A London Critic Looks at L. A. Theater : The View From Los Angeles

The scope of the problem first hit me one afternoon when I lost my way in Earl’s Court. Stopping a friendly looking East Pakistani, I asked: “Pardon me, sir, but is this the way to the Royal Shakespeare Company?”

“What is this Shakespeare?” he replied.

And I had my lead.

Oh, all right--I made up the Pakistani. But the incident certainly could have happened. Every great metropolitan center these days contains a good many people from Karachi, Erithrea, Glendale and Stoke-on-Trent who don’t know anything about theater. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that the city also contains a large, intelligent and interested theater audience.

The anecdote with which John Peter begins his adjoining impressions of the Los Angeles theater scene is therefore beside the point--in terms of logic. If the city demonstrates “a huge appetite for live theater,” what is the point of beginning with a story about a man from Ethiopia who doesn’t know what a theater is?

Because it strikes the note--unconsciously, I think: Peter seems to want to make this a friendly piece--that, in terms of theater culture, Los Angeles is still an undeveloped nation.

We are used to hearing this from New York critics, who won’t have their city displaced as the center of the American theater. London critics, however, don’t have any particular axe to grind about the West Coast. In fact, they love to come here. If this London critic finds our theater disappointing, we ought to look at that.

The other alternative is to get defensive. The guy admits he only saw half a dozen shows here--including the Taper’s roundly panned “Dutch Landscape.” What kind of a sample universe is that? What if he had seen Lillian Garrett’s beautifully modulated production of “The Day You’ll Love Me” at Taper, Too? What if he had seen Nan Martin and Alan Mandell in “The Road to Mecca” at South Coast Repertory? His report might have been different.

True. But Peter wasn’t doing a white paper on Los Angeles theater. He was asked to give his impressions of it. Half a dozen shows do generate some impressions. Our question ought to be whether his were off the mark, or grounded in reality.

For example, Peter liked the design work that he saw better than the direction. My reaction would be that Los Angeles theater design is generally on a high level, at least in the bigger houses. But since the director has considerable to say about design, a good set is partly to his credit--not a sign that he has been outpointed by his design team.

There’s also the question of how much higher a director can go than his text. Given these scripts , any director would have been hard put to find an inner life for the Taper’s “Dutch Landscape” or the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s “Stars in the Morning Sky.” How would one play the former except as soap opera, or the latter except as opera?

That’s not to say that either play was faultlessly cast or thrillingly paced. (The first was staged by the Taper’s Gordon Davidson, the second by LATC’s Bill Bushnell.) But the basic problem was the selection of the script. Peter’s real quarrel here was with Davidson and Bushnell as artistic directors, not as directors.

What about Peter’s finding that Los Angeles directors fail to make the connection between “the interior life of the characters and the physical movement of the action”? Sometimes true, usually not true.

SCR’s “The Road to Mecca,” for example, is a much more dynamic production than the one staged by author Athol Fugard in New York last season, without being any the less intelligent or well-spoken. Watch how Nan Martin translates an old woman’s need to feel helpful into a process of endlessly roving about the stage, as if haunted by a dybbuk. We can surely infer some input here from director Martin Benson.

What about Peter’s charge that famous American actors like Dustin Hoffman--the kind of actor who could bring big crowds to Los Angeles theater--stay away from the big classical roles because they don’t have confidence in American directors?

Oddly, this is less true today than it was 25 years ago, when a star American director like Elia Kazan could admit (privately anyway) that he didn’t give a damn about staging the classics and didn’t have the background for it.

The resident theater movement has taken the terror out of Ibsen, Sheridan and Shakespeare for American theater people and audiences alike. Kevin Kline, for example--one of the actors whom Peter wants to lure back to the theater--wasn’t afraid to do “Much Ado About Nothing” under Gerald Freedman’s direction for the New York Shakespeare Festival last summer.

Not in Los Angeles, though. There wouldn’t have been any psychic profit for Kline in that. And here, one echoes Peter’s puzzled question: “Why is New York supposed to be the theatrical capital of America?”

Perhaps it’s a question of mythologies. L.A. is film. N.Y. is stage. Something in the American unconscious doesn’t want them to meet, and doesn’t believe them when they do meet.

Richard Chamberlain did a glorious “Cyrano de Bergerac” under Joseph Hardy’s direction in ’72 at the Ahmanson Theatre, just as dazzling and far more moving than Derek Jacobi’s “Cyrano” at the RSC--but it wasn’t as real as if he’d done it in London or New York, because everybody knows that there isn’t any theater in Los Angeles.

It’s a vicious circle, but it is starting to dissolve. What we need now is more respect for theater within our film/TV industry--the kind that allows someone doing a play at LATC to get off the set at Universal by 5 p.m. without fail--and more confidence in the theater community that our theater is the real thing, able to stand up to the toughest scrutiny.

Visits from scrutinizers like Peter can only help. All we have to do is separate the substance from the rhetoric.