By Cory Jones
September 17, 2024
The Brooklyn Bridge was constructed from 1869 to 1883. It’s said that over 20 workers were killed during construction of New York City’s iconic Brooklyn Bridge. Many suffered from “decompression sickness.” The Brooklyn Bridge’s 486-metre (1,595-foot) main span was the longest in the world until the completion of the Firth of Forth cantilever bridge in Scotland in 1890. As a civil engineer, I always admired the tenacity of construction methods in the early days – something was driving people to build “great works” without curbs being placed on workers. Or perhaps, they just needed the work.
That bridge and it’s construction is not the consideration that was in the mind of Arthur Miller when he proceeded to write about his view of the American dream. It’s a hard nut to reach. Heck, with the median price of housing in Solana Beach, you would think everyone in California is a multi-millionaire. The fact remains that everyone is not and there is still a goal of home ownership in many that live, work, and play in sunny So Cal.
The late Phillip Seymour Hoffman wrote a forward to a copy of this play succinctly summarizing the guts of this story saying “none of us really wants to be known, to be exposed, to be found out.” We all fall prey to many thoughts and feelings throughout our lives, but if all of that could be broadcast for the world to watch à la The Truman Show, how differently would those in our midst view us? Eddie Carbone (no relation to the famous Italian joint mentioned in so many Drake songs) is the central player in this story. (No, there is no scene in this one with a gun stored in the men’s restroom after a pat down and a peaceful discussion that ends not to well for some families.)
In this story, Eddie is a blue-collar working class man in Brooklyn, trying to survive and feed his wife and her niece, who had come to stay with them and trying to do the right things for his family. He is still a man, and even though he tries to do the right thing, he is, as Hoffman illustrated, “’pulled inside out’ to describe a man whose masculine exterior has been removed and all that remains is soft and sad and wailing. Eddie is that man, unprotected, revealed, us.”
Indeed, he is torn by the frailties of humanity: love, lust and pride. Phillip explained that these essential elements, our “need to be adored – … [not] accepted or liked, but ‘well-liked,’ to the point of unattainable fantasy.”
These drivers lead Eddie down a path his pride cannot let himself escape from and as he reveals that he has fallen for the niece, he struggles to save his face and to save his pride, but as Willy Loman said in Death of a Salesman “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit.”
In the Introduction to Mr. Miller’s autobiography Timebends, he mentions that he struggled in his early life to understand why some things happen the way they do and that his Hebrew teacher explained to him that it’s something called “the firmament.” His “white-bearded teacher [explained] ‘It’s the whole thing,’…I could easily visualize an old man seated on top of the vault watching what was going on below. It was rather like a theater, come to think of it, and had a certain plausibility that a round earth has never gained in my mind, primarily, I suppose, because with the whole thing spinning around it left no place for God to sit down with any dignity.”
He went on to discuss how “Job is the only play in the Bible… Job says you’ve got to believe, not only without reward in this life but with the most severe punishment. Job is the perfect message… purest God-contemplation, love without reciprocation.” I think this story about the struggle of a man to listen to his heart and work to resolve his passions that ultimately lead to one’s demise is similar to this message. You have to believe that there is something special and unique for each love interest. There are also worldly responses to unrequited love and passion and that is just the miracle of life. It’s a little bit of everything – the firmament.
I had a chance to catch up with North Coast Repertory Theater’s Artistic Director and the director of this production the other week to get the inside scoop on this one and here’s a taste of our conversation to help whet your appetite.
Cory Jones (CJ): So it’s great to see you again. I spent several nice years here as house manager and enjoyed my time, and then moved on to a different sort of side gig over at the Belly up for a while. And I know I kept running into you, the Costco every now and then. That’s right.
David Ellenstein (DE): Usually buying stuff for rehearsals for the rehearsal space up there.
CJ: So I was reading a few different things and just starting from the bottom, maybe you can tell me a little bit more about how you decided at a pretty early age you wanted to be involved in theater.
