THE HISTORY OF CITY EQUITY THEATRE
City Equity Theatre was founded by Jonathan Fuller and Alan Gardner in the summer of 2006 with a production of David Mamet's salty drama AMERICAN BUFFALO. The production featured Gardner and Fuller in the roles of "Don" and "Teach" under the director of fellow equity member Dennis McLernon. UAB Senior Tobie Windham played the role of "Bobby."
Since Mamet's play took place in the store front of a Chicago pawn shop, Gardner wanted the to perform the play in a downtown store front and approached Ed and Mary Gurney, the owner's of Playhouse, Inc. on 3rd avenue north downtown about the possibility. Supportive of the idea of a professional equity theatre in Birmingham, the Gurney's agreed and together they transformed the space into a Chicago pawn shop. Below is an article and show poster for the production.
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The play was so well recieved (with 8 consecutive sold out performances) that the founders decided to stage a second production before the end of Summer.
They chose the Frank McGuiness's Tony nominated drama
SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME
because of it's moving story, rich characterizations and timely subject matter.
Joining Fuller and Gardner on-stage this time however was Dennis McLernon and fellow equity member Will York was recruited to direct the cast.
The show received both a strong review from the Birmingham News.
Below is the publicity post card, the review and a transcript of the article.
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Transcipt
THEATER REVIEW
SMALL THEATER MAKES BIG IMPACT WITH ‘SOMEONE’
By Pamela Morse
For The Birmingham News – Saturday, August 12, 2006
Good theater takes you to a place you’ve never been. Great theater takes you to a place place you’d never want to go, and makes you glad you went there. That’s what makes Frank McGuinness’s “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me” a great play. A concrete room in Beirut where three men remain chained to a wall, captive in some unseen war, is clearly a place nobody would want to be. But when the third act finally wraps up, you’ll thank McGuinness for the long and arduous trip.
The second production of City Equity Theatre, “Someone” opened Thursday in the makeshift space of The Playhouse in downtown Birmingham, with only a small audience of theatrefolk in attendance. Eerily timely and still-unfortunately- timeless, the 1992 play is set against the stark walls of a cell. The only characters are an Irish journalist, an American doctor, and a British literature professor. As the robust American, Alan Gardner, co-founder and co-artistic director of City Equity turns in a strong performance. He is matched by Jonathan Fuller, who plays the Englishman with a winning mix of timidity and strength. It is the performance of UAB Professor Dennis McLernon that sneaks up on you. In the first act, McLernon seems to be all bluster and Irish brogue, but, by the end of the second act , he takes on new dimensions and stealthily begins to steal this smart show.
Based on this production it would appear that City Equity Theatre is out to prove to Birmingham that Equity means something. Directed by and starring only members of Actors Equity Association, this production is clearly not the work of amateurs. York has assembled a serious cast to put on a serious play, on an unlikely stage in the back of a prop and costume shop. “Someone” is reminiscent of the fine shows staged by the short-lived Birmingham Repertory Theatre more than a decade ago.
McGuinness’s Tony-nominated play, critically acclaimed here and abroad, is based on the true story of kidnapped Irishman, Brian Keenan, who spent four years as a hostage in Lebanon. The play also has threads of autobiography: McGuinness is am Irish professor who specialized in middle and old English, like his British character. The only flaws in the opening night performance were that some of the lines were lost, and that the rumble of trucks passing on Third Avenue North swallowed a few more lines of dialogue in the play in which the words are everything. The whispering can be remedied: the traffic noise will only get worse, especially on nights when the Alabama Theatre across the street is abuzz.
City Equity Theatre has invested vast amounts of time and talent into this production. A reciprocal investment is being asked on the part of the audience. “Someone” runs almost three hours, and requires a substantial amount of thought and attention. We think it’s worth it.
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For season 2, City Equity produced the work of 2 Irish playwrights!
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"It's a tour de force for the actors involved, and City Equity Theatre's production gives us three performers who are more than up for the task."
Alec Harvey - The Birmingham News
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Patron Review:
"There is true beauty in the direction and performance of "CRIPPLE."
It is a theater experience that is fresh and alive -- one that will linger in memory. Congratulations to all of you and my very best for a great new season."
Bob Penny (Actor, Member Actor's Equity Association & Screen Actors Guild)
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"City Equity Theatre's production will make you a believer in the power and beauty of words. The deft troupe and its director, Alan Gardner, rub Brian Friel's text to a dark luster."
