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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!