DE: Oh yeah. Well, my father was an actor and a director, so I grew up in it. I was unlike most people, it was the normal thing [for me] to do. For most people, it was the abnormal thing to do. But for me, I went to rehearsals, I went on TV and movie sets with my dad as a little kid. It was just something to do and, I decided at like four years old, that it was what I was going to do and it never changed. I saw my dad, he was doing the national tour of Irma La Douce, the Musical, with Juliet Prowse, and I watched him and he looked like he was having so much fun, and I went, that’s what I’m going to do. I haven’t seen anybody have that much fun.
CJ: Yeah, that makes sense. That’s a good way to make a choice for something to do for a living. So was your father then, was he your favorite actor growing up? Or did you have others?
DE: I mean, as a kid, I loved James Cagney, cag, the James Cagney movies, not just the Bad Guy roles, but also Yankee Doodle Dandy. He acted, he sang, he danced. He was a tough guy. He was a sweet guy. He was all that stuff. So I liked him a lot growing up. And then Marlon Brando, I admired, and there were a bunch, but yeah, sure. My dad was my biggest influence.
My dad was a wonderful actor. He was not just a film and TV actor, but also a stage actor. I got to see him do all kinds of stuff. And he was also a director and he was also an artistic director, and he was also a teacher. And he always said, if you want to make a living in the theater, you better have a lot of ways to do it. And the more arrows you have in your quiver, the better chance you’ve got. So I’ve done some of that in my life too.
CJ: I saw a lot of different things on your IMDB page, a lot of voice acting looks like you’ve done.
DE: I did a lot, especially a lot of dubbing on anime stuff. It is funny because my kids don’t really care that I’ve played Hamlet and Richard ii, but the anime dubbing, they’re really interested in that. I was some of the characters in some of those anime things that they watch. I probably did 50 or 60 of those things.
CJ: Right. And of course, probably your most famous role you won the Academy Award for role, I believe was doctor number one in Star Trek IV…
DE: I won the Academy Award!?? Well, this is news to me! No, I was in it, but I didn’t win any Academy Award. I had a very small part. A very small part.
CJ: I was going to follow that one with How has your science fiction pedigree assisted you in telling amazing stories about human interactions with aliens, other cultures, art and beliefs?
DE: Well, I don’t really have a science fiction background. I was in Star Trek IV because Leonard Nimoy was one of my dad’s best friends, so that’s why I was in Star Trek IV. In fact, I made up the lines I said in that scene.
CJ: They’re not Gene Roddenberry lines?!
DE: No, they’re not Roddenberry. And they’re not even Nimoy lines. He said to me, and the woman who played Doctor Number Two was Walt Koenig’s wife, who played [Pavel] Chekov.
So it was the two of us. And Leonard Nimoy said to us, go off and figure out what you’re going to say. So we went off to the side and we figured out these lines we were going to say, and they used them in the movie.
CJ: That’s great. Yeah.
I was just listening to a podcast this morning. Mark Maron was talking to Lupita Nyong’o and she said, “awards are just for egos.”
…
DE: I’m really lucky, and I ended up here [at the North Coast Rep Theater] because we had kids. My wife and I had kids. I was working all over the country, and I ended up here because we wanted me not to have to travel so much. And I just thought I was going to do this for a couple years here, I’m now coming up on 22 years.
CJ: So I saw you were at a repertory theater in Los Angeles and then spent some time in Arizona, and then you came here, but you were also doing a lot of other work in between.
DE: I was traveling across the country.
CJ: Ever go out the country?
DE: Not out of the country so much, but all over the country. I like to say I’ve worked at theaters from Miami to Anchorage and San Diego to Maine, and most places in between. At one time or another, I worked all over the country at different theaters. So, I mean, it’s been a great life to be able to do that and explore places that I never would’ve gone except I got hired to go there.
