Hermosa resident Whitney Anderson is a co-founder of a socially conscious theater group
Whitney Anderson and Dynamo Studio put on a lauded production of William Mastrosimone’s “Extremities” this year. Photo courtesy Whitney Anderson
Dynamo on stage
In “Island on the Land,” his iconic 1946 history of Southern California, the writer Carey McWilliams defined the geographical boundaries of Hollywood as extending “from the summit of the Hollywood Hills on the north to Beverly Boulevard on the south; from Hoover Street on the east to Doheny Drive on the west.” But, he wrote, “this district is not Hollywood,” or at least not what people usually meant by the word, which is not the neighborhood but the industry. The community of people in entertainment was frequently scattered outside that rough quadrangle.
Whitney Anderson is scattered a bit farther than most: She lives in Hermosa Beach. Although an increasing share of people in the entertainment industry has made the South Bay home in recent years, this miniature exodus is dominated by those at the higher end of Hollywood’s yawning pay chasm: producers and financiers, top-of-their field light and sound engineers, and the occasional Vince Vaughn. Anderson is an actress with an impressive list of credits, but, like all but a sliver of the acting community, finding new roles remains a constant hunt. Asked to describe the anxiety of auditioning, her first thought is not of stepping into a bright room before impatient casting agents, but whether and how to commit the time to do so in the first place.
“It’s every day at 7 p.m.,” she said before ticking off the wondering about tomorrow each day involved. “You have plans, but you no longer know what to focus on. Should you wear makeup? You’re driving there, you’re questioning why you’re going, your manager is calling…”
All of these commute-influenced calculations are made a bit more complex by the fact that Anderson’s true passion is the stage. Asked to compare auditioning for a play to audition for a TV show or movie, she seemed to be describing the differences between the mediums themselves.
“More context,” Anderson replied almost instantly. “In TV and movies, you don’t always get the whole script. And you don’t always understand the character as well. They can be, well, sterile.”
Southern California supports a burgeoning theater community, but it is not Broadway. And it is also not “Hollywood” as most people mean it, even when the stages happen to fall within the boundaries McWilliams mentioned. Theater of the kind Anderson is involved in often takes place in small, unglamorous spaces that do not beckon the Saturday night commuter. (At each of the two recent Anderson performances I attended, I received multiple warnings that parking would be tough.)
Anderson is a co-founder of Dynamo Studio, a socially conscious theater group whose debut production, William Mastrosimone’s “Extremities,” opened this year with impeccable timing. The play tells the story of a woman who is the victim of an attempted rape, and manages to fend off and tie up her assailant; her two roommates arrive home shortly thereafter, and they engage in an agonizing back and forth about what to do next. Anderson and Dynamo co-founders Laura Campbell and Laura Coover began working on the production at the beginning of this year, hoping to use the play as a way to examine gender dynamics amid the #MeToo movement. But after opening in August, the play got an extended life after audiences saw parallels between Mastrosimone’s story and the allegations that surfaced in the unfolding confirmation battle over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom a California college professor said attempted to rape her when they were teenagers. (Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate, 50-48, on Oct. 6.)
For Anderson, whose recent credits include the high-profile television shows “Masters of Sex” and “NCIS: Los Angeles,” movies and TV are a way for her to make her passion projects in theater possible. It means a lot of driving and even more uncertainty. And if she seems genuinely undaunted by the odds of making it, it is likely because she has a different idea of what making it means.
Some of her local roles have come via Jack Messenger, a writer, and director who has spent 20 years in the South Bay theater world. He first met Anderson when a friend of his — Anderson’s Hermosa landlord — recommended her for a role in his staging of Lisa Loomer’s “Distracted.” He was impressed and, after he finished writing his most recent play, the gun violence polemic “Thoughts and Prayers,” he eagerly reached out to her again. Anderson, he said, comes at acting with obvious commitment.
“As we used to say in broadcasting, she’s after it,” Messenger said. “She’s hungry. But I don’t think success for her comes in monetary terms. It comes for her in terms of excellence: of taking an excellent piece of work and perfecting it. She’s a professional, a rounded professional in every way.”
