Michael Ritchie, artistic director of Center Theatre Group, delivered an outburst against subscribers in a refreshingly frank interview on Howlround.com. – the online Journal of the American Voices New Play Institute at Washington’s Arena Stage.

Here’s the reddest meat in the Q-and-A-style interview, as Ritchie was elaborating on the changes within the programming at CTG’s Kirk Douglas Theatre that led to the experimental DouglasPlus productions, which don’t rely on subscriptions:

“We were sitting around in a staff meeting and it wasn’t me saying we’ve got to come up with Douglas Plus. It came up from me, pounding my fists on the desk saying fuck subscribers. I’m so tired of subscribers. They drive me nuts; they’re strangling me; I hate them. I don’t care how good they are; I don’t care how much money they bring in. Fuck subscribers! And someone there at the table said well if we’re going to fuck them we should tell them we love them first, and we should figure out a way that we can fuck them but they stay anyway.”

Michael Ritchie when he isn't thinking about subscribers

The bottom line of Ritchie’s remarks is that he hopes to replace the “subscription model” with a “membership model,” which he describes:

“…There is a solution to it, and this is what Lincoln Center does with their membership program. They don’t plan a season. They go from show to show and depending upon demand will run it or close it. Going from a subscription model to a membership model is difficult to do in a seamless way. That’s one of the things we’re trying to do with Douglas Plus—push our subscribers into a membership model so that we can do it at the other theaters too.”

Perhaps Ritchie’s candor and his language, which reads as if it could have come from an early David Mamet script, were related to the fact that the Howlround interviewer was playwright Theresa Rebeck, whose Poor Behavior will open at CTG’s Mark Taper Forum on Sept. 18. Ritchie probably thinks of Rebeck as a colleague, not as a reporter –after all, her comment to Ritchie, just before he unleashed his innermost thoughts about subscribers, was “Wow, you are a hero.” So perhaps he let his guard down more than he would have with a journalist.

The interview, which has other morsels that should fascinate the LA theater world, was posted June 12 — just as the onslaught of LA theater conferences and festivals was about to begin, when most LA theater artists and journalists were too busy to notice it. But on June 21, alert Rob Weinert-Kendt mentioned Ritchie’s remarks and linked to Rebeck’s interview on his Wicked Stage blog. Kyle T. Wilson’s blog Frank’s Wild Lunch picked it up from The Wicked Stage on June 22.

OR IS IT ‘SLURRY WITH THE FRINGE ON TOP’?: Last week was a bit of a blur for me. From Tuesday through Saturday, I attended 17 productions at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. If you include the one already-open Fringe show that I saw on the eve of the Fringe, I saw a total of 18 Fringe shows. That number is exactly one-tenth of the 180 productions that were available at last year’s first Hollywood Fringe, but this year the number of productions expanded to 214, so I saw only about eight per cent of this year’s Fringe.

I couldn’t catch the first official week of the Fringe, because I was too busy covering the RADAR L.A. festival, which I commented on last week. At a critics’ panel on Saturday at Fringe Central, comparisons of the two festivals arose, including the obvious differences between them – the most important being that RADAR L.A. was curated and the Fringe was not.

RADAR L.A. offered only 14 productions, yet they were on a considerably higher professional level than most of the Fringe productions. The two festivals were designed that way. The value of the Fringe is supposedly related to its Wild West quality, in which anyone can stake a claim in the Fringe if they can self-produce. This is a quality that’s surely worth more to producers and artists than it is to audiences.

For most theatergoers who could take the time to see parts of both festivals, RADAR L.A. was a much richer experience – and not only because it was easier to find interesting shows there, or productions that were generally better than those at the Hollywood Fringe. It was also because RADAR L.A. emphasized theater that was “devised” by companies (international as well as local) instead of individual artists – and this is the kind of fare that isn’t seen nearly as often in L.A. as the generally smaller, showcase-oriented shows at the Fringe.

A super-size showcase?

Now that the second Fringe is over (although Theatre Asylum will again host a post-Fringe mini-season), I see no reason to revise my estimation of the Fringe’s comparative lack of importance to the future development of LA theater, first broached here last year. Most of the Fringe still consists of the kind of shows that LA in general and Hollywood in particular have always offered in great profusion.

In fact, it’s possible that by providing an even bigger showcase for showcases, the Fringe could contribute to a revival of the customary bad rap on LA theater – that it’s nothing but showcases. Although LA theater artists have worked for decades to overturn this canard, it occasionally still lingers within the comments of superficial observers of the scene, who can’t see beyond the proximity of LA theater to the Hollywood industry. The presence of an ever-growing super showcase within the literal boundaries of Hollywood certainly won’t help dispel this common delusion.

I’m not arguing that this giant developmental stew contributes nothing to LA theater. Surely a few talents will emerge from the Fringe in a better position to do better developed work. But I’m also saying that we already have a big cauldron of that same developmental stew simmering throughout the year, thanks in large part to the relatively loose strictures of Actors’ Equity’s 99-Seat Theater Plan. Most Fringe producers don’t even bother to use Equity actors or the 99-Seat Plan, so it’s not surprising that the level of professionalism in some of these Fringe productions makes the average 99-Seat Plan production look like something from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Case in point: One afternoon at the Fringe, finding myself with a little time to kill between two shows I knew wanted to see, I looked for something else that would be short enough to fill the hour between shows. I found the “world premiere” of Zombie as Fuck!, which was billed as lasting only 30 minutes. The show hadn’t yet started at least 15 minutes after its announced time, so as I waited in the lobby, part of me worried about whether it would end in time to fit my plan, while the rest of my mind eavesdropped on the other half-dozen people in the lobby. Hot topics of their conversation included their recent college experiences and whether it was better to find Hollywood managers before approaching agents. Finally the play began. It offered no zombies or fucking; it was a supposedly realistic little encounter between two young men who were at a turning point in their friendship. The title stemmed from a phrase the characters had used in the sixth grade to describe anything that’s fashionable. The play ended abruptly after only one scene – but I was satisfied that it seemed even shorter than 30 minutes, and I got to the next play on time.

The cast of The Trouble With Words

That’s an admittedly extreme case. To be fair, most of the shows I saw at the Fringe were better and more developed than Zombie as Fuck! I liked the 60-minute excerpt of The Trouble With Words enough that I hope to see the longer version of Coeurage’s musical revue in its extended run at Actors Circle. The Milford Project is an appealingly daffy little musical about a junior high science student who built an atomic bomb in 1937. Too bad the narrative derails about halfway through; I felt as if I were watching a workshop instead of the world premiere.

I was impressed by several of the solo shows I saw – Chela, Mommy With a Penis, The Next Best Thing, Be Careful! The Sharks Will Eat You! But at least three of those four have already played in other LA venues; there is no dearth of venues for solo storytellers in LA. The Long Beach companies that played off Shakespeare – 4 Clowns: Romeo and Juliet and Porter’s Macbeth – created a few funny moments, but both shows need further editing. During Porter’s Macbeth, I kept thinking about how much I’m looking forward to the revival of the Troubies’ Fleetwood Macbeth, which opens on July 8 at the Falcon and – if memory serves – is a much funnier parody of the same Scottish play. Similarly, the Fringe’s mock-musical version of The Blue Lagoon seemed like a pale shadow of Point Blank Live!, another movie parody that happened to be playing one block away, although it wasn’t a part of the Fringe (I saw it at its original downtown venue, so I’m not vouching for the current production).

Actually, the best production I saw in the Fringe area last week was another production that wasn’t part of the Fringe – the West Coast Ensemble’s version of Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs From the Table of Joy, at the Hudson Mainstage. Although South Coast Repertory presented the West Coast premiere in 1996, and LA Theatre Works more recently produced a radio theater version, I had never seen a fully staged production of it, and it’s remarkably moving and funny and alive – much more dimensional than any of the Fringe shows I saw.

Its brief run coincided almost exactly with the Fringe, and it was only a half-block from Fringe Central. But Richard Israel – the co-artistic director of West Coast Ensemble – told me that the company wasn’t making any kind of an anti-Fringe statement by scheduling it that way. West Coast booked the space long before Israel was aware that it would be surrounded by Fringe activity – and by the time he realized what would be happening, the deadline to list a show in the printed Fringe program had passed. Only budgetary problems prevented a longer run.

As I wrote last year, I like the way the Fringe concentrates so much activity in one geographical area. This year’s Fringe did an even better job of doing that than last year – most of the shows were in the Theater Row strip of Santa Monica Boulevard. Compared to the off-Hollywood Boulevard location of Fringe Central last year, this year’s hub offered many more opportunities for free parking and less competition from the usual tourist-oriented sideshows along the boulevard.

I also appreciate the ability to see Fringe shows at odd times – I saw three last Tuesday, for example, all at the same venue. During most Tuesdays of the year, that opportunity would be very difficult to find in LA.

The Fringe can be fun, even when its shows are not fun or otherwise engaging. The Fringe atmosphere is greater than the sum of its specific parts. But some of those parts are so…well, bad, that I wouldn’t recommend the Fringe as an introduction to LA theater in general.  The chances of an LA theater newbie not liking the first one or two Fringe shows and then becoming discouraged from seeing more LA theater are fairly high. The Wild West might look exciting in the movies, but would you really want to have lived there for more than a day or two?