Productions & Events
Walking the Beat 2023: C.H.I.N Up! (Critical Hope is Needed)
- The Fountain Theatre (map)
- Google Calendar ICS
Join us for the 2023 devised theatre collaborative production between cops and kids, bridging gaps and healing communities. 12 students and 6 law enforcement officers collaborating to find common ground, compassion, and hope.
Walking the Beat 2022: FLICKER
- The Fountain Theatre (map)
- Google Calendar ICS
An Arts Education Collaboration between The Fountain Theatre and Elizabeth Youth Theater Ensemble.
Students and Officers in the Walking the Beat program leaned into a transformative group process.
Change is not transformation. Change is the modification of day-to-day external action for desired results. Transformation is modifying core-beliefs and long-term behaviors in profound ways. Dr. Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, “The pandemic brought chaos where we are able to see ourselves for the first time. Normal is fluid and fragile. The pandemic unearthed and did what decades of activism couldn’t.”
LA Theatre Pays Tribute to Ed Krieger
- The Fountain Theatre (map)
- Google Calendar ICS
The Los Angeles theatre community lost a dear friend on December 16, 2020. For decades, through the lens of his camera, Ed chronicled the production history of local stages throughout Southern California.
Let’s come together in a digital gathering to celebrate Ed’s life and work, and to assemble as a community of Los Angeles theater-makers.
Raise Your Voice - VOTE
- The Fountain Theatre (map)
- Google Calendar ICS
Raise Your Voice - Vote! Is a guerrilla-style, immersive theatre event to take place over the weekend of October 24 & 25. An ensemble will present a series of pop up performances in public spaces throughout Los Angeles. Each piece will feature America's most iconic speeches about voting rights.
Fountain Theatre Leadership Transition
After 34 years as artistic director, Fountain Theatre cofounder Stephen Sachs has announced his retirement at the end of 2024.
“After thirty-four years of serving Los Angeles and the national field as Artistic Director of the Fountain Theatre, I have chosen to retire by the end of this year. A flurry of feelings swirls through me as I reach this decision. Launching, nurturing, developing, and leading the growth of the Fountain Theatre for more than three decades have been the most joyous and meaningful years of my professional life.”
The Fountain Theatre’s “Fountain for Youth” arts education wing joins forces with Inner-City Arts, The Autry Museum of the American West and CounterBalance Theater to present Biddy Mason, a theatrical blend of video projection, music, song, movement and dramatic storytelling that brings the powerful and inspiring true story of an extraordinary Los Angeles citizen to life. Ten student performances take place May 20 through May 24 followed by two public performances for adults on May 31 and June 1. All performances take place at the Rosenthal Theatre, located at Inner-City Arts in downtown Los Angeles.
In 1848, an enslaved woman in Mississippi marches on foot alongside her owner’s wagon train across the country to California, where she wins her freedom in court. With heroic determination and unearthly compassion for others, Biddy Mason works hard in Los Angeles, saves her money, transforming herself into a successful businesswoman and philanthropist. She builds schools, feeds the poor, and helps launch the First AME Church, the landmark center of political and social action, earning Biddy the loving and respectful title throughout the City of Angels of “Grandma Mason.”
The true story of the eighteen-year-old son who turned in his father to the FBI because of his dad's role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Fast-moving, powerful, and theatrical, Fatherland erupts verbatim from official court transcripts, case evidence, and public statements.
Writer and performer Margot Rose (original cast member, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road) — backed by a live, four-piece band — shares her funny and poignant story of family, loss, connection, community, and a backyard.
In the West Coast Premiere of this acclaimed solo play, J. Alphonse Nicholson (P-Valley, They Cloned Tyrone, Broadway's A Soldier's Play) embodies five incarnations of Abel Green, an African American "Everyman," as he travels through time as many selves, from a 19th Century minstrel to a fallen 21st Century securities trader. In each life, Abel is guided, distracted, helped, or hindered by a handful of characters with whom his destiny is forever intertwined.
