The Persistence of Memory

Heading Into Night, and Electric, I

 

There’s nothing scientific or remotely empirical about the observation that I’m about to make: L.A. theater is doing just fine, though without the intensity of earlier decades. Intensity means quantity, and that has certainly been curtailed by union mandates and state legislation that we’ve written about exhaustively and exhaustingly. This “professionalization” of the art has stifled opportunity for both actors and writers. And yet the work goes on.

Among the virtues of this weird place is a small cadre of artists who have always aimed to grapple with whatever cultural moment they occupy — and continue to do so — earnestly, honestly, probingly. Perhaps they did/do this out of devotion, perhaps out of spite, I don’t know. Many are still here. Still crazy after all these years, to quote the song. And many are young, newcomers, walking a well-trodden path, old ground, and new ground that they’re trying to break.

I recently read some 150 snippets of plays submitted to the PLAY LA contest. Mark my word, there is no shortage of playwrights in Los Angeles with a breadth of imagination and curiosity. Getting their work onto a stage is a different matter. It was easier then, before we became more “professional.” They write works that will never make it in the commercial marketplace, amidst this season’s avalanche of Halloween and horror tales, of rock and juke-box musicals, of Broadway and off-Broadway imports, of Hollywood movie adaptations and movie-parodies that have, at times, almost driven me out of the field — not exactly screaming but certainly muttering under my breath. It was always so, this lava flow of “entertainment” that had so little do with, well, much of anything that ever mattered. On Hulu and Amazon, and other streaming services, this is completely understandable. These commercial enterprises and hedge fund operators aim to please with tropes, and to placate executives eyeing their profit and loss columns.

But in our theater? Theater in Los Angeles in an art form where producers calculate how many shekels they’re going to lose on any given show. If they’re going to lose money anyway, why not present something that matters? That provokes? That offers a challenge? Especially if you’re in a hall with 30 to 100 seats. The money was lost long before opening night. You’ll never get it back. So what else have you got to lose? You reputation? Believe me, nobody will remember. In our culture, we underestimate the potency of amnesia.

And yet there’s also this nagging persistence of memory.

When I was younger, I mean decades ago, what kept me addicted to our theater was the notion that a cluster of companies, amidst waves of vanity productions and pointless revivals of pointless plays, were both careless and care-free in their determination to explore the world by inviting us to see it through some unorthodox, unconventional lens. They were driven by artistic conviction, hubris perhaps, that superseded the mere need for attention. That warrants respect, regardless of the outcome. Let me count the ways:

Theatre of NOTE, the Cast Theatre, the Rachel Rosenthal Company, Theatre/Theater, Playwrights’ Arena, The Matrix Theatre, Zombie Joe’s Underground, Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre, City Garage, East West Players, The Inner City Cultural Center, A Noise Within, Antaeus Company, Pacific Theatre Ensemble, The Tamarind Theatre, Robey Theatre Company, About Productions, The Fountain Theatre, Rogue Machine, Watts Village Theatre, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Ghost Road Theatre, Company of Angels, The Odyssey Theatre, Latino Theatre Company, Theatre @ Boston Court, The Victory Theatre, The Back Alley Theatre, The Actors’ Gang, Road Theatre Company, Critical Mass Performance Group, Skylight Theatre Company, Theatre Movement Bazaar, Zoo District. There are more. Some are dead and some are living, as the song goes. Some have died a death of atrophy, even though they still produce. And some have adapted meaningfully to the tectonic shifts that the passage of time brings.

Thirty years ago, I wrote in the pages of the L.A. Weekly that L.A. theater was at its best, its most thrilling, when it served as in incubator of new work, of new ideas. That’s one view, at least, that hasn’t changed.

