THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

What's wrong with a little healthy provincialism? Now that the Taper's Gordon Davidson has programmed two shows dealing explicitly with Los Angeles and its rugged social topography--Lisa Loomer's Living Out and Culture Clash's current Chavez Ravine--you'd think critics would praise Davidson for fulfilling one of his theatre's great civic mandates. Instead I read and hear criticism that these shows' L.A. references--including one, in Chavez Ravine, to Davidson himself--are too inside, that the plays won't travel, etc. Somehow I don't recall hearing anyone grouse that Lily Tomlin's references to 5th Avenue or Carnegie Hall in The Search for Intelligent Signs of Life in the Universe, let alone Max Bialystock's rant about the Village in The Producers, are too New York-centric. And that's not even citing the dozens of plays about vacationers on Fire Island, or singles in Manhattan with doormen and buzzers, or Upper East Side art mavens. I've heard audiences in L.A. laugh with an awkward pseudo-knowingness at these New York references (hell, I've joined in, sometimes only half sure what I was laughing about); there's almost a default assumption that plays are set in New York. But plays set in L.A.? Well, they can include all sorts of chatter about scripts in turnaround and three-picture deals, plastic surgery and valet parkers and Morton's, and they'll be understood, if not admired, on the other Coast. But complain about the 405 or the bus system, comment on the differences between Silverlake and Santa Monica, talk about restricted housing covenants or the redevelopment of Downtown L.A., or write a show about valet parkers--sorry, your play isn't gonna travel.

Besides, why is portability the measure of a play? When a play is as nakedly resonant as is Chavez Ravine--which not only tells the tangled story of the eminent-domain eviction of the residents of the former neighborhoods where Dodger Stadium now stands but also weaves in threads about the redevelopment of Bunker Hill, where the Taper now stands; about the marginalization of the West Coast left; about the Zoot Suit riots; about the sinister Committee of 25 who were at the nexus of all the deal-making that reshaped the face of old L.A.--why not simply savor it and evaluate it by how well it speaks to our current moment, right here, right now? While I'm a little wary of the spurious claims of "relevance" that are regularly trotted out for any work of art with even a shred of political content, when something is relevant, specifically relevant, to our time and place, I feel it.

It's true that Chavez Ravine has some bumpy, sanctimonious spots and isn't much of a play per se, but as a piece of live theatre it's a knockout. I'm a Culture Clash fan from way back, but I guess I'd forgotten how great they can be, how totally they hold the audience in their hands, and how well they reward the trust we willingly give them. They first burst onto the L.A. scene at LATC with The Mission and Bowl of Beings, and have spent a lot of time since trying for TV deals and doing Anna Deavere Smith-style docu-theatre pieces all over the country, but this L.A. history play finds them bringing it all back home, to a forgetful city with a complicated past that's always fresh because, in many senses, we're still living it.

• For a full report of the SRO Conference, see Les Spindle's story (starts on the cover). The biggest news of the conference was advocacy organization Theatre LA's "re-branding" as the LA Stage Alliance. It sounded to me like simply a way to identify the organization with its bi-monthly consumer magazine, LA Stage, but it's more than that: It's a way for Theatre LA's member theatres to ally with all L.A. performing arts, including dance and music organizations, not least because there's a big overlap in audiences. Also because, as alliance president/CEO Lee Wochner put it, there's strength in numbers--and California's performing arts will need strength in the face of Gov. Gray Davis' proposed 85 percent cut in arts funding. I didn't see any folks from the L.A. Philharmonic at the conference, but Mark Murphy from Cal Arts' new Redcat space in Disney Hall was there, and it seems wise, with international journalists poised to descend on that concert hall's opening this fall, for the city's theatres to get on board that train and get out the message about L.A.'s cultural health.

One unfortunate recent casualty of the "rethinking" going on at the new LA Stage Alliance was longtime employee Dan Harper, who'd been at his job longer than anyone in the office (indeed, he was hired there the same month as I was here). He worked under the tenure of two executive directors, Bill Freimuth and Alisa Fishbach, then, in a title change, under president/CEO Lars Hansen and most recently Wochner. Harper's longtime title was director of marketing, in which capacity he served as ad director for LA Stage magazine and for the Theatre Times co-op advertising in the L.A. Times. He was also administrator of the first competitive Ovation Awards. For my part, I always appreciated his help in assembling Back Stage West's annual Theatre Guide. Reasons for his departure remain under wraps, at the request of all concerned, but Harper did say, "I had a great time working there, and I wish the organization no ill will." And he's happy to have the time to devote to Red Noses, the new Theatre Banshee production that opened last week, in which he appears. We'll miss him at Theatre LA--oops, LA Stage Alliance--but we're glad he's still on the scene.

• Had a posh dinner at Pacific Dining Car (another just-right local name-drop in Chavez Ravine, by the way) with composer/lyricist Jerry Herman and the folks from Routledge, who'll publish a coffee table collection of his lyrics in the fall. I'm not much of a Herman aficionado (though I have a soft spot for Mame), so I brought along BSW critic Les Spindle, who's a bona fide expert and who garnered some gems from Herman, including reports of plans for new Broadway revivals of his major shows. I overheard Herman fondly recalling his first near-operatic score, for Milk and Honey, and voicing his casting choice for a Mame revival: Catherine Zeta Jones (not Cher, as has been reported). Also present at this tony dinner, held after a busy day at the L.A. Book Expo, were musical theatre maven Miles Kreuger, critic Leonard Maltin, local publishers' rep Dory Dutton (of the local bookstore family), and Samuel French's buyer, Mark Simon, who told me about a show he occasionally directs around town called The Hearst Castle Gaieties, inspired by reports of an actual play by Charles Lederer called The Magoos, performed in the 1930s at San Simeon. Who says we ain't got history?

• A final NOTE: Lovelace ,The Musical, a concoction I mentioned in my last column as slated for a brief workshop run at Theatre of NOTE, will not go down as planned; the producers pulled out. In other NOTE news, I just found out that Alina Phelan, a tremendously subtle, sympathetic performer I enjoyed in Bing, Yellow Flesh/Alabaster Rose, and with the comedy troupe Those Meddling Kids, has just been cast in the lead of NOTE's upcoming production of The First Quarto of Hamlet, directed by Oregon Shakes vet Andrew Borba. The cross-gendered-Shakespeare thing is a sort of a mini-tradition at NOTE, with Jacqueline Wright taking the lead in last year's uneven Richard III, and Diane Robinson casting male witches in her similarly hit-and-miss Macbeth of 1995. Here's hoping this next NOTE venture into classical terrain, to open July 27, is closer to the company's sublime Duchess of Malfi of 1998 than these previous Bard brews.