RIP CTG

I posted a couple of weeks ago about this, but last Tuesday it was made official and covered in the LA Times. The Center Theater Group, which runs the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson, and the Kirk Douglas Theater, terminated all of its new play development programs. This includes the Taper New Works Festival, all of their play readings, the Other Voices program for disabled artists, Blacksmyths Theater Lab, the Latino Theater Initiative, and the Asian American Theater Lab. Not only that, it means several important local playwrights/theater artists are unemployed. Brian Freeman, Chay Yew, and Luis Alfaro are all queers of color, and all were laid off in this decimation of the cultural diversity in Los Angeles Theater. And more than that, all of these artists were committed to nurturing and developing new artists, especially queer performers of color. The Taper New Works Festival supported artists such as Carmelita Tropicana, Alec Mapa, Denise Uyehara, and Luis Alfaro himself. This is an accomplishment in itself and a worthy goal. And if any of these people could survive as writers and playwrights because of those programs, that's reason enough not to cut them.

In the LA Times article surrounding the cuts, CTG's new Artistic Director, Michael Ritchie, who unilaterally decided on all of these cuts, comes off as a pompous, priveledged asshole who thinks that his taste and his perspective are universal. But who wants to put a man in charge of nurturing new plays who readily admits that he's never been to a playreading? That alone would be enough to get him fired from my ideal theater, especially a theater that boasts on its website that its mission is to "nurture artists," produce "groudbreaking experimental new works" and support a "diverse community".

I want more people to be angry about this. I want people to notice that 15 of the 16 productions annouced for next season are written by (straight?) white men. They're doing Chekov, for goodness sake! And there aren't even any women! It's a commitment to boring artistic mediocrity and straight white middle class values. And that's not what I want our major regional theater in LA to be about. CTG was the one place with the status and the funding that it COULD develop new works and support queers and artists of color and non-traditional play formats. The fact that it's choosing not to is extremely demoralizing. This decision is inexcusable and I hope they throw Ritchie out on his ass the first chance they get. I hope no one attends their next season with its unchallenging choices. And I hope Luis Alfaro, Brian Freeman, and Chay Yew speak out against this and go on to develop great new works in response to this conservative crackdown. I am extremely disappointed in this movement in the LA theater scene and I honestly hope the Taper suffers for it in terms of negative publicity, waning subscriber base, and critical scorn.