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The Shape of Things
Live Theater, Live Streaming, and Union Turf Wars
BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
Wading Up-Stream
Chima Castanoz in LAS INSTRUCIONNES, a live-streamed production presented by 24th Street Theatre
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So Zoom is now the answer? In theater, business and academia? Or, perhaps, it’s the interlude? Are we moving forward? Backward? Are we on pause?
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Let’s start with the good news. A fledgling union of local theater companies organized at the start of the 2020 pandemic by Skylight Theatre’s artistic director Gary Grossman, under the moniker Alternative Theatre Los Angeles (ATLA) – with its 35 companies — is presenting a digital festival of plays (Together LA) via the Twitch platform. The festival runs through October 17, and is presented in association with LA STAGE Alliance.
Theater goes on, streamed across America. Sort of. But hold on . . .
Wasn’t the whole point that defenders of the art form kept saying, that the primary reason that live theater will endure its crushing economic realities and antiquated business models, its ticket prices that exclude swaths of the public, is that it provides an in-person, antidote to the disconnect between people – the disconnect that has saturated our culture since the emersion of and our immersion in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok, et al? So Zoom is now the answer? In theater, business and academia? Or, perhaps, it’s the interlude? Are we moving forward? Backward? Are we on pause?
Social media divides us in the guise of connecting us, right? Everyone in their disinformation silos?
TV and movies are swell, but here’s the case that my arts advocate peers have been making for the relevance of live theater: To literally, physically bring a fractious society together for a civilized forum for often difficult ideas, there’s the theater. Live theater. Nothing compares to occupying the same room with the performers, the visceral connections with actors and audience, the spontaneity, the danger, everybody breathing the same air. And when that theater is 99-seats or 35-seats, what could be more energizing? But what when COVID-19 floats in that very air?
The death tally from this virus now exceeds 210,000 Americans. That’s if we believe the official numbers. And, frankly, in October, 2020, why should we?
No need to dwell on the businesses shuttered by this monster, the service jobs lost, the furloughs. Broadway won’t reopen until summer 2021, at the earliest. Broadway is “the pulse of New York,” according to one distraught Broadway producer interviewed on National Public Radio. And New York is the pulse of America, she added. After New York got this viral demon under control in the summer, cases are spiking there again, as they inevitably will here. Countless LA theaters that were renting their venues have turned into gypsy companies – a euphemism for homeless. Those that own their buildings have a better chance, though mortgages remain due, and there’s almost no income to pay them.
Scrapping for Turf
What’s good for the goose . . .
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Meanwhile, Proposition 22 in the upcoming election seeks to exempt the very Uber and Lyft drivers for whom AB5 was created. (That’s what happens when you work for a monied industry.) There are no such exemptions in the offing for stage actors, designers or the producers who can no longer afford to hire them.
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As you well know, or should, the actors’ union raising the price tag for a large swath of tiny LA theaters in 2016 to produce an experimental or new play (with union actors) – that added burden of putting on a play wasn’t enough.
As a side note on the newfound blend of live-theater and streaming technologies: That stage actors’/stage managers’ union, Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) is currently engaged in a heated dispute with its sister union, Screen Actors’ Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) over jurisdiction concerning plays that are streamed. SAG-AFTRA has held jurisdiction for decades over any work that is broadcast in any medium, but the broadcasters’ union offered a COVID waiver for stage actors in plays streamed through non-commercial platforms, thereby giving AEA temporary jurisdiction over a limited class of streaming technologies. This waiver, for instance, would not apply to, say, Netflix, The Disney Channel, etc., and SAG-AFTRA reserves the right to approve each waiver applicant. However, SAG-AFTRA has now taken exception to AEA’s newly formed “Media Committee,” accusing the economically besieged stage actors’ union of acting in bad faith, and of looking a gift-horse in the mouth by plotting to use SAG-AFTRA’s waiver as a precedent to co-opt, permanently, the broadcast union’s broadcast jurisdiction. (AEA has heretofore had jurisdiction only over live theater productions.) SAG-AFTRA has now launched its own investigation of AEA’s “Media Committee,” while AEA furiously insists it’s trying to protect its members’ health-care and other benefits from SAG-AFTRA’s lower pay grade. Accusations are flying.
Now, just for fun, let’s throw in yet another impediment to putting on a play: California Assembly Bill 5 (AB5, 2019)– perhaps the most ill-conceived piece of legislation ever misapplied to the arts. AB5 was created to protect Uber and Lyft drivers by making them “employees” (rather than “independent contractors”). This labor rights bill got weirdly glued onto all live theaters in the State, even community theaters, which depend on volunteers and independent contractors who are all now supposed to be classified as “employees.” So the burden of AB5 on our local stage producers (add another 30% of employee taxes to every production budget) also wasn’t enough of a burden to what now feels like the crime of putting on a play. Enforcement of AB5 remains murky, creating added confusion; meanwhile Proposition 22 in the upcoming election seeks to exempt the very Uber and Lyft drivers for whom AB5 was created. (That’s what happens when you work for a monied industry.) There are no such exemptions in the offing for stage actors, designers or the producers who can no longer afford to hire them.
And if that weren’t bad enough, then came COVID.
And all that our theater community wants is to put on plays.
