Was it only a year ago that I was rhapsodizing about the upcoming 2016 programming at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum?
As I wrote at the time, the Theatricum’s summer program blew in like a fresh breeze in a hot and suffocating campaign season otherwise filled with terrorism, gun violence, venomous national politics and the distant thunder of fascism’s goose-stepping minions on the march toward Washington.
After Ellen Geer and her colleagues previewed the program at an intimate salon and reception, I wound my way homeward down through the canyon and reflected on the healing power of the arts to help us make it through the dark nights of the soul.
I missed this year’s salon by about 300 miles, since we were passing outbound through Henderson, Nevada, for a two-week vacation in the Grand Circle of our Southwest national parks. The beer and ribs at Lucille’s Smokehouse Bar-B-Que were fine, but it wasn’t Topanga.
Every summer at the Theatricum is a new adventure, so when we returned I was eager to learn about Ellen’s offerings in her 2017 summer season. I was not disappointed.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream returns, a perennial summer charmer that is by turns comedic, romantic and thoroughly (almost literally) enchanting. I first saw a modern-dress production at a local college when I was in high school, nearly 50 (!) years ago, and I still remember it well. Several fine film versions, too, including the famous 1935 all-star Max Reinhardt production featuring Dick Powell and Olivia de Havilland as the lovers Lysander and Hermia, and a young Mickey Rooney as Puck. A few years back, we were lucky enough to score a great box at the Bowl for a special anniversary program—Reinhardt had originally mounted a spectacular staging of the play at the Bowl in 1934, which inspired the movie version the following year—where we met the director’s grandson, Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt, and Mickey Rooney, himself, seated in the neighboring box. I won’t forget the poignant scene of Rooney, by then quite elderly, watching himself on screen as a young teenager capering about as the mischievous fairy, Robin Goodfellow.
Other pleasures on offer at the Theatricum include The Merchant of Venice, a still controversial study in anti-Semitism, romantic intrigue, and revenge, featuring one of Shakespeare’s most appealing, accomplished and resourceful female characters in Portia, the heroine of the play.
We also have the celebrated musical adaptation of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s famous parable of Soviet communism and political despotism that most of us first encountered in junior high school, a production originally mounted by Britain’s leading theatrical director, Sir Peter Hall, back in (most fittingly) 1984.
There is Jon Robin Baitz’s Pulitzer finalist, Other Desert Cities, an unsparing look at the seemingly stable and successful family of conservative Hollywood royalty that finds itself unexpectedly confronting political conflict and the resulting fallout of a past tragedy and a long-buried dark family secret. Personally, I’m looking forward to this one; Baitz’s pop-up play Vicuña, entirely written and produced for the Kirk Douglas Theatre in the heat of last year’s presidential campaign, was unnervingly topical and prescient. The season concludes with Trouble In Mind, actor-activist Alice Childress’ play-within-a-play offering an intriguing mid-‘50s meta-commentary on the early civil rights movement.
The play’s the thing—and in this political mean season, here are five we can look forward to.
Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum is located at 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Topanga, CA 90290; www.theatricum.com; (310) 455-3723.