CJ: That’s very exciting. I know that when you came here, one of your first goals was to create this theater, the North Coast Repertory Theater, to be an Actor’s Equity Association house, and you accomplished that. Can you give me a little more background details, for those that aren’t aware, of what that is and the process to go through to get that? Was that very difficult or what were the challenges involved?
DE: It was mostly convincing the board of directors that it would improve the quality of what was done on stage here, and that ticket sales and donations would follow if we followed that up. And that would take a while, but if we made the change and people got used to the quality of what we were doing, more people were going to come. Our reputation was going to grow. You tell your friends. Yeah, tell your friends. We were going to attract higher level actors – And not just locally.
I mean, we want to use all of the best local actors, but we also want to augment it with the best national actors. And so that has happened. It took, I’m going to say it took five to eight years. I mean, we accomplished, we went to an equity contract within two years, became an equity theater. But I’m going to say it took seven or eight years to really establish and turn us around and get us to a place where what I said happened.
CJ: The Actors’ Equity Association, is that like a union?
DE: Yeah, it’s the union of the professional actors and stage managers. So almost all of our actors we’re allowed to hire a percentage of non-union actors if we want to. But we have to hire a certain number of equity actors, and we have to have equity union stage manager on every show. So it’s more expensive, and we have to pay pension and health for everybody. And if they’re from out of town, we have to house them. That’s expensive.
And they need cars if they’re here from out of, there’s lots costs involved. But I feel like if you’re trying to run a gourmet restaurant, don’t start without gourmet ingredients.
You don’t skip on the…
CJ: Yeah, you got to get the best stuff, otherwise there’s no chance you’re going to make the best thing.
DE: And it’s hard enough to make the best thing, even with the best stuff. So you want to give yourself the best chance at every show being a winner.
So that’s kind of my thinking.
And because I was working in the professional theater for so long before I came here, I didn’t want to do it any other way.
CJ: So had you worked in non-equity theaters before and [later with] equity theaters and then saw writing on the wall there?
DE: I joined Actors Equity Association when I was 19, not since I was 19, have I worked in a non-equity theater. When I was in Los Angeles, they had a thing back then, called Equity Waiver Theater where equity members were allowed to work at small theaters and not under a union contract. That’s long gone now, but back in the day, I did some of those, like everybody did in LA because when you were doing TV or film and you wanted to do a play, it was a different world. But it was kind of unique to Los Angeles, but I was going off and doing regional theater all over the country, and that was always equity. That was always union jobs. And then I became a director. Same thing. I joined the Directors Union, SDC, Society of Directors and Choreographers, and I’ve been a member of that since, oh gosh, 1999, I guess.
CJ: Great. So you’re a union man. That can be difficult for some people to accept these days. A lot of people have heartburn about whether or not that’s the right approach. And I know one of the issues that other folks, other unions that I heard about in the news this last year, the writers and others in the Hollywood industry, they went through a whole ordeal trying to restructure their union relationship with the places they would perform. I think one of the issues there was with Artificial Intelligence. And do you see that being any sort of issue in theater, per se, in terms of hiring?
DE: I really don’t, because the whole reason why theater is never going to die and why theater has always been around is you can’t replicate it with something else. The whole thing that makes it unique is the live nature of it and the fact that the actor is standing in front of the audience and it’s happening in the moment right now, and it will never happen exactly that way again. And you can’t replicate that with a machine. You can’t replicate that. Unlike film that once you make a film, that performance is locked into what it is forever. Whereas in theater, every night you do it, it’s slightly different. Every audience is different. What’s happening in the room is different every night. And when it’s over, it’s over. It goes into the ether, as it were. So, that’s magical about it. It’s why it doesn’t pay as well, because it’s an ephemeral thing. It disappears. Unlike film, which you can capitalize on over and over and over again, theater isn’t that way. And that’s kind of the magic of it and why I think it’s never going to go away. It may morph and change and go through its different phases, but the idea of live performance isn’t going to go away.
CJ: I know that you had to deal with a difficult situation that everybody else did during the pandemic.
How are you going to maintain live performances when you can’t bring an audience in?
