From Page to Stage

Meet Cockroach Theatre’s radical new resident playwright

Photo by Garfield & Adams

By Aleza Freeman

June 14th, 2012

 

Nothing is off-limits for award-winning local playwright Erica Griffin. She dabbles in conspiracy theories, feminism, greed, corruption, murder, incest, mental illness. It’s possible her plays will offend you. It’s also possible you’ll see the world differently—if you’re brave enough to stick around.

In May, Griffin signed on for a two-year residency with Cockroach Theatre, where she will produce her character-driven dark comedies and spearhead a training series for playwrights. She joins the decade-old company as it moves into a new home, the Arts Square Theatre (1025 S. First St.) in the Arts District.

Griffin, 36, is a stay-at-home mom and no stranger to the Las Vegas theater scene. In addition to a prolific playwriting portfolio, she’s performed in various shows locally, including Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding at the Rio and Caligula with Cockroach Theatre. Her play Spearminted was the 2012 Las Vegas Little Theatre New Work Competition’s winner, and her new play, Roles for Women, just premiered at the Vegas Fringe Festival.

Between chasing around her toddler and awaiting her next creative tidal wave, Griffin took some time to speak about her new residency.

What exactly will you do as Cockroach’s resident playwright?
A residency, in general, guarantees a certain number of full productions over a certain number of years. In professional theaters, residents usually receive a cash award, stipends to attend theater and health-insurance benefits [Griffin won’t receive any of those benefits, but she will receive a full production of one play.] Playwrights don’t have a union like actors equity. What I’ll be doing with my residency is simple: developing my craft, helping other writers develop their craft, and making some sweet, sweet theater.

Why does a playwriting residency matter?
I think it’s a vital investment. If the play does well, and it gets picked up by a publisher, then it’s good for everyone. The play has the potential of going all over the country, with the permanent inscription: originally produced at Cockroach Theatre, at the Arts Square Theatre in Las Vegas, directed by so-in-so, with the following cast. So the entire company becomes part of history.

How did you first get involved with theater?
My mom was an actress and writer; she took me to plays around Seattle and taught me how to use her old blue typewriter. I wrote my first play on it at age 11. It was an adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin, and I staged it on my neighbor’s deck, using kids in the neighborhood. … I remember watching the show, totally blissed out, thinking, “I want to do this the rest of my life!” And so I did.

You’ve described your plays as radical acts. What does that mean to you?
It’s a radical act to challenge the status quo, to present a different point of view than the audience’s belief structures, [to] offend people—whether it’s the copious amounts of marijuana used by a grandma in Mulch or the questioning of the government and anti-privacy acts in Chipped. People have been walking out of my shows since 2001, but they never seem to ask for their money back. … Critics have called my work “screwball tragedy,” which I think has a nice ring to it.

When it comes to writing a play, what inspires you?
Ideas for plays come when an interesting character in my head intersects with an interesting theme I’ve been knocking around. … For instance I see a homeless person with a blanket on their head and I’m reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, and suddenly I come up with the dramatic question of Casa de Nada: What if someone were using homeless people to make them money and then exterminating them, Holocaust-style?

What brought you to Las Vegas as opposed to L.A. or New York?
I’d rather be a pioneer than a settler. I moved here after college precisely because there wasn’t much going on, and yet a huge potential for something big to happen. I’ve always believed in theater in Las Vegas, like the little engine that could. I’ve been lucky enough to see minor shifts in the way theater off the Strip has been viewed. I feel like I’ve witnessed a small cultural awakening, and I’ve been proud to be part of the effort.

Photo by Kin Lui The Cockroach crew in their new home.

