Troupe Brings Midwest Sensibility to NoHo

Some decades ago, a group of young actors, writers and directors--most of them students at Princeton--started a small theater group on the East Coast. Bound by friendship, talent and ambition, they followed each other to the top of their profession. Among others, the group included Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Joshua Logan, Jose Ferrer and Margaret Sullavan.

The bonds are similar for a new theater group in Los Angeles. Most members of the Subterranean Theatre Company met at Indiana University in Bloomington. Following the sirens’ call of Hollywood, the group, most of them in their 20s, trickled out to Los Angeles. While waiting for bigger things to happen, they decided about a year ago to take matters into their own hands.

Like that earlier group of collegiate thespians, the Subterranean company puts their talent on the line with their first production at North Hollywood’s NoHo Studios, opening Friday night. It’s called “U.S. Blues,” a world premiere, by another cohort from Bloomington, playwright Greg Owens, who is beginning to make his mark in Chicago theater.

“U.S. Blues” is made up of nine short plays, some comic, some sad, all exploring the mystique of middle America. One recurrent theme--the desire to explore other parts of the country--strikes a particular chord with the company.

Company founders Tom and Chrissy Sonnek, the guiding force behind the Subterranean, said the play and the troupe share a distinct Midwestern sensibility. The Sonneks--who both act in and direct parts of “U.S. Blues”--have strong opinions about the quality of life in the Midwest. Still, they say, there’s an unshakable desire to see what’s “out there.” It doesn’t matter where exactly. Just “out there.”

“There’s a lot of yearning in these plays,” says Tom Sonnek, “people who are looking for something else in life. A lot of the stuff is universal, but it’s packaged in these lower-middle-class Midwestern characters.”

In one of the plays, Chrissy Sonnek explains, a woman who desperately wants to leave the Midwest watches while her brother packs to do just that. She wants him to take her along. She can’t go by herself. She’s a victim of geographical gravity.

“However bad you think things are where you are right now, there’s some comfort where you are, and that’s what’s holding you there,” says Tom Sonnek. “All of these people in the plays aren’t trying to leave the Midwest because the Midwest stinks. They’re just trying to find something else in their lives, trying to shake up their lives in some way.”

The Subterranean crew has only a slight concern that the Midwestern idiosyncrasies won’t translate to Angelenos.

“Is it too regional?” Tom Sonnek asks rhetorically. “My answer to that is another question. Can people outside the Midwest understand Garrison Keillor? Definitely they can.”

* “U.S. Blues,” NoHo Studios, 5215 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 15. $10. (310) 312-6678.

Other Families, Other Dreams: Another Midwestern playwright, Lanford Wilson, has illuminated the subject of family in most of his works. His 1973 play “The Hot L Baltimore” depicts the desperate search for a makeshift family at a condemned hotel of transients.

A revival of “The Hot L Baltimore” by the Barebones’ Theater Company opens tonight at the Victory Theatre under the direction of the Victory’s artistic co-director, Maria Gobetti.

Gobetti says the play has a universal message. Wilson’s characters are sustained by their dreams, she says, and the play resonates for anyone who has ever had a dream, or lost a dream. She quotes Wilson, who said the play is about losers who refuse to lose.

“It’s about forming some kind of support group, a family,” she says. “This family is being threatened. Every single one of them has dreams about trying to make some kind of relationship. It’s really hard on them, and they respond to it in entirely different ways. The building is a metaphor for their dreams.”

Gobetti explains that the play was inspired by a period in Wilson’s life before he achieved success as a writer, when he too lived in a transient hotel, and his family was the other tenants, upon whom he drew for his characters in this play. She refers to the play as “a younger play” than his later, slightly more bitter works, such as “Burn This.”

“It’s sweet,” she says, “and it wobbles between being very funny and very poignant. That balance in the play is very important.”

* “The Hot L Baltimore,” Little Victory Theatre, 3324-26 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays. Indefinitely. $17. (818) 841-5421.