The Dying Art of LA Play Development -- Guest Columnist

By

Johnna

Last month the Mark Taper Forum shut down all of its new play development labs (Blacksmyths, Latino Theatre Initiative, Asian American, Other Voice- Disabled Writers, etc.). The new artistic director at the Taper, Michael Ritchie, describes his disappointment in the labs to the LA Weekly thusly, “With these labs I had wanted to see more product. . . .” He goes on to cite poor advocacy for production by the lab leaders (who were all summarily fired) and long development cycles as reasons the labs were disbanded. The new plan is to ‘partner’ with smaller local theaters and bring successful small theater LA premieres to the Kirk Douglas Theatre, the experimental Culver City-based arm of the Mark Taper.

The first play to be ‘moved up’ in this Off-off to Off-Broadway model is PERMANENT COLLECTION from the Greenway Arts Alliance. PERMANENT COLLECTION is an exploration of race relations written by white, male playwright Tom Gibbons and despite its doubtless merits, politically, it is sort of an awkward choice to replace selections written about minorities by actual minorities.

They told me in theater school that the theater was a dying art. And that I was apprenticing myself to a wasteland of dwindling opportunity, increasing commercialism, and unrealizable artistic promise. That was part of the romance of pursuing theater. How poignant and meaningful to be priestess of a dying religion, I thought in my exuberant twenties. Now it is just depressing. With the Taper closing the door to all play development, the burden is now placed on the ridiculously under-funded smaller theater community. So this is a good excuse for all you local readers to go and see some local, live, small theater this weekend. That is apparently the best we can do for anything that is not ‘product’ in the arts community.

Johnna is a Los Angeles based playwright, winner of the 2003 OC Weekly Best New Play Award for her play, COCKFIGHTERS. Two of her plays will be published in an anthology of naturist plays this summer. Two other plays will be produced this year.