An Update from Our Artistic Directors

The now-expired Equity 99-Seat Plan enabled Boston Court to grow and develop in ways that would never have been possible if that plan had not existed. Many of our careers were built in 99-seat houses, and we wear that badge proudly. From our first production, The Theatre @ Boston Court has paid actors more than the plan required and, as we hope we have demonstrated, we have challenged ourselves to increase our pay to artists as we are able. It has always been our goal at Boston Court to transition to an Equity contract as the organization grew, and we feel we must continue to give each play what it needs, including working with a blend of Equity and non-Equity actors.

For that reason, as Equity has not provided any options that would enable us to continue to grow slowly to a contract over time, The Theatre @ Boston Court has begun to produce under the new LA 99-Seat Theatre Agreement. Our 2017 season will be composed of only three plays, not our usual four, and will employ the smallest number of actors in our history in order to afford to be in compliance.

While several other theatres have also decided to convert to the LA 99-Seat Theatre Agreement, already a number of theaters have announced that they will not be able to make the leap to the new Agreement. Those theatres will either cease production or find ways to work without an Equity agreement. We mourn the losses this will mean for our beloved theatre community. We treasure the opportunities the 99-seat Plan afforded us, and the rich gift it has been to our vibrant community of passionate and talented theatre artists. We are proud to be part of the amazing LA theatre community, and look forward to continued partnership and collaboration.

Jessica Kubzansky and Michael Michetti | Artistic Directors, The Theatre @ Boston Court/Boston Court Performing Arts Center

Announcing Boston Court’s New Executive Director

BOSTON COURT PERFORMING ARTS CENTER NAMES KYLE CLAUSEN EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

January 25, 2017 – Following an extensive nationwide search, Boston Court Performing Arts Center Board Chair Sarah Lyding announced today that Mr. Kyle Clausen will join the organization as its Executive Director, bringing dynamic new leadership to the acclaimed Pasadena cultural institution.

“At an important time in Boston Court’s history, Kyle joins us with strong leadership skills, experience working for various arts organizations we admire, as well as a personal passion for both music and theatre,” said Lyding.  “His vision, business acumen and track record of success are exactly what Boston Court needs as we enter our next chapter, which I am confident will be even more impactful and artistically adventurous than our last.”

Clausen said, “I am delighted to assume this leadership role at Boston Court, and work with Artistic Directors Jessica Kubzansky, Michael Michetti, and Mark Saltzman as well as the strong board and staff whose incredible work has made a name for Boston Court over the past 13 years.  This is an exciting time in the organization’s evolution, and I look forward to continuing and building upon the company’s commitment to new work and artistic excellence.”

Kyle Clausen currently serves as Director of Marketing and Patron Services at Luther Burbank Center for the Arts (LBC), a multi-disciplinary arts center located in Santa Rosa, California that presents a wide-range of performances, innovative education programs, and myriad community events.  At  LBC, Clausen has been responsible for a substantial increase in both earned and contributed revenue, including the highest levels of ticket sales in the organization’s 35-year history. Prior to LBC, Clausen served as Managing Director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz (SSC), a classical repertory theatre company in residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he oversaw a significant growth in subscriptions, led a reshaping of the company’s patron service philosophy, and expanded SSC’s programming to Silicon Valley.  He has also held positions in marketing with Mixed Blood Theatre and the Children’s Theatre Company, both of Minneapolis, and began his career as a pianist and music director with more than 40 theatrical productions to his credit. Clausen holds a degree in Art History and Music from the University of Minnesota.

Clausen’s appointment concludes a nationwide search that was launched by the Boston Court Board of Directors in September 2016, in conjunction with KGI Advisors, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm. A search committee was formed, and after a thorough interview process, the board of directors unanimously approved Clausen’s appointment in December 2016.  Clausen will join Boston Court Performing Arts Center full-time onFebruary 20, 2017.

Boston Court Performing Arts Center’s 2017 season begins with The Theatre @ Boston Court’s production of Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Boops(February 18 – March 19), and Music @ Boston Court’s Winter Series (February 17 – March 18).  More information can be found at BostonCourt.com.