Join us for the 2023 devised theatre collaborative production between cops and kids, bridging gaps and healing communities. 12 students and 6 law enforcement officers collaborating to find common ground, compassion, and hope.
Join us for a special book signing event with Tim Cummings, author of Alice the Cat.
1974. A group of queer women spend their summers together in a remote seaside town. Their enclave is disrupted when Eva, a naïve straight woman separated from her husband, stumbles unaware into their circle and falls for the charming, tough-talking Lil. This iconic lesbian play bursts with heartfelt friendship, laughter, and love.
The Fountain Theatre launches “Intermezzo: Chamber Music at the Fountain,” a bi-monthly series curated by vioIinist/violist Connie Kupka, formerly with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and cellist David Speltz, previously a member of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Sir Neville Marriner and principal cellist of the California Chamber Orchestra under Henri Temianka.
A provocative meditation on race, fusing prose, poetry, movement, music, and the visual image. A lyric poem, snapshots, vignettes, on the acts of everyday racism. Remarks, glances, implied judgments. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV — everywhere, all the time. Those did-that-really-just-happen-did-they-really-just say-that slurs that happen every day and enrage in the moment and later steep poisonously in the mind. And, of course, those larger incidents that become national or international firestorms. As Rankine writes, “This is how you are a citizen.”
What’s more important: writing the truth, or telling a good story? he Fountain Theatre presents the West Coast premiere of the Broadway hit play, The Lifespan of a Fact. Based on the nonfiction book named “Best of the Year” by the Huffington Post, this highly entertaining, very funny new play follows young intern Jim Fingal, whose first assignment at an elite New York magazine is to fact check an essay written by a highly celebrated and cantankerous author. What Jim finds turns his world upside down. Thought-provoking, with zinging one-liners, The Lifespan of a Fact explodes into a hilarious slugfest between “facts” and “truth,” making it hard to imagine a play ever being more timely.
In June 2022, reproductive rights took a giant leap backward when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In the United States, women can drive when they turn 16 and vote when they turn 18. But they can no longer decide for themselves on the issue that impacts them most.
In My Body, No Choice, eight of America’s most exciting female playwrights share what choice means to them through the telling of fiction and non-fiction stories rooted in personal experience. This is a time when women need to tell their stories.
Jazz at the Fountain continues with R&B singer-songwriter Lynne Fiddmont. Ms. Fiddmont tours the world as a vocalist and has worked with such artists as Stevie Wonder, Phil Collins, Lou Rawls, Barbara Streisand, and Natalie Cole. Her fourth album Power of Love is an eclectic collection of R&B grooves, ballads, and heartfelt soul classics.
An Arts Education Collaboration between The Fountain Theatre and Elizabeth Youth Theater Ensemble.
Students and Officers in the Walking the Beat program leaned into a transformative group process.
Change is not transformation. Change is the modification of day-to-day external action for desired results. Transformation is modifying core-beliefs and long-term behaviors in profound ways. Dr. Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, “The pandemic brought chaos where we are able to see ourselves for the first time. Normal is fluid and fragile. The pandemic unearthed and did what decades of activism couldn’t.”
In the final months before 9/11, liberal Jewish studies professor Michael Fischer has reunited with his two sisters to celebrate their father’s seventy-fifth birthday. Each deeply invested in their own version of family history, the siblings clash over everything from Michael’s controversial scholarly work to the mounting pressures of caring for an ailing parent. As destructive secrets and long-held resentments bubble to the surface, the three negotiate—with biting humor and razor-sharp insight—how much of the past they’re willing to sacrifice for a chance at a new beginning. IF I FORGET tells a powerful tale of a family and a culture at odds with itself.
An urgent call to action in response to the upcoming Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that gave women the choice of a safe, legal abortion.
