Performance : Cafe Poetry Without the Cafe at Veterans Wadsworth

A young man in an oversized shirt and baggy jeans, with an enviable headful of shoulder-length braids, steps up to the mike. Looking down toward the stage floor, he croons an urban street tale in a lilting Jamaican accent.

The multiethnic crowd listens as the man peppers his sentences with street lingo. Eventually, a few enthusiasts get into the spirit, and the more the man uses a certain word, the more they whoop.

“Go drown in a lake of Diet Coke,” Everton Sylvester exhorts an unseen adversary. “[Expletive] all that [expletive] you call music and pretend to enjoy. . . . “

It could be any open mike night in any big city coffee house. But this was the scene at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater in Brentwood. on Saturday night, when the “Nuyorican Poets Cafe Live!” was presented by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts.

If you haven’t heard of the Lower East Side New York hangout known as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe--if, that is, you’ve somehow managed to miss all the ink it’s gotten over the past few years--it’s one of the meccas for the spoken-word/poetry craze that first hit its stride around 1990 and appears, by many accounts, still to be going strong.

Well, folks, this is the roadshow.

Billed as a touring version of the NPC’s popular Friday night poetry “slams”--where poets compete against each other, vying to win the audience’s favor--this three-year-old traveling show was a predictable step in the marketing of the new neo-Beat Bohemia. It’s even packaged and pushed by Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI), the New York-based 800-pound gorilla of performing arts agencies.

There are CDs, paperback anthologies, MTV shows and other poetry-related products on the market now. And NPC artistic director Bob Holman, a seemingly tireless paragon of poetry promotion, has had his hand in many of those verse ventures, including this one.

Performing this time out in the “Nuyorican Poets Cafe Live!” line-up, which varies from city to city, were New York bards Holman, Sylvester, Dael Orlandersmith and Maggie Estep and Los Angeles writers Luis Alfaro and Wanda Coleman. Holman also took the opportunity to plug--er, preview--one episode of the upcoming five-part PBS documentary “The United States of Poetry,” which he co-produced. It will begin airing on KCET on Feb. 12.

But as for the performance part of the bill, it was cafe poetry without the cafe. And in the 1,375-seat Wadsworth--two thirds of which was empty at the show’s start and even more so by its finish--much of the the poetic punch was lost in translation.

Gone were the intimacy and interacting that are the calling cards of NPC and places like it. In its stead was an intermissionless two-hours’ worth of spoken word and video that was essentially proscenium business as usual.

After a short introduction by the hyperkinetic, porkpie-hatted Holman, the evening began with the screening of the documentary. Featuring versifiers both veteran and novice, it applied aggressive MTV-esque editing tactics to the words of men and women of widely divergent cultural backgrounds and writerly capabilities.

One of the poets featured on the video segment was Alfaro, who was also the first to appear once it ended. He made a splashy entrance at mid-house, then strolled confidently down the aisle toward the stage.

Alfaro, who is well known in performance art circles, began telling tales of growing up gay and Latino near downtown L.A. He sketched memories of going places like the Circus bar, where there were “Boys like me. Boys like me. Who speak the language.” And as he talked, he shimmied out of his jeans and T-shirt, revealing his trademark black lace slip underneath.

Coleman was up next and read several selections from her latest book, “Hand Dance.” Holman followed, also with selections from his latest book, “The Collect Call of the Wild,” including an extended riff on the historical ironies of the year 1990.

The dulcet-voiced Sylvester offered several works about city life. His final selection, “Martha,” had a particularly poignant ending that left the audience silent and still for a moment.

Actress-playwright Orlandersmith told tales of domestic violence, child abuse and other tough subjects from a pointedly female perspective. Then came Estep, a deadpan downtown diva who vamped her way through boyfriend/girlfriend/first job anecdotes and revenge fantasies while maintaining her hip persona.

All in all, the NPCers seemed satisfied with the outing, perhaps more so than the crowd.

Holman dubbed it a “most dramatic” breakthrough for the show --which had been to smaller venues in the L.A. area three years ago--to have played such a major house.

“It’s unbelievable, a real step,” he said. “[The Wadsworth] is a major cultural arena, which is where poetry ought to be.”

Of course, the Wadsworth crowd hardly compares in size with the much larger PBS audience that Holman is about to reach. “Poetry is going public,” he continued. “It’s becoming part of people’s lives in a way that I never thought possible.”

Perhaps the trend really is, as Holman calls it, “the democratization of poetry.” But the mass marketing of the Muse will still never be good enough for those who like it up close and personal.