A&E

[The Weekly Q&A]

Going off-script with A Public Fit Theater Company co-founder Ann Marie Pereth

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Ann Marie Pereth poses onstage as cast members warm up for a performance at the Usual Place
Photo: Steve Marcus

In 2014, local couple Ann Marie Pereth and Joseph Kucan founded A Public Fit, a Fremont East-based professional theater company devoted to staging smart, provocative and engaging plays using local actors and crew. Across eight smartly curated seasons, it has done exactly that, presenting such memorable and innovative productions as A Summons From the Tinker to Assemble the Membership at the Usual Place, which began, almost surreptitiously, in an alley behind the performance space (and which provided the company with the name of its Downtown venue, the Usual Place) and the largely silent Small Mouth Sounds.

Many of these productions are directed or co-directed by Pereth, an actor, dancer and choreographer whose restless creativity extends well beyond her work as A Public Fit’s artistic director. The longtime Las Vegan (“I lived here when this town only had 500,000 people”) teaches drama at CSN and assists other local theater companies and schools, working towards the goal of building something durable and lasting for Las Vegas. “I want the theater community to succeed; to rise above,” Pereth says. “I’m really fighting for that cause.”

What motivated you and Joseph Kucan to found this company? I lived in New York [for a time]; it’s a rough place. You know, it’s the center of so much industry—fashion, journalism, theater. But I was so skinny and sick there, living in a really small space; I was really lonely. So, when I came back home to Las Vegas and all of the people that I went to grad school with said, “We’re going to New York,” I was like, “I don’t know if I want to do that.”

Joe and I have always been in the same circles, but there was no romantic interest, ever, until I was just finishing grad school. I told him, “You know, our relationship is going really well, and I have to make a decision—am I going to apply to be a theater teacher, or am I going to go back to New York and try to be a working professional?” I love Joe’s family, and I love Joe, and I was actually kind of saddened that there wasn’t a professional theater in town that was paying people enough to make it worth their while to do theater.

So, [A Public Fit] started from that moment of going OK, artists are valuable. If I have a way and a means and use my connections, I’d like to find a way to pay the artists. We started reading plays at Joe’s parents’ house and that exploded; we started doing public readings, and then the staged readings turned into Foxfinder and A Summons From the Tinker. And we’ve just been building and building ever since; each year it grows, and we shift, and we change, and we get more and more professional. But it really started with just wanting to take care of the artists.

Theater is a tough sell here. Where do you find the money to pay cast and crew? Individual donors; we have a lot of people who support us. Grants. Corporate sponsorships—right now, we have a sponsorship with Findlay [Automotive Group] for our current production, Things I Know to Be True. And ticket sales, but the shows are so expensive [to produce] that even if we’re sold out—and we’ve had an excellent run for this show—we don’t pay for the cost to produce the show. So, it’s not really a money-making venture. It’s really about a community service that we offer Las Vegans, so in order to be able to do that, we have to tap into all of those different resources to make sure that the quality stays high, because if you pay people, then you attract more skilled artists.

What makes theater companies like yours such a vital part of a community? I would say that theater is about conversation. If you do it really well, people will lean in, because it’s happening in real time right in front of you. That’s really provocative … it forces us to look at ourselves; it forces us to book in our community. It encourages us to have discourse with people that we don’t agree with, and it also tells us where we’re doing really well [chuckles].

So, it’s really about creating that conversation so that there’s more humanity on the planet. The way we do it in the theatrical community is, you know, we rehearse, we get to opening night, we get all the audience members in the house, the lights go down and we sit together peacefully. And the reason why I say that right now is just because we’re under the backdrop of what’s happening in Ukraine. Their people are fighting to have a conversation, too, but they have to defend themselves [with] bullets and missiles. … That’s a really sad, sad state of affairs. We get to protest peacefully, under the lights, in a kinder way.

In an ideal world, what would Las Vegas’ theater scene look like? We have an actress who just moved here from Indianapolis. Her husband is in the grad program at UNLV. … I asked her what’s the theater scene like in Indianapolis, and she’s like, “Well, it’s bigger there than it is here.” I was like, “Damn!” And in my heart of hearts, I already knew that to be true. We just get swallowed up by the entertainment of the Strip.

A lot of [this city’s] resources for entertainment [have] not gone into the theatrical community, and that’s what APF, Majestic Repertory and Vegas Theater Company are really fighting for now, as we need our local officials to invest. They call it “the Arts District” because of what the artists have done. So, if we get pushed out because of retail and restaurants, that’s a disservice to the artists that have built that infrastructure and made it cool.

There’s not a regional theater in the state of Nevada. That’s what makes us different than other theatrical cities; we don’t have that in our city or even in our state. I don’t know if that’s a goal that I’m actively pursuing, but what I am actively pursuing is creating an ensemble of actors and administrators that have work and are being validated financially. We’re looking to keep on building and expanding, just to keep validating everybody’s hard work.

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