One August morning in the waning years of the previous century, Jerry Garcia died. On that Wednesday night, a motley contingent of actors, musicians and poets staged an impromptu memorial at a theater in downtown Fullerton. The cops were eventually called, and that gathering factored in that troupe getting bounced from the space. But, damn it, “I Know You Rider” had to be sung—and sung loudly.
I was thinking about that the night of Nov. 8 and the rough patch of days that followed. While half of America's voters took the results of the presidential election hard, local theater folks took it way hard. My Facebook feed was overwhelmed by posters reacting as if Kristin Chenoweth, Neil Patrick Harris and the family dog had just been immolated in a fire set by sparking the last, recently discovered, but never read, Jonathan Larson play. Terrified, tearful, angry and apocalyptic posts were the rage, and it seemed as if the only proactive step was to affix a safety pin to your chest and keep a vigilant eye on the jackbooted thugs who would soon begin whaling on people of color or alternative lifestyles (better idea: put 50 pins on, point them outward, then jump on the dipshits doing it).
And it makes sense. Theater people, by and large, tend to be emotional and dramatic, and they, like their audiences and the writers whose work they help to bring to life, skew liberal. And any rational human being should be just a little bit concerned about the consequences of Trump's racist, xenophobic and sexist rhetoric.
It also makes sense that so many aired their angst on Facebook, the cybernetic group-therapy session in which sympathy and smiley faces are only a click away.
But theater people, as with all creative types, have an alternative to the immediately accessible but non-physical realm of the internet: Their work and the spaces where they do it. There were no spontaneous gatherings in the days that followed the election, though. Plays and readings were staged. But considering so many creative people were taken aback by the election, it was curious that so little emphasis was placed on what is theater's yugely greatest potential: cathartic communion in a space filled with real, breathing people.
It's not that last weekend's theater events operated in a vacuum. Josh Nicols, who runs an improv group at STAGEStheatre in Fullerton, said that while performers talked backstage Friday night about the election, that didn't manifest in the material onstage, which surprised him. And Eric Eberwein, director of the Orange County Playwrights Alliance and Orange County's biggest champion of original plays, said that staged readings at Theatre Out of plays by local playwrights Erica Bennett and George Bardin Rothman prompted a discussion about “how the themes of the [plays] felt eerily appropriate . . . the responsibility of ordinary people to do courageous things in uncertain times.”
That's good, but it's still theater confined to performance. All too often, theaters seem satisfied to invite the community into their spaces every weekend, and that's it. Very few actively engage with their community, making their houses feel like a relevant part of it. Two local theater producers are the exception (maybe others, too; if so, let me know): Theatre Out, OC's bastion of LGBT theater, often holds single-night events that aren't about a play, but more about bringing that community together. And Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble has transformed from staging plays to actively soliciting its community to help write and workshop those plays, basically bringing theater to the people rather than the other way around.
More theaters need to follow that lead and create a sense that the local playhouse is not only an escape from the daily grind, but also a sanctuary for expression, community, catharsis and, above all else, the real, hard work that is desperately needed in times of turmoil. It's time to, in the 1956 words of Allen Ginsberg, put the queer, artistic shoulder to the American wheel. Or, as Steven Leigh Morris, the impossibly erudite and knowledgeable former theater critic of LA Weekly who now runs stageraw.com, said in the ending of his brilliant essay about the arts in the era of Trump, “Because when the world seems upside-down and inside-out, when reliable sources are no longer reliable, when reason starts to sound like babble, and babble like reason . . . there are places where actual truth can be told, little halls off back alleys, where poems are read, where songs are sung, where plays are put on. . . .
“And this is how the performing arts change the world. And there are small pockets of history when nothing is more important. And we may well be entering one of them.”
Word.
Work while the day is long, brothers and sisters, for the night of death cometh when no man can work.
Joel Beers has written about theater and other stuff for this infernal rag since its very first issue in, when was that again???