Steven Leigh Morris

Spoke Her Peace

Steven Leigh Morris
“The passing of an era” is one of those clichés that tends to accompany the death of a figurehead, but in the case of teacher–career activist Irja Lloyd, who died of natural causes last week at the age of 83, there’s some truth in the adage. Though the kinds of......

Ken Arno, Chick Magnate

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov Old Ken Arno has a farm, with plenty of cluck-clucks here and a bleat-bleat there: More than 2,000 critters, including chickens, turkeys, goats, rheas and pigeons share his suburban Lake Balboa farm. A few years ago, a neighbor’s complaints led to Arno’s being raided by the......
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The Buck Starts Here

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Ted Soqui It’s official: Now that the state budget has been approved, the California Arts Council’s funding has been slashed 90 percent from $18 million in 2002-2003 to $1 million this coming year. (The National Endowment for the Arts is expected to provide a matching $1 million, plus......

Once More, With Feeling

Steven Leigh Morris
On July 31, the Cultural Affairs Department will choose one of eight applicants to run the city-owned Los Angeles Theater Center. The city is giving up managerial responsibilities for the moribund facility, which includes four professional theaters and three rehearsal halls. Insiders say that Gilmore Associates is the front-runner, primarily......
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Another Day in Paradise

Steven Leigh Morris
Photos by L.M. Pagano (top) and Joan Marcus I had a cousin visiting from Sheffield, England, last weekend, so I thought I’d give her a treat, a novelty for a Brit — take her to the theater in Los Angeles. For those who don’t appreciate the staggering theatrical output here,......
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The CEO and the Lynch Mob

Steven Leigh Morris
Unless appearances deceive, 40-year-old playwright-novelist Suzan-Lori Parks is having a good time in Southern California. “New York is so dark; I love the light here.” She and her husband, musician Paul Oscher, moved here two years after Parks accepted a position running the Dramatic Writing Program at CalArts. The upstairs......
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Shipwrecked

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Ted Soqui I’ve never seen the economic climate worse in 35 years of managing nonprofit arts organizations. In terms of arts funding, we’re entering the perfect storm. —Charles Dillinghamgeneral manager of the Mark Taper Forum Dark clouds loomed over the Arts Alive rally, staged on behalf of the......
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How to Survive a Depression Without Really Crying

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Christopher Kuhl A quick look back at the slogans used by early progressives, labor union leaders in the ’30s and anti-war protesters in the ’60s raises the discomfiting question in the fledgling years of this century of what exactly was accomplished by all the sound and fury. As......
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Let Them Drink Beer

Steven Leigh Morris
Latino clowns Culture Clash (Rick Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza) have made the art of creating docucomedies about American cities and neighborhoods into a cottage industry — from Bordertown (San Diego) to Radio Mambo (Miami) to Nuyorican Stories (Nu Yorc). Most of these have been commissions from regional theaters......
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Still Searching for Signs

Steven Leigh Morris
Phot by Larry Hirshowitz Lily Tomlin rose to prominence in the 1960s on NBC’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In as the belligerent, snorting telephone operator, Ernestine, and a precocious girl named Edith Ann — who both became pop icons. We were living in a different world in 1986, when Tomlin won......