GO & DO TheatreSquared’s Gala for Education With Co-Chairmen Lucie Arnaz and Laurence Luckinbill
What: The evening’s highlights include
a wine reception, plated dinner, presen
tation of the 2012 Arts Advocate Award
to Denise and Hershey Garner and the
“Sparkling” Wine Raffle for wine and
jewelry
When: 6:30 p.m. Nov. 15
Where: Mermaids Seafood Restaurant,
2217 N. College Ave. in Fayetteville
Cost: Tickets for the cocktail attire event
are $125
Information: (479) 445-6333 or www.
theatre2.orgLucie Arnaz didn’t want to talk about her childhood.
“I’m all grown up now.
I’m an old lady of 62,” said the daughter of “I Love Lucy” stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. “And they’ve been dead a long time.”
On her agenda instead was promoting TheatreSquared, winner of the 2011 National Theatre Company Award presented by the American Theatre Wing, founder and presenter of the Tony Awards.
Arnaz will visit Fayetteville Nov. 15 with her husband, Arkansas native Laurence Luckinbill, for the T2 Gala for Education. She has served on the American Theatre Wing Board for most of two decades and was on the committee that honored TheatreSquared. She is adamant that regional theaters like the Fayetteville company are where new plays, new playwrights and new audiences are born.
“They stood out,” she said simply.
BEYOND BROADWAY
The Theatre Company Grants Program has been around for 54 of the American Theatre Wing’s 95 years, according to its website, distributing some $3 million to New York City companies over that half-century.
It wasn’t until 2010, however, that the organization decided to reach out to regional theater companies around the nation and award $10,000 each to 10 of them every year.
“I absolutely believe Broadway is 3,000 miles long, and great theater is being done across the country,” Arnaz said. “It’s just wonderful to know so many companies out there fit the bill.”
TheatreSquared was barely old enough to qualify for the award, Managing Director Martin Miller pointed out last year. Only companies that had completed five professional seasons were eligible.
The 2011-12 season was the sixth for TheatreSquared, and turned out to be more successful than playwright and director Bob Ford, one of the company’s founders, ever dreamed.
“One of the things that came up at the interview with the American Theatre Wing was the realization that we had the privilege of inventing the theater of our dreams,” he said. “We weren’t in a market where we had to find a niche that needed to be filled.
Rather we could invent ourselves - so we decided to do the theater that meant the most to us and to the theater lovers that we knew.”
Arnaz said it took her “a month of sitting down three or four hours a day” to read the 85 applications for the 10 National Theatre Company Awards. Even though the policy is not to look at the theater company’s location, “all three years we’ve done this program,without trying to make it happen this way, all 10 have been spread across the country from places like Watts (in Los Angeles) to Boise, Denver, New Mexico, North Carolina and Fayetteville. It’s fantastic to see that so many companies are doing this kind of quality work.”
What first caught Arnaz’s eye about TheatreSquared - other than the address, she admitted, since her husband Larry Luckinbill is from Arkansas - was the company’s season selections.
“I’m always looking for people who know how to be brave in the works they produce, so that audiences are introduced to all kinds of theater, not just replications of things that have been on Broadway,” she said.
She also cited: TheatreSquared’s policy of paying its actors and technicians.
The fact that the company does four fully staged productions a year.
T2’s commitment to developing new scripts - both as fully staged productions like “Sundown Town” by Kevin Cohea and “Fall of the House” by Bob Ford, but also in an annual new play festival.
Workshops and talkbacks that help “promote theater (and) teach the history of theater.” And educational programs that take theater to schools across the state.
“Kids in school don’t get an opportunity to learn about writing and acting, so it’s up to regional theaters to invite them in and include them,” Arnaz said.
GALA FOR EDUCATION
Arnaz will join her husband as co-chairmen of TheatreSquared’s Gala for Education, set for 6:30 p.m.
Nov. 15 at Mermaids Seafood Restaurant in Fayetteville.
Proceeds go toward T2’s annual road show of Arkansas schools, according to Liz France, the company’s development officer.
“During the 2011-12 school year, TheatreSquared’s Arkansas Schools Tour reached 28 high schools across the state, many in communities where students do not have other access to live, professional theater,” France said.
“This year, the tour will reach more than 50 high schools. In addition to the performance of an original, educational production,T2’s visit to each school includes interactive workshops in which students are introduced to theater-based learning.”
France said new funding this year from the Arkansas Arts Council, the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation and the Windgate Foundation, along with individual and corporate support for the Gala for Education, has allowed T2 to expand the reach of the Arkansas Schools Tour as well as other educational programs, which include Word/Play, a semesterlong in-school literacy initiative engaging students in reading and writing through playwriting; the T2 Professional Development Institute, a weeklong immersion for Arkansas educators in arts-based learning techniques awarding 30 professional development credits;
school access performances, allowing junior high andhigh school classes to book deeply discounted student tickets for the regular season; and the T2 Summer Shakespeare Academy, a two-week professional training program for students ages 10 to 18.
This is the fourth year the TheatreSquared fundraiser has been designated the “Gala for Education.”
LUCIE AND LARRY
The Gala for Education will be Arnaz’s first visit to Fayetteville, although she’s traveled to her husband’s home state before.
“They invited Larry to speak, so I’m coming alongto do what I can to promote TheatreSquared and just be the wife,” she said.
Luckinbill grew up in Fort Smith and came to the University of Arkansas, the first in his family to pursue higher education. In an interview with What’s Up! in June, he described taking a detour into the brand-new Fine Arts Building on the Fayetteville campus, where he was cast in a play translated from the French by George Kernodle, the late, great patriarch of the UA drama department.
When the show was over, Luckinbill told his parents he was changing his major to drama.
“There was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,” he remembered.
“But that’s something you have to recognize with your children: They’re lucky if they find a passion - I don’t care if it promises to make them 2 cents or $2 billion.
“Today we call it ‘following your bliss.’ Follow what your actual self is telling you is your interest in life, and you will succeed, even if you don’t succeed according to the world.”
By traditional measure, Luckinbill has had the career of any actor’s dreams. He’s starred on Broadway, off-Broadway, in television and in movies; earned an Emmy Award, a Critic’s Choice Circle Award and a Silver Gavel Award, as well as a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk Award nomination; and in 2007, he was inducted into the Arkansas Entertainer’s Hall of Fame.
And he’s been happily married to Lucie Arnaz for 32 years. Together, they have five children, two of his and three of theirs.
Arnaz said they met when she was appearing in Neil Simon’s “They’re Playing Our Song” in New York City, and Luckinbill was in Simon’s “Chapter Two.”
“We were friends first,” she said.
Arnaz had formed a theater group called Matinee Idles that met for a meal or just conversation between the matinees and the evening shows on Saturdays.
“I invited him to join us, but he had 4-year-old and 11-year-old sons, and he was in the middle of a divorce.
He told me Saturday was hisday to be with the kids, and I found it very attractive that he was that kind of guy,” Arnaz said.
She also knew she “didn’t want to be his first love just coming out of a terrible divorce,” so she encouraged him to get whatever he needed to “out of his system.”
They met in September, started dating in early December and were married the following June. It was the second time around for both, she said, and it was the charm for both, too.
Arnaz admitted she didn’t know where Fort Smith, Ark., was when she met Luckinbill but, she pointed out, “he didn’t know a lot about me either.”
“I made some kind of a joke about Ethel and Lucy, and he said, ‘Who?’” she remembered. “He’d never seen the show.”
Style, Pages 27 on 11/01/2012