The Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts—known to everyone as PCPA—started with a gentle humility that mimicked its small-town origins.
The theater arts company, designed to teach young performers and technicians under the guidance of professional resident teachers, went through several transformations before coming close to the conservatory locals know today. But the mission of the performing arts organization has been singular since its first production in 1964: to educate, inspire, and infuse the upcoming generation of performers with the skills, tools, and respect they need to produce truly great theater.
PCPA dedicated this season, its 50th, to the conservatory’s alumni. This group extends far beyond former students to include volunteers and professional actors, theater techs and craftspeople who’ve been involved over the decades. A reunion weekend held Aug. 8 through 11 included receptions, gatherings, tours, a picnic, and events for the visiting theater arts professionals, with a special fundraising event on Aug. 11—Starry Night—that rounded out the festivities.
A star-studded lineup of actors sang and danced their way through the evening, also delivering solo monologues from favorite PCPA productions. A panel discussion between several actors, writers, and directors who worked or studied at PCPA capped off the event. Many of the panel participants are now known for their appearances on television, in films, and on stage.
Alumni reminisced about back-stage antics and playful ribbings. Many emotionally described how important PCPA was to them, talking about how the experiences they had with the theater formed their careers and changed their lives. Aug. 11 was also the day news reports of Robin Williams’ apparent suicide fanned across worldwide media. Mark Herrier, who acted alongside Williams during PCPA’s 1973-1974 summer season, remembered the comedic actor fondly during the most somber moment of the celebratory event.
The wide range of talent sitting on stage recounting stories and favorite moments—including anecdotes about such actors as Williams or Kathy Bates, who couldn’t be a part of the celebration—illustrate PCPA’s capability to prepare artists for successful performing arts careers.
But one actor, Brad Hall—you might remember him from Saturday Night Live—alluded to something PCPA couldn’t prepare him for.
“There’s a big problem with PCPA; this is the elephant in the room nobody is saying,” he said playfully. “The truth is, once you’ve been at PCPA, there’ll never be anything like it again, so all you can do is try to re-create that fun.”
Curtains up
In 1964, Allan Hancock College President Walter Conrad approached a theater arts teacher at Santa Maria High School named Donovan Marley and asked him to start a theater arts program at the small community college.
“Because we are geographically isolated from population centers where artistic experiences are readily available to our students and our college patrons, we have an obligation to develop such experiences on this campus,” Conrad said at the time.
Marley left his job at the high school and started the college program with a handful of students and teachers. The company was known as The Platform Players, and it performed in refurbished old barracks left over from Hancock’s time as a military aviation training facility.
Even with limited numbers and resources, the company’s first season was met with enthusiasm from the community—and students expressed that same fervor. During an Artistic Director’s Forum event that was part of PCPA’s reunion weekend, Marley explained that the initial excitement was a direct result of the way he designed the company.
“I realized that if I was going to have an experience that was valid for the students … it had to be based on some kind of mentor apprenticeship system,” he said. “So from the very first year, I started working toward that end, and by the time I left we were carrying 17 equity contracts and had a full contingent of professional directors and designers.”
Every year following the first season was one of expansion. Students from outside the college’s district were allowed into the program in 1967, and the conservatory’s technical program brought in more staff and students as well. In 1965, Santa Maria voters approved a $1 million bond to build the college’s performing arts center. The Marian Theatre was completed in 1967, and the company’s name became the Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts.
Marian Theatre, named after Marian Hancock, was built with the thrust stage design—meaning the platform stage proceeds into the audience as well as down into the vomitorium—a style that dates back to Ancient Greece. The versatility of the new stage provided PCPA artists a canvas on which to put up many different productions. The first was Camelot, with Laird Williamson—who later became the artistic director from 1983 to 1984—playing Lancelot.
The 20 or so years after the stage was completed are often referred to as PCPA’s “Golden Years.” This was a period of exponential growth in talent, productions, and audience. The theater’s popularity grew on the Central Coast, and Roger Neilsen of the Solvang Businessmen’s Association invited PCPA to perform at Hans Christian Andersen Park in 1971. Playwright Randal Myler coyly remembered that production of Hamlet during the Starry Nights event.
“Well, I was the ghost, Old Hamlet,” he said. “And Bob Blackman had costumed me in this giant black cloak with hot glue all over it, and I had a creepy microphone I spoke with, but it kept picking up highway patrol.
“This is a true story,” he said through the crowd’s laughter. “It would be like ‘Hamlet, remember me, there’s a 2-11 in progress.’”
After that production, a massive influx of funds, volunteerism, and civic support flowed from the Santa Ynez Valley and Santa Maria to facilitate construction of the Solvang Festival Theater. In the summer of 1974, the new theater—almost an exact replica of the Marian Theatre, but outdoors—was built in 58 days. The opening play was Once Upon a Mattress with Belita Moreno as Princess Minifred.
Moreno—who currently plays George Lopez’s mother in that comedian’s sitcom—came to PCPA as an underling at the age of 19, studying the craft and playing smaller roles. That included performing as part of a youth outreach puppet theater, at which point she almost left.
“I stayed, and to this day I’m thankful because of what I learned,” she said during the Starry Night panel. “I learned to stay focused and not give up on myself; I learned to be as strong as possible and do what you can with what you have as often as possible, and work, work, work.”
When Moreno helped open the Solvang Festival Theatre, it was as a resident artist and teacher. She’d reached out to Marley, who invited her back to perform and teach, and she continued to learn from PCPA.
“It was very exciting in that, being a character actress, you’re oftentimes put into categories and slots,” she said. “And I really was able to do all kinds of different roles, and the variety gave me such a remarkable foundation to be able to build on.”
