Community Theaters Survive on Love of the Craft
by Barry Friedman, Urban Tulsa Weekly, 12/5/2002
(From left) Sara Cruncleton, John Cruncleton, Amber Whitlatch, and Jeff Whitlatch of the Midwestern Theater Troupe and Nightingale Theater
Director Jose Quintero, who was nominated four times for a Tony Award and who, perhaps more than any other director, brought Eugene O’Neill back from the dead in American theatre, once told a group of University of Tulsa theatre students whining about the lack of acting opportunities in town: "You want to act, you act! You get some friends, you find a garage, and you act. No excuses."
Which is what makes Tulsa Spotlight Theatre, Midwestern Theatre Group, Grace Ann Productions, Tulsa Experimental Theatre, Theatre Club, Theatre Arts, and Tulsa Regional Theatre so important to local actors. They provide much needed venues for the continued development of both plays and work for local performers.
For the most part, these theatre groups perform under the radar in Tulsa, so don’t receive the attention of, say, Theatre Tulsa, American Theatre Company, or Celebrity Attractions, but the work they do is often more innovative.
Their shows are sometimes improvisational and brilliant; sometimes crude and incomprehensible affairs done on shoestring budgets with borrowed costumes; sometimes unapologetic crowd pleasers and star vehicles. Often these plays have names like project and dick and vagina in their titles and include hand-held video recorders and television monitors strewn about the stage.
While not performing in garages, most of these groups work in parks, converted restaurants, warehouses with bad plumbing, and old movie houses in parts of town where you shouldn’t bring the good car. These venues are, in a real sense, part of the experience, because the shows presented, many of them avant-garde, experimental pieces, are at home in poorly-lit theatres with folding chairs, stale popcorn, and temperamental central heating and air conditioning. To put it another way, when Theatre Club did The Vagina Monologues last year, it didn’t belong at the Performing Arts Center’s Williams Theatre anymore than American Theatre Company’s A Christmas Carol belongs in the black box of Heller Theatre.
Regardless of the number of theatre groups in town, Tulsa is still a small artistic community. And the consensus among all these groups—the mainstream organizations as well—is that what helps one group helps them all. Gone, for the moment, are the turf battles of which actor can work for which group or which group gets to call itself "Tulsa’s Only Professional Theatre." Actors are now free to appear as a cigarette package in TexT’s The Distance Between Bodies Grows Greater Everyday one month and in a smoking jacket in a Theatre Tulsa’s Blithe Spirit the next without being blackballed from either.
As Quintero said, "You want to act, you act!"
But first you need a place. And then a philosophy.
Tulsa Spotlight Theatre
It’s an exaggeration to say that Tulsa Spotlight Theatre has been around so long that Nebechenezzer used to bring his dates there, but not by much. If you drive north on Riverside, perhaps farther north than you needed to go, you’ll see a theatre that looks like it’s been running the same shows for 50 years. In a sense, it has.
In 1952, a group of local actors started Tulsa Spotlight Theatre in a founder’s living room and, a year later, first performed The Drunkard, a play condensed from the melodrama Ten Nights in a Barroom, in its current location on Riverside. And while it was only planned for one performance, The Drunkard has been running ever since. The Olio, a vaudeville show, featuring local singers, dancers, and magicians was added a few years later.
The point, say producers, is to recreate the same melodramatic atmosphere in these shows that was found more than 100 years ago when they were performed in beer gardens and city parks. Audiences are encouraged (expected) to cheer the hero, hurl invective at the villain, and, generally, to be a part of the narrative.
Currently, more than 150 actors, olio performers, servers, and supporters are part of Tulsa Spotlight Theatre. Tulsa Spotlighters brings The Olio to hospitals and institutions, especially during the holidays. The Drunkard and The Olio run every Saturday night.
The Midwestern Theatre Troupe
"When people in the theatre cultivate an isolationist view, it’s not going to work," says John Cruncleton, one of the owners of the Nightingale Theatre and its resident theatre group The Midwestern Theatre Troupe. The Troupe was founded to produce original plays, and its first play, Baby, of Abbaddon Mountain, opened at what is now the Delaware Playhouse.
After producing plays at the Center for the Physically Limited and the Springdale Community Theatre, Midwestern Theatre Troupe finally found its home at the Nightingale. Its first production at the facility was the groundbreaking Romolo the Great, a play that reminded some of a dark Fellini film, but which Cruncleton calls a "warm, delicious show." Every year, according to Cruncleton, the Troupe produces an original play and a Shakespearean piece.
