Getting Real in the World of Arts, Entertainment

What if all of the arts became one big reality show?

It may be happening.

Television seems to be leading the way toward that possibility with its flood of fact-based dramas, crime re-enactments and real live cops-and-robbers and news magazine shows.

But television is not alone in the discovery and exploitation of realism, past and present.

In recent years we’ve seen operas go fact-based: Richard Nixon’s junket to China and Leon Klinghoffer’s sea journey to terrorist tragedy.

Paul Taylor in dance has cloned reality with his Emmy-winning “Speaking in Tongues,” a sardonic look at religious institutions, and his celebrated World War II/Andrews Sisters-inspired “Company B.”

The rising interest in photography may be just another yearning for the real, captured on paper and--like wildlife trophies--destined to be wall-hung.

The current biographical explorations by filmmakers into the lives of Malcolm X and Jimmy Hoffa were rooted in reality.

Then there’s live theater. Even here new strata of reality are about to be seen, heard and, with luck, pondered.

Stanford’s Anna Deavere Smith, teacher, writer and actress, has taken her tape recorder out to the Los Angeles communities that felt the flames of last spring. She will replay her voices as a one-woman show, still untitled, on the Mark Taper Forum stage in June. It is another of her explorations into current social issues. Last year, she developed “Fires in the Mirror,” another one-woman show--capturing the troubled voices of 29 people from Brooklyn’s riot-visited Crown Heights.

TV can brag about its fact-based dramas, but Smith’s work takes the genre into greater realms--social documentaries in real time. Working with one assistant, she has been interviewing hundreds of people affected by L.A.’s riots last year. Out of those talks she will develop specific “roles,” all of which she will play from the words captured in her tapings.

Playwright Jonathan Tolins isn’t armed with a tape recorder. Try a newspaper clipping service with a dash of Nova.

Tolins seems to be going one better than reality. For him it’s hyper-reality--visiting Tomorrowland with a socially sharp tour guide.

“Science-fiction” is what he calls his play, “The Twilight of the Golds,” which receives its world premiere Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Tolins apparently believes there is science and there is science. And there is fiction and there is fiction. Clearly in his new play the fiction is the invented family Gold, a functionally normal, neurotic New York grouping. The science . . . well . . . that’s another matter.

In part Tolins touches upon the work announced last year by neuroscientist Simon LeVay of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. His work and a similar study by UCLA scientists suggest that there may be a biological basis for homosexuality. LeVay found in his study of the brain of cadavers a segment of the hypothalamus was smaller in men who were homosexual compared to heterosexuals.

The LeVay announcement merged in Tolins’ mind with another item in the news: a television report about developments in genetic sciences and how research in genes would become the civil rights issue of the 21st Century.

So Tolins takes the Golds and presents them with several real problems, but only one that will have to wait for some future date and . . . but let’s not reveal the plot. Even reality has its secrets.

If you think today’s arguments about abortion are like a walk through a moral minefield, stick around for the explosion scheduled at your neighborhood gene pool.

When science can tell us who we or others might become, how will we handle the news?

Tolins takes this question, throws it in with such after-dinner conversational items as abortion, genocide, civil rights, the operas and beliefs of Richard Wagner and the thoughts of George Bernard Shaw and Carl Jung and produces what the Pasadena Playhouse first billed as “an emotional comedy that springs from today’s headlines and tomorrow’s headlines” but now advertises as “a provocative new play. . . .”

Good trick, either way!

What also may be a good trick is how these real and future issues with all of their mind-boggling overlays will be received at that ultimate reality, the box office. In its funnier moments, the play is vintage Pasadena Playhouse-lite. But it has no big star names, no box-office aura or history and its plot is wrapped in secrecy.

“The audience will market this play,” says Jim Bardwil, the Playhouse’s director of marketing. “Word of mouth will cause it to be discovered.” Plus a dose of direct mailings, some advertising and a few special-interest pushes.

With 23,000 season-ticket buyers--about 60% of the Playhouse’s normal run capacity--a little word of mouth has to help.

Just having the play at the Pasadena Playhouse is another form of reality for Tolins. A 1988 Harvard graduate, he’s had a couple of his plays performed locally in smaller theaters while serving as a staff writer on an HBO series.

His agent sent a copy of “Golds” to the Playhouse, Tolins rented the Matrix Theater in Hollywood for a one-night reading, some Playhouse people showed up and “in a few days it was set,” Tolins says. All of that happened since last March.

Speed of a different sort is at the base of his current work, he says. “If we summed it up, ‘Golds’ is about technology moving a lot faster than the American standard of ethics, about decisions coming faster than the speed of our principles, and about who in the future because of these decisions might be excluded and who will be included.”

In a word: hyper-reality.