Moreno’s feelings about her experiences at PCPA are shared by many other talented artists who enjoyed later successes—not always in theater arts—and credit their time and skills learned at PCPA as a major influence in their lives. Troy Evans, a wonderfully familiar character actor who can be seen in everything from ER to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, expressed the importance of PCPA in his life as tears welled in his eyes.
He was answering a question posed by panel emcee and PCPA alum Mark Herrier about the effect the company had on his life.
“Truthfully, PCPA saved my life,” Evans said. “I was a 29-year-old barely sober Vietnam vet and ex con. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a waxed cat in hell being chased by an asbestos dog had a better chance of having a career as a professional actor than I did.”
The humble titans at the Starry Night event fondly remembered their time at PCPA for a variety of reasons. Some enjoyed the camaraderie, some the content, but all cited the work ethic and discipline passed down from the company’s artistic directors—especially Marley—as key inspiration for their future successes.
PCPA alum Boyd Gaines—the first actor to be nominated for Tony Awards in all four male acting categories—couldn’t have made this clearer during his turn to speak. Herrier asked Gaines about the actor’s time at Julliard.
“I did well at Julliard, and what allowed me to do well was the training that I had here,” Gaines said. “And I have to say, Donovan Marley has taught more people about discipline, integrity, and collaboration than virtually any educator or director I have ever encountered.”
The creative engine
PCPA’s success comes from the bones of the organization, which formed under Marley’s guidance in its first two decades and held strong after he left to begin another company in Denver in 1984.
“I think the most important thing I learned here is how vital to the older artists in the company the student artists are,” Marley said during the forum. “I literally wrote into my Denver contract that I’d never be responsible for raising a single dime, and the second was to be allowed to start a conservatory, because I wanted that energy that flows from the students into the mature people. It is impossible for a company that is imbued with young energy to become old, jaded, and cynical.”
This energy is restocked every single year as new students enter the two-year program and immediately become immersed in theater arts with the guidance of the company’s resident artists. These educators, explained current artistic director Mark Booher, have to be dedicated to more than just teaching; they have to commit to learning as well.
“I come to work every day and am learning new things and feel like I am a student of the art and a student of the human condition,” he said.
“So I think there is actually something about the professional orientation of the company that helps the student learning.”
The culture of a conservatory is top down, so Booher and every single resident artist needs to be tuned into the ethic of the company. Members credit the professionalism that ties every part of PCPA together as what’s responsible for churning out professional actors, stage managers, set designers, lighting technicians, wardrobe artists, dancers, and more every year. The key to success is always the ability to collaborate with many different people effectively, whether in a PCPA production or regular life.
While the bellows of creativity are constantly pumping at PCPA, they’re able to do so in no small part due to the support of the community that surrounds the conservatory. Creating art at a consistent professional level isn’t a cheap endeavor, but PCPA has been allowed to keep its focus within the program thanks to a combination of federal funding, revenue, and patron and community support.
Preserving PCPA
PCPA alum Herrier, a Lompoc High School graduate famous for the movie Porky’s, took a moment at the end of Starry Night to thank PCPA’s audience.
“It’s one thing for some madman to decide he can build a classical theater in the middle of a cow town where his audience is farmers, ranchers, merchants, and blue collar workers,” he said. “But, it’s quite another for those farmers and ranchers and merchants and blue collar workers to come out to that theater not for one year or two years, but 50 years.”
There were times in the past when PCPA’s future and budget were unsure, but there are many friends of the company, which was alluded to by Jack Shouse during the forum.
“This program would not exist if Hancock College did not want it to exist,” he said. “There have always been members of the board who’ve said PCPA is the jewel in the crown of Allan Hancock College.”
Shouse was the artistic director at PCPA from 1986 until 2000, when, though PCPA received state funding, the theater also needed donations and revenue to produce each season.
“When I was artistic director, I spent much of my time worrying about how to keep the theater solvent,” he said. “Picking the shows was easy in terms of balancing schedule, but I was told by one president of the college, ‘You are like a CEO. If you don’t have a balanced budget, you are fired.’”
Shouse’s efforts to keep the theater financially sound were aided by benevolent benefactors several times over the years. In 1992, the Severson Theatre was erected and opened, serving as a more intimate theater for PCPA productions. Not long after, in 1995, a group of longtime PCPA patrons headed by Judge Royce Lewellen—the founding director of the Solvang Festival Theater—organized a nonprofit organization, the PCPA Foundation.
The foundation coordinates fundraisers like the Starry Night event, and uses the funds earned to supplement an endowment of more than $2 million, from which a 5 percent gift is made every year to PCPA. The Foundation also organizes donations, including scholarships and sponsorships, all designed to remove financial burdens from the conservatory and its students.
“It never occurred to me any year that I was at PCPA that it was a sure thing that we would get through the next year,” Marley said. “And, when I left I assumed that it would go on for a little while, and then would cease to be because that is a pattern that you see all across the country.”
By the nature of the game, an artistic director can hardly look further than the current season.
“On the stage it is always now,” Thornton Wilder, a famous playwright, once said.
The PCPA Foundation, Marley explained, was a welcome and much-needed organization.
“Because what is going to happen further down the line needs to be planned for,” Marley said. “But it’s not likely going be by the artists. It has got to be planned for by that remarkable group of individuals headed by Judge Lewellen.”
Generous fans of PCPA have donated their time and money to the foundation, creating a swirling engine of resources to help fuel the creative fire burning at the conservatory.
“Theaters do not often outlive their founders,” Marley said to the crowd of alumni, fans, and supporters at the forum. “And one of the great joys of my life is to be sitting here on the 50th anniversary.”
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 4-11, 2014.