Can you give us a little bit of information on how you coped with that and what strategies you used in that time to keep everything going?
DE: So I decided early on that I didn’t want to focus on what we couldn’t do. And what we couldn’t do was bring an audience in, and I wanted to focus on what we could do.
The first thing we did is we did a Zoom thing. We rehearsed remote. Everybody was on Zoom, and we put it together and we edited it came out okay, but I didn’t want to do another one of those.
And I said, let’s choose some small cast plays. Let’s buy some cameras. Let’s buy a supercomputer. I had two people on staff who knew how to make films and let’s build the set. Let’s rehearse the play and let’s for three weeks, which we did, and let’s film it and edit it together and make live films and offer that to our subscribers who were no longer able to come to the theater and had paid for the season instead of the live play that they were going to see.
And what we did is we made eight of those during the pandemic, and we supplied them to our patrons, and 90% of our patrons, if not above 90%, were very happy that we did that. I also did these things called theater conversations where I talked to people all over the country, Actors and directors and writers, and we put them on, I think I did about 40 of those, and we sent them out to keep people. So people stayed engaged here. We got written up in the New York Times a couple times because I think we were the busiest theater in the United States during the pandemic. And our patrons were extraordinarily grateful to have an escape during the pandemic and stayed connected with us.
CJ: And not go stir-crazy.
DE: And when we came back and everybody was having trouble getting their people back, our people came back. In fact, our subscriptions and our attendance is up beyond what it was before the pandemic. And there aren’t very many theaters in the country where that’s true right now. So, I believe that what we did during the pandemic by doing stuff, instead of saying, “oh, we can’t do it” – really paid off in the long run.
CJ: How are you utilizing those new tools that you developed in that period going forward? Are you looking to maybe fill more of your future plays to have an ongoing record for and potentially subscribers can look at past performances as well?
DE: So I’m a bit of a purist. I hope not.
I’m a live theater person. I love live theater. I did film and TV when I was in LA and I never really liked it.
[Film and TV] is not about the actors. It’s not so much about the script, it’s about the cinematography,
It’s about the editing. It’s about the camera shot. It’s about the special effects.
Theater is about the story and the actors, and that’s why I love it. And so film doesn’t capture it the same way. You can go see a play that’s great on stage and they film it and it’s no good.
There’s some plays that are no good on stage, and they film ’em and somehow they make ’em okay.
But I’m a live theater guy and I want North Coast Rep, while I’m here, and Laguna Playhouse, while I’m there, to continue to be venues for live theater. And it’s just not a substitution. I watch some of those things that get streamed from London and New York, and I get bored and I pause them and I go to the kitchen or I pause ’em. I go to the, that’s not watching a play.
CJ: You’re not completely engaged. It’s not the same thing.
DE: Yeah, it’s not the same thing. You’re not breathing the same air.
CJ: Yeah. So you did mention Laguna Beach. I know that in 22 you accepted a role there. How do you balance having two similar jobs in two locations?
DE: So it’s a jigsaw puzzle for me. Scheduling is the hardest part because we started the relationship with Laguna before I was even interim artistic director.
I’m now a full artistic director.
We were already starting to share programming. The previous administration up there had talked with us. So, two of our plays had already, one had already transferred up there before I started working there, and the other one was scheduled to transfer.
And it’s a way for both companies to save money. It’s a way to give actors longer employment. It is a benefit that’s worked really well. The hardest part about it is the scheduling and the sets, because the theaters are such different sizes. But having a company that basically rehearses for four weeks here, does the play here for four or five weeks, then moves up there, rehearses one week, and then does the play three or four weeks. It’s like they’re so honed by the time they get up there, it’s just reshaping it into that larger space.
CJ: So it’s a larger theater.
DE: Yeah. There’s more room. The week period to transition is the workout, the blocking, and redo-ing the lights
And there’s more depth, there’s more height, there’s more width. It’s a much larger space. Much larger space.
CJ: And throwing your voice around is different at a different space up there.
