Magic Theatre
Encyclopedia
The Magic Theatre is a theatre
company founded in 1967, presently based at the historic Fort Mason Center
on San Francisco's northern waterfront. For forty years, The Magic Theatre has been one of the most prominent theatre companies in the United States solely dedicated to development and production of new plays.
at the University of California
, directed a production of Eugène Ionesco
's The Lesson at the Steppenwolf Bar in Berkeley. The theatre's name came from a crucial location in Herman Hesse's novel Steppenwolf
: "Anarchist Evening at the Magic Theatre, For Madmen Only, Price of Admission Your Mind".
The Magic's first real success came with plays written by renowned Beat poet Michael McClure
, who sustained an eleven-year residency. The theatre reached a turning point when company members wanted to restructure it as a collective. Lion responded by moving the theatre across the bay to San Francisco, where it resided in a series of low-rent venues including another bar, the Rose and Thistle. In 1976 Lion learned of plans to convert a historic military base into an arts center with a view of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge . The idea was to change "swords into plowshares". The Magic became one of Fort Mason's first resident non-profit companies.
Sam Shepard
began his long association with the Magic as playwright in residence in 1975. The Magic produced the world premiere productions of his Inacoma (1977), Buried Child
(1978), Suicide in B-flat, True West
(1980) directed by Robert Woodruff
, Fool for Love
(1983), and The Late Henry Moss (2000). Buried Child was awarded the 1979 Pulitzer Prize
for Drama. Shepard also developed collaborative pieces with the renowned actor and director Joseph Chaikin
. Other playwrights associated with the theatre include John O'Keefe
, who staged many of his plays there, including Shimmer
.
In 1986, John Lion and the Magic received the Margo Jones Award, the highest honor given by the Dramatists Guild. The award cited the Magic's "significant contribution to the dramatic art through the production of new plays." John Lion left the Magic in the late 1980s to teach, direct and lecture. He died suddenly on August 1, 1999.
Larry Eilenberg became the Artistic Director in 1992, and was followed by Mame Hunt until 1998. Eilenberg resumed the position for five more seasons, during which time he premiered Charles L. Mee
's Summertime and First Love and Moira Buffini
's Silence. His Festival of Irish Women Playwrights resulted in the Magic's offering the U.S. premiere of Marie Jones
' Stones in His Pockets
, before its Broadway run.
, David Mamet
, and Elaine May
. Smith stepped down as artistic director at the close of the 2007–08 season. Loretta Greco became artistic director in April 2008. The Magic Theatre was experiencing a financial crisis brought on by the worsening economic conditions in America. Greco announced in December 2008 that unless the theater could raise $350,000 in two weeks, it would have to shut down. The money was raised by January 12, 2009, and the company continued on with its season.
In the fall of 2010, the Magic Theatre collaborated with the Marin Theatre Company
and the American Conservatory Theater
to put on "The Brother/Sister Plays," a set of plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney
. The Magic performed "The Brothers Size," which was directed by Octavio Solis and starred Tobie Windham, Joshua Elijah Reese, and Alex Ubokudom, with a set design by James Faerron
.
, Peter Coyote
, Kathy Baker
, Ed Harris
, John O'Keefe
(also playwright), and the original cast of The Late Henry Moss, Nick Nolte
, Sean Penn
, Woody Harrelson
, James Gammon
and Cheech Marin
.
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
company founded in 1967, presently based at the historic Fort Mason Center
Fort Mason
Fort Mason, once known as San Francisco Port of Embarkation, US Army, in San Francisco, California, is a former United States Army post located in the northern Marina District, alongside San Francisco Bay. Fort Mason served as an Army post for more than 100 years, initially as a coastal defense...
on San Francisco's northern waterfront. For forty years, The Magic Theatre has been one of the most prominent theatre companies in the United States solely dedicated to development and production of new plays.
History
The Magic Theatre originated in 1967 when John Lion, a student of Jan KottJan Kott
Jan Kott was a well-known Polish critic and theoretician of the theatre.Born in Warsaw in 1914, Kott moved to the United States in 1966 and lectured at Yale and Berkeley. A poet, translator, and critic, he was also one of the finest essayists of the Polish school...
at the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
, directed a production of Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
's The Lesson at the Steppenwolf Bar in Berkeley. The theatre's name came from a crucial location in Herman Hesse's novel Steppenwolf
Steppenwolf (novel)
Steppenwolf is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining autobiographical and psychoanalytic elements, the novel was named after the lonesome wolf of the steppes...