And just when I’m about to throw up my hands and say, what’s the point? It’s over. Why not relocate to live out my remaining years on some hillside looking out over the Adriatic Sea, where perhaps I’ll be spared the anxiety of watching my mountain home in Idyllwild, California burn to the ground in some yet-to-arrive forest fire, I see two productions over a weekend in Los Angeles. And I’m reminded, yet again, of what was, what is, and what can be. I see artists working things out on small stages, things that actually matter, questions of what is true, and how can we possibly know what is true, what is history, personal and global, as memory fades, as our legends dissipate into the static of pop culture like time-tinted photographs abandoned in a lonely basement.

In a recent, spontaneous in-person survey, none of my 150 general-ed Cal State students knew who playwright Arthur Miller was. His wife Marilyn Monroe has survived this entropy. It’s all so fickle, this “legacy” thing. Johann Sebastian Bach was unknown, too experimental, until Felix Mendelssohn excavated him close to a century after Bach’s death. One of Stage Raw’s younger writers, a graduate of the USC theater program, had no idea who Gordon Davidson was: the founding artistic director of our flagship theater, The Mark Taper Forum, or what used to be our flagship theater. Going, going . . .

Los Angeles was always a city of transients and transience. Perhaps that’s why its theater community is a family, albeit a bickering and at times abusive one. Nonetheless, there is, or seems to be, a level of caring for each other that runs deep in many circles. The city’s transience is an emblem for our global society: of, for example, careerist employees, newly hired, already looking for their next job, to move on, move away, to better decorate their resumes, while their employers show a similar disregard for their long-term well-being, a similar loyalty void. This represents a kind of fracturing of what’s a now antique social-professional contract that says we exploit each other while we assist each other. If that contract were better respected (remember when auto giants and other, mega industries offered pensions and paid leave?), that respect might help keeps us civil, if not civilized, not to mention loyal. I’ve come to believe that this erosion, this complacent unravelling, is among the reasons that our theater community is a family, with uncles and aunts who have been around forever. This is true in almost every metropolitan region. The theater, in its oddball way, provides a kind of glue, especially among the smaller, more personal companies. Company members who stay company members for decades. Memories, of performances, of backstage tales, become enshrined. Persistently so. As they do in families. As the world shifts beneath our feet.

In recalling those histories, what is invention and what is re-invention? What intelligence is lived and what is artificial?  These are ideas that excited me when I was younger, decades ago, and that are now, to me, the most pressing questions of our times, when guardrails for telling the truth have been ripped asunder and hurled over cliffs into ever rising seas. And here they are, those huge ideas, onstage, at both Theatre of NOTE and the Odyssey Theatre.

The first of these two shows is Heading into Night at the Odyssey, devised by Beth F. Milles and Daniel Passer, and performed by Passer with cameo performances by Peter Mark and guitarist German Schauss. The other is Electric, I, Shayne Eastin’s new play at Theatre of NOTE.

Heading into Night is a clown show, performed by Passer (formerly with Cirque du Soleil) as a poignant almost one-man, almost wordless vaudeville in the tradition of Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s Fool Moon. I was also reminded of British physical comedian Rowan Atkinson who, similarly, barely spoke, though Atkinson’s “Mr. Bean” is gleefully, obnoxiously selfish, whereas Passer’s clown is a gentle and perplexed soul. Visually, he’s out of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with his bowler hat and ill-fitting garb (costumes by Márion Talán de la Rosa). Scraping it off his head with a perfectly calibrated swipe, Passer nimbly rolls that hat across his arm before tossing it, sky bound, so that it returns perfectly to the crown of his head. A bell dings with its landing. A little girl in the audience laughed out loud.

There are so many visual tableaux, under Milles’s superb direction, but the most telling are locked into Passer’s set design: industrial-grade packing boxes that store memories: a stopwatch, a lamp, a letter, or photograph, locked away in some basement and being discovered years later. Reminders of what was, or what could have been. This clown needs reminders because his memory is fading, or so we’re led to believe in the show title’s post-script: “a clown play about . . . [forgetting].” Passer piles these boxes one atop another, into a precariously balanced tower. Until it collapses. Such is our past.

