Former grad student Maria Mayenzet honoring Gordon.
At CSULB’s soirée honoring Joanna Gordon, who is closing out a decade-long tenure as chair of the university’s Theatre Department, much was made of the woman’s balls. They weren’t talking about parties or body parts, but about the grand dame’s willingness to speak her mind unflinchingly. Thus did my interview with her grow beyond the bounds of the career-capping piece I’d planned, as she spoke plainly and insightfully on the arts, in Long Beach and society at large. And so we bring you Part 2 of the Joanne Gordon Experience.
We join the conversation as I (GM) am asking Gordon (JG) whether there was any controversy over a highly-charged political statement she posted in the lobby of the Royal Theatre aboard the Queen Mary that explained Cal Rep’s motivation to stage Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty: Seeing Red. “Our contemporary world is awash with lies, distortions and deceptions,” said Gordon on a three-foot placard that quoted extensively from Harold Pinter’s 2005 Stockholm diatribe against the U.S. government—and then-President George W. Bush in particular—for its opportunistic, incoherent, and often brutal foreign policy. “Politicians and the bureaucrats fill the airwaves with self-serving bromides. Through their greedy manipulation of the world financial systems, wealthy plutocrats shatter our faith in economic veracity.”
Despite the incendiary words, Gordon says she was aware of no reaction whatsoever.
JG: You know one of the sad things about the theatre is that you preach to the converted. I learned that growing up in South Africa, where the most articulate anti-government statements were always made in the theatre, where you were least in danger, because the people going to them were lefties anyway.
GM: I’m sort of disappointed that there wasn’t controversy.
JG: Nope. […] How to you stir up people in the theatre? I mean, Waiting for Lefty when it was originally produced, people stormed the stage. (Pause) I’m not sure we can make political theatre that really disturbs anymore. I wish we could. It would be delightful if someone closed me down. (Laughs)
GM: What made you want to make that statement?
JG: Well, I thought that was part of the statement for the entire [2010] season. […] If you look at our mission, it’s to be provocative. We want to ask questions; we don’t want to supply answers. […] One of the reasons I love my job so much is that the reality is, within the context of the American situation, the one place where you truly have state-subsidized theatre is in academia. The so-called commercial nonprofits, like CTG, still have to […] make their nut at the box office, even though their so-called “nonprofit.” Whereas, whether or not we make a profit at the box office, our salaries are paid, our insurance is paid—because we’re an educational institution. So we really don’t—at least as far as I’m concerned—need to even consider the box-office appeal of what we’re doing. We do it because we believe it’s good art and it’s good education. We don’t need to consider…I mean, I could do a season every single year which I could guarantee to sell out. I would always do something the audience recognized—so we’d only to revivals. I would get in some hotshot television person (whether they could act or not) to star in every single show—and you sell out, because all their commercial infrastructure is there for you, because there’s name recognition. We’ve never done that. We do plays because we believe students will grow and learn from them, and because we believe they’re artistically valid. And that’s a huge, huge, emancipating situation. I always used to say, “I want to be Gordon Davidson when I grow up,” because Gordon Davidson was really CTG when I first came to this country, and what he was going at the [Mark] Taper [Forum] I thought was really important. But if you see what’s being done at the Taper and the Amhanson under Michael Ritchie, how he is being governed…. I know so many students, particularly in the management area, who are working there, and they always say, “Joanne, you wouldn’t have survived, because it’s all about fundraising. It’s not about making art.” So we live in this wonderful kind of an ivory tower where we can really care about making art and educating students. So I wake up every morning and still want to come to work.
GM: I presume you’d agree with me that Long Beach as a community isn’t particularly—
JG: Arts-friendly?
GM: I was going to make it narrower and say “supportive of theatre,” but okay: not particularly arts-friendly. Why do you think that is?
