By Jeff Nelson

The Group Repertory Theatre is currently engaged in its twentieth year of operation, which makes it one of the oldest and most successful theatres in the Valley. I dropped in recently to ask Lonny Chapman, the Artistic Director, and Janet Wood, a founding member, about their theatre and the developing scene in the NoHo Arts District. We met in the lobby of the theatre on a weekday morning, when the building was deserted except for a few volunteers who were working on the latest publicity mailing.

So tell me about the Group Repertory Theatre. Tell me about your twentieth anniversary.

Janet Wood – Well, right now we’re doing a musical called Reaching Up. It used to be called Role Play, and it was originated here in 1989 by Doug Haverty and Adryan Russ and was very successful. From here it went to the Call Theater, then to New York off-off-Broadwav. It was very successful there. Then it went off-Broadway, and the New York Times gave it such a great review that instead of running six weeks it ran six months. Since we’ve been in existence for twenty years, we wanted to do something special, so we decided to do Reaching Up as our twentieth-year musical.

Lonny Chapman: This theatre opened for productions in 1973. We were in a small theater on Van Ness Blvd., [in Holly-wood] a tiny little theatre with 35 seats. There were about 13 or 14 actors. I went over there to watch them doing scenes, and they wanted to get a theatre started.

JW: We were a theatre in search of an artistic director, and Lonny was an artistic director in search of a theatre.

LC: So I came in and saw the work, and I said I would only be involved in it if they went into productions. I wasn’t interested in doing classes or scenework or that kind of thing. So it began with our first production.

JW: That was Round Dance and that was a huge hit.

LC: Yes, it was.

JW: So huge that it forced us to get into a bigger theatre the next year because so many people wanted to join.

LC: So we moved over to Magnolia, where the senior citizen’s complex is now, on the corner. That was 1975 when we moved over there, and it was 1983 when we moved here.

Do you have a theme that links your work? Is there a style you’re bringing to the theatre you do here?

LC: Well, the theme, if you want to call it a theme, can be summed up in one word: “eclectic.” If you’ll notice, there’s a listing on the wall, here, of the shows that we’ve done, and you’ll see by looking at that that this theatre is not stuck in one kind of thing, whether it be new plays, classical plays, or whatever. We’ve done serious plays, comedy, even Shakespeare a couple of times, now.

How do you perceive what’s going on in theatre in the Valley? The Los Angeles Times recently suggested that it’s the next Big Thing for theatre in Los Angeles.

JW: Absolutely. That’s what’s happening since this whole Valley Theatre League and NoHo Arts District started. It suddenly became obvious that there was tremendous theatre in the Valley, and nobody knew about it. Then, when people realized what was going on here, we all got together via the Valley Theatre League and, you know, that whole “NoHo” thought. The idea was to join together to support one another instead of being in competition. If someone needed something from one theatre, give it to another. There was a whole support group. All of a sudden — you know what it started to feel like to me? It started to feel like Greenwich Village in New York, where it’s a community. It’s a community for artists, and I think the more we put that out there, the more fun it is to be here, and there’s an excitement. I do believe that this whole area is becoming a new center for the arts. This is it. This is where it’s all starting to happen.

LC: I’ve always felt that the more theatres you have, the better. I think it’s good for all of the theatres. It’s like 45th street in New York. There’s nine theatres, and everybody wants to open their play where there’s nine theatres, as opposed to where there’s only one on a block. It’s just that psychology of, “This is the place to go.”

What’s entertaining to you? What make a play good?

JW: For me, it’s when I’m really touched in some way. Even in a comedy or musical when I’m enthralled and I’m happy and I feel great when it affects me in some way. I think that what art is about, many times, is that it touches some part of us that makes our “aliveness” come to the surface.

Are critics useful?

JW: I think a good critic is one who describes the play, what it’s about, describes how he thinks the work is, and whether or not it worked for him. You know, if he doesn’t like the play, if it’s not his thing, or if he doesn’t think it’s well written, that’s fine, to give all those opinions, but he should describe the play.

What are your actors like and where do they come from? Are they coming out of schools? Are they coming in off the street?

LC: We have two groups of actors: young people who have no professional experience, who come here to work with us and who have to have a responsibility of doing certain technical junk, like running sound, lights, stage managing, props, house managing, etc. They can then get involved here — read for shows. That’s one group. Then, the other people all have to be professionals to join this theater. We didn’t audition people for a long time; for years we just interviewed them. We got some prettv good people, without auditioning them. But lately, for the last couple of years, we’ve been audtioning them.

How do you decide on a play? How do you decide on your season?

LC: I do most of the choosing. I wouldn’t be involved in a company where you had a committee of actors or something to pick the play. I wouldn’t be a part of it. But I believe in getting feedback from people in the company. Many times a play has been suggested to me and we’ve ended up doing it.

What is it in a play that makes you say, “Yes, that’s the play I want to do this year”?

LC: First of all, we have to deal with the company when picking the plays. We try not to, these days, pick a play with a tremendously huge cast. If you get 25-30 people, you have problems with it. It might be a great play, but you have problems with it.

You have logistic problems.

LC: Yes, and cost problems, too. Plus, if it’s too technically difficult for us, we won’t choose it, because we find we run into a lot of problems if we have too much of a technical play that requires a lot of sets.

How much do you worry about what yourt audience will think?

LC: Well, we don’t have that big of a subscription list. We had a year when we were dark getting this place ready, and we lost most of them, the subscription we had, so we don’t have to worry so much about them. Personally, I would like to get younger audiences in here, and I think that might impact the plays that we do.

I’m under the impression that the plays you do here are focused on being “entertaining,” as opposed to, say, being “political,” or “avant garde.” This theater doesn’t seem to be a political theatre.

LC: It’s not a political theatre.

Is my impression a wrong impression?

LC: Well, it’s wrong in one sense because we’ve done a lot of serious plays. We do some plays that have political themes in them, like All the King’s Men. But I’m not a political person, in that sense.

You don’t hate an agenda. You’re not put-ting out a “message.”

LC: I like political theatre, but what we have done here is some of the great authors, both European and American, from Saroyan, to Strindberg, to Chekhov, to Betrolt Brecht, to George Bernard Shaw, Anderson, Eugene O’Neill, Noel Coward — so we’ve done all the great playwrights. That’s important to us. I think it’s important to any theatre.

It seems that developing playwrights is one of the most important things a theatre can do. Would you agree?

JW: I think it’s one of the most important things, because getting material for every theatre, it’s really difficult. And when you have a group of people sitting around every weekend (as we do here, with our Playwright’s Unit), and saying why this works and why it doesn’t, and helping and supporting each other, I think you really get to see what does work, you know? So what you have, hopefully, is a little stockpile of developing plays, some of which will be fabulous, some of which, won’t (laughs).

LC: We’ve done about a hundred and twelve plays, in twenty years, and I would say 47 of them were new plays.

JW: This theatre takes a lot of chances. Where other theatres may go for more safety — they know the play is going to be a hit, or it’s an established play — this theatre will take more chances. And the more chances we take, the more there’s a possibility that it’s not going to work. But, then, you get the great ones, too.

LC: We’ve had many productions that were really top-flight, from In the Boom Boom Room, to Company, to Chicago, to the King’s Men, and there’s probably a couple of others I’m not thinking of, that really were quite stunning productions.

What makes a production “stunning?”

LC: All the ingredients come together. Of course you’ve got to have a play. If the play isn’t there you’re not going to have it, no matter how stunning the production is. If it’s a poor play, then you’ll have a problem. But if the play is good, then it can be a stunning production.

JW: And the magic fairy comes and sprinkles her fairy dust on it (laughs).