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But that is not really what the Committee for the Jubilee is about. According to its announcement on the Howlround website, the idea is simply to obtain pledges from theater companies around the country that during the 2020-21 theatrical season, they will produce only works by “women, people of color, artists of various physical and cognitive abilities, and LBGTQA artists.” All other writers might as well take the year off, apparently. --BY PAUL BIRCHALL

For our local theater scene, the huge event of the week was the release late Saturday evening of the legal brief filed with the US District Court by the Pro99-Seat Union Plaintiffs against their own Union, Actor’s Equity Association.

However, to his credit, Solomon certainly never lied about himself or the Pro-99 issue: He mostly said, and quite reasonably really, that he would need to study the issue a lot more before coming down on one side or another – and, that, at least, isn’t a flat out fib to win votes. And, frankly, any one of these folks who is actually willing to reach out to the voters in LA and listen to the issues here is vastly preferable to the armchair pontificators across the rest of the country, who have no sense of the scene here. --BY PAUL BIRCHALL

Discussing this in a symposium is like holding a conference on how to rebuild a country that’s in the middle of an ongoing war: It is almost impossible to reinvent before the war is over. Perhaps we will see where this all falls out when we’re on the other side of all this upheaval. --BY PAUL BIRCHALL

The Wallis Annenberg, which certainly must be pleased about the success of Deaf West Theater’s Spring Awakening, as it played there a few months ago in its intermediate phase from 99seat stage to mid-size, has named its first artistic director and his resume sounds really intriguing. American Theatre Magazine reports that the new AD, Paul Crewes, has been the artistic and creative director of Kneehigh Productions in the UK, which produces compelling and imaginative touring productions, some of which have played the Wallis in previous seasons.

Brian Kite, producing artistic director of La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, is stepping down to take over the Department Chair at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Still quite a young artist, Kite has already had an illustrious career, with credits from the Actors Co-op to the French Woods Festival in New York (where he served as director of theater programs for more than seven years) to the Geffen, and he has certainly had played a strong leadership role at La Mirada – not to mention is position of board chair at Los Angeles Stage Alliance.

Odets’s play is a bit of a standard amongst theater folks of a vintage lefty sensibility — and there have been many productions of it between these two Odyssey stagings — but given the current economic iniquities, as well as the sentimental reasons for honoring a theater company that has been able to make a go of it for so many decades, this should be a show well worth coming out for.

Dakin Matthews, an Equity actor of indisputable professional renown and whose career spans both Equity productions like The Audience on Broadway and 99-seat shows with The Antaeus Company, is perhaps the first union member to step up and take a pin to the bloated shallowness of the “ask if it’s Equity” campaign. In a letter posted to the Pro99 Facebook page, and already widely circulated through the net, Matthews interprets the “Ask if it’s Equity” campaign as the cynical catch-up PR operation it is.

This period of quiet is, in fact, an AEA tactic: Even the most casual observer instantly recognizes that the Union is hoping to run out the clock for when their new minimum wage policy starts next year, and it is to their advantage to just stay quiet, do nothing, and wait for their new regulations to take place