Ted Lange Will Direct Reading Of OUR TOWN For Inner City Cultural Center at UCLA This Weekend

Veteran TV and film actor, director, writer and producer Ted Lange - best known for his 10-year run on the ABC-TV series "The Love Boat" -- has signed on to direct a staged play reading of the Thornton Wilder classic "Our Town" for Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center this Saturday, April 16 at 3pm in the McGowan Hall Little Theatre on the UCLA campus.

UCLA's Beloved Community Initiative is presenting the play reading in collaboration with the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center.

Toplining the cast are Levy Lee as the Stage Manager, Art Evans as Mr. Webb and Carmen Hayward-Stetson as the Narrator, supported by a multi-cultural, intergenerational cast of UCLA students and professionals from the Los Angeles theater community.

Admission is free but seating is limited. Ticket reservations are required and may be made at vazania@cpo.ucla.edu or 310-825-2420.

"Our Town" represents a significant milestone in the legacy of Inner City Cultural Center. Prior to 1968, the 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play had always been presented with an all-white cast. Inner City Cultural Center's 1968 staging, conceived and directed by UCLA alumnus and ICCC co-founder and executive director C. Bernard Jackson, was the first to employ a colorblind approach to casting. The April 16 production at UCLA follows that same principle.

"Our Town is integrated in Los Angeles," wrote the New York Times on December 14, 1968. "In the 30 years since Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town' first saw the light of a stage there has been no production with casting so novel and startling... Emily Webb..is being played by a Negro, her father by an Apache, her Mother by a Russian-American and her brother by a Mexican-American, her sweetheart and husband by a blond Caucasian, his father by a Japanese-American, his mother by a Negro and his sister by a Chinese-American..."

Founded in 1967 by Jackson, a rehearsal pianist in the UCLA Dance Department, and UCLA neurologist Dr. J. Alfred Cannon, Inner City Cultural Center was the nation's first multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural performing and visual arts center, advancing the careers of numerous actors, writers, dancers, stage directors and tech professionals who had previously been excluded from the film and television industries. A comprehensive list of ICCC alumni can be found at http://www.innercityculturalcenter.org under the "Cultural Legacy" tab.

To post a comment, you must register and login.