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Round-up of the Week’s Events

Jubiliee Year, AEA’s response to suit, French & Vanessa host the Ovations, and more . . .

By Paul Birchall

Howlround’s Jubilee Year

Howlround, the indispensable national sounding board for theatrical philosophy and policy, has announced the formation of something slightly creepy called “The Committee of the Jubilee.”

The concept refers to a committee of various small and midsize theaters throughout the country, all joining together to promote diversity. This in itself is a tremendous idea – the future of our theaters will live and die on the diversity of the audiences that we can bring in. And the shows we put on should resemble the audiences we serve. And people should see people like themselves reflected on the stage. It’s a matter of simple common sense and, really, of customer service more than aesthetics. Theater needs to reflect the needs and desires of the people it’s trying to reach or, otherwise, what’s the point? No lasting art will be created and no shekels will change hands.

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 — the white males who have admittedly dominated the national scene for decades —  might as well take the year off, apparently.  

The roster of companies participating in the Jubilee year include Victory Gardens and The Gift theater companies in Chicago and, locally,  Artists at Play and the Evolve Theatre in the Los Angeles area.

First, to be clear, color-blind consideration of material in any format anywhere, not just in a theatrical situation, is a virtue for any number of reasons. This Jubilee just ain’t color-blind.

I think that it’s tremendous for distinctive theater companies to develop materials for their particular audience. We have all seen the wonderful work done by Deaf-West, East-West, Women’s Shakespeare, and Towne Street Players, to name a just a few. There’s truth to the Howlround statement when the Jubilee proposers note that “[Many companies’] theatrical seasons. . . look like a Victorian-era propaganda version of the human race . . . We shouldn’t be modeling for corporations and governments how to exclude in practice while promoting an image of inclusiveness.”

That said, I find the juxtaposition of the cheery, upbeat language of the proposal with the disturbingly bellicose underpinnings to be a distressing, insidious mix of idealism and hate – as though they’re trying to make enemies where no enemies exist.

As a white male, I can’t help but think that the underlying tone of white male-bashing is unhelpful: The Jubilee is gunning for the small theater companies, many of which could indeed stand to add more varied seasons. But is banning any writer, based on gender or skin color, the way to redress a glaring imbalance? I mean, imagine how the Jubilee Statement would read if it substituted black for white or woman for man. The proposal would be in court before you could say how do you do.

To me, much of the Jubilee Proposal puts me in mind of one of those creepy dating ads, which state that “we’re nice people” but “no fats, blacks or Asians need apply.” Preferences are preferences – and the Jubilee Committee’s proposal is still divisive, reverse racism with a sparkly label.

AEA responds to the lawsuit filed by its Los Angeles membership

A very short time after the plaintiffs for Los Angeles’s Pro-99 movement filed suit against Actor’s Equity, the Union fired back with a statement that is about as idiotic as you would expect from its entirely tone-deaf handling of the entire fracas. The Union’s retort to the filed document frames the entire conflict as a minimum wage issue, when the legal brief actually accuses the Union of breach of contract, breach of the covenant of fair dealing, and breach of the duty of fair representation. The Union, in its response, notes that it’s unfortunate that this is going to be an expensive matter of litigation, without mentioning that its multiple breaches of the Settlement Agreement and its obvious contempt for the expressed will of local membership in an already rigged referendum are what made the litigation necessary.

Let us be clear about something we’ve been saying for some time. The Union’s use of the minimum wage issue is a canard. They’ve signaled for some time that they  just don’t want to have to oversee the 99-seat theater scene. Minimum wage is essentially just a rallying cry in the way that Bush and Cheney used Weapons of Mass Destruction to muster public rage. The minimum wage argument is, similarly, an ideological bludgeon used to muster rage. The Union would benefit if most of the 99 seat theaters were to to drop out of the Union (as they have in San Francisco and Chicago) in order for AEA to claim that a greater percentage of its members are working in higher paid Union theaters. This would seem to be largely a game about statistics and ratios in a field with 90% unemployment among the Union membership.

As one reads the Union public response, though, it is clear that AEA is trying to galvanize the rest of the country against LA, rather than attempt to deal directly with employment woes of its own membership. The posts on the AEA Facebook page support this analysis: There are posts in which AEA members (not in LA) claim that the Union isn’t about pursuing art, it’s about getting people paid (which is inconsistent with AEA’s mission statement). Other posters note that if the AEA actors wish to work for free, they should just leave the Union. Some folks mention the good things that the Union brings to their members – as though it is not possible for the Union to be a good thing even when one of the things they do is ill-advised. A few posts even hold to that tedious trope that because there’s no theater in LA, the LA actors should just move to some other city if they want to do theater. How helpful.

On the other hand, East Coast AEA Equity Member Saum Eskadandi, whose comments have become a minor rallying point for AEA actors in New York who are sympathetic to those in LA. He is quoted as saying, “I’m just really confused by this union in general. I say if the actors there want it, and can see pathways by which new Equity contracts can be created, we should let them do it.”

This is the story that keeps on giving.

Royal Couple

French Stewart and Vanessa Stewart will be hosting the Ovation Awards at the Ahmanson Theatre on November 9. The pair are one of L.A. theater’s royal couples, and we couldn’t be happier that they continue to represent our community with passion, brains and class.

Making the Invisible Visible

Margaret Gray and Charles McNulty (LA Times) and Anthony Byrnes (KCRW) at the Stage Raw’s second symposium

Last night, Stage Raw hosted its second of three symposia on arts coverage. Margaret Gray hosted the panel at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena. The conversation focused on the economics of arts coverage, and the panel consisted of Sasha Anawalt, Anthony Byrnes, Sheldon Epps, Charles McNulty and Steven Leigh Morris. The conversation was centered on models for journalism in a non-profit world, including academia becoming a centerpiece for arts coverage, and the conundrums of pay-for-play models. Some of the more intriguing insights came from Anawalt (who heads USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism) who cited evidence that intelligent, long-form online journalism has a far stronger response than generally believed, and from Byrnes (KCRW’s theater columnist) who cited the failure of L.A. as a community to articulate the case, persuasively, for how non-profit sectors, such as live theater and online journalism, feed the society and the culture. Jenny Lower will have a full report later this week.

The final installment, dedicated to diversity in arts coverage, will take place Monday night, November 23, at the 24^th Street Theatre. Margaret Gray will moderate. Panelists now confirmed are Richard Azurdia, Debbie Devine, Lovell Estell III, Jay McAdams, Rose Portillo, Jose Luis Valenzuela and Bob Verini. RSVP here.  

Cursed Child

But, of course, one story trumps all others this week, thrusting every other concern into the fusty background. If you do not think this story is important – well, you should get out of the theater and go work in a bank or fish-gutting parlor.

Here it is: The new Harry Potter story is coming – and it’s going to be a play!

Well, two plays, actually. And that is good for the future of the theater in general, though some disagree with me.

I’m a librarian by day, and I recall vividly, every time that a Harry Potter book came out, it was the best thing in the world for libraries, as readers and readers would swarm in, read the Potters and then stick around and read other things as well. I think we can predict a similar uptick in theatrical awareness when these plays are performed in 2016.