DE: They’re mic-ed up there. Here they’re not.
CJ: Yeah. So that’s totally different.
So, this current play, what motivated you to present and Arthur Miller play and why this one?
DE: So, when I’m putting a season together, I’m always looking to put a jigsaw puzzle of all kinds of plays. And I always want to include a classic, whether it’s a Shakespeare, or a Chekhov, or an American Classic, which is where I would put this one. Arthur Miller is an amazing writer. I’ve done a couple of his plays before. I’ve seen “A View from the Bridge” three times. I’ve never done it.
Two of my favorite actors, Richard Baird and Frank Carrado. Both came to me and said, “Hey, we should do A View from the Bridge” because Frank had played Eddie Carbone 35 years ago and now wanted to play Alfieri, who is the lawyer who narrates the play and is, kind of, the Greek chorus of the play. And Richard Baird is the actor that I have worked with the most at this point in my life. He’s great. And when the role is right for him, he kills it.
So, they both came to me and said that, and I said, that’s a good idea. So really, I had to figure out how to do it in our space because it’s been done lots of different ways. But if you did it as it was originally intended, it’s a much larger cast. It requires the setting to be different. So, figuring out how to do it in our space was the first challenge. But I kind of came up with a way to do that. And it was really the idea of working on an Arthur Miller play, a classic American play, with two actors who I knew I wanted to work with. And it just made sense and it made sense the way it fit with the rest of the season.
CJ: And are you utilizing the One Act or the two act version?
DE: The two act version. The One Act version was a complete failure.
CJ: That’s what I’ve heard [from Wikipedia].
DE: Yeah, it bombed. But he knew he had something and he went away and he worked it and he worked and he brought it back. And then it was a huge success. One of the few plays that’s ever been revived on Broadway four times said four different productions on Broadway. And that’s pretty unheard of for a straight play. There’s only a few that have done that.
CJ: So I read [on Wikipedia] that this story was developed based on some experiences of losing one of his best brahs [as in Hey Brah, how’s the surf today?], his bro, Elia Kazan. So, apparently Elia turned some people, socialists, into McCarthy’s Red Scare regime, and it’s reported that Arthur sent a copy (of A View from the Bridge) to him when he was done. And Elia said, [paraphrasing] “yeah, I can direct that,’ even though they hadn’t been speaking for something like 10 years. And apparently Arthur responded, “I only sent the script to let you know what I think of stool pigeons.” I think it was a rebuttal to Elia’s “On the Waterfront.”
DE: It’s a little bit reversed. On the waterfront was first. Arthur Miller was supposed to write the script for On the Waterfront, and Elia Kazan was going to direct it.
And when Elia Kazan testified before the House on Un-American Activities Committee, Arthur Miller broke ties with him. Elia Kazan went ahead and did On the Waterfront anyway.
And Arthur Miller wrote A View from the Bridge somewhat in response to that going on, because they both take place on the waterfront in Brooklyn in 1954.
Different stories, of course. But, I mean, Arthur Miller is writing about what he knows. He grew up in Brooklyn, he watched this neighborhood and the way it behaved. So it wasn’t entirely about Elia Kazan, but it was one of the impetuses that made him write it. It’s one of the reasons that the story went the way it went.
CJ: What do you think about the different underlying themes of both of those stories and how they interplay with where we are in the United States today?
DE: Well, there’s the more obvious question of immigrants because there are two illegal immigrants in A View from the Bridge, which isn’t the case in On the Waterfront. That’s not what they’re dealing with. But for me, the universal part of A View from the Bridge is the struggle between man of his animal nature and his civilized nature and the animal versus the intellect and how that’s balanced and the fight that we all have and the temptation that we have and the choices that we make that deal with that, and the laws that we make to try to control it that seem natural or unnatural. And that’s kind of what’s explored in the play, is somebody who can’t control their visceral nature and it gets the better of them. It gets the better of Eddie. Eddie was interested in a younger woman named Catherine.
