The Injured Coast

An interesting round-up of L.A.-vs.-N.Y. theater pieces in today's LA Weekly. I'm quoted at some length in Steven Leigh Morris' piece, but this quote jumped out at me as being particularly relevant and eye-opening. Though I worked in Charles Isherwood's vicinity, and served as his assigning editor at Back Stage West for a while, I had never heard him put it this way:

“To be honest, L.A. is where I first fell in love with the theater,” he says. “It was in L.A. that I started going on a regular basis. In a weird way, because L.A. is not a great place — for lack of a better term — for high culture, because that’s not part of the general conversation, [that makes] the hunger for it greater in L.A., and you start to seek it out. I didn’t know a lot of people who went to a lot of theater in Los Angeles. That’s when I became really hooked on it.”

There's also a piece about Stew's love/hate relationship with his hometown. I have to say, in rehearsal for Devil and Tom Walker last night, I heard some casual L.A. bashing among the NY-based actors (not about the theater scene per se, but still). I really do have to pick the times and circumstances I feel like I can admit how much I love the place.