Today we’d like to introduce you to Corey Madden.
Corey, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
In 1985, I was hired by legendary producer Gordon Davidson to be the junior member of the artistic staff at the Mark Taper Forum. I arrived from Louisville, Kentucky, with 4 years of work experience, my postcard collection, and a suitcase. My first day in LA I bought a new Tercel with my life savings and drove straight to Malibu to christen myself the newest Californian. I took a sublet in a 1920s apartment in Los Feliz where Raymond Chandler lived, according to my neighbors. It was an unbearably hot summer when the Night Stalker was still prowling, and I was terrified to leave the casement windows open. Many sleepless and lonely nights that summer, I lay drenched in sweat, worrying if I had made a terrible mistake following my dream.
Over the next 7 years, I came of age in Los Angeles. Initially starstruck, I got comfortable with having drinks with formerly famous people. I got used to dating unemployed men with screenplays or novels in development. And I eventually learned that driving surface streets really is faster. I worked my way up the a male-dominated ladder in a very competitive field at a time when women really weren’t considered more than assistants and girlfriends.
Seven years later, I produced a play that opened on Broadway, became the first woman Associate Artistic Director, and had my first son. It was A LOT, and looking back at that young woman, I want to advise her, “Slow down; what are you trying to prove?” But true to the first generation of white women who had the privilege to carve out their own careers, I spent next 15 years working overtime while having another child, weathering a recession and my husband’s tanking writing career teaching adjunct to make money for childcare, and careening towards a midlife crisis.
After 14 years, my marriage ended, so I began to spend half a week all by myself. I was left alone to contemplate how I might live the second half of my life with more grace and wisdom. I conducted a completely unscientific study of my happily married friends and determined that attraction and admiration were the two biggest factors contributing to their happiness. I spent many more hours walking, writing, reading, reflecting, and chatting with therapists and girlfriends, slowly coming to understand what I really wanted in my life. I wanted to fall deeply in love, and don’t ask me how I boiled it down to three word, but I clearly understood that I wanted to meet a European, Artist, Scientist. Who was also HOT.
This was a laughable yet somehow very helpful mantra for me. Fed up with the jerks and Lotharios I met through dating apps, I decided to simply visit cafes in my east side neighborhood, where I chatted with strangers, some of whom eventually became friends. Miraculously, my world opened up, and my mood improved. One day, I met an Italian physicist who loved opera. Sadly, he also had serious mother issues, but I began to understand what it meant to let the future unfold.
Fate intervened in 2004 when I was run over by an 87-year-old man in a Delta 88 while waiting at curbside baggage at Newark Airport. My spine was shattered, my liver lacerated, my wrist fractured, and my teeth shattered, but I was so grateful to be alive that I had a strangely positive experience going through surgery and rehabilitation over the next few weeks. Meditation, morphine, and my family and friends helped enormously, and I came back to LA to recover for the next six months.
After nearly dying, I now understood that I had to be grateful for the life I had, and it was immaterial whether I met the great love of my life or not. To test this theory, I decided to go on a sailing adventure with my children in Maine to celebrate my 44 birthday. While there, I played with the idea of renovating an old house in Maine with money from the accident settlement. I came back from the trip tanned and confident and strode into my local coffee house on a Saturday morning at 7 am, having just that morning decided, “I am going to buy a house in Maine, and I am done looking for a man.”
Except for the baristas, there was only one other soul in the place. I ordered my coffee, and as I turned to go, I saw him intently working on his Macintosh, dressed in sweats, his salt and pepper hair tousled. Should I bother, I wondered? What the heck. I sat down next to him and sipped my coffee quietly while glancing at his computer. There, I saw he was writing classical music, a quartet for strings. With just a glimmer of hope in my heart, I turned to him and said, “Thank you for writing a string quartet at 7 am in the morning at SWORK (the cafe).”
There’s a long, long story after this beautiful moment of our unfolding destinies but suffice to say that Bruno Louchouarn was a French-Mexican, cognitive scientists and composer–and we had a first kiss ten days later at Cafe Figaro, and got engaged in Brittany, France that Christmas. We were married the next Fall on a rooftop facing the City Hall dome in Pasadena and lived for many years happily ever after.
Today, six years after his untimely passing from cancer, I live in Monterey, California in the guest house of historic mansion. I am the Executive Director of the Monterey Museum of Art, which focuses on California Art –past, present, and future. I am single again but have two married sons, two smart and amazing daughters-in-law, and three adorable grandchildren. All wonderful gifts I could never have imagined happening to the young woman who came to LA with a box full of postcards her suitcase, and a dream.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Like so many women of my generation who worked in creative fields,
The sexist perspectives of my male colleagues impacted all the women who worked with them. Many of my supervisors had serial affairs with women they worked with, and this tainted how they saw women who didn’t want to sleep with them but rather were competing with them. Despite being under-estimated and negatively perceived as “too ambitious,” my track record demonstrated I had the vision and skill to be the Associate Artistic Director.
Coincidentally, I became a new mother, an event that challenged a long-standing myth about women in the workplace. In the fall of 1991 when I told my boss I was pregnant, he was incredulous that I planned to return to work full-time after having a child. I pointed out that he had worked while raising two children, so why couldn’t
In fact, I produced and transferred Jelly’s Last Jam to Broadway while pregnant and nursing.
Despite sexism, the narrative about what women, whether mothers or not, could achieve at work was rewritten in my generation. Seventeen women also had children and returned to work at the Taper after I did. Our solidarity proved to be a meaningful catalyst for change, and the resulting policies and practices are still impacting women, today.
It has never been easy, but nonetheless, we persisted.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I worked as a creative producer in theatre at the Mark Taper Forum/Center Theatre Group for 2o years at a time when we produced a remarkable string of plays that went to Broadway, won Pulitzers, and defined our generation. Angels in America by Tony Kushner, Jelly’s Last Jam by George C. Wolfe, Kentucky Cycle by Robert Schnnekkan, and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith were all plays I developed and produced. In total, I worked on more than 200 plays while I was at the Taper, and I treasure the collaborations and friendships that I made while lucky enough to be gainfully employed as a creative.
I also spent about 20 years directing plays and other live performance. Took a couple plays to New York and also around regional theaters and even internationally, but having a full-time job was always a necessity for me, so the freelance life was not in the cards.
I write almost daily but admit to some ambivalence about flogging anything to publishers. I spent 6 years running my own production company and self-producing very off-beat projects that I wrote and directed while getting a grad degree in creative writing. My thesis was a television show called Foggy Bottom. It is a really great spy show set in the 60s, but I could not pitch. Currently, I am satisfied writing poems and a book-length journal/memoir in the making. Most recently, my audio play and poetic” memoir “Numbered Days” was produced by the Fountain Theatre deep in the middle of the pandemic. About 250 people have read it.
An offshoot of my career in theatre is my work with museums. When I lived full-time in LA, I did a lot of consulting with LA’s art museums, including MOCA, LACMA, and the Getty, where I helped develop their ancient theatre programs at the Getty Villa. Now I lead and creatively direct the Monterey Museum of Art whose mission is to celebrate the diversity of California Art. I consider myself something of a renegade in museum world, but my career in theatre has proved to be helpful re-envisioning museum programming to attract audiences back in the post-pandemic world.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
Oh, my goodness.
Museums are here to stay, and I don’t see the model changing much.
TV/Media will go through titanic changes due to technology.
Theatre is going to die back… but I don’t think it’s going away. The bigs will get bigger, and the innovators will find new ways to create…
Contact Info:
Image Credits
Numbered Days
