Faces to watch

Michael Ritchie

Artistic director

Center Theatre Group’s new artistic director (as of Jan. 1) will be hard to avoid in 2005. Everyone in the Los Angeles theatrical world and many theater mavens elsewhere will sift his selection of productions for 2005-06 and his appointments of personnel for clues as to where he’ll take the city’s flagship theater company as it changes captains for the first time in its nearly 40-year history.

The company’s associate producer, Neel Keller -- the only CTG staff member who has worked previously with Ritchie, at Massachusetts’ Williamstown Theatre Festival and in New York -- forecasts “an exciting collaborative feeling” under Ritchie. “He instills a puckish sense of fun and an understanding that we are blessed that this is our career. He draws people in and encourages them to do more and better than they thought they could do.”

-- Don Shirley

Nancy Keystone

Director/writer/scenic designer

The artistic director of Critical Mass Performance Group has created a stir with her ensemble pieces on historical figures, such as “The Akhmatova Project” (about Russian poet Anna Akhmatova), which won raves at the Actors’ Gang in 2000. In 2005, she will move to the larger space and the higher profile of the new Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, where Center Theatre Group will present her “Apollo -- Part 1: Lebensraum.” Employing a collage-based, movement-drenched style, it concerns the space scientists who moved from Nazi Germany to the U.S. after World War II.

Keystone is also a veteran director at theaters in Atlanta and Portland, Ore. She’s developing “Apollo -- Part 2,” which covers the intersection of the space race and the civil rights movement, at Portland Center Stage. Her goal, she says, is “to delve into character, relationships and history by exploding the mere fact and mining the emotional and poetic events within.”

-- D.S.

Noah Haidle

Playwright

Haidle got plenty of bang in 2004 from his first major-stage show, “Mr. Marmalade.” Its darkly comic depiction of a too-knowing preschooler and her abusive imaginary friend sent a few patrons to the exits at South Coast Repertory, but mainly it won plaudits for its daring and flights of fancy. Just 26, Haidle will be back at SCR in 2005 with the March 11 world premiere of “Princess Marjorie,” which examines society’s perceptions of beauty and ugliness via two brothers who worship a woman they haven’t seen in years, only to discover that she has changed quite a bit. Also in ‘05, New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre will premiere Haidle’s “Rag and Bone,” and the Roundabout Theatre Company will give “Mr. Marmalade” its first New York production.

-- Mike Boehm