J.K. Rowling’s commercial site Pottermore is reporting that the play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, will open June 7 and run through July 29 at the London Palace Theatre. It will take place some 19 years after the book’s events, and will be written by Rowling, Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany. Tiffany won Olivier and Tony Awards for the productions of Black Watch and for Once.

The synopsis suggests that the story is going to feature Harry, now an adult, and his youngest son Albus.

“It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn’t easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband, and father of three school-age children,” says the press release. “While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.”

Registration for the opportunity to get tickets is available starting on October 28, and I’d anticipate that huge crowds of Yanks like me are going to fly out to England to catch the show when it opens this summer.

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Round-up of the Week’s Events

By Paul Birchall

Lawsuit Against AEA Filed, At Last

For our local theater scene, the huge event of the week was the release late Saturday evening of the Complaint filed with the U.S. District Court by Pro99-Seat Union Plaintiffs against their own Union, Actors’ Equity Association and its Executive Director, Mary McColl. At last, the first step in actually taking on the Union has taken place. The brief was filed but not served on the Union in the hope that the mere filing would bring AEA to the negotiating table, which is what the Review Committee (established in the 1989 Settlement Agreement — the result of the last time AEA members took their own Union to court) had been trying to do for months. In the Union’s eyes, however, as soon as they eliminated the 99-Seat Plan, the Settlement Agreement and its Review Committee went up in flames with it. I have been gnashing my teeth at the maladroit, arrogant behavior on the part of AEA, which is often so tonally deaf to the community it serves, it would almost be impossible to parody.  

The legal arguments are likely to take up our thoughts for some time to come, and we can expect many analyses of the document, what it means in terms of the strategy in the campaign for ensure the safety of the Equity Waiver scene.

One suspects that the reasons for filing the document, but not yet serving it to Equity, are an attempt to provoke a reaction from AEA.  The Union’s first response, however, was to re-name a breach of contract, breach of good faith, breach of fair representation, and breach of fiduciary duty Complaint as a “minimum wage” lawsuit, and to tell Pro99 to go stuff itself. This is not encouraging, but also not unexpected.

One of the aspects of the brief that leaps off the page to me is this:  The brief is essentially a continuation of the original 1989 Equity case – in the same way that World War II was really based on World War I, though separated by some years of peace.  The argument is how Equity has illegally abrogated the terms of the first legal agreement that was made with them in 1989.   The majority of the plaintiffs are holdovers from the original 1989 case – Greg Grossman, Salome Jens, and Joseph Stern, to mention a few.

The claim is made that the Union violated fair labor practices by ignoring the results of last April’s referendum – the one in which two thirds of the local membership voted to retain the 99-Seat Plan and repair it — and that the Union’s jiggery pokery in blowing off meetings with the Review Committee that was established by the 1989 agreement, sending biased information on the issue while ignoring any other point of view, and ultimately ignoring the results of the advisory referendum, and more than enough to merit legal damages and recourse.  

It is also interesting how the brief singles out for prosecution the Union’s Executive Director Mary McColl. The brief is flat out gunning for her.  One can’t help but think that her position in the Union is over, whatever happens, her being the now-cited instrument behind all the breaches of good faith. It would be much in the same way that Pope Benedict had to step down so Pope Francis could create a  seemingly more open-minded Catholic church.  

We will be saying more about this in weeks ahead – and so will the rest of the Los Angeles, I suspect.

McNulty on Criticism  

The other interesting weekend event was Charles McNulty’s essay on theater criticism. 

When the great and the good speak, it behooves us all to listen.  And I was particularly fascinated by L.A. Times’s Theater Critic’s excellent exegesis on the art of theater criticism in our local market. 

I really wish that every critic had the space to write a piece like this in a forum such as the L.A. Times – a piece that’s a philosophical explanation of how we review, how theater reviews should differ from theater criticism, and, yes, the ambiguous position of arts journalism in the context of overall arts coverage.  The article is, in many ways, a boiled down concentration of his thoughts from last month’s Stage Raw symposium at Rogue Machine, in which a panel of local writers attempted to define the issues confronting arts journalism.  McNulty will be back on Monday night for the second Stage Raw symposium, October 26, 7:30 p.m. at Pasadena’s Boston Court Performing Arts Center, also moderated by Margaret Gray, and joined by Sasha Anawalt, Anthony Byrnes, Sheldon Epps, Steven Leigh Morris, and Laura Zucker. As of this posting, there were 11 seats remaining RSVP here.

I will admit, I am often irritated by McNulty’s East Coast focus on Broadway reviews and London tours while coverage of the local scene goes wanting.  However, McNulty is on the money when he discusses the fine craft of arts criticism, and how it needs to differ from the market-oriented aspects of vox populi-Yelping.  

I found myself cheering when McNulty opined, “For as long as click counts are ruling journalism, theater criticism will be on the endangered species list.”  And I almost crowed when he mentioned, “report card (reviews) make for dull reading.”  

Summing it up in one more gem: “Criticism’s value is indissolubly tied to the art form’s. The mission now is to go deeper, to stop thinking so much about the business of the theater and to confront the reason for its existence.” 

Gary Grossman On the Mend After Serious Heart Attack

We are all thinking of theater producer Gary Grossman, who’s currently recovering from a heart attack suffered earlier this month. He’s one of the plaintiffs in both the 1989 and 2015 lawsuits against AEA, and runs the Skylight Theatre in Los Feliz. His support of theater and his theatrical output as a producer has always been robust.

Publicist Judith Borne reported that Grossman should be released from the hospital in a day or so – and that he’s ready to throw himself into plans for the tribute to Ed Asner that’s coming up on November 1.  

It is actually a good week for Grossman: The acclaimed production of El Grande Coca Cola that he created at Skylight is slated to open at the Colony in an Equity production November 7^th.  Not to hammer the point home, I think Grossman would say that is the process by which productions under the 99-Seat code should lead to Equity work. 

Best wishes to Mr. Grossman and good thoughts for his quick recovery.

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Paul Birchall’s Got It Covered

Bullying at Echo Theater? The Blogosphere Leaps to the Wrong Conclusion; AEA Councillor Sid Solomon Calls for the Right Protest at The Wrong Time; and a Street Party in North Hollywood 

Teapot Tempest

Deborah Puette in Echo Theater Company’s GHOST LIGHT

In a dramatic about-face, playwright Tommy Smith on Wednesday abruptly retracted allegations that Echo Theater Company had “stolen” his short play Ghost Light, which had starred Deborah Puette and opened August 5 to rave notices. The production was the playwright’s third collaboration with Echo artistic director Chris Fields, whose stagings of Smith’s Firemen in 2014 and last spring’s Fugue were likewise met with critical acclaim.

The retraction effectively brings to a conclusion a bizarre tempest that first broke on social media when Smith began urging theatergoers to boycott Ghost Light performances. The story was promptly picked up by the Los Angeles Times’s David Ng, who parroted Smith’s claims that a contract was never signed, that he had only been paid for a workshop run in August, and that Fields had made unauthorized “artistic changes to the text and title.”

