THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

Pilot season vs. awards season: The showdown continues. In one corner are the TV production companies and networks, scrambling for talent; in the other corner are the guilds and critics' organizations, scrambling for free film screenings and banquet halls and actors to go the extra mile to promote, present, and otherwise enliven the long, seemingly ever-lengthening parade of self-congratulation that ends at the Kodak Theatre in March. The Academy's plans to shorten the season next time out, by moving up the 2004 Oscars to February, is only likely to move up the whole awards season "launch" from late November to October.

It's not just film awards that are crowding our schedules: There were the recent NAACP Theatre Awards, which went for $150 a plate for non-nominees, and there's our very own Garland Awards, for which, sorry to say, we're charging $10 a head, even for honorees; they're coming up Feb. 10 at the Coronet Theatre, the site of the first Garlands in 1998. This year entertainment includes Eydie Alyson, doing her show-stopping "Where's Mamie?" from Michael John LaChiusa's Garland-winning First Lady Suite score, and Julie Dixon Jackson and Misty Cotton, who'll perform a big number from the Colony's multi-Garland-winning Side Show (the twins, and their awards, will be separate for this performance). Unfortunately, there will be no singing critics this year. Later, in March and April, respectively, will be the always collegial Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards and the LA Weekly Awards, the theatre community's annual blowout (apologies to the more dignified Ovations).

Meanwhile, pilot season's deadline is May, when the networks unveil their fall seasons for advertisers. Until then it's the busiest time of year for casting directors, bar none, and for their humble servants, agents and managers. As Breakdown Services owner Gary Marsh said recently on Back Stage Live (the weekly radio show co-hosted by R.J. Adams and yours truly), during pilot season Breakdown gets agencies signing up for his casting-info service from all over the country--and this year he even has three agencies from Mexico getting the breakdowns so they can submit their clients. That means that your average L.A. actor not only has to compete with the likes of Rupert Everett, Alicia Silverstone, Rob Lowe, and Luis Guzman--all of them with new pilots built around their lovable personae--but with actors from all over the country, and now Mexico. Is this another downside of NAFTA?

• I once overheard someone say that if the multitalented couple Shishir Kurup and Page Leong--actors/directors/writers/musicians with Cornerstone Theater Company--ever had a child, it would be the most beautiful creature imaginable. I'm sure this person was referring not just to Kurup's and Leong's striking looks but to their rich, soulful inner beauty, as well. Born a few weeks ago and as yet still simply named Baby Girl (come on, guys, you had months to pick a name), the first-born of Kurup and Leong has our hearty welcome and best wishes. Will she, like Liam Rauch-Moore, the precocious child of Cornerstone artistic director Bill Rauch and actor/director Christopher Liam Moore, or Emma Carey Cobb, the child of Cornerstone co-founders Alison Carey and Benajah Cobb, make her stage debut as an infant?

Not to cheaply psychoanalyze, but it seems that child-rearing has deepened and complicated Cornerstone's approach to its perennial themes of community, responsibility, and representation. Its current cycle of plays about faith--next up is Luis Alfaro's Body of Faith, about gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender people of faith, followed by a Tracy Scott Wilson-authored "Black AIDS/Black Faith" project, then in the fall by a Muslim-themed project, to be written by Peter Howard--can be seen in part as a new way of addressing the crucial questions of who we are, what we stand for, what we believe. . .

