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NEWS: Sean Daniels lands in Louisville
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sean Daniels has entered the ATL.
No, no. Not That. The ambitious co-founder of Dad’s Garage, the outlandish comedy concern in Inman Park, hasn’t taken up residence again in Atlanta, the city that claimed him and his beer buckets from 1995-2004.
After three seasons at the California Shakespeare Theatre outside San Francisco, the 34-year-old director has been scooped by Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL), where he will work as associate artistic director for head honcho Marc Masterson.
“I think I just knew my heart wasn’t into doing Shakespeare for every show all season long for the rest of my life,” Daniels said, taking a gentle dig at his old home theater’s classical repertory.
“Actors is one of the great theaters in the country, and if you want to do new plays, there’s really nothing like the Humana Festival.”
Can’t argue with that.
Founded by Jon Jory in 1976, the Humana Festival of New American Plays has produced more than 300 new scripts, won a slew of awards (including three Pulitzer Prizes) and is the theater world’s equivalent of the Sundance Film Festival.
At the 2007 fest, for example, Alliance Theatre artistic chief Susan V. Booth directed Atlanta playwright Ken Weitzman’s “The As If Body Loop,” and Bill Fennelly (late of Actor’s Express) was so hot for Carlos Murillo’s “dark play or stories for boys” and Sherry Kramer’s “When Something Wonderful Ends” that he programmed ‘em both.
Daniels says that Masterson was a “big fan” of Dad’s Garage and has been a big-brother-like mentor for four years. “He knows exactly what he is getting,” Daniels quips.
At Cal Shakes, Daniels co-directed the two-part musical “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,” which won the Bay Area Critics Circle Award for best direction and production of the 2005 season. He says the Dickens classics were the best attended shows in the theater’s history.
His personal interest at Actors Theatre, he says, will be comedy. No surprise, considering he’s the man who staged “Cannibal! The Musical” and “Carrie White: The Musical” at Dad’s.
“Nobody writes the funny anymore for the American theater,” Daniels says. And if they do, they get hired by TV.
Daniels cites Rolin Jones — a Yale School of Drama graduate whose “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow” was a 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist — as an example.
Jones, who penned Dad’s Garage’s recent roller-derby play “The Jammer,” has been hired to write for Showtime’s “Weeds.”
“We’d love to get him to do more things here [at Humana],” Daniels says. “Now with ‘Weeds,’ that’s just not going to happen.”
Meanwhile, Daniels says he’s liking Louisville, even though he left his heart in San Francisco. (His wife, Madeleine Oldham, is literary manager of prestigious Berkeley Repertory Theatre.)
“It reminds me a lot of Atlanta because it has that same feeling of a small blue city in a big red state.”
“In the Bay Area, people can be so boring because everyone agrees. It’s just a matter of who can be more liberal than who.”
“Nobody does anything funny and nobody makes any good barbecue.”
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