Fountain Theatre

Fear, loathing, love, anger, joy, whimsy, strength, tenderness. The gamut of human emotions was on display Saturday when the Fountain Theatre presented its 10th annual Festival of Solos and Duets, with 11 choreographers offering varying slice-of-life dances in the cozy space. For sheer intensity, Diana MacNeil's "Lacrymosa," performed by the choreographer and Sean Greene, proved a heart-wrenching study of hope and doom.

Two years ago Stephen Sachs began working on a play about the philosophy and practice of flamenco. He figured he had all the material he needed, having spent years in close proximity to flamenco dancers as the co-artistic director of the Fountain Theatre, home of the long-running performance series "Forever Flamenco!" But after further research, he realized that the Spanish art form intertwined deeply with certain existential preoccupations that also inhabited his writer's mind. "The older I get, the more aware I have become of the loss of loved ones, the time in front of me and how I'm spending it. You start to wrestle more with these things," observes the 53-year-old playwright and director.

The joy of sex, the cold indifference of medical specialists, the anguish of a failed attempt at parenthood--these are the emotions that linger from David Rudkin's beautiful play "Ashes." Uncannily adept at mining awful meaning from the everyday, Rudkin excels at the kind of precise, deeply felt writing that can make one behold the world in a fresh, if not always happy, way.

Cormac is a law-school-bound young man living in a cramped apartment in New York's West Village with his financially strapped mother. Iris is a blogger, working from home in Queens, who hires "Mac" to spiff up her website. The love story that develops between them in Ken LaZebnik's drama "On the Spectrum," now at the Fountain Theatre, would be traditional to a fault were it not for a salient difference: Mac and Iris are characters with autism. Mac has Asperger's syndrome and lives a fairly mainstream life with help from his mother, who is there to nudge him when he gets stuck in one of his obsessive loops.

"Flamenco is a dance form you can do into your old age," performer-choreographer Roberto Amaral maintains. "It's not like ballet, which has a high level of technical involvement. Flamenco is more than technique: It's heart, soul and emotion. It's a way of life." It's also very popular. January's Sunday afternoon flamenco series at the Fountain Theatre "was an enormous success," said Deborah Lawlor, the theater's artistic producing director. "We had to turn away 300 people."

L ate in the afternoon on bullfight days, the sun slants menacingly against the irregular geometry of Andalusian villages. The air is charged with excitement, and in the distance, a flamenco guitar can be heard, softly at first . Soon, the music is louder and raspier and cruel . . . . Can't make it to southern Spain for flamenco? On weekends, there's "Flamenco at the Fountain"--that's the Fountain Theatre, a small Equity theater in Hollywood.

The Fountain Theatre's production of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," the third in the late August Wilson's 10-play, decade-by-decade cycle about the black experience in the 20th century, resonates as a fitting memorial to a genius whose distinctive voice was stilled too soon. "Turner" is set in Pittsburgh, as are all the plays in the cycle with the exception of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," which is set in Chicago.

The band has been playing on for a quarter of a century, and "The Boys in the Band" have come a long way. Or have they? When Mart Crowley's landmark play about homosexuals opened off-Broadway on April 14, 1968, it caused more than a stir. And in more ways than one. It was the first play on the subject to become a hit with gay and straight audiences. It was the year of "coming out," just before the Stonewall riot outside a Greenwich Village bar. The play established a few careers.

"Tender Is the Night," F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest and most serious novel, which was a flop when it was published in the middle of the Great Depression, has been adapted to the stage for the first time in the face of open-mouthed wonder. Fitzgerald fans, academics and those who remember the disappointing 1962 movie version are questioning the audacity of bringing this American masterpiece onto a stage at all.

A small, respected East Hollywood theater was reeling Sunday following the slaying of one of its longtime directors. Bennett Bradley, 59, was found stabbed to death about 5:50 p.m. Saturday in his Mid-Wilshire-area apartment, according to Los Angeles police. Detectives believe the apartment was the target of a robbery but said they had few leads. "At this point, we have very little to go on," said Officer Karen Rayner. "We are asking for the public's help." Bradley had worked at the Fountain Theatre for 16 years and had become its public face, producing director Simon Levy said Sunday night.