Zooming Down the Internet
Rob Nagle in NIXON ON NIXON, Blank Theatre Company
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As Footlights’ Peter Finlayson remarked about the current Together LA virtual festival, our community is discovering how to present plays virtually in much the same way that early 20th century film-makers were stumbling through the challenges of making movies, of learning to be conversant in a visual language with clumsy equipment.
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And so we turn to Zoom – and now its enhanced competitor, Open Broadcast Software (OBS) streaming technology. Are these our Saviors who art is Heaven?
Full disclosure: I love teaching my California State University students through Zoom, though my courses are largely theoretical – playwriting, world theater, etc. I don’t teach acting or choreography or anything that would otherwise be enhanced by live interpersonal contact.
Weirdly, through Zoom, I get to know my students better than in the classroom, their attendance in class is way up, and they seem more conversant and engaged.
However, I tried logging into a couple of play readings on Zoom, and couldn’t last more than ten minutes. Eventually, I pleaded with the playwrights to simply send me their plays, that I’d get more from just reading the text than trying to imagine what the tone of the play might be without the audio lapses, the wobbly focus, the moments when somebody’s Internet wavered and a punch line was shattered.
As Footlights’ Peter Finlayson remarked about the current Together LA virtual festival, our community is discovering how to present plays virtually in much the same way that early 20thcentury film-makers were stumbling through the challenges of making movies, of learning to be conversant in a visual language with clumsy equipment.
I won’t review most of what I’ve seen in the Festival thus far, other to say that the mere act of putting on these plays is a triumph. It’s also an act of unfettered boosterism, which isn’t a bad thing given the existential threat all theater is facing. This festival represents the concept that we actually do have a community that, despite competition and our sprawling geography, and wildly differing aesthetics and attitudes to what the ambitions of a theater company should be, our community is capable of working together for a purpose larger than any company, or any individual within it. When the fight of intimate theater was with Actors’ Equity Association in 2016, that kind of shared purpose didn’t seem possible. COVID is an impressive if daunting unifier.
Of what I saw, I will point out 24th Street Theatre’s 13-minute presentation of Bryan Davidson’s play Las Instrucciones as a sample of how the OBS technology can be used as an indicator of what the future might hold.
Even as a virtual event, the production, directed by Jorge Villela, captures the lugubrious whimsy that’s been a hallmark of 24th Street Theatre in its live productions, such as The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tillane, La Razon Blindada and Walking the Tightrope. The play is more than a story, it’s a rite.
There are two aural backdrops. The first is a gentle Schumann-like piano accompaniment to most of the film – and yes, it does come off as a film. Also, much of the show is presented through narration as a bi-lingual (Spanish-English) narrator (Julieta Ortiz) gives instructions to the main character, Antonio (Chima Castanoz), on how to create a shrine to his late dancer-wife (Thais Mendendez) who succumbed to the 1918 Spanish Flu. Like so many of this theater’s productions, it flirts with grief through a beguiling acceptance, captured in Castanoz’s heavy movements, and slightly pained yet shrugging facial expressions. The technology allows two characters to occupy the same space as though in a dream, which encapsulates this play’s sweet, eerie logic.
Here is Night 6, of the Festival, which includes Las Instrucciones, at 42:24.
I was also struck by Rob Nagle’s haunting performance as the former president in Sean Waldron’s Nixon on Nixon, directed by Bree Pavey, and presented by Blank Theatre Company, though not as part of the Together LA Festival. The boxed in format (Nixon stalking around his office) would be better served live, where single settings are a hallmark of the stage. The screen – not to mention theater in the 21st century – can afford more animated visual support than an office setting that never changes, which feels antiquated even in the world of stage technique. But those drawbacks are almost entirely compensated for, by the authenticity and subtle lunacy of Nagle’s performance.
It’s evident that there will be forward motion towards the streaming of theater productions on that happy day when COVID is just a painful memory, and live theater returns, which it will. The streaming format well serves stories of isolation and plays with few characters. But when many actors can safely occupy the same room, theaters can make movies. But will it still be theater? This begs the question of theater’s original purpose in ancient Greece. A shared space, a ritual for all. A good start would be using this reboot opportunity to redesign live theater business models that provide affordable access for an impoverished world.
Whether or not the 21st century even needs such rituals will depend on whether we’ve come through our technological revolutions with our humanity still intact, with any desire to absorb entertainments and dramas in the company of people who may think differently from us. Or are information and disinformation silos now permanent? Movie chains are now throwing in the towel, yielding venues where the public gathers to watch movies to the streaming technologies inviting people to watch flicks among their friends. To a large extent, live theater’s loftiest purpose is to poke holes in all that silo cement, to provoke doubt in a society cemented in certainties, to bring people together, or at least, to try.
On Thursday, October 22, City Garage launches a weekly talk show on its YouTube channel (“Animal Farm: Theater and Politics with Steven Leigh Morris and Guests.”) The first two episodes will feature as guests, respectively, Jon Lawrence Rivera, artistic director of Playwrights’ Arena; and Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor of American Theatre Magazine. More details to come.
Also, the reviewing wing of Stage Raw remains on hiatus due to the Coronavirus Pandemic. We aim to resume weekly reviews with the resumption of live programing. We’re using this time to assemble a new advisory board, in order to make the Website less dependent on the financial support of an already overburdened stage community.
