FESTIVAL ‘ 90 : STAGE REVIEW L.A. FESTIVAL : ‘Jupiter 35’ a Dreary Slice of Skid Row

Avant-garde experimental theater didn’t begin at the crack house at 2nd and Los Angeles streets--one of the downtown references in Los Angeles Poverty Department’s “Jupiter 35,” an L.A. Festival drama at Highways in Santa Monica. But the LAPD did begin on Skid Row. That’s its strength and its weakness.

What’s great about the performance style of LAPD is that it’s so raw, unstudied and untamed that it catches liberals, elitists and “politically correct” theatergoers completely off balance. The LAPD’s vagabond players, an ensemble of the homeless or formerly homeless, make social do-gooders who have never slept on concrete under a newspaper feel stupid. That’s a big accomplishment.

What’s terrible about the company is its indifference, if not disdain, for theatrical discipline--conventions like clear diction, pacing, momentum.

“Jupiter 35” is the real-life recovery story of one of LAPD’s original members, LeRoy “Sunshine” Mills, whom we first see in a video on Venice Beach, looking and talking sharp.

Mills looks different today. The play documents his waking up in County Medical Center after being pushed from a fifth-floor window along Skid Row. When he was wheeled in the hospital he didn’t know his name, so they labeled him Jupiter 35.

For anyone who has ever been a patient at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center (as has this reviewer), there is a fluorescent, yellow-green feeling about the show’s lighting design (Kevin Susman) that establishes the real deal.

Speaking of life in the urban underbelly, the LAPD’s promotional flyer asks, “Do you want the cosmetic version or the real deal?” The danger with the real deal in theater, as in any art form, is that it’s not larger than life. It’s usually smaller. Reality, without magic (cosmetics, if you want), can be dreary. And that, despite its fervor and its intentions, is what “Jupiter 35” finally is.

When Mills lies there in bed, his street friends standing lamely at his side, he mumbles and jives to his abstracted doctors and nurses just as patients do. But you can’t comprehend half of what he says. Sure, he has just flown through a window and is spooked by pending reconstructive facial surgery, but there is an audience out there the actor (hey, who’s acting?) must address.

The show is not all gloom and doom. Mills can be funny, but too much is inaudible (Highways’ hollow acoustics don’t help).

Some of the other actors in the 13-member troupe fail to project altogether. Only Kevin Williams (who co-directed the piece with LAPD founder and artistic director John Malpede) and Elia Arce (who enjoys a raucous monologue) ring true as actors.

Malpede’s LAPD workshops and the collaborative sessions between Mills and company members that resulted in this play are impressive evidence that people, though isolated and denied sustenance in their lives, can learn to create together.

Their achievement is undeniable, but actors are still people who dissemble instead of playing themselves. A lot of “Jupiter 35” is improvised. Malpede reports there never was a script.

John Cassavetes and his actors once improvised an entire, feature-length movie, another street story, too (“Shadows,” 1958), but then he moved into writing down scenes and dialogue. Not a bad idea for the LAPD if it hopes to do cutting-edge performance work.

At 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, Thursdays through Sundays, 8:30 p.m., through Sept. 16. $15. Information: (213) 480-3232.