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Round-up of the Week’s Events

By Paul Birchall

Lawsuit Against AEA Filed, At Last

For our local theater scene, the huge event of the week was the release late Saturday evening of the Complaint filed with the U.S. District Court by Pro99-Seat Union Plaintiffs against their own Union, Actors’ Equity Association and its Executive Director, Mary McColl. At last, the first step in actually taking on the Union has taken place. The brief was filed but not served on the Union in the hope that the mere filing would bring AEA to the negotiating table, which is what the Review Committee (established in the 1989 Settlement Agreement — the result of the last time AEA members took their own Union to court) had been trying to do for months. In the Union’s eyes, however, as soon as they eliminated the 99-Seat Plan, the Settlement Agreement and its Review Committee went up in flames with it. I have been gnashing my teeth at the maladroit, arrogant behavior on the part of AEA, which is often so tonally deaf to the community it serves, it would almost be impossible to parody.  

The legal arguments are likely to take up our thoughts for some time to come, and we can expect many analyses of the document, what it means in terms of the strategy in the campaign for ensure the safety of the Equity Waiver scene.

One suspects that the reasons for filing the document, but not yet serving it to Equity, are an attempt to provoke a reaction from AEA.  The Union’s first response, however, was to re-name a breach of contract, breach of good faith, breach of fair representation, and breach of fiduciary duty Complaint as a “minimum wage” lawsuit, and to tell Pro99 to go stuff itself. This is not encouraging, but also not unexpected.

One of the aspects of the brief that leaps off the page to me is this:  The brief is essentially a continuation of the original 1989 Equity case – in the same way that World War II was really based on World War I, though separated by some years of peace.  The argument is how Equity has illegally abrogated the terms of the first legal agreement that was made with them in 1989.   The majority of the plaintiffs are holdovers from the original 1989 case – Greg Grossman, Salome Jens, and Joseph Stern, to mention a few.

The claim is made that the Union violated fair labor practices by ignoring the results of last April’s referendum – the one in which two thirds of the local membership voted to retain the 99-Seat Plan and repair it — and that the Union’s jiggery pokery in blowing off meetings with the Review Committee that was established by the 1989 agreement, sending biased information on the issue while ignoring any other point of view, and ultimately ignoring the results of the advisory referendum, and more than enough to merit legal damages and recourse.  

It is also interesting how the brief singles out for prosecution the Union’s Executive Director Mary McColl. The brief is flat out gunning for her.  One can’t help but think that her position in the Union is over, whatever happens, her being the now-cited instrument behind all the breaches of good faith. It would be much in the same way that Pope Benedict had to step down so Pope Francis could create a  seemingly more open-minded Catholic church.  

We will be saying more about this in weeks ahead – and so will the rest of the Los Angeles, I suspect.

McNulty on Criticism  

The other interesting weekend event was Charles McNulty’s essay on theater criticism. 

When the great and the good speak, it behooves us all to listen.  And I was particularly fascinated by L.A. Times’s Theater Critic’s excellent exegesis on the art of theater criticism in our local market. 

I really wish that every critic had the space to write a piece like this in a forum such as the L.A. Times – a piece that’s a philosophical explanation of how we review, how theater reviews should differ from theater criticism, and, yes, the ambiguous position of arts journalism in the context of overall arts coverage.  The article is, in many ways, a boiled down concentration of his thoughts from last month’s Stage Raw symposium at Rogue Machine, in which a panel of local writers attempted to define the issues confronting arts journalism.  McNulty will be back on Monday night for the second Stage Raw symposium, October 26, 7:30 p.m. at Pasadena’s Boston Court Performing Arts Center, also moderated by Margaret Gray, and joined by Sasha Anawalt, Anthony Byrnes, Sheldon Epps, Steven Leigh Morris, and Laura Zucker. As of this posting, there were 11 seats remaining RSVP here.

I will admit, I am often irritated by McNulty’s East Coast focus on Broadway reviews and London tours while coverage of the local scene goes wanting.  However, McNulty is on the money when he discusses the fine craft of arts criticism, and how it needs to differ from the market-oriented aspects of vox populi-Yelping.  

I found myself cheering when McNulty opined, “For as long as click counts are ruling journalism, theater criticism will be on the endangered species list.”  And I almost crowed when he mentioned, “report card (reviews) make for dull reading.”  

Summing it up in one more gem: “Criticism’s value is indissolubly tied to the art form’s. The mission now is to go deeper, to stop thinking so much about the business of the theater and to confront the reason for its existence.” 

Gary Grossman On the Mend After Serious Heart Attack

We are all thinking of theater producer Gary Grossman, who’s currently recovering from a heart attack suffered earlier this month. He’s one of the plaintiffs in both the 1989 and 2015 lawsuits against AEA, and runs the Skylight Theatre in Los Feliz. His support of theater and his theatrical output as a producer has always been robust.

Publicist Judith Borne reported that Grossman should be released from the hospital in a day or so – and that he’s ready to throw himself into plans for the tribute to Ed Asner that’s coming up on November 1.  

It is actually a good week for Grossman: The acclaimed production of El Grande Coca Cola that he created at Skylight is slated to open at the Colony in an Equity production November 7^th.  Not to hammer the point home, I think Grossman would say that is the process by which productions under the 99-Seat code should lead to Equity work. 

Best wishes to Mr. Grossman and good thoughts for his quick recovery.