NOTES FROM ARDEN

BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS

 

 

Where’s the Birdsong in Arden?

 

 

Stage Raw’s marketing department has reported the unsettling truth that in the effort by Stage Raw to promote their shows, many of our theaters don’t even have Twitter accounts, as though the future of our art lies in the methods and technologies of 1984.

 

 

With a little help from his friends, Theatre Unleashed’s Managing Director Gregory Crafts tells the story of how tried to use Twitter to enhance awareness of our community through a hashtag campaign centered on the L.A. Weekly Theater Awards last month. Crafts wasn’t even at the awards. He ran his campaign off-site at his own theater, where he was running auditions for an upcoming show.

 

 

Despite what he describes as the apathy of his peers, the negligence of our major support orgs, including Stage Raw, LA Stage Alliance, LADCC and the event hosting L.A. Weekly — that’s not counting a Verizon blackout in the awards venue – just past midnight, Crafts learned that his team’s unifying hashtag #LAThtrAwards had recorded well over a million impressions. For about half an hour, it was “trending.”

 

 

Imagine, Crafts postulates in his Stage Raw tech column, How Tweet It Is, the awareness that could be spread if our community actually coordinated on this effort, rather than leaving it to an experiment run by about a dozen people.

 

 

Charles Marowitz (1934-1944)

 

 

The fearless gadfly, critic-playwright-director Charles Marowitz, died last Friday after a long illness. Marowitz founded the Open Theatre in London, the Malibu Stage Company in Los Angeles, and became known for his blistering critiques in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner of L.A. individuals and institutions. His widow, Jane Windsor-Marowitz told Stage Raw that her task was often to clean up after the political messes he created, but that also he had a little-known soft side – weeping at romantic movies.

 

 

The First Negro Classic Ballet

 

 

 

Mindy Farabee returns with her second edition of Vaulted Ambitions, discovering who we are by unearthing who were (this time with the help of the Huntington Library). With her typical, prodigious research, she tells the exalted, poignant story of L.A.’s First Negro Classic Ballet company (1946 to 1956) – an ensemble that created art in its spare time (after work, for the most part), and became celebrated across the nation and the world. They way they operated then looks a whole lot like how so many dance and theater companies operate almost 70-years later. Still, they made history, even if that history has been left to gather dust. Farabee arrives with a dust rag, to put a shine back where it belongs.

 

 

The Dog Ate Our Gossip

 

 

The uncharacteristically remorseful Bill Raden says there wasn’t much gossip this week for his Stage Rows column. Even more uncharacteristically, Raden got talked out of revealing some upcoming dish about Zombie Joe’s Underground after ZJ pleaded with him to keep it under wraps. Still, Raden was clearly smitten with A Delicate Balance at the Odyssey (being reviewed by Pauline Adamek next week), and was able to report on the comings and goings of playwright-actress Jacqueline Wright, who’s back in L.A. after working in NYC for a while.

 

 

L.A. Stage Day

 

 

A festival of workshops, lectures and symposia at Cal Sate L.A., presented by L.A. Stage Alliance, is coming Saturday, May 17, Pauline Adamek reports. Stage Raw will be there.

 

 

On Stage

 

 

Check out Stage Raw’s eight reviews from last weekend, plus our Pick of the Week: Sheila Callaghan’s Everything You Touch, plus our current Top Ten.

 

 

Incoming

 

 

A new edition of View From the Bridge – crossing the generational divide – posts on Monday, in Citizen Raw. Our international digital play festival is shaping up, via the arrival of new plays from Warsaw. We’ll be unveiling that program within in two weeks, posting American and Polish plays, and having playwrights and the public on two continents weigh in through any number of interactive means.