The Fountain Theatre will host a celebration to honor the memory of Shirley Jo Finney at the Kirk Douglas Theatre on Tuesday, Dec. 12 beginning at 7 p.m.
A respected and beloved Los Angeles theater director who worked at regional theaters across the country and in South Africa, Finney was also an established television and film director. She was the winner of numerous honors and awards, including for eight productions she directed at the Fountain over the course of a decades-long artistic relationship. Her acclaimed staging of the Fountain’s production of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine was one of three chosen to inaugurate CTG’s Block Party at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2017. Finney passed away on October 10 at the age of 74 following an eight-month battle with cancer.
“We invite the Los Angeles theater community to gather with us to honor this extraordinary artist,” says Fountain Theatre artistic director Stephen Sachs. “The celebration is open to anyone who was touched by Shirley Jo’s life. All are welcome.”
The Kirk Douglas Theatre is located at 9820 Washington Blvd, Culver City CA 90232. Parking is free with validation underneath City Hall, located across the street from the theater on the corner of Culver Blvd. and Duquesne Ave. (entrance on Duquesne).
Reservations can be made online at https://tinyurl.com/CelebratingShirleyJo.
The Fountain Theatre’s stunning encore production of 
We came to the Kirk Douglas Theatre on Monday night to express our gratitude to Center Theatre Group, we came to congratulate three local companies and their productions, we came to celebrate intimate theatre in Los Angeles. And, most of all, we came to PARTY! 
World premiere of Building the Wall — The newest play by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan (The Kentucky Cycle, All the Way), directed by award-winning Michael Michetti. It’s the very near future, and the Trump administration has carried out his campaign promise to round up and detain millions of immigrants. Now, a writer interviews the supervisor of a private prison as he awaits sentencing for carrying out the federal policy that has escalated into the unimaginable. This riveting, harrowing and illuminating drama delivers a powerful warning and puts a human face on the inhuman, revealing how when personal accountability is denied, what seems inconceivable becomes inevitable.
World premiere of Runaway Home — Three years after Hurricane Katrina, the unhealed wounds of New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward continue to fester. In this powerful, funny and deeply moving mother-daughter story by Jeremy J. Kamps, 14-year-old runaway Kali embarks on a journey to pick through the wreckage of what used to be her life. Rhyming, stealing and scamming her way through the still-destroyed neighborhood, engaging the vivid, lively denizens who remain, she grapples with the real cost of what she has lost as she is forced to confront the even higher cost of moving forward and the possibility of redemption.
Los Angeles premiere of The Chosen — The Fountain Theatre celebrates the 50th anniversary of Chaim Potok’s beloved novel with the L.A. premiere of the award-winning stage adaptation by Aaron Posner. A silent father, an ancient tradition and an unexpectedly important game of baseball forge bonds of lifelong friendship between two Jewish boys from “five blocks and a world apart” in this funny, poignant, timely and timeless story about recognition and acceptance of “the other.” Directed by Simon Levy.
World premiere of Freddie — This hybrid dance/theater work by Fountain Theatre co-artistic director Deborah Lawlor will be presented at Los Angeles City College, inaugurating a new partnership with the LACC Theatre Academy. Set in Greenwich Village in 1964 and based on a true story, Freddie fuses theater, music, dance and video to capture the explosive spirit of a passionate artist and a turbulent era. A naïve young woman falls under the spell of Freddie Herko, a brilliant ballet dancer of extraordinary charisma and talent and a beloved luminary of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Frances Loy directs.
World premiere of Arrival and Departure — Troy Kotsur and his real-life wife Deanne Bray star in a modern-day, re-imagined deaf/hearing stage adaptation by Stephen Sachs (Bakersfield Mist, Cyrano) of the classic 1945 British romantic film, Brief Encounter. A deaf man and a deaf woman, married to different people, meet accidentally in a train station. A friendship develops over time, escalating into a passionate love affair that both struggle to permit themselves to consummate. An unforgettable love story about the challenges of communication, social isolation, diversity and self-empowerment.
