A few thoughts after catching some of the plays offered at this year’s Pacific Playwrights Festival.

American playwrights are finally tackling the history-changing events of the last eight years, not nibbling around the edges or misfiring in wild directions as they’ve done in seasons past. And it’s about time.

Theater has always been a better cultural barometer than film.

Movies take agonizing years to develop and are “improved” endlessly during their messy path from conception to birth. With theater, there’s far less at stake financially (although developing a play is no small investment for your average nonprofit regional theater) and fewer intervening egos and interests between creation and execution. We get to see what’s on the playwright’s mind, often very soon after he or she has put fingers to keyboard.

Play readings offer an even more accurate snapshot of the current mood. They’re hot off the playwright’s computer; actors don’t even have time to learn their lines before presenting them to the public.

If you subscribe to the notion of play scripts as instant zeitgeist meters, then the plays presented at this year’s Pacific Playwrights Festival suggest that we’re in for a period of dark reflection over the political era that just ended.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Orange County Performing Arts Center and South Coast Repertory are two of the brightest baubles in O.C.’s crown: high-profile cultural institutions that share the same property, billionaire benefactors and even some board members. Both market to the same arts-loving audience to fill seats for their plays and musicals.

So how, I ask, does this happen?

SCR is hosting its 12th annual Pacific Playwrights Festival, which draws artistic directors from regional theaters all over the country in search of hot new properties.

Not 300 feet away, at the Center’s Samueli Theater, is an eagerly anticipated workshop production of a new musical, “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown,” produced by Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk, one of the more talented young musical-theater teams around. The bare-bones staging features some impressive Broadway performers.

At the PPF lunch today, I mentioned to an artistic director from a large theater in the northwest that a new Kerrigan-Lowdermilk  musical was being staged four times this weekend, right next door. “Really?” he said. “I love their work! Where is this Samueli Theater exactly?” I told him he could pick up his water bottle and practically hit the front door from SCR’s patio, where we sat. There wasn’t a shred of information about “Samantha Brown” on SCR property or in the PPF programs.

Read the rest of this entry »