Sledgehammer, Smashing About

Sledgehammer Theatre is certainly aptly named. Founded in 1986 by four young Turks fresh out of the University of California, San Diego, it first made its mark with brashly ambitious, highly stylized and frequently assaultive productions of the likes of Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard and Georg Buchner.

Those early productions were staged in empty warehouses and other bleak spaces in downtown San Diego. Sledgehammer was a seat-of-the-pants operation apparently run on pure adrenaline, with a consistent tone stemming from the exclusive directorial work of co-founder and artistic director Scott Feldsher. Designer Robert Brill and actor Bruce McKenzie were also part of the initial group, but they’ve moved on since.

The creative chaos was not limited to what was seen onstage.

“We were making work like every show was our last,” co-founder and executive director Ethan Feerst recalls of those early days. “We used to put ourselves in tremendous financial peril at least once a year.”

Now, more than a decade later, Sledgehammer has grown into a somewhat different animal. The company is no longer itinerant, Feldsher is not the only director whose work is featured, and the focus has shifted to primarily American playwrights such as Mac Wellman, Kelly Stuart and Erik Ehn.

The group also has become known outside its hometown. In addition to San Diego, Sledgehammer productions have been seen in Los Angeles and New York. Its 1997 season opens today with Shepard’s “Angel City,” directed by Feerst.

Yet for all the added concerns that growth brings a company, Sledgehammer maintains an edge. “They’re not subtle,” says Stuart, whose “The Peacock Screams When the Lights Go Out” was staged by Sledgehammer in 1994. “Scott is someone who’s really interested in pushing the text with a lot of strong visual elements, in a really physicalized, operatic way.

“He’s taking great leaps all the time,” continues Stuart, whose “Demonology” will be staged at the Mark Taper Forum in May as part of the Taper’s “New Theatre for Now” festival and, in a different production, later in the year by Sledgehammer.

“Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. But I like seeing my work pushed to that extreme.”

Feerst chose Shepard’s “Angel City”--the first show he’s directed in four years--in part because he felt the piece was timely. “Although it was written 21 years ago, it’s very prescient,” he says. “It’s about two desperate Hollywood studio executives who seek creative salvation from a cowboy shaman. Shepard prophesied the complete obsession of this culture with the production and consumption of images and stories.”

What Feerst didn’t suspect is just how timely his choice would turn out to be. “Then all this wacky stuff happened with these Heaven’s Gate people,” he says of the recent suicides of 39 members of the religious cult in northern San Diego County.

“There are monologues in the play where [the character] Wheeler is talking about the people crying out for something unearthly. ‘And that’s what we must give them . . . leave them blithering . . . give them suicide, auto-destruction, mass hypnosis. . . .’ ”

Current events aside, however, such subjects are common fare for Sledgehammer. Both Feerst and Feldsher have long used their work to call attention to society’s more grisly, destructive tendencies. In 1985, while still in college, the pair and some friends collaborated on a production of German playwright Heiner Muller’s “Despoiled Shore.” It was not only a challenging text by a difficult writer, but they staged it in a steep and nearly inaccessible canyon on the UCSD campus.

Sledgehammer formally became a company when the foursome mounted its first off-campus productions--Shepard’s “Action” in downtown San Diego, and Muller’s “Quartet” at the Wallenboyd Theatre in Los Angeles.

These early shows weren’t always warmly received. Reviewing for The Times, Don Shirley wrote that “Quartet’s” “point vanishes in a haze of tedium.”

Sledgehammer’s ambitious producers were undaunted by the reviews. They say now they were almost surprised by the popularity of “Blow Out the Sun,” their 1988 adaptation of Buchner’s “Woyzeck,” staged in an abandoned downtown San Diego milk factory as a kind of “living movie” that required its audience to trek to half a dozen sites within the cavernous 20,000-foot interior. “Blow Out the Sun” also presented a collage of wild and often violent scenes, including a fighting couple driving by a carnival-like party, a woman bleeding to death on a mound of dirt and a grim proceeding in an autopsy room. The set was designed by Brill.

Sledgehammer followed “Blow Out the Sun” with two more site-specific productions in 1989: an unrelentingly yet powerfully static three-hour “Endgame” set in a deep-space apocalyptic landscape (also by Brill) and an S&M;/punk version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Pre-Paradise Sorry Now,” staged in a cold metal warehouse.

Not surprisingly, these shows made an impression. “In the wake of that, we ended up getting some local recognition,” says Feerst.

In 1990, the group staged “Hamlet” at a converted church in downtown San Diego.

“ ‘Hamlet’ brought us new board members, and the organization grew,” Feerst says. “Ambitions changed somewhat,” he said, referring to the fact that Feldsher had begun to work elsewhere, continuing his ties with the company, but not directing every show. In 1991, the company’s repertoire began to change as a result, focusing on American writers.

The change was motivated at least in part by the success Sledgehammer had when it landed the premiere of Wellman’s “7 Blowjobs,” a satire on the collusion between the Christian right and conservative politicians.

“This just came to us,” says Feerst of the company’s meeting Wellman through colleagues at the San Diego Repertory Theatre. “It was absolutely our biggest financial success, and it put us on the national map.”

In May, 1992, Sledgehammer took an even bigger step, signing a lease for St. Cecilia’s, the former church. “That changed the picture considerably,” Feerst recalls. The next show there was Wellman’s “Terminal Hip,” also in 1992.

Putting down roots meant added responsibilities. “It became clear to us that we needed to start thinking about the space--that we couldn’t fill it with our own work all the time,” says Feldsher, speaking by phone from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where he’s currently teaching at Skidmore College. “Ethan and I had to start making decisions about what other work could be in there.

“My own interest in doing things outside of San Diego happened at about the same time [as we signed the lease],” Feldsher says. Yet although the day-to-day operation of Sledgehammer now falls to Feerst, the two collaborate in planning Sledgehammer’s seasons.

Last year, Sledgehammer enjoyed commercial success with Nicky Silver’s “Free Will and Wanton Lust,” directed by Bryan Bevell, with additional staging by Feerst. This year, they plan on another, as-yet-unannounced Silver work.

Rounding out the 1997 season will be the third part of “U.S. Highway Love Slaves,” a trilogy which Feldsher has both written and directed.

The mix continues Sledgehammer’s commitment to Feldsher’s gritty aesthetic. And while the vision may not be as singularly focused as it once was, that’s part of what it means to stabilize--and to be able to provide a home for other artists as well.

“We can’t completely make decisions based on purely aesthetic considerations anymore,” Feldsher says. “We have to make decisions based on budget, and what the audience might be (for a piece), which is all very boring. But it’s the reality of where most theaters are at.”

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“ANGEL CITY,” Sledgehammer Theatre, St. Cecelia’s, 1620 6th Ave., San Diego. Dates: Opens today. Regular schedule: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends May 11. Prices: $10-$15. Phone: (619) 544-1484.