Based on Smith’s complaint to the Theater, Echo pulled the show even before Smith had made his allegations public, which is why Smith’s boycott campaign was so perplexing to the Theater. (Ghost Light had been added as a curtain closer to Fields’s September production of Miki Johnson’s American Falls.) But despite Echo’s staunch denial of the charges to Ng, and its insistence that it had Smith’s signatures on both a signed agreement for 12 performances and a cancelled check, the LAT’s spurious he-said/she-said angle quickly caught fire on the blogosphere, with the presumption that Smith had been cavalierly wronged by Echo Theater.

The Echo, understandably appalled by the brouhaha, issued a press release on Tuesday, spelling out Fields’s dismay and including PDFs of the June 18, 12-performance agreement as well as a cancelled check, both signed by Smith.
 
The publication of the conclusive evidence apparently gave the playwright second thoughts — and left Ng and the Times in a bind, addressed in a follow up piece by Ng for the paper, in which Smith apologized profusely to the Theater. “I thank Echo for allowing me the time to understand my situation,” Smith said. “I am sorry that the public had to be involved at all.”
 
Fields’s response to all this was less angry than filled with sorrow and regret — understandable, given how Smith and the Echo had such a fruitful history, which now appears to have ended. “I’m glad it’s over,” Fields wrote, referring to the controversy, not to his partnership with Smith. “It was all so unfortunate and unnecessary. I’m also really sorry that it happened, because I valued Tommy enormously as a collaborator and artist.”
 
Ultimately, what interests me is not the story so much as why it occupied so much of the local gossip for the past week-and-a-half. And that has to do with the fact that a minor contract dispute was escalated to the scale of grand opera by a poorly timed and inadequately reported article by the local paper of record.

Get out the Gun for Annie

Correction: The protest against the non-Union tour of Annie was first created by Kate O’Phalen on thunderclap.it, and was promoted by Kevin Meoak on Pro99. The protest call was not an initiative by Sid Solomon or by AEA, as stated in the item below. After receiving the support of many Pro99-ers, Sid Solomon shared a Facebook event linking to the Thunderclap website. The FB event page states as follows: “”Actors’ Equity Association does not monitor or take responsibility for the content, information, and views presented and represented here. The content of this event does not represent official positions, policies, or opinions of Actors’ Equity Association.” — SLM

A couple of interesting niblets from the Pro99 movement. If you were following the Pro-99 page this week, you would have seen a surprising posting from Sid Solomon, one of the newly elected AEA regional councilors  – and one of the few who actively courted Equity member voters out here in the Los Angeles region. Many in the area were frustrated by Solomon’s lack of a forceful declaration supporting L.A.’s small theaters in their struggle against the Union, and its war against volunteerism (with stipends) in those theaters by insisting on minimum wage for Union actors. Solomon appeared to many to play both sides of the issue at the same time.

 
However, to his credit, Solomon never lied about himself or the Pro-99 issue: He mostly said 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 necessarily a fib to win votes. And, frankly, any one of these folks who is actually willing to reach out to the voters in L.A. and to listen to the issues here is vastly preferable to the armchair pontificators across the country who condemn the economic fabric of L.A.’s intimate theaters, while having little sense of the scene here.
 
Anyway, this week Solomon posted a “call to arms” message calling for a sort of Equity protest at the opening of Annie, the bus-and-truck national tour coming to the Pantages this week. Now, for complicated reasons, many national touring productions of Broadway hits are cast with non-union performers, a regrettably standard practice — particularly  disturbing since these bus-and-truck productions have the gall to call themselves official Broadway productions and charge ticket prices far exceeding those you’d expect to pay for a non-union show. If you want to raise the charge of exploitation, look no further.
 
Solomon’s call to protest Annie during its Pantages run seems noble enough, however I do find myself questioning the motives behind mustering such a protest in Los Angeles. This show has been touring since early 2015. A New York Times article discussing the practice of using non union actors in the touring production of Annie was written as far back as February of 2014. So, this production is anything but news and this is simply one of many stops on the Annie Gravy Train.
 
Why have they decided to protest here and now, and not, say, in the Midwest or on one of the stops en route? Can it possibly be an attempt to distract from the other, larger AEA protest going on? Is it another attempt on the part of AEA to mend the union’s damaged reputations here in L.A., following the abrasive war over our intimate theater scene? Does AEA honestly believe that its members, like children, are so easily distracted by a sleight of hand on the left, while the right hand dismantles the local theater community?

NoHo Street Party!

A far better use of your time this next week, I think, would be to attend the fiesta being held on October 18th in North Hollywood – a street party being thrown to benefit North Hollywood businesses that support the small theaters, in particular AJS Costumes, the outlet operated by frequent Ovation Awards- , Lawee Awards- and LADCC Awards-winning costume designer, A. Jeffrey Schoenberg. We’ve written before about AJS and how it, as well as other businesses, are feeling the crunch in the tough economic times.

The party will be in the heart of the NoHo Arts district (around 5223 Lankershim), with all sorts of actors and performers in costumes (though I hope the weather has cooled by then). No one short of a troop of Baccantes on E can throw a party like folks in our small theater community.
 
This party also, I think, dovetails nicely with the beautiful comments made by Vanessa and French Stewart in their recent interview in Footlights, on the need for small theater to remain vibrant and healthy. The Stewarts are the Pro-99 Crown Couple, whose productions of Stoneface and of Louis and  and Keely: Live at the Sahara are exercises in how to take small shows and turn them into Equity successes.

In the article, along with the now-oft-used (though still germane) metaphor of 99-seat theater being like farming, with the paying product being what happens later in the process, French also describes small theater’s tight links to the environment it comes from.

“Saturday night is a team sport. It’s not just about your show,” notes Stewart. “It’s about the bar or restaurant next door. It’s creating foot traffic for each other and a shared sense of community. It’s citizenship.” So come on out next week and join the party!

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Paul Birchall’s Got it Covered

Visualizing the Invisible: First Symposium, “Form and Content”

By Paul Birchall

Hard to discuss, or even to tell, where we are in the middle of a battle

These are tumultuous days for the theater community in Los Angeles, but one thing is for sure: There has never been a better time for the community to draw together for the purposes of thought-provoking self-analysis.  

One of the more positive outcomes of the past year has been a concerted effort on the part of practitioners and supporters of our theater scene to define the unique Los Angeles theatrical culture and to develop a strategy for its survival, growth, and prosperity. Several groups have recently formed in an attempt to do this, from the Los Angeles Theater Network (a local think tank) to the Facebook page operated by the Pro-99 Movement. There are many angels and they are dancing most adroitly on the heads of so many pins, theatrically speaking.  

Add to these groups the symposia (three forums over three months) started last week by LA Weekly critic and Stage Raw founder Steven Leigh Morris, which seek to articulate and to explore issues confronting the “crisis in arts journalism,” not just in the L.A. area but across the country. 

