Like-Minded Friends Brainstorm --and the Result Is ‘Brain Death’

What do “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know”?

That’s the question--and title--of Mark Houston’s enquiring musical, reopening this weekend at Studio One’s Backlot Theatre in West Hollywood. Houston, who’s reprising his February staging at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, describes the piece as “an irreverent look at contemporary life--with a great sense of humor and Angst . It’s not letting the world eat you alive.”

The main target of the pop musical--a series of comic sketches devised by Houston and half a dozen actress friends hoping to generate work for themselves--is the glut of media “infotainment” and the erosion of values.

“We started looking at tabloids, saying, ‘What does this all mean?’ ” said Houston, who is credited with the show’s music and lyrics. “We’d begun reading them for a lark, but after a while, you realize it’s not just tabloids. It’s every medium out there--trying to catch your attention, trying to sell you something. If we don’t have that sensationalism, we get bored. People magazine, the Star. The line gets blurred. But the effect is the same.”

Although the show’s title might imply otherwise, tabloids are not the show’s central target.

“They’re not the problem,” said Houston, 42. “They’re the far-end symptom taken to the nth degree. We also have the demand for ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and USA Today--you know, ‘McNews.’ Our show starts with a real premise, then takes it to an absurd end.” Such as? “There’s a Barbie and Ken event, a discussion of the doll as icon. Then we take Barbie and Ken to Motel Hell. They get down and funky, discovering they have no genitals. It’s a bad honeymoon.”

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Houston, who was born and grew up in Texas, believes that going to that extreme was necessary to send his message home. “We are media brats,” he said. “We want it quick, we want it entertaining and we want it colorful. At least, that’s what we’re told we want. It’s only another step to tabloid dementia, that demand for instant attention. Then it’s right on to the next thing. And everything’s disconnected.”

Houston, who also directed “Six Women” in its original 1985 Kansas City, Mo., staging (a separate production recently ended a 15-month run at San Diego Rep), feels that the constant barrage of information also serves to squash old belief systems.

“Things you used to think were true turn out not to be,” he said with a sigh. “Old beliefs about God, old beliefs about the values that came to you out of movies and television--generating a sense of what America was like.”

The result, he said cheerfully, is brain death. The antidote? “You need a bit of a jaded eye, something to keep perspective. . . . It’s not like I’m pointing the finger, saying, ‘Ooh, you’re a bad culture.’ I yearn for things to believe in. I yearn to believe in political events--or that what’s being told me about the world is true.”

He defines his outlook as one of healthy skepticism. “I think you have a responsibility to assess those messages, to pick up the carpet and see what’s underneath. Not just to say, ‘Well, it’s fine that Jimmy Swaggart was playing with a prostitute in a motel room, asking if he could take pictures of her little girl--and now he’s back on TV.’ ”

He shrugged. “Today, Eldridge Cleaver is a Republican, Jane Fonda is into aerobics. All the old images are colliding with the current stuff. And the need for belief is a dangerous thing. It can turn you into a zealot. Then you put blinders on: ‘I don’t care what you’re saying. Jimmy Swaggart is right, and I will send him my money, to the detriment of my family--because if I let go of the core of that belief, I’m cut adrift in this culture.’ ”

He offers no easy answers.

“I don’t know if you ever solve these things,” Houston said. “But I had an English teacher who’d say, ‘You don’t know what you think till you can write it down.’ So I try to make that mishmash into something concrete. I think that’s what every artist tries to do.”