The Golden Dragon: Production photos

Photo credit: Ed Krieger

The Golden Dragon: Review Rundown

CRITIC’S CHOICE “Michetti’s production, incorporating Sara Ryung Clement’s abstract set design of metal scaffolding, projects onto the harsh narrative backdrop a Mary Zimmerman-esque whimsicality. The gushing blood from the young man’s tooth is illustrated with a red ribbon, and the cricket’s dance for the ant is conveyed through a suggestive gestural choreography with chopsticks that has a minimalist beauty all its own.

One sign of Michetti’s masterly direction is the tonal control his actors maintain over the material. They work majestically in unison, transforming as effortless as figures in Ovid to reveal to us the fractured nature of a universe contained in a steaming hot little white carton.”

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Sometimes a play registers as up front and personal; one’s immediately drawn into the experience of its characters, heartrending or comic or both as the case may be…. Other times you’ll view a drama from a palpable distance as events unfold, on an expansive terrain or canvas. It’s the latter experience you’re likely to have at the Theatre at Boston Court in its production of German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon, a collection of fanciful but compelling tales that poses fundamental questions about otherness and identity.

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Go and see “The Golden Dragon”. There are levels of empathy which will stay with you long after you leave, though some of it proves disturbing the more one thinks about it. And there is an amazingly smooth, well articulated piece of performance to revel in. Finally is a theatrical magic which only a live theater can make you believe.

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Michael Michetti’s direction is as quick and sharp as a master chef’s knife and at 80 minutes without intermission, the subtle magic of this darkly comic tale stays with you as it aims to shine a light into the dark corners of our global, migratory world. Within the banality of getting through the day, we find the beautiful and the tragic. Forget the American dream, they are just trying to get through the next hour.

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Boston Court should be applauded for bringing meaningful, socially relevant drama to Pasadena. With The Golden Dragon, Michael Michetti delivers a top-notch production that works seamlessly to examine the social disparity and moral decay in contemporary society.

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Boston Court is a bold little theater that puts every ounce of energy into every production I’ve ever seen there. Boston  Court  CoArtistic  Director  Michael Michetti’s direction takes The Golden Dragon on a fast paced journey with side trips into Aesop’s Fables as well as fulfilling hopes and dreams in fantastic ways.

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The cast is exceptional. With every actor taking on several roles, and every one of them completely distinct. We are able to track the journey of each different character even though the actors never leave the stage, never change their costumes, and sometimes barely move from where they were in a previous scene.

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In a season of outstanding, innovative drama, Boston Court’s production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon (translated by David Tushingham) stands out with boldness of concept and excellence of production. The playwright creates a universal piece that calls for actors to slip seamlessly across lines of race, gender, age and ethnicity. Women play men, men play women, but not always. Older actors play younger people, younger play older. All are Asian cooks in a Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese fast food restaurant called The Golden Dragon.

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RECOMMENDED
Five exceptional performances, Michael Michetti’s highly imaginative direction, and a breathtaking Theatre @ Boston Court production design add up to reason enough to check out Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon despite a script more pretentious than profound.

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The Golden Dragon, by Roland Schimmelpfennig, is one of those unusual plays in which your reaction to the play is actually more interesting than the play itself. You can immediately tell why The Theatre @ Boston Court chose to present it in its Southern California premiere—Boston Court has never been one to shy away from pieces that challenge an audience to question its own thought processes.

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The Southern California premiere of playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’sTHE GOLDEN DRAGON benefits from the sturdy, first-rate technical production values The Theatre @ Boston Court has earned their deserved reputation for. Sara Ryung Clement has cleanly designed a bare-staged set filled only with a two-level scaffolding, complemented by Elizabeth Harper‘s intriguing string LED/fluorescent tube lighting for a variety of landmark silhouettes on the scaffolding.

Click here to read the entire review.

