Ishika Muchhal and Paula Rebelo float on air, in Theatre Movement Bazaar’s “Tiny Little Town” (Photo by Doug Haverty)

Another Year in Paradise

L.A. Theater in 2024, and What it Portends for 2025

Change is upon us. In 2024, two veteran artistic directors, Stephen Sachs and John Flynn, retired from their decades-held posts at the Fountain Theatre and Rogue Machine, respectively. What this means for those theaters I don’t know. Institutions are like people: Sometimes they endure, sometimes they crumble. Sometimes they endure like gods, for decades, and then crumble when we least expect it, sort of like nations. Here’s a New Year wish: that these two men enjoy carving out their new life chapters, and that their theaters thrive under new leadership, continuing and supplementing their legacies.

We have a cluster of veteran leaders who still create theater with dogged perseverance in the face of blistering headwinds. A sampling, in no particular order: Marilyn Fox at Pacific Resident Theatre, Chris Fields at Echo Theater Company, Ben Guillory at Robey Theatre Company, Maria Gobetti at Victory Theatre Center, Jon Lawrence Rivera at Playwrights’ Arena, Martha Demson at Open Fist Theatre Company, Tim Robbins at The Actors’ Gang, Jay McAdams and Debbie Devine at 24th Street Theatre, Tina Kronis and Richard Alger at Theatre Movement Bazaar, Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe at City Garage, Mark Seldis and Katharine Noon at Ghost Road Company, Ellen Geer and Willow Geer at Theatricum Botanicum (the duo a replacement for the theater’s founder, Will Geer), Taylor Gilbert and Sam Anderson at Road Theatre Company, Gary Grossman at Skylight Theatre Company, Allen Barton at Beverly Hills Playhouse, Sebastian Muñoz at Force of Nature Productions, Doug Haverty at Group Repertory Theatre (himself a replacement for that theater’s founder, Lonny Chapman),  Evelyn Rudie and Chris DeCarlo at Santa Monica Playhouse, Stefanie Black at IAMA Theatre Company, and so on.

(Theatre West, producing theater here since 1962, and Theatre of NOTE since 1981, routinely change leadership as part of their cooperative structures, meaning that a theater’s endurance need not be tied to a single leader.)

 

Shadows on the Cave Wall

 

In reviewing the past year and prognosticating about the future, I will confess that I’ve grown to understand very little about much of anything, even about the way theater works, which is ostensibly my specialty. This is perhaps an incriminating confession for a drama critic. The only thing I still approach with any certainty is horticulture — about what’s needed to grow a tree from seed. That hasn’t changed much.

This is different from when I was in my 20s and understood everything, and with certainty. Understanding everything, and with certainty, is not the same as being particularly clever or wise. Plato got it right: All we can see are shadows on that cave wall. As the decades have rolled by, I’ve felt that certainty being chipped away, like paint falling off an old fence, almost imperceptibly.  Once it was so bold, and clear. But now? And yet, that fence still does its job with a kind of tattered, rustic grandeur. Until it doesn’t and needs repair. Or not.

One of the few guiding lights I’ve followed for half a century is that theater is connected to the world we live in, even when it’s trying with all its might to evade that world, to distract us from its painfully obvious tyrannies and hypocrisies, as in our countless, diverting, campy productions based on movies from the 1950s, or the 1970s, or the 1990s. Reefer Madness is everywhere There are two theatrical impulses: to confront and to distract. These are seemingly opposed, but not really, because they’re both reacting to what’s all around us.

 

Observance and Endurance

Here’s what I’ve observed over years of, well, observance.

It takes a hammer to crack open a peach pit. The shell seems impenetrable, but it’s not. With just the right balance of force, of will, of care and of dexterity, the wall will crack and reveal within the seed of the future.  The trick is not to harm that seed by using too much force. I suppose the same could be said of politics, and of the theater.

In order to germinate, the peach seed needs a winter chill. Either it’s planted in the ground, or a pot outside where the winters are cold. Or it can be wrapped in a moist paper towel, protected within a sandwich bag, and placed in a refrigerator.