June 23 - July 10
Fri - Sun 8pm
Outdoor Stage
Featuring
Billy Valentine - Singer
STUART ELSTER – PIANO
RUSS MCKINNON – DRUMS
CHRIS COLANGELO – BASS
and special guest –
TOM SCOTT – SAXOPHONE
Outdoor Stage
How do families stay together, even when they are kept apart? The Fountain Theatre presents a gripping new docudrama, a compilation of true stories that explores the rippling impact of mass deportations on families. The world premiere of Detained, written by 2021 Lorraine Hansberry Award-winning playwright France-Luce Benson and directed by Mark Valdez, winner of the 2021 Zelda Fichandler Award.
Two-time Emmy®, Peabody and SAG award-winning actor Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad) stars as playwright Corey Madden in an audio theater production of Madden’s moving and poetic memoir, Numbered Days. The real-life love story of two passionate people who use the power of music and words to sustain them through their “numbered days” has been transformed into a four-episode podcast by L.A.’s celebrated Fountain Theatre. Release date: February 14, Valentine’s Day
Tony Nominated. L.A. Premiere
What is our responsibility to the future? What legacy do we want to leave? The Los Angeles premiere of The Children, written by Lucy Kirkwood and directed by Simon Levy, asks those questions and more in its Los Angeles premiere at the Fountain Theatre, indoors.
Kirkwood’s funny and astonishing Tony-nominated play is a taut and disquieting thriller about responsibility, reparation and what one generation owes the next. With the outside world in chaos following a devastating environmental disaster, two retired nuclear engineers live a quiet life in a remote cottage on the lonely British coast — until a surprise visit from a former colleague upends the couple’s equilibrium and trust.
Featuring:Lakshmi Basile - Dancer / Director
Manuel Gutierrez - Dancer
Cristina Moguel - Dancer
Oscar Valero - Singer
Jose Tanaka - Guitar
Kambiz Pakan - Guitar
Featuring:Alexandra Rozo - Dancer / Director
Vanessa Albalos - Dancer
Manuel Gutierrez - Dancer
Jose Cortes - Singer
Alex Jordan - Guitar
Gerardo Morales - Cajon
Featuring:
Fanny Ara - Dancer / Director
Timo Nuñez - Dancer
Reyes Barrios - Dancer
Gabriel Osuna - Guitar
Gerardo Morales - Percussion
Antonio de Jerez - Vocals
Mateo Amper - Piano
Dancers: Lakshmi Basile, Timo Nuñez and Reyes Barrios.
Singer: Antonio de Jerez
Guitarists: John Moore and Kambiz Pakan.
Vanessa Albalos — Baile & Director
Briseyda Zárate — Baile
Cristina Lucio — Baile
Oscar Valero — Cante
Kambiz Pakandam — Guitarrista
Briseyda Zárate — Artistic Direction Choreography & Baile
Vanessa Albalos — Baile
Cristina “La Tigresa” Lucio — Baile
Antonio de Jerez — Cante
Jose Tanaka — Toque
Lakshmi “La Chimi” Basile — Bailora & Director
Antonio De Jerez — Cante
Reyes Barrios — Cante
José Tanaka — Guitarrista
Kambiz Pakan — Guitarrista
special guests David Castellano, Laura Castellano and Cristina Moguel of “FlamencoFlavor.”
Flamenco under the stars. Bar open the whole time. Get hype.
July 30, 31, Aug 1
Aug 28, 29
Sept 24, 25, 26
The Fountain Theatre commemorates the emancipation of enslaved women and men in Texas on June 19, 1865 — the last state to abolish slavery in the U.S. following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 — with a special event at the Fountain’s new Covid-safe outdoor venue in East Hollywood. The Fountain’s Juneteenth Celebration will take place on Saturday, June 19 beginning at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.
An Octoroon is a radical, incendiary and subversively funny riff on Dion Boucicault’s once-popular 1859 mustache-twirling melodrama set on a Louisiana plantation. A spectacular collision of the antebellum South and 21st-century cultural politics, An Octoroon twists a funhouse world of larger-than-life stereotypes into blistering social commentary to create a gasp-inducing satire.
Join us for mimosas, omelets, Bloody Mary’s, scones … or whatever your favorite brunch may be.
The Los Angeles theatre community lost a dear friend on December 16, 2020. For decades, through the lens of his camera, Ed chronicled the production history of local stages throughout Southern California.
