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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 24th 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?
