The Year of Living Dangerously, Part 1

LA Theater, 2022: What Happened?

By Steven Leigh Morris

These are cynical times. When my wife gives some blistering assessment of a political situation, or of people in general (which she often does), she responds to my withering expression with the caveat, “I’m just being realistic.”

I’m an optimist by temperament. I wouldn’t plant a garden every season if I didn’t believe, on some level, that there’s beauty (and food) to come from the effort. There are also destructive rodents and grasshoppers and all manner of aphids, and beetles and cutworms. This year, I lost an entire patch of sunflowers and watermelons to finches and something that decapitated every plant just as the sunflower heads were setting. Ten feet away, on my balcony, grew another half dozen sunflowers that survived and bloomed unscathed.

This summer, an entire patch of cucumbers was eaten by rabbits that chewed through protective wire. Ten feet away, a volunteer cucumber that I’d tossed aside during thinning, bore fruit. No wire. No rabbits. Stop trying to make sense of this. There is none. It’s the art of gardening. Figuring out the impediments and the little tricks, including placement, that reap rewards alongside the losses. To me, this is realism: the balance between life and death, between hope and despondency, between planning and chance.

Despite my optimism, I have to say that this first local post-Covid (haha) theater season has been terrible. It’s not hyperbolic to admit that our scene is diminished by a Darwinian set of circumstances that describe survival of the fittest. And not necessarily survival of the best. Just the fittest. The fittest survive more from business savvy and cash reserves than artistry. The virtues of a theater scene in a movie town such as LA stem more from the vision and audacity of artists and their artistry, than from movie genre parodies (a decades-old staple in LA theater) and other forms of diversion trying to woo a world-weary audience that remembers better times.

And yet, there are those random blooms suddenly flowering in unexpected locations. They are fewer than I recall in prior years, but they’re out there. They give me hope, if only for their tenacity. I’ll focus on those in Part 2 of this article, next week.

So what’s the problem? Let me the count ways: Covid, Costs and Coverage.

Covid

Covid is far from over. At the moment this is being written, it’s spiking again. Hospitals are filling up with Covid+flu+other respiratory disease victims, and may soon face the space crisis of yore. To date, theater audiences (an aging crowd)  have not returned to theaters at 2019 levels, not even close. Sometimes randomly, yes, for this show or that. But generally, theaters continue to see attendance peak at 50% to 60% of capacity, in a good week. And that’s not just in large theaters but in those that hold less than 100 people. We can only hope for some relief when the weather warms and infection rates drop again.

Costs

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Producers in theaters of less than 100 seats must now ask, “How much more money can we afford to lose on this one?” The answer in California is “not much” because the Golden State ranks 24^th in the nation for arts funding per capita.

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Inflation aside, the new labor law, Assembly Bill 5, that kicked in January 1, 2020, has raised production/labor costs by 100% to 300%, depending on the size of the theater, and the number of actors employed. The smaller the theater, the larger the fiscal pain. (All workers in a theater must now be classified as employees, whereas before they were allowed to be classified as independent contractors and work for stipends for performances rather than the far more expensive current requirement of minimum wage for rehearsals and performances.) Not much box office revenue comes from a theater of 30-seats.  Rather, producers in theaters of less than 100 seats must now ask, “How much more money can we afford to lose on this one?” The answer in California is “not much” because the Golden State ranks 24^th in the nation for arts funding per capita.

From a social justice standpoint, this could be a good thing for, say, local actors, who now stand to make more money than before, though nothing approaching a living wage. Or, it would be a good thing if the number of productions presented region-wide had not shrunk precipitously (per Stage Raw’s regional theater listings) as a direct consequence of the ballooning costs associated with Covid and the new labor law. The law giveth and the law taketh away.

This is, or could be, mitigated by two factors: a quirk in Assembly Bill 5, and relief legislation (Senate Bill 1116) that’s been signed by Governor Newsom but has yet to be implemented.

The quirk is that volunteer organizations are exempt from Assembly Bill 5, meaning that if nobody working in a theater is getting paid, nobody is required to be paid, because nobody can accuse a producer of exploiting labor, because the producers are also volunteering. There are a handful of theaters (collectives) working, legally, under this arrangement. Some producers have expressed frustration because they want to pay their actors more than gas money, but are forbidden by labor law from doing so. The law giveth . . . you get the idea.

Senate Bill 1116, a product of heroic local activism, finally got signed by the governor in 2022, on the second legislative attempt to provide financial relief for California’s arts organizations. It’s supposed to create a fund for grants for which all smaller arts orgs can apply, to offset the new, soaring cost mandates of Assembly Bill 5. There’s a tiny hitch, and we’ll have to see how this pans out, because predicting the fate of such a novel program is like trying to predict the fate of a garden. When the bill, which came with zero funds, was signed, California was running a budget surplus of about $100 billion dollars. This was cause for confidence that the program could get multi-year, multi-million dollar funding. Now, what with Covid relief costs and with revenue shortfalls in 2022, the State will have a 25 billion deficit in 2023, according to California’s Legislative Analyst.

Coverage

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LA Times critic Charles McNulty now holds up the theater section in our newspaper of record pretty much by himself.

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Whether commercial or experimental, what makes an arts scene sizzle is the discussion around it, which used to be generated by the press. I’m old enough to remember a time when newspapers were delivered to homes and on streets; their primary revenue stream was advertising, and the value of that advertising was determined by a metric called circulation. Circulation was measured by the number of subscribers plus papers picked up from stands and boxes on the streets. In the case of the LA Weekly, for which I worked, staff would crisscross the city, replacing the prior week’s edition with the new one. The number of papers retrieved (unclaimed) became the basis for determining how widely the paper was being read. There was no distinction, or way of measuring, to what degree the film section was getting more readers than the theater section or the news section. If the arts section had fewer readers than celebrity gossip, the gossip section was essentially subsidizing the arts. But nobody knew the numbers because they weren’t measurable.