Cockroach Theatre boldly infests the Arts District

They wandered the desert for 10 years, staging shows wherever they could find space, like in magic shops and yoga studios. Now Cockroach Theatre is putting down roots in the 18b Arts District. Their first home, The Arts Square Theater, will open this summer in Art Square (1025 S. First St., attached to Artifice).
Known for pushing the edge of convention and challenging the way audiences think, the nonprofit Cockroach Theater was formed in 2002 by a group of UNLV theater students. “Up until now, Cockroach Theater has done one-offs, now we are going to be able to present a whole package,” said the company’s new artistic director, Erik Amblad.
With a permanent home, Cockroach Theater will reach a broader audience as it presents a full season of neglected/forgotten works as well as new works by emerging playwrights. “Most exciting, is that fans of Cockroach will be rewarded with a season-long exploration of a theme—an exploration [that] will hopefully get more complicated show after show,” Amblad says.
The first season will be announced in early July and will start in September. The pre-season will begin in late July with the 2011 Sin City New Play Contest winner, Nurture by Johnna Adams. (The contest from Original Works Publishing was previously hosted by Onyx Theatre.)
Cockroach Theater also plans to offer training programs and provide an affordable space for variety acts, contemporary dancers and spoken-word performers from around the Valley. “The idea is that every step of the way, every day of the week,” Amblad says, “you’ll find something interesting at the Art Square Theatre.”

Fringe Fest: The good and the very bad

The perfect part: The actresses of Roles for Women take casting into their own hands.
photo by Richard Brusky

by Jacob Coakley

Roles for Women

By Erica Griffin, produced by Table 8 Productions

I’d say Dick Johnson had the best ensemble of actors ... if it weren’t for the ladies of Roles for Women, playing five women suffering through their most extreme audition ever. Griffin does an excellent job capturing small moments, pushing the characters through them and letting their actions generate the laughs. The actresses embraced this with gusto. You could feel the glee at having fully-formed characters that had nothing to do with “girlfriend” or “romantic interest.” If sometimes that enthusiasm veered a little too closely to self-parody for the sake of a laugh, that was only a slight problem.

Erica Griffin
Playwright takes up Residency at Cockroach Theater

Cockroach Theatre officially announces esteemed local author Erica Griffin as resident playwright. Griffin joins the creative and operations team as they prepare to move into their permanent home in the Art Square Theatre this summer.

"Erica Griffin's voice as a playwright has always been compelling, compassionate, and surprising. We are honored to have Erica join us for our inaugural season at the Art Square Theatre," said Erik Amblad, Cockroach Theatre's Artistic Director. "Personally, I've been working with Erica for years, and I'm excited to see where this new creative collaboration will take us."

According to Amblad, Cockroach Theatre established the Resident Playwright program as part of their core commitment to new and neglected works. A two-year term, Griffin's residency will see her work actively developed and then produced as part of Cockroach Theatre's season of  plays. Additionally, Griffin will spearhead new programming at Cockroach Theatre, including a development series for local playwrights to workshop their own plays.

"As a playwright, I've been growing in tandem to Cockroach Theatre since it first began ten years ago," said Griffin. "Just as they've wandered all over town in the last decade, so have I hauled my original plays from space to space. Feeling it was time to commit to one company in order to allow my craft to grow, it was the easiest decision in my career to put my roots down with the Roaches."

About Erica Griffin:

Erica is an award-winning Las Vegas-based playwright with a special interest in character driven dark comedy. Local credits include: SPEARMINTED (winner, 2012 LVLT New Work Competition), ATROCIOUS TRADITIONS (now available from Original Works Publishing), and CASA DE NADA (winner of "Best of Fringe" at the 2011 Vegas Fringe Festival). Her new play  ROLES FOR WOMEN  will be premiering this June at the 2012 Vegas Fringe Festival.

The addition of Erica Griffin to the creative team at Cockroach theatre comes as they enter the final month of their grassroots fundraising campaign , aimed at supplementing the opening  operational costs of The Art Square Theatre. Donors to the campaign have the opportunity to be a part of the historic opening of this theatre in the 18b Arts District in downtown Las Vegas.

LVTAP REVIEW: Roles for Women

Bonfire of the Vanities

 

Ego trips and satire dominate the 2012 Vegas Fringe Festival

by DAVID MCKEE

As my Dad likes to say, sometimes the best surprise is no surprise. Unfortunately, "sometimes" does not include Las Vegas Little Theatre's Fringe Festival. This year's is not only smaller than 2011's, it's less revelatory. The shows one expects to be good don't disappoint, and those that do are colossal downers.

Without question, the finest Fringe offering is Neil LaBute's Iphigenia in Orem (Olde English Productions), flawlessly paced by director Gus Langley. LaBute's spellbinding monodrama is the confession of a traveling salesman (Shane Cullum) in a Vegas hotel room. Casually, conversationally, this Utah businessman unburdens himself to an unseen stranger about the "crib death" of his first daughter and the tenuousness of his job ... although that's ultimately not what's haunting him. His confessional leads us imperceptibly to a chilling revelation that also elucidates LaBute's arcane title. (Orem is a suburb of Provo; Iphigenia was the daughter Agamemnon sacrificed to the gods when his armada was becalmed en route to the Trojan War.)