Before the panel, at Rogue Machine, on the set of Luka’s Room, left to right: Gray, McNulty, Morris, Paleo and Raden. The empty seat was to be occupied by John Flynn, who arrived at the very start of the symposium. Photo by Paul Birchall

Back in the day, I mighta been one of those hard-boiled newsies, sitting at his typewriter in the copy room, churning out an overnight review, and then shouting “copy!” to the copy boy to whisk the piece down to the editor. Now, like so many local critics, I have found that writing about the theater pays so little that I draw most of my income from work that has little to do with the stage, or with writing at all.  

The first Stage Raw-sponsored panel (“Form and Content”), moderated by L.A. Times critic Margaret Gray, brought out several of our local theater critics, an artistic director and a social media specialist to discuss the shapes and sizes of what, in this region, is charitably called “arts coverage.”  

The title for the series is “Visualize the Invisible” — perhaps a metaphor for the idea that few in the theater actually give the topic of arts journalism a thought until they need a critic or reporter to cover their event, at which point the power of the press’s bully pulpit is mighty strong. 

This first panel’s purpose was to take arts journalism and to apply what in management-speak is considered a SWOT analysis – an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – while the panel on October 23 will discuss arts journalism from the point of view of economics, and the panel on November 23 will address issues of diversity.

Panelist Bill Raden, writer for the L.A. Weekly and Stage Raw, described the importance of long-form criticism, which in the mainstream papers (though not the blogs) is going the way of the dodo. “Theater and its criticism are part of a larger discussion that includes literature, philosophy, and politics,” opined Raden. “Some people call this legacy journalism.” 

Panelist Charles McNulty, lead theater critic for the L.A. Times, remarked how he particularly misses the long-form reviews that were able to delve more deeply into the experience and meaning of a play. “I really love a nuanced response to anything,” McNulty explained. “I want to get into the impulse generating the art.”  

This, he regarded, is opposed to many other types of criticism, which are either a report card-like discussion of a show’s objective quality or its commercial merits. “We should put aside the ‘business’ of the theater and focus on something more urgent – what energizes the theater.” 

After Gray was prompted to ask how we entice people to read long-form criticism in an era “when people read less and less,” Raden riposted that people will always read writing that is good. “Present this material so that it is edited and thoughtful,” Raden noted. And that is what will mark the difference between standards traditionally attributed to print journalism versus uncurated blogs, which are frequently “self-edited.” 

Added panelist Tracey Paleo, editor of the website Gia on the Move, “There is no evidence people aren’t reading the long-form reviews (on the web). It’s just there is now so much content floating around.” 

Gray moved onto a meditation on “the elephant in the room”, the dire economics of arts criticism, where a thumb’s up Yelp review is about as useful for marketing as a McNulty think piece. “Who is going to pay” for long, deliberate, critical pieces when the fiscal trend is downsizing and trimming?  

McNulty pragmatically wondered why the academic community hasn’t taken up the slack, noting that during his years covering theater in the East, he knew of colleges that sponsored critical journals to discuss issues in the arts. Here, in Los Angeles, there’s no such tradition. “Why doesn’t Cal Arts write about arts, dance, and theater?” McNulty asked. “The fit is right. Academics are hungry for visibility.”

Morris also threw the conversation over to the audience, asking what they wanted from their arts criticism. 

Gary Grossman, producer and activist in the 99-Seat movement, replied that “we’re looking for a champion. We’re looking to be told where we’re going,” as opposed to a report that’s just a checklist of goods and bads. McNulty responded with a claim that many critics in town would agree with – that he (like any good critic) “gives 100 percent in his writing; and that is how he advocates for the theater.” 

John Flynn

Panelist and head of the Rogue Machine Theater, John Flynn, noted that arts criticism has declined partially as a result of the democratization of the Internet. There are a cacophony of voices and not all of them are equal. “There has to be respect for the well-educated professional,” he noted.  

Other discussions centered on the old ‘Butts in Seats’ question of how to bring audiences to the theater. The obvious answer is to market via the Internet – but the panel regarded the Internet as both an opportunity and a challenge. “If you want to engage with young audiences, you have to engage them where they are – the Internet is not the enemy,” noted Paleo, though Morris mused that the same information vehicle is ultimately “rearing a generation of lonely people,” due to the lack of connection to the external world. Underlined the pragmatic Flynn, “The Internet is not bringing people into the theater.” 

It was fascinating and delightful to be in the audience for this very important discussion of these issues. However, it is even more important to map out a strategy to ensure the success of the arts and their coverage.It is hard to come up with new ideas, especially when we don’t even know where our culture, our technology, or our economy is going. 

In many ways, arts journalism is undergoing an even greater threat than theater itself. Media are changing and methods of communication need to adapt to this or die. 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.  

Note: The next symposium is on the economics of arts coverage, moderated by Margaret Gray, with panelists, Sasha Anawalt, Anthony Byrnes, Sheldon Epps, Charles McNulty, Steven Leigh Morris, and Laura Zucker, October 26 at Boston Court Performing Arts Center. Presented in association with Footlights.  RSVP here.

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Paul Birchall’s Got it Covered

From the Ovations, to the Annenberg Center’s new artistic director, to
Spring Awakening on Broadway, to Stage Raw’s symposium on arts coverage 

Ovies Nominations

The Ovation Award Nominations are out  Those of us who love the theater know only too well that plays are like fireflies:  They live for a short time, are full of energy, but then they’re gone and it is like they never existed, save in blessed memory.  All that remains may be some old programs, a tattered review in your scrapbook, and, if you are really, really, really lucky, a plaque from one of the several awards that pop up like mushrooms around the town. 

In terms of presence and promotional heft, the Ovations are the biggest mushroom in the forest –– and what is particularly appealing about the Ovies is that they are peer-voted. It’s also true that one suspects there’s some backroom negotiating over which shows voters go to and which mysteriously slip through the cracks – but for the most part, the Ovations do what they’re intended to do most excellently, which is to provide a mainstream snapshot of the worthier projects that hit the Los Angeles area in the previous year. 

Truthfully, the list of nominees reads like a love letter to our local theater scene, and sincere congratulations are in order for everyone who’s on it.  I’m particularly pleased to see noms for some of my own personal favorites, including the just closed Permanent Image at Rogue Machine, the genius Failure: A Love Story at Coeurage, Trevor at Circle X, The Behavior of Broadus at Sacred Fools, and, of course, the Deaf-West Spring Awakening remount at the Wallis.   I’m also really pleased to see the mention of some productions that really shone like fireflies in the dark, from the LGBT Center’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? to Theatricum Botanicum’s August: Osage County.

Best wishes to the nominees, who can be found here:  https://thisstage.la/2015/09/announcing-the-2015-ovation-awards-nominees/.  The actual award ceremony will take place at the Ahmanson Theatre on November 9. 

Spring on the Great White Way

A quick peek at the Ovies list reminds us that this is the year for the Deaf-West Theater’s production of Spring Awakening, which this week made the jump to Broadway in a creative leap that could well be the archetype for the how theater generated in the 99-seat community crucifer should progress.  It is a pleasure to read the incredibly positive press Spring Awakening is getting in Manhattan – opening night was this weekend and glowing reviews following the Broadway opening are rolling in, with Charles Isherwood’s New York Times review calling the show “thrillingly inventive” and singling out Los Angeles leads Austin McKenzie and Sandra Mae Frank for particular praise.  Playbill just posted a tweet on their feed, noting that “there were 23 Broadway debuts on the Brooks Atkinson Stage” on opening night. 

