Spark of the New

Young women wearing coveralls take their places in front of a vast white wall that will, when it comes time for performance, become an apocalyptic video montage. This may be a theater rehearsal, but electronics are everywhere: Projectors occupy niches in the wall, cords thread over the ground like so many Medusa’s snakes, and 10 tiny TV monitors rest on the floor.

Director Travis Preston picks up a handheld microphone and narrates the sequence of events for his body-miked actors. “Ladies of the army,” he says, speaking to the supporting players, “the audience is coming into the space.” He’s referring to the smaller of two cavernous areas in a mammoth warehouse near downtown L.A.

As they walk to and fro in the long, narrow room, the young women intone fragments of Shakespeare’s text. In performance, they will don masks bearing the face of Lear.

“Does Lear walk thus, speak thus?”

“So young and so untender?”

“Are you our daughter?”

The chorus forms an undulating line across the length of the room. “A little lighter on the vocal texture, ladies,” says Preston, observing their movements from a perch midway through the space.

“My wits begin to turn,” says a regal voice, cutting through the babble. The forbidding figure enters, striding through the waves of bodies, who remain trance-like in her presence. She is King Lear, played by veteran actor Fran Bennett, the longtime Guthrie Theater player known more recently to L.A. audiences from her outings at South Coast Repertory, L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and elsewhere.

Clearly, Bennett is no ordinary Lear. Directed by Preston and staged environmentally, in six sites in a 30,000-square-foot former power plant just off the 5 Freeway, this “King Lear” features postmodern aesthetics, a suspended car wreck and an array of other, similarly outsized effects. It opens Friday at the Brewery Arts Complex.

Four years in the making, the production is one of the theater community’s most highly anticipated events this season. However, it will be a tough ticket; only 140 people can see each show during its short run. Naturally, a lot of aspirations are riding on it. But more than the usual wishes for a well-received production, those involved hope the success of this “King Lear” will prove there is, indeed, an appetite here for this kind of large-scale avant-garde work--and will justify their plans to produce more such events.

The stakes are high. The budget is $450,000--much bigger than anything Valencia-based California Institute of the Arts has done, including 2000’s Richard Foreman-Sophie Haviland world premiere, “Bad Behavior,” which was produced with a student cast for a fraction of the budget, at $65,000. What’s more, “King Lear” is an even bigger show than that number suggests. Produced in the circumstances of, say, a major regional theater, this same show would cost more than twice that amount, because it would lack the advantage of cost-sharing with an academic institution.

However, the nearly half-million dollars is seen as seed money for future productions. “King Lear” is intended to serve as a calling card for a new producing entity, the Center for New Theater, the professional producing umbrella for the School of Theater at CalArts.

In fact, the center has several commissions out. Foreman, one of the American avant-garde theater’s most important artists who is best known for his New York-based Ontological-Hysteric Theater, will collaborate with musician Michael Gordon on a musical theater piece called “What to Wear,” which will have its first workshop next year. Chen Shi-Xheng, director of a highly ambitious international opera-theater opus, “The Peony Pavilion,” is adapting a script called “Peach Blossom Fan” by Edward Mast. Also, CalArts faculty members Preston, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (“Topdog/Underdog”) and puppet artist Janie Geiser have projects in the works.

“We wanted to do something that was a real announcement that the center was arriving,” Preston says. “In the past, movements in the theater have often coalesced around productions of Shakespeare. We needed to demonstrate that we could approach a work of sufficient scale.”

Initially, the plan was to present “King Lear” in the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, or REDCAT, the CalArts-controlled theater under construction at the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. REDCAT is intended to be CalArts’ home away from home, giving L.A. the focal point for experimental performing arts that the city has long lacked.

Because the Center for New Theater is a key part of the programming there, the site made sense for the kickoff production. But ultimately that didn’t work out. There were two major delays, due to construction problems and a change in contractor. Finally, in October, it became clear the center wasn’t going to get enough rehearsal time in the space.

But within six weeks, center officials found a new venue--and the funds to pay for it. “It was an 11th-hour rescue by an anonymous contribution to pay for the Brewery space,” Susan Solt, Center for New Theater producer and artistic director, says of the new site, and the $100,000 tab that came with it.