Let’s come together in a digital gathering to celebrate Ed’s life and work, and to assemble as a community of Los Angeles theater-makers.
The Fountain Theatre has received approval from the City of Los Angeles to install a temporary outdoor stage for the purpose of presenting live performances and other events during the pandemic.
Settle in with your favorite beverage on Saturday, Dec. 19 at 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET when the Fountain Theatre winds up 2020 and its monthly Saturday Matinee series with an Old Hollywood-themed holiday party filled with joy, games, and — of course — an online playreading
Join special guest Larry Powell: writer, actor, director. Hosted by Stephen Sachs.
Special guest entertainment columnist Leslie Gray Streeter joins our host France-Luce Benson for another installment of Saturday Matinees at The Fountain.
THE GAZE is a cycle of plays that examines the process of building culturally specific and queer works of color in historically white spaces. It tackles hard topics like racism head on. It wrestles with the question:
Why strain to be free under a gaze fixed on your imprisonment when it’s you who is holding the key? Why stay? Go where? No Homo is the first play in the cycle.
Join special guest Holli Harms, playwright, screenwriter, and short-story writer for another installment of Saturday Matinees at the Fountain, hosted by France-Luce Benson.
Special guest Lynne Streeter Childress joins host France-Luce Benson for another installment of Saturday Matinees at The Fountain.
An in-person conversation with author, lecturer, and Metropolitan Opera commentator William Berger and internationally acclaimed opera star Morris Robinson, exploring political and gender issues not only in opera but in the systemic marginalization of the arts in our country. What modern issues are at stake in the works of Giuseppe Verdi? What can we do about racism in the works of Richard Wagner? Why does this matter today? Mr. Berger’s latest book of recent and new essays, Seeking the Sublime Cache, will be available for purchase and signing.
Raise Your Voice - Vote! Is a guerrilla-style, immersive theatre event to take place over the weekend of October 24 & 25. An ensemble will present a series of pop up performances in public spaces throughout Los Angeles. Each piece will feature America's most iconic speeches about voting rights.
Padraic Lillis is the Founding Artistic Director of The Farm Theater whose mission is to cultivate early career artists through workshop, production, and mentoring. He is a director, playwright, and educator.
Lisa Strum, a Philadelphia native living and working in the New York area is a director, an educator, actress, playwright, producer, casting director, singer and a certified wedding officiant! She received an MFA in Acting from the University of Washington in Seattle and has performed in regional theatres all across the country.
Art imitates life when the Fountain Theatre presents Talking Peace, a new 10-minute, site-specific “Zoom-within-a-Zoom” by acclaimed playwright France-Luce Benson. Talking Peace will premiere on day one of Alternative Theatre L.A.’s Together LA: A Virtual Theatre Festival, one of six short plays presented by Los Angeles-based theater companies on Thursday, Oct. 1 at 7 p.m. PT / 10 p.m. ET.
Join prize-winning playwright Josh Wilder and your host France-Luce Benson for an inspiring Saturday Matinee at The Fountain.
The Dynamic Duo! These two female Artistic Directors are working tirelessly to help save the Los Angeles community during this COVID crisis, and have become pals in the process. Hosted by Stephen Sachs.
Join Kit Yan & Melissa Li for another installment of Saturday Matinees at The Fountain. Hosted by France-Luce Benson
In August, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi when he was accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who was a cashier at a grocery store. Four days later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till, beat him and shot him in the head.
The original director and cast of the Fountain Theatre’s 2010, multiple award-winning production of The Ballad of Emmett Till by Ifa Bayeza will reunite for a live-streamed reading of the play
Playwright Ifa Bayeza, author of The Ballad of Emmett Till, joins host Stephen Sachs on Theatre Talk on Thursday, August 27th @ 4pm PT/7pm ET. The night before our special livestream reading of the play.
Saturday Matinees at The Fountain. Featuring Dennis A. Allen II. Playwright, Actor, Director.
