‘Goose & Tomtom’ Director Hopes Audiences Will Go Along for the Ride

Who are “Goose & Tomtom”--and what exactly are they up to?

The title characters of David Rabe’s surreal comedy (opening Monday at the Stella Adler Theatre in Hollywood) are, according to director Charles Otte, “a couple of underworld characters.” It’s a double meaning: underworld as in lowlife hoods, and also as in hell. Goose and Tomtom live in a murky, geographically nondescript nether world where sex, crime and fantasy make very odd bedfellows.

“They’re the kind of guys who go out and rob convenience stores and play with their guns a lot,” said Otte, 34. “Thematically, it’s like reality is being remade as they talk. You’re never sure if they’re describing something that has happened--or, as they say it, they’re making it happen.” At one point, the men wish aloud that a certain girl was in their closet. In the next scene, she’s there.

In addition to 40-ish Tomtom and his younger sidekick Goose (Otte likens them fondly to “a couple of bad boys playing cops and robbers”), the characters include Tomtom’s girlfriend, Lorraine (who sticks pins in their arms as a test of manhood), mobster Bingo and his sister Lulu (the closet dweller), who may be a princess from ancient times. At one point, space aliens also put in an appearance.

In spite of the comedy’s unconventional manner, Otte hopes that playgoers will be willing to go along for the ride.

“I think that audiences--and this is intentional--aren’t going to understand where reality starts and where it ends,” he said. “I hope they’re not uncomfortable. I hope they’re able to accept the fact that there’s a mystery here--that reality is a matter of perceptions and symbols and is malleable as such. I hope that afterward they’ll be sitting in cars or restaurants saying, ‘So what exactly was that?’ ”

A little mental exercise, he believes, is not a bad thing. “I mean, there’s food for thought here,” Otte said. “It’s not handed to you on a silver platter. At the same time, it’s not hard if you don’t think about it. You can just buy it. It’s the old forest and trees thing. If you try to pick out each tree and say, ‘Oh, that means this, and that means this,’ in the end, all you have is a bunch of things that mean stuff.”

“Goose” producer Steven Ullman also worked with Rabe in his 1989 staging of “Hurlyburly” at the Westwood Playhouse.

“ ‘Hurlyburly’ was more accessible; this is a little heady,” Ullman noted. “But even if you don’t understand it, it’s still a very funny play. The characters in ‘Hurlyburly’ are very real; we know them, we just don’t like them. These characters are likable in a kind of goofy way. But they’re also different enough and weird enough that they’re not threatening to us. They’re not real people we know.”

“Goose” (originally mounted by Joseph Papp at his New York Shakespeare Festival and later by Rabe in a Lincoln Center workshop starring Harvey Keitel, Sean Penn and his then-wife Madonna) is being produced by the newly formed collective the Mojave Group. Many of the cast members appeared in Otte’s last local staging, a well-received version of Brecht’s “Baal” at the Callboard Theatre (1989).

“We’d worked together for a number of years in New York in a company there,” he said. “That was important to tackle something like this. We needed to have those relationships to be able to dive in, take chances. There are so many ways of interpreting this piece--many of them wrong, but probably many of them right. So there’ve been a lot of fun revelations. Of course, David’s real closed-mouthed. He says, ‘When you find out, call and let me know.’ ”

Although he moved around a lot as a child, Otte calls Virginia home; he studied theater at the University of Virginia (also spending time as a stage manager and production manager, actor and designer) before landing at Minneapolis’ prestigious Guthrie Theatre, where one of his mentors was Andrei Serban. He’s a violinist and composer as well. Otte’s collaborators have included Peter Sellars, Robert Wilson, David Byrne and Philip Glass.

With a move to Los Angeles in 1989 (“the New York theater scene is a strange place right now,” he lamented), the director hopes to move into commercial work while building on what he believes is a big, untapped theater audience.

“I feel like there’s an audience of people, say 28 to 40, who used to go to rock ‘n’ roll concerts--a bunch of ex-hippies--and there’s an entertainment vacuum for them,” said Otte, who counts his biggest artistic influences as Brecht and Peter Brook. “These people would like to have some sort of live entertainment, other than going out to dinner and renting a video--something they could do, something that would speak to them.

“The problem is that they consider theater dead and boring. It doesn’t appeal to them, and hasn’t appealed for so long, that it doesn’t even cross their minds. What we’re trying to do is not elitist theater, not just for intellectuals--although it has intellectual underpinnings, depth and energy. It’s not just a bunch of old guys sitting around. There’s a lot of strange fun to be had.”

“Goose & Tomtom” opens Monday at the Stella Adler Theatre, 6250 Hollywood Blvd., and plays 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays indefinitely. Tickets are $15 to $20. (213) 466-1767.