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Paul Birchall’s Got It Covered
This Week’s Roundup: LADCC Nominations Announced; The Pinter Estate Gags the Wooster Group; Steven Leigh Morris’s Plan to Rent-Stabilize L.A. Theater; Pro99 Plaintiffs Looking for Crowdfunding Angels
By Paul Birchall
LA Drama Critics Circle Awards
The nominations for the L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards have just been released, delivering a smattering of good news for many of our local theater companies. We’ll be talking more about the Awards in the weeks ahead — and also about the city’s myriad number of other awards as well. But the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle remains the flagship certification of merit, as it represents the points of view of the one organization that usually has at least one member who sees virtually every single show that opens in the town.
I’m a member of the group myself, and, I hope I am not giving any deep dark-secrets away if I say theater lovers would be fascinated by the passionate arguments and debates that occur during the voting meetings. Every play that is nominated usually has an advocate who passionately defends and makes a case for it to others who may not have as strong an opinion. The end result is something between a jury deliberations and an intellectual wrestling match wherein passion inevitably segues to consensus and wins the day.
A link to the Awards follows here, but I am especially delighted by the seven nominations for the wonderfully immersive Ken Sawyer Stonewall drama Hit The Wall, Celebration Theatre’s four nominations for Bootycandy, and the Goodman Theatre/Kirk Douglas’s four nominations for Luna Gale. I was also pleased to see wonderful productions like Ebony Rep’s Gospel at Colonus, Deaf West’s American Buffalo, and Circle X’s Trevor appear on the list in various categories.
In other good news, special awards from the Circle will be going to amazing theatrical heroes and geniuses like Janet Miller, Jason H. Thompson, and Michael Matthews, as well as to favorite theater companies like ICT in Long Beach, and Deaf West.
The awards ceremony itself (at which all things will be revealed) will happen on March 14th and be hosted by Jake Broder, whose compelling production of Miravel was one of Sacred Fools’ last shows in their old space. It will be held at an intriguing new venue, the Ann and Jerry Moss Theater at New Roads School in Santa Monica.
Pinter Vs. Wooster
Wooster Group star Kate Valk in a scene from the Samuel French-gagged production of “The Room” (photo by Paula Court)
In an event that has some theater folks scratching their heads, the Wooster Group, the tremendously creative theater troupe hailing from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has been prohibited by Samuel French from having critics review their production of Harold Pinter’s The Room when it plays this February at Disney Hall’s REDCAT Theater. French has also withdrawn permission for any future performances in New York and in Paris.
REDCAT’s press release announced the press embargo on director Elizabeth LeCompte’s production, quoting the Samuel French licensing agreement that notes “there will be absolutely no reviews of the production; e.g. newspapers, website posts, etc.” The reasons for the hostility against the avant-garde theater company’s production of one of Pinter’s plays are somewhat mystifying.
I reached out to Bruce Lazarus, executive director at Samuel French, who represents the play and the Pinter estate’s interest in it. “The Wooster Group announced the Los Angeles production of Pinter’s The Room before securing the rights. Had The Wooster Group attempted to secure the rights to the play prior to announcing the production, the estate would have withheld the rights,” Lazarus notes.
“Holding The Wooster Group in great esteem, the Pinter Estate decided to accommodate the company in their post-announcement request to present the play, with the provision that the production could not be promoted or reviewed. The Wooster Group appealed this decision. As a further courtesy, the Pinter estate accommodated by allowing the group to promote the production, but maintained their provision for no reviews of the production.”
I also received a comment from Mark Murphy, REDCAT’s executive director, who mused, “I’ve never heard of a similar blackout — and the reasons aren’t really clear to me. Nor do I understand why future presentations of this piece aren’t being licensed at this time.”
He added, “The show was not reviewed in New York, but that was only because it was a preview run of performances of the work-in-progress — with the actual premiere planned for February 4 at REDCAT. But there was no restriction imposed on critics by Samuel French or the Pinter estate in the fall. The group applied for permission for that run in the summer of 2014, and no restrictions were included at all.”
The reasons for the embargo thus appear to lie with whether or not Wooster had permission to perform the play. In a January 27 David Ng article in the LA Times, a London representative for the Pinter estate is quoted as insisting that the Wooster Group applied for permission only after the theater company had already announced its production plans. By contrast, the Wooster producers maintain that they had permission for a New York production in 2014, and were in the process of getting an agreement extension for their Los Angeles run when the overall permission was cancelled.
The Room is not the first time that a Wooster production has stirred controversy in Los Angeles. 2014’s Cry, Trojans!, a staging of Trolius and Cressida set during the American Indian Wars, was decried by Native American groups for its use of “redface” and was a lightning rod for the ongoing debate on diversity in the city’s theater community.
In the end, it is not really clear what a blackout on reviews will mean.
