Wings of Desire: portrait of an underground producer
By mikko, Where Y’at Magazine, October 2001
“There isn’t anything I don’t do.”
Sounds like my kind of woman. But Amy Woodruff isn’t speaking of personal turpitude; she’s the producer of Theatre Louisiane. Among her many duties are “publicity, fund-raising, hiring, and a bunch of business shit.” Of course, those are the non-glorious elements that are essential to any ongoing artistic endeavor. “Even sweeping.”
“Theatre is always what I wanted to do for a living,” she confides from her sofa, which threatens to swallow her diminutive form. However, she speaks from big thoughts, steadily and seriously. The joy of creation in Woodruff’s world is fraught with obstacles that must be meticulously overcome.
“I’m a real control freak,” she says, pulling out parti-colored watercolors. The drawings are costume plots for her upcoming production, Aristophanes’ The Birds. The characters are carnival-looking avians that provide the commentary in the satirical Greek work. Then she pulls out a Theatre Louisiane Personnel Handbook (?). It appears to be around twenty pages long. “Everything looks corporate, but it’s not.”
Theatre Louisiane has been a growing blip on the grassroots New Orleans theatre radar for two years. Their output has typically been small productions of great works in a splatter map of locations. Ridiculous Damsels, an obscure Moliere piece, was slated to run in Coliseum Square, but ended up in the now-defunct Dream Palace. A grander production of Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild fell apart, but the shards became a night of Harold Pinter Sketches in the unlikely venue Mystic Pizza (sic).
At the time, the Times-Picayune did a piece on alternative theatre and though it quoted someone speaking about shows at the Mystic, Woodruff wasn’t interviewed. “I don’t know what that was all about,” she quips, without a trace of rancor. After Sketches, TL mounted the free-form N2O which she admits “wasn’t that good, but it was amazing that it went up in two weeks. It drew the best of any of our shows.” Was it because of its nitrous name? “I don’t know. I never think about the material in terms of its draw. I pick stuff that’s exhilarating for me.”
The original attempt at Laughing Wild served as a catalyst for the explosion of TL productions. “When the first Laughing Wild fell apart, it was strange because usually at the end of a hard rehearsal process there’s a show – we put it in the paper and everything. So [the other shows] became a kind of damage control.”
Getting good notices can be tough for alternative theatres, especially in the light of the Sacred Theatre Success Choice: set your piece locally, playing to the audiences’ love for New Orleans navel-gazing, or get a guy to dress like a girl. If you have both, you’ll get packed houses. But in The Music of Erich Zann, which featured neither tenet of The Choice, Woodruff finally combined the arduous elements of production into a show that may have been her best work. Running at The Pickery, both audiences and press lauded the eerie piece based on a gothic H.P. Lovecraft story.
Even as she has gone through the process of getting a show on its feet several times, Woodruff still feels “I’m finding my way through directing. I come at directing from being an actor and a producer – since they don’t gel, and neither has anything to do with directing – that’s probably a problem.” The insulation most directors enjoy isn’t there when one is trying to keep a show together administratively. “I should be an asshole, but I’m not. As a waitress I was one, and I didn’t get many tips! But when I do something I really want to do, I get more sensitive.” She laughs at her own paradox, and speaks like a true producer. “I wish I didn’t have to be a director, but I couldn’t bear it if I weren’t.”
After collecting hundreds of tuna fish cans for its hilarious breakdown scene, TL finally got its shot at Laughing Wild at The Pickery. The production, however, blossomed during last March’s post Mardi Gras theatre madness when, at a conservative count, there were at last fifteen productions going on in town. Anyone running shows then (read: me) felt the economic sting of too much supply – houses were weak.
Woodruff came out of McNeese State with a degree in theatre and specifically came to New Orleans to start a theatre company. “I want to go against the public mentality, show them there’s another truth,” she explains. The reason she finds herself in so many venues stems from the paucity of spaces in town. So few seem ready for production. “For the money it takes to outfit a non-theatre space, I could just as well rent,” she says, echoing the sentiments of local producers since Jenny Lind came to town.
And she’s found a new passion. “Last winter, I taught myself to sew in a week and fell in love with it.” Though sewing seems a small bit of accomplishment, it smooths another rocky part of the road to a successful production. “Now I costume all my shows.” Naturally, this plays into her control-freak racket as well.
This month, however, Woodruff’s business acumen has paid off. She’s procured a grant from the Jazz & Heritage Festival (sic) for The Birds which, among other virtues, makes the admission free. Interestingly, TL will set the piece in the Atchafalaya and there are cross-dressing scenes, so she’s hit both ends of The Choice. Perhaps this unlikely 2,000 year old comedy may be the breakthrough show for Theatre Louisiane.
“Aristophanes is spoofing everything – nothing is safe in this play. And I love the visual composition – festive fruity birds prancing around the stage.” Exactly what Blake Buchert – Woodruff’s husband and operative from ineffable universes – will do is not clear, but he always ends up notoriously supportive of TL projects. The show runs October 4th through the 20th, and as mentioned – it’s free.
“The important thing is to get people involved,” Woodruff says, now surrounded by artistic and ministerial pieces of Theatre Louisiane on her burnished couch. “I have no patience with people telling me that doing our shows is ‘a favor to me.’ You’re here because you want to be here. If they are part of a thing they help to create, then I don’t have to ask them to do the little things. They just pick up the broom and sweep.”
(Note: Theatre Louisiane’s production of Birds was cancelled shortly after this article due to irreparable artistic differences amongst the cast. Because the project was supported by a grant, Woodruff quickly reorganized it into Liquid Land.)