It is also a paradigm that simply won’t exist in about a year’s time if the AEA has its way.

The small theaters are our local culture’s experimental hot houses, not the money machines that the union seems to think they are – it’s when the shows are allowed to grow and bloom (to paraphrase French Stewart) that the material success is to be found.  But, of course, the people in AEA responsible for the vendetta against the local theater scene have heard all of this already, and, with typical tin ear maladroitness, they don’t care.

Crewes on Board at the Wallis

Paul Crewes

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. 

Crewes’s Kneehigh created a “nomadic theatre space” called the Asylum Tent, which serves as a home for many of the company’s productions.  The Kneehigh’s production of Brief Encounter, which played the Wallis a year ago, was quite delightful. Crewes sounds like a good fit for the complex and we hope he enjoys the balmy Los Angeles winters.

Visualizing the Invisible

Tonight marks “Visualizing the Invisible,” the first of the Stage Raw’s expert-curated panels on arts and arts coverage in Los Angeles, which is being held at Rogue Machine at 7:30.  It should be a thought-provoking panel, attended by many of local theater journalism’s wise mandarins.  Rogue Machine’s artistic director John Flynn will be serving on the panel, along with social media guru Tracey Paleo, LA Times Critic Charles McNulty, Stage Raw editor and LA Weekly Critic Steven Leigh Morris, and Stage Raw writer Bill Raden – all in a give-and-take moderated by LA Times Critic Margaret Gray. I’ll be there, too, come to think of it, but I’ll be hiding in the audience scribbling away and taking notes.  It should be a fascinating seminar on a subject that touches directly on our interests. It’s technically sold out, but if you RSVP, Stage Raw will make room for you.

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Paul Birchall’s Got it Covered

From an Aborted NYC Mikado to Bloomberg Foundation Largesse to the 20 Most Produced Playwrights of 2015-16

Our Kite Flying High

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 his position of board chair at Los Angeles Stage Alliance. 

Kite will be a tremendous asset to UCLA’s theater school – but I am unable to shake a certain sense of amazement, since I still believe that Kite’s glory days were back when he was himself a very recent UCLA graduate (in 1991), when he and a group of extremely talented fellow graduates started the itinerant Buffalo Nights theater company at a variety of mousetrap-sized venues, including the Complex and the old Powerhouse in Santa Monica.  That was an era when folks could create a little theater company and put on shows, without a lot of fuss and bother. 

There were plenty of good performers in that company, too, many of whom have gone onto greater pastures since – folks like Gibson Frazier, Kevin Weisman, and Even Arnold, all now familiar for their TV turns.  It should be really interesting to see what Kite does in his new position at UCLA, as he influences the next generation of theater-makers.

Yellowface Flap

This is just out of New York: The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGSP) has just pulled the plug on their production of The Mikado, announcing instead that they will replace the musical with a production of The Pirates of Penzance.

If you haven’t been following this story, which has been covered in various blogs and papers around the country, the issue was that NYGSP’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado was going to be given a highly traditional production at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan. This would be a Mikado in its most classical form — all Victorian orientalism, replete with fake Kimonos and skullcap wigs with three-quarter hairpieces, and (worst of all) white performers with slanted eye make up in an attempt to imitate Japanese characters.

I’m torn about this sort of thing. First of all, there is really no excuse for yellowface, which is the minstrel show-like presentation in which white performers play Asian characters. It is shameful to see any culture stereotyped by another culture — and The Mikado represents yellowface at its most offensive.

Diep Tran’s excellent article for American Theatre analyses the situation from the perspective of cultural appropriation — where one culture simply rips off another culture’s references and traditions and then interprets them in a patronizing and watered-down way.

Tran’s article compares the aborted Mikado with the recent staging of Cry Trojans! the Wooster Group’s controversial and widely condemned adaptation of Troilus and Cressida, whose narrative premise cast the Trojans as a made-up Native American tribe played by a cast of mostly white performers in redface, and which included ersatz ceremonial dancing and peace pipe smoking.

I saw Cry Trojans! in its REDCAT premiere, and for me, comparing the two productions simply isn’t valid. The Wooster Group was essentially creating an entirely new work of theater, which self-consciously chose the tactic of representing cultural appropriation in order to charge Shakespeare’s text with a discourse of American imperialism and implicate its audience in the tragedy.

By contrast, the Mikado planned by NYGSP, whose mission statement is to faithfully perform Gilbert and Sullivan in the style of the original D’Oyly Carte company, would have left those stereotypes unexamined in a creaky rendition of the antique operetta that has been trotted out like an old horse since the Victorian Age, whose thoughts and philosophy the operetta represents.

The country is full of theater companies that put on nothing but Gilbert and Sullivan musicals. To call this one out for yellowface almost seems beside the point. Call them out for doing Gilbert and Sullivan instead. There was a similar company on my college campus in Chicago, and their productions were typical repertory company fare; The Nankipoo was sleeping with the director, while the Mikado was the silly old local performer who had been with the company since the First World War, and no one dared tell him he had a voice like a Brillo Pad.

I do sincerely think NYGSP erred in not casting any performers of color in their Mikado. After that, I think accusing the company of some kind of deliberate perfidy is a little unjust: It’s Gilbert and Sullivan, for crying out loud! It is what it is. Most subscribers expect Gilbert and Sullivan (for good or no) to look a certain way; it’s a period piece, pure and simple.  Perhaps the company could have held a talkback on the topic of cultural appropriation versus anachronistic interpretation of the past — or they could have anticipated the objections by setting the show in some other culturally inoffensive setting.

Many of the Facebook comments on the American Theatre story have taken umbrage with Gilbert and Sullivan, rather than the production, and that seems to me to be a completely different question: Should we be staging Gilbert and Sullivan at all these days? Do the operettas speak to audiences in a consensual way? If you look at Gilbert and Sullivan as being a historical document that exemplifies the unreconstructed social values and ideologies of their era, replacing The Mikado with The Pirates of Penzance, which is what the NYGSP has done, is a cosmetic change only.

Spreading the Wealth

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Bloomberg Foundation, the philanthropic arm of publishing mogul (and former NYC mayor) Michael Bloomberg, has provided a number of generous grants to Los Angeles’s nonprofit arts organizations, including a number of L.A. intimate theater companies.

The grants will total $4.5 million over the next two years, with the individual awards ranging from $5,000 to $175,000 a year. 51 arts organizations in Los Angeles are getting some of the lovely moola, with the recipients including local stalwarts such as East West Players, the 24^th Street Theater, Beyond Baroque, Cornerstone Theater Company, Debbie Allen Dance Academy, LATC’s Latino Theater Company, Rogue Machine Theatre, Sacred Fools Theatre, The Blank Theatre, Theatre of NOTE, and Theatre West. The money must be matched by donations from the public.

