States of Plays: Where North Coast Shows Come From

As we pause after the traditional end of last season and before the start of the next, here’s a retrospective question: where do the plays we see on the North Coast come from?

 For many decades the answer to that would have been easy: New York. After tryouts in select northeastern cities, a show would play Broadway, then go on tour until years later community players would get their chance. Musicals, comedies, dramas—New York generated pretty much everything. But that’s no longer true.

Back in the mid-1980s I interviewed Jason Robards, Jr. backstage at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre during a revival run of the 1930s classic You Can't Take It With You (soon to be seen at NCRT). He was the second generation of three (so far) to be New York stage actors. His father performed on Broadway in the 1920s.  One of his sons, Jason III, was in this production.

 “When I was starting out just after World War II,” Robards, Jr. said, “my father came to see me and he told me ‘This is terrible! When I was an actor there were 700 road shows out, and two hundred some-odd theatres on Broadway.’ But even when I was starting out we still had 134 theatres in New York, and many road shows and stock jobs and resident theatre jobs.”

 New York City dominated largely through size. Even in 1940 it had a bigger population than the entire state of California, or any other state. But war industries spread out across the country in World War II,  the population boomed and so did suburbia in the 1950s. Robards believed the new highways that sliced through city neighborhoods and led to the suburbs depleted New York City audiences. “Now I think the theatre in New York is going to become like the opera, if it isn’t already becoming that: a small, specialized thing.”

 Robards didn’t reckon with the rise of tourist-oriented blockbusters in a Disneyfied Broadway. That trend continues, as movie companies invest more in huge stage productions. The Off-Broadway and then Off-Off Broadway stages rose in the 60s and 70s, then settled to a sustainable level as “a small, specialized thing.” So now Broadway produces bigger but fewer shows, and non-Broadway houses have become incubators for shows that will live most of their lives in independent regional and community-based theatres across the country.

 So last season on the North Coast for instance, we saw products of traditional Broadway, from one of the earliest musicals (Anything Goes at North Coast Rep) to one of the last of its kind (Victor/Victoria at Ferndale Rep.)  The new blockbuster Broadway was represented by Shrek The Musical (Humboldt Light Opera) while Circle Mirror Transformation (seen at Redwood Curtain) had a modest Off-Broadway run before productions by Seattle Rep and the Guthrie in Minneapolis, and stages in Marin County and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Some shows used to be developed outside New York, but became successful when they transferred to Broadway.  David Mamet's Chicago-born American Buffalo (NCRT) is that example.  The New York run still lends a reassuring patina, but more and more shows developed outside New York don’t even bother with the legitimizing New York showcase. The Fox on the Fairway (seen at NCRT) started in Arlington, Virginia before productions in New Brunswick, New Jersey and Naples, Florida. These shows are typically designed for export. Even prize-winning shows with decent Broadway runs (like the musical Next to Normal at NCRT or the drama Proof at HSU) have the small casts and modest staging to be done almost anywhere.

 Prolific American playwright Steven Dietz is a prime example of this new decentralized situation. His work is seldom performed in New York, but appears so often in regional and community venues that he’s in the top ten of produced playwrights in America. His comedy Becky’s New Car is currently onstage at Redwood Curtain.

Except for local group-generated shows and classics, the North Coast is primarily dependent on this new circuit of shows built for quick and relatively easy replication. Some may have virtues and perspectives a New York-generated show might not. But at worst they approach a stereotypical script that’s clever and a little odd but safe and small, with a slick first act and a slack second (that nevertheless includes a thesis statement.) The script too often shows signs of too many hands that got tired before the end.

 More generally, what are we missing on local stages? Due mostly to the demographics of our performers as well as our audiences, we seldom get shows centered on non-white characters or communities. On the other hand we get plays written about southerners, New Englanders and even New Yorkers, but not about North Coast characters. Fortunately, our live actors are surprisingly adept at bringing out the universal (or the North Coast) in any play.

 We also rarely get political plays in the larger sense, apart from gender politics. But hardly anyone in America does. We don’t have a David Hare (one of several British playwrights who look outward) or even a Robert Sherwood, who wrote three Pulitzer Prize winners in the 1930s and a book about FDR and World War II. Wallace Shawn and Tony Kushner are the closest. We’re unlikely to see a play as complex and provocative as Hare’s A Map of the World, for instance. For whatever reasons it’s not a time for singular playwrights with big voices.

 Our North Coast stage institutions do include variety, often at some risk. We're going to see that in the coming season, as well as examples of the kinds of plays I've described.  But our local stages operate in a particular theatrical environment, in a particular national context of this time.

This North Coast Weekend (and Outside News)

The final theatrical presentation of Dell’Arte’s Mad River Festival is The Submarine Show, performed by Dell’Arte alums Jaron Aviv Hollander and Slater Brooks Penny. Its comic mixture of mime, acrobatics, storytelling and audience interaction was developed at San Francisco’s Kinetic Art Center, where Hollander is Artistic Director. It was named Best of the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 2011. This one hour, family-friendly show is presented Thursday through Saturday (July 11-13) at 8 p.m. plus a Sunday matinee on the 14th at 2 p.m., in Dell’Arte’s Carlo Theatre. www.dellarte.com. There’s preview video at www.submarineshow.com.

The Submarine Show is presented by the Mad River Festival and the Nancy LaFrenz Memorial Scholarship, which supports original work created by alumni of the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre to be performed during the annual Mad River Festival. Nancy’s classmates, the Dell’Arte graduating class of 2002, set up the scholarship fund to keep her memory alive forever. Nancy LaFrenz (1974-2005), died from cancer early in her life, and the memorial fund helps other emerging artists cultivate their professional careers.

The Heir Apparent continues at Redwood Curtain.  I reviewed it in this week's Journal.

