He’s Staging the Revolt

David Sefton knows what it’s like to suffer for his art.

“I found myself trapped in a room with a French puppet theater of found objects,” says Sefton, who’s just put together UCLA’s first International Theatre Festival. “Stuck, for two hours, watching a man playing with potatoes and making funny noises.” Another winner: “Eight-hour, high-naturalist versions of Russian masterpieces, done in Polish with no subtitles. Believe me, I’ve done a lot of those. And one of the most annoying things you see are these new New York companies--it’s like being stuck in a religious cult, where people are just worshiping this stuff, laughing hysterically. I sit there thinking, ‘What are you all laughing at?’ ”

Amid the sea of dross, though, the 39-year-old Liverpudlian beginning his second season running UCLA Performing Arts swears he’s found gold. UCLA’s new season is full of unusual work, in music, dance and spoken word, but the theater festival is the boldest, the most ambitious swath of 2002-03’s offerings. Many of these pieces--only a few can really be called plays--are non-narrative, abstract works that rope several genres together at once.

The festival--eight works that run from late September to early December--includes a play about punk rock and the Dada movement (“Lipstick Traces”), a radically irreverent adaptation of Racine by New York’s avant-garde Wooster Group, and a version of “Woyzeck” with music by Tom Waits. “Woyzeck,” in fact, will be the first fully staged work by Robert Wilson to come to Los Angeles; several of the performances are exclusive U.S. engagements or West Coast premieres. Although UCLA’s offerings typically are staged in Royce Hall, most of the theater festival will appear in the more intimate, 583-seat Freud Playhouse.

For the festival’s first year, Sefton is trying to define the term “theater” as widely as possible. “I’m trying to nail my colors to the mast to a certain extent, start to mark out the territory,” says Sefton, who recalls both the Manchester club owner in the film “24 Hour Party People” and a mad scientist. “And much of the work here either is or was revolutionary.”

There’s no question that the offerings are adventurous. The question that remains, though, is whether people will come out for theater--theater of the kind rarely seen in Los Angeles--in a town that owes its fealty to the movies.

UCLA has a lot riding on the festival: About a quarter of Performing Arts’ $9.2-million budget--which covers 193 performances of 86 productions--is devoted to these eight shows. Some signs are good: “Woyzeck” has already become the second fastest-selling show of the season, after Yo-Yo Ma’s “Silk Road Project.”

UCLA’s season was born of Sefton’s frequent flying: He spends about half his time traveling the world. Over the last year, he saw roughly 20 times more theater than he was able to book--not seeking anything specific but hoping to be floored. “I’ve been looking to get enthralled, excited and enthused enough,” he says, “to want to go through all the trouble it takes to bring a theater company to Los Angeles.” Don’t look for anything that comes out of Eugene O’Neill’s line of heightened realism, any British work--ironic given Sefton’s origins and the torn-from-the-headlines plays currently galvanizing the London stage--or much traditional storytelling. “I think there is a lot of narrative theater in L.A. already,” Sefton says. “I can’t really speak to the quality. But that’s already here. When you say theater to people in L.A., that’s what they picture: actors shouting at each other on stage, in an Elizabethan drawing room.” (Next year’s theater festival, which he’s already begun to book, includes more narrative work.)

The Wooster Group is renowned in hipster circles for its deconstructing of familiar masterpieces and for graduating Willem Dafoe and monologuist Spalding Gray. (Dafoe may appear in the group’s UCLA production of “To You, the Birdie!,” which is based on Racine’s “Phedre.”) Its method, evolved over a quarter century, is based on distance, not emotional warmth.

“Behind the Wooster Group’s aesthetic is a distrust of--even a contempt for--the theater’s tendency to naturalistically depict human feeling, and by doing so to evoke emotional responses in the audience,” Charles Isherwood wrote in a recent Daily Variety review of the Racine piece, performed in Brooklyn. The Wooster gang, he writes, “wants you to think about feelings, not feel them.” The Wooster Group is working in a venerable line of international theater going back at least to Brecht and Beckett, but its iciness may not appeal to a city whose culture tends toward more direct heat.

