Off-Off-Broadway West: On Guy Zimmerman’s “Outlaw Theatre”

NOSTALGIA AND ITS PERILS aside—

the latter including, more often than not, becoming repetitious and shamelessly preaching to the choir—one might argue that, in the 1970s and ’80s, Los Angeles became one of the country’s most vital centers for equity-waiver theater. Eastside, Westside, Valley, Downtown—theater was burgeoning in almost every part of Los Angeles, with far too many venues to enumerate.

         Despite the long-standing excellence of a site such as the Pasadena Playhouse, this year’s recipient of the Tony Regional Theatre Award, the legacy of equity-waiver theater has been mostly overlooked. (Regional theater itself is/was a term reserved for places like Louisville or La Jolla—i.e., anywhere outside of New York.) This is especially relevant when considering a collection of essays like Guy Zimmerman’s Outlaw Theatre: Field Notes from the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop and Festival, published last fall, which examines a time when our city’s artistic development was less addicted to the delirious pragmatism that has overtaken us today. For a generation or so, the Hollywood dream factory was lagging and couldn’t fill its quotas.