For Valley, a Landmark Production

A revival of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” will be a landmark on several fronts when it opens on April 3.

Produced under Actors’ Equity’s Hollywood Area Theatre contract at the 471-seat Madrid Theatre in Canoga Park, it will mark the first fully professional theatrical production at the new space. Owned by the city of Los Angeles and operated by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, the theater was built largely with federal money, after the old Madrid (which had been an X-rated movie theater in recent years) was destroyed by the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

For that matter, it’s hard to remember the last time there was a full Equity-contract production at any theater in the vast flatlands of the San Fernando Valley. Such productions have occurred on the Valley fringes--in Glendale and the hills of Universal City--and visiting troupes have briefly passed through Valley college campuses. But professional productions in the Valley proper have recently been limited to sub-100-seat shows, without contracts.

This “Fool for Love” is co-produced by Cultural Affairs and the East L.A. Classic Theatre, a mostly Latino group, and the cast will be all Latino. All-Latino productions on Equity contracts are also rare. East L.A. Classical Theatre Executive Director Tony Plana noted the irony that a group that’s rooted in East L.A. will perform about as far west as the city limits extend, but he added, “I like to explore new territory. We go all over.”

That will soon include Spain, which brings us to one more claim to fame for this production. The plan is to take it to the 1999 Festival de Otono in the original Madrid in September. Cultural Affairs officials can’t remember another such occasion when a city-sponsored theatrical troupe went abroad as, more or less, the city’s official ambassador at an international festival.

The production originated with an invitation from the festival to send such a troupe. Soon thereafter, Cultural Affairs General Manager Adolfo Nodal was, he said, contemplating a way to make it clear that the latest municipal theater, the Madrid, would be a home for “serious theater as well as community events”--and that “this theater belongs to the whole city. It won’t be just for Valley artists only.”

It was natural to match the one Madrid with the other, he said. Furthermore, he had been considering ways to bring East L.A. Classic Theatre into the Cultural Affairs sphere, and this occasion seemed to be the right opportunity.

The Canoga Park run will last through April 24, with 14 performances following two previews. The budget for it is around $72,000, of which the city is kicking in a little more than $20,000. A support group for the new theater, Friends of the Madrid Theatre, is adding $8,000 to the pot. The rest of the budget depends on box office. A Cultural Affairs official estimated that the production will break even if an average of 250 theatergoers per night turn out. If as many as 400 show up (on average), the production might move downtown to Los Angeles Theatre Center.

The Spanish trip won’t require additional city funds, according to Cultural Affairs. The Festival de Otono will pay for the production and provide housing. However, a campaign is underway in L.A. to raise money from the private sector to cover travel expenses.

Meanwhile, back in Canoga Park, the Madrid will host the touring production of “Heading East,” a historical play about Asian Americans in California, May 5-7, and the Woodland Hills Community Theatre’s musical version of “A Tale of Two Cities,” May 14-June 6. The Woodland Hills group presented the first theatrical production in the Madrid, “The Mousetrap,” last month, but it wasn’t on an Equity contract.