STAGE : Theater on the Edge : Teetering near financial ruin, LATC dares to stage one of its most costly, controversial shows, Reza Abdoh’s outrageous ‘Bogeyman’

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

--Dylan Thomas

It is 9:30 on a Saturday night and the cavernous lobby of Los Angeles Theatre Center is eerily vacant. Sounds from the four stages don’t penetrate the 1916 bank building’s thick marble walls. No one sits at the cafe tables. No one stands at the base of the towering thermometer poster that marks LATC donations, pleading in huge hand-printed letters: “Help the Miracle Continue by September 1!”

“Quiet as a tomb” is a sadly accurate description. It is as if the downtown theater complex’s nationally publicized financial struggle has ended in failure, as if this night is a prophetic image of LATC’s deadline date. After $27 million of city investment since its celebrated 1985 opening, the cultural hub of the city’s downtown redevelopment dreams--christened “The Miracle on Spring Street”--seems reduced to a haunted house. The doors feel padlocked, the windows boarded up.

Suddenly, Theatre Two’s exits burst open. A last flutter of applause echoes, quickly submerged by a cascade of voices. Into the lobby pours a seething crowd of theater patrons: agitated, subdued, argumentative, reflective, stunned, horrified. LATC’s heart is beating again.

Producing director and LATC co-founder Diane White has been cornered by a subscriber. “I’ve seen a lot of things here that I like very much,” the bearded man is saying. “But this! This is too much! I can’t stand this!”

White isn’t offended. “Good,” she tells the man. “Tell me why.”

The subscriber sputters: “I can’t tell you! I don’t know!”

But he tries: Maybe it was seeing 10 men dancing naked while singing “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” Perhaps it was the castration-by-chain-saw scene. But the torture of the black slave was even more upsetting. And the 4 1/2-foot-tall, physically handicapped Fairy Godmother--sheer exploitation! But the coup de grace had to be when the green-haired boy with rings piercing his tongue, nipples, stomach, genitals and anus--you know the one I mean?--when he’s nude and hanging upside down in a fish tank and . . . on top of all that, why did it climax on Mars during a picnic with a heartfelt rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”?

The subscriber runs out of breath. White nods in sympathy, then tells him, “It shook you up. Good. This is the kind of reaction theater should have. Theater should make you think. It should affect your feelings. Sometimes the only way is to shock you. It is the violence within ourselves that the play is depicting.”

Oh. The patron nods in agreement. His calm reversal is as shocking as anything he’d witnessed on stage. Yes, he says to White, he should see it again.

A telemarketing man forces his way through the crowd to hand White a pair of tickets. Irate elderly women, he explains, returned the tickets just before walking out. On each ticket are scrawled succinct critiques of tonight’s entertainment. White laughs, then signals across the lobby to a slight, dark, 27-year-old youth with a pockmarked complexion.

Reza Abdoh examines the pair of tickets to the first preview performance of “Bogeyman,” the 20th production of his career, the fourth he’s directed at LATC. He reads the women’s review: a graphic, one-word expletive.

Abdoh shrugs, evidently indifferent. “So what? I’m not in the business of pandering to the audience,” he explains. “There are much more important issues than satisfying people’s taste buds. People who are offended are afraid of their own demons.”

The show must go on, he says, returning to the circle of production associates who have been working as a team with Abdoh since 1986. There is much work that must be done on “Bogeyman” by its world premiere this Thursday.

The show must go on, yes, but what is going on at LATC? On the verge of bankruptcy, in a hail of apocalyptic headlines, the company is defiantly premiering a work that has all the signs of becoming the most controversial production in its controversial history. Graphic nudity, homoeroticism, relentless scenes of assaultive violence, simulated sex, castration and cannibalism--Abdoh’s “Bogeyman” should prove, if nothing else, that LATC isn’t about to go gently into that good night.

It also proves that, despite a crisis atmosphere straining every artist, technician and employee--from secretaries to security guards to publicists--LATC isn’t afraid of its own bogymen: budget constraints, decreasing city support, shrinking staff, mounting debts and exhausting personal sacrifices.

For LATC, “Bogeyman” is business as unusual . The work comes first.