CJ: Right, who’s his niece, but I found it odd that Arthur chose to name the older woman in the play Beatrice. And now the younger since said Dante’s love interest was a younger woman named Beatrice.
…
How do you approach this dynamic between those three characters in the play, Eddie, Catherine, Beatrice, and how do you work with the actors to present the story, working out the way you want to see it played on stage?
DE: So in this case, I’m very fortunate in that I have an extremely well-written play that works as a play. And I have really good actors. I’m really fortunate. Eddie is Richard Baird. Beatrice is played by Margo White, who’s awesome. She came in from New York. She’s a Broadway actor. She’s great. And a young woman whose name is Marie Zolezzi is playing Catherine, and they’re very good.
The play starts and it’s not that they are a cheery, totally happy family at the beginning, but they’re kind of a normal Brooklyn working class family who doesn’t have a lot of money, they’re of Italian descent. And the couple, Eddie and Beatrice, don’t have children of their own. And they’ve taken in Beatrice’s sister’s orphaned child when she’s very young and they’ve raised her. And so that’s the family dynamic.
And Catherine is now about to turn 18, and she doesn’t have family. She’s turned into more of a woman than a girl. And yet the dynamic in the house is that she still treated as a little girl by Eddie, and she behaves that way with him. And Beatrice is not necessarily so happy with that anymore, but it’s not out of control. And it’s only when they take in these two illegal immigrants, that push comes to shove.
Things kind of spiral out of control. And Miller wrote it in the form of a Greek tragedy. So there’s actually the character of Alfieri, who’s the lawyer, who is the Greek chorus for the audience. He has monologues where he talks to us about what’s happening and how it’s progressing. And then he also has three scenes in the play, where he interacts with the characters in the play and moves the action forward. But he’s telling us the story because of how deeply what happened to this family affected him.
CJ: Yeah. So I saw that that was also mimicked in the trailer you have on the website you created. You kind of had that interaction back and forth, cuts together. I thought that was well done.
DE: You asked me, I didn’t really answer your question. You asked me how I approach it, and I kind of told the story a little bit.
CJ: You said, “I have good actors.”
A View From The Bridge, (L-R) Lowell Byers & Coby Rogers – photo by you guessed it, my man, Aaron Rumley
DE: I do. I have good actors. I have a great play. I just give them the script and they do their thing.
You know what, in a weird way, that’s true. And I ask questions and I prompt them and I talk about the environment in which we want these actions to take place. And I ask them about where they’re coming from and where they’re going. And I make sure that they’re staged in a way that the audience can see them and hear them. And I make sure the lighting and the sound is augmenting what we’re doing and telling the story. And as much as I can, I stay out of their way and let them do their good work and coach them from the sidelines. That’s what you do when you have really good actors. If you don’t have really good actors or you don’t have experienced actors, you have to roll up your sleeves and get in there more and talk to them about what they’re doing in their work.
In this case, I didn’t have to do that very much. I have a uniformly really, really strong cast from top to bottom, and it’s a pleasure to work that way.
CJ: So do you have any challenges keeping the productions here fresh and keeping the audiences engaged and wanting to come back to see what you guys decide is going to be your season run?
DE: So we have built a great loyalty with our people. When we go into sales for a new season, we do what’s called a blind renewal. We haven’t announced any of the plays, and we get about 80% of our people who buy the next season without knowing what we’re doing. And then when we announce it, we get about 15%. Of the other 15%, five percent fall away for one reason or another every year for whatever reason. But 80% of our people come back before we, because they trust us that we’re going to do a good job.
They’re not going to like all seven plays probably, but they know they’re going to like five or six, and they know the one that they don’t like will be well done even if they don’t like it. And so we built a brand loyalty as far as keeping it fresh.
The runs aren’t long enough for them to get stale actors that work in New York and do a show for two years. I’ve never done that. I don’t know what that’s like. I don’t know how you go out there for your fifth 500th performance, but here they’re only going to do 35 performances. So, for 35 performances, it’s still exciting. You’re still finding new stuff every night. You’re still engaging and growing in the role.
