Stuff Happens
A Changing Landscape for the Humanities
By Steven Leigh Morris
Hands of God creating man from clay.
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Being human, and humane, as reflected through the humanities has sunk (on these shores at least) as a priority.
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The 2023 PLAY LA Festival opens next weekend, grappling, in its own way, with the changes bearing down on our local theater scene, which are similarly bearing down on the culture at large.
The news that Center Theatre Group has chosen to shutter the Mark Taper Forum and most of the programming at the Kirk Douglas Theatre from now through the 2023-2024 season (though there is no date set for either theater’s re-opening) is a disheartening emblem of the state of America’s regional theaters. CTG is not alone in its financial woes. Add to the list Oregon Shakeseare Festival, the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, and so many more flagship theaters across the country.
In an interview with Stage Raw last month, CTG’s incoming artistic director Snehal Desai referred to a cultural “inflection point.” Perhaps its time to reckon with the realities of an institutional theater movement that launched in 1950 with Zelda and Thomas Fichandler’s Arena Stage in Washington D.C, and spread like wildfire to American’s cities and hinter regions, that can no longer sustain itself. This network of American theaters was propelled by a subscription model, supplemented by federal and state funding, as well as private donors and organizations such as the Ford Foundation. What has happened over the past decades has felt like climate change, with the subscribers and the funders all backing away, ostensibly to support more urgent social causes.
The cultural “inflection point” may be a larger concern than just theater, when there evidently isn’t the collective will to support the flow of ideas and passions that define the performing arts. The theater is a place where we can learn, and re-learn, what it means to be human. Yet being human, and humane, as reflected through the humanities has sunk (on these shores at least) as a priority. Click on YouTube, and you’ll find an ad for a company that specializes in AI produced voice-overs. “I’m not human,” the narrator chirps, “but I’ve learned to copy the emotions that sound human.” Well, there go thousands of more voice-over jobs for actors.
The WGA is leading a labor strike to keep screenwriters from being something other than literary janitors to clean up scripts written by AI, whose primary purpose, across a spectrum of professions, from Amazon delivery services to Google services, to education, to public health, to the film, music and TV industries, is to further concentrate wealth in the hands of the wealthy, literally at the expense of our humanity.
Is there an antidote to all this? So far, yes. The Hollywood Fringe Festival has no trouble attracting audiences, young and old, who hunger to see raw emotions and reflections on tiny stages, performed under the most primitive of conditions. Perhaps some kind of festival model that’s not funded on the backs of the artists themselves provides some remedy for the woes facing our theaters, large and small, that are literally grounded by their geography and infrastructure.
AI and the viability of local theater are the topics of two symposia, as part of the PLAY LA Festival that’s co-presented by (and at) Greenway Court Theatre and Stage Raw. All events are free.
On Friday, June 30, at 4 pm, playwright Shem Bitterman will moderate a discussion on AI (“Robots and Writers: Do the Humanities Need to Be Human?”) with lawyers, philosophers and computer scientists including John Lopez, Jonathan Gratch, Jen Markewych, and Kurt Eggert.
On Saturday, July 1, at 4 pm, journalist-playwright Steven Leigh Morris will moderate a discussion on the viability of local theater with local artistic leaders including Lindsay Allbaugh (Center Theatre Group’s associate artistic director), Martha Demson (Open Fist Theatre’s artistic director), Guillermo Cienfuegos (Rogue Machine’s co-artistic director), independent producer Matthew Quinn, and Kimberly Glann (representing the LA County Department of Arts and Culture).
On Friday night, at 8 pm, the Festival hosts a special reading of “Fluff,” a new play by Sigrid Gilmer and directed by Kila Kitu
The body of the festival consists of concert readings by four playwrights who developed a play from scratch through the PLAY LA play development program. These playwrights are “Roost” by Zharia O’Neal, presented by Playwrights’ Arena and directed by Penny Johnson Jerald ; “St. Rage” by Adam Esquienazi Douglas, presented by Ammunition Theatre Company and directed by Nicole Pacent; “The Palm of Her Hand,” written by Weston Gaylord, presented by Circle X Theatre Company and directed by Casey Stangl; and “Red Tar,” written by Morgan Smalley, presented by The Road Theatre Company, and directed by Andre Barron.
Hard to tell at this early stage, but festivals such as this could be roadmap forward for how to sustain this art form as an advocate for being human.
