I’m
David L. Coddon,
and here’s your guide to all things essential in San Diego’s arts and culture this week.
If you need a lift during these troubled times, take four and a half minutes out of your day and experience San Diego IndieFest founder
Danielle LoPresti’s
video performance of “22 Mountains.” The re-recording of the title track from a 2003 album by LoPresti and her band, The Masses, is a passionate exhortation of hope and courage, slightly reworded from the original composition by LoPresti and Matthew Stewart. The message to parents, to teachers, to artists, to activists, to visionaries is clear: Don’t give up.
Sam Woodhouse is the Artistic Director of San Diego Repertory Theatre.
In the late spring of 2020, the perfect storm hit our country and the San Diego REP family: an unpredictable and deadly pandemic; a ferocious call for racial equity and justice on the streets of America; and a lockdown that led to the loss of 80 percent of our ticket income.
This trio of reckonings threatened our ability to make the art that defines us.
We faced a choice: We could stop producing art, lay off our artists and staff, become silent, and wait
; or we could respond to the storm by leaning into the fierce winds, produce theater and address the calls for social justice.
Twice in the past 10 years, Steven Lone has come to a crossroads in his life where he had to make a choice between pursuing acting wherever it might take him or finding a way to balance that passion with the rewards of a non-artistic personal life.
The 39-year-old Mission Valley actor has no regrets about the paths he chose each time. When he couldn’t find full-time work with an Actor’s Equity contract in San Diego, he gave up his Equity card to stay in town and work a full-time tech job to support his acting pursuits. And after he and his wife, Laura Lone, started a family their daughter Sofia is 4, son Oliver is 2 they agreed he would only do a couple of shows each year so he could share equally in the work of parenting.