Colony Collapse: Production photos

Photo credit: Ed Krieger

Review rundown: Colony Collapse

CRITIC’S CHOICE “In Kubzansky’s hands, the complex storytelling finds the seamlessness, emotional resonance and magic that are characteristic of her work at Boston Court, where she is co-artistic director, and elsewhere. Set designer Susan Gratch uses curtains of camouflage net to suggest tree trunks. In what would typically be a bucolic place, mystery deepens, foreboding builds. Yet the story is luminescent as well. This cautionary tale about a wounded America never quite gives up hope.”

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“Take this as metaphor in the aptly named “Colony Collapse” by Stefanie Zadravec, now in a world premiere production at The Theatre at Boston Court in Pasadena. The play examines manifestations of tragedy and loss, and the human resilience that often kicks in, at least eventually, unless the people it happens to are too weakened for that to occur. Beautifully constructed to juxtapose several stories of parents whose children have disappeared against the tale of a teen whose parents are unable to parent him, it proves intense and absorbing from start to finish.”

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“The complex and brutal dynamics of this highly dysfunctional yet entirely relatable family unfold beautifully. The realism of the main characters’ strife finds a lovely counterpoint in the theatricality of a Greek chorus of sorts — a collection of mourning parents who support the main story, along with the poetic insight delivered by an omniscient missing young lady, referred to only as “the girl” (Emily James).”

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“A Stunning COLONY COLLAPSE Makes For a Completely Engrossing Honey of a Production.”

“COLONY COLLAPSE opens with an intense, involving scene of seamless, overlapping lines of dialogue from the four missing children’s parents, each oh-so painfully describing the moments leading up to each of child’s disappearance. John Nobori’s moody music certainly heightens the doomed, despairing outcomes of their respective situations.”

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“And then there’s The Girl, who may or may not be the teenager being searched for, a waif inhabiting a reality (or dream world?) all of her own.

As may already be evident, playwright Zadravec has bitten off a good deal in Colony Collapse, so much so that you may find yourself wondering how or if she will ever tie these disparate threads together.

Indeed questions do remain even at the end of the play’s two-hour-forty-minute running time (that’s including intermission), which is just one reason you’ll be talking and thinking about Colony Collapse long after you’ve left Boston Court.”

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“The scenes between these four characters — Mark, Julia, Jason and Nicky — positively crackle with tension, astute character-driven dialogue, and realistic conflict. And when a sheriff and an officer show up later in this 150-minute two-act drama, the fear is so palpable that I want to round up everyone I know to see how powerful theater can be.”

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Seven Spots on the Sun: video preview

Seven Spots on the Sun, by Martin Zimmerman from Boston Court on Vimeo.

Review Rundown: Seven Spots on the Sun

 

 

The West Coast premiere of playwright Martín Zimmerman’s involving SEVEN SPOTS ON THE SUN receives a splendid, mesmerizing mounting with all the artistic elements artfully converging into one of the best and riveting theatrical experience I’ve seen in the Los Angeles theatre scene this year.

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Now at The Theatre at Boston Court in Pasadena, “Seven Spots” proves riveting and wrenching as it explores the motives and consequences of the terrifying conflicts, which have afflicted, in this case, an unnamed Latin American country. Here, as in the real El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru or Colombia, villages change hands multiple times, with each side punishing those who aided the other one, and brutal tests of fear which harm mostly those whose compassion drives them.

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Martín Zimmerman’s extraordinary play “Seven Spots on the Sun” draws upon some of the most ancient theatrical devices to tell a complex, profoundly emotional tale of honor and love, as well as cruelty and horror set in a small Central American village suffering through a brutal civil war. Three actors collectively called The Town (Daniel Penilla,Dianna Aguilar and Michael Uribes) call to mind a Greek chorus as they join with the rest of the cast in choral speech, dance and rhythmic drumming at critical points in the play, beating their fists on the high, curved corrugated steel wall that forms the scenic background of the production.

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Martín Zimmerman’s play “Seven Spots on the Sun,” now in its West Coast premiere at the Theatre @ Boston Court, dramatizes the effects of civil war on a village called San Isidro in an unidentified Latin American country. The setting is allegorical rather than naturalistic: We never learn who is fighting whom, or what either side hopes to accomplish. War is simply the environment that these characters occupy and, we learn, helplessly perpetuate.

