Center Theatre Group News & Blogs

Finding Hope in Horror and Hauntings with Danny Robins

Jessica Doherty — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 16:30:00 -0700

How did you first become interested in ghosts?

I was a ghost-obsessed kid, but I think it comes from two places. I think one is being brought up in an atheist household. My mom [was] brought up as a Catholic and then became devoutly atheist. [So] I was brought up in this belief-free household. But I’d visit my grandparents and they would have pictures of the Pope up on the wall and slightly scary pictures of Jesus with his Sacred Heart all over the place. I was intrigued by the idea that there might be something I was missing out on, some magic that I could tap into. Some people would have found God—I found ghosts.

The other key incident was when I was in my early twenties, I had a moment where I thought I was dying. I was sure I was having a heart attack and I was hallucinating angels coming down. It wasn’t a heart attack—it was a panic attack. It was something that a lot of people go through and it’s not genuinely life threatening, but at that moment it felt like it was. I think that fear that it instilled in me and the idea that everything was just going to end—all the fun of living and being a part of the universe and having all these amazing relationships with the people you love would cease, I found that more terrifying than any ghost story.

What is it about ghosts that you find so fascinating?

I’m fascinated by belief and by moments in people’s lives that make them change what they believe. That road to Damascus conversation—where you see something that seems to totally rewire your sense of reality. If you’ve seen a ghost, you can’t undo that. You’ve stepped across this threshold, and you’ve entered another world where the rules are different. Maybe there’s life after death and maybe the people we love can come back...I found that really exciting.

I think there’s a paradox at the heart of ghost stories—they are simultaneously frightening but also comforting. Because if that really is a dead person coming back to life, that means there’s hope for us all and that we might get to come back, or the people we loved and lost might come back.

What inspired 2:22 – A Ghost Story?

It was a conversation I had with a friend of mine who told me she had seen a ghost. I thought, how will people in our friendship group react? There’s gonna be people who laugh at you...who judge you and...who find it annoying...and who absolutely believe you. I was really interested about what would happen if you put that life experience into a couple and what would happen if one half of the couple utterly believed that they’d seen a ghost and the other half totally refused to believe those exist. It was a clash of belief systems and cultures and emotions—where does that go? What do you do if that person you love doesn’t believe you? That’s really what 2:22 – A Ghost Story is about.

You’ve worked a lot with television and radio. What went into the decision to make 2:22 – A Ghost Story a stage play?

I’ve always had this love affair with theatre. I spent all of my teenage years at an amateur theatre in Newcastle in the North of England and I spent my entire adult life not doing theatre, really. A few years ago, I got the chance to adapt a radio series made in the U.K. into a play and I got the bug back. [2:22 – A Ghost Story] just felt like a very theatrical piece. And the way that

Matthew [Dunster] has directed it, it feels very rock and roll and in your face. You’re going to jump a bit, you’re gonna want to talk to your neighbors, you’re going to accidentally send your drink flying. To be in a theatre and feel excited and have adrenaline coursing through you and feel scared—if makes you feel so alive. And coming out of the pandemic, we can have a whole audience packed and to see people grabbing onto each other and whooping and jumping is just amazing.

While this play is a ghost story, you manage to bring in mundane truths of marital struggles, parenting, and coping with loss. How do you balance the mundane and the supernatural?

I feel like a lot of horror lies in the mundane. The more real I could make my ghost stories, the more effective I felt it was going to be. I like to sometimes say I make horror for people who don’t think they like scary things, like gore or gruesomeness. And particularly when you’ve had a kid, I think you lose your threshold for scary stuff. But the fact that [these characters] are so real and recognizable, it draws you in and lets you come into this world where the scares build up gradually and you get to the point where you are scared but can cope with it.

[With 2:22 – A Ghost Story], there is this naturalism that you feel like you’re watching a slice of real life in these characters’ lives, so when scary stuff happens it’s particularly scary because it feels like it could happen to [you].

There are also many funny moments in the play. How do you manage to mix both horror and humor?

throughout the production? If you put the words “comedy” and “horror” together, that’s often something that has you running for the exits. [Scary and funny] are bedfellows, though. It’s interesting to look at how many people have moved from comedy into horror. I went to see a stage production of Woman in Black and what I noticed was every time it was a big scare, the reaction of the audience was to laugh afterwards. You try and make yourself feel better after the scare and bring yourself back into the real world and feel normal again. So, in 2:22 – A Ghost Story, we mix comedy moments and scary moments.

