Calling All Risk Takers

A new century of theater? Certainly. Let’s plan on it. But those of us in Los Angeles and environs must ensure the health and well-being of our most cherished theatrical traditions.

Clearly, we need:

More lame plays about people trying to make it in the movies.

This is paramount. Every week I scan the theater listings and think: Why are there only two or three dozen new plays about people trying to make it in Hollywood? That subject has plenty of steam left in it. It isn’t hackneyed in the least.

More showcases designed to attract casting directors, rather than actual people.

I don’t know about you--much, anyway--but I can’t be alone in thinking there’s nothing finer than watching a 90-minute audition piece disguised as “a play,” as the old folks call it. Is that a casting director or DreamWorks executive sitting next to you? If so, enjoy the proximity, if only for a scene or two. You never know how long those people will last. They are very busy. They have much to do.

And while we’re on it . . .

More mid-performance cell phone usage.

I am sick of theatergoers being told by some disembodied voice to turn off all cell phones and beepers. As if we could! The whole point of this technology is that we never have to be out of touch again, even for a second. I want no-cell seating sections established in every L.A. theater, way, way in the back. It’ll be the Little People section. The rest of us need to stay connected and still get excellent seats.

More revivals of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

Theaters should be required by law to produce these two plays and nothing else. And maybe “A Christmas Carol.” And “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” Really, it’s just too chancy investing in new work, commissioning local playwrights, that sort of thing.

More stage musicals taken from movies.

“Footloose,” “Fame” and “Saturday Night Fever” will barely get us through the new year. Why the hell hasn’t someone adapted “Flashdance” yet? I only have one life to live, and I’ll be damned if I live it without a stage version of “Flashdance.”

More Vari-lites.

Vari-lites (and variations thereupon) are those swivelly automated lighting instruments, the ones hamming it up above the heads of the members of KISS and the like at arena acts. Increasingly in the ‘90s they’ve spread to Broadway and touring schlock-taculars on the order of “Jekyll & Hyde.” So much to look at! More choreography above the stage than on it! I’d love to see Vari-lites going nuts during the next Spalding Gray monologue.

Even bigger movie stars in vehicles even shorter than “Hughie.”

Pacino for an hour of your time? Hey, I wish I had that kind of time. What about Harrison Ford in an extravagant theatrical treatment of a Bicentennial Minute? How about full price to watch Julia Roberts simply walk by the Music Center?

More frequent usage of the word “journey” in program notes or interviews.

As in: “The playwright’s characters are all on a journey.” And the audience embarks on the journey with the characters! Load up on this noun now, as we embark on a journey into a new millennium. Another noun of which I cannot get enough.

More revivals of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

This one bears repeating.

Finally: The abolishment of nonprofit theater.

Enough of this socialism. No matter that in most other countries, subsidized theater isn’t a concept that has to be defended on the federal or local level, over and over. Can you believe that only a few years ago in this country, so many major nonprofit institutions operated on a 50-50 ratio of earned versus contributed income? Administrators felt emboldened to take the occasional programming risk with a ratio like that. Now, it’s generally more like 70-30, which is weeding out those pesky (if infrequent) stabs at something provocative. We shouldn’t rest until we redefine “nonprofit” to mean “profit,” period. The entire concept of arts subsidy should be shunned, especially in Los Angeles, where philanthropists have to be beaten off with a stick.

*

The 1990s haven’t been a decade distinguished by nerve. I spent very little of it here. But elsewhere, certainly, the survival mentality took its toll on large outfits and small ones, on dull seasons and provocative ones. The last 10 years, many nonprofit resident theaters across America programmed their seasons pretty much like many others. As one artistic director told me: “The soul’s gone.” And he’s an upbeat guy.

Like middle-class everything in this country, middle-class professional theater--the mid-sized houses that used to thrive on established off-Broadway hits--has gotten the squeeze. Many closings resulted. As a result, the big houses all started doing the same plays. “How I Learned to Drive” at the Mark Taper Forum, for example. It opens in a small off-Broadway house, and a year or two later, it’s playing an uncomfortably larger one.

“How I Learned to Drive” author Paula Vogel once wrote about the ‘90s--the decade, she said, when everybody seemed to be reviving “Harvey” simultaneously. By the end of the decade, in fact, everybody seemed to be doing simultaneous productions of “How I Learned to Drive.” It’s good news for a good playwright. But look at the regional theater seasons nationwide, and you don’t know where you are anymore. You could be anywhere. There’s a lot of work, and a lot of it’s accomplished. It just isn’t site-specific enough, in terms of relating to a given region, the product of a particular sensibility. Or a true sense of adventure.

We need our nerve back. We need to make theater like we mean it, not like we have to do it. We need to discombobulate our audiences, and not be afraid to lose some folks along the way.

This may weed out some theaters. This may be OK.

L.A. is lousy with writers, a lot of them wonderful, a lot of them former and current women and men of the stage. Commissions and readings and workshops are all crucial. But if we don’t start seeing more full productions of L.A. writers’ work, we’re never going to figure this city out. A city’s playwrights--a city’s theater scene--can help make sense of why things are the way they are. They can concentrate our attention, and focus our imaginative energy, in a cultural landscape prone to dispersed energies and fuzzy-headedness.

Our 20th century baggage is motley. The best thing that happened this century is, we made a step toward diversifying the kinds of people writing about it, acting it out, directing or designing or carrying it.

The guy who said the soul’s gone also said he thought the soul could be reclaimed. Fear points like an arrow in the direction you must go, as John Patrick Shanley once opined. (He didn’t simply “say” it; he opined it.) We’re all going to be better off if the new century ushers in more theater made by people who took a chance.

Fear plus nerve, plus savvy marketing, can end up equaling bravery. And nights out you remember.