Playing a misogynistic, petty and drab man with the face of an insect, Cullum fully humanizes this unsympathetic figure. Behind the buglike spectacles and caterpillar mustache, he finds the universality of a deeply disturbed person, in addition to his furtive monstrousness. It's pure brilliance and not to be missed.

PONDERING PONDEROUSLY

Lurching from the ineffable to the unspeakable, we encounter Fringe's other monodrama, Eugene Markoff's 75-minute Expanding the Relative: Pondering Einstein, presented by aptly named Endless Productions. This catastrophic vanity project stars Markoff himself, over whose "acting" a veil of charity should be drawn. Making matters worse, sloppy tech cues ground last Saturday's performance to a temporary halt.

Nominally, Pondering is a lecture by distant Einstein relative, Ezekiel Beam (Markoff). This disjointed, free-associative harangue is replete with pseudo-profundities like, "What if our yesterdays were today's tomorrows?" If that doesn't make you groan, there's plenty worse in this interminable, smug string of one-liners and faux insights. Markoff comes across as a Beat poet who dropped far too much acid, then hit the vaudeville circuit. Faced with an incompetent protagonist, director Timothy Burris is reduced to reprising sight gags from last year's Wind in the Willows. If he's lucky, the self-important awfulness of Pondering will be mistaken for High Art.

The title of Poor Richard's Productions' Dick Johnson, Private Eye -- three penis references in four words -- makes one expect the worst. Instead, Maxim Lardent and Mark Valentin's nostalgic comedy is very creatively penned and a Fringe smash. Set in the studios of WKZP in 1942, Johnson is couched as a radio serial involving the titular private dick's search for his missing desk. Interspersed are clever jingles touting the healthful virtues of asbestos, cigarettes and such, while Arles Estes nimbly alternates between providing dramatic musical punctuation and atmospheric, live sound effects. Valentin and Lardent wittily use the radio-drama format to comment on the conventions of the detective genre (the omniscient cabbie, the lady in red), as well as on the '40s themselves.

Lysander Abadia brilliantly orchestrates the dizzyingly intricate, quick-change staging, and Kirstin Maki's costuming is the fest's best. Regrettably, Lardent arrogates the title role for himself. His mumbling, arrhythmic delivery does his writing a serious disservice. Much of the cast is drawn from local improv troupes, with Valentin and Kimberly Scott Faubel distinguishing themselves as cabbie and adenoidal Gal Friday, respectively. Flawless period panache is displayed by Benjamin Loewy -- flinging himself with relish into a continent's worth of accents in four roles -- and by Breon Jenay (Femme Fatale). Her plummy, seductive delivery elevates obvious jokes into double entendres. This duo plays it to the hilt and not one scintilla beyond.

TOO MUCH 'DICK'

Watching Johnson back-to-back with A.R. Gurney's The Open Meeting (LVLT) requires superhuman tolerance for "Dick" jokes. Cutesy, Nixon-era agitprop, it's a wan allegory of democracy. The oft-referenced, unseen Dick is unreachable in Washington, spinning sinister plots. In his absence, Gurney's town meeting degenerates into a power struggle between rebellious youth (Dustin Sisney) and the Establishment (personified by Ralph Weprinsky), with vacillating Verna (Teresa Fullerton) representing the electorate. An ostensibly hilarious Oedipus Rex subplot thickens the metaphorical stew. It's even more didactic than was LVLT's Yankee Tavern, albeit funnier, too. Weprinsky's authoritative presence and clarion delivery ultimately prove more sympathetic than Sisney's oafish hollering.

Worse still was Michael O'Neal's flaccid Soul (Chaos Theatre), disparate episodes posing as Something Deep about mortality. Jason Niño's drowsy, disjointed production (more scene changes than action) only sows confusion, as does acting that's borderline-comatose. A totally random set and a cast of mostly too-old actors muddles locations and relationships alike. Except for Michael Drake -- brisk, nasty and dangerous as a drug dealer -- the best performances are given by Jamie Carvelli (in a pre-recorded voiceover) and Kiha Akui, as Death, who says almost nothing.

