Interview with Bay Area Theatre Legend Andrea Gordon

 

Acclaimed theatre writer, director and producer Andrea Gordon is presenting a six-part series of monthly play readings with her company Rainbow Zebra Productions at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Titled the ‘Reading Series Extravaganza’, every performance will feature a piece of new writing and local actors, with casting by Liam Vincent.

 

Curious to know more about this ambitious and community-minded project, Spinning Platters recently sat down with Andrea Gordon for an interview.

 

Andrea: Yep, yep, yep.

 

 

Andrea: Thank you!

SP: It’s very inspiring. I’d love to know how you got started.

Andrea: I’ve had a very long career in theatre in the Bay Area, as you noted. My mom was an opera singer, and she sang all over the world, and when she wasn’t singing opera, she would be in musicals. And so she started getting me and my sister into musicals all across the country when I was, like, four and five years old. I actually played Greta, Marta and Brigitta in The Sound of Music because I kept growing. So, I’ve been acting since I was a little kid, and I did commercials and that kind of stuff when I was a child – and never really liked acting. I’m actually a little bit introverted and, for me, I really loved the idea of putting it all together and I was very inspired by a lot of the beautiful theatre that I was able to see.

 

I was an usher at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and all of us ushers were aspiring theatre people. And so we would be able to trade ushering jobs all over the city. So, I literally saw things like James Earl Jones in The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten with Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards and, obviously, everything at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, and I saw many of them many, many times and so, as a director, I would be analysing that.

 

And in the meantime, I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City; I went to the High School for Performing Arts in New York City. And then I had one of those weird forks in the road where I didn’t go to school at Sarah Lawrence – and I would have had Joseph Campbell as my don – and I wanted to get three thousand miles away from my mother and stepfather, so I came to UC Santa Barbara. And so, then I majored in Writing – Playwrighting – at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

 

 

Andrea: [I became] Director of Play Reading and Production at the Magic [Theatre], so I then decided to put together a series of plays and I got some submissions that were not awesome, but I also reached out to a bunch of playwrights that I knew very, very well from the old days and I asked them if they had play scripts that they were interested in having read, and I had criteria. One was that the writing be good. Number Two was that it be by a playwright over the age of fifty-five. Number Three was that it have roles for women over the age of fifty-five. Number Four was that it not be overtly political (because I’m really sick of Agitprop theatre).

 

 

Andrea: So, all of the plays have a feminine perspective – all of them are plays about women. There are two male playwrights, one of them being Michael Lynch, who wrote a devastating play that we have already done a reading of called Crows Landing, Gently, Gently, which is about a young woman who gets into a marriage with a much older man who convinces her that the apocalypse has come and convinces her to live in a bunker underneath their house for twenty years. It was bleak and devastating and also shows what happens when you blindly follow someone without questioning anything.

 

The next reading that we’re doing is a play by Laurel Ollstein called Pandora, which is about Pandora, who was the first woman and also, as we all famously know, she opened the box and supposedly let out horrible things onto the world. It’s a feminist comedy set on an island and the cast is absolutely stellar. [Ollstein is] a wonderful writer and I’m hoping that it will be fun for the audience even as they’re thinking a little bit about how women have been second-class citizens forever.

 

I’m sort of holding up the old person female quotient over at the Magic Theatre.

 

 

Andrea: Yeah, it is. There’s so much that’s possible every way you look if I didn’t in some way categorize what it is I wanted to present out into the world and I wanted to curate a reading series that had kind of a message to it – not one that hits you over the head in any way shape of form but one that I think audiences will relate to. People were devastated by Crows Landing, Gently Gently, there were people in the audience who were crying by the end of the play. I think, when you hit people in their hearts with good writing it makes them want to come back to the theatre; it makes them want to think about the issues that you’re presenting.

 

 

Andrea: Men are allowed to get old; women are not. But I will say this: ageism can go many ways… we all have our own predilections and assumptions that we make about people.

 

 

Andrea: There’s a very distinct possibility that one of [the plays] will be picked to have a full production at the Magic Theatre – the board members are all coming to see them. I have been so incredibly fortunate. Literally everybody I keep asking to be in them is like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’d love to do that!’ So, we have plays that you would see at Berkeley Rep or ACT; we have actors in these plays that are phenomenal and [it’s been] a joy.

 

 

Andrea: Absolutely.

 

 

Andrea: All they have to do is email me – they can email me their script to andrea@magictheatre.org.

 

 

Andrea: You’re delightful!