Dateline Los Angeles . . . Where the Theater Ain’t Easy

Dateline Los Angeles — Where the Theater Ain’t Easy

When it comes to understanding the decline of theater and its dwindling cultural reach in the early 21^st century, there are as many diagnoses out there as there are proposed cures. Though sometimes one must read between the lines to glean from which narrative page a specific prescription has been written.

 

Here in Los Angeles, for example, where there is consensus only that things couldn’t be more dire, the powers at CTG apparently decided that L.A. theater’s most alarming symptoms were too few restrooms, not enough imported shows from New York and way too much support and development of homegrown writers and plays. So they wrote a prescription called Michael Ritchie and, a decade later, the only difference for the patient seems to be that the audiences are ten years older; self-sustaining, L.A.-based playwrights are far fewer; and the producing playhouses that might mount their work are on a fast track for the endangered species list.

 

A Stink Bomb from Abroad

 

For Stage Rows’ favorite gadfly, L.A. native son and multiple-times expatriated playwright John Steppling, the scorched earth of L.A.’s theater landscape proved so grim that, several years ago, he again decamped for northern Norway, where he appears to have given up playwriting for international cultural criticism.

 

And it was from his Norwegian fortress of solitude that John last week laid out his prescription in the pages of Stage Raw for what ails us. There was nothing terribly unfamiliar in his polemic — at least for those of us who know John. For him, the disease is always the reactionary drift of culture, and his preferred dose of salts – a “political vision of resistance.”

 

What was new was the maestro’s unkind words for the circle of allied playwrights, avowed Steppling disciples, and former members of John’s own Gunfighter Nation playwrights’ group workshop, who have been soldiering on in L.A.’s avant-playwriting trenches in his absence.

 

John seemed to single out writers like Sharon Yablon, Wes Walker and Kevin O’Sullivan, who, in recent years, have added free, so-called “one-off” evenings of short-short works, staged in non-traditional spaces, and which have become crucial and exciting audience-friendly entry points for L.A.-birthed experimental stage writing.

 

But John will have none of that. “Mounting semi-rehearsed skits in backyards or bars,” the Norwegian curmudgeon declaimed, “is like getting genital warts from that guy or girl who looked better at closing time: playwright as genital-wart sufferer.” Ouch!

 

Neither, it seems, does John care for the reports he’s apparently been getting about the successor playwriting workshops — presumably those run by Guy Zimmerman and Walker — that have sprung up to continue the Gunfighters’ work; what he describes as “a slightly toxic vibe in today’s playwriting workshop culture; and that is workshop as self-help, or therapy.”

 

What is especially ironic is that John’s arctic blast against his former associates comes at a moment when those same writers have been putting up some of the most worthwhile and vibrant Los Angeles stage work — short-run and long-run — in recent memory.

 

Playwrights Doing God’s Work

 

 

 

At the top of that list is the spectacular Sissy Boyd-Wes Walker show, Riddance, which just closed a three-week run at Highland Park’s MorYork Gallery. But one of the unsung heroes of the scene on which John pisses is ex-Gunfighter and current Walker-workshop rising star Jeptha Storm. Storm has stepped into the breach as co-producer at Hollywood’s Lost Studio to help its financially beleaguered artistic director, the renowned acting teacher and director Cinda Jackson, generate enough ticket income to pay the rent.

 

 

Jackson, who has headquartered several Steppling companies, including Circus Minimus and the Gunfighters, has been left struggling in the wake of the departure of a children’s Shakespeare workshop and longtime tenant Les Enfants Magiques! To help out, Storm has organized several multiple-weekend themed evenings of short-short plays.

 

The latest of those was a very solid evening called Lost Ireland, which closed on Sunday. Featuring new short plays by Cheryl Slean, Yablon, Steppling’s own son Lex Steppling and Coleman Hough, some of the program’s most thrilling moments turned out to be the contemporized supernatural fables written by Storm and his cohort and ex-Gunfighter writer John Bower; they marked these writers as talents to watch out for.

 

In addition, on Saturday, the Walker workshoppers unveiled the first of what they are promising will be a regular series of semi-public and free afternoon salons that, for lack of a better title, we are calling the “Saturday Salon with Nathan Birnbaum.”

 

 

Birnbaum, a playwright, UCLA adjunct professor of theater and the thinking man’s Charlie Rose, interviewed the legendary and longtime L.A.-based stage actor, mentor and producer Alan Mandell before a rapt audience that included SOSE actors-about-town Melina Bielefelt, and Betsy Moore, more or less fresh from her stunning turn as Joan Vollmer in the Sacred Fools’ production of the William S. Burroughs bio-drama Bill & Joan.

 

 

At 86, Alan turns out to be a very entertaining and practiced raconteur and, of course, in addition to serving on Stage Raw’s Advisory Board, is a living link to the two great watersheds of postwar American literature and the English-language stage: the Beats (via San Francisco) and Samuel Beckett. Alan famously made history as Lucky in the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop staging of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin penitentiary, before being directed by Beckett himself as Nagg in a 1967 staging of Endgame. Los Angeles stage veterans may know Alan better as a leading light (Consulting Director) at the old LATC, from where he helped launch the career of the late, great performance-theater genius and Dar a Luz founder Reza Abdoh.

 

The salon was hosted by the punk rock documentarian and political activist Susan Ricketts at her Lafayette Park artist’s studio. Susan’s space proved the perfect venue for both Nathan’s interview and the very convivial after-party, at which we helped hold up the host bar while chatting with Bielefelt and Moore about their very cool-sounding upcoming SOSE show, Woman Parts, which is not, apparently, a sequel to the Vagina Monologues but, rather, more a feminist riff in the spirit of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls.

 

Jason’s Drunken Rohr

 

 

George Jean Nathan once observed that it is easier to write an interesting derogatory review than an interesting favorable one — an assertion that was borne out last week when Stage and Cinema’s Jason Rohr fired a deliciously woozy broadside across Stage Raw’s bow from the op-ed pages of Bitter Lemons.

 

The piece, in which Jason used the extended metaphor of a blackout booze binge to imagine himself gutter drunk enough to write for Stage Raw, is a classic of Jasonian critical wit, albeit without, shall we say, the journalistic rigor of a Don Shirley. Jason pounced on a single week’s data set of Stage Raw content that, he crowed, proved conclusively that “90% of the reviews are 100% positive,” and that SRAW was merely Steven Stanley boosterism in slightly more sober surroundings.

 

The un-argued assumption being that a telling measure of critical ability or integrity can somehow be deduced from a simple love-hate ratio of picks and pans.

 

Let us hasten to interject that Jason is one of our favorite L.A. reads. To encounter his sweetly-persuasive and highly-fanciful gonzo impressionism is, to borrow Nathan’s own words, to experience “the unstrained simplicity that so often is just around the corner from profundity and much nearer to it than the strained complexity which frequently passes in the drama for lofty thought; and … a little of the wayward music that colors and enlivens life.”

 

So what if his math abilities suck?

 

After consulting Stage Rows’ own crack team of statisticians (i.e., our computer-nerd brother in Cleveland), it turns out that when the data set is widened and all of SRAW’s reviews (at the time of this writing) are compared to Jason’s own output since January, the mighty Rohr turns into something of a hollow whimper: Jason’s nine raves and three pans make him 75 percent Stanley to SRAW’s own 49 percent positive rating based on 16 pans and 15 recommends. All of which adds up to nothing at all.

 

Note to Jason: Apparently the “enriched uranium glow” you were detecting last week was merely the reflected rays of your own red face. But it’s a good look on you, dude.