Theatrical vanities are skewered in Erica Griffin's Roles for Women (Table 8 Productions), staged with manifest affection by Troy Heard. Five actresses are auditioning -- or so they think -- for the meaty role of a cannibalistic murderess. Petty jealousies and one-upwomanship escalate into a full-blown brawl (unconvincingly choreographed, alas). The climactic catfight is provoked by a quintessentially Griffinesque, underlying deception. It's more fully realized than her 2011 "Best of Fringe" winner, Casa de Nada, and just as funny.

Sarah Spraker has the gravy part of the Amazonian, domineering community-theater diva, complemented by Stacia Zinkevich as a hilariously daft, eyelash-batting ingénue. Playing the attitude-throwing, tattooed, wannabe "rebel," Mary Foresta should provoke shudders of self-recognition among certain local actresses, while Carvelli's fascinatingly detailed portrayal of the group's earnest underachiever binds the story together. Natascha Negro riffs amusingly, neurotically on previous tragedy-queen roles but, as the draconian and manipulative stage manager, mild Cathy Ostertag lets the side down.

VEGAS FRINGE FESTIVAL Thursday-Sunday, through June 10; Las Vegas Little Theatre, 3920 Schiff Drive, 362-7996 (www.lvlt.org/FRINGE2012home.htm for showtimes), $12 (single ticket) or $90 (all-show pass).

Last updated on Thursday, June 7, 2012 at 12:07 am

A new space has Cockroach Theatre making big plans

Jacob Coakley

Wed, Jun 6, 2012 (5:07 p.m.)

The gentlemen of Cockroach Theatre—Levi Fackrell, Erik Amblad and Will Adamson.

Photo: Bill Hughes

It’s 10 a.m. on a Monday morning and the heat hasn’t really started yet, so it’s still cool inside the nearly finished Art Square complex, Brett Sperry’s latest addition to the Arts District. I’m standing in a loft in the corner space of the building, looking down at the main floor, a jumble of carpenter’s tools, cans of paint and the occasional art piece. But soon—depending on construction schedules and fire marshal approval—the space will open as the Art Square Theatre, Cockroach Theatre’s new home. And until that happens, the heat is definitely on for the Cockroach team.

“We’re taking a leap of faith on this, that’s for sure,” says Levi Fackrell, managing director of Cockroach. Fackrell, friends with Sperry, was the first to see the empty space and began discussions with Sperry to turn it into a theater. With Sperry’s encouragement, and a generous lease, Cockroach will have its first permanent home—and Fackrell feels the time is right. “The buzz about Downtown has always been, ‘It’s gonna happen; it’s gonna happen’—but now it’s really tangible. It is happening. You can really feel the energy.”
But you need more than energy to run a theater. To help raise that capital, the Cockroach team has turned to the Internet and an Indiegogo (it’s similar to Kickstarter) campaign to raise $20,000 by June 15. Just like the weather, that’s heating up, too. People from Summerlin to Abu Dhabi have donated.

“That’s what’s great about our Indiegogo campaign, you really get a gauge of who’s behind you,” says Fackrell. Also important: Visible support of the campaign has emboldened other backers who might not be able to contribute through Indiegogo, but are just as important to the theater’s success.
“The platform has really helped us get some larger corporate sponsors,” says Will Adamson, producer at Cockroach. “They can have confidence that we’re not just a small group of people.” Cockroach has some specific fund-raising events planned to reach out to those sponsors and to some high-profile donors.

Cockroach isn’t only adding a new space. In April it named Erik Amblad its new artistic director; it has a new resident playwright, Erica Griffin; and its inaugural production in Art Square Theatre will be the winner of the Sin City New Play contest: Nurture, by Johnna Adams. That will be followed by something else that’s new for Cockroach: a full season of plays, rather than one-off productions.
“We get to express a point of view through a series of plays,” Amblad says. “This infrastructure allows us that freedom, and I’m hoping that people will see we have a real dedication to new works and neglected works with a new point of view.”

It’s exciting, and possibilities fill up the room with the rising heat.

“In Vegas, we don’t have the luxury of taking amazing regional theater for granted yet,” Amblad says. “One of our goals is to get to the point that people take it for granted that we’re one of the great regional theaters in Las Vegas and America.

“Ultimately, we want to be seen as Las Vegas’ professional theater company,” Fackrell says.

