Remembering humbug hunter Dan Sullivan. 'Search' slackens. 'Simone' simmers.
Plus 'Desert Stories for Lost Girls" at LATC, 'Babe' and 'To the Bone' in Atwater.
Dan Sullivan, the former LA Times theater critic who ushered LA readers into the modern theatrical world, died last week at the age of 86. It’s time to remember him, before moving on to current fare such as “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” at the Mark Taper Forum and “Nina Simone: Four Women’ at South Coast Repertory.
During the ‘70s and ‘80s — two decades when theater in Greater LA was rapidly proliferating — Sullivan was its most important chronicler. And he helped expand public awareness of the region’s theater not only by bearing witness but by bringing a winning wit to that task. The often playful quality of his prose probably drew readers who weren’t all that interested in theater, as well as the fervent fans.
Like many of his colleagues, Sullivan frequently wrote year-end summaries of the best theatrical phenomena that had occurred during the previous year. But he also wrote year-end accounts of the flip side — some of the amusingly egregious lowlights of the stage world during the previous 12 months.
He called this latter tradition the Bah-Humbug Awards.
It began in his Sunday column at the end of his first year on the job, as 1969 turned into 1970. In the December 28 Times, Sullivan reported that he and his colleagues were in the midst of deciding who should receive Los Angeles Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards for theatrical achievements. He also assured readers that he would soon publish his own 1969-theatrical-highlights column.
But in the meantime… “for realism’s sake, may I this week present, in the spirit of the season, the first annual Bah-Humbug Awards, dedicated to the proposition that, terrific as our theater is in Los Angeles, we’re none of us perfect? The Humbugs are in the form of a rusty hatpin piercing a withered sprig of holly. They may be picked up in this office between 7 and 8 am New Year’s Day.”
Gee, that sounds like someone who enjoyed writing satirical comedy. Actually, Sullivan had previously written satire for the Brave New Workshop in Minneapolis — which, according to its website, has been performing such fare since 1958, “longer than any other theatre in the United States.” He also met his future wife, novelist Faith Sullivan, there.
Sullivan wrote Bah-Humbug columns almost every year until 1989 turned into 1990 — when he took a leave of absence from the Times that turned into a permanent departure.
The Bah-Humbug essays were usually hilarious — except perhaps to those who were the targets of Sullivan’s jibes. “I do not believe in pussy willow criticism,” Sullivan said in an address to the American Theatre Critics Association in 1998. “The motto of the theatre is not ‘darling, you were wonderful'…If it entails saying no, firmly, that's the job. But I do think it's wise to avoid the gleeful tone of an avenger grinding his enemy, the actor, into the dust."
Sullivan habitually ended the Bah-Humbug columns with a mea-culpa paragraph, recalling some of his own mistakes during the past year. It was important to him to set the record straight — perhaps because he was a reporter before he was a critic.
He had migrated from Massachusetts to Minneapolis in order to attend graduate school in journalism. Subsequently the St. Paul Pioneer Press and then the Minneapolis Tribune hired him as a general assignment reporter, even as he was also having fun at Brave New Workshop.
In 1962, the Tribune asked him if he wanted to be the theater critic. He eagerly accepted, not only because of his own interests along those lines but also because “I was covering the merger of…two railroads and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he told his former LA Times colleague (and successor as Times theater critic) Sylvie Drake in a 1996 interview, printed in the 2004 book “Under the Copper Beech.”
Then he also inherited the post of music critic. At first his training was strictly on-the-job. But later he received a two-year fellowship that included one year at USC (yes, LA’s USC) studying music and a second year as an intern at a larger newspaper. Harold Schonberg, a mentor in the program and the music critic at the New York Times, asked him if he would like to join Schonberg’s employer for his second year. Duh — he accepted.
After that year, the Times offered him a job as a junior theater critic, which Sullivan himself preferred to the music beat. He worked under Walter Kerr and Clive Barnes for a couple of years. Then, prodded by his wife, who wanted to return to LA, he sniffed out the news that the LA Times had an opening for its first-string theater critic. He got the job. Thank you, Faith Sullivan, and whoever made the ultimate decision back then at LA’s Times.
