Factory Direct : Sledgehammer Hits Hard to Shock Its Theater Audience

The sign above the abandoned, peeling old milk factory on 10th Avenue between J and K streets reads “Carnation.” But today, its contents are anything but 100% homogenized.

Bodies are autopsied in the bottling room. Soldiers hang laundry on the loading dock as pool cues strike their mark in a festive, pinata-festooned bar a few doors away. No one is surprised to see a husband and wife motor through, arguing mere steps past a carnival site.

The man pulls out a knife, and the woman runs from him, only to fall, bleeding to death on a mound of dirt in the corner of a barracks garden.

Should you call the police?

Only if you think they want to see “Blow Out the Sun,” the new Sledgehammer Theatre adaptation of Georg Buchner’s “Woyzeck,” extended through Sunday.

Sledgehammer Artistic Director Scott Feldsher and executive director Ethan Feerst see nothing odd about ushering the audience from scene to scene through a “living movie” format at the musty Carnation. After all, the two 24-year-olds staged their first show, Heiner Muller’s “Despoiled Shore,” in a canyon in 1985 while both were attending UC San Diego.

Then, too, they believe in surprising and shocking audiences. Their living movie is no “Tamara,” the free-flowing, food-and-drink extravaganza that has played Los Angeles and now New York. It’s a two-hour, intermission-free update (by H. P. Taubman) of a 150-year-old German classic in a drafty factory--without refreshments, bathrooms or chairs.

And yet, this new form of boot-camp theater hasn’t sent people walking out--which they did at Sledgehammer’s other shows, such as the canyon production and two at Sixth Avenue Playhouse, “Brain Fever” and “Action.”

For the first time in its history, Sledgehammer has been selling out all its performances.

While a full house for this show means 35 to 40 a night, the idea of its being a hot ticket--with waiting lists--isn’t something two guys who pride themselves on shaking people up feel altogether comfortable with.

“We want people to feel uncomfortable,” Feldsher said. “We try to confront audiences. The play is about the objectifying of human beings to the nth degree. The doctor (who examines Woyzeck) predates the Nazis and today’s genetic engineers. Why does he have him eat peas for a year? He thought it would be a good idea. If he does an experiment that leaves Woyzeck’s left side paralyzed, he says, ‘I can write it up in a medical journal. I can make a name for myself.’

“It’s (also) about an obituary that might be buried on Page 20 of the Los Angeles Times that tells you why a man kills his wife.”

Feerst called it a new but not unwelcome experience to court a popular success.

“It doesn’t matter all that much, since Scott and I are still struggling and we can’t pay our rent next month and we’re working in a cold factory,” he said. “It’s nice, but it doesn’t change things all that much. Talk is cheap; theater is not.”

But theater may become increasingly affordable--at least at the Carnation--if Gloria Poore has her way. For the past six years, Poore has spearheaded the RE-IN Carnation project, a campaign to convert the space into a multimedia arts center, complete with a visual gallery, work-live spaces and performance space on the second floor and on the outside ledge.

It was through Poore that Feldsher and Feerst found out about the Carnation. They fell in love with the downtrodden ambiance of the space; it was conducive to updating Buchner’s study of a poor man’s frustration exploding into violence, against a bare setting that’s been a surreptitious sanctuary for San Diego’s homeless.

Poore fell in love with the idea of letting Sledgehammer prove that the Carnation was a place people would go to for art.

Being the first artists in the building brought its share of headaches. The recent passage of Proposition 103 made the first challenge getting insurance. That done, they moved on to the sweat portion of the project: mopping up a foot of water left after Thanksgiving, sweeping the floor four times to get rid of the mud and dirt, and running walls of extension cable all over to set up the lights.

Feldsher first conceived the show as taking place in what is now the autopsy room, with the audience studying the action from above like medical students observing an operation.

The height was ruled out by Poore as dangerous. Then Feldsher noticed that, if he added votive candles, a phonograph and a picture of Jesus to a wide-windowed room with a visible bathroom in the back, he would have the perfect bedroom for Woyzeck’s wife, Maria. Scouting around further, he found several spots that lent themselves to a variety of long shots and close-ups, and, eventually, with the help of set designer Robert Brill, the living movie was born.

The idea was a natural for two film buffs who envision a genre of theater that will hybridize with cinema at a fraction of the expense.

And if, to Sledgehammer’s surprise, it found an audience, the team would have concluded a political and artistic mission as well.

“Most people who go to the theater in San Diego go to a park or a university or a shopping mall,” said Feldsher. “It’s very safe. We want to reach the people who are politically incorrect and shock them by showing them how people really are.”

“People have been saying San Diego is a very conservative town,” Feerst added. “We could see ourselves in any number of places that have a more liberal scene, like New York or Los Angeles. But we have an exclusive here. No one else is doing the kind of work we’re doing. There’s an open slate here. I don’t think of our work as liberal or conservative. None of it deals with ideological issues.

“But I do think it’s much more political to get people to a broken-down factory around the corner from a rescue mission than to talk politics.”

Still, social consciousness in theater sometimes translates differently in real life, the two acknowledge.

When they returned to the Carnation after taking a Thanksgiving break, they found a knife and some surgical equipment from the autopsy scene missing. They found themselves complaining about the homeless people “who probably ripped us off so they could eat,” Feldsher said ruefully.

Eventually, they found that police officers had come by and confiscated the knife and surgical goods, and were quite suspicious as to whether the bucket of stage blood was really fake.

They took it as a backhanded compliment to their skills at verisimilitude.

Sushi will be bumping Sledgehammer with a benefit at the Carnation tomorrow. Sunday will mark the conclusion of “Blow Out the Sun,” but not of Sledgehammer at the Carnation, say Feerst and Feldsher, who hope to make it their permanent niche.

They are negotiating with Poore to do Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” or a work by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the space in March.

As the development plans continue and subdivide the space, they know they may never get to roam this free again.