We Don't Need No Playwright: How Ensemble-Created Work Is Changing L.A. Theater

Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Thursday, Mar 29 2012

...continued from page 2

In one car, the audience members unwittingly became the actors: They were told to sit in the front and the actors got into the back of the car, and then sat in silence, before finally engaging in a comedic meta-theatrical discourse about the "play" they were seeing in the front seat and what they expected from it. "Why don't they say anything?" one asked the other.

Meanwhile, in another car, a forlorn fellow in the front seat was trying to explain to a child sitting next to him why exactly the boy's mother and he had split up, attempting to be charitable to his ex, the boy's mother. The preteen boy absorbed his father's heartbreak in stone-faced anguish.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY STAR FOREMAN

Critical Mass creates a script in only two weeks of rehearsal.

More About

While The Car Plays weren't ensemble-created in the same way that, say, Critical Mass or Ghost Road's productions are, with actors and the director contributing significantly to the text, they are a collaboration among a number of playwrights, which emphasizes a company's aesthetic and overall conception of a project over the voice of any one writer.

La Jolla Playhouse literary director Gabriel Greene says he spotted The Car Plays during last summer's Radar L.A. Festival, which was presenting ensemble-created work from companies across the Pacific Rim, many from Los Angeles. Moving Arts had been staging Car Plays at various local parking lots for years.

Last month, La Jolla also presented Richard Montoya's play American Night: The Ballad of Juan José — the picaresque journey of a Mexican immigrant to U.S. citizenship — before the company moved north to perform the play at CTG's Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. Though written by Montoya, American Night was developed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2010 in collaboration with Montoya's sketch-comedy troupe, Culture Clash, and the show's director, Jo Bonney.

Both Greene and Rodriguez point to cooperation among the artistic directors of California's flagship institutional theaters — La Jolla Playhouse's Christopher Ashley, South Coast Repertory's Marc Masterson, Center Theatre Group's Michael Ritchie and Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Tony Taccone — to present works that are created under the pervasive influence of a strong director and ensemble.

This foursome is in line with a similar national trend that started about five years ago, which marks a sea change in the way new work is encouraged at the institutional-theater level. The model until recently was that of commissioning and working with playwrights. This has been long-standing tradition at Costa Mesa's South Coast Repertory, which annually presents public readings and workshops of commissioned plays in its Pacific Playwrights Festival, and gives at least a couple of them full productions the following season.

When Ritchie took over the helm of Center Theatre Group from Gordon Davidson, he took the controversial step of dropping four minority playwriting labs that Davidson had established. Rodriguez insists CTG still has an active playwright commissioning program. She says the company has been working with seven different local authors for each of the past five years, and plans to stage at least two of their works next season.

Yet Rodriguez also points to the kind of play development that shifts the larger institution's role from producer to curator — aligning CTG with companies rather than just individual playwrights, and presenting their work in its smallest space, the Kirk Douglas Theatre. At CTG, these groups include not only Culture Clash and Critical Mass (Apollo) in L.A. but also Rainpan 43 Performance Group (All Wear Bowlers) from Philadelphia, the Civilians (This Beautiful City) from New York and the Rude Mechs (The Method Gun) from Austin.

Mark Valdez is executive director of the Network of Ensemble Theatres, a national organization that supports the work of theater ensembles. He says ensemble-driven work is not so much a trend as an ongoing movement.

"I think there have been waves of it," he says, adding that the previous wave was in the early 1980s. "We're now riding the most recent wave."

Valdez believes the reason for the recent wave of collaborative work — and the institutional support for it — mostly has to do with how larger regional theaters are increasingly playing it safe in these cash-strapped times, making the specificity and the idiosyncratic aesthetic of these small ensembles a breath of fresh air.

"I think regional theaters have become generalists," Valdez adds, "programming for a really wide audience — here's our classic play, here's our comedy, here's our Black History Month play. There's nothing wrong with that, and hopefully they become homes for a wide segment of the population."

But ensembles, nationally and locally, are able to focus more, Valdez says, "and develop a style of working and an aesthetic, and that's what makes the work exciting. Because of that, it's reinvigorated the field. I don't think it's going back. I wouldn't be surprised [if] in the next handful of years, regional theaters bring back [the now out-of-fashion concept of having their own] acting companies. I think this is only the beginning."