[ssba]
In the few weeks, I’ll be working on a transition team for Stage Raw, which will continue to thrive and serve. I won’t be working on the day-to-day operations, but I’ll be watching from a distance, and lending a guiding hand from that distance.– BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
There are so many plays about aging, and the loss of memory. Few of them have this degree of economy and breadth of perspective. How can something so small feel so large? This isn’t a play, it’s a prayer.–BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
On Saturday, October 17, plaintiffs representing L.A’s. intimate theater community, and consisting of Equity members and some plaintiffs from the 1989 lawsuit against AEA that resulting in a Settlement Agreement, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central Division of California for breaching that Settlement Agreement (among other complaints), but have not yet served the Union, in the hopes of bringing AEA back to the negotiating table.
Lew ran backstage at the start of intermission, assembled the cast and lit into them, focusing his wrath on Pete: “You do NOT act while stoned! Acting is difficult enough, totally dependent on timing and on the connections you make with the other actors, and with the audience. You can’t do any of that while stoned!”
There was a long, pained silence, broken by the rumble of Pete’s voice:
“No white man ever yelled at me, and lived.”
This raises the question of how to find the broader markets reached, with diminishing returns, by the print media? What are the most viable economic models for sustaining comprehensive and quality reporting while reaching for a broader market share? And how is it possible to engage ethnically diverse perspectives, to keep the performing arts, and its coverage, relevant to the population at large?
Dear Violet and Mattie Fae, we understand that you like to control things and that you’re exceedingly stubborn, but rather than keeping union actors out of 99-seat theaters, where nobody makes any money and people try to make art, wouldn’t your efforts be more in keeping with the traditions and ideals of your union to get your actors into the Pantages? Why do you keep picking on Little Charlie, instead? Because the unemployment figures within your own union demonstrate that whatever it is you’ve been doing all these years simply hasn’t been working.
To be more parochial, land of actors pouring in to L.A. to be movie stars. Land of broken-dreams. Land of bitter-departures. Land of evil producers exploiting the desperate. Land of hobbyists and crap theater. They keep saying it over and over until it becomes like legend, but that doesn’t make it any more true, or any more supported by so many facts on the ground.
At this moment, a no vote appears headed to a 61% victory. The word “landslide” is being used by media sources from London’s The Guardian to The New York Times. Sound familiar? — BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
To every thing turn, turn, turn, turn. There is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven. When is the time to turn the other cheek, and when, before it’s too late, is the time to bring in the lawyers?
“The larger point being that we presume that the law’s the law, but if that were really so, there wouldn’t be any need for lawyers.”
