Desire Under the Palms

By Gerald Clarke

At the TV and movie studios' front door, live theater is booming

Los Angeles is probably the only city in the world in which theater has been considered a lesser art form, something actors practice while they are waiting for the big break into television or movies. But now, with the enthusiasm of a convert, the city has discovered a secret the Greeks knew 2,500 years ago: there is nothing so exciting as a live performance. The nonprofit Mark Taper Forum has become a showcase for serious, innovative drama; dozens of tiny, off-off-Broadway type theaters have sprung up in the shadow of the freeways; and big Broadway producers have found a huge, hitherto un tapped audience in what they thought was hostile territory. "The whole thing has broken wide open," says Robert Me Tyre, Los Angeles manager for the Nederlander theater chain. "The dollars are here and L.A. is now the No. 2 theater market in the country--coming closer to New York all the time."

Evita earned $27 million during its two-year run at the Shubert; Peter Pan, which plays in a former movie house, the Pantages, made $482,706, a local record, in the week ending Jan. 3; the Wilshire has just reopened after refurbishing with A Day In Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. Yet producers of smaller plays, some of them by California playwrights, occasionally find it harder to locate theaters than audiences. William Bushnell, producing director of the L.A. Actors Theater, had no trouble filling his 174-seat house with Frank South's Two by South. But when he tried to put the show into a bigger space, he found none was available, and shipped it to New York instead. He explains: "It was easier to move it to Manhattan than to find a place for it here."

The reason for the squeeze is obvious. In 1978 there were 368 professional productions in Los Angeles. Last year there were 573 and, by all indications, the number this year should be well over 600. "We are building new audiences, getting people into the habit of going to the theater," says Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper. "Broadway plays wait for an audience; if the audience doesn't come, the play closes. The Taper audience has been nurtured to wait with plays from their beginning."

Davidson has already turned his 742-seat theater into a national hitmaker with such shows as The Shadow Box and Children of a Lesser God. Last week he opened the first of two new plays with a Southern California theme--a belated celebration of the 200th birthday of Los Angeles. Titled Number Our Days, it is based on University of Southern California Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoffs study of a community of elderly Jews in a seedy part of Venice. The play attempts to examine not only what it means to be Jewish in America, but what it means to be old. It is an ambitious undertaking, clearly too large for Playwright Suzanne Grossmann, whose script is lachrymose and, in the end, static. Still, the production itself is impeccable, and the cast proves again that one thing Los Angeles is not lacking is superb actors.

Indeed, the actors can claim most of the credit for the theatrical boom. The Taper Forum and the big Broadway road shows have given Southern Californians a taste for live performances, but the actors have given them such wide choices. Under pressure from its rank and file, Actors' Equity in 1972 agreed to let members work for free in theaters that seat no more than 99 people. There have since been hundreds of such so-called waiver productions--423 last year alone.

Unemployed actors look upon waiver work as a way to attract the attention of TV and movie agents; those who are lucky enough to be working enjoy the challenge of demanding scripts. This month, for instance, Hal Williams is busy from 5:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. playing Sergeant Ted Ross in the CBS series Private Benjamin. But four nights a week, he also appears for free as Boise McCanles in the L.A. Actors Theater production of Steve Carter's all-black Nevis Mountain Dew. "A play like this doesn't come along very often," he says.

There are probably more little houses in the Hollywood area than in any other part of town, but there is no real center, no off-Vine Street, for instance, that could be compared with off-Broadway in Manhattan. Ron Sossi's Odyssey is in West Los Angeles, where it is currently selling out with Something's Rockin' in Denmark, a musical based on Hamlet. J.F. Smith's bare brick-walled Deja Vu, which looks like a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, is on the eastern frontiers of Hollywood Boulevard. The Studio Theater Playhouse, which is currently premiering a delightful musical version of Ray Bradbury's story Dandelion Wine, is in a working-class neighborhood near Los Angeles' Griffith Park, surrounded by warehouses. In a vacant lot next door to the Playhouse, a guard dog snarls at patrons from behind a chain-link fence. Inside, a remarkably sophisticated set recreates a cheerful Illinois town of the '20s.

Terrence Shank, the Playhouse's artistic director, says that the problem of getting from here to there is the reason most companies, including his own, play only from Thursday through Sunday. "After people have fought the freeways to get home from work, they just don't want to go out on them again," he explains. Geography also precludes much camaraderie among theater professionals. "There is no sense of community here," complains Actor David Dukes, who just completed a run with Brooke Adams in Kevin Wade's Key Exchange at the Westwood Playhouse.

Another vital element of theater is lacking: good playwrights. Though all the important companies encourage local writers, few budding Tennessee Williamses, or even Neil Simons, have emerged. Says the Odyssey's Sossi: "Most writers here are working for the movie and TV industries, and the scripts we get read like screenplays. Serious playwrights go to New York."

More than most Californians, Los Angeles theater folk both love and hate New York. Nothing, so far as many of the locals are concerned, is really good until it has made it in Manhattan. "You can be a success as a playwright out here, but who cares?" laments Kitty Felde, a playwright and actress at the Deja Vu. One of the rare examples of a play that was not a success in New York but has been a hit in Los Angeles is Tom Topor's courtroom drama Nuts, which has proved a financial salvation for Susan Dietz and her L.A. Stage Company, a pioneering theater midway in size between the tiny outposts and the big commercial houses.

Perceptions, however, often lag behind reality. The idea of a California theater is gradually taking hold. "Los Angeles may be a long way from being a rival of New York," says Shank. "But it will be, it will be."

--By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Martha Smilgis

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