Character Driven

It’s politicians and sociologists who usually tackle the issue of homelessness. But with a play opening Friday at the Back Parlour Theatre, a group of performance artists has decided to take a closer look at the subject.

Writer-director Ken Tesoriere wrote “Bread and Wine” a couple of years ago for Coyote Ramblers, a group he formed in Tucson in 1993. The current players joined when Tesoriere came to California in late 1996, but the earlier group toured internationally, including Berlin and Barcelona, Spain.

At present, Tesoriere is playwright-in-residence at Actors Alley and is developing two plays there. But he says his personal work is much different. “Their [Actors Alley] audience is older, much more conservative,” he said, “much more involved with the kitchen-sink type of drama.”

“My work--the work I’m most interested in--is more involved with what living feels like for a particular set of characters. I use more Expressionism. I use other theater devices that are not really wanted at Actors Alley because of their audience, and I understand that.”

That’s the reason he is settling in for a run in the tiny space behind the Kindness of Strangers coffeehouse. It’s just right for experimental theater, and particularly appropriate for Tesoriere’s piece on homelessness.

“It fits the venue,” he says. “It’s a play about street people, and what their life feels like from the inside. They find this abandoned building to live in. I’ve been able to take the smallness of this space, and the budgetary limitations regarding lights and sound system, and instead of their being a liability, we can turn them into an asset because of what the story is about. With this kind of play, you can treat the action as if it’s part of the building.”

The characters, he says with a chuckle, are his “Frankenstein monsters.” But as writer and director, if the magic doesn’t happen, he shoots himself with two guns. It’s a chancy undertaking for a playwright to direct his own work, and Tesoriere is aware of that. But, he says, he spent plenty of time directing other writers’ works, particularly as artistic director of two theaters in Florida.

The bottom line, he says, is that, no matter who wrote it, a script is not a finished piece of writing; it’s an outline for a performance.

“It’s not a full-fledged thing,” he says. “You write ‘1940s kitchen’ and then leave it alone. The designer then comes in and makes the 1940s kitchen live. You never know about a script until you take it into the rehearsal process.”

In “Bread and Wine,” he’s using Expressionism to delve into the lives of street people. He is adamant that he’s not trying to draw new conclusions about street people, or to pass any moral judgments. His only interest is to present their lives from their perspective, as honestly as he can.

Tesoriere feels that the public view of street people, particularly in theater and on television, has been too much a “Waiting for Godot” comical approach. His piece tries to explore the pressures--the personal devils--that drive these characters.

“Then an audience might go away and two days later might be driving through this area and see somebody pushing a shopping cart and just have a sense of their interior. We only see the exterior, the extremes. I want them to have a sense of what these people’s lives are like, basically rejecting society and then re-creating their own.”

BE THERE

“Bread and Wine,” Back Parlour Theatre, Kindness of Strangers coffeehouse, 4378 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept. 20. $7. (818) 752-9566.