His New York acquaintances and bosses couldn’t believe that he would give up a second-tier position at Gotham’s top newspaper to be the first-stringer in LA. Speaking to Drake, Sullivan recalled that one friend asked if he would be covering Broadway openings for the LA Times. “I said, ‘No, I’m going to review the L.A. openings for the L.A. Times.’ He said ‘No shit. They got theater out there?’ Tremendous ignorance. And it persists.” But then, wearing his reportorial hat even as Drake was interviewing him, he immediately noted that in addition to his local coverage, the LA Times sent him not only to Broadway but also to London, Greece and Israel.
Sullivan was a masterful mentor. He taught journalism at the University of Minnesota after leaving LA, but he is probably better known as the director of the O’Neill Center’s National Critics Institute, a seminal critic-training summer program in Waterford, Connecticut, from 1999 to 2013.
Full disclosure: Although I had read some of Sullivan’s ‘70s work, I worked in Washington during much of the ‘70s and didn’t meet him until I attended the NCI late in that decade. Dan was one of the faculty members. That’s where I first encountered his real-time ability to discuss criticism in a frank but friendly fashion — qualities that also described his writing. I moved to LA in 1979 to work for a magazine that disappeared after two years, at which point I renewed my acquaintance with Sullivan. He brought me to the Times as a free-lancer, but ultimately I was on the full-time theater staff there for 16 years, working not only with Sullivan but also with such bright lights as Sylvie Drake, Lawrence Christon and Lynne Heffley — and, later, critics Laurie Winer and Michael Phillips.
Now, of course, the Times theater staff has been slashed (along with the size of the printed LA Times itself and post-COVID theater audiences) down to one critic, Charles McNulty. The Times recently ignored some of the area’s best productions of the year, at South Coast Repertory and A Noise Within.
Of the productions that now receive prominent Times coverage, it’s often in the form of soft-angled feature stories instead of reviews. This past Saturday, filling in for Carolina Miranda on the online “Essential Arts” column, McNulty was able to use that platform to sneak in a few paragraphs of commentary on plays that probably weren’t seen as important enough to merit separate reviews. Good for him.
But if Dan Sullivan were still alive and kicking, what might he say about the state of theater coverage at the LA institution where he provided two decades of inspired criticism?
Bah. Humbug.
A ‘Search’ that is still searching
Speaking of this tendency at the current LA Times to focus on soft features about theatrical productions, last Sunday the Times filled the front of the printed Sunday Calendar section with the headline “Cecily Strong Achieves Liftoff” over a giant photo of the “Saturday Night Live” star. She’s currently performing the solo “Search for Signs…” at the Taper, as revised slightly by its author Jane Wagner from the original “Search” that featured Lily Tomlin.
It would be reasonable for many readers to assume that this Sunday coverage was a signal that the Times critic actually liked this revival. But no.
In McNulty’s earlier review, he called this particular “Search” “sluggish” in the second paragraph, started discussing “the problem” with it in the third paragraph, and concluded with his belief that the script felt dated even during a revival in 2000. Hear, hear! I agreed with his review (which appeared online Sept. 30 and in print Oct. 5) so thoroughly that instead of using this space for my own comments, feel free to simply read his review, linked above.
I’ll add only that this is the second solo comedy in a row to fill Center Theatre Group’s Taper as a season offering, following Mike Birbiglia’s “The Old Man and the Pool” in August. I hope that CTG is saving some money by presenting such small-scale bare-bones productions. The next Taper production, Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s,” features a cast of 10.
Counting the ‘Women’ in South Coast’s ‘Nina Simone’
Like “Search” in downtown LA, the opening production of South Coast Repertory’s new season in Costa Mesa is also a revised version of a previously produced play, “Nina Simone: Four Women” — which was inspired not only by the famous singer-songwriter-pianist but also by one of her songs in particular, “Four Women.” In an interview on the SCR website, the LA-based playwright Christina Ham says she has rewritten the last 41 pages of the script for this production and that the context has radically changed.
For example, the play’s previous settings were based on the ruins of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, after the 1963 bombing that killed four girls. In this production, director Logan Vaughan and scenic designer Jack Magaw brought those ruins to the top of the set in order to make room for what the program describes as the “collision” between the devastated church and “the upper-middle-class confines of Nina’s home in Mt. Vernon, New York” (a suburb just north of the Bronx). But the date remains September 16, 1963 — the day after the bombing.
Simone (Chibuba Osuala) is in her home, manically trying to compose a musical response to the racist attack, when she is interrupted by women who mysteriously wander in, embodying three of the women in her song “Four Women.” The fourth woman in the song, with the roughest edges, doesn’t appear and isn’t actually referenced until Simone sings the song at the end of the play, which ends with this woman’s nickname, “Peaches.”