“If this company is going to close,” declared LATC co-founder and artistic director Bill Bushnell during an earlier interview, “then it’s going to close swinging. It’s not going to close whimpering in a corner doing a two-character play.”

Yet just this past June, when Bushnell publicly began admitting that his company was being “weighed down by a boulder” of debt, some of his staff argued against the timing of “Bogeyman.” With an Equity cast of 12, plus a remarkably complex set design requiring the stage to be removed for a three-story, 14-room apartment building, “Bogeyman” would rank among the most expensive shows ever mounted at LATC. Why now, when the staff worries each week if the payroll will be met?

Besides, pleaded some LATC personnel, Abdoh’s uncompromising dedication to the avant-garde could alienate general audiences. Critics compare his work to controversial directors Pina Bausch and Peter Sellars. His fragmented, elliptical texts resemble iconoclastic East German Heiner Muller’s nearly impenetrable plays. Abdoh’s furious multimedia choreography assaults an audience in the experimental style of the notoriously radical Wooster Group in New York. We’re not talking boffo box office Variety-speak, said some of LATC’s staff.

Plus, why not a safer choice in this conservative climate? If Sen. Jesse Helms could accuse the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger in Washington of inserting the word erection into “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (yes, the Bard wrote it), then no telling what the extremes of “Bogeyman” could attract. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to wait until the theater is more solvent?

“Yes, there were people in this company who did not understand the bigger picture,” Bushnell answered. “The essence of this company is our commitment to multicultural theater and our commitment to artists. And Reza is one of the artists in whom we have a very big investment. It’s not an investment the private sector is going to understand, because we don’t get any return out of this. The return goes to the community. They get a chance to see for the first time work that no other community gets to see. I believe we’ve recognized here a truly unique talent. Reza Abdoh is a theatrical Picasso. He’s that major.”

Producer White also had an answer to those arguing against “Bogeyman”: “How can we not do it?”

Their commitment goes back to LATC’s opening season. In early 1986, Abdoh--then only 21--made his professional directing debut with David Henry Hwang’s “As the Crow Flies” and “Sound of a Voice.” In 1989, he conceived, directed and co-wrote (with Mira-Lani Oglesby) an epic on industrial and spiritual pollution, “Minamata,” which garnered national attention. Last December, LATC premiered Abdoh’s “The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice” (the first work of a trilogy that includes “Bogeyman”). When invited to Montreal’s prestigious Festival De Theatre Des Ameriques last June, “Hip-Hop” became LATC’s first internationally recognized artistic achievement.

The drama critic for Montreal’s Le Devoir newspaper declared “Hip-Hop” “. . . the surprise of the festival. A shocking spectacle. Jarring. Unexpected. Inspired . . . the most decadent, desperate, cynical and the most American production . . . “ Such reviews led to formal invitations to festivals in France, Yugoslavia and another in Canada. Other festival producers now wait to view “Bogeyman” and, if it meets their standards, plan on inviting it as a companion piece with “Hip-Hop.”

But Abdoh’s gathering fame was not unexpected. LATC’s recognition and discovery of the precocious Italian-Iranian Wunderkind had received New York’s rare agreement just this past summer. Abdoh’s environmental staging of Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” (“Father Was a Peculiar Man”) became a surprise Off Off Broadway hit. New York Times critic Steve Holden did not find scenes of naked men kissing in the city’s meat-packing district to be obscene. Instead, he declared Abdoh’s East Coast debut “exhilarating” and “exuberant.”

Abdoh’s emerging international profile led to the formation of his own permanent company, Dar A Luz. The literal translation from Spanish means “to give light,” but Abdoh chose the phrase because Ecuadorian women also use it as a synonym for birth. The bi-coastal ensemble of eight performers (all in “Bogeyman”) quickly attracted an impressive board of directors. One New York board member donated an Upper East Side office and an enormous four-room rehearsal loft in mid-town. Abdoh even drafted a Hollywood movie executive, Adam Leipzig, senior vice president of motion picture production at Touchstone Pictures.

“I’ve long been an admirer and supporter of Reza’s work,” said Leipzig of his motives for serving on a theatrical board. “I know of no American theater creator working today whose work is as consistently evocative, challenging and of such high quality. One of the most inspiring aspects of Reza’s work is the way he is able to blend cultures and traditions simultaneously on the stage, drawing from ancient Eastern and African rituals, as well as completely contemporary facets of our culture.”