After newspapers went digital, they could assess with far more precision who was reading what within the paper. As a metric of value, “views” replaced “circulation.” Lo and behold, across the nation, newspaper discovered that there were fewer readers of arts sections than celebrity gossip or sports. They questioned the value of placing already strained resources into sections that comparatively few people were reading. And so commenced an inexorable, international decades-long decimation of arts journalism in the mainstream presses.

Our local example from a newspaper that once employed half a dozen theater writers: For all intents and purposes, LA Times critic Charles McNulty now holds up the theater section in our newspaper of record by himself. And he does so with a kind of quixotic grace. He’s doing all, perhaps more, than can be reasonably expected of one person. And he does stimulate intelligent conversation effectively in the Times and through attendant social media. But he’s still only one person.

It’s true that the number of live stage productions across the LA region has declined by about 50% annually over the past decade, but the scene remains sufficiently vibrant to warrant more than one journalist covering it for our only remaining daily newspaper covering eight counties

From the early 21^st century, in response to the demise of arts coverage in the daily and weekly newspapers, there emerged in the crevices of the large urban and national platforms a flurry of theater niche blogs, with the aim of helping keep conversation about theater alive. There was some contempt for individual bloggers, that they were self-appointed attention-seekers who didn’t actually know much about the theater, that they were angling for free tickets, or food at opening night parties — all of which was the first line of attack against the onslaught of populism, and its confrontations with expertise. After all, the heritage of drama criticism is predicated on the notion of expertise, i.e. that a theater critic provides informed and unique insights on a work of art.

But for our theater scene, the dichotomy is a false one, first because these new blogs have permitted access to new voices, which our theater desperately needed, and secondly because so many of the individual bloggers are extremely insightful and dedicated to the art form: Mark Hein, Leigh Kennicot, Travis Michael Holder and Steven Stanley spring to mind, though there are many more. (Stanley take some heat for being more of a theater fan than a critic; it’s true that he’s an unapologetic theater fan, but I also find him to be sharp as a whip when it comes to swiftly grasping the essence of a play’s intent.)  With some notable exceptions, these blogs couldn’t sustain themselves as volunteer operations, and struggled to find a business model as professional entities – not unlike the newspapers themselves.

And so, the conversation about our theater has become as fragmented and as fractious as conversation about our lives and our nation within the larger culture, for most of the same, toxic reasons related to the shifting ways tech companies determine how we receive information about the culture.

In late October of this year, I was invited to moderate an international panel of drama critics in Prishtina, as part of Kosovo’s international theater festival. The panelists included Natasha Tripney, International Editor for The Stage in London and founding editor of theater blog SEEstage.org, covering theater across southeastern Europe; Borisav Matic, from Serbia, also the Regional Managing Editor for The Theatre Times; and Tom Mustroph who works in Berlin and Palermo as both a dramaturg and a journalist.

Stemming from the premise that sustaining theater has become increasingly challenging, as has sustaining arts journalism, the question was whether or not a rising tide can lift both ships: Is there a way for arts institutions and arts journalism to work together symbiotically, supporting each other, with the ultimate aim of candid, public conversations about the work on the stage that serves everybody’s interest, while avoiding conflict-of-interest – i.e. “pay for play”?

Tripney’s comments were of particular interest, first because she identified the explosion of a dynamic new theater blogging scene in London, which largely evaporated, as it did in Los Angeles, for largely the same reasons. But she also noted that after the Yorskhire city of Hull lost all of its local newspapers, one of the regional theaters there, Middle Child, decided to dedicate a portion of its arts budget to funding arts journalism, having determined that it was in the theater’s interest to help the cultural ecosystem. The writers were able to speak candidly about the work, despite the source of their funding – Tripney’s point being that there is a successful model for such symbiosis.

The larger implication for all the impediments facing both our theater and our coverage of it, is that our theater, and perhaps the theater in general, no longer matters. They certainly don’t believe that in coastal, working-class Hull, England.

There’s a case to be made that the need for theater has never been more urgent, precisely because the impediments suffocating our theater are the same impediments suffocating our ability to recognize our individual and our shared humanity. From what I’ve seen here and overseas, when it works — and it doesn’t very often — but when it does work, the theater has the best chance of any form of communication for cutting through those impediments, giving us air to breathe — not with words like these, but with energy and actors and poetry and music and dance all coming from a stage, in order for us to face, collectively, in a room,  the worst in ourselves in order to recognize the best in ourselves. Perhaps that sounds like it’s coming from the upper stratosphere, but I’ve seen it in Kosovo, where a genocide resides in living memories, and their theater grapples with that immediate, unbearable history —sometimes in austere darkness, sometimes through satirical lampoons, sometimes in cabarets. You see rooms filled with people, in the theater, engaging in a kind of transformative reckoning with who they were, who they are, and what they’re capable of becoming. I’ve seen it with audiences in Kosovo watching a play put on by their historic enemies, the Serbs, and closing the evening with a standing ovation. Yes, it’s possible that the theater can have such profound, healing power.

Not many art forms can do all that.

Next week, I’ll discuss a sampling of productions I saw locally in 2022, and why, like those straggling cucumbers and sunflowers in my garden, they give me hope.