Join Jon Rivera, Artistic Director of Playwrights Arena along with your host Stephen Sachs.
Join Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning playwright and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan and host Stephen Sachs.
Celebrate Pride Month with a Daniel's Husband & The Normal Heart company reunion. Featuring Verton Banks, Bill Brochtrup, Tim Cummings, Jose Fernando, Matt Gottlieb, Simon Levy, Ed Martin, Michael McKeever, Jenny O'Hara, Lisa Pelikan, Dan Shaked, and Jeff Witzke. Hosted by Stephen Sachs.
Showtime Blues by France-Luce Benson
On a stalled train, Ameira and Demetrius dodge law enforcement and grapple with the realities of life as a moving target.
Wren T. Brown, founder of Ebony Repertory Theatre joins your host Stephen Sachs for another edition of Theatre Talk.
Saturday Matinees at The Fountain. Plays, prose, and poetry celebrating our fathers.
This week, in honor of all the men and women on the front lines of our Nation's current uprising, we'll celebrate one of the greatest uprisings in world history - The Haitian Revolution. Join us for excerpts from the first play in France-Luce Benson's epic trilogy - Deux Femmes on the Edge de la Revolution.
Join us for a live reading of our smash-hit CITIZEN: An American Lyric.
A provocative meditation on race, fusing prose, poetry, movement, music, and the visual image. A lyric poem, snapshots, vignettes, on the acts of everyday racism. Remarks, glances, implied judgments. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV — everywhere, all the time. Those did-that-really-just-happen-did-they-really-just say-that slurs that happen every day and enrage in the moment and later steep poisonously in the mind. And, of course, those larger incidents that become national or international firestorms. As Rankine writes, “This is how you are a citizen.”
Saturday Matinees at The Fountain. Featuring Darrel Alejandro Holnes & Tom Angelo
Saturday Matinees at The Fountain. Featuring Antonio David Lyons
Award-winning playwright Nambi E. Kelley (Native Son, Jazz) shares her process as an acclaimed writer and actress.
Saturday Matinees at The Fountain. Featuring Vanessa Garcia & Cameron Dye
A live online reading of France-Luce’s gripping docudrama that explores the rippling impact of mass deportations. Based on real-life interviews.
Saturday Matinees at The Fountain. Featuring Juliette Jeffers & Shawn Randall
The Fountain launches a new online program, Theatre Talk. You'll get up-close-and-personal with some of your favorite Fountain actors, directors, designers, Board members and theatre professionals.
Award-winning director Michael Michetti (Building the Wall) talks shop about his process with actors, how he prepares for each production, and how he navigates being an in-demand stage director in Los Angeles.
Saturday Matinees at The Fountain. Featuring Sharina Martin, Lily Jo Ockwell, and THE TALK by France-Luce Benson
Saturday Matinees at The Fountian present M.J. Fievre & Fernando Subirats
The Fountain Theatre presents Saturday Matinees at The Fountain. Featuring EllaRose Chary and Brandon James Gwinn, an award-winning writing team specializing in stories that take a fresh look at the queer community with cutting-edge music.
Fountain Theatre technical director Scott Tuomey & Keisha-Gaye Anderson join our host France-Luce Benson for this week’s installment of Saturday Matinees at The Fountain
Written by Stephen Sachs (author of Bakersfield Mist)
Directed by Stephen Sachs
Produced by Simon Levy, James Bennett, Deborah Culver
Starring Tanya Alexander, Richard Azurdia, Aleisha Force, James Harper, Matt Kirkwood, Rob Nagle, Tarina Pouncy
Feb 15 – April 5, 2020
World Premiere – Written and Directed by Stephen Sachs (author of Bakersfield Mist). Newspaper columnist Andy Kramer is laid off when a corporate takeover downsizes the City Chronicle. In retaliation, Andy fabricates a letter to his column from an imaginary homeless woman named “Jane Doe” who announces she will kill herself on the 4th of July because of the heartless state of the world. When the letter goes viral, Andy is forced to hire a homeless woman to stand-in as the fictitious Jane Doe. She becomes an overnight internet sensation and a national women’s movement is ignited.
