The 2024-2025 season marks our 25th year of bringing classic theater, and more, to Los Angeles.
How PNT Came to Be
Back in 2000, I'd been doing some guest teaching at Cal States LA and San Bernardino. My acting students were talented, enthusiastic. But when it came to discussing Shakespeare, or Moliere “The Father of Modern Comedy”, they were at a loss.
“Why don’t you guys know these plays? They have great parts for you!”
“They’re too loooong. They aren’t funny. They’re too hard to understand.”
I’d heard this refrain, with variations, over thirty years of performing in major theaters across the country. How do we get a wider audience for the classics? Why are people so hesitant to come? Why do they think of it as cultural "medicine"? Perhaps... it’s our fault.
So I came back to Mary and said, “Okay. Let’s get our friends together, professional veterans, and do these plays. I’ll pare them way down and highlight the humor. I’ll keep the original language, just not so much of it. I’ll stay true to the playwright - no “rap” or “drunken” Shakespeare. When you leave, you’ll be familiar with the characters, plots, and language, of our greatest writers, and then you can go to Ashland or Stratford for a three hour version if you wish to, and you’ll begin to understand the genius of these great writers whose works have spoken to us for centuries.
And at Parson’s Nose you’ll experience the work of a true “company” of actors - a group of artists who over time become a family and enrich each others’ work - a phenomenon once popular in mid-60s America but now gone, due to funding. We now, unfortunately invest in buildings, not artists. At PNT actors are allowed to return to their theater roots, performing "live" in front of an audience.
Pause – Two "influencers"
My good friend Desmond Heeley, three time Tony Award winning designer, whom I first met at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in the 1970s, was a huge fan of what we were beginning at PNT. This brilliant and dear man, who designed for Stratford, La Scala and The Met, on whose resume was “investiture of the Prince of Wales”, loved to hear what we were about. “So wonderful. Do keep it simple, Lance. Tell the story. Do not let the designers take over, because they will try!Less is always more.”
On another occasion at about the same time, I was at The Hobart School in Koreatown. The legendary public school teacher Rafe Esquith’s Shakespeare class was performing in an ordinary classroom with risers on one side for about 30 adults. Twelve Latine and Asian kids were doing Midsummer Night’s Dream. No costumes. A few musicians in the corner for accompaniment. The kids started in. They weren’t fantastic. They weren’t prodigies. But they had practiced, studied, and they knew what they were saying, not just reciting. The story was being told. And they were having fun.
Sitting next to me was Sir Ian McKellen. He too had heard about Rafe’s program. He turned to the fellow on his right and said, “This is theater. A simple classroom. It doesn’t have to have all the fuss. Just tell the story.”
May 2000, Interact, Geffen Playhouse
With the initial generosity of Terry Perl, Eileen Davis and Mario Molina, Parson’s Nose started out at the 90 seat Interact Theater in North Hollywood, where I was a member. We played Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and Moliere’s “The Mi$er” in one-hour versions, and we were off! After one performance of "The Mi$er" a youngster shouted, "That was great! Let's watch it again!" After we play "Twelfth Night" a mother tells me her son was doing an Andrew Aguecheek impersonation in the car on the way home. It was working!
The Early Years 2001-2007
Very early on, the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood heard about us and we became their educational arm for six years, taking Moliere, Shakespeare, Belasco to 130 LAUSD Title 1 schools. Unfortunately, however, we became known as "The Geffen Players", not "Parson's Nose". Hmmm.
The Tent 2007
In a wildly fun and exhilarating experiment to establish our own home, our own identity, we took advantage of the parking lot of the old nursery in South Pasadena and set up our own tent. We performed "Midsummer Night's Dream" and a melodrama "The Perilous Streets of South Pasadena" with great success. For many younger people in the audience this was their first opportunity to see a grown man in a dress. Theater breaks boundaries.