Mary Colurso - 12 To Do List
(Birmingham News, June 29th)
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THEATRE REVIEW
Sunday, June 24, 2007
LONG 'FAITH HEALER' TESTS PATIENCE, BUT WORTH THE EFFORT
Brian Friel loves words. The Irish playwright has used them to great effect in his Tony-winning "Dancing at Lughnasa," his adaptation of Chekov's "Uncle Vanya" and many other plays throughout his illustrious career. His are rarely works of great action. More often, his characters tell us of momentous events rather than showing them to us.
Such is the case with "Faith Healer," his 1979 work that has already seen a couple of acclaimed revivals on Broadway. It's a series of four monologues, told from the perspectives of three people - itinerant faith healer Frank Hardy; his wife, Grace; and his agent and friend, Teddy - all of whom were involved in a horrible event one night in County Donegal in northwest Ireland.
It's a tour de force for the actors involved, and City Equity Theatre's production gives us three performers who are more than up for the task. Jonathan Fuller opens and closes the show as Frank Hardy, with Francie Gardner as Grace and Alan Litsey as Teddy, who provides some much-needed comic relief.
Fuller is formidable as the "fantastic Frank Hardy," a man who questions his talent as a faith healer right up to the very end, including a fateful night where his hands seemed to rid 10 villagers of their ailments. Friel has created a multifaceted character in Frank, and Fuller captures every nuance. He grabs the audience from the first scene and has the unenviable task of grabbing them again when the show goes on about a monologue too long.
Sandwiched between those monologues, but no less effective, are pieces delivered by Gardner and Litsey. She plays a woman on the brink, building her monologue to a devastating finale, and he is manic and lovable as Teddy, the cockney agent who devoted a good portion of his life to Frank and Grace. Director Alan Gardner moves the proceedings along as swiftly as possible, but Friel is not a playwright to be rushed. He loves the language and weaves an intricate tale, but even then it wears a bit thin as the running time approaches 2˝ hours.
But if you're patient, "Faith Healer" is worth the wait, and you can credit Friel and three talented actors for that.
ALEC HARVEY
News staff writer
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| Jonathan Fuller as FranK |
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| Jonathan Fuller, Francie Gardner (as Gracie) and Alan Litsey (as Teddy) |
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Season 3 focuses on plays by Sam Shepard!
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Love, hate collide in Shepard's `True West'
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Alec Harvey
News Staff Writer
From the moment brothers Austin and Lee meet in their mother's kitchen in Sam Shepard's "True West," you know all is not right with this family dynamic. Austin, an Ivy League grad who is house-sitting in the Hollywood hills while mom's in Alaska, is putting the finishing touches on a script that he is this close to selling to a powerful agent. Ne'er-do-well Lee is a thief by trade, and he's hoping to find some houses nearby to burglarize. There is, to say the least, some tension, and it only gets worse in City Equity Theatre's solid production running through Sunday at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
Shepard's plays run the gamut from comedy to drama, the absurd to the sometimes unintelligible. "True West" - considered by some to be his masterpiece - is probably his most straightforward work, a look at the love and hate shared by two brothers who are more alike than either would admit. Like Shepard's other work, "True West" is a "talky" play, but City Equity's co-founders Jonathan Fuller (Austin) and Alan Gardner (Lee) are more than up to the task. The two have an undeniable chemistry on stage, and they maneuver Shepard's story with aplomb. As the beer and liquor flows during Lee's visit, the brothers come to understand each other all too well: Lee sells a script before Austin does, and a drunk Austin pilfers toasters from nearby homes. It takes two fine actors to make this role-reversal believable, and this production's got them.
The real power of "True West" lies in Shepard's words and the actors playing Austin and Lee. City Equity has all of that going for them.
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| Alan Gardner (as Lee) & Jonathan Fuller (as Austin) |
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| Melissa Cox and Edwin Booth in THE GOD OF HELL |
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From The Birmingham News, July 19, 2008
Review by Alec Harvey
"The God of Hell"
City Equity Theatre
Through July 27
951-3029
Review: four out of five stars
In its first three seasons, Birmingham's City Equity Theatre has proven at least two things. First, the troupe isn't going to take the easy way out, opting for literate, challenging work rather than sure-fire box-office winners. And second, they're always going to do it with a high degree of quality.
And so it is with "The God of Hell," City Equity's second entry in its mini-Sam Shepard season. "The God of Hell" is much more political in nature than "True West," which opened the season in June. A Midwestern couple - whose biggest excitement is feeding the heifers and watering the plants - find their lives turned upside-down by the visit of a mysterious friend of the husband's. He literally shoots out sparks when he's touched, and it turns out he's contaminated by plutonium. (Pluto, you'll learn, was the God of Hell.).