Months will go by when nothing happens. This is just like in the theater, or any institution, when you’re trying to build something. After three or four months of dormancy, if kept moist but not too moist (leading to rot), that seed will have sprouted a taproot if you’re lucky. And luck is certainly a factor in this delicate balance.

After the taprooted seed is placed in a mixture of potting soil in a comparatively warm place, a spray of green leaves follows shortly thereafter. So much of this is about climate. Cold followed by warmth. Just like the theater. Warmth is vital to that sense of belonging, for a theater company and the rapport with its audience.

Growing a peach tree, or orchard, need not be expensive. It costs some time, some skill, some luck, and patience. The same could also be said of the theater, under the right conditions.

What follows is a skeleton, a shape-shifting twig, and in the summer, a leafy skeleton, that grows. And grows. After some four or five years of watching this intriguing but unassuming evolution, the otherwise bare frame sports a handful of tender pink blossoms, like in a Japanese painting. Having seen nothing but green and wood heretofore, this development is thrilling. The following spring, entire boughs will be saturated in pink, followed by summer buckets of the sweetest peaches you’ll ever taste.

Not that there aren’t impediments: A disease such as peach leaf curl (that could kill the tree) has to be treated annually with fungicide. Gofers, groundhogs, and squirrels are often eager for bites of the wood and, in worst case scenarios, the roots. That’s a bit like what happened to our theater from about 2012 through the Covid pandemic.

Endurance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Offensive Line

 

Another observation, for what it’s worth: When I was young, among the unspoken edicts for the many purposes of theater (to entertain, to educate, to enlighten) was the necessity of theater to provoke, to offend.

Gordon Davidson opened the Mark Taper Forum with a production of John Whiting’s The Devils in 1967 — a production that emptied two-thirds of the audience by curtain call, including Governor Ronald Reagan, and his wife Nancy, Mayor Sam Yorty, and a swath of Hollywood’s elite movers and shakers. This was because Whiting’s play shot missiles at a libertine priest in the Catholic Church, a latter-day Tartuffe. Davidson’s board of directors, headed by Dorothy Chandler and movie mogul Lew Wasserman, stood by their young, new leader because, among its many purposes, theater was also supposed to offend. Two years prior, in 1965, Zelda Fichandler had taken that risk by staging The Devils at her Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. That’s part of what our fledgling regional theaters were for.

In the span of 60 years, there’s been a climate change that’s removed those risks from what I’m seeing in local theater and reading about in national theater. What I saw in 2024 in venues large and small was a theater almost bereft of offensiveness, a timidity stemming from obvious financial imperatives and leading to a kind of capitulation along our theater’s long road to irrelevance.

In November alone, five of our institutional theaters presented Waiting for Godot (Geffen Playhouse), La Cage aux Folles (Pasadena Playhouse), Green Day’s American Idiot (Mark Taper Forum), Pacific Overtures (East West Players), The Piano Lesson (A Noise Within)— an entire month of productions seeped in nostalgia for the prior century, born of that century, teasing out some social themes that might have pertained to that century but at a distance from our own, and studiously avoiding the kind of offense that was part and parcel of when those plays were created.

I’m probably an outlier, but sometimes I want to be offended in the theater. That feeling of indignation gives me something to mull over, and to question why I’m so offended. I’m guessing, but far from certain, that’s how one grows. By grappling with opposition, rather than merely deflecting it, we spread our branches. Whereas, by demonizing our opponents, by adhering only to the edicts of our own tribe, we cement the walls that confine branches and roots. This is not just terrible for us — it’s also terrible for the larger world with which we seek some kind of harmony.

This sentiment defies the past half century of a now established cultural tenet: that words are not so much tools of expression and defiance and liberation, but that their sharper edges must be sanded down and rounded off, in order to protect groups from harm. Be careful what you say.

I’m with Albany, at the close of King Lear: “The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

Los Angeles, 2024, Ten Best

 

I’ll address what I’ll call the best productions of the year, not necessarily because they were successful (some were, some weren’t), but because they stuck like gorilla glue. I credit ambition more than polish, friction more than adherence to established norms. I don’t go to the theater to have the values that I already hold affirmed. I go to the theater, either because I want a rollicking, meaningless good time, or I want my values challenged.

