Around Town - LA Theatre or Why I Love Netflix

I had never really stopped to think about the fact that Los Angeles really is a theatre town...
not in the way of London or New York, with their well defined theatre districts, debuts and big productions. LA is all about small productions where the local acting populace can hone their craft. Across the city, in tiny theatres from Venice Beach to Hollywood to Downtown, you can find all kinds of plays, from the obscure to the well known.
And that's what I got on two subsequent evenings this week.
First was the well known...David Hare's "The Blue Room", a play about sex that was anything but sexy.
I liked the idea of the play with only one actor and one actress playing multiple parts that interacted in a quick succession of scenes.

The Girl (Irene) (Scene I & X)
The Cab Driver (Fred) (Scene I & II)
The Au Pair (Marie) (Scene II & III)
The Student (Anton) (Scene III & IV)
The Married Woman (Emma) (Scene IV & V)
The Politician (Charles)(Scene V & VI)
The Model (Kelly) (Scene VI & VII)
The Playwright (Robert) (Scene VII & VIII)
The Actress (Scene VIII & IX)
The Aristocrat (Malcolm) (Scene IX & X)

Considering the intimacy of the scenes, staged in the tiny Odyssey Theater in Westwood where the audience was seated no more that a few feet away from the actors, I would have thought that it would have been easy to have been drawn into the play as it progressed. Unfortunately I was bored by scene VII and just didn't give a damn about any of these characters and who they were screwing and why.

Fortunately it was a play in one act.

The next night I was off to another adventure in theater in Hollywood.

Now to drag me into Hollywood for anything is no small thing and I'm glad that I went just to remind myself that culture (good and bad) is everywhere and that the borders of the city don't end at Doheny Drive. Luckily, preceding a theater experience from hell, was a nice dinner at Cafe des Artistes, a charming restaurant with a decent frenchy menu and lovely service. After hoovering down my dinner and two much needed glasses of wine, it was off to see the "Buffalo Hole" the Arena Stage at Theatre of Arts.

Here's the description

A Dirty Bloody Black Comedy. From his outpost single wide, 30 miles from nowhere in freezing Foxholm, North Dakota, Braggert Strong awaits the arrival of his family to say their last goodbyes to a father, Patton L. Strong, Medal of Honor “winner” who has been a little less than “fatherly.” Between vicious dog bites, a mother who arrives 60 and pregnant, a sissy brother who won’t leave, and a sister who’s rode hard and put away wet, Braggert has little if no idea what he’s in for. A story of revenge, “dog food” and…amputation.

I don't even know what to say about this horrendously bad black comedy. It was insulting on so many levels, with characters so cliche that it made the playwright and lead actor, Robert Riechel Jr., just look like a smug ignoramus. The play was insulting to men, to veterans, to medal of honor winners, to fathers, to Midwesterners, etc. in a way that only a hip Hollywood writer would think was clever. But we've all seen these stock white trash characters before, so there was nothing daring or amusing in this production.

Out of politeness I didn't walk out.

Thank God for netflix so I could watch Balzac's "Cousin Bette" at home in my comfy bed after sitting through that pathetic play. Yeah, give me a well acted classic film over a wanna be edgy play any day.

Around Town - Sunday at the Skirball

I've always wanted to check out the architecture at the Skirball Cultural Center which sprouts out of the hills on the west side of the canyon between Bel Air and Brentwood and yesterday I finally had an event to attend there.

The Skirball Center, contains a concert hall, theater, amphitheater, auditorium, gallery space, conference center and various other areas of terraces and courtyards. Even with all of these features the overall structure, designed my Moshe Safdie, seems intimate because it was created as a series of interconnected low buildings punctuated by gardens.

At any rate it was the perfect venue for a lecture by Pulitzer Prize winning historian, David Kennedy and Hoover Institute Fellow, Thad Kousser, titled "What's The Matter With California". The lecture was Sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the American West of Stanford University, which obviously deals with issues specific to this region.

The lecture focused on the political problems of California stemming from a gridlocked legislative process. Let's just say that the gist of the matter is that California desperately needs legislative and constitutional reform. But as we all know we seldom get the government that we want, unfortunately we get the government that we deserve.

While I do think that California, the 8th largest economy in the world...or something like that, will eventually recover from this cyclical recession, I'm skeptical of long term progress in terms of political reform.

When the best and the brightest from the brainiacs at Stanford and the University of Rochester can come up with this astounding conclusion in their report from last February

When a state legislature is not dominated by one party, and the salaries are modest, legislators waste less time on bills that benefit only their own districts, according to researchers at Stanford and the University of Rochester.

That doesn't leave me too hopeful. Because as astute as this statement is, any person of average intelligence would have rationally come up with the same conclusion...you know without a full on study. Is this the best that these professors have to offer?

Well apparently not, because they've got CaliforniaChoice.org which aims to educate the State's citizenry on constitutional and political reform.

Yeah, good luck with that.

At any rate after coming to grips with the fact that the California of my parents and grandparents, of fragrant orange groves between benign suburbian sprawl, has long been gone and is never coming back, I was happy take my focus from the political to the personal and to sip some sauvignon blanc and listen to some soft jazz at Vibrato Grill high up in the hills of Bel Air.

Even with all of the problems of the State, at least we don't have volcano eruptions...yet.