Walter “Pops” Washington is a retired New York City policeman. His wife has died and his son, “Junior”, has just been released from jail. They live in a rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City. Junior’s girlfriend, Lulu, and Oswaldo, a recovering addict, also spend time at the apartment. Walter has been pursuing a discrimination suit against the Police Department, because he was accidentally shot by another police officer.
New York Times Critic’s Pick! – “For theatergoers who are tired of the clear-cut eithers and ors of most mainstream play writing, ‘Between Riverside and Crazy’… is a dizzying and exciting place to be… ‘Riverside’ creeps up on you. And every time you think you’ve figured out where it’s going, Mr. Guirgis alters its course, forcing you to readjust your emotional bearings and your take on its characters.”
Hannah is two weeks away from becoming a board-certified neurologist when she receives a strange Fedex package from her grandmother in faraway Korea. Inside are two things: a bona-fide-heart’s-desire wish, and a suicide note. The mystery sends Hannah and her family on a surreal, funny, and poignant journey back to their roots in North/South Korea and the forbidden Demilitarized Zone that divides them. This startling new comedy about mothers, daughters and granddaughters twists together a strange series of events within one little family to explore generational shifts, opposing worldviews, fantasy and reality, and the mystery of human experience.
Southern California Premiere
Michael McKeever’s witty, passionate, and deeply moving play takes an unflinching look at how we choose to tie the knot — or not. Daniel and Mitchell are the perfect couple. Perfect house, perfect friends — even a mother who wants them married. They’d have the perfect wedding too, except that Mitchell doesn’t believe in gay marriage. A turn of events puts their perfect life in jeopardy, and Mitchell is thrust into a future in which even his love may not be enough. Daniel’s Husband is a bold reflection on love, commitment, and family in our perilous new world.
West Coast Premiere – Winner, 2018 Elliot Norton Award – A music group is on the verge of making it big on national TV when a police shooting of a Black teen shakes the band to its core, forcing them to confront questions of race, gender, privilege and when to use artistic expression as an act of social protest.
Achingly human and surprisingly funny, Cost of Living is about the forces that bring people together and the realities of facing the world with physical disabilities. It challenges us to re-think the true meaning of abled and disabled, whole and damaged. By shattering stereotypes, it reveals how deeply we all need each other.
An unforgettable love story inspired by one of the most romantic movies of all time. Stephen Sachs directs Deaf actors Deanne Bray (Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye, Heroes) and Troy Kotsur (title role in Cyrano at the Fountain, Big River on Broadway) in Sachs’ newest play, inspired by the screenplay for Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter.
In Sachs’ new spin on the classic 1945 British film, a Deaf man (Kotsur) and a hard-of-hearing woman (Bray), two married strangers, meet accidentally in a New York City subway station. As their casual friendship develops into something deeper, each is forced to confront how their simmering relationship could forever change their lives and the lives of those they love.
“A train station is a place of transition, a place people go when they’re on their way to someplace else,” notes Sachs. “‘Arrival & Departure’ is not only a travel term. It expresses the journey of change that the people in this play are experiencing. What happens when you find your soul mate, but the circumstances of life get in the way?”
Kostsur and Bray are married in real life, and Sachs wrote the play with them in mind.
Friendship, faith and fatherhood. Jonathan Arkin, Alan Blumenfeld, Dor Gvirtsman and Sam Mandel star in The Chosen, the award-winning stage adaptation by Aaron Posner and Chaim Potok of Potok’s beloved novel. Simon Levy directs for a January 20 opening at the Fountain Theatre, where performances continue through March 25. The Fountain celebrates the novel’s 50th anniversary (last April) with the West Coast premiere of Posner’s new, streamlined version.
Set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn against the backdrop of World War II, the revelation of the Holocaust and the desperate struggle of Zionism, The Chosen is a moving coming-of-age story about two observant Jewish boys who live only five blocks, yet seemingly worlds, apart. When Danny, son of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic tzaddik, injures the more traditionally Orthodox Reuven during a baseball game between their rival yeshivas, their two universes collide and a unique friendship is born.