And, by extension, who "our" children really are: Rauch's most recent extra-curricular directing assignment, Lisa Loomer's Living Out at the Taper, is a broad, satisfying comic treatment of the inevitable dilemma of educated white professionals whose liberal notions about class, ethnicity, socioeconomic disparity, etc. are severely tested, if not forgotten, when a child becomes the center of their lives and they need domestic help to do the job. Rauch and Loomer, both parents of young children cared for by nannies, and both abiding liberals who care about the implications of all they do, onstage and off, bring uncommon empathy to the table but don't let the Westside whites off the hook for their unthinking dependence on an economic arrangement fraught with as many inequities as opportunities. (Kate Mulligan's turn as a blonde rich bitch is a priceless bit of unembarrassed but full-bodied caricature.) A former sketch comic, Loomer writes big, show-stopping laugh lines as well as tense domestic exchanges, and Rauch is the perfect director for both. And in Zilah Mendoza--who made a haunting Nina in his California Seagull back in 1995--he has the perfect leading lady to convey both hard-won dignity and the inner struggles that make it so hard to win. Her scenes with Amy Aquino's guilt-ridden have-it-all mom, negotiating one's maternal prerogatives against the other in queasy bad faith, become primal, painful, ultimately tragic scrimmages--they reminded me of the fateful maternal-love-triangle climax of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, which Lynn Manning adapted so sharply for Cornerstone's Watts residency in 1995, and Rauch directed with equal daring and feeling. If Loomer's play isn't in that class--how many plays are?--the comparison reflects well on Rauch's continuing progress into the heart of the matter.

• If Cornerstone and Living Out portray an L.A. we recognize, the new film Dark Blue does, too, in its way. I didn't care for David Ayer's script, a routine police procedural with the by-now-obligatory overlay of cynicism about corrupt cops and their cavalier racism and greed (adapted from a James Ellroy story that's uncannily similar to L.A. Confidential), and Ron Shelton's direction is likewise mostly ho-hum. This is especially disappointing from the director who, in his knockabout sports comedy White Men Can't Jump, cast a loving but unflinching eye on an L.A. we don't typically see in the movies: parking lots sticky with heat, '60s apartment buildings moldering in the sun, Venice Beach's ramshackle beauty. A hard-to-watch recreation of the 1992 riots mostly functions to provide extra peril for Dark Blue's implausible chase climax. Kurt Russell has moments of casual, hangdog brilliance that are worth at least the price of a rental. But his final look out at a city on fire inevitably makes us feel he's seen it all before, and much worse--as Snake Plissken in the vastly superior Escape From L.A.

• I finally caught Big Love at Pacific Resident Theatre, which, despite unanimous rave reviews at its opening in November and full houses leading to an extension through Mar. 2, has since generated a steady buzz of backlash among some theatregoers, who either can't stand anything by Charles L. Mee Jr., or who, conversely, love Mee's irreverent, boundary-breaking work and feel this production, directed by Mel Shapiro, somehow doesn't "go far enough." I can't answer the first objection, which is largely a matter of taste, except to wonder if people who see a lot of theatre and take it seriously feel Mee's free-wheeling sense of play--with form, with character, with tone, with high and low, with stereotype and ritual--as an assault, or a pointless goof. But for those Mee fans who find this PRT production insufficiently daring, I can only agree in some particulars--an occasionally lagging pace, a certain chafing at the confines of the space, a few performances that milk the obvious rather than plumbing the depths--while utterly disagreeing in general. In short, I had a very good time at Big Love. It offers not only the tactile pleasures of Mee's masterfully unruly stagecraft; it also showcases his particular gift for giving full, even sympathetic voice to civilization's most illiberal impulses without the flinching or indignation that's de rigeuer among lefty playwrights. Indeed, you can't parse the speeches of Warren Buffett or Heiner Muller in The Berlin Circle, or of Menelaus or Andromache in Mee's Trojan Women, in programmatic political ways; they don't score easy points for either "side" in familiar ways. Likewise in Big Love, speeches by the uber-male Constantine (a riveting, husky-voiced Scott Conte) and by the uncompromising revolutionary Theona (a ferocious Katy Selverstone) are not just opposite poles of the play's argument between oppressor and oppressed; they are also uncomfortably familiar positions, worldviews, from which we may shrink when expressed so fiercely but which we can't ignore. History is either inevitable or it's changeable, and either way lies blood and cruelty--or, at best, the cold but necessary comfort of forgetfulness. This insight, as much as his cut-up aesthetic, is what makes Mee the heir apparent of Brecht, who likewise delivered unwelcome quandaries to a world at war, and somehow gave audiences a good time doing it.