Company Stages ‘Lower Depths’ With Passion of Experience : Homeless Actors Rise in ‘Lower Depths’ : Stage: In his production of the Gorky play, Michael McGee has one goal in mind--to empower the homeless.

There’s little hope in this melting pot of despair. Its inhabitants are the disenfranchised of the metropolis--craftsmen without a shop, artists without a canvas, human beings who have lost touch with humanity. They struggle for their bread as aimlessly as they struggle to keep the faint flame of optimism burning in the dark recesses of existence.

Are they sheltered among packing crates on a downtown corner somewhere near San Pedro Street? Inside a plastic-draped lean-to on a vacant lot east of Main?

No. They’re the lost souls of Maxim Gorky’s classic drama about conditions in czarist Russia that eventually led to the 1917 revolution. They live in “The Lower Depths,” opening today at Stages Trilingual Theatre in Hollywood.

But take a second look at what’s going on at Stages’ outdoor theater. There on the set are the crates, shattered remnants of furniture, boards thrown against a wall with found plastic forming the roof--artifacts of the homeless ghettos of Los Angeles. The clothes are castoffs, and at least a third of the company are themselves among the homeless. They don’t want to be.

The production’s director, Michael McGee, had the notion that resulted in the staging of this play.

“It’s mostly Michael’s vision,” said one of the producers, Liz Carlin, a film editor who also works in public relations. “I’m not a member of any organization. I’m a member of the human race,” is Carlin’s way of explaining her involvement in the project. “I figure we all owe something, and we’re all here together.”

She happened to attend a poetry reading featuring the work of the Homeless Writers Coalition (HWC), and asked what she could do to help. She was sent to Hollywood’s Artists Against Homelessness, where she met McGee.

McGee’s original aim was just a production of the play. But he too discovered HWC about a year ago, and friends like Pipeline’s Scott Kelman, who suggested a staged reading with both homeless and professional actors, helped get the ball rolling.

“We started rehearsing down on Skid Row on an empty lot,” said McGee. “I got some actors together and we just collected people. They’d come up as we were working and wonder what was going on. We worked for a couple of months, then we did the staged reading.”

In the process he had met HWC’s Dino Lewis, Southern Comfort and Jackie Townson, all poets from among the homeless. Lewis is no longer homeless and has written a play McGee will probably stage. He’s also one of “Lower Depths’ ” producers, along with Carlin. Comfort and Townson are in the cast.

There are a lot of talented people on Skid Row, asserted McGee, who moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco about two years ago. Involvement in about 30 plays in the Bay Area (as actor or director) and a stint as acting teacher provided the background. The plight of the Los Angeles homeless provided the impulse.

“You have an economically deprived area,” he said, “you’ll find a lot of artists there. This doesn’t have anything to do with homelessness, but a lot of creative people tend to drift outside the system, outside of the mainstream. That’s just something that happens. When you’re a creative person and, for one reason or another you’re unable to do your work, it can be destructive to you.

“That’s why people like Scott Kelman and myself and others believe that a cultural center would be a piece of gold in that area. When you tap into the creative life of a person, it’s a healing thing. It heals them more than bread, more than a place to sleep.”

It’s the dream of that cultural center that sparks this production, McGee’s involvement with HWC and other creative stirrings on Skid Row, including his own Row Actors Workshop. (A homeless cultural center, Another Planet, was destroyed by fire last summer.)

“We have a lot of missions down there, which is where most of the money goes,” he said. “But, in a way, that adds a complacency. Where’s the empowerment? Art awakens your creativity and starts moving you in a positive direction. That’s an empowering thing. It has to do with self-respect and things that get you out of where you are.

“A number of people I first met in this project are now in homes, working at jobs. I lost some actors, because now they have jobs. You need to have survival, a place to live, and money. Just lining up for food, going from one line to another line is not a life.”

The eventual beneficiary of the production, the cultural center, is always in McGee’s mind.

“There are a helluva lot of homeless artists down there who are doing their work in spite of their living conditions. If we had one spot to go to--where people could show up --this is why we’re all doing this play. The play spreads a message of good.”

As a boy of 10, Gorky himself became homeless when his mother died and his grandfather sent him away to earn his own living. He supported himself as an itinerant laborer, bootblack, errand boy, dishwasher and stevedore, all the while pursuing his self-education.

“Yeah,” McGee said with a smile, “after that he began writing about the people he’d met. There are going to be a lot of writers coming out of this society today.”