Fringe Festival full of fare to whet theatergoers' fancies

By ANTHONY DEL VALLE
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

 

I came away from the eight-play Vegas Fringe Festival amazed at how much higher in quality local acting has become. People in the smaller parts often demonstrated the charisma and talent to tackle lead roles. Where have these people come from?
It helps to enjoy the productions if you think of most of them as works in progress. If you are looking for perfection, you will be disappointed. But it's a potpourri of possibilities. I was more excited by what these shows could be than what they were. And that made for an enormously satisfying marathon.
Here's a brief look at the plays in order of preference:
■ Olde English Productions' "Iphigenia in Orem" (part of Neil La Bute's "Bash") contains just about the best dramatic performance I've seen in 15 years of local reviewing. Shane Cullum, under the smooth, unobtrusive direction of Gus Langley, makes small talk to a male stranger in his hotel room. The strained chit-chat soon evolves into a confession of a horrific crime. Cullum makes the monologue seem like a two-character play because he established a relationship with the unseen stranger. He weeps, laughs, fidgets and all the while never seems like an actor going for an effect. Cullum embodies the torment of this man in a way that I suspect few actors could. Grade: A
■ "Asphyxiation/Masturbation," written, directed and co-starring Test Market founder Ernest Hemmings, is a multi-media bit of fun that seems to want to suggest nothing more than that the medium is the message. Two young men (Hemmings and Alex Olson) perform a series of skits involving various kinds of conflict. The challenge is that all the sound effects have been pre-recorded and the actors must stay in sync. Of course, the funniest moments are when the dialogue is a split second off. The performers are blissfully funny, with Hemmings in particular showing a surprisingly wide range of effortless characters. I have never before seen him so free. The evening could use some cohesiveness, and the final 10 minutes or so feels repetitive. But it's a beautiful bit of nonsense. Grade: B+
■ "Expanding the Relative: Pondering Einstein," directed by Timothy Burris for Endless Productions, is a humorous look at a man's philosophy about what is relative. The man, in the form of actor and writer Eugene Markoff, looks peculiarly like Einstein, and there's a good reason why. Markoff's performance is a marvelous blend of academic earnestness and little-boy innocence. Burris gives the script a surprisingly lyrical quality with sound, light effects and two stagehands whose movements have been carefully choreographed. The script could use some serious editing, particularly in the final fifth or so, when its themes become heavy-handed. But the project deserves Markoff and Burris' further attention. Grade: B+
■ "Dick Johnson Private Eye," by Poor Richard's Players, is a mixed bag. The original script by Maxim Lardent and Mark Valentin has the feel of improvisation but doesn't make for much of a play. However, director Lysander Abadia has staged the movement exceptionally well. Trouble is, this is supposed to be a radio drama, so what is all that movement about? I'd love to see this again just for Abadia's stage know-how. But isn't it time we gave Philip Marlowe spoofs a century's rest? Grade: C
■ "Roles for Women," an original comedy by Erica Griffin for Table 8 Productions, is about a group trying out for a community play. There are lots of "in" jokes, and obvious ones. I can't imagine anyone outside the theater wanting to see this. Griffin's plot turns are too carefully planned, and by the time we get to the women screaming at each other and turning over tables, I couldn't figure out why I was there. Director Troy Heard gets a couple of solid performances from a mostly expert cast. Grade: C
■ "Soul," an original drama by Michael O'Neal for Chaos Productions, grabs your attention immediately. A young man stands center stage pondering the big questions. In the second scene, an abusive druggie is forcing a needle into the arm of a homeless woman he hopes to sleep with. The relationship between the two scenes doesn't need explaining; it fits perfectly. But, unfortunately, the story grows obvious and uninteresting. Director Jason Nino gives us some intriguing visual images, but he doesn't tone down the melodrama. Still, this is another of those projects I'd love to see remounted after some work. Grade: C
■ "Fringe Shorts," is three playlettes by different groups, each offering at least one yummy element. "Kissing Hank's Butt," directed by Thomas Chrastka, is an amusing absurdity about an absurd religion. Mick Axelrod makes a likable nerd, and Mario Mendez projects the comic attitude of a masculine Pee-Wee Herman. "Maranatha," directed by Chrastka, features a skillfully subdued performance by Chris Fune, as a man who claims to be - and might well be - the son of God. "Nutshells," an original by Brandon Oliver Jones (with no director credited) explores a conformation between a man and his female shrink. Nichole Unger and Tony Foresta give mesmerizing performances, but Jones' script is too simple. He has an ear for dialogue, but he hasn't yet learned the value of subtext. Grade: C
■ "Open Meeting," by A.R. Gurney, directed by Frank Mengwasser for Las Vegas Little Theatre, brings up the rear. But it's by no means a stinker. A public meeting becomes a free-for-all, with three officials trying hard to cope with an "incopable" situation. Dustin Sisney brings a welcomed, natural presence to his role as the young man. And the script has its share of laughs. But Mengwasser doesn't modulate the performances, so it doesn't take long before you get tired of the screaming. Grade: C-
Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.

