The fall program that brought cutting-edge theater from across the globe to the Westwood campus has been officially put on ice.
It's a depressing though not unexpected development. In May, UCLA Live executive and artistic director David Sefton resigned in response to the cost-savings edicts coming down from above that put a big scary “X" on the theater program he began in 2002 and curated throughout with a connoisseurs fearlessness.
The words “rethinking and restructuring" those rhetorical piranhas infesting our recessionary waters circled ominously. It doesn't take a psychic to tell you that a limb is about to be torn off.
“Hopefully, it's not a permanent decision," Christopher Waterman, the dean of the arts and architecture school who's serving as UCLA Lives interim director, told The Times. “If the economic prognosis improves, we will be interested in staging theater at UCLA, no doubt about it."
Forgive me if that no doubt about it leaves me cold. We're less draconian measures really not available? Could the pain not be divided more equally with dance and music and thus made slightly more bearable?
More urgently, does it make sense, economically or otherwise, to risk undoing the almost decade-long work that went into augmenting UCLA Lives artistic identity and, for many of us, put it on the map?
It seems to me that the decision, made by Waterman and members of UCLA Chancellor Gene Blocks staff, reflects a lack of understanding of the theater festivals unique place in the city's cultural ecology. There is simply nowhere else to experience the kinds of offerings Sefton was importing to Los Angeles. Beyond the Brooklyn Academy of Music and one or two lonesome xenophilic venues in the U.S., the only option is a pricey European flight.
Last seasons highlights included one of the most innovative forces in Irish playwriting (Enda Walsh), a radical Italian stage visionary whose American visits are as rare as a pope's (Romeo Castellucci) and a vibrant Belgian movement-theater piece set to the rhythm of adolescent angst (Ontroerend Goed's “Once and For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen"). Past seasons have brought Ian McKellen's outsize Lear, a portion of the Druid Theatre Company's stinging Synge cycle and the National Theatre of Scotland's hallucinatory Black Watch.