And so LATC’s commitment to Abdoh is no longer an isolated stand. However, Abdoh’s stature has not generated massive donations during the emergency fund drive. Those who support Abdoh do not necessarily support LATC. Indeed, to stage “Bogeyman,” White must write checks out of her personal accounts to cover production expenses.

“With all the problems that LATC has endured in the last few months,” acknowledged White, “all the money that comes in must go to pay our taxes, our actors and our staff, and then our other bills. In this crisis time it was necessary for me to pay some of the remaining bills, and they happen to be for ‘Bogeyman.’ My commitment is to the theater first, and I believe it was necessary to keep ‘Bogeyman’ going for the sake of the theater.”

The staff’s collective dedication to Abdoh’s vision has required heroic stamina. Each employee knew that if LATC’s Aug. 15 deadline for raising $250,000 wasn’t realized, “Bogeyman” would never open--and yet the set continued to be constructed, the costumes sewn, the rehearsals attended. Every designer and technician knew that even if the first deadline was met, another $250,000 had to be raised by Sept. 1 or “Bogeyman” would close three days after opening. No critic could close a show faster than bankruptcy.

Laboring under the constant burden of this doomsday, LATC resident designer Timian Alsaker said the experience “ . . . has been very hard and really rewarding at the same time. It has been very hard to motivate a whole crew to finish something that (could) be in the scrap yard the next day. I have had to go out of the room while they were building the set or while they were rehearsing, with tears in my eyes. It’s been tough. Really tough.”

Yet Alsaker judges this to be LATC’s “biggest and most complicated show”: a three-story-high apartment facade that required Theater Two’s stage to be removed; 14 individual rooms, each constructed with inlaid electricity, water, gas or smoke. To cut costs, the crew cut metal from previous sets.

“Basically, all normal working processes have been totally difficult at this time,” Alsaker acknowledges. “You use every resource possible. But we have a tremendous belief in this product and in Reza. When you are on the decline, everybody wants you to sort of sink to the common denominator. I prefer to go down with a strong piece that will immediately put us back on the artistic map. At least my epitaph will have a little bit of hope in it, that despite all that society was telling me I did something that I believed in.”

LATC technical director David MacMurtry has averaged 17-hour days while working to realize “Bogeyman.” “Basically, it’s a nightmare,” he admitted. “It’s been like an emergency room. There’s no money, no credit. We have to pay for all the materials out of our petty cash fund.”

Even the indefatigable Abdoh has suffered despair during rehearsals. “I have never, ever been so depressed,” he said shortly after LATC’s public appeal for financial support. “I’m taking it one day at a time. But I’m hopeful that it’s an awakening for people that there is something we can lose.”

One of the subtexts in “Bogeyman” is AIDS, Abdoh explained, in part because he’s HIV-positive. The shadow of death hovers not just over LATC but over the work itself.

“We never talk about his HIV,” White said. “It’s too negative. It’s too sentimental. And that’s the one thing about this work: It is never sentimental. I’m so glad it makes people angry. It’s about the violence within ourselves. The violence of AIDS. It’s about crisis. It’s about suffering. It’s about thinking about the horror of it.”

And it’s about time. Deadlines.

The atmosphere in LATC’s lobby after the first preview performance of “Bogeyman” has grown calmer. Now only staff and performers discuss the work. Nearing midnight, actor Anthony Torn enthusiastically declares, “This was extraordinary! This was wild! The most extreme experience I’ve ever had!”

The son of actors Geraldine Page and Rip Torn, he asks a fellow cast member how it felt to work on LATC’s stage in front of an audience for the first time.

Cliff Diller shakes his green snake-braided hair out of his mascaraed eyes. When he speaks, the silver pin piercing his tongue reflects the lobby’s lights: “I did things tonight I never did before.”

Nearing midnight, a security guard locks each lobby door. A weary Torn reluctantly walks toward the exit. “We didn’t know what the hell was going on with the financial hassles,” he sighs. “But there was such momentum we just knew we’d do it somewhere, even if it was in a warehouse without the set. There was nothing that was going to stop us. But we just really wanted to do it here.”