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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
