The Local Angle

Let’s go local.

The people who run many of America’s most prominent theaters are thinking in those terms. More and more plays that address local subjects and concerns are being produced in the same areas where their stories are set.

Such works intensify the impact of an essential element of theater--the fact that it’s always local, on at least one level. It occurs in a particular place and time, among a small group of people whose momentary communal experience will never be duplicated exactly. Dealing with indigenous subject matter adds yet another layer to the local quality of a theatrical event.

In Los Angeles, the Mark Taper Forum has commissioned seven plays with only one requirement--that they be California-oriented. It’s the Taper’s most extensive effort ever to create locally themed work, and the scope of the operation may be unprecedented among major theaters nationwide, according to observers of the national theater scene. Most of the plays that are expected to emerge from the Taper program are set in the L.A. area.

Three of the Taper-commissioned playwrights are also working on locally focused projects for theaters in other parts of the country. Localism is not just a local phenomenon.

The L.A.-based comedy trio Culture Clash specializes in such fare--and not only in its hometown. The group began its current phase of locally themed work with “Radio Mambo,” in and about Miami, in 1994, followed by shows about San Diego, New York’s Puerto Rican community and San Francisco’s Mission district. Culture Clash is preparing “Anthems,” a production about Washington, D.C., in the post-Sept. 11 era, for an Aug. 30-Oct. 13 run at that city’s Arena Stage. Next winter, a production of “Culture Clash in AmeriCCa” at San Jose Repertory Theatre will include material about San Jose.

Culture Clash’s “Chavez Ravine” will look at the history of the community that was supplanted by Dodger Stadium in L.A. The same chapter of L.A. history--the Dodgers’ arrival--is also a topic of another theatrical piece, Heather Woodbury’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” that’s being developed by the New York Shakespeare Festival. The New York half of Woodbury’s piece is about the Dodgers’ departure from Brooklyn.

A potential problem with locally themed fare is the strong possibility that it might not interest anyone in other locales, after the initial production. But that hasn’t been true for Culture Clash, said the group’s Richard Montoya: “Radio Mambo” began as “a one-night deal in Miami, but it has played all over the country and won several awards. I think ‘Chavez Ravine’ would play well in cities like Seattle, San Diego, Berkeley and New York. Every city we tour to has a stadium issue.” Added the group’s Herbert Siguenza, “It’s a story of progress, urban renewal, families ripped apart, greed, politics and baseball. Now that’s an American story.”

That doesn’t mean that every locally themed piece can or even should travel. Another Taper-commissioned writer, David Henry Hwang, said, “Theater does not require, and often cannot accommodate, mass national audiences. I’m sometimes struck, when visiting smaller countries that do not have a mass entertainment media, by how much more seriously they regard theater as the medium through which they can express their local themes and culture.”

Taper-commissioned writer Ain Gordon said that theater is “a great chance for the chemical equation of community interaction, which is something America is looking for, because we’ve otherwise disappeared into our homes.”

In the United States, local plays are often new, created to address a particular time as well as a place. But the topics of such plays often reach back into history. For two years, L.A.’s Edge of the World Theater Festival has included a component called the “L.A. History Project,” which resulted in workshop productions of 13 short plays about episodes from L.A.’s past. Longer versions of two of these, “Gatsby in Hollywood” and “Crazy Drunk,” are now set for full productions before the end of the year.

Classics also can be adapted to local contexts. “I’m on a crusade to assert that William Shakespeare is a Los Angeles playwright,” said Ben Donenberg, artistic director of Shakespeare Festival/L.A. “Whenever I hire directors, I say to them, ‘There is this new playwright who dropped this play on my desk and said he wrote it about Los Angeles in the present day.’ I’m offended when I walk into a theater that has a production that could be plopped down in any regional theater in the United States.” His company’s current “Romeo and Juliet” is loosely set in the contemporary Los Angeles record industry.

Theater intended for a particular community is hardly a new phenomenon. Western theater was born as a community ceremony in ancient Athens. The first plays were on Athenian themes, meant for Athenian audiences. No ancient impresarios were waiting to take them on the road to amortize the costs and enhance the profits.

Yet as theatrical history continued through the centuries, playwrights became less interested in making sure their work had a local component. It was safer to set plays in distant places or times than to risk offending anyone in the audience. Playwrights’ imaginations ventured beyond geographic boundaries, not only for the sake of artistic freedom, but also because plays that seemed too “regional” might not be produced elsewhere, resulting in fewer royalties for the writers.

