'Selected Shorts' at the Getty, starring Tim Curry

On Saturday, Tim Curry captivated the sold-out crowd at the Getty as he read Stephen O'Connor's story "Ziggurat." It was part of the three-program "Selected Shorts" series at the Getty, run by New York's Symphony Space. Selected Shorts pairs actors with short fiction for readings that are funny, strange, sad and, at the Getty, well attended.

This was the 19th year of "Selected Shorts" at the Getty, and the $30 tickets included a wine and food pairing after the readings, which were loosely grouped under the umbrella "Delicious Fictions." Each of the three programs featured different stories and actors, including regular readers Leonard Nimoy and Christina Pickles and first-timer Tim Curry. New to the program, that is, not new to the stage -- he's been nominated for three Tony Awards, most recently for playing King Arthur in "Monty Python's Spamalot."

An actor of Curry's caliber can take a story like O'Connor's -- a long fairy tale with a terrifying Minotaur and a video game-playing ingenue he calls New Girl -- and give it a shape an author's reading rarely can. With most of the reading inflected by Curry's British accent, his switch to flat affect for the New Girl, a spacey Rolling Rock-drinking American with a propensity for saying "Wow," often drew laughs. The fit of the story into the program, which mostly consisted of the Minotaur's habit of eating humans and an occasional dog -- went from grotesque to exquisite, with Curry rumbling, "mmm, mmmm, tasty." 

"Selected Shorts" founder Isaiah Sheffer read T.C. Boyle's "Rapture of the Deep," a funny story of Jacques Cousteau's chef driven to mutiny by having to serve fish one too many times. Before the reading, Boyle, who was in the audience with his wife, wondered how Sheffer would fare with the French accents -- très bon, as it turns out: Sheffer can do a very good Costeau impression.

The day opened with "Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote," a funny short short by Juan Martinez, a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The story is narrated by the Karaoke Don Quixote host, who admits he has a "bad accent on purpose," which actor Nate Corddry ("Harry's Law") interpreted as an impossible combination of Russian and Spanish. "It was fantastic," Martinez said after the reading. "It was exactly what I expected."

That all three authors attended the Saturday reading was unusual for "Selected Shorts." The other programs, on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, included stories by Dorothy Parker, John Cheever and Raymond Carver, authors who are no longer able to enjoy food, drink and the pleasures of hearing their works read by actors. But their delicious fictions live on.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Stephen O'Connor and Tim Curry. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Grace M. Lenihan]

Wish you would have waited to include review of Leonard's Nimoy reading on Sunday.

[Constanza Martinez]

Would it be possible to get the readings of the selected stories from this event?

[Geraldine Clarke]

KQED-FM, the San Francisco NPR station, broadcasts "Selected Shorts". Not sure how much of a delay there is as what was aired yesterday was not this program.

[Jolie]

According to Jennifer Brennan, the production coordinator for Symphony Space in NYC, the home base for the Selected Shorts program, the majority of the stories recorded at the Getty performances will be broadcast on the radio. Generally, it takes 3 – 12 months for a story to air.

According to the website belonging to author Stephen O'Connor, who wrote Ziggurat, the short story that Tim Curry read Saturday, the program will be broadcast three times during the Selected Shorts 2011-2012 season.

Once it is broadcast, a podcast will be available to listen to at NPR dot org.

I expect that Selected Shorts will include some, if not all, of these Getty readings in a future CD compilation, as they do for so many of their programs. Previous collections on CD or MP3 download are available for sale on the Symphony Space website estore.

[Carolyn]

Grace, it wouldn't have been fair for me to attend all three! The idea was to go to the first of the Selected Shorts program and provide a writeup before the last. Admittedly, this was an imperfect idea, because the final event was sold out weeks in advance. If you ever get a chance to attend, the Selected Shorts and the Getty programs are highly recommended.

[Amy Wallen]

Wish I could have been there. It sounds like a stupendous evening. Thanks for the great reliving of it for us, Carolyn. You've certainly made me aware of something going on in LA that I thought was only available in NYC.