Actors' Ovations, Quotable Lily

L.A.'s theatre scene is primarily actor-driven -- which is to say the town's glut of talent seeking work is the main reason there's so much theater here. Because of this, most folks assume that it's all showcase crap. But in any talent pool there are those that rise to the surface, and among L.A.'s stage-hopping actors and designers are some exceptional performers. Many local aficianados will tell you the best theater here is as good as the best anywhere.

Last week's Ovation awards -- the 10th annual peer-judged awards given by Theatre LA (oops, their new name is LA Stage Alliance) -- gave out its aqua-green lucite statues to a deserving batch of thesps at the Orpheum Theatre. Apart from directing and writing, acting is the only Ovation category in which actors in small 99-seat theaters compete with those appearing at the Taper or the Geffen. It may have seemed provincial of Ovation voters that this year they seemed to favor actors in small-theater productions. But only someone who hadn't seen, say, John O'Keefe's timely new work or Del Shores' latest tragicomic Southern-fried soap would make that assumption -- a misconception roughly equivalent to assuming that Broadway is the only district in New York to see real theatre.

Host Lily Tomlin opened with a few choice zingers about the world's second oldest profession. In the voice of laconic Midwesterner Judith Beasley, a character not from her popular multi-character show, Tomlin said: "I am not a professional actress. Unlike many of you, I am a real person." She riffed on Edwin Booth's famous analogy: "He said an actor is sculptor who carves in snow. So in L.A., we have an especially hard job." She repeated an exchange with her partner in writing and in life, Jane Wagner: "She says playwrights have a hard job -- they hang their guts out onstage. And I say, actors have the harder job: We have to suck in our guts." She quoted character actress Eileen Heckart, who said, "The longest run I ever had was on the unemployment line."

Most characteristically terse and sharp was Tomlin's report that California now spends the least dollars per capita on the arts of any state in the union. "But now that there's a fellow actor in Sacramento," she deadpanned, "I am confident things will change. Watch out, Idaho!"