In the 20th century, a widespread nonprofit theater movement rose to challenge the notion that Broadway was synonymous with American theater. These professional “resident theaters,” such as the Taper, Pasadena Playhouse and South Coast Repertory, create their own productions. But the subject matter of most resident theater productions is seldom distinctive. Such theaters often face criticism of predictable seasons made up of familiar classics, new versions of recent Broadway and off-Broadway hits, and new plays that often double as tryouts for potential commercial productions.

On the fringes of the theatrical scene, however, several institutions stayed true to theater’s local roots, becoming known for work that was specifically tailored for their audiences. One hotbed of such activity was Northern California, where the San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino and Dell ‘Arte Players tackled local issues with a vengeance. Sonja Kuftinec, an assistant professor of theater at the University of Minnesota who has researched such companies, calls them “grass-roots” or “community-based” theaters (not to be confused with “community theaters,” which are usually groups of amateurs doing familiar plays that are seldom on local subjects).

A decade ago, the previously itinerant Cornerstone Theater--an exemplar of this kind of company--settled in Los Angeles, where it has produced a variety of community-specific shows, plus plays that combine themes and talent from several L.A. communities. Last week, Cornerstone closed its latest production, “Crossings,” written in collaboration with members of five groups of Catholic immigrants to L.A. from different cultures and performed at St. Vibiana’s cathedral.

Meanwhile, the theater company has continued creating other locally themed work elsewhere in the country, including “Public Ghosts--Private Stories” last spring at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J. That production, which delved into more than 180 years of New Brunswick history, was written by Gordon.

The Taper invited Cornerstone to perform on the Taper main stage in late 2000--the first smaller L.A. company to do so. The result, “For Here or to Go?,” was awash in L.A. references and characters.

Not that it was the first locally oriented Taper production. Among the most notable productions in Taper history were Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit” in 1978, which examined social issues in ‘40s L.A., and Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” a 1993 response to the riots of the previous year. There have been others, such as Suzanne Grossmann’s “Number Our Days” in 1982, about elderly Jews in L.A.’s Venice.

“I have always been interested in finding out more about Southern California,” said Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson, who was raised in Brooklyn and moved to L.A. as an adult. He believes that the Taper’s thrust stage--with audience areas wrapping around the sides so spectators can see each other--”encourages the feeling of community.” But he didn’t have a formal program to develop locally themed work until now.

He found what he needed at the James Irvine Foundation, a San Francisco-based donor that focuses on California projects. The foundation had recently completed a project, “Connecting Californians,” that studied public performances throughout the state that addressed local concerns.

The Taper and the Irvine Foundation joined forces to create the current three-year program of commissioned plays about California, with Irvine contributing $300,000. Danton Miller, at that time the foundation’s program director for the arts (he has since left Irvine and taken a job at A.S.K. Theater Projects), recalled that “the Taper was importing a lot of work from elsewhere. The foundation wanted to encourage more theater that addresses the needs of the community.”

Taper staff members compiled and Davidson approved a list of seven playwrights, three of whom already were working on L.A.-set scripts that were then folded into the Irvine project. Two of these three scripts have been booked as part of the next Taper season. Lisa Loomer’s “Living Out,” about East L.A. nannies and their Westside employers, is scheduled for January, and Culture Clash’s “Chavez Ravine” is slated for next May.

The third play that was already in the works was born in conjunction with the Taper’s decision to renovate the Culver Theater in Culver City into the Kirk Douglas Theatre, which will serve as the company’s play development and youth theater headquarters. The Taper called on New York-based Gordon, who had just finished his work on Cornerstone’s New Brunswick project and co-wrote the 1999 Taper production “The First Picture Show,” which was about early Hollywood. The Taper asked Gordon to write a play drawn from Culver City history. The resulting script is called “93 Acres of Barley.” But no commitment has yet been made to present it at the Douglas, which is expected to open in 2004.

The other four plays in the Irvine project came about in response to it. L.A.-based Naomi Iizuka, whose plays have been produced elsewhere more often than in her hometown--and never at the Taper--is writing a play on earthquakes and murder in the Los Angeles Basin. Marion McClinton, best known in L.A. as the director of August Wilson’s “Jitney” and “King Hedley II” at the Taper, is writing about three African American families who move to L.A. just in time for the 1965 Watts riots and their subsequent experiences through the 1992 riots. Hwang, whose rewrite of “Flower Drum Song” recently played the Taper, is working on a new play based on experiences of the Los Angeles band Hiroshima (already the subject of another Taper production, “Sansei,” in 1989). Jon Robin Baitz is, at least tentatively, considering a musical that examines customs related to death and dying, presumably in a local context.