Jameson Brown Coffee Roasters
In 2008 the recession hit. Funding dried up. We quickly changed our program to a "coffeehouse" style at Jameson Brown Coffee Roasters on Allen in Pasadena. Our format echoed “Readers Theater” - “theater unplugged” - very popular in the 1920s and 1940s (Charles Laughton, Agnes Moorhead ). No sets or costumes, just actor, audience and script combining to create the play in the imagination, just like “radio”. “Shut your eyes and see”, as James Joyce might have described it. It also hearkens back to the touring performances of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. Readers’ Theater now flourishes in educational theater throughout the country.
The Lineage Years
In 2009 Hilary Thomas opened Lineage Performing Arts on Fair Oaks and graciously hosted Parson’s Nose. For seven years, PNT set up and took down shows on weekends with a mix of "major" productions and Readers Theater from the coffee house days. Our loyal audience followed, thank heaven, but we were still a “gypsy” company, living out of trunks.
A Home at Last
In 2015 our loyal, generous, and adventurous Board of Directors stepped up to support a serious search for a home. After months of scouring every possible space in Pasadena, Barry Gordon and Gail Shaper discovered a treasure – the historical Turner Stevens Mortuary Chapel, built in 1923 by noted architectural legends Marston and Van Pelt.
Local contracting genius and good friend Mike Bollenbacher refurbished the space with new soundproofing, electrics, HVAC, paint. PNT company members Paul, Ralph and Jake Perri and Gary Lamb, installed a beautiful dressing room and light grid. Not big theater, with only 40 seats. Truly intimate, with no audience member more than 15 feet from the 16x16 stage. Our Readers’ Theater Series continued the mission, along with more fully realized classic productions of Gogol’s “Government Inspector”, Goldoni’s “Servant of Two Masters”, Tom Taylor’s “Our American Cousin” – plays you may have heard of but never seen.
A New Opportunity - 2016
In our new home, Mary Chalon started “The Women’s Project” to promote works of particular interest to women. Hoyt Hilsman started a “New Play Project”. Our “Music Series” hosted The Harvard Yardbirds and the Cal Octech. Our "Conversation Series" began, hosted by Hoyt Hilsman, to discuss topics of interest to the community. And PNT welcomed “the first LatinX theater company in Pasadena”, Roberta Martínez’ “Amapola Players”.
Surviving the Plague
In March, 2020, immediately following our production of – wait for it - Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid” - COVID closed theaters across America. We were told it would last at least a year, and we were stunned. But our supporters stayed the course. And a nice thing about being a small theater organization is we could pivot quickly. We employed acclaimed sound engineer David Bennett to tell us how to enter the world of audio drama.
The Art of Improvisation
Microphones were sent to cast members, software installed, and PNT’s “Radio Theater” was born, beginning with Mary and I recording my adaptations of five chapters of Kenneth Grahaeme’s classic “Wind in the Willows”, adding sound effects and having a wonderful time in a new playpen.
Next up, the company – Barry Gordon, James Calvert, Jill Rogosheske, Marisa Chandler, Heather Taylor, Laurine Price, John Rafter Lee, Alan Brooks, Paul Perri – joined in, recording remotely, and over the next 18 months PNT produced over 50 radio dramas ranging from Mark Twain to Shakespeare to Moliere to Chekhov, adapted by Lance Davis. We not only survived the pandemic, we found something new. To date, our podcasts have reached over 19,000 listeners all over the world. Hans Andersen heard in Odensk!
Published Classics for Teachers (and Everyone)
We also began to publish our scripts, keeping our educational mission alive. "The Mi$er", "Our American Cousin" and "The Servant of Two Masters" are all available on Amazon.
"Recalled to Life!" (Tale of Two Cities)
Post pandemic, a line had been drawn. The world had changed. We knew that live audiences were, rightfully, skittish, and our spaces would be the last to recover. All theaters were struggling, but 50% of small theaters had disappeared.
In 2022 we returned to our home with a new understanding of our mission. We could not compete with the funding of large theaters – Mark Taper, Pasadena Playhouse – but we could offer something uniquely ours – a more intimate experience of theater, in an almost cabaret style, with an informal, yet sophisticated approach. The PNT "Radio Live!" Series had begun.
