By Eileen Wingard
SAN DIEGO — The prolific San Diego County playwright, Myla Lichtman-Fields, will be traveling to Los Angeles next month, and then to London, England in November to see performances of two of her 16 published plays that have gone global through lulu.com.
September 25th, a staged reading of one of her early plays, Thadius Streed, will be presented at Theatre West. This is an Appalachian folk musical with music by Barbara Rottman, inspired by the folksongs and culture of Appalachia. It will be directed by Victoria Lavan, with music director Richard Berent. Instruments such as harmonica, banjo, dulcimer and limberjacks (similar to castinets) will be accompanying the nine-member cast.
Lichtman-Fields developed the idea for this play when, in 1978, she and her parents took a road trip to the Smoky Mountains, along the Tennessee, North Carolina border. The aspiring young playwright made a documentary film of that trip, with the help of her father, who did the filming. She did extensive interviewing of residents, gathering material for this Appalachian folk musical.
Felix & Fanny is the first of Myla Lichtman-Fields’ four “Musicmakers” plays about classical composers. Others are about Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Emma Denton, cellist of the famed British-based Carducci String Quartet, contacted Myla, after reading the play, to see if it could be adapted for their “Words and Music” presentation.
The Quartet had already presented two concerts with scripted words framing the music of Beethoven and Shostakovitch.
On November 24th, at the Milton Court Theater in London’s Barbican Centre, the Carducci Quartet will be playing the music of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, framed by the words of Myla Lichtman-Fields’ play Felix and Fanny.
California Artists Radio Theatre recorded the play featuring Michael York and Samantha Egger, which has aired on NPR and Sirius XM radio. That recording is available through The Cart, downloading on-line.
Lichtman-Fields currently lives in El Cajon, where she has a small black box theater attached to her home where she can have staged readings of her plays. I remember her family as friends and neighbors in the Del Cerro area of San Diego. I even attended her wedding in her parents’ home.
She was a wonderful singer of Hebrew songs, accompanying herself on guitar. I have several of her recordings and recall her inspiring performances at the JCC on 54th Street and at Tifereth Israel Synagogue. I recall when she was accepted into the prestigious Juilliard School of Drama and when she was a cast member along with the great tenor, Jan Peerce, in the East Coast production of Laugh a Little, Cry a Little.
While in graduate school at USC, Myla worked as a staff writer at Universal Studios. She wrote NBC television episodes, Movies of the Week and an NBC special. She earned her B.A. in drama from UCSD, her M.A. in theater from SDSU, and her Ph.D in Communications/Drama with a minor in film from the University of Southern California
Many of her plays have been produced in California and throughout the country, for example, The Wetback, at the Lex Theatre in Hollywood and in Orange County, and Satan Amongst Us by St. Peter’s Players in Palos Verdes. Across the Great Divide was presented for two separate seasons in Westcliffe, Colorado. Many of her plays have received staged readings, such as Vs. Robert Schumann by the Antaeus Company. Her plays The Stones of Kilhara and the award-winning The Peacemakers were both read at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.
Hopefully one of our local San Diego theater companies will take note of this talented playwright in our midst and produce some of her dramatic works. Meanwhile, we wish Myla Lichtman-Fields much success with Thadius Steed in Los Angeles and Felix & Fanny with the Carducci Quartet in London.
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Eileen Wingard is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts. She may be contacted via eileen.wingard@sdjewishworld.com