Now, if you are at all like me, the first thing that popped into your mind is how could an arts organization — a certain not-for-profit online stage periodical that covers the Los Angeles scene, for example — get in line for some of this grant aid? Sadly, there is no public application process: The Times article notes that the Bloomberg Foundation worked with “local arts funders” to find companies that both had “strong programmic activities” and which “exhibited a potential for growth.” 

Meanwhile, the LAT article also mentions another grant program, entitled Community Impact, whose organizational funding comes from the National Endowment for the Arts, and which is working with grants from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. These are going to be smaller awards, but their selection process is through a “panel of experts” that will evaluate each applicant on a case-by-case basis before sending the selection to the County Board of Supervisors for approval. So perhaps this is a good starting point if you’re looking to get some funding for your 501(c)(3) theater company. 

The full list of performing arts companies that received Bloomberg grants may be found here.

Voted Most Produced

Also in American Theatre this week, we saw a list of the 20 most produced playwrights of the year. It’s quite a list, too, and it makes for fascinating reading. I think we’re all excited about the opportunity we’ll have later this year to see a show by top playwright Ayad Akhtar, whose Disgraced will be coming later this year to the Taper. 

But, amongst the list of stalwarts like Tennesee Williams and August Wilson, I was rather pleased to see the awesome local playwright Steve Yockey, with 9 productions around the country. Yockey’s horror anthology play Very Still and Hard to See was one of the great scare chills of the Production Company’s 2012 season — and his delightful farces, such as Disassembly, are always a delight to enjoy at Theatre of NOTE. 

As I look at this list, though, I can’t help but think it’s strange that for all the theaters and plays in the country — American Theatre culled 2,159 productions at 386 theaters — we are talking about 9 or 17 productions as being such a huge number. Makes one sort of wonder, what are the shows that are not being counted in the mix?

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Paul Birchall’s Got it Covered

From Monday Nights at Rogue Machine to Awake and Sing! to Jennie Webb

I Like Mondays

Tracie Lockwood, left, Anne Gee Byrd and Ned Mochel in A Permanent Image (photo by Samuel D. Hunter)

What is nicer than a Monday night show? If I were a theater producer I would always slip a Monday night performance into the schedule, just on principle. 

For one thing, all the critics will come, as they really won’t have anything else to do that night, except perhaps tweaking their prose before the Tuesday deadline and maybe watching Antiques Roadshow. You may even get some of the ol’ parasites (read: awards voters) from the Ovations, LADCC, and Stage Raw, given the lack of distracting other attractions. 

In addition, you’re going to be surrounded by real theater people, folks who are so busy doing other shows that they don’t have time to see plays except on a Monday night. 

The audience for Rogue Machine Theatre’s Monday closing night of their excellent production of Permanent Image was chock-a-block with intimate-theater veterans. Here you could find the leads from the Pacific Resident Theatre’s acclaimed revival of The Homecoming. There, you could overhear one of the actors bragging about prepping for the La Mirada production of Michael Frayn’s farce about a farce, Noises Off, to name a few.

My second observation about the closing of Permanent Image: Why not simply declare star Anne Gee Byrd a local treasure? What an amazing actor she is. I remember seeing her a season or four ago, playing the loving-to-a-tragic-fault matriarch of the unhappy clan in the Matrix production of All My Sons. Now here she is again, playing a completely different kind of matriarch — brittle as ice, bristling with rage and sorrow that she masks with one of those tight smiles that suggest anything but humor, and a passive-aggressive interactive manner fit to make her children shriek like banshees. I’ll say it again: She’s an amazing actor. 

Revive and Sing!

Also at Permanent Image, I had the opportunity to chit some chat with the amazing Elina DeSantos, co-artistic director of Rogue Machine, who should herself be designated a Local Living Legend for L.A. Theater. Over a delightful glass of delicious Rogue Machine plonk, DeSantos discussed the upcoming 20th anniversary revival production of Awake and Sing!, which she’s directing at the Odyssey. 

Orson Bean, left, Marilyn Fox and Gregory Vignoll in Odyssey Theatre’s 1994 Awake and Sing! (photo courtesy of Odyssey Theatre Ensemble)

This is going to be really exciting, it seems: DeSantos helmed the original Odyssey production in 1995, and it ran for 9 months. For this remount, the company has assembled much of the original cast from its earlier run, including the ever-amazing Richard Fancy and Dennis Madden, with original producer (and another Living Legend) Beth Hogan producing. 

“And we’ve got Marilyn Fox (now artistic director of Pacific Resident Theatre) reprising her role,” DeSantos noted. “In the original production, she was way too young for the part. Now, she’s just … perfectly cast!” 

Odets’ 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. 

Information about Awake and Sing! can be found by phoning the Odyssey at (310) 477-2055 or at the Odyssey’s website, www.odysseytheatre.com.

Voltaire Wasn’t a Woman

There are few theaters more intimate and also more delightful than Sacred Fools, which in its space off of Melrose on Heliotrope has carved out a reputation for genuinely unpredictable works of high quality and imagination. When attending a show at Sacred Fools, one always sees a house full of half-familiar faces from other shows around town. They always bring friends, it seems: The company’s audiences consist of a young hipster crowd of the kind that makes theater box office mouths water. 

And if you have the ear for it, just keep your mouth shut and you will hear all the local theater gossip you need to know.

At the opening weekend of Sacred Fool’s riff on Candide (my review will appear under “REVIEWS” later this week), I found myself sitting next to Jennie Webb, the local playwright, producer, and publicist, whose current major cause is the Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative, which tracks and analyses gender parity issues in the local theater scene. Over a nice glass of Sacred Fools wine, Webb and I discussed the recent uproar surrounding the Manhattan Theater Club’s season, which only contains one female playwright — and even that seemingly tacked on after public criticism of the theater company’s all male slate.

Perhaps Webb’s glass was laced with vinegar, but whatever the cause, it was with a peppery spirit that that she pulled out the Sacred Fools program to show that even locally, among extremely acclaimed companies, the issue of gender inequality is really quite noticeable. Not to be unfair to Sacred Fools, which just happened to be the theater at which the convo between Webb and myself took place, a quick perusal of the company’s upcoming shows revealed that here, too, the entire season consists of works by male playwrights — and only one of those is directed by a woman.  

Webb was quick to point out similar problems within the upcoming seasons for Long Beach’s International City Theatre and Rogue Machine; the seasons consist of plays that are overwhelmingly, if not entirely, written by men. “I asked [so-and-so artistic director] about this,” Webb said indignantly, “And he noted that his criteria was to get ‘the best’ plays. So is he saying that no woman has written a great play?” 

Webb was quick to note that companies such as Antaeus and LATC have a much broader attitude towards including diverse playwrights and directors. And South Coast Rep, possibly in response to the MTC issue, is doing a thus-far mostly all-female playwrights season on its Julianne Argyros Stage that launches on October 4 with the world premiere of playwright Qui Nguyen’s romantic comedy Vietgone, directed by May Adrales. Mr. Nguyen’s play will be followed by Sandra Tsing Loh’s The Madwoman in the Volvo and Bekah Brunstetter’s Going to a Place Where You Already Are.

