STAGE : Yesterday’s Headline Resurfaces as...Western Avenue’ Theater Pieces

There is, in the newspaper business, an old and usually dismaying saying that goes, “News is what happens to editors.” And one day in 1984, Western Avenue “happened” to an editor of mine: He found himself driving along the street and decided, in an epiphany of insight, that it was news.

That took care of the hard part. I was assigned to step in for the cleanup, to write a profile on one of the longest, most anonymous thoroughfares in Los Angeles, a 28-mile former horse path. The story became a five-part series.

In newspapers, that is usually where it stops. End of story, literally. Today’s prose, tomorrow’s compost. But four years later, the Western Avenue series has arisen from the compost heap--a page-to-stage feat of street theater, “Western Avenue,” opening Wednesday at the Ensemble Studio Theatre.

It is a mosaic of episodes that, like Western Avenue itself, crosses time and space, something like the “Living Newspaper” of WPA writers of the ‘30s. The stories dropped seeds along a 28-mile furrow, and 150 people--writers, directors, actors, scenarists--came along to reap their harvest.

With disarming innocency, the 19th-Century settlers had named it Western on the notion that this penciled line on a surveyor’s section map would be the uttermost, outermost boundary of the Pueblo de Nuestra etc. etc. Porciuncula , the far horizon of a nothing little pueblo .

Not a chance.

But long before the city had exploded beyond Western, the street had its measure of wilderness and craziness. In 1905, little Adam Walsh--who would eventually captain the fabled Four Horsemen team at Notre Dame--fled down Western Avenue toward home, shrieking that a mountain lion was after him. He was right. Nowadays, kids are still the prey, but drug peddlers and flesh peddlers are the carnivores.

In the hills of Griffith Park, the picaresque Mexican highwayman Joaquin Murrieta reputedly cached a treasure. In the comedic playlet “Joaquin Murrieta,” two thugs kidnap a channeler to lead them to the riches.

I found treasures of my own along Western, a route that traverses the city like an urban biopsy. Each of the five stories had a hundred fascinating pocket-sagas within it, a macedoine of tales.

Among my favorite storytellers (now dead):

The head chef at El Cholo, who started grinding corn after school there in 1929 to earn a dime to see the Tom Mix movies up the street.

The old book vendor with his deliciously jumbled shop; he had fled ardently to Soviet Russia in 1922 to be a Communist but became so disillusioned that he came back and declared himself a capitalist / monarchist. When he died, his Lenin Library card was still in his wallet.

Vincent Miranda, founder of the Pussycat Theatre chain. The Western Avenue Pussycat opened in 1963; he took care to keep the marquee decent “because you have people going by on their way to church.” And he told me, with a note of civic sorrow aquiver in his voice, that the whole neighborhood had just gone downhill, ever since “that Zody’s” moved in.

It seems the editor had called it right. The flashy, Max Factor face of Los Angeles runs east and west, along boulevards like Hollywood and Sunset, with their moguls and mansions. But the verities of L.A.--its texture, its life--run north and south.

Some of my favorites aren’t in “Western Avenue”--the Two Gentlemen of Gardena, for example, Mr. B and Mr. W, founders of a tile company. Mr. B supposedly wooed Mr. W’s wife, thus ending the partnership. The courtly old swordsman who taught Errol Flynn to fence with credible deftness. The sad refugees from sanity who eat and sleep and rant in the shadow of the sublime Wiltern Theatre, among them a man who vowed that he invented the U-2 spy plane. The stretch of Western where 10 years’ social change is summed up in an optometrist’s eye chart, in English, Korean and Hebrew.

But in theater, music and dance, there is:

“Starlet,” the endlessly renewed story of yet another Miss Cornhusker Nineteen-Anything, off the bus and into the business--if not movie making, then one smaller, or sadder, or more sordid.

“The Promised Land,” a drama and dance piece about the killing of a Korean storekeeper, a stitch from the ragged seam of coexistence between Korean merchants and their poor black customers.

“Girls, Girls, Girls,” showtime with an exotic dancer at a Western Avenue club that, years ago, served as local headquarters for Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign.

“Jungles,” an unsettling gang-dance and theater piece. “People of Los Angeles,” they say, “we want you to feel our power, we do not answer to God or man . . . some of us are scared little kids. . . . Help us.”

The rumor trade at my high school held that our English teacher had been an actress once. Her name was Edna Mae--as antique-sounding as “Lilith” to all of us Tammys and Susies. She spoke in a low, throbbing, precise voice, whether she was reciting the death messages of Sacco and Vanzetti or reading the school lunch menu.

Edna Mae believed in the potency of theater. It was more real than life, because it held itself before you and said “Look at me, think of me” and you could not glance away.

So here is “Western Avenue,” the stage distillation of a street in Los Angeles. And “Western Avenue,” like Edna Mae, should make demands.

It seems the fashion in Los Angeles to be in the city but not of it. Some people boast of having lived here 10 years and never having been downtown. We pride ourselves on our tolerant city, but we make it tolerable by retreating from it each night and merely gliding through it twice a day, car windows aseptically closed, music of choice keeping at bay the unsought and unsettling sounds of the city.

Starting this week, for a score of nights, “Western Avenue” is playing on stage.

For tens of thousands of nights, the real Western Avenue has been out there, one block away from the Ensemble Theatre. The real “Jungles.” The real “Starlets.” The real “Promised Land.”

Perhaps what goes on inside a theater can make clearer our vision of what goes on outside it. The astronomers call it “averted vision,” as when one must glance away from a star to see it more clearly. So, too, might we perceive our reality more intensely when we perceive it obliquely.

“Western Avenue,” (Kelley Adam Smith, producer; Dale Howard, producer; Stephen Sachs, artistic coordinator) will be at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford St., through June 12. (213) 466-2226.