He sits at a bus stop. Jackson Funke’s lighting indicates the approach of a bus while we hear the familiar sounds of a bus approaching, the hiss from the brakes, and sound of the doors swinging open. Passer watches it drive away before realizing he was supposed to board that bus. He chases it. The motif is repeated several times in succession. He couldn’t remember to get on the bus, though if that’s his state of mind, his forgetting may be a blessing. Gabrieal Griego’s projection design beams the words, his thoughts, “Have I been here before?”

One box morphs into a microwave oven, in which he nukes popcorn, forgets it’s there, a forgetting which sets fire to his abode.

From another box, he withdraws a water-filled bowl containing a (mechanical) goldfish swimming in circles (metaphor, anyone?)  Feeding it while lounging, he’s also preparing his own soft-boiled egg. In the midst of these two tasks, he takes a phone call (the phone is a land line, for the nostalgia-inclined), and while distracted and yacking, he mistakenly pours salt into the fish water, and later attempts CPR on the now limp fish. This begs the question, what is cognitive decline, and what is mere distraction? How many road deaths are attributed to cellphone use while driving? This has nothing to do with aging, though it is certainly an attribute of brain function, and the arrogance that we’re immune to its limitations at whatever age.

Passer is a limber, athletic performer, who leaps from his seat with the agility of a dancer.

In a meta-theater spin, he invites audience members to dance, but that immersive aspect is blocked by an enforcer, The Mover (Peter Mark), underscoring the isolation that our anti-hero battles.

Perhaps it’s a logical extension of a play about the slippage of memory that the production should be so baked in nostalgia, particularly through Passer’s sound design, which includes recordings of songs from World War II (“We’ll Meet Again”) to the 1950s (“On Moonlight Bay”).

(In the 1951 movie, On Moonlight Bay, with Doris Day, her male high school suitor, played by Gordon MacRae, complains about the shallowness of his high school peers. “The world is falling apart, and all they care about is baseball.” The more things stay the same, the more they stay the same.)

This aural trip down memory lane also includes another 1950s dittie “Que Sera Sera” (also made famous by Doris Day), with a sojourn to the 1960s and 1980s, respectively in Simon and Garfunkle’s “Old Friends” and The Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” (Annie Lennox).

Among the many elements that make this production so evocative is Wei-Fang Chang’s video design with a wash of images accompanying the story that are so striking and haunting, literal and abstract, in combination with the sound design, they transform the show into a hybrid of theater and cinema. But the form isn’t the point here. It’s the emotional wallop that it delivers.

Shayne Eastin’s Electric, I at Theatre of NOTE has a riveting premise, and a vibrant, compelling production, more than capably directed by Amanda Sonnenschein. It employs ten actors with one standout performance by Brad C. Light as Nikola Tesla, who, not counting the electric vehicle named after him, re-entered the popular culture with a movie this year bearing his name. His rival was the famous, and if this play is to be believed, infamous, Thomas Edison as they battled over patents for products that both inventors competed to bring to the starting gate. (Tesla lost most but not all of those battles.)

Light’s Tesla is ostentatiously out of his mind, willfully electrocuting himself to test the AC current (that he invented) and its viability for use in an electric chair. While being insane, he is also gentle, amiable, in Light’s multi-faceted interpretation. Particularly intriguing and endearing is his affinity for birds (gorgeously depicted in Kesley Kato’s puppet design).

Most of the play is set during the birth of the motion picture industry. Tesla, a Croatian immigrant living in New York (though his country of origin is never specified in the play, as this is a work that plays fast and loose with the historical record), is trying to bring a fledgling actress, Victoria (Hannah Arungwa) across the continent to meet Cecil B. DeMille (Joel Scher). Tesla famously predicted the cell phone back in 1926, and that prediction is in the play. Meanwhile, Victoria’s lover, Millie Shaw (Caitlin Apparcel) is a writer-dancer plugging her wares. A director Cora (Greenberry Lucas) films her dancing, a relentless almost abusive interaction that gets captured on celluloid and lodged in the culture’s memory banks.