The discussion on diversity seems more important than ever, particularly in these hardscrabble times for the arts. If a nonprofit theater gets any funding from governments or foundations, the idea of a non-diverse program become downright bizarre and unjustly discriminatory.

You may learn more about the Los Angeles Female Playwright’s Initiative at https://lafpi.com.

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Paul Birchall’s Got It Covered

From Paul Verdier to Dakin Matthews to A. Jeffrey Schoenberg to Stephen Sachs

Paul Verdier

(contributed by Steven Leigh Morris)

Yet another passing of another era was marked September 6, when actor-director-playwright-producer Paul Verdier died of complications from Parkinson’s Disease while under hospice care in West Hollywood.

L.A. theater veterans will remember the gravel-voiced tempestuous Frenchman as the artistic director of Stages, a tiny Hollywood theater (on North McCadden Place) that he established in 1982; it was a kind of antecedent to Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe’s City Garage in Santa Monica, equally focused on international work. Verdier’s aesthetic, however, was more stark and minimalistic, focusing without diversion on the texts.

You may also remember that Verdier and his wife, Sonia Lloveras-Verdier, opened a restaurant-café adjoining their theater, aptly named Café des Artistes.

Eugene Ionesco visited Stages in 1982, and productions at the theater included Tales for People Under 3 Years of Age, which Verdier translated and adapted from Ionesco’s play; Verdier also translated and adapted Eduardo Pavlovsky’s Slowmotion, Marguerite Duras’s English Mint, Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1789; Edoardo Erba’s The Night of Picasso and Porco Selvatico; and he directed David Hirson’s La Bete

Each production was covered with slavish curiosity and obvious respect by L.A. Times theater writers, including Sylvie Drake and Dan Sullivan.

Before moving to the United States, Verdier was a member of the Paris-based repertory companies of Jean-Louis Barrault/Madeleine Renaud and Nicolas Bataille.

Actor Ayre Gross worked with Stages for years, and set up a Facebook Page at the time Verdier went into Hospice care. Gross wrote:

“He taught me how to work. He was extraordinarily demanding, and working with him was quite often exceptionally challenging, but almost always exquisitely rewarding. His work was international in scope. He had a laser sharp vision. I’m so grateful to have been among the group of theatre artists in Los Angeles he called upon to give substance to his dreams.”

Verdier is survived by a son, Abel.

Go Ahead, Ask!

Dakin Matthews

In an attempt to grasp control back over the way they are perceived, Actor’s Equity Association has launched a promo campaign to improve its much-tarnished image.  I suppose this was meant to dovetail with the Labor Day holiday, the national celebration of the many truly good things that the unions have done for workers.  If you’re a Union and you can’t get good press on Labor Day, well, something is wrong.

In this new ad campaign, all members of AEA were urged to run out to the theater over the holiday weekend, whip out their Equity cards and then “ask if it’s Equity.”  

In theory this was, and is a good thing – Union members supporting their Union, in public, is a fine thing to do.   Of course, who the cardholder is supposed to ask is a little up in the air.  If you ask some long-suffering box office clerk, you’re sure to get an eye-roll and a placement in a seat behind a pillar. If you ask the poor usher, who, more often or not is a volunteer, you will likely as not get a perplexed reaction.  Maybe you’re supposed to whip out your card and show it to the dude sitting next to you.  This might lead to a polite nod.

You can see what they’re thinking, of course — hoping that legions of actors whipping out their cards on Broadway and holding the fat cat producers’ feet to the fire. Mind you, the campaign will inevitably backfire if the union folks wave their cards at those national touring productions, which, with full permission of Equity, are trumpeting themselves as the “official” Broadway shows, while using Non-Equity actors for pennies on the Union dollar. Those producers will have every right to reply, “Hey!  Your Union caved in and gave us absolute permission to do this!”

And how depressing if the same actors whip out the cards to wave at the producers of non-Union shows in L.A.  The joke, of course, is that if you “ask if it’s Equity” to many of the small shows in L.A., the response will be “We wish we were – but they don’t want us!”

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 on the Net, Matthews interprets the “Ask if it’s Equity” campaign as the cynical catch-up PR operation it is. 

“’Equity’ is defined as being fair and impartial,” Matthews responds.  He then goes on to summarize the ways that Equity has acted in a way that can only be described as “Inequitable.”  His list includes the fact that the members of a the L.A. region voted overwhelmingly to table the Union’s plans for the 99 seat plan in L.A. County, and the National board ignored all that and voted in its own plan anyway; as well as how the Union didn’t allow even the slightest amount of dissent in discussion of the issue; how the Union used dues to pay for advocates against the Pro99 faction, and how “it even permits some of the (anti-99-supporters) to make misstatements of fact and law in their opinions (using Equity’s resources and facilities), thus tacitly endorsing views it knows to be in error and . . . even encouraging its own membership to be misinformed.” 

Matthews concludes, “Unfortunately, it’s Equity, but it sure doesn’t feel like ‘equity’ to me.” 

It is indeed daunting to consider the uphill struggle the local theater community has to face as far as this issue is concerned – and that doesn’t take into account other issues that every arts organization has to contend with, from the inability to fund art in a slumping economy, to the wearisome attempt to bolster L.A. as a theater town. 

Dakin’s open letter may be found on the Pro-99 Facebook page. 

We Come Before You Naked

On a related topic, I am fascinated — and more than a little appalled — by this story, which broke over on the Los Angeles Theater Network Facebook page a few days ago, about brilliant costume designer A. Jeffrey Schoenberg, who has caparisoned almost more local theater performers than there are stars in the heavens.  

Whether it is simply due to the poor economy – always a possibility – or pressures of small theater companies battling AEA, many of the clients of Schoenberg’s parent costume company AJS have cut back their costume orders, with the result that the designer, winner of multiple Ovation, LAWWIEs, RAWWIES, and even a Backstage West Garland or two, has had to take to a crowdfunding source like Gofundme to make ends meet.  Notes Schoenberg, on the Gofundme page, “To avoid collapse, many theater companies are doing smaller productions, with less costume design needed, and fewer plays.  The rental business and costume design services of AJS costumes has slowed to a trickle.”  Schoenberg concludes, “This downturn has been sudden, it has been unforeseen, it has been devastating.” 

On a human level, we are all of course dismayed that such a an amazingly creative talent such as Mr. Schoenberg has felt compelled to turn to crowd-funding to make ends meet when, really, he has every right to deserve to make his art his living.  However, it is also a terrifying object lesson on the business-busting trickle-down effects of the AEA conflict.  

It isn’t just the actors and the theater producers who are going to be hurting when these new rules hit:  All the surrounding businesses that support the theater are going to feel the pinch as well.  It would be best for the outlying businesses that have been on the sidelines to start taking note of the tsunami of changes that might be ahead, and which might have an infelicitous effect on vendors, restaurants, coffee houses, and mom-and-pop stores round the corner from your local theater.

Schoenberg’s Gofundme page may be found here:  https://www.gofundme.com/bn328dqq

The Bubbling Fountain

The invitations have gone out to the Fountain Theatre’s 25^th anniversary  celebration gala to be held at the Redbury Hotel in Hollywood.   

