LOS ANGELES — It’s rare to find a play about eight women — and even rarer for all of those women to be lesbians. That is why Ellen D. Williams feels like she’s a part of history.

“There's no other play like this in regards to a story about lesbian friends,” she said.

Williams knew "Last Summer at Bluefish Cove" well, even before she was cast in this production at the Fountain Theatre. The Santa Monica native has a copy of the script by Jane Chambers that she’s held onto since college, but her cast mate Noelle Messier, who plays her partner, is kind of embarrassed to say she’d never heard of this landmark piece of theater.

“And I was like, ‘How do I not know a play with this many lesbian women in it?’” she said with a laugh. “So I immediately went to the physical library and got the play out and was like, ‘I need to educate myself.’ And after I read it, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I've got to do this play.’”

This is the perfect location for a west coast remounting. The play originally ran off-Broadway in 1980 in a production starring Jean Smart, who revived the role in Los Angeles — where the groundbreaking play ran at the Fountain Theatre for two and half years. It’s an amount of time that Williams says is remarkably telling.

“There was an audience,” she explained. “People weren't seeing their story being told. So they were coming out to see it.”

Now, director Hannah Wolf thinks they will come again because, even four decades later, the piece remains relevant.

“There's an attempt right now to push queer people back to the edges of society,” Wolf said. “And this show really brings up the history of these small spaces that are safe where queer people can gather and can live a more outwardly public life.”

This work is considered a landmark in lesbian theater, something Wolf says there certainly isn’t enough of.

While watching six-plus hours of the all-male, two part play “The Inheritance” at the Geffen last year, Wolf wondered what it would look like to have a theatrical experience where lesbians take up that much space. It’s another reason why she’s thrilled to be working on this production outdoors.

“We are public, right? We were not hidden away in a dark theater that only specific people can find,” she explained. “We are really out for the neighborhood. We're out for the people around us. And we're really not hiding the show. And I really, really love the message that we're sending with that.”

Of course, outdoor theater has its challenges, especially in LA where actors have to compete with helicopters overhead and honking traffic on the ground. The Fountain’s first outdoor production in the summer of 2021 amplified the dialogue so loudly that they received complaints from the community. Last summer, they experimented with a new audio system. And this summer, they think they’ve not only solved the problem, but also elevated the experience.

Utilizing a state-of-the-art sound system, actors' voices are pumped directly to headsets worn by audience members. Those voices are mixed with sound design elements like the crashing of waves, drowning out the noise of East Hollywood and giving the production an immersive feel.

It also allows the actors more range and realism in their performance.

“It adds a little bit of intimacy,” Messier said. “You can whisper, you know? You can talk quietly… when you need to have that kind of a moment. And I think that the audience can catch all those little moments.”

That’s thanks to Andrea Allmond, the sound designer for this show. In fact, the entire cast and design team is comprised of female, non-binary and trans artists, a level of representation that Messier and Williams say needs to extend to the highest levels of theatre making.

“The people in power are not lesbians,” Messier explained. “Anytime you're trying to get a minority group more widely seen you need more writers, you need more producers, you know, that promote our stories.”

Williams agreed, adding, “If you get those people who are representing that community in those places of power, then we will start seeing those stories more.”

Wolf feels like there has been a bit of an uptick.

“I think we're starting to see a renaissance of lesbian and of queer woman plays,” she said. “So it's so great right now to go back into the history, go back into the canon and revive the show, in a way, and to introduce it to newer audiences.”

As they dive back into "Bluefish Cove," the women keep an eye on the horizon, hopeful that a new wave of plays centered on the experiences of queer women is starting to swell.