Talking back
Like so many in the entertainment industry, Anderson came to Southern California from the midwest. She moved to Manhattan Beach from Minnesota with her mother at 13 and, not long after, was “discovered,” while walking through a shopping mall.
Anderson said that her mom often took her to the theater when she was growing up, which nurtured a love of performance. But she was not prepared for where the star life would take her. She quickly began booking parts and commercials, filling up her schedule with auditions while friends her age were working on homework and soccer games. After an agent told her that she should consider getting emancipated from her parents to have more control over her career, she made an extremely adult decision for someone not yet out of middle school: she quit. She went to high school and attended USC where, near graduation, she decided to get back into acting.
It’s impossible to say where Anderson’s career would have gone had she stayed on the track she was on, but she has no regrets. Having a more “normal” adolescence, she said, allowed her to avoid the perils of youthful stardom, and also gave her a broader range of experiences from which to draw on.
On stage, Anderson is lively and energizing, finding ways in which her character’s appearance can unhinge the order by which other people think their lives run. In Messenger’s “Thoughts and Prayers,” she plays Danielle Lamb, a thinly veiled take on National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch. Last year, Loesch appeared in the organization’s incendiary “Violence of Lies” video, in which she breathlessly recounts the misdeeds of an unnamed “they” — which, as soon becomes clear, are the “elites” who oppose President Trump’s agenda — as images of protest and rioting flash on the screen. The video went viral, and the biggest risk of the Lamb role for an actor was probably descending into parody. But Anderson kept things edgy by emphasizing Lamb’s sexuality. The result was a character who, like Loesch, seems conscious of the fact that she is playing a role.
Anderson, Campbell, and Coover formed Dynamo with bigger-picture goals. The three decided to collaborate out of a desire to have more influence over the kind of stories that are told. All of them had become more politically engaged after the 2016 election, and forming the studio gave them “the opportunity to engage with issues in our own way.” “Extremities” easily won a consensus as their first production.
“Extremities” is an intense play that opens with a frank depiction of sexual assault. The scene is slow yet violent, and the bodies of people in the audience visibly stiffened as it wore on. They remained clenched for the remainder of the play, loosening only when director Tina Alexis Allen asked everyone to take a deep breath.
Allen was on stage because of one of the notable features of Dynamo’s production: after each showing, the cast invited the audience to stick around for a “talk back” with the cast and a guest speaker, and discuss the issues the performance raised. Campbell said that the talk-back structure suits the group’s focus on social justice issues.
“We definitely want to make art — theater, film or anything — that has a conversational component. We want the audience to become part of the conversation, and at least start a dialogue with people witnessing art,” she said.
Along with the difficulties inherent in financing and putting on socially conscious theater of the kind Dynamo pursues, it also forces those involved to constantly confront the difficult question of whether things are getting any better. Hollywood is supposed to use stage and screen to reflect what is happening in the country, but even that thin layer of separation frequently vanishes as turmoil in the industry presages struggles far beyond it. The Hollywood Blacklist became the most famous example of nationwide anti-Communist hysteria, and damning stories about producer Harvey Weinstein kicked off a surge in recognizing sexual assault in politics, journalism and elsewhere. Hollywood, McWilliams wrote, is “America in flight from itself.”
For Anderson and Dynamo, the proof that they are making a difference comes in the feeling that follows a show. In the same way that an audience can sense an untrained performer, those on stage can doubtless tell real applause from courtesy claps. Putting on “Extremities” was, Anderson said, “the hardest thing [she had] ever done,” but, listening to people pour their hearts out after a show, there is no question that being responsible for a production from the ground up had been worth it.
“When it happened, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh: this is exactly what I am supposed to be doing.’”
Whitney Anderson is appearing in “Blue Surge,” which runs Nov. 9 through Dec. 8. Shows begin at 8 p.m. at the Marilyn Monroe Theater at 7936 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood.