RAT [bigcheap] LA Weekly Edgefest article

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Title: [bigcheap] LA Weekly Edgefest article

The Edge of the World As We Know It  
Notes on the second annual Los Angeles Edgefest  

by Steven Leigh Morris   (LA Weekly, Theatre Editor)


    November 9 through 19 marked the second annual Edge of the World Theater 
Festival (a.k.a. Edgefest), a nonjuried showcase of stage offerings almost 
entirely from local troupes, at venues in all corners of the city. (There was 
a visiting company this year, A Hairy Innovation, spawned by UC San Diego, 
which performed a decidedly collegiate effort called Fun House Style at the 
Ivy Substation.) The 60 festival entries were 11 more than in last year’s 
inaugural festival, and also included the endeavor’s most striking success, a 
two-day festival-within-the-festival called the L.A. History Project: seven 
commissioned works, each focusing on a different sedimentary layer of our 
city’s past and performed with skeletal production values at Los Angeles 
Theater Center.
    An audience of close to 200 gathered on a Sunday afternoon to watch a 
company called Plymouth render a thoughtful staging of Crazy Drunk, in which 
Methodist alcoholic G.J. Griffith (for whom Griffith Park was named after he 
donated his land to the city) shoots his Catholic wife in the face, presuming 
that she has been unfaithful. Remarkably, she survives; the play includes 
excerpts from Griffith’s 1904 trial, after which the landowner was sentenced 
to two years in San Quentin. (He served half that before being released for 
good behavior.) The story is told from the point of view of Griffith’s 
attorney and the advocate’s grown daughter/newspaper columnist, whom he 
dragged to the trial when she was a child. (Their fate was another story, 
also told in the play.) Other worthy entries among the septet of historical 
pieces at LATC included Lucy Kim’s Fancy, a radio play about the Wild West 
and presented by Playwrights’ Arena, Joshua Rebell’s Gatsby in Hollywood, 
presented by Sacred Fools Theater Company and dealing with F. Scott 
Fitzgerald in Hollywood, and Open Fist Theater Company’s wry The Bay of Smokes
, a noirish barroom-murder-mystery send-up that has characters somewhat 
pedantically, and amusingly, throwing in archaic historical references. Like 
these, a significant proportion of the other works were created for the 
festival, which also presented plays that were already in production on 
November 9 and continue to run as this edition goes to print.
    The idea for Los Angeles Edgefest came from conversations on a local 
theater Web site/listserve called Big Cheap Theater (BCT), in which members 
of the L.A. theater community plug their shows, announce their parties, 
congratulate each other, put out pleas for technical help, and engage in 
discussions of principles and politics — the sorts of conversations that, in 
a more geographically hospitable city, would occur at the bar where the 
region’s thespians regularly meet, and which does not yet exist here.
    BCT was spawned from a theater movement unofficially called Regional 
Alternative Theater (RAT), trumpeted by Seattle playwright Erik Ehn and New 
York scribe Mac Wellman as a national movement propelled by ideals of 
inclusion and enthusiasm rather than any formal credo. Their concept calls 
for the creation of a theater scene via the coming together of disparate 
elements, as though by magic, or magnetism, rather than by applicants 
submitting to the kind of critical judgments by which theatrical art is 
traditionally valued and devalued.
This somewhat anarchistic approach may lead to the kind of raw, underground 
aesthetic implied by the Edgefest acronym and embodied in the Actors’ Gang 
entry, Cintra Wilson’s XXX Love Act, a quasi-biographical docudrama, set in a 
strip club, about the rise and demise of two porno-baron brothers; or 
Evidence Room’s hypnotically repulsive production of Edward Bond’s 
infanticidal Saved. But “inclusion” also translates into the kind of 
open-arms policy that makes the Edinburgh Fringe Festival so democratic, 
erratic and unwieldy, and, locally, has XXX Love Act playing down the street 
from the Actors Co-op’s corn-fed production of Godspell. Edgefest: a world of 
difference.
    Aesthetic difference maybe, but not ethnic — though not for lack of 
trying. Did the stage companies of color all leave town during Edgefest? 
Where were Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, Grupo de Teatro Sinergia, Robie 
