A Festival That Has Its One-Act Together

One-act festivals, the appetizer platters of theater fare, have become a mainstay of small stage Los Angeles. Some last for years, receiving critical acclaim and launching new careers, while others come and go in a season.

They are popular for good reason. Typically low-cost to produce, festivals tend to provide more roles for a greater range of actors than a single full-length work. They also allow writers, both novice and veteran, to see their work staged absent the risks of a full production.

Naturally, there’s also a downside. All these proscenium-side pluses don’t necessarily add up to a fulfilling evening in the theater, even for the most forgiving of audiences.

That’s why festivals that nourish those in the house as well as the people onstage are hailed as such a welcome treat. But with the recent demise of the long-revered Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and the much-younger Showtime-sponsored Act One, the well-wrought one-act festival is getting harder to find.

Fortunately, Theatre 40’s one-act festival, one of the most consistently praised efforts of its kind in town, is alive and well. The eighth annual event, which opens on Thursday, comprises “A Death in Bethany” and “A Blooming of Ivy” by Garry Williams, “The Magic Feather” by Jill Remez and “Intelligent Life” by David Babcock.

In a Times review, Scott Collins called Theatre 40’s 1995 festival “one of the richest and most satisfying shows in town. Not to mention one of the most provocative.”

The seventh annual festival had “some pretty big shoes to fill,” Collins wrote of last year’s effort. Yet it still offered “one very good playlet, two fairly solid titles and only one dud.”

That’s one miss out of eight scripts staged in two years--a far better batting average than most theaters can claim. That success, Theatre 40 members will tell you, is the outgrowth of planning and preparations that begin in the spring of each year.

“The biggest challenge is finding the material,” says festival executive director Andre Barron. “A play that’s divisive or funny [alone] doesn’t cut it. I read a lot of clever, funny plays. I go, ‘Great. I could turn on the TV and see the same thing.’ In theater there’s an opportunity to present something higher.”

Theatre 40’s one-act festival was the brainchild of Stewart J. Zully, an actor-director-producer who’d been with the group for three years when he launched the event in 1989.

He was looking for a way to make the best use of the company’s resources. One of the oldest theater groups in Los Angeles, it has a membership of 200 actors and occupies a small theater on the campus of Beverly Hills High School.

“During this time slot, Christmas into the new year, the theater sat dormant, in between second and third shows of the season,” says Zully, speaking by phone from New York, where he has lived full time since leaving Theatre 40 three years ago.

“Having this festival would [provide] a chance to have more of our actors up on stage, to have more directors working with the company and to explore some playwrights.”

From a pool of about 250 scripts submitted that first year, six were chosen. The entries included works by Horton Foote and Martin Epstein, as well as four premieres.

Yet it was evident from the outset that the benefits of having a festival weren’t limited to the finished product. “The whole company came out to audition for the directors we had,” Zully recalls. “It was a terrific gathering for a project. It really brought the company together.”

Whereas a typical Theatre 40 production would likely require four to eight actors, the festival made 20 roles available that first year. “I always picked the plays so that every member could audition for at least one play,” Zully says.

But Zully also kept sight of the audience’s needs. “I tried to give people something to please everybody,” he says. “There might be a play that was conservative, then I would slip in a play that was risky. As a producer, my job is to make a good evening.”

His strategies paid off. “We got great reviews that were extremely encouraging,” Zully recalls. “Then people really wanted to work with us.

For the first four years, the festival was staged on two separate bills, with seven or eight plays total. In Zully’s fifth and last year, the festival was reduced to one program with four plays.

Zully, who met his wife when she was in the audience for the Theatre 40 festival one year, recalls those five years with pride. “One of the reasons I wanted it to get started was to bring the company together,” he says.

“Since it started, there were five couples in the company who were on their way to getting married. It was bizarre--something about one-acts and single people. Five marriages, no divorces and good reviews to boot.”

When Zully repatriated to New York, Barron, who had been a festival co-producer, took over. “I was really looking for a challenge,” Barron says. “From play selection, to casting and hiring, I thought it would be good experience.”

Starting in April of each year, Theatre 40 conducts a play search, placing ads in various trade publications and consulting with contacts at theaters and talent agencies. This year, the festival received more than 500 submissions.

Barron and three other readers narrow the pool, and by September, they have their finalists. “In the final process, there are about 10 plays,” Barron says. “Then I need to narrow it down to three or four.”

Barron’s criteria sound deceptively simple. He says, “I always have three questions: Is the play compelling? Is it stage-worthy? And, why should we do this play?

“After I answer those three questions, I try to maintain a sense of the literary [in the evening],” Barron says. “The play needs to serve the festival and an audience. Ultimately, I have to weigh out how those plays balance each other.”

Barron’s priorities do, however, differ somewhat from Zully’s. “Stewart was concerned with balancing [the number of available] roles,” Barron says. “I made a decision to just do the plays, [without worrying about] covering our bases and every age range of actor. I think I serve the company best by choosing the best plays.”

Barron also admits to some idiosyncratic factors coloring his selections. “At some level, the plays every year tend to deal with things that are going on in my own life,” he says. “I like writers who are talking about things like personal power, who is God, what is our purpose--things that I’m constantly evaluating in my own life.”

Still, there’s more to putting on a festival than choosing the plays. “My next concern is to find the directors,” says Barron, who directs one of the works himself each year. “I personally think it’s just as important as choosing the play.”

This year, there’s a common thematic denominator in the three plays being presented. “These characters are very brave, looking and searching for purpose in their lives,” Barron says. “Writers have put these characters there to take on this task and make those decisions and that’s very theatrical.”

Williams, an Indiana-based writer whose “Rain” was the most praised entry at last year’s festival, has written two of the three works on this year’s bill, “A Death in Bethany” and “A Blooming of Ivy.”

The former is about a young couple’s struggle to stay together after the death of the young husband’s father, while the latter is a comedy about a longtime widow whose neighbor proposes an affair.

“His characters find grace in spite of themselves,” says Barron, who will direct Williams’ “A Death in Bethany.”

The third play, by company member Remez, is also a comedy. It focuses on two waitresses with starkly opposed world views. “It tackles questions about friendship, personal power and the meaning of miracles in our life,” Barron says. “It kind of creeps up on you.”

That might also be a way to describe the task of putting on such a festival. “It ends, then it comes up again really quick,” Barron says of the nine-month prelude. “But I think I’ll stay--as long as I can find the joy, not only in my growth as a producer, but also as a director.”

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THEATRE 40’S EIGHTH ANNUAL ONE-ACT FESTIVAL, Theatre 40, Beverly Hills High School campus, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. Dates: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 9. Price: $12. Phone: (213) 466-1767.