Offscript - Northern light

suburban theaters around the Atlanta area live under a Catch-22. With small budgets, limited resources and local audiences who often seek predictable fare, they’re pressured to program safe, familiar plays. But if they only appeal to ticket-buyers in their community, they’ll never attract theater fans from outside the neighborhood.

A numbing sameness can settle over the programming of suburban theaters, as if they take turns drawing from a narrow roster of Neil Simon-style comedies, British whodunits and toothless musical war-horses. At times it seems that Atlanta’s two Shakespeare companies have less overlap in their shows, like the way Dunwoody’s Stage Door Players staged I Hate Hamlet last fall and Roswell’s Georgia Ensemble Theatre presented it this month.

Fortunately there are exceptions like Marietta’s Theatre in the Square, and other suburban theaters should aspire to its example. It has one of the healthiest budgets of any Atlanta playhouse, and reliably strikes a balance of broad appeal and creative interest.

Not yet on a par with Theatre in the Square, Duluth’s Aurora Theatre has been gradually rising above its own community-theater origins. Last year it received an Abby Award nomination for Best New Arts Organization — which was a little strange, given that it began in 1996. But given the pedestrian level of early work like 1998’s Harvey, Aurora is now like a different playhouse altogether.

Under producing artistic director Anthony Rodriguez, Aurora’s numbers have noticeably improved, with its annual budget climbing from about $90,000 to a half-million, its subscriber list from 120 to 2,000 people, and its seating capacity from 130 to 200.

But such statistics would mean little if Aurora wasn’t producing interesting work. It saw a watershed in last spring’s Floyd Collins, a downbeat historical musical in which the title character is stuck in a cave for nearly the entire running time. Although the theater’s Gwinnett County regulars had mixed reactions, Rodriguez said the play was one of its best at attracting publicity, talented artists and new spectators.

Rodriguez’s personal connections have helped, too. As an actor at Horizon Theatre and Soul-stice Repertory, he established a relationship with Heidi Cline, who’s directing Aurora’s revival of Clifford Odets’ boxing play Golden Boy, showing through Feb. 23. Golden Boy was the cutting-edge play of 1937, but Odets seldom gets produced nowadays, with his brotherhood-of-man earnestness making his dialogue sound campy in an ironic age. And Odets’ use of vernacular means delivering — with complete sincerity — broad ethnic accents and forgotten slang like “Don’t Brisbane me, Lorna, I’m licked.”

It’s hard to imagine the old Aurora being up to the material, but based on the show’s final dress rehearsal, Cline has got Odets licked. Golden Boy’s fine cast could live up to any playhouse inside the Perimeter, with Damon Boggess sparring with the title role, a young man torn between his abilities as both a boxer and a violinist. And Cline appreciates that it’s not just Odets’ heated dialogue but the silence and the stillness between the words that makes the play live and breath.

Aurora has plenty of ambitions it’s still trying to achieve, including the purchase of Calvary Christian Church as a permanent home. And Rodriguez, a first-generation Cuban, has organized the Spanish-language Teatro del Sol in honor of his late mother’s memory.

After Golden Boy, Aurora offers the more audience-friendly musical revue Five Guys Named Moe. But then it takes another sharp turn with As It Is In Heaven, a play about the lives of nine Shaker women. “It’s not a musical, not a comedy and not a drama — although it has music, comedy and drama in it,” says Rodriguez, who trusts that Aurora’s audience will approach the play with an open mind. Aurora’s establishing a track record solid enough to suggest that Heaven may be worth the drive.

Beat the clock. Dad’s Garage’s annual short play festival 8 1/2 x 11 is all about meeting deadlines: The plays in the lineup can be no more than 11 minutes (except for the five-and-a-half-minute “half” play), or a buzzer will cut it off. But Dad’s Garage itself faced an unexpected time crunch when, a mere five days before opening night, Jomandi Productions withdrew its entry, the monologue “A Fool From My Past,” due to availability conflicts with the actor.

Rather than rename the show 7 1/2 x 11, artistic director Sean Daniels e-mailed theater companies nationwide to recommend a 10-minute script. By the next morning, Marc Masterson of Louisville’s Actor’s Theatre recommended award-winning playwright Carter W. Lewis, and consequently Daniels is directing the writer’s “The Seduction of Things Past” for 8 1/2 x 11’s fifth annual production. Perhaps finding and staging a short play in 120 hours will become a regular feature of the show.

Opening Out of Town. Atlanta actor Thomas Byrd has joined the cast of Broad- way’s Royale Theatre’s revival of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, starring Whoopi Goldberg.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com

Off Script is a biweekly column on the Atlanta theater scene.