On The Stage

Theatricum Botanicum: High Drama in the Woods

Kevin Allardice
Mirror contributing writer
  
   To the casual passerby, Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum might appear to be nothing more than a minor roadside attraction, because when you’re driving through Topanga Canyon, the hand-painted sign that proclaims its existence is little more than a blip in your peripheral vision as you negotiate the canyon’s tricky curves.
   But beyond the sign and down the dirt road that takes you through a wall of foliage is a world that was (to this writer, at least) previously unknown.
   While it’s a theater, it has the unmistakable feel of a summer camp. Offices are housed in cabins. There is the scent of pine trees that, to the city slicker, vaguely recalls taxicab air fresheners. And dirt trails lead through the trees to unusual theater alcoves – like the Shakespeare garden. If a plant or flower is mentioned in Shakespeare, chances are it can be found in this garden. Whether the pollen from these flowers will make or man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees is yet to be seen. But the earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb; what is her burying grave, that is her womb—because the garden is also the final resting place of Will Geer, who founded Theatricum Botanocum in the 1950s, in the midst of the McCarthy era.
   Will Geer—best known for playing the grandfather on “The Waltons” TV show — was an established working actor in the fifties, sufficiently well-known to be called before the most demanding and critical of audiences — the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). He had always been politically active, never afraid to speak his mind. And so he — and thousands of others — became prime targets of Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC’s witch hunt to root out alleged communists and communist sympathizers from, most publicly, Hollywood. When asked that most infamous question, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Geer stood his ground, and cited the Fifth Amendment. But civil rights mean little in the court of public opinion — the “public” in that instance being studio heads who were unwilling to hire anyone who might be considered “un-American”— and Geer joined the ranks of the blacklisted.
   While many people who were blacklisted lost everything, Geer eventually made something positive out of it. It was during this time that he purchased about five acres of undeveloped land in Topanga Canyon, which soon became a gathering place for Geer’s friends, actors, folk singers (including Woody Guthrie), artists and other victims of the blacklist.
   “It was like a haven,” said Ellen Geer, Will Geer’s daughter, “…this became a place of healing.”
   What was then known as Geer Gardens became Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum when he and his compatriots began to put on plays. The name means “theater of plants,” and combined Geer’s previously disparate passions, theater and botany.
   Geer had been on the blacklist for just over ten years when director Otto Preminger hired him in 1962 for his film Advise and Consent. “He played a senator,” recalled Ellen Geer, “which was ironic.”
   The community of artists that Geer had brought together at his Topanga Canyon hideaway eventually began to disperse, but in 1972, when Geer was cast in “The Waltons,” he was able to bring the theater back together.
   When he died in 1978, his daughter took the reins as artistic director and continued in the pioneering spirit of her father. She has not forgotten the political miasma that surrounded the theater’s beginnings, especially since, as Ellen said, “It feels like that time again.”
   As communists have been replaced by terrorists, HUAC by The Department of Homeland Security, and the blacklist by the Patriot Act, history does seem to be repeating itself.
   “It was kind of like now,” Geer said. “I’ve got one of my actors in jail because he didn’t believe in the war.”
   But now, as then, the theater is striving to remain a positive voice in the din of political unrest. Last year, she wrote a modern adaptation of Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ 2400-year-old comic play about women who conspire to stop a twenty-year war with a sex strike.
   In addition to mounting productions, Theatricum Botanicum fosters talent — ages six to eighty. Little kids in particular have benefited from Geer’s outreach to the community. Through a program called Classroom Enrichment, actors from the theater go to schools and perform for classes. The program was originally called Actors for Education, but with a tag like that it didn’t get much attention. “Actors still have a bad rap,” said Geer.
   Now the actors are bringing the classics to children, and simply by their performances making the sometimes dense wordplay of Shakespeare accessible to them. “I don’t think there’s anything kids don’t get,” she said. When the words are combined with the actions, they are suddenly charged with meaning and emotion.
   “They don’t look at [Shakespeare] as a foreign language,” Geer said.
   Indeed, she has great confidence in the abilities of youth. She likes to evoke the ancient Greek practice in which children as young as four studied rhetoric, learning the power and importance of language. She believes theater can do the same for young children, not just on the stage but in their lives and education. “If they can read Shakespeare, they can read anything.”
   And sticking with its perennial favorite, the theater is currently staging two productions of the Bard: A Winter’s Tale and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The latter is particularly suited for the theater’s outdoor stage. In place of a backdrop are the woods, and actors run in and out of the trees. “Ophelia went and jumped in that creek over there,” Ellen said recalling a past production of Hamlet.
   Theatrium Botanicum also does modern and contemporary works. Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood is in rehearsal and set to open July 10th. And the Botanicum Seedlings program develops and workshops the works of contemporary playwrights.
   Theatricum Botanicum is located at 1419 North Topanga Canyon Boulevard. For tickets, call the box office at (310) 455-3723.