None of the four is slated for a production yet--and Baitz, whose Taper productions include “Three Hotels,” “The Substance of Fire” and “Dutch Landscape” as well as next season’s “Ten Unknowns,” said he is uncertain that he will use the musical about death as his Irvine subject. Nevertheless, in April the Taper gathered all seven of the Irvine playwrights for an intensive weekend of consultation with local experts on the subjects about which they’re writing. All participated in sessions to learn about aspects of Los Angeles that aren’t directly related to their own subjects. They then discussed their experiences at a public forum at the Taper.

None of Southern California’s other major theaters has focused on local subjects to this extent. South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa is nationally known for its new play development, “but we’re looking for long-term relationships with writers,” said South Coast dramaturge Jerry Patch, “so we go with what they’re thinking of writing, rather than suggesting it to them.”

However, Patch was speaking primarily of South Coast’s regular subscription programming. A block away from South Coast, in an Isamu Noguchi-designed sculpture garden called California Scenarios, South Coast presented a program of five short plays with California Latino themes last summer, borrowing the name “California Scenarios” for the title. That program will be repeated this year, July 25-Aug. 4. Also, South Coast’s educational touring wing has commissioned “California Stories,” a three-year cycle of plays on state history, for young audiences who study California history in elementary school.

On the South Coast main stage, local themes do appear occasionally, most recently in 2000 in Richard Greenberg’s “Everett Beekin,” part of which was set in Orange County, with one character serving as a tour guide who offered comment on a pedestrian bridge that connects the South Coast campus with the shopping center across the street. New York-based Greenberg, who has spent months in Costa Mesa working on commissions for the theater, “was making fun of us, to our delight,” Patch said.

Patch contended that the smaller communities that once might have gathered at a theatrical performance to examine common concerns “exist less and less around the world. In California, the people who have maintained a neighborhood identity have often done so because of oppression, and even that is eroding.”

In Orange County lately, the highest-profile issue was the status of the decommissioned El Toro Marine base, Patch said. While a play about the El Toro controversy is not inconceivable, “our position has been to find plays that really transfer to different cultures, that reach across cultural enclaves.”

Not surprisingly, the Taper-commissioned playwrights also hope their plays will reach audiences beyond their original “enclaves.”

“I always think that Los Angeles is to America what America is to the world,” said Loomer, known to Taper audiences for “Expecting Isabel” and “The Waiting Room.” Although her new play is set in L.A., “it’s a small way of looking at an issue in the world. I’m talking about race and class in our time, and that’s relevant to many cities.”

Several of the Taper playwrights pointed to the work of August Wilson, which usually addresses 20th century African American history through the prism of characters inhabiting one particular pocket of Pittsburgh. They noted that his plays have found international audiences.

Ain Gordon’s “93 Acres of Barley” already played a few small workshop performances in New York, where chances are that the majority of the population has never heard of Culver City. “People responded terrifically,” Gordon said. He speculated that it probably helps that “Culver City” is not in the title. If Thornton Wilder had titled his masterpiece “Our Town, a Play About Grover’s Corners, N.H.,” Gordon said, “it might not have gone so well.”

Bill Rauch, artistic director of Cornerstone Theater, said some of his company’s productions that seemed to be inexorably anchored in particular communities have found audiences elsewhere, but usually with at least a few adjustments in the scripts. He added that it’s important for such scripts to avoid being “too leaden and realistic”--the more photo-realistic a script is, the less likely that it can transfer elsewhere.

Augusto Boal, a Brazilian experimentalist and theorist who visited local adherents of his “Theatre of the Oppressed” movement in Los Angeles recently, goes one step further--in the direction of advocacy. “I don’t care about folkloric theater that doesn’t transcend its region,” he said. “Analyze a situation in a city, but don’t forget it’s part of a world. And if you talk about particularities, you should be trying to change them, not simply reflecting or photographing them.”

But audiences sometimes like to see their reflection on a stage, said Taper dramaturge John Glore, “whether they directly recognize themselves or it’s subliminal.” And with the Taper plays, he added, “no one will think they failed if they don’t go beyond our community.”

“Theater is the last form of communal fireside contact,” said Taper-commissioned playwright Baitz. “It’s poignant. I don’t know what comes out of it other than contact in the dark. But I can’t think of many forms that are as well suited as theater is to that kind of contact.”

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Don Shirley is a Times staff writer.