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I: THE CRAWL TO THE COAST
I had come to L.A. to investigate the rapidly changing relations between nonprofit American theatre and the motion picture and television industries--to study the Deals, and talk to former theatre people who had made the Crawl to the Coast. Instead I was lying poolside, paralyzed at the Highland Gardens Hotel in central Hollywood, vaguely happy to have escaped the ice fields of Manhattan in January, but also enervated by my deep suspicion that from the P.O.V. of the "Industries" in this town, non-profit theatre was more or less irrelevant--at best, a kind of low-tech training ground for people preparing to start "real" careers in motion pictures and on TV.
Look beyond the myths, the shibboleths and common wisdom, I told myself, but my emotions couldn't be avoided: To ponder the future of nonprofit theatre these days, in Los Angeles as in New York, is to feel a lot like a lover of poetry--part of something defensible and more or less vital, but off on the cultural margins somewhere, seldom part of the "Big Picture." These feelings are reinforced by statistical evidence: Yes, Theatre Communication Group's nonprofit professional theatres constitute a $366-million industry, but federal, state and local support are in an historical decline, and expenses continue to rise; budgets have been slashed in more than one-third of the institutions participating in TCG's latest fiscal report, Theatre Facts 93, and numbers of productions, workshops and subscribers have dropped--the latter for the first time ever.
Hard times can be expected in an economy still suffering the effects of the worst recession in two decades. But there are aspects of our current crisis that seem new and radically underreported: First, there exists the very real possibility that we in the '90s are experiencing a cultural earthquake on a scale with the '60s, only its name this time is the death and re-invention of publicly funded culture--and that it represents the utter triumph of capitalism as the nation's dominant cultural ideal.
The second aspect of the crisis is the radical drain of theatre talent to the Coast: The trickle that began in the early '70s--first stage actors, then playwrights, then directors and designers, and finally administrators and even Yale-educated dramaturgs--became a torrent in...