Greenwich Village, 1964, based on a true story. A naïve young woman falls under the spell of Fred Herko, a brilliant ballet dancer of extraordinary charisma and talent and a fiery denizen of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Freddy fuses theater, music, dance and video to capture the explosive spirit of a passionate artist and a turbulent era.
New Orleans, three years after Hurricane Katrina. 14 year-old runaway Kali embarks on a journey to pick through the wreckage of what used to be her life. Rhyming, stealing, and scamming her way through the still-destroyed neighborhood, she grapples with the real cost of what she lost and is forced to confront the higher risk of moving forward. A funny, moving, and powerful new play about community and the power of family.
Imagine being one of the first to see a new play by Tennessee Williams. Now is your chance.
Our long-term successful relationship with the Tennessee Williams Estate continues with our highly anticipated West Coast premiere of Baby Doll in July. You may remember the provocative 1956 movie written by Williams, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Carroll Baker, Karl Malden and Eli Wallach. Sixty years later, Pierre LaVille and Emily Mann adapted Williams’ screenplay into the first-ever authorized version for the stage at the Tony Award winning McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ. The production drew rave reviews and national attention. The Fountain Theatre is honored to be producing the second production, in our exclusive West Coast Premiere.
The Story: Mississippi Delta, early 1950s, where the accents are thick, the summers are hot, but the livin’ isn’t so easy. Archie Lee has been married to a seductive young woman/child, called only by the endearment of Baby Doll, for some time, but by agreement with the girl’s now-dead father, the marriage can only be consummated on her 20th birthday, now just days away. The manager of a successful plantation nearby, handsome Silva Vacarro, swaggers in, suspecting that Archie Lee is the arsonist who destroyed his cotton gin the night before. Once Silva sets his eyes on Baby Doll, things get steamy and complicated.
Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of this daring and sensuous West Coast Premiere.
It’s going to be a very hot summer.
Four busboys in the kitchen of an upscale restaurant learn the hard way how to deal with pay cuts that could jeopardize their dreams for a better life, their dignity and their friendship. Fast-paced, hip and funny, the play brings to colorful life the camaraderie, sharing of dreams, competition and traitorous backstabbing that climaxes with a powerful dramatic turn at the end. Immigration, the minimum wage crisis, rights for undocumented workers, and citizenship lie at the center of this fast-moving, funny and powerful new LA premiere that examines the true meaning of ”home” and how far we’re willing to go to get there.
A new play by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan (The Kentucky Cycle, All the Way, Hacksaw Ridge), written in direct response to the immigration policies of the Trump administration, reveals how those policies might lead to a terrifying, seemingly inconceivable, yet inevitable conclusion. Building the Wall opens at the Fountain Theatre on March 18, the first in a series of productions set to take place at theaters across the U.S. as part of a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere.
In the very near future, the Trump administration has carried out his campaign promise to round up and detain millions of immigrants. As a writer interviews the former supervisor of a private prison, it becomes clear how federal policy has escalated into something previously unimaginable.
Come experience the NEW Fountain 360. In the round. Even more intimate. More personal.
Stephen Sachs, the multi-award winning author of CITIZEN, BAKERSFIELD MIST, CYRANO, HEART SONG, heats up the stage with his new play.
Solar power confronts spirit power in the Mojave Desert.
Cameron Watson (multi-award winning director of PICNIC and TOP GIRLS at Antaeus) directs Elizabeth Frances and Brian Tichnell in this hot (literally!) world premiere, running through March 21st at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood.
Internationally-acclaimed playwright Athol Fugard returns to the Fountain Theatre with this beautiful heartfelt new drama inspired by the life of South African artist Nukain Mabuza. Aging farm laborer Nukain has spent his life transforming the rocks at Revolver Creek into a vibrant garden of painted flowers. Now, the final unpainted rock, as well as his young companion Bokkie, has forced Nukain to confront his legacy as a painter, a person and a black man in 1980s South Africa. When the landowner’s wife arrives with demands about the painting, the profound rifts of a country hurtling toward the end of apartheid are laid bare, and a painter’s greatest statement against injustice is the art that he creates.
