Seattle’s Gay Theater Brings ‘Zombie’ to L.A.

Pack up your feather boas and put away those high-heeled mules. And while you’re at it, mothball those persnickety ideas about what kind of performance is right for a general audience.

Lesbian and gay theater, you see, is not just for lesbians and gays anymore. That’s according to Rick Rankin and Susan Finque of Seattle’s Alice B. Theatre, who call their 6-year-old performance, dance and theater space “a gay and lesbian theater for all people.”

L.A. people will get to see Finque and Rankin, along with Alice B. performers Larry Lefler and Timothy Jones, in a triple bill called “Attack of the Zombie Backup Singers and Other Hits” at Highways today through Sunday.

Alice B. is “for all,” Finque and Rankin say, because gayness isn’t the only topic. Moreover, their theater boasts a “one-third gay, one-third lesbian and one-third straight” subscriber audience whose support backs up their claims to inclusivity.

Alice B. may present some radical and high-camp material, but it also employs a mix of styles to make the season accessible to non-gay theatergoers.

The slogan on the front of the purple pamphlet touting the 1989-90 Alice B. season screams, “Afraid of gay theater? Get over it!” The flyer’s offerings: a tribute to the AIDS quilt, a comedy about a gay man trying to live with his boyfriend and the First National Gay/Lesbian Theatre Festival.

Rankin cites composer Edvard Grieg as an analogy to explain how a gay sensibility doesn’t leave out those who aren’t gay.

“Grieg felt the need to express Scandinavian culture. He composed national music, but you wouldn’t say it was only for Scandinavians.”

Similarly, many Alice B. productions have no obviously gay or lesbian orientation. “Some works we produce are obviously gay theater, what people typically expect from a gay theater, but some have no overtly gay content whatsoever,” says Rankin.

“We don’t feel that gay theater is limited to men kissing men and women kissing women on stage. There may be some lesbian and gay imagery, but it’s not the primary image,” says Rankin. “Whatever gay and lesbian imagery may be in (some works) comes from (those images) being part of the human psyche.”

“We are not out to do kitchen-sink soap operas about gay relationships,” says Finque, whose movement-based performance “T.S./Crossing” looks at female-to-male transsexuality.

“Attack of the Zombie Backup Singers,” for instance, is a play with a ‘50s sci-fi look in which aliens disguise themselves as Motown singers in order to infiltrate a two-bit town in Alabama.

Written by Rankin and performed by Rankin and Lefler, “Zombie” has no gay plot, they say. So what makes it gay theater?

Says Rankin, “It’s definitely gay theater in that I wrote it and I’m gay and the look comes from drag.”

Adds Finque: “The gay sensibility behind ‘Zombie’ is that when you’re already an outsider in America, you perceive the society from that perspective, observing absurdism or prejudice in a different way.

“You see the way the mainstream treats aliens and then you see what your place in that society is.”

Finque and Rankin argue that this “gay sensibility” is a way of seeing that colors the subject matter without excluding people who aren’t gay.

“When you’re gay in a primarily straight society, the work can’t help reflect that. Even if we do a scene about heterosexual marriage, it has a certain color,” says Finque.

Alice B. takes on topics as large as American history and global politics, albeit from a “gay perspective.” The work may be political without necessarily focusing on gay politics.

That openness, they say, is theater and performance’s special province.

“Theater is the first art form, after literature, to blaze a trail for society to look at. People hungry for great theater are hungry for change: It’s where revolution begins,” says Finque.

“We had a focus group with our general theater audience, many of whom aren’t gay or who aren’t necessarily interested in theater,” Rankin says. “Subscribers said, ‘We don’t always love what you do, but we expect it to challenge us.’ ”

Challenge is the operative word all right, as with any theatrical endeavor nowadays.

“Because of the power of the media, anyone who does theater in the U.S. is tilting at windmills,” says Rankin, “and people in L.A. probably understand that better than anyone.

“So in a way, we’re not all that different.”