THEATER NOTES : The Ovation Process, Explained

Nominations for L.A.’s first peer-judged competitive theater awards will be un veiled Tuesday, as Theatre LA’s Ovation Award enters a new chapter in its history.

Established in 1989 as an award for lifetime achievement, the Ovation will now primarily honor specific achievements onstage during a single year. Although a single award for lifetime work also will be announced on Tuesday, most of the attention will be focused on the nominations for the 24 competitive awards.

Think Tonys, not Kennedy Center Honors. But in a painstaking effort to insure fairness, the rules about who may vote for which Ovations are actually much more complicated than they are at the Tonys, which rely on an honor system to make sure that people don’t pass judgment on works they haven’t seen.

Not every show locally is competing for Ovations. Contending shows must have been presented by a member of the sponsoring organization, Theatre LA, between Sept. 1, 1993, and Aug. 30, 1994. There are currently 119 members. But two of the area’s most prominent companies don’t belong--South Coast Repertory never joined, and the Theatre Corp. of America (which presented shows at Pasadena Playhouse and the Alex Theatre during the past year) dropped out last spring because of its ongoing financial crisis. (Theatre LA membership costs .001% of total annual grosses. Minimum dues are $180, the maximum is $800.) Nor is Hollywood’s well-known Cast Theatre a member.

Contending productions must have played at least 12 performances and operated with an Actors’ Equity agreement. They must have been registered with Theatre LA (for a $20 fee per production), and at least eight of the 92 certified voters must have seen and graded them.

This year, only 65 companies registered even one show. But those 65 registered a total of 169 shows. Twelve shows were eliminated because fewer than eight voters scored them.

Each Theatre LA member was entitled to be represented by one voter, who was forbidden to grade shows from his or her own company. But only 92 voters began the process, including 12 at-large voters who were recruited in order to increase the size of the voting pool and the variety of professional credentials within it. Of the original 92, 10 didn’t bother to grade a single show. However, the remaining 82 voters submitted 2,143 scorecards--each active voter graded an average of 26 shows.

The most prolific voters went far beyond that average. As of Sept. 12, at-large voter Dick Dotterer and Heather McQuarrie of Shakespeare Festival/LA had graded 110 shows each. Aside from the 10 deadbeats, however, other voters were disqualified from participating in the final voting because they didn’t send in scorecards from at least 25 shows.

Voters also were eliminated from the upcoming final round if fewer than 80% of the shows they graded were in sub-100-seat theaters. This is part of Theatre LA’s effort to make sure the L.A. theater scene’s many smaller fish aren’t swallowed up by its few big fish. That’s also the rationale behind splitting six award categories--musical, play and four design honors--into separate awards for achievement in small (sub-100-seat) and large theaters.

Because of the stringent rules, only 42 voters will participate in the final round. And it’s likely that even fewer voters will determine the winners in the more obscure categories, because yet another requirement limits final-round voting in any category only to those voters who submitted score cards for all five nominees within that category.

Meanwhile, the new Ovation procedures have been accompanied by a change in the trophy itself. Robert Graham’s 17-pound faux -lamps, awarded to the previous lifetime achievement winners, have been replaced by a two-pound statuette designed by Christopher Komuro, art director of Center Theatre Group. The design was inspired by the logo for Theatre LA’s 688-ARTS informational telephone service, according to the group’s executive director William Freimuth, but the figure in the statue has been abstracted so that it’s “androgynous, outside of time, outside of ethnicity,” he added.

The color is, in Freimuth’s words, “Coke-bottle green,” which places it securely outside of ethnicity. But one observer quickly noted that the statue’s “androgynous” figure, accepting an ovation, appears to be dressed in a long gown--and “how many men go around wearing long gowns?”