The Play’s the Thing--the Playwright Too : It’s Time to Spotlight Substance of Theater

The story on the discouraging lot of the Los Angeles playwright (“To Live and Write in L.A.,” Calendar, Feb. 14) was either blindly hypocritical or blackly humorous--I’m not sure which. Of all the reasons plays and playwrights don’t receive the attention in Los Angeles they should (and do in other cities), negligent coverage by the Calendar section is surely chief among them.

Articles and reviews are relegated to the back pages, often limited to an inch or two if a star isn’t involved, and no recognition is given to a major aspect of good playwriting that separates it from writing for movies and TV: its content.

By content, I mean philosophical substance--some kind of thoughtful underpinning that gives the work some meaning besides “distraction.”

Except for Stanley Kubrick’s films, and the occasional picture such as “Hero” and “The Crying Game,” which pose intriguing questions about morality, love and power, most movies don’t give you much to take home except gunfire, platitudes and the unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bag.

And you certainly can’t find much intellectual content on non-news TV, where the L.A. riots and child abuse are “covered” in the 22 minutes of a sitcom, and complicated subjects such as religion are left to evangelists.

In contrast, philosophical content is the good play’s meat and potatoes. This doesn’t mean that all plays need to be high falutin’ treatises nor that those that do provide intellectual challenge need to be boringly serious: John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” Sondheim and Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” David Mamet’s “Oleanna” are not only dazzling and fun to watch, they’re actually funny--and engage the mind. The several thousand works in the theatrical canon attest to this--to cite the Greeks, Shakespeare, Congreve, Shaw, Chekhov, Ibsen, Beckett as simultaneously entertaining, serious, funny and espousing complex philosophies is only to skim the surface of theater history.

But when was the last time Calendar printed an examination/discussion/argument about the ideas of any of the above playwrights or, God forbid, the playwrights of today? Today’s Racines and Strindbergs and Feydeaus are out there, and Calendar should be finding them and shining its considerable spotlight on them.

Instead, the theater is treated like an embarrassing, dotty old Auntie to be kept in the attic, vaguely related to the Much Sexier Show Biz World of Movies, TV and Pop. Every so often, Calendar will trot out a piece about “The Endangered Playwright” just as once a year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences trots out a presenter to say, “It all begins with the word,” in feigned praise of screenwriters. No one in the hall believes that about screenwriters and no one reading the Feb. 14 article could believe Calendar actually cares about the fate of playwrights or the theater here because the section just doesn’t give it much space--or understand the intellectual, emotional and spiritual stimulation it could give the city.

Calendar goes out of its way to promote serious music, opera, dance and art, often placing them on Page 1 (and I’m glad it does); the theater, by comparison, lands on Page 12. But the theater needs attention just as urgently if it is to be taken seriously as an art form here (as it has been elsewhere for several thousand years). And by “attention,” I don’t mean mindless praise--the vanity productions and sitcom auditions should be called exactly that--but attention. Space. Focus.

If Calendar granted the theater the prestige it has so long enjoyed (deservedly so) and valued the work of playwriting--not just the success but the act of creating, successful or not--you’d be amazed how many more writers would work at it.