Lamp Life

Community theatre has long been something that was considered “less than” in the eyes of the professional theater artist. The common idea of community theater is that of a bunch of hobbyists slapping together another standard musical with poor technical work. When I worked at Stages Repertory in Houston there was someone who referred to it as River Oaks Community Theater in conversation as it was in the River Oaks part of town and it wasn’t the Alley. I think that the word community in theater needs to be re-examined.

This past Tuesday evening my fiancée and myself went to see the Culture Clash show at the Taper “Water and Power”. I had been long looking forward to this show, having been a long time fan of Culture Clash since watching their long gone variety sketch show on fox when it led into the Simpsons. Having since veered into the professional theater world and having studied Culture Clash academically I was excited to see their work live. And I really thought it was fantastic.

However It did get me thinking to many a conversation I’ve had about my belief in the death of regional theater. The LORT movement started quite publicly as a way to bring out of New York. It was envisioned as a network of theatres that brought theater out from the east coast and helped to develop new work from local artists as well as testing the waters before things went in the opposite direction.

But, New York isn’t St. Paul and it definitely is not Los Angeles. It is it’s own thing with it’s own culture and a population more than twice that of New Zealand. Los Angeles is also it’s own thing with it’s own culture as well. We have different sensibilities and as someone who spent a lot of time back and forth as a child this is very clear to me.

So if the culture is so different, if we aren’t just on opposite coasts but have opposing cultural paradigms from our outdoor activity to economic base, should our theater be the same? If plays are about people and relationships at some level irregardless of narrative, and we have a different approach to out lives and how we interact with others how can a play from New York have as much resonance here as it would there.

I’m not saying that the pieces won’t work here, sometimes they do and other times they don’t, but it seems to me to be an important thing to point out. For instance, look at this past year’s CTG season. Michael Ritchie’s first season started with Dead End, a long archaic musical that was essentially a remount from a Williamstown production under his helm years back. It was awful. It is about life on the east river in the 1930s. There is little relation to the Los Angeles mind. That specific culture is not as relevant, it becomes a pageant and not a story. The Cherry Orchard was similar, it was actors posturing, it was a show, but it was not relevant.

This isn’t to say it can’t work, but it just it harder. Doing Ibsen or Shakespeare is not hard innately I believe, but making that leap into getting the audience to go along with you is harder because of cultural distance. The Elizabethan English mind is no contemporary Angelino. But it can work given you make that leap.

Back in reference to the CTG season at the Taper, the first thing I was really compelled by this season was this recent production of “Water and Power”. It takes place in Los Angeles and is specific to Los Angeles. And if you want someone to go to the theatre that typically does not then you’re going to need to make it relevant to him or her. Permanent Collection was successful it pulling in a more diverse crowd of new theater goers not because it was good, there was that, but because it had something to do with it’s audience, it wasn’t a vehicle for a star to get their stage cred.

You may be thinking, well most of August Wilson’s work takes place in Pittsburgh and it works in other places. That’s because it’s about the black experience and it’s set in Pittsburgh. It isn’t about Pittsburgh. But The Cherry Orchard is about pre revolutionary Russian land based class wars and the dynamic alteration of the relationships between people that resulted… you have got to find something that brings it back to now. The most successful production to my mind of it was the Williamstown season of 2004 where Ritchie was leaving and a new theater was being built. That clicked, the change in control, the repurposing, loaded memories being physically altered in the name of progress. But when we see it in Los Angeles? It’s about Annette Benning being on stage. Without Walls was about Laurence Fishbourne being on stage, I couldn’t tell you anything about it really except for it’s lukewarm reception.

It is about relevance to your community. This is what I think is the key. How does this respond to ideas and issues of those people around me, ultimately the people coming to see this piece, who buy the tickets? How do I make this relevant to them so that the extra dough they shell out over Snakes on a Plane is worthwhile? They can see movie stars in greater detail on screen. Putting them onstage is novel for a few lines, but then the content needs to be there. And this is hurting smaller theaters.

Here in Los Angeles there must be hundreds of small theater companies enabled by the 99-seat plan. What I’ve noticed about them though is that their programming does not justify their numbers. How many companies a season can do the same play until it’s time to move on? There were 5 productions of “How I learned to Drive” my first full year back since college, and a similar number of productions of The Shape of Things. Why? Part of the problem is that the companies do not talk; they just do what seems edgy enough, but will get people in. But they are all trying to get the CTG subscriber crowd it seems. They don’t offer anything different (most of the time) from the big guys, unless you can qualify that as saying the production quality is not as high. There is no respect for resources; just blowing it all on something that will fill seats with the audience that already goes to the theater. It’s why the majority of the 99 seat audiences are part of the 99 seat productions.

It is my belief that it is a lack of response to the community. They are trying to cast a large net to get in 99 people a night or less. That seems manageable if the taper can sell out a run and it has 300 seats with more shows. A smaller theater, without much parking, without the big advertising dollars for print, radio and mailings, can’t affect this audience effectively, not consistently. What it can do though is become part of its community. These struggling companies turn to the small theatre community when rent goes up and they are threatened with losing their space, or when they need things, but what about the people that live around them? Stages in Houston is in what is now a Historic Landmark that was saved from repurposing to condos by the community of people involved in the theatre. A bigger audience won’t save your space; tickets barely cover production costs if at all. You need the community to have a feeling of necessity that you’re there and to get that you have to give them something specific to them, not a new play from off Broadway for it’s west coast premier, that’s marketing talk for the dissemination of culture from somewhere else.

So why do I feel most engaged by “Water and Power”? Because it’s the first thing I saw that had anything to do with me. Cherry Orchard was a bore. iWitness was about a situation that I can’t imagine being in and I got it very quickly. Without Walls I didn’t bother. The Black Rider I loved but couldn’t see how it would do well in LA. “Water and Power” was about something that I see and interact with everyday and was in tune with my sensibilities more than anything else. It reflected my community of Los Angeles, what has started to be marketed as “The Village of LA”. And is it necessarily the use of Los Angeles as location, I don’t think so, but that framework does allow me to associate with the action. This is as easily accomplished in more abstract no narrative work, it is simply an issue of relevance and “Water and Power” has a very opaque relationship to LA in this use as an example. But if radio is geared towards an audience and advertising is specific, the theatre must be somehow relatable to the local community culture.

Community Theater is important if it reflects the community. In some small Midwestern town it could be about theater hobbyists putting on another West Side Story. It’s people from the community getting together to do something then can get behind. And Los Angeles, or any city /town theater company can learn from this. You must know your audience and play to them and as the we look at the retribalization of society, the implosion of community and the increase of urban density you must become a part of that community or just be another notch on progress’ bed post. If you can’t defend your reason to be in a specific place, no one else can and if your identity doesn’t stem from your surroundings and your desire to do theater (which I maintain as a secular non theistic religion) you are welcoming death into your midst’s.