Chapman Folk Hero Returns With Unsettling Farce

Joel Moffett knows how to draw a crowd. Last spring, while a senior at Chapman College, Moffett was restrained by administrators of the private school in Orange affiliated with the Disciples of Christ from presenting full frontal nudity in his performance piece, “A Coloring Box.”

Moffett cried censorship and promoted a large student protest, attracting widespread attention and becoming sort of a campus folk hero in the process. As Chapman junior Gayle Jenkins remembers it, the student demonstration was “one of the few times our campus took on an issue and did something about it. . . . It was even covered by ‘A Current Affair,’ ” the national TV show.

Monday, a crowd of Chapman students again turned out to applaud Moffett. Now a graduate student in UCLA’s theater program, the 23-year-old Santa Monica resident returned to the campus with “The Middle of Nowhere,” a high-volume, high-impact farce that he wants to take to public parks, nursing homes, schools and homeless shelters and institutions across the country this summer.

“Our goal is to bring the theatrical event to those who would normally miss it, to people who would go to a football game or a rock concert rather than theater because they perceive it to be over their head or nothing that would concern them,” Moffett said.

“We want to use theater as a communicative device, to make it something that can concern them. Theater has become a social event in a lot of ways, which is OK, but in the process it seems we’ve lost some of the essence of it. With the tour, we want to give the audience something they can look at objectively and think about.”

Moffett also hopes that the project will mark a new chapter in his own career. “One of the reasons I’m doing this is that I’m sick of being referred to as the guy who tried to do a nude play,” he said with a wry laugh. “This is now, in the present; it’s a way to get away from that.”

Moffett wrote, directed, bankrolled and now stars in “Nowhere,” which, he said, speaks of “the hypocrisy of man’s temptation to find security in mass conformity, even when that conformity may be based on a lie.”

The play ricochets from attacks against stereotyping and class prejudice to jabs at the media and social services, all delivered in disjointed and purposefully unsettling scenes and punctuated with pratfalls by a mostly male cast in nonconformist calico frocks.

Monday’s performance featured Kirk Scott, Mark Holte, John Klein, Harris Van Cleef and Ted Lowe, all Chapman theater students, and Jena Gannon, a professional singer and friend of Moffett.

On the road, the troupe--which is calling itself the Spontaneous Combustion Traveling Show--will keep its budget slim and baggage light (the stage is a road-weary Ford bobtail truck outfitted with a rolling stage and a few pieces of crude scenery).

Moffett popped for the truck and the cost of mounting the show, and each actor will chip in for gas and traveling expenses. Performances will be free; a cardboard box at the foot of the stage will invite “donations . . . if you can afford it.”

From time to time, the troupe also may stage productions of George Buchner’s sober “Woyzeck” and a dramatization of the Bertolt Brecht poem “Ballad of the Dead Soldier.”

Students at Monday’s performance seemed positive about the venture--if a little baffled.

“I’m not sure, but I think the message of the play is that it’s not necessary to conform to society,” said Dana Daws, 20, “. . . and that’s important not to give up, just have faith.”

Laura Dienich, 18, agreed: “They’re saying that you can’t pretend all the problems in the world are going to be solved, but you just can’t ignore them. . . . You have to try to help.”

“Just the fact that they’re reaching out, trying to do something . . . (that’s) what’s important,” said Angela Brown, 20. “They’re making their contributions as artists.”