Adding a Visual Life to Poetry : Theater piece picks up on the rhythms of the Lower East Side

It’s poetry like you’ve never seen or heard before in “The Rhythm of Torn Stars,” a self-described “theatrical adventure” opening this weekend at The Pink nightclub (formerly the Pink Elephant) in Santa Monica.

“All the dialogue in the show is poetry,” said Julian Neil, who has conceived and directed the eight-character piece. “Shakespeare is poetry, right? I did the whole play that way. But instead of using iambic pentameter and Old English verse, I used the words of contemporary poets. Shakespeare told tales about kings and princes. I talk about the artists and poets, the life style of the Lower East Side.”

The contemporary New York poets represented are Barbara Barg, Ted Berrigan, Jim Carroll, Sandie Castle, Lucky Cienfuegos, Maggie Dubris, Michael Lally (who appears in the show), Elinor Nauen, Frank O’Hara, Miguel Pinero and Ed Sanders.

“What I did was edit all the poems,” said Neil, 36. “Some of them are performed in their entirety; a lot of them are excerpted. But they’re all performed dramatically as part of the story line. Poetry’s been put to music for a long time. We’re just adding a visual life to it, filling it out. It’s something that New York poets started and perpetuated--the performance of poetry, not just the reading of it.”

Although he’s never written poetry himself, Neil’s contact with the poetry world is longstanding: “Most of the poets I knew growing up in New York. Some of them afterwards. But the Latin poets--Mikey Pinero, Lucky Cienfuegos--I knew since I was young.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s relevant or if I really want it printed, but I was in a gang when I was a kid, and there were a lot of Hispanics in it. We were different, I think, from the gangs today. More territorial than anything else. And I come from very bright parents who encouraged a lot of reading. Yet I lived on the street. So we used to have gang fights in the afternoon--then I’d go off to some rooftop and read Henry Miller.”

“The violence and romance” of that street life--in addition to the cultural ferment of the ‘60s--made the Lower East Side an especially fertile place for artists.

“Dylan lived there with Joan Baez; people were playing in the street,” Neil recalled. “It was alive. A lot of people don’t realize what was happening then: All the stylistic innovations coming out of there were influencing music and dance and theater--and the poets were at the center of that. They were influencing everybody . If you lived there, you knew it. There was a poetry project at St. Mark’s Church. And Mikey and Lucky started the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe, a real center for the whole community.”

Although much of his work has centered on those Latino poets, Neil has not been blind to the behavioral excesses of his friends.

“Mikey was always being thrown into prison,” he said of Pinero, “even after ‘Short Eyes. He was writing a ‘Miami Vice’ and was shot on the Lower East Side for selling bad dope. He never got out of the broken bottle,” and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1988. “Lucky died, too. And Berrigan, who taught at Oxford and was one of the great American poets, was very rebellious.”

Yet Neil doesn’t see the personal destructiveness and artistic creativity as being at odds. “What you are in your life is not what you are in your art,” he said firmly. “You don’t have to regard the messenger, just the message.”

In this case--since many of the messengers are no longer alive--Neil had to go to their estates to get the rights to the poetry.

Yet none of the heirs and poets, he said, had any trepidation about his fiddling with the work. “I’m just putting it in a different context,” Neil said. “It’s like a jazz riff. Like when John Coltrane did ‘These Are a Few of My Favorite Things’: It reached a lot of people and was very beautiful. The important thing about this is that it’s allowing these poets’ work to reach a greater audience--people who’d never ordinarily pick up a poetry book or go to a poetry reading.”

Neil’s first stab at such an arrangement came several years ago in New York, with poetry readings (accompanied by music and dancing) at the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe. With “Nuyoricans: Bicultural Nomads” at the Public Theatre, there were also musicians, dancers and poets reading their own works--yet this time Neil had edited the pieces into the story line about being Puerto Rican in New York.

Now he’s taken it a step further. Actors will take over for the poets, performing within a self-styled story line and new theatrical identity. Last summer, a workshop production of the piece was done at Venice’s Pacific Theatre Ensemble, where creating the correct New York ambience included bringing in trash cans--and hiring local graffiti artists to paint the wall.

Recalled Neil: “When it came to putting the piece together, I’d say, ‘This character needs these poems, this character needs these poems’--and the words would start touching off each other, the concepts would interrelate. We kept changing the order around till it worked. My favorite thing was when, after the show, screenwriters would come up asking to see a script, and I’d hand them a stack of poems. That’s all we had then.”

Now the script is set--and written down, and eight distinctive characters (played by Tate Donovan, Meg Foster, M. K. Harris, Lally, Mimi Lieber, Perri Lister, Michael Tulin and Maura Tierney) inhabit the poets’ voices.

“One character, Hollywood Mike, does Jim Carroll’s and Pinero’s pieces,” Neil said. “Another character does Berrigan and Frank O’Hara. Kathy, a woman who runs the Happy End Cafe, does Elinor Nauen. And Sheila Velveeta, who talks with a British accent, does a lot of different poets. The accent wasn’t there to begin with, but she tried it and it worked.

“The point is, you can change the actors, change the accents--but the work stands up. That’s what’s so beautiful about it.”