Tracking the Monster Within : 20 years with the eclectic savant of the L.A. stage

There’s no particular reason to grieve as the Odyssey Theatre locks the door for the last time on Ohio Avenue and moves to a new home not that far away. Moving on--that’s what odysseys are about.

If artistic director Ron Sossi were giving up the ship, there would be reason to grieve. But Sossi is a stayer. When he learned that his theater was about to lose its lease--to a video store, yet--he didn’t whimper about how hard it is to do theater in Los Angeles. He found a new location.

It will be the Odyssey’s third location. It originally abutted a porno theater on Hollywood Boulevard. During quiet moments in the play, one could hear the simulated ecstasies. This jibed with the theater’s investigation of ritual--the year was 1969--but the neighborhood had bad karma and, worse, bad parking, and Sossi moved west in 1973.

In those days it was the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble . This is still on the letterhead, but Sossi was really serious about it in those days. One of his theater’s models was Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre. (The Open Theatre’s “The Serpent” was the Odyssey’s second show.) Another inspiration was the “poor theater” of Jerzy Grotowski, with whom Sossi had studied in Poland. Finally, there was the example of the Company Theatre, devising their own pieces down on Robertson Boulevard.

Next to these, the ensemble work at the Odyssey looked as if it had been copied from a book. One wouldn’t have been surprised to see Sossi’s theater fold as the steam went out of the ensemble theater movement in the mid-1970s. Indeed, there were months when it seemed to have done just that, without notifying anybody.

But Sossi was going to have a theater--a theater not to be confused with any other in Los Angeles. Sossi may not be a Grotowski, but he shares the latter’s fascination with the darker side of the human condition, his suspicion that there’s something pathologically askew there--something that can’t corrected by better laws and orange juice.

Sossi also knows how to keep a theater organization going. Even better, he knows how to avoid becoming a slave to it.

A theater’s most interesting work is invariably its most interested work--the stuff it really wants to do, as opposed to the stuff that it does to keep its subscribers happy. The Odyssey has certainly put out its share of crowd-pleasers over years, not to mention schlock--the long-running “Kvetch,” for instance.

But--maybe because the Odyssey is, in fact, a poor theater--Sossi has been allowed to program for himself. He does not think about demographics. He does not try to guess what the next wave in theater will be, so as to catch a ride on it. He simply does plays that interest him. It just seems right to do the memoirs of a defrocked Carpathian monk at the moment, that’s all. It was a big hit in Cracow.

We exaggerate, but not much. Sossi does come up with the damnedest things. Sometimes he launches them, as with “The Adolf Hitler Show” (1976), which attempted to confront the viewer with the Nazi in himself, and indeed sent him home in a mood to hit somebody.

Awful! Outrageous! Insulting! Alive, though. Certainly not selected by the marketing department. Sossi does his thing and hopes that other people will like it. If they don’t, at least he had a good time.

His taste in plays is eclectic, not to say eccentric. But one can make out certain areas of interest. One is politics. It’s curious that Sossi doesn’t himself see this as a theme in his programming. (See Janice Arkatov’s adjoining interview.) Here are some of the figures and events that the Odyssey has treated over the years:

--Joseph Stalin (“Master Class”--’87)

--Joseph McCarthy (“McCarthy”--’88)

--Adolf Hitler (twice: “The Adolf Hitler Show” and “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.”--’84)

--J. Robert Oppenheimer (“In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer”--’83)

--The Vietnam War (“Tracers”--’80)

--As an analog, the Spanish-American War (“Year One of the Empire”--’80)

--World War I (“Johnny Johnson”--’86)

--”The Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” beautifully staged by Frank Condon in ’79.

The Odyssey has also shown an ongoing interest in Brecht, both his plays and his career. (Sossi himself starred in “Baal” in 1981.) Clearly this is a theater aware of the world outside the theater, the world of power and its corruptions.

Yet, the Odyssey has never gone in for agitprop. It has pointed out that Adolph Hitler had a mother like everybody else. Monsters have to come from someplace, after all. And that, maybe, has been the Odyssey’s (i.e. Sossi’s) deepest study: monsters. What fantastic distortions when some gene goes awry in a Stalin, a Hitler, a McCarthy, a “Mary Barnes” (an amazing performance by Laurie O’Brien in ‘82), a “Peer Gynt” (‘73)!

But then, every human soul is strangely shaped--if not at birth, later. Sossi staged a helplessly funny production of Wallace Shawn’s “Marie and Bruce” (1983). Anne Bronston’s Marie and Sam Anderson’s Bruce made George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” look like honeymooners. This couple weren’t just totally wrong for each other, they had sought each other out.

Sossi’s best work takes the Manichean view that the universe is the scene of a struggle between the forces of light and darkness, with the outcome very much in doubt. This is not the theater of Have-a-Nice-Day. Yet of all our theater makers, Ron Sossi seems the most contented. He’s an original, and the voyage will continue.