From Lance Davis
Co-Founder
I’d been a professional New York actor for twelve years after training in the classics and comedy for five years under Michael Langham’s direction at the esteemed Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, had moved to Los Angeles with my wife, actress/director Mary Chalon, to start a family and do shows like "Twin Peaks" and "Hogan’s Family", and was guest teaching at some local colleges when I realized that my students had little if any experience with live, professional theater, and even fewer with "classic theater". In Acting Class they watched scenes from films. Theater is a completely different experience.
I was chatting about this with a lawyer friend who said, “It’s not just the kids, y'know. I don't know these shows. I’m a fifty year old lawyer and I’ve never seen 'Twelfth Night'. I’ve always been afraid I wouldn’t get it and be bored.” The only exposure he’d had to Shakespeare was of three hour "institutional theater" productions that seemed more like taking medicine than entertainment. It was "good for you." He loved to laugh but had never heard of Molière – France’s most gifted playwright, the Father of Modern Comedy, and the source for Archie Bunker and the Jeffersons.
After some discussion, Mary and I believed that classical plays could and should be done in a way that would inspire the young and reward the old, developing in them an appetite that would lead to further exploration of the unique art form of ‘Classic Theater’. We found a generous angel, Terry Perl, a passionate New Yorker with a love of theater, and in May 2000 we sailed forth to create The Parson’s Nose Experience.
We began with my adaptation of Moliere’s “The Mi$er” at the Interact Theater, of which I was a member. My inspiration was the Classics Illustrated comics I’d read as a kid. I wanted to emphasize the comedy, the Italian “commedia dell arte” improvisation that colored Moliere’s early theater experiences touring France for sixteen years with his company. We had minimal props, costumes, no set, but a very funny company, and we did the play in one hour. We then did “Twelfth Night” with the same formula. Audiences loved it. We had launched.
Like Moliere’s troupe, we became a gypsy company. We played the Geffen and Pasadena Playhouses, toured 130 LAUSD and PUSD schools, the Jameson Brown Coffeehouse, the Pacific Asia Museum, The Fremont Center, Lineage Performing Arts, and after sixteen years settled into our own home. Our work would be under our own banner. We restored the Marston Van Pelt designed Turner-Stevens Mortuary Chapel, one block from City Hall, into a jewel box theater seating 50. Actor, audience, stage. Storytelling.
To date we have introduced fun, condensed, broad-stroke, professional comedies by Shakespeare, Molière, Goldoni, Shaw, Belasco, Grimm, Hans Andersen, Goldsmith, Perrault, Boucicault and others, delighting over 80,000 Angelenos.
We have introduced The Women’s Project, exploring new plays by, about and for women, and a New Plays Workshop for the works of tomorrow.
During Covid PNT reassessed its mission and came up with a most exciting response. Taking a clue from the old Orson Welles Mercury Theater of 1940s radio, we took our Readers’ Theater Series – actor, script and audience – and transformed it into a new entity which we love – The Parson’s Nose Radio Theater.
Throughout the pandemic the company continued to record remotely, edit and produce in podcast form 51 – to date – episodes of radio drama, including works by Shakespeare, Hans Andersen, Chekhov, Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens and others. It allows us to reach a national audience, available free of charge, 24/7 on iTunes, Spotify, or our website www.parsonsnose.com. Through it the company can explore a myriad of stories, playing a multitude of characters. We shall continue our podcasts, even as we return to live “radio style”, script-in-hand performance in this our 26th season.
With your support these timeless stories will live, and grow.