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In Defense of the Audience: an Apologia Pro Vita Sua

99-Seat Theater, Now and Forever?

by Myron Meisel

I come to praise the 99-Seat (Theater) Plan in Los Angeles, not to bury it, to speak on behalf of that absolutely essential component of the theater everywhere, one unrepresented at next week’s forum on the Plan and seemingly left out of the heated discussions on the issue: namely, the audience. (On January 12, the stage-actors/stage-managers’ union, Actors’ Equity Association is holding a membership meeting to discuss its intentions for the Plan. This comes on the heels of a survey taken of its Los Angeles membership.)

[Correction: the Union’s annual membership meeting is scheduled for January 12; its forum on the 99-Seat-Plan is scheduled for January 13.]

And here in Los Angeles, and in Southern California generally, we the audience have it pretty damn good. By my lights, the last dozen or more years have been nothing short of a Golden Age for range and degree of excellence in theater. That’s why it’s of the utmost importance that everything possible be done to contradict the Big Lie that will not die: that Los Angeles suffers from a paucity of innovative and excellent work, a bigotry masquerading as a fantasy that our scene is predominantly comprised of vanity productions for actors seeking representation and recognition, road shows and local efforts of unrealized good intentions.

Instead, the true delusion is that so many people of good will, of otherwise substantial culture, and of hopeless ignorance believe that Los Angeles theater begins and ends with the relatively few institutional houses, the official temples that serve as standard-bearers for brand name live performance. Every real music devotee knows that the action is in the clubs and not the arenas, though perhaps patrons of classical music are not so aware that tremendous activity thrives outside Disney Hall and the L.A. Opera.

In fact, there are far more functioning theaters in Los Angeles than in New York or Chicago and, I suspect, London, mounting far more shows, upward of 500 annually of professional productions with runs of two weeks or more. Is that too much theater? Naturally, just as too many bad movies open in the summer, and too many awards contenders open in the last quarter. For that matter, not unlike the misperception of the local theater, most moviegoers remain unaware of most of the best films of any year (when they get here at all) because they come and go with such unheralded rapidity, even faster than the short runs mandated by the 99-Seat Plan.

The point should always be: is there enough good theater in Los Angeles? My answer is a resounding “yes,” and virtually all of it is due to the unprecedented creative freedom empowered by the 99-Seat Plan. Los Angeles has been universally recognized as a major world metropolis for some time now, yet it is still prone to the inferiority complex Chicago managed to shake off. (That bias is obvious on the Board of the L.A. County Museum of Art, for another example.)

The snooty, unfounded condescension toward the town because of its mass entertainment business might have had some legitimate traction with the arrival of the New York playwrights, newspapermen and novelists, mostly journeymen themselves, who migrated here at the advent of the sound era to work in the talkies (and later, in series television), and felt so deeply compromised to need to assert that their past, at least, continued to remain preeminent. As recently as 40 years ago, there may still have been some discernible vestiges of an aesthetic backwater, though by then the movies that had been so reviled had already been reevaluated as exemplars of the finest cinematic art. But given the present-day evidence, these persistent, yet pernicious, provincial attitudes merely betray lazy stereotyping, inappropriate to apply to the dynamic cosmopolitan culture of contemporary Los Angeles, which is represented at its very best by its vital theatrical life.

Let me put it another way: before I started writing about the theater, for at least a decade I had attended live performances, mostly theater, an average of four times a week. I was a dedicated audience member and still consider myself above all to be one. For the last four years, I’ve been going five times a week, and it is rare that I encounter a show that is not at least worthy of attention, if not admiration. You may find that hard to believe – I did, too, but experience has made a believer out of me. Despite inadequacies, most local shows I choose to attend do offer that ineluctably real experience of being live and shared, moment by fleeting moment, a reason I like to sit close, where I can see directly into the players’ eyes. It’s not a genuinely intimate encounter if they can’t spit on you.

