Getting kids into the act

Laguna Playhouse Youth Director Donna Inglima is ready for the task of molding young actors.Donna Inglima is into her work.

Inglima gets down on the floor with her acting students, demonstrating the “downward-facing dog” yoga position, as she warms them up for a two-hour session of improvisation, poetry reciting and make-believe.

As director of the Youth Theater, education and outreach for the Laguna Playhouse, Inglima has the job of inspiring, teaching and training a new generation of actors and theater-lovers.

Inglima has taken over the post vacated by Joe Lauderdale, who held the directorship for 17 years before retiring in June.

The students, all young teens of varying ages and sizes, struggle to keep up as Inglima leads them through a series of stretches and exercises.

The students have just gotten out of school, and they are full of pent-up energy that Inglima must try to direct.

With the class in a circle holding the downward-dog position, she makes them walk to the other side of the circle and change places with the person across from them.

It’s arduous but fun, and the students giggle, trying to keep their composure -- and to keep from toppling onto each other.

Then the group is ready for “group sculpture,” an exercise which combines improvisation and holding a position in character.

The students come up with their own scenarios to enact, pantomiming emotions and then explaining them to their teachers.

It’s good discipline for the aspiring actors, who go on to recite their own haiku as Inglima and co-teacher Kelly Herman critique their delivery.

Inglima stands behind one boy, holding his arms down as he attempts to recite a poem he made up on the spot.

“Plant yourself, quiet your hands and fix your eyes,” she tells him. “It’s not about the face, it comes from deep down.”

As the students get up one by one, they go through their paces. One student’s original poem is so lyrical and moving that she receives a spontaneous round of applause.

“Acting is about being truthful,” Herman instructs. “You have to believe it yourself.”

The Youth Theater not only mounts four full productions every year, it also brings theater into some 100 classrooms throughout Southern California.

Inglima trains the young people who will be on stage -- and behind the scenes. It is a job that she clearly cherishes.

“It’s about encouraging them, allowing for a discovery,” Inglima said. “Young people have fewer walls than adults, they absorb quicker.”

Inglima joined the Playhouse in 1998, moving to Laguna Beach from New York, where she spent years as an acting coach and freelance director and also ran a children’s theater company, Animal Crackers Unlimited, for 10 years. She taught theater at Syracuse University for seven years.

At one time a working actress in New York City, she was involved in a theater company, Time and Space Limited, which concentrated on classics such as Chekhov and George Bernard Shaw, as well as literary adaptations.

She helped bring the works of Gertrude Stein and Anne Sexton to the stage as part of the lively and serious theater scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

Inglima, who still has the energetic walk -- and accent -- of a true New Yorker, says she is still acclimating to this laid-back state.

“When Rick Stein [the playhouse’s executive director] recruited me from New York, I said no three times,” she said, but he finally convinced her to make the leap to Laguna.

“I was brought in to support the youth program and develop a touring program,” she said. “This theater casts age-appropriately, and the standards are high. We encourage our students to reach a professional level.”

Stein says that Inglima was a natural choice for both positions.

“In October 1998, I prevailed upon Donna Inglima to come work for the playhouse as a partner to Joe Lauderdale in leading our rapidly growing youth and education programs,” Stein said.

“Donna worked for me 20 years earlier in a similar capacity in upstate New York and had since been a professor of theater at Syracuse University. Upon Joe’s retirement, the playhouse began a process, still under way, of evaluating its youth and education programs.

“We saw Donna as the obvious choice to lead these programs through this evolution and consolidated their management in her capable hands.”

Inglima says that one of the perks for her at the playhouse is the opportunity to work on the “main stage” as a director.

Another of her passions is adapting works from other literary genres, such as “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” “Give a Boy a Gun” and others.

With Theaterreach, the Playhouse brings productions of excellent children’s books to schools -- with Inglima at the helm, and often in the director’s chair.

Theater for a New Generation mounts challenging, real-life dramas with and for young people, ages 13 and up, involving pressing -- and touchy -- social issues such as sex.

But when it came to directing this year’s final youth production, “Wiley and the Hairy Man,” Inglima offered the directing job to Lauderdale.

“It was the first production he had ever directed here, and it was fitting for him to do it,” she said. “It brought everything full circle.”

Founded in 1920, the Laguna Playhouse is believed to be the oldest continuously operating community theater in Southern California.

The Pasadena Playhouse is older, but, as Inglima noted, it stopped running during World War II.

The Laguna Playhouse, on the other hand, provided entertainment for troops during the war in the original 1924 theater on Ocean Ave.

It’s kept growing ever since.

The Moulton Playhouse on Laguna Canyon Rd. opened in 1969, and in 1998 the organization acquired 580 Broadway, a historic building next door to the modern playhouse, with future plans for an expansion of the theater.

This is where Inglima has her office, and she enjoys pointing out the original gaslights that still operate on the second floor.

Over the years, as Orange County has grown up, so has the playhouse -- and the local theater scene.

From this platform, the Playhouse has grown in stature and ambition. Inglima notes that four “star dressing rooms” were built just a few years ago, when Joyce and Dick Van Patten came to the playhouse for a production.

Other “names” that have trod the boards at the playhouse include Sally Struthers and, much earlier, Harrison Ford, who launched his acting career there in 1965.

“A lot has changed,” she said. “We were the one big show, and now there are many shows. We are rededicated to our mission, and in the future I see tremendous growth and continued dedication to quality programs.”

There are plans afoot for a new, 225-seat “intimate” theater, with classrooms, sound studio and more “audience amenities.” The new facility at 580 Broadway will be connected to the Moulton Theatre, and the playhouse website boasts that the two theaters “will form the centerpiece of the Laguna Beach Arts District.”

In the Green Room, where the youth classes are taught, colorful posters of productions from years past line the walls. No doubt many more will be added.

20051111ipq1dzkn(LA)Donna Inglima goes over a poem written and performed by student Nettie Wigdor. 20051111ipq1dlknPHOTOS BY DOUGLAS ZIMMERMAN / COASTLINE PILOT(LA)Donna Inglima, the youth director at the Laguna Playhouse, raises her hands as her students finish peforming a “group sculpture” in which a patient, played by Ryan Morris, ascends to heaven. Inglima became the theater’s director this year.