By this time, some spectators might have already concluded that Simone herself is the fourth woman. But I didn’t hear this clearly stated during the performance (although the unspoken character descriptions in the script specifically identify Simone as “Peaches”). The ambiguity can be somewhat confusing. If you’re going to see this “Nina Simone: Four Women,” I recommend that you first watch Simone performing the song on YouTube and perhaps also read her lyrics for a clearer pathway through it. Perhaps the production should even begin with a video of Simone performing the song, for the sake of clarity. To make matters slightly more confusing, the song she’s trying to compose isn’t “Four Women” but “Mississippi Goddam.”
I appreciate that “Nina Simone: Four Women” isn’t a standard jukebox musical — or a dramatized Wikipedia article. But a little more information would help audiences make more sense of it. The production can be harrowing in its depiction of a gifted and justifiably angry woman at her wit’s end (Simone was later diagnosed as bipolar), but it’s also distractingly disjointed.
‘Lost’ in the ‘Desert’
“Distractingly disjointed” also could be used to describe “Desert Stories for Lost Girls,” a Native Voices and Latino Theater Company co-production at Los Angeles Theatre Center in downtown LA.
I was looking forward to it, to the extent that I mentioned it in my last post. It’s Native Voices’ first production in a real theater, as opposed to the auditorium at the Autry Museum, where the company is based. And given their mutual histories, it seems natural that Latino and Native theater companies should at least occasionally join forces.
That’s especially true when they’re examining the entwined histories of Spanish colonialists and the Natives they enslaved, beginning in the early 1600s. The descendants of these captives, known as Genízaros, are especially prevalent in the current state of New Mexico.
But Lily Rushing’s play is not set there. It’s set in Stockton, in northern California, apparently because that’s closer to where Rushing grew up and started learning about her roots. Unfortunately, the play’s 18-year-old protagonist isn’t studying the historical record, but instead relies on the visions of her demented grandmother — who hardly seems to be the most reliable source. Rather incoherent images from scenes from the distant past appear, but we never feel as if we’re in the past — or in New Mexico.
At the performance I saw, the apparent absence of air-conditioning was also a problem (as opposed to an intentional suggestion of the “Desert” in the title). The theatergoers whom I heard as I exited were discussing the heat, not the play. But I heard from others that this wasn’t an issue at subsequent performances.
Native Voices and Latino Theater Company should continue building their alliance — as long as the foundation is based on stronger dramaturgy.
‘Babe’ and ‘To the Bone’ premiere in Atwater
Perhaps you’ve noticed that I haven’t been nearly as positive about the productions in this post as I was in my last post on September 23. There was even more bad news from a few productions that opened since then but have already closed. I’ll avoid beating those dead horses.
However, I can recommend two world premieres that are still running, side by side, in the Atwater Village Theatre complex. They’re written by established women scribes, who focus primarily on women characters but who also make room for one vivid male character in each play.
The better of the two is Jessica Goldberg’s “Babe,” produced by Echo Theater. At first it appears to be a confrontation between a veteran male music-industry bigwig and the young Generation Z woman who’s applying for a job at his firm. But as the play develops, we gradually realize that the central character is the less talkative woman (Julie Dretzin) who’s literally in the center. She’s in her 50s and has been with the firm for years, apparently contributing more than her share of great ideas, but who is occasionally dismissed with the diminutive “Babe.”
Directed by Chris Fields, “Babe” shoots to the top of the charts in both comedy and current commentary on sexual politics. My one slight objection occurs only at the last moment, so I won’t be any more specific about it.
Adjacent to the “Babe” Echo chamber is Open Fist Theatre’s space, where the company is producing Catherine Butterfield’s “To the Bone.” It’s set in 2013 in south Boston, in the home of two sisters in their late 30s, plus the younger sister’s teenaged son. The plot pivots around the first reunion of that younger sister with her biological daughter — now a young woman — whom she gave up for adoption more than two decades earlier.
Tisha Terrasini Banker — who plays that younger sister, the birth mother of the newcomer — and the rest of the cast supply brash, vibrant performances that hold our attention through some of the script’s weaker links. Credit Butterfield, who directed, but a second production should probably have an independent director who could serve as a sounding board for script issues.
By the way, both of these plays include a character who has cancer. But this development fits more easily into “Babe” than into “Bone.”