Re: Backstage West online re the 1999 RAT Conference

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RAT Packs 'Em In

By Rob Kendt

People who give a RAT's ass about small alternative theatre gathered this 
past weekend at the Ivy Substation in Culver City and the Los Angeles Theatre 
Center in downtown L.A. for the fifth annual RAT conference, the first of its 
kind in L.A. Drawing attendees from small theatres in Washington, D.C., New 
York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Little Rock, and many areas of 
Southern California, the conference splayed wildly over three-plus days of 
all-free events, workshops, panel discussions, performances, and free-form 
schmoozing.

RAT stands variously for Regional Alternative Theatre or Room And 
Transportation-or, as RAT founder Erik Ehn said in one panel discussion, "It 
stands for nothing. It's a fake name."

Indeed, RAT is consistently undefined as a non-organization by the often 
contrarian, self-styled outsider artists who first met around the 
Off-Broadway run of Mac Wellman's language-based plays Bad Penny, Crowbar, 
and Terminal Hip, and later coalesced more formally at the University of Iowa 
in 1995 for the first RAT conference.

The manifesto of this nascent movement was provided by Ehn, a Bay Area-based 
playwright who in a 1993 essay in the Yale journal Theatre advanced a 
well-considered argument against the stasis of institutional regional theatre 
in the U.S. and in favor of a number of radical but very specific grass-roots 
alternatives meant to link theatre artists more directly to each other and to 
their communities.

In practice, the RATs emphasize the movement's lack of a plan and take pride 
in its disorganization and "inefficiency." The result at last week's L.A. 
gathering was a kind of ongoing meta-theatrical happening that became its own 
reason for being-one which organizers Lee Wochner and Mitch Gossett kept 
appropriately loose and on-the-fly without losing their cool. Rather than a 
ringing endorsement of a new model or aesthetic, the conference came out with 
individuals vowing to meet again at next year's RAT conference, to share 
information and gossip via e-mail, and maybe even work together soon.

The conference's big-drawing panel discussion promised to feature Ben 
Cameron, executive director of the national organization Theatre 
Communications Group, alongside Lars Hansen, the new president of Theatre LA, 
squaring off "against" Ehn and RAT co-conspirator Nick Fracaro of Brooklyn's 
Thieves Theatre. Moderator and conference co-organizer Lee Wochner admitted 
to the crowd that the conference's "contentious" billing was a "scam" to get 
the crowd to show up.

What ensued was polite if passionate disagreement on very few points, since 
Cameron has redefined the mission of TCG from what he calls its original goal 
of "validating a certain kind of behavior"-i.e., helping U.S. regional 
theatres define themselves as serious nonprofit institutions in the 1960s and 
'70s-to "capturing theatrical energy in whatever form it takes," including 
"irreverence and innovation" outside the institutional LORT model.

Representing the RAT side, Ehn spoke of the culture's "tremendous pressure to 
go to the marketplace," and worried that insitutional theatres want to 
compete with the slick, efficient distribution of film and TV-a "spiritually 
dead" path to which the alternative is for like-minded rebels to "find each 
other," à la the renegades in The Matrix who take on a pervasive mind-control 
machine, and fight the power and/or claim their own.

The passionate Fracaro called RAT "not quite a religion, but pretty close to 
a way of life," and compared it to "a van going around the country, or an ark 
picking up anyone who's on the same search" for "a life in the theatre rather 
than a career in the theatre." Looking just a mite bewildered by the abstract 
tone of his panelmates, Theatre LA's Hansen spoke admiringly of the "mutual 
respect developed over the years between the large and small theatres" in 
L.A., and spoke hopefully of today's graying theatregoing audience being 
replenished by aging baby boomers.

As if to supply some of the controversy missing from the panel, audience 
members were vocal in their concerns about everything from the high salaries 
of big-money arts administrators to the need for theatre to validate youth 
culture rather than condescend to it. And while some acknowledged hopeful 
signs for big/small theatre partnerships as well as within LORT theatres 
themselves, many in smaller theatre clearly see themselves as engaged in a 
pitched battle between scrappy, grass-roots artists and a professionalized 
arts racket for a shrinking funding pie.

Ehn's answer-to fight the tyranny of money by embracing poverty, both as a 
value and an aesthetic-is radical, although the theatre artists of L.A., with 
their selfless Equity 99-Seat Plan, are already practicing it in their work, 
and few with better results than such local troupes as Actors' Gang, which 
gave a phenomenal demonstration of its signature commedia-based style, and 
Cornerstone Theatre Company, which gave a workshop on its unique 
community-based work.

Among the free performances offered were "Night of 1,000 Playwrights," in 
which bits of many plays were sampled over several hours, some after hours of 
rehearsal, others strictly cold-read; a free reading/performance of Nat 
Colley's play Lawyers by Moving Arts theatre company; a pair of diverting 
monologues by members of San Diego's Sledgehammer Theatre, and the "High 
Cheeze Challenge," a performance contest won by a group which "sunk the LATC 
like the Titanic" by lying down on the floor of the former bank building as 
blue balloons were dropped on them.

"It was spectacular," said Mark Seldis of the Actors' Gang, who issued the 
challenge on Thursday and helped judge the finalists late on Saturday night. 
About the whole RAT infestation, Seldis raved: "I thought it was pretty 
amazing, to have people from out of town along with the people from theatres 
here, as well as this whole slew of individuals who are just interested in 
theatre and aren't affiliated with any company. There were definitely a lot 
of doors opened here."

Indeed, while RAT has yet shown nothing close to the scope or impact of the 
resident theatre movement of the 1960s, to which it is often compared, it 
does have a similar do-it-yourself breakaway spirit and tenacity, and remains 
perhaps the most likely laboratory for the next great nonprofit theatre model 
to brew-even if that model is simply, for the time being, a commitment to get 
together once a year and talk theatre. 

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