Welcome to Issue 2 of Stage Raw!
We continue to take small steps to expand coverage of the arts and the arts community in and beyond Los Angeles. We thank you for your support, and hope that you will stay tuned: the best is yet to come.
This week’s features focus on the visual arts. Padua Playwrights Artistic Director Guy Zimmerman has a report on “art warrior” Poles, recently returned to Orange County on a rainy night (See “Polish Art Warriors Ride in on a Rare SoCal Storm,” in features). Pauline Adamek has the back-story on the restoration of Jackson Pollock’s Mural at the Getty (See “You Take the High Brow” feature.). Meanwhile, in Shoreditch, London, we crossed paths with muralist Blériot, who just happens to have a Day-of-the-Dead mural on Melrose. (See “I’ll Take the Low Brow” feature.)
In Stage Rows, Bill Raden continues to celebrate and offend our friends and neighbors. Also, in his feature “Sounds of Riddance,” Raden discusses the motions and emotions between the words in Sissy Boyd and Wesley Walker’s new plays, under the collective title Riddance. Raden speaks with the authors and with actress Meg Foster.
This week we also have our second installment of “Our Town: Memorable Moments in L.A. Theater,” with stories by actors Cathy Carlton, John Achorn, Rhonda Aldrich, actor-playwright John Pollono, and playwright Sharon Yablon.
In addition to providing local theater reviews and listings, which we hope to amp up in the coming weeks, Stage Raw is laying the foundation for a network of endeavors/exchanges beyond Los Angeles. After all, we can’t really be on a map if the map doesn’t include the rest of the country and/or world.
One of the first initiatives up our sleeve is a call-and-response exchange of new plays.
This whole idea started from a world theater course I teach at Cal State. I got so weary reading the students’ critiques of world classics – mainly parroting what I felt about the plays – that I asked them instead to write five-minute plays, set in any era with characters of their own, but inspired by the classics.
They lit up. I lit up. For the first time, I was able to see how the world classics actually affected them, and the connections they made between sometimes ancient plays and their own lives.
Stage Raw has taken this idea overseas, and was in London this week, meeting with the literary managers of the Young Vic and the Royal Court theatres. We spent a scintillating hour with the Young Vic’s David Lan, who said he’d explore which British playwrights he knows might want to participate. Ditto Chris Campbell at the Royal Court, who’s now prepared to take the idea through that theater’s administration.
Poland, too, is ready to play, thanks to Joanna Klass (see Guy Zimmerman’s feature, below.), and just as the “post” button was hit on this article, Russia also said yes. Here’s from John Freedman, theater critic for the Moscow Times:
“Mikhail Durnenkov, the head of the big Lyubimovka new play festival and of the International New Play Projects, which Lyubimovka runs together with the Meyerhold Center, said he’d be interested in participating in your project, officially as part of the latter base (Meyerhold). . . We’re a go on this now from Moscow.”
So, we’ll start by posting new American plays (Pier Carlo Talenti, CTG’s Literary Manager, has agreed to help with that), then writers in other cities/countries will respond to the plays with five-minute plays of their own. (Inspired by our originals, that is.) Readings of the five-minute response plays will be live streamed back to the U.S. In this way, texts speak to texts, playwrights speak to playwrights, not through the language of criticism, but through the language of art.
Beginning this spring we’ll also be rolling out a series of theme issues focusing on networks established by L.A. artists in other places. Because of Klass, Poland has been a major influence on many of our theater-makers, so we’ll start there.
With much, much more to come . . .
The arts are under siege – as though they’re an indulgence. Yet the arts may be the only true forum for expressing all that’s happening to us, of expressing where we’re going in our lives and in our cultures. The arts an indulgence? Hardly: they’re a necessity. And so is the robust support of them.
Please send your ideas and suggestions to steven@stageraw.com. We need your help in order to be of service now, and to be able to be of service in future.