Director Preston and his colleagues see their mission as giving this type of high-end avant-garde theater a permanent home in L.A. It’s a daring venture, given that such fare has long been conspicuously absent from L.A.

That’s not because L.A. audiences haven’t shown an appetite for it, as well-attended events such as the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival and 1987 Los Angeles Festival have demonstrated. Even a lecture by the iconoclastic Robert Wilson, internationally known stage and opera director, was standing-room-only at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theater in the early 1990s. Similarly, the work of the late director Reza Abdoh, seen mostly at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, had a devoted and enthusiastic following.

Unfortunately, in recent years there has been an almost complete dearth of internationally recognized experimental fare--apart from the occasional piece at UCLA’s Center for the Performing Arts, or at any number of smaller-budget venues across town. Indeed, while there is experimental and avant-garde work in L.A., the overwhelming majority has long been done in smaller venues on smaller budgets.

But the kind of work that can be found regularly in New York and to an increasingly greater extent in many of Europe’s cultural capitals remains conspicuously absent from a city as large, diverse, dynamic and wealthy as Los Angeles.

“There are simply not organizations in L.A. that have defined their charge in this way,” CalArts President Steven Lavine says. “And because there are not organizations, then you don’t develop audiences and donors who define their interests in that way.” The Center for New Theater has taken on that mantle. The only question is whether L.A. is interested.

Members of the theater community are optimistic. “It’s exciting to have people daring to chart new territory,” says Robert Egan, Mark Taper Forum producing director. “I think that kind of experimentation in the theater is important. They’ve got their work cut out for them. If they deliver on their promises, there’ll be an audience.”

“I couldn’t be more excited about the idea of CalArts making a bigger place on the L.A. scene for this kind of work,” concurs Bart DeLorenzo, artistic director of the Evidence Room, one of L.A.’s most aesthetically adventurous smaller theaters. “To see work like that created here is a great new flavor for L.A.”

Dressed in black on black, a lightweight sweater thrown casually over his buff shoulders, Preston sits in the towering space of the Brewery warehouse. It is a vast, imposing and gloomy place--and yet he seems to find this kind of menacing environment almost comfortable.

Preston has the pose of the avant-gardist down cold. The brow is slightly furrowed, the head tilted just so. The corners of his mouth are turned down in pensive, presumably existential or deconstructionist, thought. It all fits the bill.

Until he laughs, that is. Then his smile melts away the hard edges. His warmth shows through and blows the impression altogether. It’s clear why this director gets such committed performances from his actors--actually, actresses--and why they do his often extreme bidding. Preston requires a very tightly controlled physicality from his actors. It’s not naturalism, and it’s not for everyone.

He’s also asking his cast to follow him to the darker side of Shakespeare. “There’s no question that my reading of ‘Lear’ is an extremely dark one,” he says. “It responds to my personal sense of catastrophe in contemporary history.”

Shakespeare’s tale of the aging monarch whose willful demands on his daughters cause his own personal diaspora is removed from its particular time and place in this production. Since 1999, Preston and New York-based writer-dramaturge Royston Coppenger have been working on an adaptation of the text, cutting and reshaping the classic. “The general philosophy of this adaptation has always been to emphasize certain aspects of the play that seemed most exciting and contemporary,” he says. “Instead of smoothing out the rough edges in the play, I’ve tried to highlight them.

“From the beginning, this was intended to be a site-specific production that interacted with its location in downtown L.A., and I believe that liberates us from certain aspects of representation that are traditionally associated with Shakespeare,” he continues. “So, for example, in most cases, the ‘connecting tissue’ of the play has been excised--all those scenes in which we’re informed of changes in locale or time.”

Such changes underscore the play’s timelessness--and help explain why Preston didn’t stage “King Lear” sooner. “I felt it transcended the boundaries of traditional theater space,” he says. “I wasn’t going to do the play at Center Stage in Baltimore or at the Yale Rep, because I felt that the problem of Shakespeare’s works is that when we read them, they’re of overpowering imagination, and when we see them, we’re bored to death.”

Sheer scale alone suggests why this “King Lear” won’t likely be boring. Like it or loathe it, it will be a “Lear” of its time and place. “It’s a ‘Lear’ for L.A.; a ‘Lear’ in L.A.,” Preston says.