JG: (Sighs) I think there are a number of reasons. I think there is no tradition of arts engagement in Long Beach. Whether it was because it was a blue-collar community, whether it was because it was a commuter community […] The centers of theatre and music, if you think in terms of New York, were the Jewish immigrants. And as a Jew I can say that the Jewish population of Long Beach is small and not particularly vocal. […] They don’t look to make art and music and theatre here. I think there are just too few of us. What I love about the university community is that it’s incredibly diverse ethnically; but therefore, a simple Western aesthetic is not necessarily going to appeal to the Cambodians, to the Vietnamese, to the Chicano community…. Here at the university we’ve tried to make at least one show [in every season]—particularly on the undergraduate level—appeal to a different ethnic culture. So we’ll do something that will appeal to the Chicano kids, to the Asian kids, to the Black kids, because we need them to have a way to express their own concerns, their own voices. […] One of the ironies of coming from South Africa, where things were so segregated and separate, is that I dreamed in a very naïve way of (to use a very clichéd metaphor) the fruit salad, [of] finding that blending of culture. But because I arrived here in the late ’70s, when it was all about separating and pride in your own community, [as opposed to] bringing us to all together, I think we’re all struggling with all those issues. But at ground level, [it’s about] money. Money. I mean, you’ve seen what’s happened with Redevelopment, you’ve seen what’s happened with the Arts Council…. If the City doesn’t dedicate itself to a serious financial commitment to the arts, it’s not going to happen.
GM: What kind of letter grade would you give to the City of Long Beach—the Arts Council inclusive—as far as arts investment, arts engagement, arts outreach.
JG: I hate letter grades here [at the university], so I won’t give you a letter grade [for the article]. I’ll just say that I have been here teaching at this institution, and a fairly vocal and active leader in the theatre for 24 years, and I’ve had one meeting with the Arts Council. [… It was w]hen we were struggling to keep the Edison. And believe you me, I went through the torments of the damned to try to keep that going. I begged. I said, “Just give me a loan. We will pay it back!” But I couldn’t get any support. They never were interested. […] That place has been sitting empty for six years, with nothing happening. And it did not need to be. Heartbreaking.
GM: What do you think the Arts Council is doing?
JG: I have no idea, honestly. I have no contact with them. Thank goodness I’m full enough here to keep me busy, but it’s kind of sad that I have been here 24 years [and] they have never availed themselves of what I could have offered. And would still offer! Maybe now.
GM: Yeah, maybe they’ll read about it here, and…
JG: I’m ready to work with the City. I would be happy to work with the City. Because this is my home; I’m not going anywhere. And [now] I’ll have more time. I’d be willing to work with them.
GM: Here’s a criticism I hear about the City vis-à-vis the arts: What a city government does when it’s truly supportive of the arts is to look at what’s organically happening in the community and says, “We’re going to help you with that. We’re going to fund that.”
JG: Right.
GM: But what Long Beach does is say: “Here’s the new arts thing that we’re going to create and that everyone’s going to come to and rally around.”
JG: They seem to have done a million studies. I know someone who is really cynical about bureaucracy. They say the pattern is as follows: you bring in somebody new, they spend a great deal of money doing a study, the study comes in, they then use the study as an example of their great work and get another job, then a new person comes in and commissions another study. And honestly, that seems to be the pattern [in Long Beach]. I’ve heard of so many studies since I’ve come here of all the things the Arts Council intends to do, I can’t point at anything they’ve done. Can you? […] They’ve done studies, lots of commissioned and paid-for studies, great studies. […] Can you imagine in science […] if people didn’t utilize the university research facilities in order to promote what they do? The fact is, at least as far as I know, the City has never used the Theatre Department…except when we were at the Edison [Theatre]. But then when we were in trouble, they just abandoned us. I mean, we took a wreck, a wreck of a place, and we invested so much money in turning it into a theatre. […] It’s the perfect place for a theatre, and they could have kept that place going—at no cost to them! Nothing! We paid for everything! And we paid God knows how much so they’d let us park—so they were getting income from us! And all the kids coming to downtown, going to the restaurants, everything else. It was a vital and viable place. It’s heartbreaking!
GM: Your criticism of the City is refreshingly…
JG: Uncensored.
GM: (Overlapping) …forthcoming.
JG: (Laughs) I’ve got nothing to lose.
GM: That may be the answer to my question: Why are we not hearing this kind of criticism from arts leaders all over the city? Because we’re not.
JG: Honestly, I think it’s because for me it’s anonymous. I’m criticizing [people] I don’t even know. Maybe [arts leaders who don’t criticize] are more involved [with the City] than I am, so they would be insulting people. I can’t name a single person on the Arts Council, ’cause I’ve not had any encounters with them. So I’m criticizing a totally invisible entity, so it’s easy for me. And I’m not harming my organization, because we’ve had no support from them. Now, maybe they feel that the university is a monolith and doesn’t need their support, but we could have given to them. We want to be out in the community; we think theatre belongs in the community. And I know my successor is very into community engagement; she wants to be involved. So we’re a huge resource. I’m simply saying: use us.