Curtain Call with Erik Ball Fringe Review

Vegas Fringe Festival offers something for everyone

All the world's a buffet. Especially in Las Vegas. But there's one particular buffet that serves up plays, not plates: the third annual Vegas Fringe Festival. Seven short plays, plus one double-header and a scripted finale - appropriately titled "The Final Four" - turn up on the menu of the two-weekend, seven-day theater celebration that kicks off tonight.

Hosted by Las Vegas Little Theatre, the festival features productions (presented in the troupe's Mainstage and Black Box theaters) that "run the gamut" from mainstream to avant-garde, according to festival producer (and LVLT president) Walter Niejadlik .

As befits a wide-ranging theatrical buffet, the festival features "a little sample of everything," he notes. And "if it's not something to your taste, maybe the next show will be to your liking."
LVLT's production, A.R. Gurney's "The Open Meeting" - which, like the other plays, will be staged multiple times during the festival - "is definitely an established piece," Niejadlik says, with "some twists and turns" as mystery surfaces during the title gathering.
By contrast, there's edgy playwright Neil LaBute's dark "Iphigenia in Orem" (presented by Olde English Productions), in which a young Utahan on a business trip to Las Vegas relates a tragic tale to a stranger in a hotel bar.

Table 8 Productions, new to this year's Fringe Festival, will premiere Erica Griffin's dark comedy "Roles for Women," about actresses preparing to compete for "the role of a lifetime."
Other fringe premieres include Ernest Hemmings' "Asphyxiation/Masturbation" from Test Market, an experimental collection of sketches, film footage and sounds that explores everything from time and space to fast food. And "Dick Johnson: Private Eye," from Poor Richard's Players, depicts the comedic adventures of the title character. (Maxim Larden and Mark Valentin wrote the play; Benjamin Loewy contributed songs.)

None of the productions lasts longer than 90 minutes; Found Door Theatre and Chaos Theatre share one time slot for two even shorter plays, "Kissing Hank's Ass" (based on a James Huber short story) and the philosophical comedy "Maranatha," by Nicole J. Cyrus, about a man who thinks he's Jesus - and a reporter trying to expose him as a hoax.

Chaos Theatre's "Soul," by Michael O'Neal, centers on a group of college students and dropouts who must face their decisions as they're shadowed by the play's title character, an embodiment of their own evils.

Endless Productions also goes philosophical with Eugene Markoff's "Expanding the Relative, Pondering Einstein," in which the great scientist applies his theories to "where technology is taking this world" - and its impact on humanity, explains director Tim Burns.

"Expanding the Relative" represents a definite departure from last year's Endless Productions' fringe production: an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's family classic "The Wind in the Willows," which countered the notion that "a lot of times, people think fringe has to be shocking," Burns says.
The sheer variety of plays means that audiences, as well as participants, experience "a diverse energy" generated by "different theater companies with their own particular voice," comments Table 8 artistic director Troy Heard, who's directing "Roles for Women" at this year's festival. "It's a celebration."

It's also a way of reaching out to new audiences "who have never heard of our company," Burns points out. "We all have our own audience base." At the Fringe Festival, however, "we get a lot of new faces."

More than a thousand theater fans attended the first two Fringe Festivals, Niejadlik notes.
And when you're at the Fringe Festival, "you can't help but feel arty," Burns says - whether you're onstage or in the audience.