“It’s a ‘Lear’ that’s happening on the side of the 5 Freeway in a building that was discarded. My principal image of catastrophe was a car wreck--the image that we have on the side of the road that freezes your blood when you see those overturned cars. We’re bringing the highway in. I’m even going to do a live feed of the 5 Freeway for the final scene.”

At the same time, Preston is conscious of the history of the text and comments on it through his use of an all-female cast. In Shakespeare’s time, his plays were performed by all-male casts. “I felt I could get a harder, and in my view a truer, reading if I had a female cast.”

Solt, the center’s producer-artistic director, and Preston go back to their school days together at Indiana University and the Yale School of Drama. Solt spent eight years as film director Alan J. Pakula’s producer in New York, but gave up her movie career to become dean of the School of Theatre at CalArts in 1995.

Preston, now head of CalArts’ directing program, is an internationally recognized director of theater and opera whose unconventional stagings typically use enhanced sound techniques and visual imagery incorporating film and video. Preston’s most recent productions include “Boris Godounov” and Luigi Nono’s “Al Gran Sole Carico D’Amore,” both at the Hamburg State Opera.

Preston’s 1996 staging of the Alban Berg opera “Lulu,” presented in the immense Royal Riding School of Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen, became a phenemenon because he had Lulu tell her paramour’s fiancee that he was breaking off their engagement--by scrawling the information on her naked body and parading around the stage. The New York Times called the production “the highlight of Copenhagen’s opera program for the year.” It also said, “Mr. Preston dealt skillfully with the space by having the cast appear and disappear through trap doors, while he found novel ways of occupying the vast stage, not least in one scene by filling it with large, icon-like paintings of Lulu.”

1996 was also the year that Solt lured Preston to CalArts, and that’s when the two hatched the scheme for the Center for New Theater. “New York was progressively becoming more and more conservative,” Preston says. “New work could be presented there, but L.A. was a place where new work could be created.

“We thought about a center that would be ambitious to the maximum,” he adds. “We were looking in the direction of international co-productions, not the avant-garde being ghettoized in small spaces with limited resources, but something that had the possibility to produce things of scale.”

About the time Preston came to CalArts, Solt and CalArts President Lavine began recruiting other theater faculty to the Valencia institution. “Over the last six years, we have recruited an extraordinary new faculty in the school of theater, all of whom have been attracted by the possibility of doing a kind of edgy cross-disciplinary work that is more associated in people’s minds with, say, the Brooklyn Academy of Music than regional theater,” Lavine says. “Many felt they had to go to Europe, and they’ve been persuaded to move to L.A. by this combination of teaching and professional activity.”

These people form the basis of the faculty of the theater school and the core of the Center for New Theater, including Joan MacIntosh, a noted actress of the American avant-garde whose 35-year career has included roles on Broadway. They are also the key players in the cast and design team of “King Lear.”

Having these artists on salary is the single factor that makes this project affordable. “The subsidy that we are really benefiting from is the notion that CalArts will hire professional artists to teach,” Solt says. “We’ve essentially borne the cost of this on the back of staff contracts of the School of Theater.”

The team of faculty artists was supplemented with roughly half a dozen guest artists, including several cast members and writer-dramaturge Coppenger.

“King Lear” may even have what’s known in the business as “legs.” “There are Europeans, potential co-producers, presenters and festivals who are coming to this event,” Preston reports. “New York is a known quantity to them, so L.A. is undiscovered territory, and they’re really interested in it.”

Based on his “King Lear” experience, Preston is bordering on bubbly. In fact, his enthusiasm is threatening, once again, to spoil that avant-garde persona. “I’m convinced that there’s now in L.A. a critical mass of artists and intelligentsia ready for things to ignite,” he says. “There’s an incredible kind of openness to things new. It’s also not tied to the stodgier side of European influence. I’m totally enthusiastic about what’s possible,” Preston adds. “I don’t think it could happen anywhere else, honestly.”

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“King Lear,” Brewery Arts Complex, 650 S. Avenue 21, L.A. Friday to June 23, 8 p.m. $40. (877) 407-7499.

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Jan Breslauer is a regular contributor to Calendar.