Among the theatrical news from Out There this past week:  President Obama presented the 2012 National Medals of Arts and National Humanities Medals.  Among the honorees were several theatre artists: writer and performer Anna Deavere Smith (pictured),  playwright Tony Kushner,  and writer and performer Elaine May.

McCarthyism in America

The City University of New York has refused to give playwright Tony Kushner a planned honorary degree because a member of its board of trustees objects to Kushner's views on Israel.

Now historian Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University is returning her CUNY honorary degree in protest, with a very pointed statement.  According to Salon, her statement reads in part:  "I received my honorary degree from CUNY because of my scholarship on the McCarthy period, when over one hundred professors (including at least fifteen from the New York City municipal colleges) lost their jobs for political reasons," writes Schrecker. "I assume that no one within CUNY’s Board of Trustees or administration wants a repeat of those dark days."

Justification for this response is inherent in the statement made by the objecting board member, who wrote in a New York Times oped that Kushner's "libelous statements against Israel were made by anyone outside the Jewish community, that person would be correctly labeled an anti-Semite."  This is precisely the kind of inflammatory charge that McCarthyism represented.

The KC Four: Angels in America

from the St. Mary College of California production of Angels in America

Under different circumstances, the four plays that HSU hosted during the mid-February Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival would be major theatrical events on the North Coast. In addition to attending the plays, I had the benefit of reading a dozen or so opinions of each from students who reviewed them as part of the festival (I was their guest critic) and also of asking questions and picking up stray facts during the week.

Of the four plays, two were first productions: Xtigone by Nambi E. Kelley, presented by California State University—East Bay, and The Time Machine or Love Among the Eloi by Edward Mast, presented by Ohlone College of suburban San Francisco. I wrote about those two in my North Coast Journal column that comes out this week.

The other two productions were of plays that some readers may have seen: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and Bridget Carpenter’s Up. I’m posting here about those two. Once the column comes out about the first two, I’ll post it here with additional observations I couldn’t include within my word count.

Several years ago HSU presented both parts of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in the intimacy of Gist Hall Theatre, directed by John Heckel. It was a great way to experience the intensity of these plays and the richness of Kushner’s language. St. Mary College of California’s production of the first play, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches in the 800-seat Van Duzer Theatre emphasized its epic quality, with a staging that was probably more like its most prominent U.S. productions.

The large but light and quickly shifted sets with the American flag motif, and especially the use of music made it dynamic as well as big. Apart from some issues with articulation, and within the age constraints of college actors, the performances were convincing enough to make the characters and their relationships credible. But it was the overall scope of the show, directed by Reid Davis, that helped to relate these characters to the larger world and the times.

This was a 20th anniversary production. While faculty members at the festival expressed wonder that the play and what prompted it was that long ago, it meant their students hadn’t lived through the time when AIDS was a plague killing thousands and threatening everyone. The St. Mary’s cast and other production members learned about it by working on this play, meeting doctors and nurses who served in AIDS wards, and finally in an hour’s discussion with playwright Tony Kushner. Through seeing the play, many other students at the festival learned about it as well.

As a play reflecting an era, but also as a work of theatre and dramatic literature, Angels in America remains powerful—a great American play.

This Insubstantial Pageant

That's what Shakespeare called it, but his texts
have remained pretty substantial. The text and
the moment, as in Tony Kushner's "Angels in
America" and its various performances on stage
and screen, demonstrate that the tension between
text and performance is theatre, and is a lot of its
enduring value. See post below.

From the film version of Angels
in America by Tony Kushner.

This North Coast Weekend and This Week's Column

A stage-related film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner will be shown at the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka on Thursday at 6 PM. Discussion afterwards will be led by Michael Field and Joan Schirle of Dell'Arte and Christina Accomando of HSU.

At the Arcata Playhouse on Friday and Saturday at 8PM, the Redwood Curtain production of Blown Sideways Through Life concludes its run. I review it in my North Coast Journal column this week, and Barry Blake reviews it in the T-S. We both praised it, and coincidentally both found it worthwhile noting (with gratitude) that Christina Jioras, the star and only actor in it, didn't attempt the Brooklyn accent of the writer of this apparently autobiographical piece, Claudia Shear.

A word missing in the first paragraph of my column makes the sentence seem a little odd, as if answering the phone at a whorehouse is a fairly common job for actors. It's not, of course, but on the other hand, Claudia Shear's is not the only account I've heard by someone in show biz who did this.

Also I forgot to change a word in another paragraph, which I will now do without saying which one it is:

Part of the brilliance of this piece is that audiences can connect with her unique experiences while recalling moments of their own lives and their own similar feelings -- not only about crappy jobs, but the anxieties, indignities and injustices of almost any job, from the "no reading" and "no opinions" rules of busywork to the arbitrary bosses whose cold ire appears as mysteriously and disproportionately as their praise.

I note in my "Coming Up" paragraph that Jeff DeMark will be bringing one of his one-person shows to the Arcata Playhouse next weekend--specifically on Saturday, Sept. 15 at 8 PM. The show is his most recent composition, They Ate Everything But Their Boots. I note that, like "Sideways," it deals with insane jobs, but Jeff corrects me: there's a story or two that touches on the subject but the show with jobs as the main topic is Went To Lunch, Never Returned.

This will be Jeff's second show at the Arcata Playhouse, and the second time I'll be out of town at the same time. And I don't get out of town that often! I'll be in Ashland to catch most of the remaining plays of this season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for my column the following week. But I have seen the show he's doing--and so should you.

Jeff DeMark will be performing his baseball show, Hard as a Diamond, Soft as the Dirt at Ferndale Rep on Saturday, September 29. That's the one show of his I haven't seen yet, and as far as I know, I'll be around to see it this time.