Theater on Skid Row: The Hip and the Hapless

Grizzle-haired Russ Garner--ex-con, ex-mental patient, ex-nurse, compulsive gambler, periodic denizen of Skid Row, now, surprisingly, something of a poet--paced round and round the piano at a little theater on Skid Row, declaiming his profane hymn to the “concrete thighs” and “neon scars” of the city.

Beneath my window she stands, restless, uncaring and naked...

alive to every movement, I roam about her...

pushed aside by others anxious to partake her garish beauty, I remain a victim....

Indeed, as of this weekend Garner was homeless again. He had lost his cheap hotel room “because of some difficulties,” he said later. “I’m living right on the street.”

In the Spotlight

But he was in the spotlight Friday night, along with a group of other Skid Row men who were reading their work and playing their music in an unusual meeting of the hip and the hapless. It will be staged for the next four weekends at City Stage, a 35-seat theater on East 4th Street.

The struggling theater group has been there for three years, attracted by the cheap rent and avant-garde ambiance of the east side of downtown, home to many artists and musicians. Since February, the group has opened its doors to several of the homeless people who frequent the same seamy streets.

“Theatrically, it’s more realistic to serve your community, no matter where you are,” said Lauren Hartman, a member of the City Stage group who directed the show, called “Serious Box.”

While other organizations offer food and temporary lodging to those who frequent Skid Row, the theater group hopes to answer the no less human need for self-expression, she said.

Word of the program went out by flyers posted on walls in the Skid Row district, where people with nowhere else to go spend the night in the open or sheltered by the flimsy protection of paper boxes they refer to as “cardboard condos.”

Some ‘Too Weird’

Some of those who came to the three-hour workshops in music, acting and visual arts that began in February proved to be “too weird to work with, but that’s OK,” Hartman said.

In the end, the more serious of the would-be artists told off the others, and a group of 22 men, all of them homeless or residents of cheap hotels nearby, coalesced around the theater and its newly formed Inner City Arts Center.

“Serious Box”--no explanation is offered for the ambiguous title--is billed as “music and poetry of the inner city.” It consists largely of jazz, rock and funk music, interspersed with readings of free verse and the flickering projection of old home movies on a back wall.

Much of the music was written by Roger Pegues, a classically trained pianist who said he made a living as a performer in Seattle before he came to Los Angeles earlier this year.

“I came here to be a star and when I ran out of money I didn’t want to go home, so I ended up on Skid Row,” Pegues said.

‘Born to Be a Star’

One of his songs, “Hollywood,” speaks of being “born to be a star/so my light can shine/ridin in my car/makin big paper/with a lotta free time./In that great city/it will blow your mind/excuse me, I musta turned wrong/I think it was at Sunset & Vine.”

Steve Moore, a singer with a delicate falsetto, followed a similar path from Chicago to seek an evanescent fame in show business, but fellow vocalist Tommy Williams had a more prosaic story.

Laid off from his job as an insurance rater for four months, “I knew I had to eat, sleep and survive, so I came down here,” he said.

He learned of the theater after he and Moore met while harmonizing with a song on the radio as they stood on the sidewalk outside the Midnight Mission.

“It’s very revealing to find out that you do have some talent that people might like,” Williams said. “Being unemployed maybe was a blessing in disguise. I wouldn’t have come down here if I wasn’t unemployed.”

Ex-Addict, Alcoholic

The program’s 12 hours a week of workshops provide a “bright spot in an otherwise screwed-up life,” said Thomas Gist, a former heroin addict and alcoholic who said he has taken neither drink nor drug for 15 months.

Appearing on stage in a short-sleeved Salvation Army T-shirt and a black head band setting off his deeply lined face, Gist described being homeless as,

No place to go

No date to keep

No one who cares

No one to meet. . . .

His refrain recounted a dulling routine of going “to the mission, and to the park and back to the mission, and back to the park, and sometimes on Sunday, they serve fried chicken at Fred Jordan’s Mission.”

But for now, at least, he said, he has found something else. “There’s a lot of talent down here,” he said. “We are working our way out. We’ve got things to look forward to.”