4w1 — Los Angeles theatre is where Hollywood goes to feed its soul
ARCHIVE | How troupes like The Geffen Playhouse are giving Broadway a run for its money
WORDS BY EMMA BILDERBACK
Here is a spicy take for the American theatre sphere: the Tony Awards are a local award show. When this has been said to New York arts workers, the reaction varies from humour to vigorous defence. But stew on it for a moment: Who gets represented on that stage? How are nominees picked? Why does the rest of the country have to fight for national recognition over the one award reserved for them?
American theatre is so much bigger than Broadway. It’s bigger than New York City. It’s American theatre. It’s for all of us that exist within these borders. And yet when discussing the state of the American theatre, we frequently only think of Broadway─not even the other theatre scenes that exist within New York. Every other major city is a second or third-tier theatre scene when pit against Broadway. This is unfortunate, because there is incredible theatre being made in every artistic corner in this country. Not least in Tinseltown.
Los Angeles is a different entertainment epicentre, with unfettered access to talent and resources that rival New York. Yet its theatre scene is not viewed on par. Here, theatre and film are intertwined─artists, especially performers and writers, frequently jump between the two mediums. Los Angeles theatre is where Hollywood goes to feed its soul at the end of its gruelling production days.
The Geffen Playhouse is at least one company in Los Angeles that fuses the magic of Hollywood with the magic of theatre to create exciting work that makes the drive to the West Side worthwhile. As a non-profit theatre with two stages, The Geffen Playhouse produces eight works per season, attracting more A-List talent than most theatres in the city. A recent season boasted the talents of Bryan Cranston, Rivkah Reyes, Louisa Jacobson, Zachary Quinto, and Calista Flockhart─all across different productions. That’s impressive access to talent, especially when coupled with the vision of Artistic Director Mark Shakman, who notably produced and directed Marvel’s WandaVision.
The Geffen has brought many West Coast Premieres and World Premieres to the Los Angeles theatre scene, recently and notably The Inheritance, which won the Tony for Best Play in 2020. Even in this piece, which seeks to divorce Los Angeles from New York, the Tony’s still loom as the ultimate theatrical validation in these United States. Two productions that New York was not lucky enough to see from a recent season were a star-studded production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the West Coast premiere of Paul Grellong’s Power of Sail, a play not yet seen in New York at all. Zachary Quinto and Calista Flockhart were simply immaculate as George and Martha, Albee’s iconic, puzzling, feuding married couple. The set was the kind of peak American Realism that I had been missing from similar productions in New York, which seem to want to do the absolute least with their sets (though that reads less as minimalism as more as producers being cheap). This sort of incredible talent is just part of what makes theatre in Los Angeles special─you really get to see how multifaceted these performers are. Those who have never taken an acting class might not understand how vastly different the skills of stage acting and camera acting are. The credits are not always transferable.
New York has not yet been graced with Power of Sail, and it’s hard to know how a New York audience would react to a play about the faults of the New England Ivy League elite and their insidious, cynical racism. Bryan Cranston led a dedicated ensemble as a fictional Harvard professor under fire for facilitating an on-campus conversation with a noted, fictional white supremacist. It’s a very specific conversation at a specific moment in American history and it follows its logic through to a tragic conclusion. Most of the play is a series of philosophical hypothetical conversations, with most of the pivotal action happening offstage and the dramatic action being the fallout from those events. The title is derived from one of these conversations, where Cranston monologues about how motorboats must yield to sailboats under maritime law. A clever metaphor about those with more power making sure that those with less are safe. A bold statement for a play that had its world premiere in South Carolina.
The Geffen is a special place in the larger Los Angeles theatre sphere, but it is far from the only exciting theatre space in Los Angeles. There is new and exciting work happening at East West Players, the nation’s first professional theatre specifically for Asian-Americans; at Native Voices at The Autry, the only Equity house dedicated to Indigenous American storytelling; at Deaf West, the nation’s premiere company for American Sign Language theatre making; at Center Theatre Group, arguably Los Angeles’ largest theatre company. The Geffen is just one patch on the great quilt of Los Angeles’ theatre scene, woven into the broader brocade of American theatre.