A London Critic Looks at L. A. Theater : The View From the West End

The size of the problem first hit me when a man gave me a lift from Malibu to downtown Los Angeles. I told him I wanted to go to the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

“Los Angeles center,” he repeated. He was an Ethiopian from Erithrea. He had lived here for three years. He knew Los Angeles well. “No,” I said, “Los Angeles Theatre Center.” “Yes,” he said, “Los Angeles center.” “ Theatre Center,” I said. There was a puzzled silence. It turned out that he did not know what a theater was.

I had never come across such a thing before. I had met people who thought that the theater was the pastime of the idle rich; people who thought it was a breeding ground of Communists, homosexuals and freaky subversives; people who thought it was the scene of religious or political experience; people who thought it was where you went for a good laugh and chocolates in noisy wrapping paper. I had never met anyone who did not know what the theater was.

I tried to explain. I said, I think, that the theater was like a TV series but bigger, and that it was like movies where the actors were real. I knew all the time that this was ridiculous: The theater differs crucially from both films and television in that a stage play fully exists only when it is played live, and that it can only be played live or it is not theater. But actually, these are quite sophisticated notions. How do you explain the reality of live impersonation to someone who is a stranger to the practice?

The point of all this is that the population of one of the largest and most sophisticated conurbations of the Western world includes people who know nothing about theater. Moreover, this conurbation contains the homes, workplaces, playgrounds and killing fields of some of the most famous as well as some of the best acting talent in the Western world. In other words, theater in Los Angeles is full of paradoxes.

Now it may be foolhardy to generalize on the basis of a short stay; but I was struck, on my few visits to theaters here, how much better theater design is than theater direction.

The set of “Stars in the Morning Sky,” at the LATC, was designed with a combination of realism and expressionistic grandeur that is characteristic of the play; but the cast almost entirely missed its flavor. “Ladies Room,” at the Tiffany, is one of the crassest and most insulting plays about female sexuality I have ever seen, and the acting had a rough crassness to match; but the set was put together with loving accuracy.

So, is there a shortage of good directors in Los Angeles? Or is it simply that they are not interested in the way the feelings and thoughts of characters express themselves in the speeding up or slowing down of the action? The half a dozen plays I have seen here may not have been representative, but they all had in common a lack of dramatic rhythm and pace.

David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly,” a two-act play that spreads itself ponderously over three acts, was directed by its author like a slow train: It chugged across all kinds of emotional terrain with the same heavy amble. “Dutch Landscape,” at the Mark Taper, matched the verbal flab of the text with a performance full of unfocused soap-opera emotion: A kind of aimless theatrical Jacuzzi.

The point is that if you miss the link between the interior life of your characters and the physical movement of the action, you have no grasp of the most vital element in the dynamics of your play. The text should play as it moves.

The problem is rooted in a number of causes, all interconnected. Where does one begin? I find that American audiences are apprehensive of the great European classics, largely because they do not know them; and that they do not know them because they are apprehensive of them. Producers are scared to put them on. Who will come to see Ibsen’s “Ghosts” unless you can get famous stars to play the leading roles? But the problem is that famous star actors in America are by definition film actors. How can you tempt them to play Ibsen or Chekhov if it means reducing their earnings for months on end?

I come to this problem with British perceptions. In England, most top actors (though admittedly not all) would jump at the chance to play the top classical roles from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams. But then, they know that they would mostly be directed by people who could be counted on to bring the best out of them and out of the play.

Compare this with the United States. It is four years since Dustin Hoffman played his famous Willy Loman, directed by the brilliant expatriate American Michael Rudman; this year he is to play Shakespeare’s Shylock--but in England under Sir Peter Hall. Would he do more theater in America if he could work for such directors?

The point is that in England we have many such directors, steeped in old traditions, because there is a demand for all kinds of theater. The tradition breeds the directors; the directors keep alive the tradition. No one is afraid of Virginia Woolf; no one is afraid of Ibsen. We are back where we started.

All this seems rather unfair on American actors; but the problem in Los Angeles has a particular irony. I am told that there were more than 200 openings in the city last year, so there is clearly a huge appetite for live theater. Moreover, over the Hollywood Hills, there are men and women acting away in films who could between them fill all the stages in the Music Center all the year round.

Why don’t they? Is it greed? Would it hurt that much to earn a little less for three months or so? Is it the fear of exposing on the live stage a talent that is accustomed to being used in short takes? Is it indifference?

Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and William Hurt, for example, seem to me among the most brilliant and versatile talents to have come forward in recent years. All of them were trained in the live theater, and their film work bears all the signs of an artistic intelligence nourished on the live stage where the actor’s body and mind engage with the role and with other actors and other roles, continuously, without retakes.

It is this constant engagement that gives stage acting its thrilling sense of danger; and when I watch Streep, Kline or Hurt on the screen, I think I can tell that their art was shaped and refined by the danger and absorption of live stage performances. And yet how often have these actors returned to the theater?

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Another problem is the problem of New York. Why is it supposed to be the theatrical capital of America? Its standards seem to me increasingly unremarkable, almost provincial; its audiences and producers have become so timorous that they can be cowed by the opinion of one newspaper. So why is it still so important to be on Broadway? Why should not the heart of American theater be in Los Angeles where most of its finest actors live or work?

One of the reasons why the standards of American stage acting in general are not as high as they might be is that the ordinary actor hardly ever has the chance to work on-stage with the leaders of his profession.

What better place for this to happen than Los Angeles? I know that a country the size of the United States cannot really have a national theater like England or France; and I know, too, that Americans have inherited the strong British suspicion of national cultural institutions. But something really exciting and unique could happen in Los Angeles if someone had the generosity to make it happen, and the vision, and the courage.