Especially in the United States, horror was originally seen as a cult-like medium, a niche genre that was very fandom driven, that has now become more mainstream with popular shows like Black Mirror or Stranger Things and films like Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Nope. Do you feel like there’s a reason why horror and supernatural stories appeal to a wider audience today?

We live in an age of chaos and uncertainty. Even before the pandemic, you were seeing in the U.K. the rise of Brexit and in the U.S. the rise of Trump, society was changing, and traditional structures were being torn up. Whatever side of the divide you fall onto, society looked quite different. And now we have war in Ukraine, the pandemic, this rising death toll, and the existential threat of climate change. There are different things that are making us confront our mortality in a way we haven’t had to for a long time.

You can draw parallels with just after the first World War or the second World War or even a link back to Jacobean times. When you have real horror in society the stage and the screen reflect it back at you. If we are surrounded by death, we want to know if there is any hope. Society feels a bit hopeless at the moment. So, I think ghosts weirdly do offer that. As much as [ghosts] are going to scare us, they do offer that little beacon of hope.

Another aspect of our rapidly changing society is the adoption of new technologies. Voice activated AI is a new technology that plays a role in 2:22 – A Ghost Story. Do you feel there’s something supernatural about the way we are becoming more of an automated and technological society?

I’m really interested in telling contemporary ghost stories [and] how ghosts can survive and thrive in the world we have now. Traditionally, ghost stories take place in dark castles, moody train stations, gaslit streets. How do ghosts exist in a world of Facebook and Spotify and Amazon Alexa? You can control the lights in your house talking to a little box. The idea of talking to a thing that is not human has that disembodied, almost ghostlike quality is incredibly affecting. Also, there’s this nature of tech that it’s constantly pushing us to be solitary...the more that we exist in the solitary way, the more we are in a place where we are vulnerable.

The home and town that the play takes place in plays a major role in the story. What has it been like to adapt this show to an American audience?

It has been a brilliant journey to go on. I recently spent some time in the States, traveling around a few different American cities, trying to find where my setting was. In Britain, the play is set where I live, in Walthamstow in East London. I know it intimately; I live and breathe it every day. It’s basically in a house like mine, an old, Victorian house that I moved into anddid up. So, the challenge was to find my equivalent Walthamstow in a world that feels real and accessible to an American audience. I did a lot of research and went to a lot of people’s houses and spent ages asking about their heating systems and things that are little plot points in the play and speaking to people who have been affected by gentrification, which is one of the themes of the play.

Now, the play is set in Boston, and I think, hopefully, it feels authentic and real. Massachusetts is rife with ghost stories and it’s a place that exudes history. It’s important that the house feels old and has had these layers of people living there, different layers of a community, which is something that happens a lot with gentrification.

I love the fact that [theatre] is never finished. There’s that moment that you have in any recorded medium where you have to walk away. [But] every night a play is evolving and living and breathing and it’s been beautiful to watch each [production] evolve and adapt. The U.S. version is very much the same play, but I think it has actually grown in many ways. I’ve taken everything I’ve learned from the British version and put it into this.

Anecdotally, there’s a huge rise in ghost sightings and accounts during the pandemic. And I think we can understand that...we spent a lot of the last two years cooped up in our houses...where your house starts to go from feeling friendly and comforting to feeling claustrophobic and that you are trapped in it. I think we relate to haunted houses and that sense of people feeling the house shift into something alien and threatening and unfamiliar.

Most ghost stories happen to people when they are alone, that moment where your senses are heightened and where you are cut off from the world and you’re maybe susceptible to all of those little noises and shadows on the walls. An interesting aspect of the rise in ghost sightings during the pandemic is that they’re taking place at a time when we are very disconnected from our support structures. We’re not around our friends and families as much, and maybe ghosts fill the gaps.

Back to School with Center Theatre Group’s Student Matinee Program

Center Theatre Group — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 10:00:00 -0700

Over the past two years, it has been hard to not only bring students together in person to see a show, but to have them physically present together in classroom at all. The COVID-19 pandemic upended the pre-established educational structures, affecting the way Center Theatre Group’s Education & Community Partnerships programming functioned as well. But with the challenges the pandemic posed also came innovation across the entire department.

