The Downtown Development Blues
by Guy Zimmerman


I used to think all the loft condos being put up in the Arts District were too pricey for artists, but then I saw this advertisement in the glossy downtown newspaper where four young people were standing around in front of the lofts they had just bought. The ad actually identified these loft owners as artists, but it didn’t really need to because of how cool they looked with their unique personal styles, which is how you can tell an artist from, say, a lawyer. I showed the ad to a friend of mine to prove I’m not always being negative and he laughed at me because I guess the people in the photograph in the glossy downtown newspaper were really just models and not artists at all! Boy did I feel dumb!

These models were decked out in what might be called the art school style – a dreadlock here, a tattoo there - generic iconoclasts you might call them, assuming you were deaf to the egregiously oxymoronic. That advertisement and the article you are now reading form two poles of a late 20th century debate that is at once so old and yet so entrapping that the mind simply packs up and moves off in search of greener pastures. I, for one, do not want to complain, exhort or thunder about gentrification or the commodified identity of the artist because I’ve been doing that for twenty years. But whether I draw attention to the issue or not, downtown LA is being made uninhabitable to artists, and the forces in play are vast and intractable, and the reason we can’t escape the conversation is because we haven’t come close to pegging it yet.

In New York right now, Wallace Shawn has revived his furious and funny hairball of a monologue, The Fever to critical acclaim. As it happens, I’ve been working with downtown actor Paul Mackley on his interpretation of this astonishing text, which Mackley performed in the late 90s for a year at Café Metropol and other downtown venues. The Fever runs about an hour and a half and manages to embody the moral crisis dominating all of our lives right now as no other work of art I know. What is this moral crisis? One statistic speaks volumes: according to the U.N. Development Report of 1999, the richest 20 percent of the world’s population now accounts for 86 percent of private consumption. As a result, a quarter million children die of malnutrition or infection every week.

In The Fever, Shawn recounts a bout of illness that gripped him while traveling in an impoverished country, filling his mind with a terrifying clarity about the actual suffering caused by his American lifestyle. In the 90s Shawn performed The Fever in apartments and lofts of his well-heeled friends in New York, but the play has assumed new weight in the intervening years, which have been dominated by the lurid pathologies of the Bush administration. It’s a relief today to sit with someone like Shawn who isn’t lying to us about issues secretly troubling us all.

How swiftly the mind recoils from the phrase “moral crises.” How quickly the eye glazes over. A yawn begins to form in the chest, and the shoulders perform a nearly automatic shrug of resignation. Since the late 1970s the Right has exploited this resignation to steal nearly everything from us – remember the “doom and gloom” rhetoric the Reaganauts pole-axed the Dems with for eight long years? Rather than open the confusing Pandora’s box marked “moral crises” it’s much better to gaze with longing at the sexy insouciance of that exceedingly rare breed, the loft-buying artists.

We’re in a bad way. We all know it. I take refuge in the idea of a 40-year pendulum swing governing political and cultural life in America. From 1890 to 1930 we swung hard to the right, and then there was a crises. From 1930 to 1970 we swung to the left and then there was a crises. From 1970 to 2010 we are swinging back again... This theory suggests there’s nothing to worry about – the rule of law will be restored, inequalities will be addressed. But it seems clear that this pendulum swing is part of a much larger and more disturbing trajectory that includes the entire Industrial Age and that is fueled by forces we are only beginning to understand. In times like these, worrying about condos on Alameda is like complaining about the position of the famous deck chairs on the Titanic.

Guy Zimmerman has been artistic director of Padua Playwrights since 2000, overseeing award-winning productions of new plays in Los Angeles and New York by numerous contemporary playwrights, including Murray Mednick, John Steppling and John O’Keefe.  Under his direction, the company’s productions have garnered LA Weekly, Garland, LA Drama Critics Circle and American Theater Critics Association awards.