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God Winked

A mid-summer tempest pokes back at the drought

Kingsmen Shakespeare Company’s first cancellation in almost 20 years, due to rain

This July has seen more rainfall in Los Angeles than any July since 1910. (That may sound hyperbolic, but the National Weather Service says its true.) Who would have dreamed that you can’t rely on fair weather for outdoor theaters here in the summer? God is winking.

The storm that saturated the region over the weekend was responsible for the cancellations of Shakespeare (and one Misanthrope) – not to mention the Pageant of the Masters arts festival in Laguna Beach – from the beaches to the far side of San Bernardino.

With thanks to Patrick Vest, Diane Robinson, Richard Azurdia, Dana Martin, Lee Lawlor, Kelly Hargraves, Tracy Hudak, John Iacovelli, Alan Blumenfeld, Dan Duling, Julie Kirkman, and Elizabeth Karr for their tips, Stage Raw learned that Romeo and Juliet were hard hit by the rain, postponing their suicides at Independent Shakespeare Company in Griffith Park (the first cancellation in 12 years) and at Shakespeare OC. In a stroke of cosmic irony, The Tempest was cancelled due to inclement weather at a Newport Beach pit stop for Shakespeare by the Sea, Kingsmen Shakespeare Company’s Richard III also got his hump rained out in Thousand Oaks (the first cancellation in almost 20 years), as did Classical Theatre Lab’s The Misanthrope in West Hollywood.

Explains publicist Nora Feldman, “Classical Theatre Lab’s show is outdoors at Kings Road Park, and the seating is under a shade tree (which is why they cancelled Saturday’s show, with hard rain and lightning).” The following day (Sunday), with cast and audience peering apprehensively into the partly cloudy sky, the show went on as scheduled.

Theatricum Botanicum, up in bucolic Topanga Canyon, called off a matinee performance of As You Like It and an evening performance of Green Grow the Lilacs  – the first, 45-minutes before curtain. Says TB’s press rep Lucy Pollak regarding the 3:30 p.m. matinee, “Just to be clear, everything was fine and beautiful until about 2:30 pm and then all hell broke loose. Wow.”

Theatricum Botanicum is a union house; therefore, as Pollak explained, because the matinee cancellation was so late, the actors had to be paid regardless. (The evening show was cancelled with more notice.)

The forest of Idyllwild (Riverside County) May 8, 2015

I was in my living room, in the forests of Idyllwild in Riverside County last Saturday, reading one in a series of hyperbolic end-of-the-world articles in the New York Times about the effects of the California drought on the forests. There were striking photos of the burnt landscape from the Lake Fire that had recently roared in the San Bernardino forest, across the ridge from the San Jacinto Mountains, where my home is situated. There were also photos of a brush fire jumping Interstate 15 near Barstow, of abandoned trucks and cars that had been detonated by the flames, and there were photos of exhausted, heroic firefighters mopping brows, and quotes from a U.C. Berkeley professor saying how the fire season in California is now 12 months a year. What struck me was the author’s melodramatic, almost mythical description of California’s forests that had never been so dry and so brittle.

“In the forests outside San Bernardino, the drought’s impact was hard to miss. Stomping down the dirt trails leading into the Lake Fire meant breathing in a fine dust, as dry as that of an Iraqi desert. The leaves of otherwise moist vegetation like Manzanita, an evergreen shrub, crunched rather than bent, and much of the wood on the ground was dry and light, some as airy as Styrofoam.”

That’s when I looked up from the newspaper and looked out my window: Rain was pounding down, leaving newly flowing rivulets. Strawberry Creek had cascades of water crashing over stones, jays and finches were screaming out their excitement, and the forest itself – the same forest referred to as historically ashen in the New York Times – had never looked so lush.

How many editors gave their nod to this series, and to the timing of its release? This is not to deny the gravity of climate change or the impact of California’s drought, or of the fires and parasitic beetles that have indeed savaged the arid forests. But to read this story, itself saturated with data supporting its thesis of dystopia, you’d think there had been no rain for four years. There was no mention of the mini-El Nino that formed off the coast of Mexico around this time last year and may have been responsible for the 20 inches of rain and 10 inches of snow in the middle altitudes of the Angeles and San Bernardino national forests over the winter – a 20% increase in precipitation over the prior year. That El Nino petered out, but currently (also unmentioned in the Times report) there is a larger, irreversible El Nino now forming, and verified by three climate sources. This does not guarantee rain in California this coming winter. Nothing guarantees rain in California. But it portends a considerably wetter winter in 2016 than 2015 – not enough to end a four-year drought, but likely enough to water it down some.

Also missing from the Times report is the reality that droughts in California are cyclical – the evidence being the rings exposed in ancient oaks and redwoods, revealing periods of water shortage over centuries, each lasting several years and then ending. Is the current drought part of a normal cycle, or an aberration of climate change? Only time will tell. According to Mark Thompson, retired U.S. Army weather-forecaster, the thing about climate change in general, and climatology in particular, is that “nothing can be predicted beyond a five-day window.” Everything else is speculation.

Rain could easily crash down on Theatricum Botanicum later this month or next, as last week’s storm showed. Everything is possible.

Forecaster Joe Sirard of the National Weather Service told the Associated Press that with downtown Los Angeles in line for more rain, “It looks like there’s a good chance the monthly record is going to go up. Really, this is super historic.”

Shakespeare in the Park, 2050?

But these nuances, and the facts supporting them, do not conform to the more easily digestible mythology of destruction and horror without end. Land of earthquakes, land of endless fires and floods, land of broken cities and forests aflame.

To be more parochial, land of actors pouring in to L.A. to be movie stars. Land of broken-dreams. Land of bitter-departures. Land of evil producers exploiting the desperate. Land of hobbyists and crap theater. They keep saying it over and over until it becomes like legend, but that doesn’t make it any more true, or any more supported by so many facts on the ground.

L.A.’s theater has responded with its own mythology over the past quarter century – the legend of a strange and quite wondrous scene, a city-wide incubator of talent slowly rising like a phoenix in the shadow of the film and television industries. Its bizarre shapes and behaviors defy economics, and any number of other cultural expectations – such as people in L.A. aren’t supposed to take interest in poeticism or reflection – the kind seen at Rogue Machine or Theatre @ Boston Court. These aspects don’t make money, so who cares? Our theater’s resistance to those myths is worth believing because it happens to be true, supported by the evidence, like the evidence of a summer tempest in the midst of a long drought. Still, we’re going to have to fight like hell for our legend to endure.