Critical Crossfire: Charles McNulty and Steven Leigh Morris on L.A. Theater

Over dinner at the Newsroom Café recently, Times theater critic Charles McNulty and LA Weekly theater critic Steven Leigh Morris (current official title: critic at large) began a dialogue on the state of the city’s smaller theater scene — the 99-seat-or-fewer venues that percolate with a relentlessness that not even Starbucks can rival. McNulty recently weighed in on the leadership challenges confronting the larger nonprofit venues, and this give-and-take on L.A.’s network of smaller theater, which the critics subsequently pursued over e-mail, seemed worthy of a larger forum.

CM: I’ve argued in the past that L.A. theater is too actor-driven and that the director has been shunted to the margins as a result. This holds true for the Equity-waiver theaters, where the bulk of the city’s offerings take place. It’s understandable that actors working practically gratis should want to take a controlling interest. But too many productions have little more urgency than an acting showcase.

SLM: The actor union’s initial rationalization for allowing its membership to work for token payments was founded on the premise of theater as an employment opportunity in TV and movies, hence the damning myth of “showcase theater in Los Angeles.” Yet the community has moved beyond that over the decades: Half the productions across the city are new plays.

Click here to continue reading the dialogue in Sunday's Arts & Book section. 

-- Charles McNulty

twitter.com\charlesmcnulty

Photo: Photo: Mandy Freud, left, and Christel Joy Johnson in the Ghost Road Company's production of "Home Siege Home" at Inside the Ford. Credit: Mark Seldis.
 
 

Comments

[NR]

Same rhetoric, different decade. McNulty is hopeless along many axes, offering comments about LA theatre while spending most of his time reviewing wonderbread shows in Laguna and San Diego. He's spent the last few weeks shamelessly flogging one of his pet directors. Morris could have and should have done better. He unfortunately hasn't gotten that the Cold War is over and that there's more to the arts than endless references to Chekhov.

What's true is not new, what's new is not true. Technology has not saved LA theatre no matter how many 'tribes' have formed since the late 1990s. Yes, it's been going on long before MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever shiny objects come along tomorrow. Roundtables come, roundtables go, but nothing changes. Edgefest tried valiantly for years to create a festival and whoever tries next will have to figure out why it didn't take.

Meanwhile, the Spanish speaking countries are turning out spectacular work. FITLA brought a lot of it here but it disappeared, uncommented and unlamented by, you guessed it, the Times and the Weekly. One would think that would be noteworthy in a city where that language is commonly spoken.

Crossfire? Hardly.

[Justin Tanner]

Charles McNulty and Steven Leigh Morris take a collective dump on our local small theatre scene (again) in today's LA Times. I guess they won't be happy until they put us all out of business. Though I fear THEY will be unemployed long before we are. Rock on L.A.'s thriving Theatre scene. And I gleefully applaud the critics' continuing marginalization and loss of relevance.