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Following on the discussion that fed this week's KCRW column, here's a report by Los Angeles theater types who aren't fans of the Center Theater Group model. It's by playwright John Steppling, who convened The Uninvited: Crashing the Party, a conference to re-imagine the next 50 years of Los Angeles theatre.
Today in theatre there is a hegemonic system of funding domination by big corporate non-profit theatre. The society reproduces itself at an ever more compulsive and rapid pace. Art, especially theatre, has the potential to be transformative, to be emancipatory. As it is practiced today in the non-profit model we see exemplified by CTG, we have neither. In fact, for forty years it CTG and other big corporate entities of culture have actively discouraged the transformative. The professionalization of art coupled to a careerist mindset in young artists, results in comforting non-disruptive product.This conference was called in an effort to find a method of opposition to this spirit killing model. To find a new sensibility of seriousness. One that is linked to history, politics, and a mystical dimension that reaches beyond the bland reproduction of an illusory pre-packaged reality.
Read the rest at Cultural Weekly, a compilation of culture-related pieces maintained by Adam Leipzig, the former president of National Geographic Films who also was part of the team that opened the Los Angeles Theatre Center on Spring Street.