By Cynthia Citron
BURBANK, California –“By the time Tom and I had finished building the theater, we had $25 left in the bank.”
Maria Gobetti is talking about the Victory Theatre Center in Burbank that she and husband Tom Ormeny opened in 1979. Now, after more than 30 years, the Victory is still going strong, with Gobetti and Ormeny still in charge. And Gobetti still fusses over their productions like a mother hen, as enthusiastic about the next one as she was about the first, The Miss Firecracker Contest.
“Beth Henley, who wrote that play, was one of my acting students and we were thrilled to open with the world premiere of that work,” Gobetti says. “We mounted it several years before it went to Broadway, and a year before Beth won the Pulitzer Prize for Crimes of the Heart.”
Gobetti, who obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theater and film from UCLA, “always wanted to teach,” she says. Currently, she’s not only teaching but she’s preparing to play a teacher in Lissa Levin’s Sex and Education, on the Victory stage.
She teaches Fourth Year Acting to students at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, on the campus of Cal State LA, and she also teaches for the New York Film Academy, at the Victory. In addition, she directs the activities of the Gobetti-Ormeny Acting Studio, also at the Victory.
Among her tweeted advisories to her students: “Don’t go to an audition to get the job. Go to have a good time,” and “Remember, you are perfect the way you are. You are the right weight, the right type…you are exactly who you are on this particular day.” And finally, “Remember, whoever reads with you is the character he or she is reading.”
Gobetti herself studied acting with Sanford Meisner but it was his assistant, Ed Kaye-Martin, who taught her to teach. “I apprenticed with him for five years,” she notes. “He taught me to look, to listen and to really hear.
“He believed you have to use yourself fully,” she continues. “You have to determine every way that you are like the character you’re playing before you look for the differences.”
She also studied with Lee Strasberg but “he scared me,” she admits. “He raged and I thought he was scary. Although Sandy was no sweetheart… Most of the classic teachers were ‘pedantic dictators’ and you either got along with them or you didn’t. But Sandy made you strong.”
Her own teaching philosophy is that “you have to make people accountable without making them wrong. And you have to have a sense of playing.”
In Levin’s Sex and Education, Gobetti plays an English teacher who finds herself in the position of having to discipline a graduating senior in high school for having passed a somewhat illiterate note to his girlfriend during final exams. Incensed by years of dealing with disrespectful, uninterested students, the teacher enters into a confrontational dispute with him about the importance and value of education.
Levin, whose television comedy credits include such hit shows as WKRP in Cincinnati, Mad About You, Family Ties and Cheers, says she wrote Sex and Education “to honor the English teacher who changed my life and to reform my son who loathed English.”
“Lissa Levin is a uniquely funny writer,” Gobetti says.. “She knows how to write something funny with heart. Sex and Education is a smart comedy with a lot of language in it. It has something to say about education and what it means to be educated. Lissa’s play comes at a time when education is getting a bad rap. Teachers don’t make all that much and students are generally apathetic, especially about politics.”
The Victory has presented its share of explicitly political plays over the years, including two by Donald Freed, American Iliad and The General and the Archbishop (the latter was the forerunner to Freed’s The Devil’s Advocate, which was produced earlier this year at Los Angeles Theatre Center). “Donald is a trip,” Gobetti laughs. “He has a positive persona and he believes acting is breathing. He worked with the actors for a week when we produced his plays.”
But the Victory began focusing more on comedies after 9/11. “We were running a musical, My Old Friends, to sold-out houses every night. But after 9/11 we were down to 20 patrons a night. People were just not in the mood. Ever since that time we’ve given priority to comedies,” she adds. “But we don’t do ‘easy’ pieces. We like a challenging script. And the plays we do are mostly original.
“One thing you dread in the theater is quiet,” she says, “but this place is always jumping.” As she says this, the noise in the lobby grows louder as a group of students from the New York Film Academy gathers to rehearse a program of staged readings they will present that evening.
Gobetti and Ormeny frequently rent the theater to “outside” productions or to co-producers. “That can be a disaster sometimes,” Gobetti notes. She cites a recent production she says was “crass and badly directed. It’s our job to protect our theater and this production really made us look bad. So we had to go to war to make sure it got fixed.
“I’m not a writer,” Gobetti continues, “but I’m a real reader and I have a great appreciation for writing.”
She is also a theater activist. She and Ormeny were among the Actors’ Equity members, doubling as small-theater producers in the ’80s, who led the campaign against proposed changes in what was then called Equity Waiver. In 1988, the Waiver was replaced by the more restrictive 99-Seat Theater Plan, but Los Angeles is still the only city in the country where Equity actors are allowed to perform in sub-100-seat theaters for more than 12 performances without using a contract. Gobetti says the Waiver and the 99-Seat Plan have “encouraged the theater culture in LA, and that’s pretty wonderful in a movie town.
“In theater, staying alive is a big deal. What means the most to me is keeping it all moving.” And, obviously, acting every once in a while. (“I used to be an ingénue but now I’m a character actress,” she says with a grin.) In Sex and Education she appears with Jessica McKee, who plays “an adorable cheerleader” and Kanin Guntzelman, the son of Daniel Guntzelman, who is directing.
“It’s a two-family affair,” she explains. “We have the two Guntzelmans, and then we have my family with me playing the teacher, Tom producing and Bear [their huge golden retriever-Irish wolfhound mix] on standby to lick people’s faces if they cry or get upset.”
Sex and Education, produced by the Victory Theatre Center, opens today (June 3); plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 4 pm; through July 17. Tickets: $24-$34. Victory Theatre, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank; 818-841-4404 or 818-841-5421 for tickets. thevictorytheatrecenter.org.
*
Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. This article appeared previously in LA Stage Times. Citron may be contacted at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com