Goodbye, Dolly!
by Bondo Wyszpolski
Published July 9, 2009

 
“The biggest challenge for any new theater is just for people to know who you are or to take you seriously. Half the battle is for people to realize something is going on.”

“I grew up as a child performer in Dallas and I did a lot of theater,” Schwind says. “That was in the ‘80s and there was a lot of money in Dallas, and a lot of money had been put into the arts. Professional theater companies were bringing in these amazing guest directors,” and so by the time he finished high school Schwind had appeared in a variety of acting roles and was ready for the Big Apple.

He enrolled at NYU and then joined the touring company of “The Secret Garden,” a musical that had opened on Broadway in 1991. He was on the road for about a year, but afterwards chose not to return to college.
“I decided, well, I’m just going to try to make my living as an actor in New York. You know, when you’re young you’re fearless, and you can do that kind of thing. I wish I was as fearless now, but with the experience.”
Partnering with Kate Jetmore, who’d been in the cast of “The Secret Garden,” Schwind soon found success with a musical revue called “The Season.”

“Each week we would take a different season in Broadway history – 1945, I think, was when we started – and we would do a musical number from every show that opened that year on Broadway, hit or flop or whatever, and tell anecdotes. It was fun and had a little bit of a Micky-Judy feel to it. And it really caught on, because no one at that time had done anything like that, and there were enough diehard musical theater fans that were curious about a lost musical from 1945 that they’d heard about, but maybe had never heard a musical number from.”

And then one day a directing assignment fell into his lap. That was how Brady Schwind became a theater director.

“It was a situation where the director who was supposed to do it couldn’t do it, or backed out, and someone said, You could do it; you’ve done all these shows. And I thought, well, okay. It didn’t occur to me that I could.”
A door was opened, or maybe two or three, because Schwind began writing (film scripts, and recently a play) and also working as a script doctor. He sees the skills demanded by each of these disciplines as interrelated.
“I’ve come to realize they are really the same thing, different aspects of the cube, where your job as an artist is to convey the human experience, and I think that’s why people go to the theater or go to see film or want to act, because it’s like we have to experience emotion, and we usually get about that much of it in our daily lives. But in the theater or film it’s okay to experience those things. That’s sort of the responsibility of the artist; we’re just holding the mirror up to the audience, and showing them the truth of the human condition. As a performer, you have the experience of bringing a character to life, but as the director or writer you have the experience of bringing a world to life in the way that you see it.”

The theater on the hill

You were in New York, but what got you out to the West Coast?
“My grandparents had a house in Palos Verdes,” Schwind replies. “They’ve both since died, but it was the place I landed when I came to Los Angeles and did some film and TV stuff as an actor.”

The Neighborhood Church is perched on a cliff top overlooking the Santa Monica Bay. Built in 1927, it was originally the summer residence of J.J. Haggarty, but was purchased by the church in the 1950s. For some years it has fostered an in-house arts program. The theater end of it, at least, was overseen by Bob Wright, and Schwind first became involved when they were doing “Fiddler on the Roof.”

About six years ago, Bob Wright was killed in a car accident. It looked as if the in-house theater productions might cease.

Karin Frasier had been working with the Neighborhood Church for years, and one day she and Schwind were discussing what sort of future, if any, theater could have there.

“We thought, What if we try to turn this into more of an outreach program where it’s something that will attract people to the church, just so they know it’s even there, because you would never know about it if you didn’t drive by. And then, What if we tried to do something that would also contribute to the arts scene in Palos Verdes?”

They were already ahead of the game in that they already had a venue at their disposal – unlike, say, Actors’ Repertory Theatre, which had to contend with overhead costs during its tenure at Peninsula Center. And being a smaller space than the Norris Theatre, Frasier and Schwind also realized that they could be a little more adventurous in the projects they undertook.
Of course, the playhouse is in a church, so there are limitations.

“Karl Johnson, the head minister of the Neighborhood Church, has been very cool and supportive, because this is new; and for an old institution like a church to have something like this… I really give him a lot of credit for just allowing us to do this and thinking, Well, maybe they are on to something; maybe this could be a unique and interesting kind of experiment.
“Karin and I both said,” Schwind continues, “that if we’re gonna do this – the term we always use is regional theater – it needs to be of a quality that is rare in Los Angeles, for costumes and scenery and production values. It also needs to [present] titles that are different.”

Initially, not everyone thought that “Parade” was a good choice, that it was too dark for Palos Verdes. Fortunately, Schwind didn’t relent:
“We thought, You know, yes, there are people that’ll see it. The one luxury you have with a new theater is you build your audience, and by doing what you feel passionate about you attract patrons who feel the same way. I think you run into more problems when you try to please everyone and you say, This season we’re going to do ‘The Marat/Sade’ and then we’re gonna do ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Then you have no focal point.

“So we decided to do stuff that wasn’t done, and we did ‘Drood’ [“The Mystery of Edwin Drood”], and that was kind of the experiment: Could you even pull it off? Could you do something in that space? Could you do something bringing in outside people? How would the church react or the outside community react? And it was a big hit.”

“It’s timeless,” he says of the piece, written in 1955 and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize. “There’s nothing more exciting for a director – and for actors, I think – than big family drama. It’s also, I think, the most difficult thing to pull off.”

In the 1950s, he points out, families had a lot of skeletons in their closets, and did not generally discuss personal matters, and certainly not with others outside the family. “But in a pop-culture age, where you have this psycho-babble and you’ve got Oprah and Doctor Phil, people are able to look at these characters and see Big Daddy and Big Mama and Brick and Maggie and they see themselves in the characters, and they see their families, for better or worse.”

The play was carefully cast, and Schwind is happy with the result thus far.
“The two leads are really quite wonderful. The actress playing Maggie, Kathleen Early, recently relocated to Los Angels from New York. She has a pretty extensive resume; she did the original production of Edward Albee’s “The Play About the Baby” in New York, and she did Honey in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin. She also did that here at the Ahmanson.

“Aaron Blake, who’s playing Brick (the husband who scorns her), is originally from Canada, and most of his training and actually most of his training and actually most of his credits are in London. They’re wonderful together and they’re true artists to their craft; they’re exciting to watch and exciting to work with and they’re very into the process of discovery.”
This writer worked with them as well (it’s going on my resume, you know), tossing books all around them as they clutched one another tightly and frolicked in the surf.

Schwind has high hopes and expectations for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” “It’s so intense in a small theater space,” he says. “It is like being in a living room. I think it will make the audience at times a little uncomfortable, but that’s sometimes why you go to the theater!”

Ready for the challenge

Schwind isn’t reluctant to talk about the musicals, plays, and playwrights that he admires, and his breadth of knowledge is impressive. In part, that means he knows there is a wealth of fine but perhaps forgotten or underappreciated work that deserves to be dusted off. He still hopes to do the musical “Romance/Romance,” which had been previously announced but sort of fell through the cracks, particularly when “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” became available. And perhaps he’ll do some originals as well (his own play, “Beautiful Invention,” sounds positively enthralling). “I think people are ready for different stuff,” he says. “I don’t think you’ll ever see us doing ‘Hello, Dolly!’