At 80, South African playwright Athol Fugard is still turning out plays at a rate that would be daunting for a dramatist half his age. A crucial witness to the warping effect of apartheid on his country's soul, Fugard has continued in the post-apartheid era to track the difficult moral journey of characters heeding and resisting the national imperative of reconciliation. His latest play, "The Blue Iris," receiving its U.S. premiere at the Fountain Theatre, is in keeping with the distilled, backward-looking, frankly mournful style that has dominated his late works.

"Blackbird," Scottish playwright David Harrower's daring two-hander about a young woman who confronts the older man who sexually abused her as a girl, gave Rogue Machine one of its most memorable hits last summer. Would you believe that it was something of a miracle that this highly respected little company was even allowed to produce the play, especially after it became a succès d'estime off-Broadway in a Manhattan Theatre Club production starring Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill?

Texting and email may have replaced quill and ink in "Cyrano" -- Stephen Sachs' contemporary re-envisioning of Edmond Rostand's classic drama -- but the problematic nature of communication remains a constant. If anything, the theme gains new dimension and impact through the collision of hearing, deaf and online cultures in this inspired and inspiring adaptation's debut co-production from the Fountain Theatre and Deaf West Theatre companies. Performed simultaneously in spoken dialogue and American Sign Language by a mixed ensemble of hearing and deaf actors, Sachs' moving adaptation transposes Rostand's archetypal heroic outsider into a gifted coffeehouse poet whose inferiority complex is rooted in his deafness rather than his perfectly normal nose.

The word "decline" has cast a dark shadow over more than just America's prosperity. The theater has been in a downward slope since the recession, and only those with their head in the sand could overlook the plummeting number of theatrical offerings, the fall off in institutional ambition, the degeneration of book musicals and the eroded ability of the art form to mirror its own contemporary moment. Was there a drama as revealing of the zeitgeist as the film "The Social Network" or as expansively ruminative about what led us to this current hole as Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom"?

For Athol Fugard , the playwright's pilgrimage can be a long, tortuous slog. But the trek is less daunting and more companionable if that road happens to pass through L.A.'s Fountain Theatre . Since 2000, when the intimate Hollywood playhouse staged the Los Angeles premiere of Fugard's "The Road to Mecca," the 78-year-old South African playwright has regarded the Fountain as something of an artistic home away from home. It will be again starting Saturday, when the Fountain will host the U.S. premiere of Fugard's latest work, "The Train Driver," a succinct, one-act, two-character drama that deals with Fugard's pivotal theme of the last two decades: South Africa's quest to shake off the ghosts of apartheid's dehumanizing legacy.

Websites of some of the theaters and theater companies mentioned in the conversation. The Antaeus Company , http://www.antaeus.org Black Dahlia , http://www.thedahlia.com The Blank Theatre Company , http://www.theblank.com Circle X Theatre Co. , http://www.circlextheatre.org Circus Theatricals , http://www.circustheatricals.com City Garage , http://www.citygarage.org Critical Mass Performance Group , http://www.

"Blackbird," Scottish playwright David Harrower's daring two-hander about a young woman who confronts the older man who sexually abused her as a girl, gave Rogue Machine one of its most memorable hits last summer. Would you believe that it was something of a miracle that this highly respected little company was even allowed to produce the play, especially after it became a succès d'estime off-Broadway in a Manhattan Theatre Club production starring Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill?

'Victory' photo: In the Sunday Arts & Music section, the credit was missing from a photograph with Charles McNulty's Critic's Notebook on the Fountain Theatre's production of "Victory." Ed Kreiger took the photo.

Over dinner at the Newsroom Café recently, Times theater critic Charles McNulty and LA Weekly theater critic Steven Leigh Morris (current official title: critic at large) began a dialogue on the state of the city's smaller theater scene — the 99-seat-or-fewer venues that percolate with a relentlessness that not even Starbucks can rival. McNulty recently weighed in on the leadership challenges confronting the larger nonprofit venues, and this give-and-take on L.A.'s network of smaller theater, which the critics subsequently pursued over e-mail, seemed worthy of a larger forum.

A small, respected East Hollywood theater was reeling Sunday following the slaying of one of its longtime directors. Bennett Bradley, 59, was found stabbed to death about 5:50 p.m. Saturday in his Mid-Wilshire-area apartment, according to Los Angeles police. Detectives believe the apartment was the target of a robbery but said they had few leads. "At this point, we have very little to go on," said Officer Karen Rayner. "We are asking for the public's help." Bradley had worked at the Fountain Theatre for 16 years and had become its public face, producing director Simon Levy said Sunday night.