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The atrocities of war are not confined to battlefields. It’s trite but true: War changes a man, and Seven Spots on the Sun, now playing at the Theatre@Boston Court, examines what that means, both for the men at war and those who witness the effects.

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Zimmerman’s script has a poetic quality too (see paragraph three) that makes it particularly apt for a stage production (with just enough español to give it sabor latino without confusing non-Spanish speakers). Bits of magical realism are scattered throughout as well, with Tom Ontiveros’s dramatically animated video design adding moments that are both magic and real. Performances could not be finer.

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SHIV: Review Rundown

CRITIC’S CHOICE Riffing on a modern-day incarnation of the goddess Shiva, this subtly crafted portrait of a Hindu immigrant girl’s coming-of-age in her new American homeland shapes seemingly unrelated narrative fragments into a poetic, often humorous and ultimately profound journey of self-discovery, metaphorically mapped to the wonders and terrors of space exploration.

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“Shiv” is given a sensuous, mesmerizing and thoroughly thought-provoking production at The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena, playing through Aug. 9. Those daring to see it should be prepared to think, feel, and reflect on whatever part of life’s path one is currently treading.

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At a time when the entire concept of white privilege is under a microscope, it becomes especially fascinating to explore the larger concepts of European/American imperialism and what that process has done to the world we now live in. Most particularly, what has been lost as several centuries of the practice interfered with the natural self-development of the peoples of the earth. Which proves foundational to Aditi Brennan Kapil’s “Shiv,” now receiving its west coast premiere run at The Theatre @ Boston Court. As the best introspective plays often are, this tale can be approached on a number of levels, but at its core it examines what is left behind when foundational cultures clash with dominant ones. It does so through the engaging story of one immigrant family from India.

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The west coast premiere of Aditi Brennan Kapil’sShiv receives a simply gorgeous mounting at the Theatre @ Boston Court. Amazing just how far, with the proper elements, your imagination will allow you to go. Shiv relays the story of a young south asian woman transplanted from her homeland to Skoie, Illinois. Monika Jolly embodies this title character, easily convincing us that she’s in her twenties (presently) or in her teens (in the many flashbacks) as she attempts to come to grips with her puzzling relationship with her recently departed father Bapu.

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Shiv, by Aditi Brennan Kapali, is a complex, fascinating, time bending fantasy that weaves in and out of conventional time and space, taking place in the present, the past, and in physical and imagined realities of Shiv and Bapu drawing inspiration from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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You gradually come to realize that the scenes with her father, Bapu (Dileep Rao), take place when she was a child and the family had newly emigrated from India to Skokie, Illinois. Her father was a well- respected poet in his homeland but his attempts to translate his work into English and to write original poems in English only resulted in failure and disappointment. But Shiv adored her father and lovingly recalls their adventures together and his fantastical story-telling.

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Aditi Brennan Kapil’s play Shiv, playing now at The Theatre @ Boston Court takes the idea of this self discovery, and places it in a surreal, post-colonial, post-modernist setting. It gently dances with the themes of loss, identity, and culture while maintaining the narrative of a beautifully nuanced relationship drama between a father and daughter.

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In her play Shiv, the third part of an immigrant-experience trilogy first workshopped in 2013, Aditi Brennan Kapil writes of a character (played by Monika Jolly) named after a Hindu god most widely known as an agent of destruction. The girl’s troubled relationship with her poet father, and her subsequent involvement with a family that contributed to his downfall, are presented as illustrations of the post-colonial Indian diaspora in the West.

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The play freely collapses Shiv’s idolizing childhood memories of Bapu (Dileep Rao), her beloved immigrant Punjabi-poet dad (based on Kapil’s real-life father), with scenes charting the curiously charmless romance between the adult Shiv and the grandson (James Wagner) of the patrician publisher (Leonard Kelly-Young) she blames for Bapu’s dissolute fall from grace.

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SHIV: Production photography

Photo credit: Ed Krieger