“Part and parcel of running a theater in Los Angeles is waking up two to four times a year and not knowing if you’re going to be in business the next week,” John Perrin Flynn reflected after announcing his retirement as producing artistic director of Rogue Machine Theatre. Speaking at a desk on the set of “A Good Guy,” a new play by David Rambo that marks Flynn’s last directorial project in his current leadership role at the theater, he was addressing the state of the field, widely seen to be in a state of crisis since the pandemic. Despite that struggle, the company he co-founded in 2008 is one of the few in town that has been flourishing artistically since venues reopened.
Financially, Rogue Machine continues to operate by the skin of its teeth, but the cavalry has come in the form of a game-changing grant from the Perenchio Foundation and an anonymous philanthropic gift that will further shore up institutional stability . The theater isn’t out of the woods — theater is never out of the woods in Los Angeles — but it has been given an opportunity to build on its growing reputation and consolidate its gains. So why then has Flynn decided to leave at the end of this season, his 16th? First and foremost, he knows the company is in excellent hands with artistic director Guillermo Cienfuegos, a prodigiously gifted director who has been part of the theater’s leadership team since 2018 and has been officially named Flynn’s successor.
( Cienfuegos is the pseudo.