What About the Audience?

April's Theater cover story, "Why Theater Matters," called for L.A. to harvest its abundant assets of small theater and dedicate itself to drawing stronger national attention to what it already does best: incubate new works. That article also drew attention to several local, smaller theaters that are on "the tip of the spear" in terms of presenting the kinds of productions that challenge established ideas of what theater is supposed to do. It was a profile of the city's lesser-known experimental wing, including Son of Semele Ensemble, NeedTheater, the Steve Allen Theater and REDCAT.

And the future looks like ... ?

Related Content

• 5 Best Comedy Shows in L.A. This Week, Including SNL Vet Garrett Morris' Revamped Comedy Club
  November 7, 2012
• Carl Reiner on His New Memoir, Holding Steve Martin's Baby and His Love of Zooey Deschanel
  January 23, 2013
• 5 Best Comedy Shows in L.A. This Week, Including Mike Birbiglia's Latest Solo Show
  October 31, 2012
• 5 Best Comedy Shows in L.A. This Week, Including Paul Scheer's Sexy Christmas Spectacular
  December 6, 2012
• Lizz With Two Zs, Not Liza With a Z (what a stupid fucking headline)
  May 17, 2012

More About

• Terence McFarland
• Lasa
• Steve Allen
• Theatrical Plays
• Theater

The piece's varied responses included complaints that championing experimental theater, so limited in popularity, was not in the best interests of keeping L.A. theater relevant. How relevant can the art form be, after all, if it's only being seen by niches of the intellectually precocious, while leaving out the crowds that pour into the Pantages? What about the audience? Critics like me, who stand up for minority tastes, are behind "the problem" of our theater's demise, the detractors suggested.

Those arguments shine a light on the contrary philosophies of relevance in the theater — mirrored, of course, in all other arts. In one school, popularity and relevance are one and the same: A sold-out show in a big theater is relevant because so many people will see it. The other school, represented in the cover story, holds a different view: Relevance is not necessarily tethered to popularity or to commerce — though it can be if, for instance, experimental work is given financial and press support, and if crowds show up out of curiosity, or perhaps just to jeer.

An entire school of popular British theater, plays and playwrights was influenced by the experimental plays put on by the Royal Court Theatre, from the 1970s through the 1990s. These were not particularly popular plays, nor did they necessarily garner rave reviews. The playwrights (such as Arnold Wesker, Howard Brenton, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Edward Bond) are a long way from being the names that crop up in kitchen conversations, even in Britain. Yet these are the works seen by the comparatively well-known British playwrights — the likes of Caryl Churchill, David Hare and Martin McDonough. These are the kinds of works that more commercially inclined playwrights look at with a kind of envy — for the quality and originality of ideas being presented (though there's little envy for the tiny cadre of enthusiasts who follow such work). Thus, these are the plays and ideas that influence the more commercially minded playwrights — ensuring that new ideas trickle out, and up.

So it is in the United States. American behemoths of commercial theater, from Neil Simon to Christopher Durang, have openly expressed the influence that the decidedly noncommercial but fiercely respected Samuel Beckett had on their work, and the works of generations that followed. If our experimental wing is clipped, and we grow to depend only on what is popular in order to define what is relevant, we are actually consigning the art form to inevitable, eventual irrelevance. (Read: abject boredom.) Because it's risk that moves the art form forward; popular theater, and the economic imperatives that create it, have by definition an aversion to such risk.

Not mentioned in the article was the work of L.A. Stage Alliance, a nonprofit service organization that puts out a magazine profiling local theaters and individuals in them, administrates a discount-ticket program and conducts workshops on marketing, publicity and other challenges faced by the theater community. LASA has had many incarnations and has survived various crises, including a crushing debt, staff cuts and seeing its glossy print L.A. Stage Magazine become the online L.A. Stage Blog. It's now headed by a two-man team, Executive Director Terence McFarland and Programs Manager Doug Clayton, with supplemental support from a small staff.

The other facet of L.A. Stage Alliance's work recently has been empirical research that sets the stage for the kind of theater that can, and might, make Los Angeles among the nation's more relevant theater cities. Setting the stage doesn't usually warrant attention; it's what's on the stage once it has been set that gets noticed. Yet LASA's investigations of the question "What about the audience?" are particularly sophisticated and nuanced, and can go a long way to shattering the myth that popular theater need necessarily be the most relevant theater.

McFarland and Clayton have kept quiet about policy proposals for L.A. theater because, they believe, they don't yet understand empirically what the problems and possibilities for resolving them are. So, LASA has become a kind of research institute, seeking the facts and figures of who is going where, and why. Now that the organization, according to McFarland, will be debt-free by December, they're in a position to press ahead with research.

One of the programs in the works, Arts Census, is designed "to understand in a comprehensive way arts patronage," McFarland explains. So far, they have data on 57 organizations and 2.5 million unique households. "My goal is to hit 200 organizations by the end of the calendar year."