‘Ned’ to Take a Bow, Head-Scratching and All

In “Not For Real,” performance artist Leonard Pitt appeared to “eat” his face, through the clever manipulation of a lifelike mask.

In “Ned,” he turns into a fish during a 50-minute monologue that will have its Southern California premiere at Sushi Performance Gallery tonight through Saturday.

But such sleight of hand is all the two shows have in common, Pitt said from Life on the Water, the theater collective he co-founded in San Francisco in 1985.

Pitt, 49, known for his skill with visual improvisation for almost 30 years, has decided to try something new. A story with a beginning, middle and end, and lines written entirely by someone else.

The story of “Ned,” which debuted Jan. 23 at Life on the Water, was written by David Barth and tells the story of a gangster, Ned, who is thrown into crisis by the sudden loss of his girlfriend, Poppy.

“It is a total departure from anything that I’ve ever done,” Pitt said. “I asked all my actor friends, ‘How do I memorize all these lines?’ I felt like a complete novice. Someone told me to put the script on tape and play the thing on a ghetto blaster all night. Then I woke up at five in the morning and heard this guy saying, ‘Take this, you dirty rat.’ I started to think all my neighbors were hoods.”

Audiences familiar with Pitt’s love of word play and symbolism, however, may find that “Ned” is not as much of a departure as Pitt suggests.

Ned is less an underworld figure than an Everyman who finds himself a gangster in his relationship with the woman he loves, Pitt said. He struggles to fight his enemy, Big Trout, which may be his own unconscious, spiritual self as much as it is an opposing hood.

As for Pitt, who has never been married, he acknowledges that he can see a bit of himself in Ned.

“Ned deals with the underworld of the psyche. He’s dealing with his relationship with Poppy. And any man who is going to be halfway honest with himself is going to look at Ned and see a little of himself in it. I have to admit that I’ve been with women in my life who have said, ‘Come on, Lenny, talk to me.’ And you shrug it off.”

Though his approach to “Ned” is different from his approach to his own work, it’s not hard to pick up on a common thread between “Ned” and the only other show he’s presented at Sushi, the well-received “Not For Real.” In “Not For Real,” Pitt examined the conflicts between the natural and mechanical world. In “Ned,” he looks at a man struggling between his natural spirituality and what’s mechanical in him.

Pitt comes by the struggle honestly.

A one-time graphic designer for an advertising agency in Detroit, it took him a year to tell “it was a rotten world out there.”

He heard about a wonderful performance by French mime Etienne Decroux in New York and on a whim went to see him. Decroux’s work inspired him to take a vacation from his job in August, 1962--a vacation from which he has yet to return.

The timing for Pitt’s change in life was bizarre, he said. Two days after the Cuban missile crisis when, for all he knew, the world was about to fall apart, the 21-year-old sailed out of New York on the Queen Elizabeth, heading for France “with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket and not knowing a word of French.”

After three weeks of traveling around France, he checked out Decroux’s school. He loved it and stayed for four years. He returned to the United States, left again in 1973 to study mask theater in Bali, and finally came back to stay in San Francisco.

Pitt said he doesn’t know whether there’s a future in “Ned.” One San Francisco newspaper gave it a rave review, but the others were mixed or negative. Pitt concedes it needs more work. What happens at Sushi will determine, he said, whether it goes on the road or not.

“I’m enjoying it, but what I wanted originally when I talked to David (Barth, the playwright) was a detective story,” Pitt said. “I wanted a whodunit that was really concrete. What I got instead was a what-is-it that is poetic, imagistic, abstract. I’ve been doing what-is-it’s for years. There’s a lot of ambiguity to the piece.

“Ned keeps referring to oatmeal. It symbolizes his banal world. Some people get angry that they can’t make it out. ‘The fish . . . the oatmeal . . . what does it mean?’ they ask. I’ve been talking to David, ‘Let’s clarify the oatmeal.’ It’s a head-scratcher for a lot of people. But I’m always finding things in it. There’s so much I can play with. It fascinates me.”