Do-It-Yourself Dramatists

What they really want to do is direct--and write, sing, act, produce, choose the cast, do a little hoofing and, if necessary, move the sets and wash the costumes.

Laural Meade, 32, writer of the play-with-music “Harry Thaw Hates Everybody,” currently onstage at downtown’s Los Angeles Theatre Center, says she learned during her student years first at Occidental College, then as a UCLA master’s student in playwriting, that the best way to get a play on its feet is to do it yourself.

“They always said, ‘Yeah, your play’s a little weird, but go ahead, here’s 50 bucks,’ ” she jokes.

Her creative partner, Susan Rubin, a transplanted New Yorker who gives her age as “baby boomer,” developed the same attitude as part of the Bay Area’s rebellious political theater scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, including stints with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Pickle Family Circus. “Nobody wanted help from the big, existing organizations,” she says. “It was a way of doing things for my generation--if you want it done beautifully, you don’t take it to ‘the machine.’ ”

So it seems only natural that the two women found a meeting of the minds as persons-in-chief of the Indecent Exposure Theatre Company, created with the sole purpose of presenting their own work--in this case “Harry Thaw,” written and directed by Meade, a story of high-society scandal circa 1906 that cheerfully skewers the capitalist spirit that built America.

The L.A. Weekly called the workshop performance of the show an “intoxicating gothic musical”; the Downtown News praised the current production as “a superb ensemble performance maneuvered adroitly in a less-than ample space.” The Times called the show “an interesting distortion of ‘Rashomon’ storytelling techniques.”

This “nonprofit theater company that works for progressive social change through the creation of aesthetically sophisticated, socially relevant and thematically compelling new work for the stage” has found a simple way of getting its plays seen by the public.

“We call it ‘page to stage’--you write it, I’ll produce it; I write it, you produce it. Just do it,” says Meade, a high-spirited native Angeleno. “That way, we don’t have to wait on anybody, unless we choose to. I hate to call us a vanity project, but we are a self-preservation project--because we have created something that is specifically a creative home for our writing.”

Adds Rubin, “Say whatever it is you have to say, I’ll stand by you. That has been a real important component, that sort of blind belief in each other as artists.”

The show tells the lurid true story of Broadway showgirl Evelyn Nesbit--whose batty millionaire husband Harry Thaw murdered Nesbit’s former lover, architect Stanford White. The tale was a side issue in the musical “Ragtime,” based on the E.L. Doctorow novel.

“Thaw”--described by one critic as “a thinking person’s ‘Ragtime’ “--first saw life in 1997 as a staged reading as part of the Mark Taper Forum’s annual New Work Festival, held at Burbank’s 99-seat Falcon Theatre. While most of the new plays at the festival are done as readings, Meade impressed festival directors by staging something more elaborate for “Thaw.” She thought this wacky blend of vaudeville revue, courtroom farce and “avant-garde meltdown” couldn’t be appreciated from merely reading the script. Performed on Nov. 15 of that year, the show proved so popular that it was brought back for another performance at the festival three weeks later.

While never intending to bring “Thaw” to the 760-seat Mark Taper Forum main stage, directors of the festival hoped to help it get a full production somewhere. “I really felt like there was some commercial potential behind this show,” says Christopher Lore, director of special projects for the Taper. “It was fast and furious, and it only has four characters, which is great from a production standpoint.”

Unfortunately, Lore adds, the financing was not there, either from the Taper or the Falcon, and the Taper does not have the 300-seat second space Lore feels would be an ideal transitional spot between the 99-seat arena and larger venues. “It sort of fell through the cracks of what we do,” he laments.

Instead of waiting for the off chance that the Taper will someday dust off the script, Meade and Rubin decided to go ahead and produce their show at LATC’s 99-seat Theater 4 in cooperation with the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, which has supported most of their productions so far.

“They [the Taper] never officially said, ‘No, thank you,’ ” Meade says. “But I got anxious to do the work. I wanted to be able to hurry up and finish my play.”

Indecent Exposure grew out of a relationship Rubin and Meade developed as participants in a cabaret troupe that existed in the late 1980s under the aegis of LATC.

When they founded the company, most of their work was cabaret material and political comedy revues; these days, the company scrambles to patch together the $64,000 annual budget needed to develop two new full-length shows a year. Since 1990, they have had financial help from the Cultural Affairs Department.

Along with presenting new plays, the Indecent Exposure Band--directed by Rubin’s husband, Charles Degelman--turns up at LATC, the Farmers Market and various venues around town in cabaret performances, including an International Women’s Day Cabaret in March.

Rubin is probably best known to L.A. as the author of 1996’s “club termina,” a musical cabaret about four women facing death from breast cancer--of which Rubin is a survivor. The company continues to present the show once a year, most recently in 1998 for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Rubin also wrote 1997’s “Mysteries in a Silver Box,” a comedy-mystery-thriller that mines her own Russian-Jewish immigrant heritage. In “Thaw,” