Drawing a Blank : Laguna Museum, Playhouse Doing Little for Arts’ AIDS Event

This city has been hit harder by AIDS than possibly any other in the country, but its art museum is doing far less than other local institutions--and its community playhouse is doing nothing--to take part in A Day Without Art, a nationwide event on Sunday designed to mark the destruction the disease has wrought in the art world.

“Every arts organization is struggling to live in these economic times, and this repressive political climate, and I’m sure it’s particularly difficult in Orange County, which has hardly distinguished itself for its progressive leadership,” said Rodger McFarlane, executive director of Broadway Cares, a New York-based foundation that raises funds for AIDS service organizations nationwide. “But we’re facing a plague. Remarkable times require extraordinary efforts.”

For the third annual A Day Without Art, about 4,200 visual and performing-arts organizations, from the Honolulu Theater for Youth to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, will cloak artworks, shut down, darken stages, offer free admission, hand out AIDS information or stage special events.

Held in conjunction with the World Health Organizations’s World AIDS Day, the event’s title was chosen to suggest that if the disease continues unchecked, one day the world could literally be without art. While organizers say more visual than performing-arts groups will observe the event, several renowned ballet dancers, composers, rock stars and actors as well as visual artists have died from AIDS-related illnesses.

In Orange County, groups from the Fullerton Museum Center to South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa will feature special events to heighten AIDS awareness, although SCR is weighing in with a free reading of a new play on Monday--a day late. (For full schedule, F27.)

But A Day Without Art is getting scant attention from the leading arts groups in Laguna Beach, the seaside community that proclaims itself as “Home of the Pageant of the Masters,” the annual summer arts festival.

The number of people with AIDS last year in Laguna was roughly 17 per 10,000, surpassing San Francisco’s rate of 13 per 10,000, the highest among major U.S. cities, according to Ron Taylor, HIV program manager for the county’s Health Care Agency.

Laguna Beach also has the highest percentage of AIDS cases among cities in the county, with 211, or 12.6%, of 1,676 total cases reported since record-keeping began in 1985, Taylor said.

As the county’s second-largest art museum--behind Newport Harbor--the Laguna museum on Sunday will give visitors educational materials on AIDS and staff members will wear red ribbons to draw attention to the epidemic.

Charles Desmarais, director of the Laguna Art Museum, staunchly defended the museum’s degree of participation, which has remained about the same for the last three years.

“We do what we do,” Desmarais said, explaining that he, not museum trustees, determines A Day Without Art involvement.

He also said that, in addition its other activities for the day, the museum makes members aware of the issue in newsletters, but said that any action seems “grossly inadequate” in the face of AIDS.

“I don’t think there’s more that can be done,” he said. “I don’t think that dimming gallery lights or reducing admission is going to make a difference in the AIDS issue. . . . The important thing is to share whatever awareness we have of this terrible disease and the effects it has had on people in the arts and on people throughout the country.”

Joseph Amster, a member of ACT-UP Orange County, a gay-rights group, said Desmarais “has a good point” in suggesting that symbolic gestures don’t go far enough. But even symbols are critical to the battle, he said. “I think the museum and the playhouse both have a responsibility.”

In addition, Amster said Desmarais’ “attitude of ‘We’re doing enough for AIDS,’ is what we’ve been hearing for a decade, and it’s not enough. . . . We all have to do more. Everybody needs to do as much as they can to fight AIDS,” he said.

The Laguna Playhouse, which won a national competition for the best community theater in 1987 and is Orange County’s largest and oldest community theater troupe, has scheduled two performances of the musical comedy “She Loves Me” for Sunday. But the playhouse has, as in the past, planned nothing to commemorate the impact of AIDS on the arts world.

Playhouse executive director Richard A. Stein said the theater has been busy because of the addition of its new artistic director, Andrew Barnicle, who began in July.

“We have a new artistic director, and I think basically, from our standpoint, there were a lot of other plans that needed attention before we were able to take on any new projects,” Stein said. “Whenever you have someone new coming on, that takes a priority in your institution.”

Stein said Laguna Playhouse intends to take part next year, but added that he was not contacted by anyone involved with coordinating this year’s A Day Without Art activities.

In fact, this is the first year that a committee was assembled to help coordinate A Day Without Art events in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Newport Harbor Art Museum spokeswoman Maxine Gaiber, who serves on the ad hoc panel, said the committee’s overriding aim was to find out and publicize what various groups were doing, not to encourage participation. She also noted that the event has been widely publicized in major media nationwide since its inception.

In addition, Gaiber said, the committee did not contact performing-arts groups because A Day Without Art was conceived within the visual arts community, although it has expanded beyond that now. The head of Visual AIDS, a New York-based group of artists and arts professionals that spearheads A Day Without Art activities, said about 250 performing-arts groups nationwide are taking part.

Amster said he was unaware of any coordinated effort by ACT-UP to encourage A Day Without Art involvement in Laguna Beach.

“That’s going to need to be addressed,” he said.

Said McFarlane of Broadway Cares: “I don’t know what these individuals or organizations are struggling against, but I do know there is a responsibility for those of us that have a platform to raise the awareness in our communities.” Broadway Cares, which raises money through its association with professional theater labor and management associations, will contact the playhouse on Monday to help theater officials “get ready for 1992,” McFarlane added.

Bobbi Cox, chairwoman of the Laguna Beach Arts Commission, declined comment on city arts groups’ participation in A Day Without Art. The commission voted Monday, she said, to drape in burlap a downtown Laguna Beach kiosk used for announcements of county arts events.

Of arts groups that claim countywide audiences, the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the site of matinee and evening performances of the San Francisco Ballet’s “Nutcracker” on Sunday, will use lobby signs and program inserts to focus attention on the AIDS epidemic.

No direct reference will be made to A Day Without Art so as not to “carry forward the stereotype that AIDS is limited to the arts, or that we don’t care about” those outside of the arts community who suffer from AIDS, said Center president Thomas R. Kendrick.

Still, signs and program inserts will state that the Center and the San Francisco Ballet recognize the “devastating impact of AIDS on the world and the vitality of the performing and visual arts” and urge patrons to support efforts to fight the epidemic, Kendrick said.

“This (disease) has a direct relationship to the arts, and anyone in the arts can’t help but be concerned about AIDS,” he said.

At SCR, the county’s largest theater company, spokesman Cristofer Gross said the reading of Anthony Clarvoe’s “The Living” was planned for Monday because holding it on Sunday would have conflicted with matinee and evening performances of “The Caretaker” and “A Christmas Carol,” currently occupying the theater’s two stages.

“This is the way our season works; we’re doing what we can,” Gross said. Audiences throughout the weekend will be asked to donate money or non-perishable food for the AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County.

“We really want to get a large crowd for this and make a lot of money” for the AIDS Service Foundation, Gross said.

ACT-UP’s Amster said he wasn’t bothered that SCR’s reading falls one day after the official event.

“It’s great that they are doing something,” he said. “SCR has always had a strong awareness in that direction.”

Meanwhile, Joe Felz, director of the Fullerton Museum Center, said that that facility wanted to be heavily involved largely because “our board feels strongly that we have a broad mission (that includes) using our institution to contribute assistance to a social problem or address issues.”

* RELATED STORIES: F8, F26-27