‘Grizly Cargo’: A Band and Its Messages

For a guy who has a liking for several, seemingly incompatible endeavors--acting, writing, drumming and fight choreography--one might suppose that Randy Kovitz would think twice about adding a new endeavor. He’s added one anyway: title maker.

First, he named the band that he formed two years ago Lies Like Truth. Odd, but it’s originally derived from “Macbeth” (“I pull in resolution, and begin / To doubt the equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth”) and Harold Clurman’s book of the same title. “He felt, and I agree, that theater is the art of illusion, artifice, lying, while telling life’s truths,” Kovitz says.

But now, he’s gone further with the title game. After gigging around town and honing their chops, Kovitz and Lies Like Truth have moved to the theater--Theatre/Theater to be exact--and woven together their original songs into a stage show.

Title? “Grizly Cargo: a band and a man with a load on his mind.”

Kovitz explains: “There’s a British word, grizzle , which means to worry, combined with the word grisly , plus the term cargo , referring in this case to the weight of life’s burdens. So I just combined them all, and it sounded kind of cool. . . .”

The sound and the meaning of the title are, in fact, at the heart of Kovitz’s show, which is designed to start off with a bang. Kovitz plays an everyman who is thrown by an invisible force through a door and lands in a world dominated by a band that assaults him with noises and messages, which the man joins the band in delivering, when he isn’t battling with them on stage.

Ask Kovitz for some examples of the band’s messages and his response suggests that, in this show, the word is the star, with the music as support. “The key line in one song,” he says, “is, ‘Caffeine runs the country,’ and it’s absolutely true. The millions of us who get up every morning and only begin to function after we get that coffee in our belly. It’s like the electricity that the whole country runs on.”

The only contemporary songwriting paying attention to this larger social view is hip-hop. But Kovitz and his band’s musical identity are deliberately impossible to categorize. “When I’m pressed for a phrase to sum it up,” he says, “I call it beat-fusion.”

But whether it’s creating a jazz sound, or a funk sound, or a calypso sound, the band’s identity in “Grizly Cargo” is foremost to Kovitz: “It’s a Greek chorus in the purest theatrical sense, confronting my character and forcing me to confront myself. There’s no psychological motive for them to do this and, anyway, that kind of psychological theater doesn’t interest me. The roles in this work aren’t understood by digging for their underlying purposes or motives; the purpose is the role.”

Kovitz says this liberates the show from the constraints of the naturalistic style that dominates theater, and allows the action of “Grizly Cargo” to become a choreographic accompaniment to the show’s aural blend of spoken words, music and vast array of digitally produced sound effects.

He credits co-director and band member Charles Otte with keeping a sure hand on the show’s pacing, but Kovitz says “Grizly Cargo’s” vision is his own, stemming from an ambition to find some way of blending his multiple career paths as actor, writer, drummer and fight choreographer. (He has frequently staged fight scenes for Mark Taper Forum productions since “Burn This” in 1987, and acted in everything from “L. A. Law” to readings of the L. A. Classical Lab to milk commercials.)

“This project really began in coffeehouses,” he says. “You can get lonely in this town, especially after spending years working so hectically in New York City that you don’t have a moment to reflect on if you’re lonely or not. In L. A., I found myself needing to write, and I also met an actress named Belinda Wells. We’d meet in coffeehouses and have these writing exercises. ‘Just start,’ she would say, and I did. I didn’t realize the anger I had stored up inside me.”

The anger is directed at several targets, especially what Kovitz, in his mid-30s, calls “technological overload, how it prevents us from experiencing peace and quiet, how it makes life such a struggle to stay sane.” Kovitz performed his prose pieces at a Scripps College coffeehouse in Claremont, and he was soon accompanied by musicians Andre de Channes and Tish Racheli. They formed a unit, booked a gig at yet another coffeehouse--Hollywood’s Highland Grounds--and Lies Like Truth was born.

(Racheli has since left the band, which now includes, with de Channes and Otte, Korey Mall and Chet West.)

Bryan Rasmussen, former artistic director of the performance series at the defunct Itchey Foot Ristorante, notes that he regularly booked the band “not only because I was looking for exactly what Randy provided--a combination of an intimate coffeehouse-style performance with a rock ‘n’ roll stage show--but because the band reflected a need to speak out about how tough it is to live in this town.

“Now it’s exciting to see how Randy and the band are taking the next step up with this driving spoken word music-theater and putting it in a real theater.”

Kovitz doesn’t have the field of this kind of performance to himself: Spoken-word musician John Trudell, for example, has been producing works for several years, and recently appeared in the Taper’s “Out in Front” series.

Although Kovitz calls Trudell “an incredible performer, I don’t hear a lot of humor in his songs. I find it very hard to keep my tongue out of my cheek. ‘Grizly Cargo’ is not all Angst, by a long shot. Charles and I get into some really wild stuff, which can start with a song, then move into a thing with dueling drums, then move into a fight with drumsticks. It’s a flow of action that infuses all the skills I know.”

Most of Kovitz’s life seems like it’s been one big “flow,” as when director Simon Callow cast him as a drummer in “Stevie Wants to Play the Blues” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, then hired him to stage the fight scenes in Callow’s film, “Ballad of the Sad Cafe.”

“I was always getting knocked by my teachers at Carnegie-Mellon, where I studied theater, that I was spreading myself too thin, dabbling in too many areas. But you never know where things will lead. My spoken-word work probably started when I was a kid. My dad was a radio announcer for many years, so I’d play DJ and invent my own radio shows.”

But for a guy who seemingly does so many things so well, Kovitz says he’s running into a real problem with “Grizly Cargo,” and it’s about the last problem he expected to happen: “I’m finding it really hard to memorize my own words. It’s easy acting with someone else’s writing, because you’re apart from it, and you personalize it. But here, I can’t do that. It’s already my own, so it’s a weird problem.”

The actor-writer-drummer-fighter with a load on his mind just shakes his head and quietly laughs.

“Grizly Cargo: a band and a man with a load on his mind” runs at 10:30 p.m. Fridays and 1 p.m. Sundays at Theatre/Theater, 1713 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, until April 30. Tickets: $10. Call (213) 469-9689.