By the time the short play is over, another mysterious man will appear at the farmhouse, and Shepard will have taken us on a strange ride that involves patriotism, torture and cookies, among many other things. Director Marlene Johnson has put together a fine production, complete with special effects that entertain without being overwhelming. Her biggest achievement, though, is the casting.
Alan Gardner turned in a memorable performance in "True West," but he makes even more of a mark here with his turn as Graig Haynes, the radioactive friend. It's a physical performance that demands nuance at times and over-the-top theatrics at others, and Gardner is up to the task.
As Emma and Frank, the husband and wife at the center of this storm, Melissa Cox and Alan Litsey are also quite good. Neither actor does many shows in Birmingham, but "The God of Hell" will certainly leave you wanting more from both of them. In the role of Welch, the smarmy pursuer of Haynes, Edwin Booth is appropriately creepy, much more convincing than he was as the smarmy producer in "True West."
City Equity's season of Shepard has been a success. It'll be interesting to see what the troupe comes up with next.
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| Alan Litsey in THE GOD OF HELL |
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| Alan Gardner in THE GOD OF HELL |
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Birmingham Weekly - July 17, 2008
Cover Story Seeing The God of Hell
City Equity Theatre takes the next stepA Review By: Glenny Brock
In the oh-so-Oklahoma atmosphere that has comprised Birmingham's theatre scene during so much of recent memory, a minor Sam Shepard play is a major event. But the playwright's cultural standing isn't really what makes the City Equity Theatre production of The God of Hell noteworthy so much as the radioactive politics that permeate the script.
The show, which opens Thursday, July 17, at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, is the second Shepard outing for the company this summer, a follow-up to last month's True West. No doubt the company's founding directors, Jonathan Fuller and Alan Gardner, were conscious of the powerful, one-two punch effect these back-to-back productions would have. True West was an admirable warm-up. The God of Hell, under the direction of Marlene Johnson, is a clear triumph.
The play begins, as so many good stories do, with a ritual and a mystery. The ritual is the mundane morning routine of Frank and Emma, a couple of Midwestern farmers living in America's dairy land (not to be confused, it is made clear, with America's heartland). He is polishing his work boots before going out to feed his heifers and she's watering and over watering a glut of houseplants. The mystery is what they should make of their unexpected houseguest, Craig Haynes, still asleep in the basement having arrived after an incomprehensible late-night phone call to Frank. The farmer tells his wife that all he could get out of his old friend Haynes, whom Emma has never met, was that "the bottom has fallen out," and that Haynes needed a place to stay. Immediately. And indefinitely.
After relaying this information to his wife, Frank heads down to the field to feed the heifers. Emma is flutters through her kitchen, fixing bacon and coffee in anticipation of playing hostess to Haynes when another stranger arrives at the door. The man's suit alone would make him an aberration in the flannel-and-denim farmhouse but his peculiar way of talking makes him nearly a menace. Plus, he's hawking various patriotic wares – American flag cookies and stars-and-stripes banner and decal sets – and plying Emma with questions about her house. Specifically the basement. And more specifically, any guests who might be in the basement.
Defending her privacy, Emma denies having any guests and sends the stranger packing. She rings the massive cowbell on the porch to get Frank out of the field and back up to the farmhouse, in order to tell him about the troubling visit. His puzzled nonchalance has her edging toward furious but Haynes makes his entrance from the basement before the couple can resolve the argument. And Haynes, it turns out, is pretty peculiar himself, even absurdly so – a bolt of lightning shoots from him whenever he comes in direct contact with another living thing. It's obvious that the unwelcome arrival of these two men is going to spoil the daily routines on the farm for a while. Maybe for good. Maybe for not good, not good at all.
Alan Litsey plays Frank, and it’s gesture above all that makes the Birmingham-Southern theatre professor a fine, beleaguered farmer: To understand how this man handles things, you need only watch how he handles things – palms massaging mink oil into his boots, nervous whole hands fondling his coffee cup, fingers gripping an attaché case that looks out of place in his grasp. Here is a man who has always kept his hands busy, but the way he clutches at things reveals a fear that's unexpected from a farmer at the center of America.