Of course, it’s a fundraiser, so you may indeed get your own invite if you so desire.  The party is being held as a tribute to Fountain Artistic Director Stephen Sachs, who, as one of the original founders, has been at the local treasure for its entire run.  

Sachs is worthy of a veritable cornucopia of awards, if not just for founding the Fountain, than also for his contributions to local theater, which range from his drama Bakersfield Mist, which has gone from the Fountain to the West End, and then to being one of the regional standards, to worthy works such as his adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie (set in the segregated South),  and then to his powerful collaborations with South African playwright Athol Fugard and with Arthur Miller (who, back in the day, personally allowed Sachs to stage his rarely performed After the Fall).  The party will be hosted by Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, who has been one of the driving forces behind the naming of the Theater District for the area we know as the Complex-Lounge-Blank theater corridor.

Any theater professional or company that can make a 25 year go of it in the Los Angeles environment which is, as we know, so notoriously unfriendly to intimate theater, is worth a great deal of honor and applause – particularly the Fountain, a company that has so many brilliant productions under its belt.

Head to www.fountaintheatre.com to learn more about the celebration.  

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Paul Birchall’s Got It Covered:

After a pause, Pro-99 speaks; diversity please; and Malibu Playhouse’s Revolving Door Plan of Artistic Leadership

By Paul Birchall

After a Pause, Pro 99 Speaks Out with a Letter

Last week, members of the Pro-99 movement, whose current contact person is Lisa Glass, released their long-awaited congratulatory letter to newly elected AEA President Kate Shindle, who actively courted the Pro-99 seat faction during the months leading up to her election. The letter represents a cordial attempt to remind her of that fact.  Unstated in the letter is the meaning behind a recent advisory referendum, that the continuation of the 99 Seat Theater Plan of 1989, affirmed in a landslide, 66% vote of the L.A. membership earlier this year before being nonetheless gutted by the Union’s National Council shortly after the vote, remains the largest concern to members in the Union’s West Region. 

Battered by the Union management’s abrasive campaign leading up to the election – and the almost bizarre silence about the issue following it – the letter’s signers remind Shindle, who is quoted as saying “the coolest thing Equity can do is encourage its members to be passionate,” that her words celebrating one play performed at the Hollywood Fringe under the Union’s proposed new plan as a triumph “was the problem and not the solution. . . We have found . . . the fact that the leadership ignored the will of its own membership deeply disturbing.  Worst of all, we firmly believe this new plan will effectively destroy our own vibrant theatrical community.”

It’s interesting to scan through the 400 undersigned members to see who agree with the message.  Certainly, we find the folks you’d expect, like Alan Mandell, Dakin Mathews, and Nan McNamara, but there are some surprises, including film and TV A-listers like Zachary Quinto, Ed Asner, Joe Spano, Alfred Molina, and Linda Kerns.

Politically, the letter can be seen as an attempt to get the concerns of the Pro-99 movement back out into the forefront, following a somewhat quiet period when the issue has seemed to drop from being the “top story” in local cultural matters.  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 – regulations which, it is clear from the pitbull antics of AEA managers Mary McColl and Melissa Robinette, they will enforce with extreme vindictiveness and brutality.

If the letter opens a new can of 99-worms for the theater community, it will only be a good thing. 

The letter may be found here. 

In Living Color

The struggle for diversity in representation is a theme that’s on many creatives’ minds these days – and rightfully so, as it is simply ridiculous for movies, TV shows, and plays not to resemble the audiences who attend them.  A few days back, there was rather a broo-ha-ha (admittedly opportunistically) about the Manhattan Theater Club’s early announcement of their new 2015-2016 schedule and how it contained no plays by women playwrights.  The company’s schedule, under popular backlash, was quickly updated to include a play by a female playwright, but the theater company, generally considered one of the nation’s most challenging and exciting, was put on reactive mode under attack from what many would consider their own base.  

These are, of course, critical issues for any artistic organization — not only do you want to represent the folks who are in your audience, but you might also find that by adding diverse communities to your group, you might open your theater to whole new audiences.  

Diversity and visibility are the themes to be explored on September 13 at the upcoming meeting of the Los Angeles Theater Network, our local, non-aligned think tank for issues relating to the production of local intimate theater.  The Network, intended as a crucifer for the invention of solutions to local theatrical problems, meets monthly (or so) and is nominally headed by local director Jon Lawrence Rivera and some time Stage Raw writer Ashley Steed.  This month, the meeting will be held at the Bootleg Theatre, 2220 Beverly Blvd, at 11 AM.  

Take Us To Your Leader

It’s not uncommon for theaters to have different directors rolling in and out of their doors, as part of the theater’s structure – but artistic directors?

The Malibu Playhouse was gadfly-critic-playwright-director Charles Marowitz’s old stomping grounds. He was artistic director there for about 10 minutes, so you could say the Playhouse’s new plan for its artistic leadership is part of a local tradition. They will be utilizing a series of artistic directors on six month terms.  Each of the artistic leaders will oversee an entire half-year slate of plays that will represent his or her taste and sensibility.  Despite what is rather optimistically noted in the press materials, this is not precisely a new business model:  Rather, it’s a sort of sublease, a theater AirBnB, in which the artistic directors are rotated out through the revolving door after six months.

First up will be Jeremy Skidmore, former artistic director of Theater Alliance in Washington D.C.  

“The major drive behind the change in model is to attract artistic talent among those working in a variety of industries who may not be able to commit to yearlong or full-time employment,” notes Skidmore, whose plans for his six month term include Wonderful Life! a musical based on It’s a Wonderful Life!;  Mary’s Wedding (Stephen Massicote’s WWI-era romance) and Pavillion. 

This portends a fairly un-precocious start to this administrative experiment. However, the thing about the rotating artistic director model is that, even while looking at the bill for this six months, your mouth can water at the thought that things might completely change in the next six, when the subsequent Executive-Artistic-Tourguide du-semi-annee comes in for his/her term. 

Wouldn’t heads turn were the next artistic director, say, City Garage’s Frederique Michel, with Skidmore’s Wonderful Life! musical being followed by a harrowing drama of incest in which naked ladies roll around on the floor shrieking existential thoughts?  And if the director after that was someone like Michael Kearns with endless ferocious meditations on gay life in the 20^th century, replete with bouncing bottoms?

In fact, though, it doesn’t seem as though the six-month artistic director model is in itself particularly unpromising.  After all, it is certain that the fundamental infrastructure of the company, including their Artistic Board and Chief Operating Officers, will remain the same, even as the artistic directors “sashay away!” (to quote Rupaul) at the end of their cycles.  What might be more problematic is how the frequent changes help establish a long range vision for the theater company motivated more by expeditiousness than inspiration. Let’s see how it goes.

Correction: An earlier posting of this article cited Stand Up!, a night of comedy with headliner Jimmy Dore and hosted by comedian Michael Schirtzer, and The Guys, a Dan Lauria-directed play by Anne Nelson about a meeting between firefighters and a journalist after 9/11, as part of Skidmore’s season. In fact, these are special events that will predate the inauguration of Skidmore as artistic director.