THEATER : Troupe Parks Itself in a Permanent Place

The Aresis Ensemble has been bouncing around Santa Monica since 1987, first at the Off-Main Street Theatre, then on the pier at the company’s Waterfront Stage. Now, however, the Aresis has found a permanent home.

In an alley just off 4th Street, the group has taken over what was in the 1930s a parking structure for Santa Monica officialdom. Appropriately, they call their new theater City Garage, and have even left the original parking assignments on the beams: “Judge Ryan,” “Police Truck,” “Radio Car 86” and “Commissioner of Public Works.”

The managing director of the ensemble, Charles A. Duncombe Jr., explains that the parking designations contribute to the ambience he and artistic director Frederique Michel were looking for.

“There’s something about the space,” Duncombe says, “with the brick and wood and its age, that seemed to fit the kind of image of the theater that we aspire to create, which is sort of rough and immediate and strong.”

Duncombe says he and Michel also seek to expose the process of theater itself. Audiences will be able to see, through glass windows, the operations in the light and sound booth, and the long dressing room where the actors are preparing to go onstage.

The first production in the new space was the American premiere (which closed at the end of December) of a new work by French playwright Marguerite Duras, known on this side of the Atlantic as the author of “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and, more recently, “The Lover.”

For their second production, Michel has chosen to direct a work by the late German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Titled “Blood on a Cat’s Neck,” it is described by Michel as a “vicious comedy” about an alien woman who visits Earth to study human sexual behavior. It is typically Fassbinder and, along with the Duras play, very much in line with the type of theater to which Michel has dedicated herself, first as an actress, now as a director.

“When I moved here,” the Paris-born Michel says, “I wanted to do this kind of theater because no one was doing it.”

What kind of theater is that?

Michel was trained at the classically oriented Conservatoire de Paris, where the icons were Pierre Marivaux, Moliere and Shakespeare. Even then, she wanted to do more exciting theater, with texts that dug more deeply into the emotional chasms of modern life and with stage techniques that spoke more clearly to modern audiences. In addition to “Blood on a Cat’s Neck,” City Garage’s first season will include Irene Maria Fornes’ “The Conduct of Life” and Heiner Mueller’s “The Hamlet Machine.”

Also, because of Michel’s European training, there are more intense acting and staging techniques for her actors in these difficult works. She auditioned for two months to find a nucleus of 60 actors, who as members of Aresis Ensemble will collaborate with Michel in a weekly workshop to explore texts and methods.

“I was really amazed,” Michel says. “So many of them showed up that I could not believe it. I told all of them, ‘This is the kind of theater we are doing. This is the way I work. I’m tough to deal with. You have to follow direction. We don’t do Neil Simon. He’s a good writer, but we don’t do him. This is the kind of show we are going to put on, so if you don’t like it, don’t try to get involved with us.’ They were all excited, because most small theaters don’t do the kind of theater they wanted to do.”

Duncombe nods in agreement, adding: “We’ve been very fortunate. We just seem to have hit the right note with people. Somehow, we’ve gotten a lot of people who feel the same way we do. They want to be challenged, to expand, and they want to do this kind of theater. They’re on fire to do it. And hungry. ‘Yeah,’ they say, ‘push us farther, go farther.’ ”

The two focuses of the ensemble’s work have been innovative contemporary drama and new works from the international theater. There has always been a very strong orientation toward European theater--people like Duras--and Latin American authors. As Duncombe says, “Theirs is such a different approach than most American writers take.”

Michel looks around at the new theater in this very old Santa Monica garage and smiles. “This is the vision of our theater. This is our particular passion.”

“Blood on a Cat’s Neck” opens Jan. 27 at City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St. (behind Parking Structure 3), Santa Monica. Will run indefinitely Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. $10 (Sundays, pay what you can). For reservations and information, call (310) 319-9939.