“I read it,” this man says, “and it’s a really wonderful piece. [Elias doesn''t] understand how hard it is to make a deal for a stage play here, even with a name like Paul Mazursky atached.”
Mazursky himself doubts that a hate-L.A. bias is keeping Catskill Sonata off the New York stage — just the difficulty of financing. Still, he is puzzled by its reception there. “I just don’t get it,” Mazursky says. “I’m from New York, the play takes place in New York — everything about it is New York.”
Michael Elias decided it's up to him to produce his play in New York.
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Others claim too many inferior Los Angeles productions have been dumped on Broadway following a lot of hype. Richard Kornberg, the venerable New York theater publicist, blames attitudes on a reaction against Los Angeles’ soft-touch critics.
“The nature of Los Angeles criticism,” Kornberg says, “is that it’s so salutary that reviews there seem to be written by Captain Kangaroo. You get [an L.A.] show coming here with this warm-and-fuzzy review, and New York critics will slam it.”
Elias candidly admits he is fighting the DNA-deep attitudes of the city he reveres, yet whose cultural snobbery he cannot understand — especially when he encounters it in L.A.
“I love Los Angeles,” Elias says. “I remember how excited I was when I first came out here to write variety shows and when the Negro Ensemble Company came here or when I’d see something at Jack Jackson’s place, the Inner City Cultural Center. What gets me are these people who say, ‘I can’t stand it out here, I really miss New York.’ They miss Broadway musicals, because I never see them in the theater here. They’re just talking about fucking Broadway musicals!”
On the other hand, his adoration of New York as the arbiter of taste is total, and its roots reach far back into his personal past.
“I worshiped the idea of New York,” Elias says. “My whole cultural heritage — everything — is from New York. When I saw those entertainers come up [to the Catskills], all I wanted to do was go to New York and become part of the theater, the art world — everything. Murray and I were kids who went to New York and saw Broadway, art galleries — we’d hang out at the Museum of Modern Art. That’s where we learned sophistication when we were in high school and college.”
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“If you can make it there,” the song says about New York, “you can make it anywhere.” But how can plays from hated Los Angeles even get onto New York stages? Not all L.A. plays, of course, are blocked at the Mississippi, nor are the ones that perform in New York necessarily masterpieces, as the mass graves of L.A. shows buried by New York critics attest. Still, New York’s hostility toward L.A. theater is palpable.
In the meantime, Michael Elias battles on.
“I’m just saying the hell with them all,” he says, “and am moving ahead and doing it on my own.”
Click here to read Continental Divisiveness: New York and L.A. Theater.
Click here to read Passing Strange: The L.A. Problem.
