Craig Fees, "LA as a culture medium", THE OCCIDENTAL, May 18 (1973), p. 9 and Back Page
"The Occidental" was the student newspaper for Occidental College in Los Angeles.
In a culture in which man goes to a two-dimensional screen to be aroused, trading sexual, intellectual, moral and emotional experience away to tubes and electric projectors, live theater is fighting a discouraging battle for survival on its own possible terms. Without the mythic power of rock music built on a litany of publicity and a diverse army of fostered addicts, without the draw and business support of sports or the low overhead and guaranteed constituency of religions - the other live entertainments open to the public - Los Angeles theater faces the daily choice of starvation with possible extinction or solvency-seeking with shows in direct competition for the audience of the more popular media. Were it not for grants and private donations, for example, the Mark Taper would collapse. The standard financial support for much of Los Angeles small theater has been and continues to be the actor-director-technician membership fee, ranging anywhere from ten to thirty dollars per month for the privilege of producing live theater. And despite outside grants the Company Theater has had to beg the public in the past (unsuccessfully) for show-producing monies, is still living in the poverty range, and has like other theater organizations before it lost its building to rising, impossible renting costs. The individual public simply does not support live theater in Los Angeles.
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“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”
- William James
Los Angeles is the paradise of mass culture. Locked in the individual crania of automobiles erasing the distinction of street names, neighborhoods, time and distance in freeways, man here is isolated from direct experience in a manner altogether different from that of a New York City, say, where isolation is based in confrontation, and walking the Park or being in the streets carries a real sense of possible danger. In Los Angeles if one senses fear, it is more often a fear of oneself, a fear of being alone. There are certainly places one doesn’t go, but one needn’t - and the deepest external experience in Los Angeles may well be a proposition on Hollywood Blvd. as one is leaving the movies to go home. We are not geared here for confrontations with reality. As critic Robert Warshow wrote, “The chief function of mass culture is to relieve one of the necessity of experiencing one’s life directly ... Its ultimate tendency is to supersede reality,” and our drive-in churches, our porno houses, radio stations, television and movie theaters, in catering to the Spectator that we of the evening news have become, aggravate the separation from our living that we too much are.
This separation is dangerous, is tantamount to and exhibits symptomatology identical with standard sensory deprivation: it is a very real form of sensory deprivation, social sensory deprivation. We cease to be surprised by the world, we are restless, ill at ease. We seek chemical and electric solutions, and in a freneticism for which Los Angeles has become notorious we race from stimulation to stimulation, ‘uncertain what is exciting and how much’, distracted but not having formed the relationship with events around us prerequisite to satisfying the deeper need to experience. Ultimately and ironically as we seek more and more of these changes on our senses, we simply compound our isolation to the point where our role in the world becomes passive response to a field of changing stimuli, the perfect spectator cut off from any active role in the shape of the world around us. Or rather all but cut off, because ours is the ability to select the particular stimuli to which we will respond, and we can exercise the freedom to change channels, switch newspapers, stay home or go to a particular movie, make love or masturbate, choose or not choose among presidential candidates. But then, once that choice is made, the initiative is taken away from us and returned to the stimulating media, and until we choose again we form the unilateral relationship of response which has left us powerless, and leaves us powerless, over the form and direction of our world.
The theater in Los Angeles has done little to meet with this fact. Because this is the world that the entertainment dollar and the theater people themselves know, this is the world to which much of Los Angeles theater naturally and with financial common-sense responds. To wit: Oedipus at the Oxford, The Mind with the Dirty Man at the Mark Taper, Days in Wakefield’s Bar at the Cellar, all of which to one extent or another promote the spectator shaped in mass culture to the expense of the activator, the possibility creator. That this is done in the name of keeping stage theater alive simply demonstrates the extent of victimization of Los Angeles theater that it is willing to sacrifice the basic elements of interpersonal theater to the financial survival of the framework of theater. If it were to be true to the possibilities of theater, it would rather seek alternatives to the sensory deprivation and perceived impotence of this city’s culture - and in doing so give Los Angeles not merely another organized distraction, but a theater grown in, by and for the peculiarities of the Los Angeles world. Such a theater would be Los Angeles’ Theater and would give to Los Angeles at last the sought-for distinction of a stage which is neither a copy nor a victim of New York theater, movies, television nor the cultural malaise.
Leaping ahead, a vital candidate for such a theater is the Company as demonstrated in the best nights of its Hashish Club and symbolized in its home grown production “The James Joyce Memorial Liquid Theater” of a year or so ago. The latter was an exercise quite literally in direct experience, of touching, dancing, exploring, acting in groups with others—a production in which the audience became the actors, and the actors shared themselves and their freedom to learn. The former, Hashish Club, is more traditional as theater pieces go, but it too is home-grown and exercises that unique ability of live theater to incorporate the mind and reactions of the audience into the shape of the ongoing production. A truism of theater, this effect of audience on production - the ability to act and react which has unsubtle effects on the thinking of man, and which has been carried to its extremes as a program in Julian Beck’s Living Theater - is important to the success of Hashish Club, and is indeed exploited and integral to the Company production. Without us, the Los Angeles audience for which it is made, neither this company nor this production can exist.
This is significant for it immediately makes Hashish Club a period piece fated to die when this period dies, and infects it with a transitory quality missing from too much of Los Angeles’ celluloidal theaters. Marjoe, 2001, Walt Disney, drugs, Charlie Manson, Viet Nam, the need and craving for direct experience, for break-throughs, which are part of our culture, will never exist together as they do in this production in any other time, for any other culture, however much the general experiences are the same.
Furthermore, it is precisely this existing for and in the moment that gives to drama its life, its compulsion, its touch for the audience of reality. It is this sense of mortality - which so much of Los Angeles theater avoids like a man afraid of dying - which resides in the Company Theater at its best, and which pumps through all of the great masterpiece plays of the past. It is almost as if in touching the moment the drama somehow transcends the moment, connecting with something structurally universal in human experiencing which can be applied, like Hamlet, across centuries. The songs, the wordplays, the period ironies that exist may die outside their own times, but the ideas remain constantly alive.
Whether or not the Company will eventually produce a play for Los Angeles of the magnitude of Hamlet is, of course, academic. That it has the capacity to do so is not academic, however, and that it could become Los Angeles’ definitive Theater is as within its range as the time it has to devote beyond survival to productive creativity. Given the time, the money and the support it deserves, it could enrich the Los Angeles cultural life immeasurably. But this, of course, like so much at the Company Theater, depends upon the choice of its audience constituency, and the actions it chooses to make. For its part, Company Theater can only garner grants, work in outside jobs, and keep producing.