THE STUDENT MATINEE PROGRAM goes beyond bringing students to see live theatre during a school day. Center Theatre Group’s professional artists and educators (“Teaching Artists”) work in collaboration with educators to lead students through creative activities and discussions before and after the performance about theatre and the show they plan on seeing. Show-specific Discovery Guides and resources are developed to guide their learning and deepen their understanding of the experience. Student matinee performances also include Q&A sessions with the cast and creatives immediately after the show and follow-up classroom visits back in the classroom.

We take you through the development of the student matinee experience post-pandemic and the lessons that four of our Education & Community Partnerships staff learned in the process.

PREPARING FOR THE SHOW

The first part of the Student Matinee Program focuses on preparing students to attend a show. Resident Teaching Artist Deb Piver is instrumental in leading the development of Discovery Guides, materials to deepen students’ understanding of the show they will attend.

Piver said she looks for “three C’s” when developing these guides—Comprehension of the production’s plot and themes, Connections to the students’ lives, and Creativity to inspire the students to create their own work.

Teaching Artist Johnathon Jackson helped write the Discovery Guide for Blues for an Alabama Sky at the Taper. To write about the central themes and history of the play, he interviewed some of the cast and creative team about their work, collaborating in a way he had never been able to before. “To be able to be a bridge between the artistic and education teams for these guides was really cool because we were able to work with the people who were working on the show in real time,” Jackson said.

What were once physical booklets distributed to students have now become digital materials. Digital Learning Manager Courtney Clark said most digital learning materials were simply a collection of links to recorded Zoom lessons on a website page and uploaded documents, due to the quick shift to online learning at the start of the pandemic.

But Clark was able to find more effective ways to package and present this content in a digital space as the pandemic persisted. “Everything we do is data-driven,” Clark said. “Feedback from our educators and students and constituents drives our [work].” Data and feedback from students and educators helped them curate materials designed for young people deeply familiar with online and virtual technologies.

Clark also said the pandemic fostered more collaboration between Education & Community Partnerships programs. Last season, the high school students participating in Center Theatre Group’s Student Ambassador Program were able to create digital materials that were used by the Student Matinee attendees. Highlights included an interactive character personality quiz featuring the characters of Hadestown, which connected the character results to community organizations in Los Angeles. These projects were used as a lobby engagement and shared with students attending the matinees. “To have a student-made resource for other students was so exciting,” Clark said.

During the height of the pandemic, when students were unable to attend events in person, Center Theatre Group was able to provide virtual “matinees.” Educators were offered exclusive access to archival production recordings and additional learning materials associated with each show to share with students. Teachers could then utilize pre-recorded activities and written lesson plans to lead their own online or in-person discussions and activities before and after watching the show.

Jackson had a great deal of fun recording some of these additional learning materials with fellow teaching artists and artists as well. And, as Clark shared, as the pandemic continued, these videos went from recorded Zoom calls to professionally produced videos.

Despite the challenges, the virtual format allowed for a broad variety of students—from middle school to university—to access the videos, and for Center Theatre Group to continue hosting the resources online far beyond the close of a show.

As the department returned to hybrid and in-person opportunities, they continued to explore ways to offer the Student Matinee Program, shifting to online educational materials and live streaming performances to expand their reach. One student matinee of Alma at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, for instance, was live streamed to digital audiences and performed to an in-person audience.

After the show and activity, cast and creatives will engage in a “talkback” Q&A session with students. Piver finds the chance to meet passionate adults is important for students. “The passion is what’s exciting, not the career specifically, but [saying] here are adults doing something they love,” she said.

IN THE CLASSROOM AND BEYOND

Even faced with the incredible challenges of the pandemic, theatre teachers continued to be creative and passionate role models for students. Traci Kwon, who has worked in the Education & Community Partnerships department for 13 years, shared, “I think teachers are amazing. They’re often underappreciated, so anything that we can do to support teachers is necessary and vital,” she said. In the coming year, Kwon hopes to return to developing educator-focused workshops, professional development opportunities, and gatherings to give theatre educators, often working alone at a school or institution, an opportunity to foster a theatre community.