For those onstage, the short running time of each play contributes to what Burns calls "that kinetic vibe." In part, that's because "we don't allow folks to build sets," Niejadlik explains. There's no time - not with a 10-minute turnaround between performances. "That encourages a lot of interesting staging - and creative use of props," Niejadlik says, recalling a previous LVLT fringe production in which sand-colored tarps doubled as a beach, "because we could set it up in three minutes." But that's part of the festival spirit - a spirit that extends to the fringes of this Fringe Festival, in Burns' view.
"It's a good sign that a lot of us are moving away from our sand-box mentality," he says. "There's a great feeling of pride in working with everyone. We're not rehearsing together - but we're in this together."
Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.

The Gospel According to Cockroach
Las Vegas Citylife's David McKee sat down with Artistic Director Erik Amblad to chat about Cockroach, new Resident Playwright Erica Griffin, and the future.

Talking with new Artistic Director Erik Amblad about the future of the durable troupe

by DAVID MCKEE
During the past two seasons, local producer/director/actor Erik Amblad has staged one Cockroach Theatre production (Danny and the Deep Blue Sea) and appeared in another (The Flu Season). Mainly for the want of a home base, Cockroach has been more spoken of than seen lately. But that’s changing with a dramatic confluence of events. This spring, Cockroach launched an online fundraising campaign to help bankroll the ongoing conversion of a barrel-vaulted space next to Artifice Urban Bar, in the arts district, into a new, 96-seat theater. It adopted the Sin City New Play Contest, orphaned when Sirc Michaels was ousted from Onyx Theatre, signed Erica Griffin (Spearminted) as playwright in residence and tapped Amblad as artistic director. CityLife sat down with him last Sunday, at The Arts Factory’s Bar + Bistro, to learn more. Cockroach had just hit the halfway mark on its $20,000 fundraising campaign, which ends June 15.

What will be the scope of the first Cockroach season?

We’re going to start it in September. We’ll be doing five in-season shows. We’ll end our season in May, and then we’ll do the winner of the Sin City New Play Contest. The [subscription] shows themselves continue the trend of the last 10 years of Cockroach: We get to explore a full point of view, rather than just going show to show, ad hoc. We’ll be able to connect things thematically. Sin City New Play Contest needed a new home, so I approached Original Works Publishing and said that we’d love to offer Arts Square Theater. This last contest had over 400 playwrights from across the nation participate, and the winner, Nurture by Johnna Adams, will be our first production in the space — we just had our first read-through — and Johnna is actually going to Skype into rehearsals [from Queens, N.Y.] so that she can be part of the development process.

What are your responsibilities?

I’m crafting the season and also helping to drive all the Cockroach-produced programming in the space, whether it’s the late-night programming that we’ll do with Erica, trying to bring back some of the original-playwright material that she and I were doing at the [Katherine Gianaclis Park for the Arts], to bring back that ethos to late-night programming. But we’re also going to be driving education. We’re going to do playwright workshops, acting workshops and right now we’re in discussion with a few community groups to do education outreach for youth. That puts a lot on the plate. Day to day, I’ll manage the space with Levi Fackrell, our managing director, and just spread the gospel of Cockroach Theatre.

What was the attraction of getting involved?

I was born and raised here and, when I left, I thought I was leaving for good. I’d go off and do my art elsewhere. But when 9/11 hit, I came back because I wanted to be closer to my family. I thought at the time that I’d be making this sacrifice: no more acting for me. But two years later, I’d just done a show at Las Vegas Little Theatre and came down to this strange place called the Arts Factory in the arts district. I thought, “What is this? This is the town I grew up in?” It changed my perspective, and then I went to a play inside the Arts Factory, produced by this tiny company called Cockroach. It was [Camus'] Caligula. When I walked out of that, it changed everything for me. I realized you can do the theater I hoped to do in this town and, since then it’s just been full-bore for me. Cut to eight years later, and suddenly I’m the artistic director of a theater across from the Arts Factory — and that is Cockroach Theatre. There’s a kind of symmetry there that I can’t ignore.

Why is it important to have a playwright in residence, and why was Erica Griffin the right choice?

Theater in this town can be taken seriously as a discipline, not simply that something people do in their spare time. Part of the way is showing a commitment to someone like Erica, who has shown that discipline in this town for the last five, 10 years. She was in Caligula when I first met her. Erica Griffin is one of the most interesting, compelling and compassionate voices that I’ve encountered. She lives in Las Vegas, cares about Las Vegas and wants to tell Las Vegas stories. We share that passion. So it is an exciting moment.