"The most interesting thing about most of the good work going on in Tulsa," he says, "is that for the most part, it’s all volunteer. There are a number of talented people in town; it’s really starting to unify." When not being used by Midwestern, Nightingale is home to other groups in town, like Theatre Club, which produced Beckett’s Endgame at the theatre.
Films, one-person shows, and underground guerilla circuses, as Cruncleton calls it, find Nightingale’s peculiar charm conducive to shows from the subversive to the main stream. He does see a need for groups in this town to, as he says, provide more "internal support."
"What makes a theatre community vibrant," he says, "is when artists of one group go out and see others’ work."
Grace Ann Productions
So what’s a Broadway veteran and burgeoning theatre doing in a shopping center, near a pizza place and a gas station? "Outgrowing it," says one E. Kirby, the Broadway veteran, and artistic director of both Grace Ann Productions and Kirby Kasting and Studios. Forget the self-consciously cute, misspelled alliteration; this is, according to Kirby, serious theatre.
Kirby, who’s performed the role of Richie in A Chorus Line on Broadway, says, "I think there’s an overwhelming desire in this town for Tulsans to see Tulsans on stage … to have homegrown and native actors and actresses. I think the PAC brings in good out of town people; our focus is different."
He says Grace Ann Productions hopes to provide a "safe atmosphere of love and acceptance." Kirby hopes that by doing this, his theatre will encourage the performer to take risks and, ultimately, experience new levels of artistic expression. "Theatre is an awesome opportunity to try on different clothes." Grace Ann opens its door to anyone who has a desire to express him or herself artistically, which gives the place less of an edge than other theatres in town. And that may be the point. Kirby is not as sanguine, though, about the theatrical cease-fire in town.
"There’s still a lack of unity, and the competitiveness limits other group’s ability to network and produce the big picture of what we’re supposed to be doing in theatre." Part of that big picture, for him, is taking shows not only on the road, but also across the ocean. Grace Ann’ production of Godspell appeared in Stockholm, and last year’s Temptations of Mann appeared in San Francisco. Children of Eden, a recent production, based on the first nine and a half chapters of the bible, is slated for Australia.
Kirby, who Barbara Bush once called "a consummate entertainer with a tremendous dedication to the arts," hopes to build a new theatre, away from the pizza place, where there will be more room for dancing and acting workshops and theatre space. "We envision being Branson-style entertainment, where mom and dad can bring the kids—or vice versa."
Tulsa Experimental Theatre
Founder Jonathan Scott Chin, who will soon be studying directing at Columbia University, told a funny story about reviewers, his little theatre group, abbreviated TexT, and the perception of what theatre is supposed to be.
In the summer of 2001, during SummerStage, Tulsa’s theatre festival held at the PAC, TExT produced a show called The Distance Between Bodies Grows Greater Every Day. "The critic hated it, hated me, hated everything about it. I mean, here we are, this little bitty group, and the guy unloaded. I guess what we gave him was too easy of a target." And what he gave them was a piece combining the spoken word, dance and music, and audio and video effects.
Chinn, who also produced StudioTulsa for years on KWGS, says of the mission of TexT, "I’m really interested in the relationships, the interface we have with the world and how it’s shifting, what it can affect." The group, which consists of a small group of dedicated actors, whom Chinn says he both loves and trusts, shares his unorthodox vision of theatre.
TexT projects, like a 24-hour play festival, where plays were both written and performed in one day, also included Line In/Line Out for last year’s New Genre Festival IX. Chinn hopes to create special projects that engender an interest in experimental forms in both artists and audiences. "In more traditional work, there is a set of expressions that the audience agrees on.
"We all agree to applaud during the blackout, to laugh at a joke with a punch line. The actor, in turn, agrees to pause for the laugh before he or she moves on. But with our work, the goal is to take away expectations, and to engage the audience in immediate, unexpected ways."
Theatre Club
You’ve got to hand it to Theatre Club. In previous years, it produced one play, The Vagina Monologues, a play about the personification of female genitalia that has become a national hit and touring show (in Tulsa this week); Stop Kiss, a play about a kiss between two women; and this past summer, the impressive The Laramie Project, a show about the brutal killing of student Matthew Shepard.
It also does original plays by Tulsa writers, puts on stage readings, produced Largo, a play by Czech President Vaclav Havel, and did Kafka’s Dick as well. Imagine Celebrity Attractions presenting those kinds of shows?
"We got no flack from doing Vagina," says Craig Walter, one of the founders of Theatre Club. "Not one. In fact, we had people bringing their own folding chairs because we sold out most nights. As for Kafka’s Dick, we couldn’t get the Tulsa World to print the word Dick in our audition announcements," he says with a laugh.
