“Every Ojai play has a single plot,” Cain said. “Did you think we were going to let you get away so easily?” Cain seated Egan in a chair and called the remaining artists and staff from their seats to gather down front for an impromptu homage. Down the aisle strode Cain, demonstrating surprising vocal power for so slender a man.
Not so fast: “Stay right where you are!” boomed a voice from the back. (OPC, which was founded in 1998, a few years before Egan came on board, celebrated 25 years this summer.) With a few last upbeat words, he waved a jaunty goodbye and made to bound out of the spotlight to let Cain’s play begin. “Look, my mantra is that change is good, transition is good,” Egan reassured the audience, made up of OPC board members and patrons, writers, directors, dramaturgs, stage managers, staff, and interns, assorted theatre enthusiasts-many of them noticeably long-faced even behind their KN95s.Įgan’s successor has yet to be announced, but he expressed confidence in his staff and supporters to sustain the organization he is credited with shaping and putting on the map. He had announced his decision to step down in March. and Cain had a hit there with Stand-Up Tragedy.Įgan then alluded, a bit hesitantly, to another milestone: This would be his last introduction as OPC’s artistic director/producer, a role he’s held since 2002. Their relationship began in the late 1980s, when Egan was the producing artistic director at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A. Promising to keep his remarks brief, because “it’s a two-act play,” Egan reminisced about the start of his long collaboration with Cain, who went on to be “the most produced playwright” at the Ojai conference.
14, Robert Egan stood up at the front of an auditorium in Ojai, Calif., to introduce the final event of the 2022 Ojai Playwright’s Conference’s (OPC) New Works Festival, a staged reading of Bill Cain’s play-in-progress, God’s Spies.
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