Theater Company, Unity Players Ensemble, East West Players, or even the 
Taper’s in-house workshops, such as the Latino Theater Initiative, 
Blacksmyths and the Asian Theater Workshop? Festival organizer Mark Seldis 
explained during a wrap-up roundtable that such companies were in fact wooed, 
and that most of those who had expressed interest in Edgefest were unable to 
follow through. Of the city’s nonwhite troupes, only the Asian-American 
company Lodestone included itself on the festival docket, with its production 
of American Monsters. At the same roundtable, Lodestone artistic director 
Philip W. Chung said that he’s “starting from scratch” in trying to entice 
audiences from a community that has little cultural sense of, or interest in, 
the theater. Yet Chung’s plight, which he may believe is idiosyncratically 
Asian-American, is just a microcosm of the larger quandary faced by every 
company in the city.
    In 1999, the Weekly reviewed approximately 750 professional stage 
productions in L.A., reluctantly missing at least 20 percent of the 
legitimate candidates for review and choosing to disregard the many shows 
that had runs of less than two weeks. These stats alone render Los Angeles 
the busiest professional-theater center in the country. (Actors Equity says 
that New York City opened 653 professional productions that same year.) 
Still, the myths persist that a) Los Angeles is not a theater city, and b) 
the stage work done here is all showcasing for the film and TV industries. 
Both of these statements are patently untrue. The activity is here, the 
quality is here — in fits and starts, anyway — but the audiences are not.
    The discussion during the round-table homed in on that frustration, 
targeting the usual suspects: the lack of grant money, shoddy publicity 
campaigns, high ticket prices, all of which are largely beside the point — a 
point best expressed in publicist Jerry Charlson’s anecdote about his futile 
efforts to convince a local TV station that, despite the hours and hours of 
televised vomit spewed forth during local “news” broadcasts, perhaps one 
minute of air-time per week could be devoted to the theater. No such luck. We 
live in a city that blithely disregards one of its most vibrant cultural 
arteries. The attitude, the apathy, is in — and on — the air.
    The Edge of the World Theater Festival is a tiny voice-in-the-void that 
must continue and gain resonance, a declaration by a well-entrenched and 
largely ignored arts community that it does, indeed, exist — and for the best 
of reasons, despite the impediments that come with poverty: to produce works 
of theater designed to provoke, intellectually and emotionally; to offer 
alternatives to, and commentary on, the kinds of entertainment seen on our 
TV, movie and computer screens. The festival’s function at this point is to 
make a little noise, create a scene.    The strategy appears to be working. 
As with last year, the hub venues reported booming attendance during the 
festival’s 10 days. But logistical questions remain. Scheduling, for 
instance: On a typical night — Friday, November 17, for example — there were 
29 different shows slated for 8 p.m., all at different locations; then 
anywhere from one to three events during each of the remaining time slots. 
Such stacking of shows during the prime-time slot makes it impossible to see 
the festival in its entirety, or to get a sense of its scale. And if shows 
can be staggered more evenly through the night, can they also then be located 
at theaters adjacent to subway stations? Theatre/Theater, Stella Adler, the 
Hollywood Court and Open Fist (Hollywood and Highland), the Tamarind theater 
and Actors Co-op (Hollywood and Vine) all come to mind, not to mention the 
cluster of Valley theaters adjoining the North Hollywood station. If the 
festival can help get audiences off the freeways and onto the trains, the 
experience of theatergoing in Los Angeles might come to resemble that in 
Chicago, Seattle and New York, places that people-in-the-know like to refer 
to as “theater cities.” Along the same lines, how about more deals with local 
restaurants for discount coupons? As Anthony Burns from Burning Wheel and the 
Mark Taper Forum pointed out during the roundtable, “People go to rock 
concerts not only for shows but for the community. We have to start thinking 
not only of the 90 minutes on the stage, but what happens before and after 
those 90 minutes.”