A Patch of Green

A Patch of Green

By SLM
LA Weekly - July 15-July 24, 1994

There's a new kid on the block, and he's Irish. Picking up where Hollywood's burned-down Celtic Arts Center left off, actor-director Robert Ginty has created the Irish Theatre Arts Center (ITAC), which, at 1261 N. Farifax Ave., is ironically located just up the street from L.A.'s traditional Jewish quarter - and adjacent to St. Ambrose Catholic Church and school. Because of demographical changes, the church has sent its students to other parishes, leaving the mulitclassroom facility vacant. So the classrooms are now used for weekly meetings of ITAC's 40-member playwrights' group, a refugee organization that used to be affiliated with the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute.

It's fitting that these playwrights stumbled onto Ginty and the church. The parish feeds up to 100 homeless people several days per week, but on Thursday nights a room is reserved for the playwrights, where they come to be served food for the soul.

Last January, pastor Father Jack Beattie offered both the classrooms and the next-door auditorium to ITAC on the condition that it wouldn't cost the church any money. In the seven months of the center's existence, Ginty had named Cynthia Baer (who used to run Woodland Hill's Richard Basehart Theater) as executive director and has established a weekly Wednesday-night staged-reading series of new plays and Irish classics. Featured actors have included Shirley Jones, Charles Durning, Stephanie Zimbalist, Orson Bean and Jean Smart. Performances are at 7:30 p.m.; in the next reading, to be held July 20, Bruce Davidson will direct Tony Danza in Jason Milligan's Men in Suits. The July 27 bill features Frank Gillmore's play A Way With Words: 3 One Acts, directed by Baer.

Plans for the August docket include a George Bernard Shaw festival - a series of scenes by the master, performed in workshop and complied by Yale dramaturge Leon Katz. The scenes will be staged in the parking lot by various directors from the old Los Angeles Theater Center's Classics Lab.

"I'm not interested in producing 99-seat theater," Ginty insists. "If I'm providing a showcase, I want the center to be a showcase for writers, so they can hear their work with name actors and [then] work on it some more, or move it on to another venue."

Although work developed at the center is not restricted to Irish writers or even Irish-based themes, Ginty wants ITAC's prevailing voice to have a brogue.

In the center's office there are sketches of Samuel Beckett, Shaw, James Joyce and other Celtic masters. Rifling through an appointment book or ambling through the auditorium, Ginty speaks of the most interesting ways ITAC can be of service: turning the auditorium into an art gallery to show paintings, for instance, by Mike Kelley or John Houston. For a reading of Sheila Wash's Molly and James, about the life of James Joyce, Ginty invited a Joycian scholar from Loyola Marymount University, professor John Menaghan, to speak after the reading.

Ginty says that he does not charge dues for groups in residence at the center, nor does he charge admission for the events held there. Office expenses and administrative costs are picked up by Ginty, who was recently a director on the Emmy-winning CBS comedy series Evening Shade and directed another Emmy Award-winning series, China Beach. Ginty also produced and directed an independent film entitled Vietnam, Texas, which garnered him, among other awards, best-director citations at the Houston International Film Festival and Italy's Taorrmina Film Festival.

But in January 1994, Ginty completed a year's sabbatical fellowship at Yale University, where he rekindled an old love affair with the stage. The rest is yet to come...