Copious Notes

Timothy Hull, seen here with Allie Darden in the On the Verge production of "Another Part of the Forest" in May, will star as the Elf in Actors Guild of Lexington's production of "The SantaLand Diaries." Photo by Rich Copley.

Yes, Kentucky, there will be a Christmas production by Actors Guild of Lexington.

The troubled theater’s next show will be a site-specific staging of David Sedaris’ The SantaLand Diaries at the site of the former Portabella Restaurant on Locust Hill Drive. It will run Dec. 10 to 20.

The show comes in the wake of a stormy summer and uncertain fall for the theater, whose funding from LexArts was eliminated and whose top two directors resigned. LexArts cut the funding, which had been about $70,000 in recent years, saying it had concerns about the fiscal management and overall viability of the theater, Lexington’s only semi-professional stage troupe for adults.

The SantaLand Diaries is Actors Guild’s first production since Beguiled Again, a Rodgers and Hart musical revue that had a two-weekend run at the Downtown Arts Center in early fall. The season schedule that Actors Guild announced last spring was to include David Hare’s The Vertical Hour and, for the holidays, a one-man version of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Associate artistic director Eric Seale, currently the theater’s only paid staff member, said SantaLand is a signal that AGL will continue presenting shows.

“If people are wondering, ‘Is there an AGL?,’ Yes, there’s an AGL,” Seale said. “If they are wondering, ‘Are they putting on shows?,’ Yes, we’re putting on shows.”

He said the theater is not ready to announce any productions after SantaLand.

A site-specific production is staged in a venue that relates to the subject matter. It’s not a new concept and has been popular in Lexington in the past year. On the Verge Productions presented Lillian Hellman’s family dramas The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest in historic homes downtown.

SantaLand, a one-person show about a man who plays an elf in the Christmas display at Macy’s, will be presented in the vacant retail space formerly occupied by Portabella, next to the Kroger at Richmond Road and Man o’ War Boulevard.

It will star Tim Hull, an emerging Lexington actor who recently was in Another Part of the Forest. Co-directors will be Seale and Leif Erickson Rigney, an actor last seen in Studio Players’ production of The Unexpected Guest.

AGL previously staged SantaLand in 2004 at the Downtown Arts Center.

Seale said the site-specific nature of this fall’s production was an aesthetic decision inspired by ideas he had heard at theater conferences. He said AGL explored several retail-space options before settling on the old Portabella location.

The play, based on Sedaris’ 1992 essay, looks at how people try to find holiday happiness in retail experiences, including visiting a department-store Santa. Seale said the Portabella site will be done up like a mall-Santa display to make the show “an experience.”

Seale said he expects tickets to go on sale early next week through Actors Guild’s Web site, www.actorsguildoflexington.org, or by calling 1-866-811-4111.

Roger Leasor plays Marcus Hubbard in On the Verge's production of Lillian Hellman's "Another Part of the Forest" at the Hunt-Morgan House. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Click the play button to hear our interview with Roger Leasor:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Also, see our slide show from Another Part of the Forest.

Roger Leasor feels as if he’s come full circle with On the Verge’s ­production of ­Another Part of the ­Forest, and not just because he’s playing the father of a ­character he played last fall.

“When I started performing, it really was as a storyteller in high school, reading to the kids at the public library,” says Leasor, 58.

In subsequent years, he became an actor and a singer at the University of Kentucky, focusing on those crafts.

“But now it comes back full circle,” Leasor says. “What I really want to do is tell the story, and I have all these tools to do it with. I just don’t have the youthful energy to do it or the free time.”

Leasor is chatting in one of the offices of his day job, at the Harrodsburg Road Liquor Barn. As president of the expanding party and spirits business, Leasor has found he spends much of his time overseeing operations in Lexington and Louisville.

He jokes that after ­Another Part of the Forest, he will enter his 19th and last retirement from the stage. But despite his schedule, some roles are too good to pass up.

“These are opportunities that just don’t come along, Leasor says. “I’ve just been so lucky all my life to be given these amazing roles. It takes that anymore to justify the time, and it takes someone like Ave that wants you to work with them.”

Director Ave Lawyer is the most recent person to lure Leasor out of his umpteenth retirement with the opportunity to play the patriarch of the Hubbard family, playwright Lillian Hellman’s treacherous Southern clan, a group that demonstrates how much emotional terrorism can be inflicted while decked out in formal wear.

In the fall, Leasor played Ben Hubbard in Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Now, in Hellman’s prequel to Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, Leasor is playing Marcus Hubbard, Ben’s father.

In "The Little Foxes," last fall, Leasor played Ben Hubbard, Marcus' son. Bob Singleton, right, plays Ben in this show.

“With Ben Hubbard, I was consumed by the fact that he was always conniving, always planning,” Leasor says. “I got the feeling that before he took each breath he was trying to decide which side of the mouth it should come out on. … Well, this is his daddy. Who do you think he got it from?”

Indeed, Marcus is as treacherous as Ben, minus the subtlety.

Leasor says they are both roles that probably startle some who have followed his stage career, particularly recently.

His last few turns have been noble, warm characters - Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, the stage manager in Our Town - roles that seem like typecasting when you talk to Leasor.

Maybe his harshest role of recent vintage is Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind, a character whom you had to admit had good intentions, even if you disagreed with his point of view.

There is nothing good or selfless about Marcus ­Hubbard or his son.

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Here’s our slide show of On the Verge’s production of Another Part of the Forest. Mouse over the bottom of the slide show to get controls. Click on the little comment cloud to the left to activate captions (if you want captions on this show, it’s probably best to go to the large version of the show). 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 of the slide show window for a larger version of the whole show.

On the Verge opens its second site-specific production this weekend: Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest at the Hunt-Morgan House on Gratz Park. The play is the prequel to Hellman’s The Little Foxes, which was On the Verge’s debut last fall, across the park at the Bodley-Bullock House. Like that original show, the audience is extremely limited for each performance of this play, which will be acted out in various rooms of the house.

Read more about the show, directed by Ave Lawyer, later this week as we catch up with Roger Leasor, who plays Marcus Hubbard, the father of Ben Hubbard, the character he played in Foxes.

Allie Darden is Ouisa in Studio Players' production of "Six Degrees of Separation" at the Carriage House Theatre in March and April. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Lexington actor Allie Darden will get to make her New York debut after all.

Darden will be heading to the Big Apple this summer to participate in a production of Brian Hampton’s Checking In at the Midtown International Theatre Festival July 15-Aug. 1.  She will be reprising the role of Brooke, the part she originated in the world premier production of Checking In at Actors Guild of Lexington in 2005. Actors Guild artistic director Richard St. Peter will be directing the production. It will be St. Peter’s New York directing debut.

Darden traveled to New York earlier this year for a reading of the play, which is about a group of high school friends who gather years after graduation at a hotel room in Atlantic City. She was invited to join the production when the Midtown Theatre Festival picked it up, but had to wait for permission from her employer to take the time off to go participate in rehearsals and the performances.

Darden’s most recent role in Lexington was Ouisa in Studio Players’ production of Six Degrees of Separation. She is currently working in On the Verge’s production of Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest, which opens Sunday at the Hunt-Morgan House.