Interview: Andrea Gordon of READING SERIES EXTRAVAGANZA at Magic Theatre

If you were artistic director of a prominent Bay Area theater company looking for someone to produce an ambitious new play reading series, you couldn’t make a better choice than Andrea Gordon, and she is exactly who Magic Theatre’s Sean San José tapped to helm its Reading Series Extravaganza. In addition to being a playwright herself, Gordon has been directing and producing award winning theater on the West coast since 1983. She has been resident director at Theater Artists of Marin and the One Act Theatre Company, Artistic Director for Tour de Force Theatre Company, and Co-Artistic Director at the Eureka Theatre, and has directed plays for theater companies up and down the California Coast, and in New York City and Chicago, giving her a wealth of contacts to call on going back some 40 years. She is also coming fresh off the success of her play Miriam and Esther Go to the Diamond District, which she wrote, directed and produced at the Magic just this past winter.

The Reading Series Extravaganza kicked off in June and will continue through December, presenting a new play each month. As an added bonus, tickets are free of charge. Gordon chose the plays with an eye toward diversity, complex roles for older women, and especially what she calls “gorgeous writing.” She and her casting director, Liam Vincent, have engaged a veritable Who’s Who of veteran Bay Area theater actors to rotate throughout the readings, forming a de facto rep company in the process. Gordon is directing five of the readings herself.

I spoke with her by phone recently to learn more about the series and how she went about putting it together. We talked about the kind of writing she is drawn to, how important it is to her to champion the work of older women, and why she wishes local theater companies would focus more on the wealth of talent to be found right here in the Bay Area. Gordon is a great conversationalist – warm, smart and opinionated without coming across as arrogant or pretentious. She reminds me of that favorite aunt you always make a beeline for at family gatherings because she’s fun and she’ll tell you the truth. The following has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. 

How did you go about putting together the Reading Series Extravaganza for the Magic?

There were five criteria for who got into the series. One was they had to have a tie to the Bay Area and two, I wanted it to be really good writing. I’m kind of tired of going to see agitprop plays that aren’t written well. I like plays with story and character development and important, universal life choices. Another thing was I wanted to make sure that there were excellent roles for women, and excellent roles for women over 50. That was very, very important to me. The fifth criteria was that even though the plays were topical, their main point was not to be deliberately, absolutely political.

So those were the five points, and I ended up with stellar scripts. We just did Michael Lynch’s Crows Landing Gently, Gently and it was devastating. The audience was blown away and moved because it’s a morality tale that goes from a kind of challenging situation to pure devastation. The premise of Crows Landing is that a young woman in Pawhuska, Oklahoma falls in love and marries a man twenty years older than her who turns out to basically imprison her and convince her that the apocalypse has happened. They end up living in a bunker for twenty years together and then he dies, and she figures out that her entire life has been a lie. The political ramification of that of course is the MAGA supporter who suddenly realizes the emperor has no clothes, but the underlying theme is just how sad it is when someone is so beguiled by something that is so wrong and isolates themselves and basically exhibits Stockholm Syndrome and loses everything. The next piece is a comedy (thank god!) by Laurel Ollstein, called Pandora. It’s got amazing strong women characters and a phenomenal cast.

How are you approaching casting for the series?

Liam Vincent is helping me. I’m casting some parts and he’s casting others, but the main goal is for it to be as diverse as possible and for it to be kickass actors who are going to be seen in varying configurations all the way through the whole season. For example, many of the people that were just in Crows Landing are also in Pandora. Then Anne Darragh and Merrill Grant and Brian Rivera, who will have just been in Pandora and Crows Landing, will be in Julie Hébert’s Entangled.

Ken Narasaki’s play, Spoiled (and I know Ken from like - jeez! - 40 years ago at the Asian American Theater Company), is being directed by Eiko Yamamoto, who will have been in all of the plays except for Entangled at that point. Spoiled will be all Japanese American actors. And then Liam is directing my play, My Lunch with Babs, and I’m still working on casting for it because the roles are extremely complicated. It’s a vague homage to My Dinner with Andre, two women in their 60s having lunch and what ensues from that.

The last play is Lee Brady’s Appointment in Mendocino. Barring any last-minute changes, that’ll be John Flanagan, Molly Goode, who was my assistant director on Miriam and Esther, and Robert Sicular. They play siblings in their 60s dealing with their parents’ disappearance. They don’t die, they disappear.

For anyone attending multiple readings, it’ll be like seeing a rep company.

Yeah, and I mean the quality of the acting - my god! Directing the reading the other day of Crows Landing was like getting to play a Stradivarius. All the actors were so fricking amazing.

How does the rehearsal process work for a series like this?

We only get the actors for an afternoon, so I’m calling them and having really intense discussions with each actor about my vision for the play, my vision for their character, answering any questions they have.  These people are so good that they come in very prepared. Movement is limited - for example Pandora is such a sweeping, physical play that in an afternoon I’m not going to be able to get that physicality into it. But what I am doing is augmenting it with slides and music.

Were all of the playwrights already familiar to you?

Yeah. Not that it matters, but way back when I was pretty well known in the Bay Area. When I got disgusted by the politics of getting money for theaters, I backed out and decided to actually make some money in real estate. Then Lee Brady kind of dragged me kicking and screaming back to theater, and with Facebook and everything I’m still friends with literally every single person I was friends with 40 years ago, if they’re still alive. It’s kind of wacky. So I have a wonderful paintbox I can pull from on pretty much every level.

You mentioned that you haven’t chosen plays that are “deliberately, absolutely political.” Since it can be argued that any play is political to a certain degree, how do you see that boundary?