Theatre Club is a theatre populated by a loose, group of people who enjoy theatre. "We have a fondness for people like Beckett (Endgame which ran this summer at the Nightingale Theatre.) In fact most of Theatre Club’s performances and readings are done at the Nightingale Theatre. Like Heller, a 50-seat black box stage, Nightingale is considered either quaint or atrocious by theatre producers in this town.
"Nightingale is too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter," says Walter, "but I’m a warehouse kind of guy." Like many of the artistic directors in Tulsa, Walter sees theatre getting better and better around town. "I’m seeing more and more interesting stuff." he says, "I just wish the audiences were better."
Theatre Arts
"We do things on a Broadway level," says Shari Lewis, founder of Theatre Arts, whose company criteria is to present family-oriented shows by mingling national celebrities with local actors.
During its eight-year existence, it’s brought in the likes of Adrian Zmed, Sam Harris, Katherine Zaremba, Rebecca Luker, Jamie Farr, who last Christmas played Fagin in Theatre Arts production of Oliver!, and most recently Debby Boone in The King and I.
Unlike the other theatre groups in this piece, Theatre Arts does not strive to do the offbeat; its goal is the mainstream musical with the familiar name, surrounded by local actors. It is the community theatre equivalent of a guest artist program at a university drama program. Thus, you won’t see a musical adaptation of Kafka’s Dick at Theatre Arts. This rent-a-star business seems to be working for all concerned, including the national celebrity who might otherwise be stuck doing Hollywood Squares for the rest of his or her career. Zmed, after finishing Big in 2001, said of Theatre Arts, "Every performer should work with Theatre Arts at least once so he or she can remember why they went into theatre in the first place."
In addition to national performers, Theatre Arts uses professional musicians, Broadway directors and choreographers, along with, according to Lewis, the best local talent, including a backstage crew that can number as many as 100. Theatre Arts, bucking the Spartan storefronts and converted park buildings and movie houses of other groups, produces its plays in the cozy, plush confines of The Dean Van Trease Performing Arts Center in southeast Tulsa.
Tulsa Regional Theatre
"We want," says Artistic Director Carolyn Taylor, "to raise theatre to the highest level in Tulsa. We want to be, along with the symphony, ballet, and opera, the fourth corner of the arts in this town." And TRT plans to do that in the new Westby Playhouse and Cinema on Second Street, where TRT productions will take place. Additionally, the space has been used to feature foreign and art films, like Bread and Tulips, which won 9 Donatello Awards (the Italian equivalent of the Academy Awards); a documentary on the relationship between Jerry Garcia and David Grisman of the Grateful Dead; and a Spanish horror film, The Devil’s Backbone, from the director of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down.
TRT, which also produces Shakespeare in the Park, is Tulsa’s only Equity theatre. Equity is the theatrical union, which at any given time has more than 90% of its members unemployed; still, there’s an imprimatur that goes with the union designation (not to mention pages and pages of regulations and headaches for the theatre trying to adhere to them.) "We have an excellent opportunity to make this work," says Taylor on the prospects of an Equity house. TRT’s maiden production last December had the somewhat clunky and endearing title The Butterfingers Angels, Mary and Joseph, Herod the Nut, and the Slaughter of 2 Hit Carols in a Pear Tree.
TRT also has a non-equity ensemble component to its credit—TR2, which last year did Eric Begosian’s Suburbia.
Taylor is upbeat about theatre in Tulsa. "There are a lot of people doing really good things in this town." And speaking of the competition that sometimes gets in the way of art, she says, "Everybody in town does something different, so there’s no need for that kind of in-fighting."
Show Must Go On
It’s in the DNA of arts groups, from symphonies to ballets to opera, to complain about shrinking budgets and lack of community support. Theatre groups are no exception. What’s heartening about theatre in Tulsa, though, especially with these groups, is that they accept, almost celebrate, the fringe on which they operate. Most of them are non-profit; they office in storage rooms and lobbies; they don’t answer the phone before noon; they don’t have donor cocktail parties; and they don’t serve two kinds of bottled water at intermission.
These theatre groups, many headed by people who look ridiculous in tuxedos and formal dresses, are to be commended for remembering that theatre is more about the truth happening on the stage than the trappings surrounding it. They are Tulsa’s Off Broadway, and out of stubbornness or passion or ego, or some combination of the three, they survive.
A few weeks after Quintero spoke at the University of Tulsa, the theatre department brought in Edward Albee to give his take on the state of theatre in America.
"Ultimately," said a dour Albee, "we in this country get the theatre we deserve.
In Tulsa, we get more than that.