'Russia and U.S. Are Like Romeo and Juliet'

It took a trip to Poland for this Moscow critic to renew acquaintance with what many believe is the best theater critic in Los Angeles.

Steven Leigh Morris, like I, traveled to Wroclaw for “The World as a Place of Truth” festival, a huge undertaking mounted and run by the Grotowski Institute of Wroclaw and Arden2, a Polish-American cultural organization founded by the irrepressible Joanna Klass in Los Angeles. It not only brought major world artists and their companies to perform over a 16-day period — it was also planned as a forum for a huge contingent of independent American theater practitioners. Directors, actors and critics from Massachusetts, Baltimore, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York attended productions by Peter Brook, Theodoros Terzopoulos, Eugenio Barba, Tadashi Suzuki, Pina Bausch, Roberto Bacci, Krystian Lupa, Jarek Fret and many others, then listened to the artists speak and discussed their work with them.

All of this was prepared in conjunction with the UNESCO-proclaimed Year of Grotowski, a worldwide series of events commemorating the great Polish director and visionary Jerzy Grotowski. In the near future I will say more about this event both on this blog and in the newspaper proper, but right now I’m thinking about Steven Leigh Morris.

I first met Steven some 19 years ago. He was a playwright and theater critic who became involved in organizing a tour of Moscow’s Spartacus Square Theater to what is sometimes dauntingly called the greater Los Angeles area. I tagged along on that tour because my wife was playing the lead in the show. Steven and I were often in each other’s company during that time and we frequently saw each other when he came to Moscow as a playwright-in-residence at Spartacus Square. Then life took over.

Every summer when I visited my mother in Southern California I would hungrily read Steven’s reviews for the L.A. Weekly. Moreover, I would secretly look for things I could steal — you know, pithy words, phrases, ideas, insights. Every one of Steven’s articles is a treasure trove of wit, wisdom, insight and delightful linguistic acrobatics. Through hearsay and happenstance, I occasionally learned that one of his plays was being performed in Los Angeles or New York. But, as hard as it is to believe, there was no Internet in those ancient days, and it was already more than I could handle to maintain a correspondence with my mother — you may recall how it used to be done, with pens and paper and stamps and envelopes. I would write a letter home and receive a rumpled answer two to four months later. I short, I lost track of Steven.

Fast forward to Wroclaw, 2009. A table at breakfast at the Wroclaw Hotel. Jim O’Quinn, the garrulous, ubiquitous and inimitable editor of American Theater magazine, offers to introduce me to a gentleman who is just sitting down to a plate of scrambled eggs and Polish sausage: “John, this is Steven Leigh Morris.”

“Hello, Steven,” I grinned, “my name is John Freedman.”

After that we joked that we were old friends who had known each other for 20 years but hadn’t seen each other in two decades.

While keeping Los Angeles covered all these years, Steven has kept an eye on Russia, too. So, I asked him to share some of his observations. One of my favorites is his comparison of Russia and the United States to Romeo and Juliet. You just watch: I’ll find a way to work that into one of my articles someday. In the meantime, click on the picture below and listen to what Steven has to say as life goes on around him on the Ratusz Rynok, the main square in gorgeous Old Town Wroclaw.