Editor’s Note

by Jim O’Quinn

 

Some gulfs are tough to bridge. There are those who like anchovies on their pizzas and those who don’t. There are red states and blue states. There are theatre audiences on the East Coast and those on the West Coast.

In the latter case, some mysterious but potent disjunction of taste seems to prevail, frequently sending plays and productions that San Franciscans or Los Angelenos flocked to down the tubes in New York, and vice versa. Will the twain ever meet, and where?

One gesture of reconciliation is hidden in plain view on this month’s cover. The image is from a production by the L.A.–based Son of Semele Ensemble (the name refers to Dionysus’s mortal mom), one of a dozen freshly minted, artistically precocious but off-the-beaten-path companies featured in our “Hot, Hip and On the Verge” compilation. Son of Semele is shown offering its Los Angeles patrons, of all things, a Richard Foreman play called Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good. How did this brainy, self-referential riff on the media, a quintessential product of the New York avant-garde, land a couple of miles west of downtown L.A.? “Artistically, the troupe jumps off cliffs the way most people step off curbs,” reports critic Steven Leigh Morris, whose profile of Semele’s progeny praises the company’s gulf-bridging choice of material as well as its bold aesthetic.

Adventurousness is, in fact, the main thread connecting the collection of upstart companies you’re about to be introduced to. And there are additional adventures afoot on subsequent pages: in an unexpectedly provocative set of interviews that might be dubbed “adventures in translation”; in Danny Hoch‘s passionate manifesto for a hip-hop generation; in the primal beauty of the outdoor spectacles of the great Bread & Puppet Theater.

The fact is that adventures (as those who fashion theatre of any sort—and those who report it, too—are duly entitled to say) are our business. —Jim O’Quinn

 

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Hot, Hip and on the Verge

A dozen young American companies you need to know

by Sarah Hart

First question first: Are these the dozen companies that are heralding our theatrical future? Of course not. Hundreds of young, under-the-radar theatre troupes are capturing audiences and creating buzz in arts-friendly neighborhoods, storefronts, community centers, converted warehouses and basements, in cities large and small—confirming that the theatrical impulse is something utterly innovative and unquenchable.

American Theatre selected this dozen as emblems of the wave of American companies that have formed or come into prominence within the last five years—particularly companies with strong missions or aesthetic thrusts. Mostly, we put our ear to the ground to hear what local theatre-watchers were talking about. Our representative dozen is by turns tenacious and permeable, ambitious and on a budget, esoteric and low-brow. The work ranges from re-envisioned classics (with or without clowns) to new work by contemporary playwrights; it’s vaudevillian, dance-centric, visual art–focused, music-infused, socially conscious, ethnically organized—and fun.

Of course, numerous other such companies exist in myriad forms, probably not far from where you’re sitting. We encourage you to find them.

Bedlam Theatre, Minneapolis

Black Dahlia, Los Angeles

BlueForms Theatre Group, Columbus, Ohio

Charter Theatre, Washington, D.C.

The Civilians, New York City

Defunkt, Portland, Ore.

The Dirigo Group, Austin

Flaneur Productions, Minneapolis

Mad Dog, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Out of Hand Theatre, Atlanta

Silk Road Theatre Project, Chicago

Son of Semele Ensemble, Los Angeles

 

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SON OF SEMELE ENSEMBLE
Young and Restless
by Steven Leigh Morris

In this town, probably the biggest compliment you can bestow upon a company is that it “does theatre for the right reasons.” This generally means that the troupe is cognizant of what film does and what TV does—and what theatre can do differently. Sounds simple enough. But in America’s movie-biz capital, packed with actors who create theatre in their downtime between filming 30-second plugs for Citibank or sashaying onto HBO, doing theatre “for the right reasons” (and no money) takes on quixotic dimensions.

Enter Son of Semele Ensemble, a new kid on the block among a cluster of excellent L.A. storefront companies that use theatre to challenge perceptions rather than to audition for the more lucrative media. In 2000, founder Matthew McCray—self-described then as “a frustrated and out-of-work actor”—assembled an ensemble of 11, most of them fellow drama graduates from Chapman College in Orange County. In the hinterlands of L.A.’s Silverlake district, they workshopped McCray’s own play, Earthlings—a somewhat cryptic debunking of sexual stereotypes—which went on to become SOSE’s inaugural production in 2001.

“Our mission is to do work that addresses emerging cultural questions,” says McCray. If this seems a bit vague, it’s because the company is still finding its way. SOSE’s résumé now includes 12 productions, a membership of 26, a steady climb in standards and growing attendance in its permanent home, located (since 2003) a couple of miles west of downtown. SOSE has produced two plays by Richard Foreman, one by Ibsen, one by Richard Greenberg. It won two Los Angeles Stage Alliance Ovation Awards for a visually arresting production of Sir Peter Hall’s doctrinaire adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm; even the masks couldn’t hide the company’s devotion to the project.

In July 2003, SOSE mounted the West Coast premiere of Matthew Maguire’s The Tower, a “choreopoem” about a woman climbing the Tower of Babel and how the meaning of words has been shattered in contemporary society. With this breakthrough production—by turns poetic, surreal and darkly humorous—the company synthesized radically disparate ideas into a raw theatrical experience that was part vaudeville, part religious mass.

Sometimes employing masks or commedia whiteface, the company resembles the Actors’ Gang in its early years: fearless belligerence applied to political, linguistic and theological themes. (SOSE is planning an epic staging of medieval cycle plays, Edward Kemp’s The Mysteries, for spring 2005.) In its young life, SOSE has demonstrated cosmic reach, some gut-wrenching performances and an attraction to whatever is innately and unexplainably theatrical. And all for the right reasons.

Steven Leigh Morris is theatre critic of the L.A. Weekly.

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