kenneth Branagh to me, in a little theater, which was incredibly generous.”

It was generous and also shrewd. The Belfast-born Maguire was clearly poised to bring much of his own life experience to the piece. A panoramic solo with more than 20 characters, the play focuses on the humble life of an Everyman civil servant in Northern Ireland and the personal transformation he undergoes when confronted with the bigotry and hatred of his countrymen before embarking on an odyssey to America.

“This man echoes everything I’ve always felt about Northern Ireland, how futile it is that people are murdering each other over religion and politics,” Maguire says. “It’s one guy’s discovery that even though he’s a Northern Irish Protestant, why can’t we all just be Irish people and stop killing each other?”

The Belfast-born Jones’ work as an actress and writer has long been known in Northern Ireland, but it was only with the hit “Stones in His Pockets” that she broke through to more widespread recognition as a playwright. First staged at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, “Stones in His Pockets” won not only Tony nominations, but also London’s Olivier Award for its West End production.

Maguire has followed Jones’ recent fame, even as he’s continued to dream of performing her work himself. The actor, who moved to L.A. in 1989, has long been working as “a typical bartender-actor” at a place called Ireland’s 32 in Van Nuys, often organizing pub theater and staged readings there.

Consequently, when a critic friend brought Jones’ “A Night in November” to Maguire’s attention, he couldn’t resist giving it an outing. “Over the last couple of years, I’ve done maybe six or seven performances of it,” he says, “but always dreaming of the day when I could do a proper production.”

One of the people who caught one of Maguire’s pub readings was Tom Hayden, who invited the actor to perform the work as a fund-raiser for his unsuccessful campaign for Los Angeles City Council in the last election. That’s where the Celtic Arts Center’s Lynch and Owen first saw Maguire perform the piece.

“I was invited to see a reading in an old abandoned bank building on skid row,” Lynch recalls. “I’m not usually a fan of one-person shows, but I was just so completely blown away by not only the material, but by the actor.

“What attracted me most about this play was that through the years I’ve seen many plays that portrayed the Catholics to be bad guys and tons of plays that portrayed the Protestants to be the bad guys, and in this play there is no bad guy,” Lynch continues. “This play is just about a man who wants to belong, a man who wants to be a part of something, a man who just wants to be.”

The material also has personal resonance for Lynch, a former member of New York’s Circle Rep who has been with the Celtic Arts Center since it began in the mid-’80s. “I had one grandfather who was born in Derry, in the north of Ireland, who was a Protestant, and the other side of my family was Catholic,” he explains. “I have a strong identification with the two sides.”

Moreover, the play’s underlying ecumenism struck home. “My mom would pray in any building,” Lynch says. “She’d go into a synagogue as fast as she’d go into a Protestant church as fast as she’d go into a Catholic church. It didn’t matter. And this play is about a man who says finally it doesn’t matter.”

Lynch and Owen were touched by Maguire’s performance. “I said we would really love to do this play and we’re going to do everything we can to get the rights, not expecting to get them,” Lynch recalls. “Tim Owen went through a lot of different channels. They pursued it and pursued it. Finally she said, ‘OK, I’ll give you a six-week run,’ and we were just ecstatic.”

The timing was also right, in terms of the renaissance of the Celtic Arts Center. Only six months earlier, the organization had undergone a key change due to the terminal illness of former executive director Sean Walsh. “We started reorganizing about a year and a half ago when Sean Walsh found out he had cancer,” explains executive director Thom MacNamara. “When Sean passed away, the board voted me in, and my first big project was to find a new venue.”

After locating the current site, MacNamara spearheaded the conversion of the space, a former furniture outlet store, into a multiuse arts and community center, suitable for the center’s varied programming of theater, music, dance, spoken word and more.

“We had generous donations from Sony, some individuals who gave us some start-up money, and one man who gave us his Home Depot credit card. And we had some very skilled people who knew what to do,” MacNamara says. “There’s a new wooden floor that is dancer friendly and they built everything from scratch.”

Lynch helped with the actual building, as he had with the center’s old home on Hollywood Boulevard. “This is the second time I’ve walked into the space on day one and built that place from scratch,” he recalls. “Something magical happens when you do it from scratch. It’s yours, and when you walk on the stage, it’s familiar and everyone knows it. You have an investment.”

Building the theater itself was a labor of love, just as rebuilding the Celtic Arts Center has been, particularly in a city as geographically and culturally diverse as Los Angeles. “L.A. is not like most cities where you have central locales where specific ethnic groups gravitate to,” Lynch says. “To attract the community was a little more difficult out here, but we’ve done it. We have a strong base. We’ve got a lot of spirit. And we’ve got a lot of tradition.

“We have outgrown the space we’re in now, in one year,” Lynch continues.

“It’s phenomenal. In my wildest imagination, I didn’t know it would grow this fast. Why? Because I think there’s a need in people to belong, the same as in ‘A Night in November.’ We need to have community.”

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“A NIGHT IN NOVEMBER,” Celtic Arts Center, 4843 Laurel Canyon Blvd., L.A. Dates: Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. (Sold out this Saturday). Ends March 2. Price: $15. Phone: (818) 760-8322.

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Jan Breslauer, producing director at the Falcon Theatre, is a regular contributor to Calendar.