Let’s start with a pair of farces: Tiny Little Town (Theatre Movement Bazaar at The Broadwater), and The Planet Earth Farewell Concert, Jonas Oppenheim’s Hollywood Fringe production, also at The Broadwater.      

Tina Kronis and Richard Alger’s musical, Tiny Little Town, was based on, and clung to, Nikolai Gogol’s comedy, The Inspector General. Set at a remove from just about everything (1975 in small town USA), the company of 12 squeezed the ’70s through a commedia funnel with Ellen McCartney’s whacked-out costumes, a beehive ‘do in which you could smell the honey, abundant songs (original music by Wes Meyers, all rhythm, scant melody) and batshit crazy choreography by Konis. Stylishly and gleefully absurd, it appeared at first to be a sojourn through a pointless landscape of corruption and the paranoia of being found out. The voices were meh, the movement sharp and sublime. Then director Kronis pulled a one-two punch, a tonal gravity, pointing to the gullibility of a population so willing to accept corruption as a path to their own security.  Welcome to an America that we’re starting to see laid bare.

In The Planet Earth Farewell Concert, writer-director Oppenheim used a similarly jocular cabaret style to parody the farewell pop-singing tour of a diva, Planet Earth, before going all interactive, dragging the entire audience onto the stage and offering to return them to seats based on their stated income. As satire, that’s pretty sharp. I got annoyed at the group-think lecture — that we should vote moderate Dems out of office and make AOC president. But that’s because I’m a crank and don’t like to be told what to do, or how to think. I guess when the world is on fire, that makes me part of the problem, which may well be Oppenheim’s point. I mean, to be self-critical, if a fast-moving brush fire is roaring towards your suburb, maybe it’s a good idea to do what the local sheriff says. Laying crankiness aside, I find Oppenheim’s passion and theatrical imagination invaluable. Years ago, he created a site-specific, interactive comedy on authoritarianism, I’m Going to Kill the President! in which a squad of LAPD officers (great costumes) raided the venue after the audience had been goaded to chant the play’s incriminating title in unison. These are moments one doesn’t forget easily. When so much of theater drifts into the fog of amnesia, it’s evident that Oppenheim’s work is too potent to be forgotten.

Nora, Nora everywhere. First, Nora at Anteaus Company (Ingmar Bergman’s redux version of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 feminist anthem play, A Doll’s House). And then A Doll’s House at Beverly Hills Playhouse, in rep with Lucas Hnath’s 2017 A Doll’s House, Part 2. So, in praise of older women, that would be Ibsen’s centerpiece, Nora Torvald, here are two actors interpreting her in memorable performances.

At Antaeus, Jocelyn Towne was twitchy, like no Nora I’ve seen, a lobster in a pot of water being heated, temperature rising. At first she  doesn’t even know, and as she realizes her doom, she internalizes, soft-spoken at a horror that she muffles. No emoting, no shrieking, just feeling each moment, softly, with a growing desperation that, weirdly, doesn’t just invite empathy but commands it. Cameron Watson directed that performance.

I didn’t catch A Doll’s House at Beverly Hills Playhouse, but it did make it out to see A Doll’s House Part 2, which imagines Nora returning, years after she walked out on her husband and kids. She returns as a successful author of books about the barbed wire of marriage, and of the steps women should take for their own autonomy. But, because of the ways the laws are structured in 19th century Norway, she needs her husband to grant her the divorce that he said he would do, but didn’t. Hnath’s play is quite powerful and empathetic to all parties still seething with resentment.

Mia Christou’s Nora couldn’t be more different from Towne’s. Whereas Towne was diminutive and as fluttery as a sparrow staring down a cat, Christou was statuesque, regal, with a rich, almost baritone voice that she used entirely for theatrical effect. This was a strategically performative performance, bordering on a kind of parody of the Queen of Hearts, a parody that Christou knew she was approaching and seemed to relish. Hers was an almost sadistic Nora, as though she’s an ill-tempered if emotionally muted Hollywood agent who needs a signature from her ex, and is working very hard to contain her contempt for him, and her glee for arriving at her new station. As for her daughter, who grew to despise her in her absence, I sensed that Nora didn’t give a hoot. It would have been so delicious to loath Nora, except that the points she expressed with such an earnest yet world-weary condescension, were so cogent. She was directed by Allen Barton.

