STAGE REVIEW : Lawrence’s ‘BEATific Poets’ at the Itchey Foot

Eight years ago, Allen Ginsberg took a glib stab at summing up the Beat movement he helped breathe life into: “Who were we? A bunch of dopes sitting around trying to figure out where we were.”

Then why do an evening dedicated to the Beats, as the Mark Taper Forum’s Sundays at the Itchey Foot is doing right now with a show titled, appropriately, “BEATific Poets”? Ginsberg’s follow-up remark suggests why: “Everyone else was a bunch of dopes, too, but they didn’t know it.”

In Jeremy Lawrence’s adaptation of the writings of Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen and the nearly forgotten John Clellon Holmes and Philip Lamantia, artists who thumb their noses at the outside world are also painfully aware of their own mishaps. Before he met the Beats, Ginsberg was a market researcher. These San Francisco bards might not have broken ground on their own.

That’s the impression in Lawrence’s text, and the picture onstage in Lillian Garrett’s friendly, almost informal production. The viewer can’t help but notice how this group portrait contrasts with the studied depictions of lonely, self-flagellating literary figures fed to us in school and so common in pop culture. But there’s another contrast as well.

Too often, especially within the frame of the publicity which attended and nearly drowned out the Beats, we view them as entertainingly rebellious, or isolate them as embodiments of the Freaky Poet.

Or we institutionalize them: in prison, where Ginsberg almost went for committing “obscenity” in his incantatory “Howl,” or literary enshrinement, as when Ginsberg won the National Book Award.

From its first moments, “BEATific Poets” rejects these strategies. It sets the right atmosphere, with a cafe-like ambience, and interested listeners tightly packed together at small tables. Then, jazzman Ara Tokatlian (of the group Arco Iris) enters blowing a tenor sax fusing Sonny Rollins with Warne Marsh. The poets wander up to the stage and start talking.

Lawrence, of course, has to give his audience some history, but the trick is to make the information come out as conversation, since we’re at adjacent tables. Some past Taper literary cabaret readings have turned into history lessons. This time, we’re in a jazz club.

The evening is not, though, a succession of cool guys soloing words into the air. Relationships form between them. Tony Amendola’s Snyder deeply admires Rexroth (John Apicella, who also reads/plays Duncan and Whalen) as the mentor, with his interests in anarchism, American Indians, Orientalism and “poetry-as-music” as the basis of the Beat aesthetic.

Rexroth howls at Lawrence’s Ginsberg to leave his silly corporate job. Ginsberg finds Corso’s (John Castellanos, who’s also Ferlinghetti, Lamantia and Holmes) ability to write on any subject profound, but he ambiguously calls Richard Holden’s Kerouac, who wrote verse as well as novels, “possibly the strangest writer in the room.” (Holden’s smoky aloofness nicely adds to the ambiguity.) McClure, played by Jay Louden as an all-American boy who has found freedom, wants them all to go off to Mexico and get crazy.

So Lawrence and Garrett allow for the possibility that these were “dopes” trying to escape, while giving them a platform. These poets felt the best art was felonious by nature, but also that it was only of this moment. Which is why Ginsberg says, “You have to attend to what you’re saying, because you can’t say it twice.” (Is it also why key Beat influences--Walt Whitman, Cesar Vallejo, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller--go unmentioned?)

But when Lawrence, who is in the background through most of the performance, rips into “Howl” and its angry, corrosive song of lament fills the room, “BEATific Poets” extends to at least one writer--Ginsberg--the mantle of timelessness. The deeply meditative and Jewish quality of what Lawrence turns into a song affirms the entire Beat phenomenon. They didn’t have to say it twice.

At 801 W. Temple St., Saturday at 6 p.m., and Sundays, 6 p.m., until May 6. $8; (213) 972-7477.