How I see that boundary is that if there is anything political in relationship to the play, it has to be organic to it and not something that is artificially imposed upon characters. So for example, you know how Brecht was always extraordinarily political through all of his pieces? It’s not gonna be like that because I’m not trying to fix something political. I’m trying to express something meaningful and moving, and I want to grab my audience by the heart, not by the head necessarily. And by the way, all the playwrights are between 55 and 94 years old. That’s another part of this.

Okay, I just have to ask - which playwright is the oldest?

Lee Brady. She probably doesn’t want me to be trumpeting that to the world cause she’s quite the southern belle, but she’s gonna be 94 when this is all over with. She is amazing. Two years ago in Lee Brady’s house someone dropped a CD on the floor and she went into a grand plié to pick it up and bounced right back up again. Lee is a force of nature, about as sharp as anyone could ever be.

I admit that I share your aversion to specifically political theater. As much as I love a good political rally, that’s not why I go to the theater. I go to the theater to be moved by story and characters.

Yeah, that’s it exactly. And I genuinely believe that the very act of me putting this reading series together at 67 with all these amazing older playwrights who write about actual people and thoughts and feelings and are brilliant and what have you, most of whom happen to be women, I’ve done something political in and of itself, just by doing that. I don’t have to trumpet it.

Regional theaters everywhere are still struggling to reconnect with audiences post-COVID. It’s scary, like the people went away and aren’t coming back. As someone who isn’t currently running a theater company yourself but who has been there, done that and seen it all, not to mention has a good head for business, do you have any thoughts on what our regional theaters might be doing to regain their footing in the cultural landscape?

I think they should be doing exactly what I’m doing. I was so appalled when they built a building just so they could house out-of-area actors at Berkeley Rep. Berkeley Rep used to be a theater where you went and cheered local actors doing brilliant work in a variety of plays, and the audience loved watching the different actors in different roles. You know, you could go one night and see Charles Dean playing in, I don’t know, O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, or you could go see him the next night in Long Day’s Journey into Night. It was powerful and amazing because it also showed the indomitability of the human spirit that these actors were capable of housing that unbelievable plethora of emotions at that level. It was glorious.

To have a bunch of movie stars come in and lead things because you think that that’s gonna bring you more money, I think is foolhardy. And it’s also taking away from the original impulse behind theater, which was for the community. It was to bring people who lived in a particular place together to experience things together. To have a roving band of movie stars passing through does not bring people together the same way as having people within your community doing these roles and connecting with you on that level.

I remember one of the things that would happen at the Berkeley Rep a long time ago is the actors would all come out and the audience would be milling around and they would get to know these people. I think that was also really important. There’s a pride people had in their local talent that is missing right now. Regional theaters should look deep inside their own communities and find the talent within their own communities and work with that. There’s such a dearth of money out there right now and it would create so much goodwill in the whole community, including the community of artists, if they would focus more locally. I think it would help everyone.

I think A.C.T. has been actually doubling down on that a little bit. And since I picked on Berkeley Rep, I should mention that it was such a joy the other day to see their new show, Octavio Solis’ Mother Road, which is beautiful and brilliant. [Bay Area theater veteran] James Carpenter played the lead, and I think that really thrilled audiences. And he was brilliant in it.

And then also I would suggest really focusing on good writing. There’s a lot of stuff out there that is being produced for tons of money that is not good at all. In contrast, you’ve got the Octavio Solis play, which is exquisite and brilliantly written and works on every level. I think at the heart of everything is always the script. In a musical, it’s always a good book and good music. If the music is not good, it does not work. Period. And people forget that!

But it’s hard to know. I was in the development process with a playwright/lyricist and singer who had created a musical about her journey as an artist trying to make it, and it was really, really hard because these [shows] are people’s children and you don’t want to destroy them when you’re talking about them because you know how much hard work they’ve put into it. Ultimately, she and I parted ways cause I just didn’t believe in what she was doing musically.

Yeah, I just finished reading James Lapine’s book, Putting It Together, which is about his collaboration with Stephen Sondheim creating Sunday in the Park with George and the difficulties they encountered with people’s antipathy to their work and trying to derail them from writing the show they wanted to write. But they stuck to their guns, thank god, and now we have a masterpiece for the ages.

Yeah, when I was directing and producing and writing Miriam and Esther, I had way too many people in my ear. I cut out stuff that should not have gotten cut out just for expediency, for the sake of getting things to click along faster. I feel like I robbed the play of a lot of stuff that was important in it. It was so gratifying the other day to have a readthrough [of a revised version of the play] with Kathleen Turco-Lyon and Lorri Holt where I put things back and thought “Oh, that should’ve been there. That would have helped the relationship between the sisters.” You have to figure out when to listen to people and when not to, and that’s hard. I do respect people’s opinions but when you’re making art, at a certain point it has to come from your own heart.

(photo of Ms. Gordon is courtesy of the artist)

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Plays and dates for the Reading Series Extravaganza are as follows:

Sunday, July 21, 2024 - Laurel Ollstein's Pandora

Monday, August 26, 2024 - Julie Hébert’s Entangled

Monday, September 23, 2024 - Lynne Kaufmann's The Next Andy Warhol

Monday, October 14, 2024 - Ken Narasaki’s Spoiled

Monday, November 18, 2024 - Andrea Gordon's My Lunch with Babs

Monday, December 9, 2024 - Lee Brady’s Appointment in Mendocino

All readings will take place at Magic Theatre (Fort Mason, 2 Marina Blvd., Building D, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94123). Tickets are free and available by clicking here.

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