World Premiere! A provocative meditation on race, fusing prose, poetry, movement, music, and the visual image. A lyric poem, snapshots, vignettes, on the acts of everyday racism. Remarks, glances, implied judgments. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV — everywhere, all the time. Those did-that-really-just-happen-did-they-really-just say-that slurs that happen every day and enrage in the moment and later steep poisonously in the mind. And, of course, those larger incidents that become national or international firestorms. As Rankine writes, “This is how you are a citizen.”
Caroline is sick and hasn’t been to school in months. Anthony suddenly arrives at her door bearing a beat-up copy of Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ and an urgent assignment from their high school lit teacher. As these two let down their guards and share their secrets, the poetry assignment unlocks a much deeper mystery that has brought them together. Winner of the 2014 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award and finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Playwrighting Prize, I AND YOU is a funny and haunting play about youth, life, love, and the strange transcendent connections between us all.
A memorable and moving play about unconditional love. How far would you go to create family?
In Reborning, a young artist who crafts custom-made dolls begins to suspect that a demanding client may be the mother who abandoned her at birth. As she tries to unravel the mystery, she discovers the path to her own “reborning.”
Los Angeles Premiere. Nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, Best Original Script.
Trick or Treat. Director Stephen Sachs and actress Jenny O’Hara (Bakersfield Mist) reunite for the wickedly entertaining, spine-chilling West Coast premiere of Broomstick by John Biguenet. A funny, poignant and “spell” binding tale about the magic of the human heart, Broomstick opens at the Fountain Theatre on Oct. 18.
Broomstick is the winner of a National New Play Network (NNPN) Continued Life of New Plays Fund Award.
Set in Appalachia and written entirely in verse, Biguenet’s charming and mesmerizing solo play introduces us to a wacky, bizarre old woman living in an odd little shack deep in the woods… who just may happen to be a witch. Creepily funny and frightening, she takes us back to our childhoods when, in our innocence, we first wrestled with good and evil. As she unveils her life, we journey with her down a shadowy path somewhere between our material world and the realm of fantasy. But this is no Hansel and Gretel fairytale; in Broomstick, justice is meted out swiftly and harshly.
Award-winning director Shirley Jo Finney returns to direct The Brothers Size, the second play in McCraney’s Trilogy, following our acclaimed and award-winning In the Red and Brown Water. The Brothers Size is a hot-blooded, music-filled drama from one of the country’s most exciting new voices. After a homecoming in the bayous of Louisiana, the Size brothers, Ogun and Oshoosi, try to start fresh. This haunting, funny, and heartbreaking tour de force probes sexuality, coming of age, and the bonds of family as the brothers struggle to discover identity and to unearth a new sense of freedom.
Los Angeles Premiere. Adapted by Aaron Posner from the beloved, best-selling novel by Chaim Potok (The Chosen) and set in post-war Brooklyn, the powerful story of a Jewish boy’s struggle to become an artist at any cost, against the will of his parents, community and tradition. A recent hit Off-Broadway. Winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play and the John Gassner Playwriting Award.
The iconic American play about a nation in denial. Fueled by love, anger, hope and pride, THE NORMAL HEART unfolds like a real-life political thriller — as a tight-knit group of friends refuses to let doctors, politicians and the press bury the truth of an unspoken epidemic behind a wall of silence. Thirty years after it was written, this outrageous, unflinching, and totally unforgettable look at the sexual politics of New York during the AIDS crisis remains one of the theatre’s most powerful evenings ever. First produced by Joseph Papp at New York’s Public Theater, the play was a critical sensation and a seminal moment in theater history. The play was so ahead of its time that many of the core issues it addresses – including gay marriage, a broken healthcare system and, of course, AIDS – are just as relevant today as they were when it first premiered.