‘Choice Cuts’ Opens at the Shampoo Bowl

Theater has been performed in parks, under freeway off-ramps, in drained swimming pools, in bookstores, museums, vacant motels, carwashes, gyms, parking lots and airplane hangars. Now comes theater in a beauty parlor.

The newest environmental theater piece to hit Los Angeles is “Choice Cuts,” a 70-minute, five-character comedy created by the Helicon Theatre Company and bowing this weekend at Ravello’s hair salon in Santa Monica.

“Helicon is a mountain range in ancient Greece where the Muses were born--so we’re trying to get some inspiration from that,” company president Barbara O’Neill Ferris said.

The year-old company--whose first production, “L. A. and Beyond,” played at the Zephyr as part of the Open Festival in 1990--was conceived “as an outlet for us in our childbearing years,” Ferris said. “People don’t want to cast you when you’re pregnant. And when you have young children, you’re just not as flexible. I wanted to be with my child and yet participate in society.”

Producer Cate Caplin was originally approached to direct another play for the 12-member company, but suggested that they write their own women’s piece. “They said, ‘We’re not really writers; can you write something for us?’ ” Caplin recalled. “I told them I’d be willing to work with them, pull it all together. So we started with them writing monologues, bits and pieces of voices. After six weeks with me dramaturging them--like, ‘Where is this character going? Does she have a beginning, middle and end?’--I got very complete monologues out of each of them.”

Caplin took the individual entries home, laid them out on the floor, then sat down at her word processor “for many, many hours” and fashioned an integrated piece. “The information comes in a collage of voices,” she said. “Putting it together was almost like pacing out a musical song: the voices singing together, climaxing together, then unifying out. But it breaks all the rules in terms of traditional structure. The characters can stop time: talk about what’s happening, then step back into the action. It’s very stylish--and very different from anything I’ve ever done.”

That says a lot because Caplin has had a very varied career. Although she produced John Ford Noonan’s “My Daddy’s Serious American Gift” at the Tiffany Theatre (1989) and has directed shows for the past three Edinburgh Festivals in Scotland, her training is in classical dance; her credits include performing with the Metropolitan Ballet, Ballet West and American Dance Machine.

In this play, Caplin said: “I create a dance with voice . . . what’s pleasing to the eye, what makes sense dramatically. There’s a fluid movement to everything, real-life choreography.”

Several universal themes inform the work, the director noted. “Self-image, self-worth, fantasy, sex, relationships and food came out early on as strong topics,” she said. So did the real-life pregnancy of cast member and co-writer Sydney Coberly, whose baby is due in mid-October. Cast member and co-writer Penny Peyrot, who works in another beauty salon, provided Caplin with valuable technical advice: “She knows how long foils take, how long people would be under the dryer, when you use a timer.”

The choice of the salon setting, Caplin added, is not just theatrically creative but conducive to the characters’ interaction. “People from all walks of life intersect in these places,” she said. “And everyone seems to talk to their hairdressers about personal, intimate issues.”

Happily for the company, Ravello’s owner, Gib Acuna, is a theater enthusiast; he’s even a built a 45-seat audience platform, which he originally used to give hair demonstrations. Caplin described the real-life set as “clean and open, wood floors and mirrors.”

“And it’s got great sight lines,” she said.