Is there a lot of bad work out there? Uh huh. But with a little familiarity with the scene, it is possible for an alert theatergoer to avoid most of it. (One must except hapless critics on assignment, bless them for the effort.) As with the other arts, you follow the people whose instincts you learn to trust. (An early trick I discovered was to track the best sound designers, since they appeared to have the most reliable taste in material.)

Usually in assessing the local scene, out-of-towners (and too many folks who have only dipped their toes in the pool instead of plunging in) cite a half-dozen highly worthy companies, and they are not wrong, just woefully incomplete. By my reckoning there are a goodly two dozen or more committed groups capable of substantial work (and many more not wisely dismissed), and that dedication costs them dearly in every way except the soul-nourishing satisfactions of caring deeply about personal expression and collective effort, and of sharing that with their public. And in part because so few people are paying attention, freedom’s just another word for nothing else to lose.

Los Angeles’s troupes are especially distinguished by their ambition and daring, most particularly in the face of such threadbare budgetary resources. Very little they do has the remotest connection to movies, television or celebrity, though the ethos demands understanding tolerance for those who must take those paying gigs that make the truer work possible.

Those resources they do have are an abundance of talent, though – directors, designers, stage managers, even (heaven help us) producers – and there is never any excuse for bad acting where there are so many gifted performers willing to sacrifice for the privilege of putting their abilities to their highest and best use. Indeed, the most elusive and difficult element inevitably remains a good text.

Actors, like everyone else in the arts, deserve to make a living and are irrefutably entitled to protection from the depradations of unfair or unscrupulous treatment. That’s a proper role for a guild or union to play for its members’ collective benefit. Do abuses occur? Indubitably. But like Reagan’s Welfare Queen, the errant anecdote does not suffice to indict the substantial benefits of a wildly successful and indispensible program.

As a most appreciative member of the audience, my conviction remains: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Above all, don’t fix it by breaking it. The sorely mistaken misapprehension that better-paying gigs will materialize by choking off the liberty of Equity members to choose to work on a basis that provides them with other compensating fulfillments conjures up memories of unrealistic demands closing the bakery rather than expanding the pie.

Unlike coal miners in the 1970s U.K., no one is being compelled to work for what are unquestionably inadequate fees.  (The same goes for everyone else engaged in the hapless noble enterprise, not excluding journalists.) My impression is that many of the most vocal opponents of the 99-Seat Plan neither participate in nor partake of it, but they are most eager to flaunt their lack of awareness, to propound their prejudices, and above all, to deprive those who care deeply about the opportunities it affords from that avenue of self-expression. Self-righteous people love the chance to compel everyone else what to do as they dictate.

I worry also that with an impressive new headquarters building in the region that there may be an irresistible compulsion for Actors’ Equity Association to feel itself be seen to be doing something, when in large measure the system in place remains of incalculable benefit not only to its members but most especially the community and the culture at large. Tweaks need to be administered with a lapidary hand.

There ought to be unabashed civic pride in our local theater community, which, thanks to the vision permitted by the 99-Seat Plan, I would not consider the lesser of any other city in the world. I do the legwork and see for myself. If others did, they could readily encounter what they have been missing. But like most of the other traditional arts, theater is of course fated to fade, as our identity becomes inexorably expressed solely as dictated by the niches we are deemed to inhabit (as access to information supposedly expands, marketing considerations deem it essential for our interests to contract). Let’s just not hurry it along, and relish the fruits of this most invaluable innovation for as long as our artists can sustain it. It’s a wonderment not to be dismissed.

There’s an exchange in one of my favorite musicals, On The Town, when a female Manhattan cabbie (it’s wartime) tells her passenger, a sailor on leave, when he reads out of a dated guidebook telling her to take him to the long-shuttered Hippodrome: “I may not have 5000 seats, but the one I’ve got is a honey. Come up to my place.”

Our 99 seat theaters comprise a genuine sweet spot. Come up to our place.

Myron Meisel was the founding film critic for the Chicago READER and the Los Angeles READER. He is also an award-winning film-maker. Most recently, he was The Hollywood Reporter‘s theater critic. Meisel is currently a regular contributor to Stage Raw.