Similarly, October will offer the West Coast premiere of “Hashirigaki” by German artist and composer Heiner Goebbels. Not only has the piece never been performed on the West Coast, the work of Goebbels--a serious, difficult figure whose music can be equal parts sublime and assaultive--has rarely been performed in Los Angeles. (The piece does have a California connection: Unlikely as it sounds, its text was inspired in part by the Beach Boys.)

Sefton has called the abstract, visually stirring Societas Raffaello Sanzio “the best thing I’ve seen in 10 years.” (The Italian group, led by Romeo Castellucci, performs “Genesi,” on Oct. 4-6, and “Giulio Cesare,” on Nov. 1-3.) But Societas Raffaello Sanzio has never been to the United States. Its appearance here is a coup for Sefton, but he can rely on very little name recognition from his audience.

Some arts observers aren’t worried. “I anticipate that many of these shows will sell out,” says Lee Wochner, head of Theatre LA, a service and advocacy organization for local theater. Difficult material can work in Los Angeles, he says, like the Berliner Ensemble’s version of Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” that went up at UCLA in ’99. Wochner judged it “easily the most exciting thing I’ve seen in a long time. I haven’t forgotten Berliner Ensemble--and it was in German.” Wochner wasn’t alone; the show he saw was sold out. Overall, Wochner is pleased that the UCLA season is dropping what he calls “the artificial boundaries” between theater and the performing arts.

“I think if they don’t make it in L.A., I don’t know where they will make it,” Robert Cole, director of Cal Performances in Berkeley and a former Angeleno, says of the shows. “There’s such a big potential audience for it with all those small theaters.” Cole admits he’s a little envious of the UCLA schedule, especially its ability to inhabit a variety of spaces. (Most of Cal Performances’ pieces go up in UC Berkeley’s 2,000-seat Zellerbach Hall.) “A lot of the things he’s doing I wanted to do, but didn’t have the theater.” The key to helping risky material find its audience, Cole says, is catching fire in the press and offering runs long enough to allow word of mouth to build over a week or more. “And the artists. They’ve got to deliver.”

Dean Corey, executive director of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County and programmer of the Eclectic Orange Festival, says anyone trying to bring non-narrative theater to L.A. faces sizable challenges. “It seems that local theater is either small and experimental, or large and dreaming of Tonys, with nothing in between,” he says via e-mail from Austria’s Salzburg Festival. “If L.A. is to be taken seriously on the culture map, new theater must be regularly on the menu. It will only happen if places like UCLA make it and keep it happening. Eventually there will be an audience and we will all be better for it.”

If all goes well, UCLA could create a link between touring groups new to California and West Coast audiences. Harvey Lichtenstein ran the Brooklyn Academy of Music for more than 30 years, establishing a famous house style and building the careers of major avant-garde artists. It’s no secret that BAM is the presenter Sefton most wants to emulate. But when Lichtenstein took over at BAM in 1967 and began importing talent--Wilson, composer Steve Reich, choreographer Merce Cunningham--for performances and residencies, most of them were obscure names or young upstarts at best.

“It was tough,” says Lichtenstein. “My major theater was a 2,000-seat opera house, and we put Merce Cunningham in there and he would draw 400 people, 500 people. It was a matter of sticking with the genre. It took a long time, and a lot of perseverance and a lot of heartache.” Sometimes it worked--as with Reich’s “Drumming,” from 1975, now a canonical piece--other times it didn’t. “We did an extraordinary production of [Federico Garcia Lorca’s] ‘Yerma’ in the early ‘70s, done on a trampoline, a stunning production. It didn’t catch on. And that’s happened with other things that I’ve thought were terrific.”

Sefton’s first foray into theater at UCLA was the chilling plane-crash drama “Charlie Victor Romeo,” which ran in the summer of 2000. Since then he’s offered works by Robert Lepage (“The Far Side of the Moon”), da da kamera (“In on It”) and Theatre de Complicite (“The Noise of Time”). The theater offerings sold, on average, three-quarters of the available seats, according to UCLA Performing Arts, with demand building after strong reviews or word-of-mouth. He says he’s feeling less resistance than he detected when he arrived at UCLA. “I think it’s clear now,” Sefton says, “that I’m not gonna burn down Royce Hall and build a rock stadium.”