Even as theatres reopen, Kwon also hopes to find ways to offer a variety of digital and physical options for the Student Matinee Program and expand the reach of students who are able to participate.

“There are juvenile detention centers, group homes, things like that, where you can’t get young people to the theatre at a certain time,” she said. “What we learned during the pandemic was that there are other possibilities to expand the audience for those shows.”

As for Johnathon Jackson, he’s enjoying being back in the classroom, able to connect to students in real life instead of through a Zoom screen. “Really cherish your classroom time,” he said. “I try to feel the energy of a room and connect to people that way...so the pandemic felt like it took my superpower away [and] stripped me of my strongest attributes as a teacher.”

Returning to classrooms posed new challenges for Teaching Artists and students alike. Students are still required to wear masks, which can sometimes prove difficult with the physical nature of theatre classes. “A lot of the work we do is about communication, and there’s a lot of cues that faces give away that are lost with masks—when you only have eyes, it changes things,” he said. He also saw that his students were returning to school burnt out from online learning and readjusting to in-person instruction.

But arts education can be the bright spot in a child’s day, and theatre can support this transition back to in-person learning and living. Jackson also feels there’s nothing like teaching in a classroom with students again. Having in-person student matinee performances also had a noticeable and positive effect on the students in the classroom—they were much more excited and engaged with the work in class after seeing the show. “When you work in the classroom with the students, you’re able to see how seeing live theatre is a transformative experience,” Jackson said.

A Haunted History: Ghastly Ghosts of Center Theatre Group’s Past

Center Theatre Group — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 10:00:00 -0700

Nöel Coward’s Blithe Spirit took the stage at the Ahmanson Theatre in 2015. Novelist Charles Condomine and a medium summon the ghost of his deceased wife, Elvira, who attempts to win Charles back from the other side—and out of the arms of his new wife.

In the same season, Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at the Mark Taper Forum in 2015 explored the hauntings of a Southern family’s decaying Arkansas plantation home as they struggle over their recently deceased father’s inheritance. The ‘ghosts’ of this play are less literal—as the family finds artifacts depicting the brutal murders of innocent Black people, their surroundings grow increasingly tense and unsettling, revealing how they are haunted by their past.

Be careful not to read this one aloud—one of the most infamous spooky tales in the theatre world is the superstition behind The Scottish Play: Macbeth. By speaking the title in a theatre space, you may cause disaster to befall the performance you are about to see. This legend dates all the way back the very first performance in 1606, when Lady Macbeth died suddenly and Shakespeare himself had to stand in. In 1849, two actors playing Macbeth in rival productions died during the Astor Place Riots. Even esteemed Shakespearean actor Lawrence Olivier came close to injury in a production of Macbeth at the Old Vic Theatre in Should you ever slip up and say the true title aloud, exit the theatre, spit, and spin around three times before reentering...that is, if you’re allowed.

The Scottish Play was performed in 1975 at the Ahmanson Theatre, early in Center Theatre Group’s 55-year history. Beyond the supposed superstition, the play itself features the ghosts of Macbeth’s victims. In Macbeth, the titular character murders his beloved friend Banquo at the bidding of his power-hungry wife. Banquo’s ghost later haunts Macbeth, who causes quite a scene at dinner as a result.

Though not a literal ghost, who could forget The Phantom of the Opera, which had a record-breaking four-year run from 1989 to 1992 at the Ahmanson Theatre, becoming one of the longest-running West Coast theatrical productions of all time. The musical is based on a 1900s novel by Gaston Leroux, which he wrote after exploring the supposedly haunted Paris Opera House. One such haunted instance in 1896 inspired one of the most famous theatrical scenes of all time: a seven-ton chandelier fell from the ceiling, killing a concierge.

Just last season, the Ahmanson Theatre brought the classic tale of A Christmas Carol to audiences, in which protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas’ past, present, and future in an effort to change his curmudgeonly ways.

Not all of our ghost stories are behind us. Soon to come to the Kirk Douglas Theatre this season is the West Coast premiere of Our Dear Dead Drug Lord by Alexis Scheer, in which a group of teenage girls summon the ghost of cocaine cartel leader Pablo Escobar. So, if you’re interested in more harrowing ghost tales, stay tuned if you dare!