Another performance nod, a Hollywood Fringe show at The Broadwater, Delusions and Grandeur featuring writer-performer-cellist Karen Hall about life as a cellist, and a cello teacher, trying to scrape out a living as a performer in clubs where the men are there to see your legs, and the music is just an add-on.

Hall was wolfing down a Subway sandwich at the top of her show, as an indicator of her frenetic life. I recall specs of moist bread spewing from her mouth, before she opened up her cello case, wrapped herself around the instrument, and launched into a Bach Prelude for solo cello, the first of several Baroque selections.  I don’t know if this is a review of Hall, or of Bach, but that dingy, dank theater with chipped black paint on the walls transformed into a cathedral;  and Hall’s performance, into the distant  cousin of an oratorio. Yes, Bach deserves some credit, but it was Hall striking those notes, interpreting them, and telling those funny, poignant stories. At this point, Bach doesn’t need the recognition, and Hall so earned it.

 

 

Final performance nod: Taylor Gilbert in Shem Bitterman’s Civil Twilight, also at The Broadwater. (It continues there through January 22.) Like Tiny Little Town, this is also a play about gullibility. Gilbert’s character, Ann Carlson, becomes infatuated with the celebrity of an AM radio host (Andrew Elvis Miller). Circumstances have compelled them to spend one dark and stormy night in a shared, dingy Midwest motel room. The radio star has done some truly terrible things, and we watch how Ann rationalizes each and every one of them. Political allegory aside, Gilbert’s performance revealed a spellbinding authenticity: earthy, coy, angry and masochistic, tolerating his verbal abuses first with pouting and then with fury and then with defiant loyalty. It was ultimately pathetic (and not as in pathos), with a multi-tiered emotional range that felt blazingly true. Ann Hearn Tobolowsky directed

Production design of Waiting for Godot at the Geffen Playhouse: Director Judy Hegarty Lovett sat at the top of this chain of command and deserves credit for a production of Samuel Beckett’s masterwork that was unafraid to take its time, in a play that already takes its time going nowhere. She slowed down whiplash repartee, invoking a Robert Wilson approach (though not so extreme) that time is not an aspect we control with our iPhones and calendar alerts; rather it engulfs us, seduces us, and ultimate consumes us. That’s the kind of conceptual and stylistic bravery one hopes for when seeing a classic interpreted.  Augmenting this effect is Kaye Voyce’s set (unquestionably a Beckettian landscape, but in hues of black and white) in tandem with Simon Bennison’s gentle, austere lighting. The moon slowly emerged like a headlight shrouded in haze. Slowly. As dusk actually falls. And not in a Hallmark postcard. All of this, combined, gave Beckett’s abstractions a hue of authenticity, as though we were in their world, and they in ours.

Much has already been written about Tom Jacobson’s play, Crevasse (directed by Matthew McCray), at the Victory Theatre Center. In combination with Jacobson’s The Bauhaus Project (two plays in three sections, staged by Martha Demson) simultaneously performing at Open Fist Theatre Company, Jacobson grapples with the origins of fascism in a hitherto open society. All three plays are fascinating, though The Bauhaus Project is unruly, structured around students on probation at a quasi-Cal Arts having to research and perform a play about the end of the Weimar Republic in order to avoid expulsion (an experience that fails to transform them in any meaningful way). Crevasse, however, hit home.

Leo Marks and Ann Noble undertake multiple roles, but the main characters they portray are Walt Disney and Nazi film-maker/propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. (In a decidedly anti-Nazi Hollywood, Disney was the only producer who would meet with her.) The presentation (a co-production of the Victory Theatre Center and Son of Semele Ensemble) kept dancing around the question of who was the actual Nazi in the room. One of Stage Raw’s teenage youth journalists noted that the play forced her to confront how her own gender diminishment had been programmed through her engagement with Disney cartoons. A kind of propaganda. That never occurred to her before seeing Jacobson’s play. Now that’s theater doing its job.