Emma is played by the diminutive powerhouse Melissa Cox (notable for her outstanding work in Angels in America at Birmingham Festival Theatre in 2002-2003). In a show held together by tension, Cox extracts just enough comedy to keep the audience breathing, mining her lines for the kind of laughter you hear when someone is more relieved than amused. Her petite frame belies Emma's life force but puts on view the character's growing fear. Her interactions with these big but fragile men – the sinister stranger, the frightened houseguest and her own farmer husband – are exquisite and nerve-wracking. You find yourself rooting for her most of all.
Alan Gardner's bulk and heft plays as a counterpoint to Cox: when the robust Haynes becomes a waif, triggered into mewling submission, it's a shock. His expressive physicality is masterful. The fourth actor, Edwin Booth, is wonderfully cartoonish in his creepiness, playing his man of mystery as much like a game show host as a government agent.
The play has repeatedly been called a farce but the modern connotations of that word suggest a ribald lightness that is wholly absent here. That said, what comedy there is does call to mind the French root farcir: The word for forcemeat stuffing entered the dramatic lexicon in the 16th century to describe comic interludes “stuffed” into religious plays. The God of Hell is political, no doubt. The question of what torture is, is at the center of the play, and we get Emma's answer early on:
"You don't get tortured unless you know something or somebody thinks you know something."
The title character never shows up on stage, at least not in his own mortal coil. Speaking privately to Frank, Haynes mentions the god of hell, whom the Romans called Pluto, after whom scientists named plutonium, "the most carcinogenic substance known to man."
He describes what would happen if plutonium was released into the atmosphere.
"It causes mutations in the genes of reproductive cells," Haynes says. "The eggs and the sperm. Major mutation. A kind of random compulsory genetic engineering that goes on and on and on and on... It definitely would affect your heifers. It would affect every heifer within 600 miles of here. It would penetrate the food chain and bio-accumulate thousands of times over, lasting generation after generation."
Here, then, is the thing to fear — the drama that plays out on stage looks the skin of the bubble growing cloudy, dissolving before it bursts. Bound to pop at the sound of a bell ringing or a lie being told or the silence that follows either clamor.
At one point, Frank is trying to get a single straight answer out of Haynes, an explanation for his Haynes' skittishness and ranting.
"Are we talking about a world situation or something personal, Graig?"
Graig responds, "What's the difference?"
City Equity Theatre, in residence at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, presents The God of Hell by Sam Shepard. Show times are Thurs-Sat 8 p.m. and Sun 2:30 p.m., July 17-27. General admission $25; students $15; actors' special $10. Call (205) 951-3029 or visit www.cityequitytheatre.com to purchase tickets online.
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THEATRICAL REVIEW - June 6, 2009
CHEMISTRY, FINE ACTING KEY TO PERFORMANCE
"FRANKIE AND JOHNNY IN THE CLAIR DE LUNE" ťCity Equity Theatre at Virginia Samford Theatre - Through June 14. 251-1206 (Alec Harvey, - The Birmingham News) **** out of 5 stars
Frankie and Johnny are scarred. They're lonely and ordinary and unsure of themselves, but most of all, they're scarred -- she by an abusive boyfriend and he by a failed marriage and a stint in prison. Somehow, though, they find each other while working together at a New York diner. In "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune," we meet them on their first night together, filled with great sex and a slowly dawning revelation that they might be perfect for each other.
For Terrence McNally's two-person play to work, you need two fine actors, and thankfully that's what we get with City Equity Theatre's production that opened Wednesday night. It's a showcase for Tyler Layton, nearly perfect as the leery and wary Frankie, and Jonathan Fuller, almost as good as the strange and unnerving Johnny. Fuller's only downfall is Johnny himself, a character that's difficult to put up with for two hours. He's abrasive and relentless and just not very comfortable to watch. He tells Frankie that he would never hit a woman, but somehow we don't believe him. On the other hand, we're pulling for Frankie, whose hopes and dreams will be familiar to everyone. She's funny and romantic, sarcastic and feisty, and Layton is spot-on throughout the play.
Jonathan Offutt's set is the best we've seen in the intimate Martha Moore Sykes Studio, and the play works really well in the space.
Dennis McLernon directs "Frankie and Johnny" with very little of the nudity that came with the recent Broadway production starring Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci. It's still a decidedly adult story, with language and situations as raw as you'll find in any play.
But it's mostly filled with beautiful, real moments courtesy of two fine actors. Layton and Fuller have the chemistry that's paramount to "Frankie and Johnny." To stick with them, we have to believe there's some sort of magnificent attraction between the two, and we do.
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