: "Anarchist Evening at the Magic Theatre, For Madmen Only, Price of Admission Your Mind".
The Magic's first real success came with plays written by renowned Beat poet Michael McClure
Michael McClure
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
, who sustained an eleven-year residency. The theatre reached a turning point when company members wanted to restructure it as a collective. Lion responded by moving the theatre across the bay to San Francisco, where it resided in a series of low-rent venues including another bar, the Rose and Thistle. In 1976 Lion learned of plans to convert a historic military base into an arts center with a view of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge . The idea was to change "swords into plowshares". The Magic became one of Fort Mason's first resident non-profit companies.
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...
began his long association with the Magic as playwright in residence in 1975. The Magic produced the world premiere productions of his Inacoma (1977), Buried Child
Buried Child
Buried Child is a play by Sam Shepard first presented in 1978. It won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and launched Shepard to national fame as a playwright...
(1978), Suicide in B-flat, True West
True West (play)
True West is a play by American playwright Sam Shepard. Like most of his works it is inspired by myths of American life and popular culture. The play is a more traditional narrative than most of the plays that Shepard has written.-Plot:...
(1980) directed by Robert Woodruff
Robert Woodruff (director)
Robert Woodruff is an American theater director.-Early life:Woodruff graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from the University at Buffalo in political science. He has a masters degree in theater arts from San Francisco State University...
, Fool for Love
Fool for Love (play)
Fool for Love is a play written by American playwright/actor Sam Shepard.-Plot:The "fools" in the play are battling lovers at a Mojave Desert motel. May is hiding out at said motel when an old childhood friend and old flame, Eddie. Eddie tries to convince May to come back home with him and live in...
(1983), and The Late Henry Moss (2000). Buried Child was awarded the 1979 Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
for Drama. Shepard also developed collaborative pieces with the renowned actor and director Joseph Chaikin
Joseph Chaikin
Joseph Chaikin was an American theatre director, playwright, and pedagogue.-Early years:The youngest of five children, Chaikin was born to a poor Jewish family living in the Borough Park residential area of Brooklyn. At the age of six, he was struck with rheumatic fever, and he continued to...
. Other playwrights associated with the theatre include John O'Keefe
John O'Keefe (playwright)
John O'Keefe is an American playwright, director and solo performer. Notable awards include the 2002 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Times Like These, and a Bessie Award for Shimmer, which was also made into a motion picture by American Playhouse.Born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1940, O'Keefe...
, who staged many of his plays there, including Shimmer
Shimmer (play)
Shimmer is a 1988 award-winning one-man play by American playwright John O'Keefe. It is a solo performance, portraying multiple characters, that describes life on a harsh juvenile detention farm in the Midwest in the 1950s.-Plot:...
.
In 1986, John Lion and the Magic received the Margo Jones Award, the highest honor given by the Dramatists Guild. The award cited the Magic's "significant contribution to the dramatic art through the production of new plays." John Lion left the Magic in the late 1980s to teach, direct and lecture. He died suddenly on August 1, 1999.
Larry Eilenberg became the Artistic Director in 1992, and was followed by Mame Hunt until 1998. Eilenberg resumed the position for five more seasons, during which time he premiered Charles L. Mee
Charles L. Mee
Charles L. Mee is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts.-Early Life and Early Career:...
's Summertime and First Love and Moira Buffini
Moira Buffini
Moira Buffini is an English dramatist, director and actor.-Career:Buffini was born in Cheshire to Irish parents, and trained as an actor at the Welsh College of Music and Drama. For Jordan, co-written with Anna Reynolds in 1992, she won a Time Out Award for her performance and Writers' Guild Award...
's Silence. His Festival of Irish Women Playwrights resulted in the Magic's offering the U.S. premiere of Marie Jones
Marie Jones
Sarah Marie Jones is a Belfast-based actress and playwright. Born into a working class family, Jones was an actress for several years before turning her hand to writing.-Charabanc/DubbelJoint:...
' Stones in His Pockets
Stones in His Pockets
Stones in His Pockets is a two-hander written in 1996 by Marie Jones for the DubbleJoint Theatre Company in Dublin, Ireland.-Plot summary:...
, before its Broadway run.
