Copious Notes

Leslie Beatty in

Despite LexArts recent cut of Actors Guild of Lexington’s funding and the pending appeal of that decision, the theater’s summer shows are going on at the Downtown Arts Center.

Last weekend’s performances of the encore production of Bad Dates were cancelled due to low ticket sales, but Leslie Beatty’s performance of Theresa Rebeck’s one-woman show is scheduled to happen at 7:30 p.m. tonight through Saturday. The well-reviewed production was one of two shows, Silas House’s Long Time Traveling being the other, that helped Actors Guild end the year on a positive note.

And at 8 p.m. July 10-18, Actors Guild will present Eric Bogosian’s subUrbia in conjunction with Apprentice Players. Apprentice Players are the group of high school and college actors who have staged recent productions such as Dog Sees God and last summer’s The History Boys. We’ll have more on subUrbia as the show draws closer.

Actors Guild of Lexington will reprise its production of Theresa Rebeck's "Bad Dates," a one-woman show starring Leslie Beatty, June 18-27 at the Downtown Arts Center. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

The economic downtown hasn’t hurt some local theaters at the box office, lately.

This week, both Actors Guild of Lexington and the Lexington Children’s Theatre announced they are adding performances of their current productions because the originally scheduled dates are selling out. And Actors Guild will reprise its previous production, Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates, in June.

Lexington Children's Theatre's production of "How I Became a Pirate" features (clockwise from top) James Hamblin, Mark Funk, Nicole Floyd, Daniel Nation and Lew Bowling.

The additional shows actually continue a trend stretching back to earlier this year when Studio Players added a performance of its production of The Last of Mrs. Lincoln, which quickly sold out.

Lexington Children’s Theatre’s production of How I Became a Pirate has added a performance at 2 p.m. May 17. The only tickets left for its remaining scheduled performances are pay-what-you-can tickets for the 7 p.m. performance this Saturday, and those tickets are only available to walk-up patrons the night of the show.

Actors Guild of Lexington will add a performance to the world premier production of Silas House’s Long Time Travelling at 7:30 p.m. May 14. The play is selling quickly on the strength of good reviews and House’s popularity as a Kentucky-based author.

Bad Dates, a one-woman show starring Lexington actor Leslie Beatty,  was a hot ticket in March and April and will return to the Downtown Arts Center stage June 18-27. Showtime and ticket information is forthcoming.

Bad Dates is something of a stand-in on the summer calendar for Shakespeare at Equus Run, AGL’s outdoor production in Midway, which was cancelled this year due, in part, to the economy. The series had run two years, and Actors Guild officials hope to bring it back in future summers.

Lesley Beatty at home in Lexington. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Click the play button to hear part of our conversation with Leslie Beatty:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Click here for a slide show from Bad Dates.

Leslie Beatty always wanted to be an actor, and few things got in her way, except bacon.

“I took a theater class at UK when I was in college,” Beatty says. “I went in the class, and they told me to lay on the floor and be bacon. … I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean. I can’t be bacon.’ And I left and I never came back.”

The early experience with Method acting did little to derail Beatty’s career, which started modestly. When she was cast in her first play, Breaking the Code at Actors Guild of Lexington in 1990, her résumé read, “Shows auditioned for, 4. Times cast: none.”

That play launched a career that took Beatty all over the country, including stints in the prestigious American Repertory Theatre’s Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University and at David Mamet’s Atlantic Theatre Company.

Leslie Beatty in"Bad Dates."

This weekend, Beatty is back at Actors Guild in a sort of homecoming performance, starring in Bad Dates, Theresa Rebeck’s one-woman show with a self-explanatory title.

“As someone who’s experienced lots of dates, 50-50 good and bad, I can relate to a lot of it,” Beatty says over lunch at The Julep Cup restaurant. “I’m reading this one part of it, and when you get to a certain age, issues come up that didn’t come up when you were younger, health being one of them. Older people like to talk about their health.

“There’s this scene where she’s talking about a date where the guy started talking about his cholesterol, and I started laughing. And Walter May was just sitting there looking at me like, ‘What the heck?’ and tears were flowing down my face. He said, ‘This gives me hope.’”

Beatty says May, the play’s director, didn’t think the scene was that funny, until she read it and explained it.

“I said, ‘Imagine having to listen to this on a date. This is not what you want to talk about,’” Beatty says. “And I have been in this situation where people start talking about their health and their doctors, and I’m like, ‘You know, more information than I need.’”

Bad Dates is a 90-minute chronicle of the romantic travails of Hayley, a single mother and restaurant manager in New York who has no luck breaking back into the dating scene. It takes place in the bedroom of her apartment as she tries on shoes and dresses for her nights out with everyone from total non-starters to hot prospects that fizzle.