Act 2 jumps to a contemporary VR convention, featuring the grandchildren of the characters we met in Act 1 (an echo of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls) This is where we come to realize that Act 1 was a setup for a culture trafficking in alternative realities, and that the burgeoning movie industry that we so romanticize was phase one of that “evolution.” We’re now living with the mind-bending consequences of blurring both realities and memories. This is scorchingly illustrated in a scene where these Gen Z grandchildren watch with a kind of wonder Millie’s dance, that we saw being filmed so brutally in Act 1. It’s just a flickering image. A memory. A meme. Not even real, anymore.

Structurally, Eastin’s play is a mess. I still loved it. Act 1 goes on for 90 minutes, an excruciating length where the story’s trajectory becomes increasingly challenging to discern. (My guest fled after Act 1.) I guess the play’s defense comes from the character of Millie, speaking to reporters, belittling Cora the entrepreneur: “She likes sense. I like the senses.” Is aiming for both really such a conundrum?

Electric, I could easily be repaired by judicious editing and clarifying the story, because this play is, at root, a story. I just had trouble locating it. The breadth and brilliance of Eastin’s ideas warrant further work on this play. The playwright and the production team and future audiences deserve it.

Here’s a small speech by Nikola Tesla, from the play, anticipating the cellphone:

“We live in a world of device. To receive and to give. A telephone. A camera. Computers. Everything becoming flat. Someday, mark my words, someday, a small receiver, no bigger than a watch, will enable a person to listen to music or speech from any other location. No matter how distant. No matter on land or sea. And because it is there, man will listen. And they will hear what they hear. In the same manner, a picture-whether still or moving-will transfer from one place to another. Millions of small machines. Desires. Devices. Who holds the truth, Victoria? Who holds the device?”

Forgive my enthusiasm, but this is a brilliant encapsulation of past, present and future. Movie studios once held the device. Now its the likes of Elon Musk. What on God’s Earth have we done?

I was driving home to Idyllwild along Sunset Blvd. (for the first time in years), after a Sunday matinee of Electric, I.

Adjoining the corner of Las Palmas Avenue, the former offices of L.A. Weekly are now as unrecognizable as that newspaper itself. Near Bronson Avenue, also on the north side of Sunset, there’s a massive new edifice, unoccupied, I think. I had to blink a couple of times before recalling that’s where the Old Spaghetti Factory used to be before it was bulldozed. At a red light, I peered at this massive building and tried to imagine where the Spaghetti Factory front entrance had been. I tried to reinvent where, precisely, I had walked into that building so many times, so many decades earlier, with friends and lovers, some living, some gone.

Did it ever actually exist? The Old Spaghetti Factory? Or am I just inventing it? This memory? This virtual reality. This city, this stretch of Sunset Boulevard at least, is so unrecognizable from what was not so long ago, both glossier with chain-store eateries, and more decrepit.

In Brian Friel’s play Faith Healer, the British, under Cromwell, aim to conquer the Irish by changing the road signs, from Celtic to English, so that the natives no longer understand where they are. That’s what this felt like in what was once my city, with its network of landmarks. Traversing Sunset Boulevard, it felt as though these changes, the developments, this progress, was a kind of conquest of people who had lived there so long. By whom, and for what, remains a mystery.

“Who holds the device?”

To people who say that the theater is ephemeral, I would reply, try living in Los Angeles. Try living in the 21st century.

HEADING INTO NIGHT: A CLOWN PLAY ABOUT…[FORGETTING]  Odyssey Theater, 2055 S Sepulveda Blvd., West LA. Opens Sat., Oct 6; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 2 pm; thru Nov.  www.odysseytheatre.com

ELECTRIC, I Theatre of NOTE, 1517 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 6 pm; thru  Oct. 28. https://theatreofnote.ludus.com/show_page.php?show_id=200461517