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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.