The 24th Street Theater was filled with kids, absorbed in watching Pascal and Julien, Australian playwright Daniel Keene’s linear two-hander about a child and a man, initially strangers, who form a bond, born of mutual loneliness, that escalates through a series of scenes (meetings) into a dance of role reversal. It was another in this theater’s dedication to grown-up youth theater and featured Paul Turbiak as the man, and Darby Winn as the child sharing the role with Jude Schwartz. Debbie Devine directed. If we really want a new generation of theater goers, this is one way to do it.

Had a splendid time with Jazmine Nichelle’s raw, potent staging of Michelle Tyrne Johnson’s family/ancestry play, The Green Book Wine Club Train Trip, at Loft Ensemble. It was a mostly gentle and times sentimental rendering of a young woman literally stumbling into her past. Its rawness lay in its lack of polish, which felt just right for this story.

A quintet of Black women is on a train trip in 2018. They belong to a book club. They drink wine. A lot. And it seems quite static until the central character, Marie (Brieyonna Monét) wanders into a local burg during a layover to find herself in a Jim Crow town in 1946, wondering how on Earth she’s going to bet back to the train, and back to her era. Furthermore, she’s guided into a brothel that serves (and services) Black men, all with the acquiescence of the local sheriff, presumably White, who believes in a “separate but equal” approach to Black and White businesses.

 

The feminism in a 1946 brothel, as depicted by Johnson, is really not so different from that of today, nor from that of Nora Torvald in A Doll’s House, Part 2. This play, however, did involve an incident of sexual assault, absent from the work of Henrik Ibsen, who trafficked instead in sexual bribery. A bit like Waiting for Godot, there was the sense that the more things stay the same, the more they stay the same. As though we’re all just caught in time loops, wherein we play out the same repetitive rites.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

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At different holiday parties, the same polemics unfurled: We’re losing our country versus our institutions are strong enough to withstand the threatened assault upon them. Underscoring the earlier anthem that I understand less and less as time goes on, I have yet to understand the argument in the strength of our institutions, with a Supreme Court, appointed through a blatant and hypocritical abnegation of Constitutional norms, i.e. the Senate not considering Obama’s nominees due to a timeline issue of a pending election months away, yet rushing through Trump’s nominees with an election mere weeks away. In addition to that same Court now granting unprecedented blanket immunity for crimes committed by the president, that same Court appears now to have engaged in corruption/conflict-of-interest that would be disqualifying in the lower courts, yet has no compulsion or intention to do anything about it. I fail to understand how our institutions are holding firm when a violent group of insurrectionists get off scot-free after storming the U.S. Capitol, killing police, and trying to stop Congress from certifying a valid election. I fail to see how our institutions are holding when next year’s proposed FBI will be an arm of the Executive Branch of government. I fail to see how our institutions are holding firm when books, recently considered world classics, are banned in public schools and libraries. I fail to see how our institutions are holding when the Bible and its edicts, become a mandated part of public schoolrooms. Perhaps I’m too old to understand such things, because I remember when such things were unacceptable. It does feel like we’re currently living through a scene in a Tom Jacobson play, trying to fathom the origins of fascism and the creeping capitulation to its rise.

The question, as we lurch into 2025, as we enter our own Jacobean revenge melodrama, is how our theaters, local and national, will respond. Will yet another revival of Sweeney Todd suffice, for its metaphoric, cutthroat resonances? Will that be the best we can do, if, at long last, they finally succeed in gutting the NEA, when our theaters are already wheezing on a razor’s edge?

Will our youth rise to the occasion, as they did in other countries in turmoil, in standup comedy clubs, and cafes, and bars. We may not be losing our country, not literally, but it certainly feels like it with the upending of foundational institutions, from the justice system, to education, to health care, to the economy, to our international alliances, to the protection of the environment.

Will our theater be just another play thing, a diversion? Or will it take the risk of offending? Like Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel, who was jailed for what his plays had to say; then his jailers’ power imploded, and Havel walked out of prison to be elected his country’s president, because of what his plays had to say.