On the 400th Anniversary of The First Folio, “A Touch of Shakespeare” presented selections from our greatest writer in a, dare I say, almost “educational” format. We heard the language of the Balcony Scene from “Romeo and Juliet”, “To Be or Not to Be”, “All the World’s a Stage”, Henry V's "Ceremony", the comedy of Midsummer's “Pyramus and Thisbe” once again, simply and clearly. The genius lad from Stratford who went to London and changed the world with his pen was "recalled to life".
We did the same with “A Touch of Dickens”, an exploration of "our second greatest writer" with dramatizations of “Nancy and Bill Sikes”, “Hard Times”, and “The Pickwick Papers”. We investigated this complex Victorian, so familiar with joy, sorrow and cruelty, in his work and in his life.
Our Music Series premiered “A History of the American Musical in 90 Minutes or Less” educating us, ever so entertainingly, about the progression of the musical comedy form from the 19th Century to the present day.
Our audiences continued to enjoy this different approach to theater, this art form that can be expressed in so many ways. Of course, some will favor big splashy productions, and there are many venues where they takes place. But some of us, having been through all that (I was in a Broadway play that closed because of over-production. We had a Cadillac hanging in the flies) have enjoyed exploring in a way more in line with the Small Theater Movement that came out of Chicago and the Provincetown Players in the early 20th Century. Everything old is new again.
This 25th Season
This September we've begun with "Golf and Love!", adapted and performed by Lance Davis - three stories by the inimitable British humorist P.G. Wodehouse, who gave us the comical ne'er do well Bertie Wooster and his all-knowing servant Jeeves. In his golf stories, the Oldest Member of the Club skillfully traps a despairing younger member, about to give up the game, into listening to a cautionary tale of Mortimer Sturgis, Cuthbert Banks, Mrs. Willoughby Smethurst and Betty Weston.
In October we’ll gather for “An American Celebration”, a quilt of poems, songs and humor designed to lift our hearts in thanks for the New Experiment in Democracy forged by the men and women of the 18th Century with the stories behind The Star Spangled Banner and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. We'll have inspiration from Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Rosemary Benet, John Steinbeck, and Thornton Wilder. And of course a few jokes guaranteed to offend someone.
In November we'll have TBD The Women's Project, Amapola Players and New Play Series. In December Our Music Series will have the Octech and Harvard Yardbirds and we'll reprise our annual “PNT Readers' Theater Christmas Carol”, highlighting the marvelous Dickensian descriptions of grocers’ shops and blushing girls.
Twenty five Years of Fun, Intimate Theater
Our mission continues. None of this could have happened without the support of hundreds of people who are kind enough to give their time and treasure to bring PNT to life. Our foundations have stood strong in their support for the arts. Our major donors, Terry Perl, Eileen Davis, Mario and Therese Molina, and Tim Unger. Our generous and loyal board members through the years, currently Maggie Ewing, Lisa Stark, David Barber, Barry Gordon, Kevin Bourland, Ivar Brogger, John Cate, John Harnagel, Jemma Bennett. And the company of selfless actors over the years, now including Jill Rogosheske, James Calvert, Paul Perri, Jake Perri, Marisa Chandler, John Harnagel, John Rafter Lee, Heather Taylor, Laurine Price, Barry Gordon and Gary Lamb.
Hoyt Hilsman came aboard several years ago as board member, and in a moment of crisis the prize -winning playwright, screen writer, novelist, and political activist took on the duties of PNT Managing Director. His Swiss knife of talents has been invaluable in guiding us with a sense of savvy and a sense of humor.
And none of this could have happened without Mary Chalon. She is our Co-founder, Director, Actress, and producer of the Women's Project, also overseeing Hospitality, though madly looking for a successor now that she is a new grandmother. Mary is the light of my life, who shares the joy, and soothes the worries, offering comfort and advice in the perilous moments. I could not have a better partner.
Thank you all for joining us on this adventure. With your support and enthusiasm, we shall continue.Thousands of fans served. And more to come. www.parsonsnose.com
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