The Geffen Playhouse: Twenty Years Of Serious Theater Presented With A Hollywood Sheen

While New Yorkers are still getting accustomed to calling Lincoln Center's former Avery Fisher Hall by its new name, David Geffen Hall, over on the left coast Los Angelinos have been attending live performances at a playhouse named for the entertainment mogul and philanthropist for 20 years.

"I have to tell people constantly that I'm only the benefactor," David Geffen tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I have nothing to do with what gets produced, but that doesn't stop them from telling me how much they enjoyed what they saw at the Playhouse."

Starting out of thin air in 1995, after a $5 million gift for the naming right, the Playhouse has not only lured Hollywood stars to its stages (including more than a dozen Oscar nominees, from Annette Bening and Laura Linney to Ed Harris and Demian Bichir), but has become a showcase for emerging playwrights.

But while Off-Broadway success may get a playwright a Broadway transfer and a West End production, a hit run at the Geffen may land a playwright a gig writing for film or television.

In 2009, playwright Beau Willimon's political drama FARRAGUT NORTH played the Geffen after an Off-Broadway run with the Atlantic Theatre Company. The play became the basis for the George Clooney film THE IDES OF MARCH and year after the Geffen production Willimon got a call about a project with similar themes.

"I firmly believe that the production at the Geffen very much had to do with me ending up doing HOUSE OF CARDS," says the departing show­runner of the Netflix drama that's garnered 33 Emmy nominations.

But even as it celebrates its 20th season, the critically acclaimed nonprofit theater faces challenging market shifts. Los Angeles suffered a 47 percent decline in the number of professional plays produced from 2004 to 2014, according to a study by the nonprofit L.A. Stage Alliance.

There's competition from new neighboring playhouses like Center Theatre Group's Kirk Douglas Theater, Santa Monica's Broad Stage and the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and also the second-class-citizen status Los Angeles theatre is regarded with as compared with New York.

The Geffen has sent nine productions to Manhattan, including Donald Margulies' TIME STANDS STILL which earned two Tony nominations, but its playwright observes, "There's a certain amount of elitism that takes hold. It's a distrust of what is anointed and celebrated in L.A."

After the loss of the theatre's charismatic founder, Oscar producer Gil Cates, who died in 2011, Cates' son, director and producer Gil Cates Jr., stepped up as executive director, sharing responsibilities for the theater's future with Geffen's longtime artistic director (formerly of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater) Randall Arney.

Like many small playhouses, the red-brick Mediterranean building in Westwood didn't start life as a theater. Built in 1929 by Stiles O. Clements, it originally was the Masonic Affiliates Clubhouse, where students who were freemasons or children of freemasons could socialize.

In the early '1970s a Swedish couple, Donald and Kirsten Combs, purchased the building and opened the Contempo Westwood Center, a seller of imported Scandinavian furnishings. "They loved the theater though," recalls Arney. Within two years, the couple converted the space into the Westwood Playhouse, with a retail twist. "They had furniture in the lobby and they'd try to do plays with two intermissions, so that would give patrons a chance to shop more," says Arney. Shows there included some of Peggy Lee's late-career performances and P.S. YOUR CAT IS DEAD, the last play to star actor Sal Mineo.

When Kirsten Combs, who outlived her husband, was ready in 1993 to sell the property, it was Gil Cates who convinced UCLA to purchase it for an estimated $5 million. The Geffen now rents the building from UCLA for $1 a year. His passion for theater, says his son, dated from his undergraduate days at Syracuse University. "More than producing the Academy Awards, his ultimate dream was to start a theater, and it's super hard to do that from scratch," Cates Jr. recalls. "He really gave it everything."

Cates' first production at the Geffen was John Patrick Shanley's FOUR DOGS AND A BONE, setting a tone of serious theater presented with a Hollywood sheen. A satire about the movie business, it was directed by Lawrence Kasdan and starred Parker Posey, Brendan Fraser, Martin Short and Elizabeth Perkins; a company that helped draw the industry audience. The 1996 season opened with the Marquis de Sade tale QUILLS, in which Howard Hesseman bared all on stage. "It became the talk of the town, which is what Gil certainly wanted to make," recalls the theater's first director of publicity, Gary Murphy.

The more than 120 Geffen productions include three notable one-woman shows, developed in-house: Carrie Fisher's WISHFUL DRINKING, Joan Rivers' A WORK IN PROGRESS BY A LIFE IN PROGRESS and Bette Midler in John Logan's I'LL EAT YOU LAST.

Its convenient location allows actors to fluidly go from stage to screen work and The Geffen's partnership with 44 charities has endeared the company to the community. Nearly 20 percent of its seats are available for free each season to veterans, seniors, students and people transitioning out of homelessness and foster care. It also runs a year-long writing and performing program for veterans and has developed an education program with UCLA that teaches literacy to sophomores at Mendez High School in Boyle Heights.

Playwright Neil LaBute sees the Geffen's community work as a natural extension of its artistic mission: "They are a huge advocate of playwrights and a great cheerleader for theater in Los Angeles, rather than being just a showcase for actors to be seen to get other work."

David Mamet, who's had five plays produced at the Geffen, calls it "a happy oasis in the arid pesthole which we, its citizens, know as the entertainment industry."

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