Dustin Lance Black's Play 8, Starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt

Chief Judge Vaughn Walker (a droll reading by Brad Pitt) was portrayed as growing increasingly sardonic and impatient with the notion that anybody's civil rights should be postponed because of some unknown, unproven fears. Defense attorney Charles Cooper (Kevin Bacon, with an unassuming posture that wavered between humility and humiliation, as though forced to defend Rush Limbaugh against his better judgment) actually suggested that the danger posed by same-sex marriage was a "given" that outweighed the need for actual evidence — a suggestion that clearly tested the judge's patience.

There's a deeper question provoked by the reading: whether there's greater merit to plays that provoke reflection and rumination, or plays that agitate for the kind of action that can help remedy woes, which in classically inspired works are merely exposed. There are those who feel that activist plays such as Black's are somehow less worthy than works that examine paradoxes and enigmas. The theater of political agitation has both national and international traditions worthy of respect: from Bertolt Brecht to Clifford Odets, from Václav Havel and Athol Fugard to Harold Pinter, from Heiner Müller to Arthur Miller, from Caryl Churchill to Tony Kushner.

Brad Pitt, left, and Kevin Bacon dramatize the 2010 Proposition 8 trial.

Location Info

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Wilshire Ebell Theatre

4401 W. Eighth St.
Los Angeles, CA 90005

Category: Music Venues

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

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More About

• American Foundation for Equal Rights
• Dustin Lance Black
• Proposition 8
• Same-Sex Marriage
• Referenda

One still has to ask a question that determines the merit of a theatrical event: Does the audience see the world differently after leaving the theater from when they walked in? Can art change the world? It can, in a good production of a complex play of advocacy by Pinter or Churchill or Kushner.

Not so here. Not the art on this stage. But one night of star power did raise $2 million for AFER. And that reality might help make the world a more enlightened place in 10 years than what it is today. And that's not a bad consequence of political theater.

(Editor's note: We have corrected the name of the theater as well as the name of the character Blankenhorn and the actor who played him. Thursday, March 8, 11 a.m.)