So that’s not really an issue, if you have good actors.
CJ: Are there other things you do to engage the local community and what role does The North Coast Rep play in shaping cultural conversations?
DE: Well, being the only fully equity professional theater in North County, if you don’t count La Jolla Playhouse as North County, we are already a destination as far as if you don’t want to go down to La Jolla Playhouse or Old Globe or Cignet and you want to stay in North County, we’re your option. If you want to see fully professional theater, you can go to Moonlight in the summer and see a musical. That’s a different animal.
You can go out to Escondido if you want to go out to Escondido and see stuff there. But the other theaters that exist in North County are only either semi-professional or non-professional. And so we are the game in town. We are Solana Beach’s too, they’ve got us and they’ve got The Belly Up.
That’s the two cultural attractions in Solana Beach. The Cedros Design District is fun, but you walk it for two hours and you’re done. So we’re kind of the arts thing. Art, theater, arts thing for North County, especially for Solana Beach, Del Mar, Carmel Valley, Encinitas, Carlsbad, we’re that area’s professional theater. So that’s kind of the role we fit here. And we do all kinds of plays. We do dramas, we do comedies, we do musicals. We do old plays, new plays, everything. So there’s going to be something at some point, even if you don’t want to subscribe, that you might want to come and see.
CJ: Yeah, yeah. There is a good diversification to the types of shows you do. I always liked some of the, what do you call it – The talkbacks.
DE: The Friday night of the second week, we always have a talkback with the audience.
CJ: Yeah. I was going to ask about financial constraints. It didn’t sound like with that’s an issue with 80% blind renewals.
DE: I am knocking on wood here and saying we used to have struggles financially the last bunch of years. We’ve been in a much better position. We are healthy, we are doing extremely well. I don’t have to worry about where the pennies go quite as much. We’re still very fiscally responsible, but we are healthy and we are doing what we’re not in any, we don’t have to make decisions based on finances. That’s how I’ll put it.
CJ: That’s a good place to be. That does give you all the options you need to select the shows you want to select.
DE: That’s Right. I mean, I have to be realistic about the confines of the theater. It’s only so big. We only have so many dressing rooms and the backstage doesn’t exist and all that stuff.
CJ: Not a lot of space there.
DE: So I can’t do 20 character plays. I just can’t. We’ve done 12.
CJ: There were a lot at one of those [that I worked as House Manager at]. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. That had a lot of people that had a lot of people. It did have a lot of people.
DE: We were crowded every once in a while.
CJ: Let’s see if there’s anything else here? Music. I remember you do bring in live performing musicians pretty frequently, from what I remember. And not always just a background music. What role do you think that plays in the performances you design?
DE: So it also goes back to your other question about the function that we fill in the community. Not everybody likes plays. So we have a Tuesday Night Comic Series that we do six times a year. We’ve done jazz concerts here. We’ve done Peter Sprague, a well known guitar virtuoso in town. We always have him come every year and do a couple of concerts. We do one person plays on, it’s a thing we do called Variety Nights, and one person plays or their comedy things or their concerts. We have the John Denver Tribute band to spin here a number of times, and they always do really well. So it’s offering to the people who are not as hardcore theater goers the opportunity to come here. We find not only do they enjoy that, and those events usually sell really well, and people have a really good time and they discover North Coast Rep. But some of them end up then going, you know what, we’re going to come here and try some plays too. We’ve developed audience members and supporters because they started coming to those things and ended up coming to the other stuff too. So it’s just a way to round out the programming.
CJ: Great. Yeah. No. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time here talking with me. I just ask one more thing. If I can get a quick picture and maybe a selfie.
DE: Sure!
CJ: [It’s not every day I get to show people I know, that I know a real local star!]
…
The North Coast Repertory Theater is presenting this Arthur Miller classic, A View From The Bridge, now through October 13th.
If you have the time, please do check it out!