“If you were just looking around town for who to cast in this play, Leslie would be the one,” May says.

The actor and play actually came together by accident. Actors Guild’s original season included a March production of The Waiting Room, but that show was shelved as the theater tried to trim costs because of the economic downturn. Beatty was cast in the show that replaced The Waiting Room — Robert Hewitt’s one-woman play The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead. But rights issues emerged with that show. The theater finally turned to Rebeck’s Bad Dates, which has been a hit at theaters around the country.

The road from and back to Lexington

For Actors Guild, Bad Dates was a chance to present a distinguished alum.

“It’s been five years since I’ve done anything,” Beatty says. “So I equate it to an athlete who hasn’t run in five years suddenly deciding to do a marathon. It’s kind of crazy.”

Beatty’s initial foray out of Lexington was in 1992, when she joined the apprentice program at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where among others she got to share the stage with Tony and Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl in Antony and Cleopatra.

That was a precursor to the Henry Clay High School grad’s career acting alongside a slew of marquee names. For instance, Beatty appeared in the second-ever production of actor and playwright Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile at American Repertory Theatre, or A.R.T., in Cambridge, Mass.

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Here’s our slide show of Leslie Beatty in Actors Guild of Lexington’s production of Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates, which plays March 20 to April 5 at the Downtown Arts Center, 141 E. Main St. Mouse over the bottom to get controls. Click on the little comment cloud to the left to activate captions. If you click on a photo, it will take you to a larger version of it at Picasa, and you can click the link at the bottom left for a larger version of the whole show.

Actors Guild of Lexington’s production this month appears to need a little clearing up.

The March production was originally announced as The Waiting Room, which would have opened next week for a four week run. Then, the economy happened, and the show was changed to a three-week run of Robert Hewitt’s one-woman show, The Blonde, The Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, starring Leslie Beatty and directed by Walter May.

Then some rights issues happened.

So now, we will still have a one-woman show starring Leslie Beatty and directed by Walter May, but it will be Teresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates. In the end, this may be the best of the three options for the company, as Rebeck’s name and this show have been fairly prominent in theater circles in recent years. Rebeck has had two recent successes at the Humana Festival of New American Plays: the post-9/11 drama Omnium Gatherum, co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, in 2003 and The Scene in 2006. Rebeck also writes for film and television, including episodes of Third Watch, L.A. Law and the feature film Harriet the Spy.

Bad Dates is about a single mother trying to get back into the dating scene while running a restaurant. It runs March 19 through April 5 at the Downtown Arts Center.

• Click the play button to hear our interview with Michael Shannon talking about his career and his Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

• Click here for our story and interview with Shannon about Revolutionary Road and his upcoming projects.

• Check the LexGo version of the story for more photos and Shannon’s filmography.

Michael Shannon’s journey to the Academy Awards started at Tates Creek Junior High School in Lexington.
“I was in eighth grade, and I was not athletic at all,” Shannon says, recalling the years at Tates Creek. “But I wanted some sort of after-school activity.”

Michael Shannon. Copyrighted Associated Press Photo | Matt Sayles.

He tried the speech team.

“They gave me a little monologue to work on,” Shannon, 34, says. “It just captivated me. It wasn’t anything I fantasized about. When I was a little boy, I wanted to be an architect. So, it kind of surprised me.”

That surprise has translated into a serious stage and film career that has resulted in Shannon’s Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his performance in Revolutionary Road.

He will learn whether he won Sunday night, when the Academy Awards are handed out in Los Angeles.

Revolutionary Road, about a couple who try to flee 1950s suburbia, is loaded with Oscar-caliber talent, including stars and previous nominees Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes. But, on Jan. 22, when the nominations were announced, Shannon’s best supporting actor nod was one of only three for the film, in which he plays a mentally disturbed man who makes powerful observations.

The movie’s other two nods are for art direction and costume design.

Shannon slept through the nominations.

He was at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where two of his films were premiering: The Missing Person, in which he plays a noir detective, and The Greatest, in which he plays another brief-but-memorable role as the driver who killed Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon’s son.

Michael Shannon (standing) and Dallas Roberts in Adam Rapp's "Finer Noble Gases," part of the Humana Festival of American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

“I had gone to see a midnight movie the night before … so, unfortunately, I didn’t get to sleep until 3 a.m.,” Shannon says.

The nominations were announced at 6:30 a.m. Utah time. That’s when his phone started ringing.
“I was pretty shell-shocked,” he says. “It just kept ringing all day long.

“That’s the special thing about it is realizing how many people are rooting for you.”

Including people back home.

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