From the Los Angeles Times:

A group of Los Angeles theater leaders will announce this week an aggressive plan to diversify Southern California theater companies, the productions they present and the audiences they draw. Tim Dang, producing artistic director of East West Players, has written an initiative that calls for at least 51% of those employed by Southern California theater companies by 2019 to be people of color, women or those younger than 35.

How many people, besides the authors of this quota plan, have made a stable middle class living out of being employed by a Southern California theater company?

Back in the Eighties in Los Angeles, I went to a fair number of plays in 99 seat “Equity Waiver” theaters because the tickets were so cheap. For $5 you could see a quite talented, highly attractive cast of 20-something actors trying to catch the eye of TV or movie people. The productions weren’t as interesting or ambitious as what the best Chicago companies like Steppenwolf or Wisdom Bridge were doing because stage actors in L.A. didn’t want to do something that seemed too weird in case the casting director from a soap opera was in the audience. But practically every role was filled by somebody who was the best actor ever in his or her high school’s annual musical.

Theater in L.A. was like being a Class A minor league baseball player: a death or glory field crammed with ambitious, talented, broke young people desperate to Get Noticed, most of whom will end up back home in Lake Forest or Provo directing high school musicals, if they’re lucky.