Making Magic

“When I was young, I really, truly believed that magical worlds existed,” said Tinka Menkes, surrounded in her living room by colorful self-designed props for the first production of her theater company, The Great Theater of Love. “Making plays is a way of keeping those worlds alive.”

Menkes’ festive creations include yellow windmills, miniature rose gardens and a lavish array of costumes recalling 17th-Century Europe. They are all part of the “decoration,” as she called it, for an evening of one-act comedies: “Scenes from La Mancha,” Menkes’ spoof on Don Quixote, and “Puss in Love (Don Quixote’s Dream),” and her retelling of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “Puss in Boots.”

Performances continue through Oct. 25 at the Los Angeles Photography Center, 412 S. Park View St., near MacArthur Park.

The thought of linking such different tales is no more unlikely for Menkes than the desire to stage them in a large photography gallery. Along with her producer and fellow cast member, Daniel Villarreal, Menkes wanted to create a portable theater show that could be set up “anywhere but a traditional theater, which I feel always has the ghosts of past plays hanging around.”

Turning theater conventions upside down, Menkes has arranged a gender-bending, multiracial cast--all the better to spoof Don Quixote’s inflated macho pretensions and universalize the classics. “Only with the death of Don Quixote, whom I make into a self-involved New Age-type idealist, can the ‘Puss in Love’ story happen, in which I rewrite Perrault so the cat can get the princess.”

This marks a fourth phase of Menkes’ creative life: Dancing, painting, then playing the central roles in three of sister Nina Menkes’ experimental feature films. “We’re reversing roles this time,” she said.

* “Scenes from La Mancha” and “Puss in Love (Don Quixote’s Dream)” continue Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 4 p.m., through Oct. 25. Admission: $10 suggested donation. Information: (213) 935-4783.