THE UNINVITED: CRASHING THE PARTY

A conference to re-imagine the next 50 years of Los Angeles Theater

To be held on June 19th, 2011

The Lost Studio
130 S. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90036

(Los Angeles, CA) (June 6, 2011)… THE UNINVITED Crashing the Party has been organized by Los Angeles theater artists as a counter-conference to the national Theater Communications Group conference being held in downtown Los Angeles this month.

Sponsored by longtime L.A. theater makers who have witnessed the vitality and viability of the city’s smaller, risk-taking companies and stages languish under the 50-year-old institutional model of regional theater being celebrated by TCG, the counter-conference will seek to send a message to the performing arts establishment that, in Los Angeles at least, there is little in theater to celebrate.

THE UNINVITED Crashing the Party is the first salvo in a dialogue of like-minded and similarly discontented members of the theater community that will imagine alternatives to the mediocrity prevailing at the region’s larger institutional theaters. The gathering will address the concerns of the marginalized majority of Los Angeles artists who have been systematically excluded from the funding, visibility and public arts discourse dominated by the large, regional stages and their programs of conventional banalities and New York imports. Led by a panel including Travis Preston, John Steppling, Zombie Joe, Denise Devin, Matt McCray, Jay McAdams, Tina Kronis, Guy Zimmerman, Wes Walker and Murray Mednick, the counter-conference will address the proposition that the business of theater is not business or institutional self-preservation but rather the creation of a kind of art that should be innovative, transformative, socially revolutionary and at the center of L.A.’s cultural life.

The conference is: June 19, 1-4 p.m., 5ドル donation

THE UNINVITED Crashing the Party, a conference re-imagining the next 50 years of Los Angeles Theater convenes June 19th, 2011 at The Lost Studio at 130 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036 (between 1st St. & 2nd St.). Admission by donation is 5ドル. Street parking on La Brea Ave.

Sponsored by The Lost Studio, Gunfighter Nation, and Padua Playwrights

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The Lost Studio has been a teaching theater and one of L.A.’s leading acting schools for 20 years. Award-winning director Cinda Jackson offers intensive training and production workshops for actors, writers and directors. It is also home to the renowned children’s classical theater ensemble, Les Enfants Magiques. In 2000, Jackson launched The Lost Studio Pinter Project, an ongoing exploration of the body of plawright Harold Pinter’s work. The series began with Jackson’s productions of Night School, Victoria Station and A Night Out. John Pleshette then directed The Cartaker, No Man’s Land, Moonlight, and Old Times. The Caretaker won the LA Weekly Award for Best Revival for 2002.

Gunfighter Nation is a Los Angeles-based autonomous arts collective founded by John and Lex Steppling and named after Richard Slotkin’s book on the American West. Since 2010, the collective has produced four evenings of theater, including John Steppling’s LA-Weekly award winning play, Phantom Luck. Their other stage work includes L.A. History Project: Pio Pico, Sam Yorty and the Secret Procession of Los Angeles and Alamo Project, productions aimed at rescuing events and places from the myth-making amnesia of America in her march forward.

Padua Playwrights began as an annual Festival and Workshop in 1978 when Murray Mednick invited five other playwrights, including Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes to join him on the old Padua Hills estate in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, just east of Los Angeles. The playwrights, as well as playwriting students and actors, were given free reign to re-investigate their creativity, developing writing exercises for the morning, rehearsing in the afternoon, and presenting the results in he evening. Under Mednick’s artistic direction, the Festival became a model that, staged annually, had a lasting impact on American theater. Since 2001, under the artistic direction of playwright and director Guy Zimmerman, the company has been offering regular seasons of new work to critical acclaim. Among its prominent alumni are Henry David Hwang, John Steppling, John O;Keefe, Jon Robin Batiz, Marlane Meyer, Julie Hebert, Kelly Stuart, Wesley Walker, Rita Valencia and Sharon Yablon.