Recent history
Under the direction of Chris Smith since 2003, the Magic celebrated its 40th Anniversary in 2007. Recent events have included premieres by Anne BogartAnne Bogart
-Biography:She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Bard College in 1974, followed by a Master of Arts degree from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1977. She served as Artistic Director of the Trinity Repertory Company for its 1989-90 season...
, David Mamet
David Mamet
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...
, and Elaine May
Elaine May
Elaine May is an American film director, screenwriter and actress. She achieved her greatest fame in the 1950s from her improvisational comedy routines in partnership with Mike Nichols...
. Smith stepped down as artistic director at the close of the 2007–08 season. Loretta Greco became artistic director in April 2008. The Magic Theatre was experiencing a financial crisis brought on by the worsening economic conditions in America. Greco announced in December 2008 that unless the theater could raise $350,000 in two weeks, it would have to shut down. The money was raised by January 12, 2009, and the company continued on with its season.
In the fall of 2010, the Magic Theatre collaborated with the Marin Theatre Company
Marin Theatre Company
The Marin Theatre Company is a professional regional theatre located in Mill Valley, California.It was founded as the Mill Valley Center for the Performing Arts by Sali Lieberman and Al White in 1966, with its first twenty seasons produced at the Mill Valley Golf Club...
and the American Conservatory Theater
American Conservatory Theater
American Conservatory Theater is a large non-profit theater company in San Francisco, California, that offers both classical and contemporary theater productions. A.C.T. was founded in 1965 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Playhouse and Carnegie Tech by theatre and...
to put on "The Brother/Sister Plays," a set of plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Tarell Alvin McCraney
Tarell Alvin McCraney is an award-winning American playwright and actor. He is a member of Teo Castellanos/ D Projects Theater Company in Miami and in 2008 became RSC/Warwick International Playwright in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company...
. The Magic performed "The Brothers Size," which was directed by Octavio Solis and starred Tobie Windham, Joshua Elijah Reese, and Alex Ubokudom, with a set design by James Faerron
James Faerron
James Faerron resides in San Francisco, California, where he presently is the Producing Manager for Z Space and Co-Artistic Director for Encore Theatre Company...
.
Actors
Among the many fine actors who have performed at the Magic are Danny GloverDanny Glover
Danny Lebern Glover is an American actor, film director, and political activist. Glover is perhaps best known for his role as Detective Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film franchise.-Early life:...
, Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote is an American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audio books. His voice work includes narrating the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Apple's iPad campaign. He has also served as on-camera co-host of the 2000 Oscar...
, Kathy Baker
Kathy Baker
Katherine Whitton "Kathy" Baker is an American stage, film and television actress.-Career:Baker began her career at San Francisco's Magic Theatre, performing in several of Sam Shepard's plays before getting her break in an off-Broadway production of Fool for Love opposite Ed Harris...
, Ed Harris
Ed Harris
Edward Allen "Ed" Harris is an American actor, writer, and director, known for his performances in Appaloosa, Radio, The Rock, The Abyss, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, A History of Violence, and The Truman Show. Harris has also narrated commercials for The Home Depot and other companies...
, John O'Keefe
John O'Keefe
John O'Keefe may refer to:* John O'Keeffe , sometimes O'Keefe, Irish playwright* John O'Keeffe , an Irish painter* John A. O'Keefe , American planetary scientist...
(also playwright), and the original cast of The Late Henry Moss, Nick Nolte
Nick Nolte
Nicholas King "Nick" Nolte is an American actor whose career has spanned over five decades, peaking in the 1990s when his commercial success made him one of the most popular celebrities of that decade.-Early life:...
, Sean Penn
Sean Penn
Sean Justin Penn is an American actor, screenwriter and film director, also known for his political and social activism...
, Woody Harrelson
Woody Harrelson
Woodrow Tracy "Woody" Harrelson is an American actor.Harrelson's breakthrough role came in the television sitcom Cheers as bartender Woody Boyd...
, James Gammon
James Gammon
James Richard Gammon was an American actor, known for playing grizzled "good ol' boy" types in numerous films and television series.-Early life:...
and Cheech Marin
Cheech Marin
Richard Anthony "Cheech" Marin is an American comedian, actor and writer who gained recognition as part of the comedy act Cheech & Chong during the 1970s and early 1980s, and as Don Johnson's partner, Insp. Joe Dominguez on Nash Bridges...
.