Craid Schwartz photo Julian Sands, left, stars as Prime Minister Tony Blair with Keith Carradine as President Bush in the American premiere of "Stuff Happens." Click photo for larger image.

LOS ANGELES -- "Imagine a room where everybody knows best," headlined the Los Angeles Times, writing about the gathering of more than 400 arts critics in that city, May 24-29.

"Everybody's a critic," the reporter cracked. And it was true: The Omni hotel -- located in downtown L.A., which many Los Angelenos are convinced doesn't really exist -- was overrun with more than 400 members of five national organizations representing critics of theater, dance, classical music, visual art and jazz, convened for the first-ever National Critics Conference.

For three days we caucused, debated, kvetched and socialized between and during panels, speeches and break-out sessions on such cross-disciplinary topics as "Criticism at the Crossroads" (appropriately held in the Bunker Hill Room), "Ethical Traps" and "Digital Media and the Future of Arts Journalism."

Concurrently, we withdrew into our own specialized organizations for business meetings and panels. Mine is the American Theatre Critics Association, and one of its best sessions was (predictably) on "Why Do Theater in a Movie Town?"

The Times reporter notwithstanding, not everyone at the NCC was a critic. We all do other kinds of arts journalism, too -- news, interviews, previews and columns, not just reviews -- and some organizations admit arts writers who don't really do traditional criticism at all. So that was a constant preoccupation: Who are we?

The best answer came right at the start of the intensive meetings and plenary sessions, in a persuasive keynote speech by groundbreaking TV producer, philanthropist and political activist Norman Lear, who told us we critics are critical to "our wildly confused culture."

In today's polarized America, where contradictory certainties take arms on every side, he said, the arts are essential because they give the lie to politicians and ideologues who "collapse human complexities into simple-minded stories and sound bites." Art knows that life is "messy, inconsistent and complicated," and critics are the conduits and interpreters of that art.

But more about that and the substance of the NCC in my Sunday column. Because on top of this self-examination and self-justification, we also did what critics do -- we went to plays, dance, galleries, concerts and such, to see what is on offer in a city that hometown arts philanthropist Eli Broad claimed in a statistics-laden speech is the world's fourth-leading destination for cultural tourism, after Paris, London and New York.

For the music critics, there were a couple of operas and the symphony; for the dance critics, the final week of Matthew Bourne's visiting "Play Without Words"; for us all, there was the entrancing Getty Museum. And for theater critics, the biggest event was the American premiere of David Hare's epic "Stuff Happens," a quasi-documentary portrait of how Bush & Co. took us to war in Iraq, a high point of last season in London.

For that, downtown L.A. was the place to be, since the Omni is right beside the Museum of Contemporary Art and two blocks from the Music Center and its concentration of Mark Taper Forum (plays), Ahmanson Theatre (mainly musicals, dance), Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (opera) and Walt Disney Concert Hall (symphony) -- sort of the Lincoln Center of L.A.

'Stuff Happens'

On the first day of the NCC, "Stuff Happens" was just having its first preview, so critics were forbidden to review and were also asked to stick their NCC badges in their pockets, so as not to alarm playwright Hare and director Gordon Davidson (recently retired from the artistic directorship of the Taper), who were still working with its American cast and tightening it for an American audience.

I saw it a few days later, halfway through previews, so although it has now opened, I can't review it, either. But I can report that "Stuff Happens" is a bold attempt to put on stage the process behind the largest event of our day, in the old "living newspaper" spirit, but with a theatrical and language-rich largess that is positively operatic.

In all, there are 14 named American roles, 13 British, four French and two United Nations, plus six other anonymous "viewpoints" and various ushers and secretaries, played by a cast of 22. Keith Carradine's President Bush is mainly a taciturn enigma, without the implicit complexity and empathy we heard of in the London production, and John Michael Higgins' Secretary Rumsfeld is suspiciously lightweight. But Dakin Matthews could probably step right in as Vice President Cheney, Tyrees Allen is a buffeted Colin Powell, Julian Sands is suitably whiny as Tony Blair, John Vickery is darkly powerful as Blair's adviser, and Stephen Spinella is very persuasive as Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister who has just (in real time) been made prime minister, in case you thought all of this was now ancient history.

That's the American way, of course, to consign yesterday to the dust heap and forge optimistically ahead. "Stuff Happens" is a powerful argument to stop, think and understand where we've been.

Theater in a movie town

Some 230 theaters and producers are members of the LA Stage Alliance, and they claim (as does Chicago) there are more theater productions each year in L.A. than in New York City. So all I could do is sample a tiny bit of what was available.

Most interesting was "Imelda," a new musical about the empress of shoes, less impressive as an artistic achievement than for its Asian-American company, the East West Players, now in its 39th year. By Sachi Oyama (book), Nathan Wang (music) and Aaron Coleman (lyrics), the show feels hung up between hagiography and parody. But the company demonstrates admirable spunk, history and ambience in its converted church home.

Similarly, I was drawn eastward to the legendary Pasadena Playhouse more for the history and ambience of its handsome 1925 Spanish Colonial Revival home than for the very good version of Noel Coward's "Private Lives" on display. The Playhouse foundered when founder Gilmor Brown died and it closed in 1969, to be reopened in 1986 (there are parallels here to the Pittsburgh Playhouse). I thought the set needlessly garish and the insertion of "As Time Goes By" inexplicable, but I admired Monette Magrath's Sibyl and the sexy energy of the piece.

Another trip took me an hour south to Costa Mesa in Orange County to see the rapidly growing Orange County Performing Arts Center -- another West Coast Lincoln Center in the making -- and a very fine "A View From the Bridge" at South Coast Repertory, a Tony Award-winning theater of scope and ability.

Of the smaller stuff that abounds in L.A., I had to content myself with the first half of Julia Sweeney's funny philosophic quest, "Letting Go of God" (running for more than eight months), and part of the sketch comedy show at The Groundlings, L.A.'s famous answer to Chicago's Second City.

Sweeney is best known as the ambi-gendered Pat from "Saturday Night Live," but she is a thoughtful, funny monologuist whose dissatisfaction with how God is usually packaged suggests she is more truly religious than all the traditions she has tried.

Her quest and the panache of its presentation will do as emblems of L.A., vigorously negotiating between past and future -- until I can get back.