Although a producer has every right to refuse reviewers free tickets, it is impossible to prevent ticket buyers from writing about what they’ve seen. Back in the day when the LA Weekly covered a lot of plays, if a sufficiently important production banned critics, the reviewer (or their paper) would just buy the ticket and review it anyway. Ironically, though the acrimony of the Pinter estate may not be good news for the Wooster Group, the publicity and the fact that Los Angeles may be the only public run of The Room (which had received only preview workshop performances in New York late last year) should translate into a sellout for REDCAT.
Morris Manifesto
Steven Leigh Morris, Ron Bird Photography
Now that the training wheels are finally off the new year, theaters are starting up again. There are shows playing at almost every big and little theater in the L.A. area. I spent the holiday the same way every other thespian did, I am sure — by intensely perusing LA STAGE Alliance (LASA) executive director Steven Leigh Morris’s enormous and weighty LA STAGE Manifesto, which calls for a sea change in the way we perceive our local theater. This is a document to ruminate upon whilst sitting in front of the fireplace, feet up, quaffing a nice hot chocolate. The manifesto was published January 11.
Part of Morris’s document consists of what in management lingo could be called an “environmental scan,” with a clear-eyed appraisal of the many threats to L.A. theater — from rising property values in gentrified neighborhoods that force theaters from their homes, to reductions in school arts and programming budgets, which have the gradual effect of undercutting the next generation’s interest in creating and enjoying art.
If you had to boil down the document to its essence, I think you could say that Morris is calling for creating several theater districts in different regions of the sprawling Los Angeles area.
In some ways, this has already happened. As Los Angeles, by its very nature, is a collection of small cities within the leviathan that is Los Angeles County, neighborhood theaters generally reflect the attitudes and demographics of their zip codes. I can speak to this myself; as a theater critic, I have traveled many, many times from one side of L.A. to the other to find myself in a small theater that wonderfully represents the neighborhood it’s part of. You notice this effect in particular when you head to one of the theaters downtown, like LATC, or when you head into Burbank — or heck, when you go to Beverly Hills to see a show at Theatre 40 or the Beverly Hills Playhouse.
The heart of the LASA plan is to seek ways to help create rent-stabilized arts hubs across the city. In Morris’s words, “These hubs would provide centers of industry, education and employment for California’s “creative class”; they would provide affordable live-work spaces for artists and arts organizations; they would mitigate the need for cross-region travel; and they would support local and related businesses.”
Morris is now seeking to officially solemnize the cultural centers into bona fide local arts districts — so there will now be “theater rows” in different parts of the county: the NoHo Arts District, for instance, or the lovely bouquet of theaters on Santa Monica from Wilcox to El Centro, or the burgeoning region downtown, near Little Tokyo. Morris also mentions both Bergamot Station in Santa Monica and Atwater Village as naturally forming regional theatrical consortiums.
On January 27, Morris announced immediate next steps. As LASA attempts to inspire this notion of regional arts districts, it will be holding a series of forums, optimistically entitled, “Looking Forward,” in each of the so-called theatrical regions. The first of these roundtables will be held at the Road theater in NoHo on Feb 8. Others will be held in the days ahead at Theatre of NOTE, the LASA offices at Atwater Village, Culver City’s Kirk Douglas Theater, the 24th Street Theater in L.A., and the Music Center Annex on Grand St.
Crowdfunding the Case.
Greg Crafts’ crowfunding page on GOFundMe
Not much news is leaking from the negotiations er, informal talks between Equity administrators and the Pro99 plaintiffs, and I think that is a very good thing. The less we know, the better things are probably going for supporters of the small theater scene and Pro99. If the talks were going south, there would probably be more leaks than there are in a pail without a bottom.
To keep our spirits up, it seems, ingenious local playwright and producer Greg Crafts is starting a crowdsourced fund, ostensibly to pay for legal issues that are considered beyond what the attorneys who are working pro bono for the plaintiffs should be asked to shoulder. After six days online, the fund has raised almost $15,000 bucks, with many of the donations small gifts from individual members — 109 people so far.
I was a little alarmed by the idea of crowdfunding — I admit, I’m of a generation that doesn’t quite trust the concept, and there are a lot of gullible folks waiting to be fleeced by some nebulous “Save da Theeeters!” campaign. However, Crafts struck me as a genuine fellow and the parameters of the fund seem to be well thought out.
According to the GoFundMe site, the donations will be held in a “trust account through the lead attorney, Steven Kaplan, and used to disburse the money to pay for the facilitator/mediator who may eventually be necessary for the final resolution of any arrangement.” It goes on to say that donations are not tax deductible, and that the ultimate goal is $75,000. The list of people who endorse the fund includes some names we’ve heard before and consider trustworthy, such as Lisa Glass and Kevin Meoak. That’s good enough for me.
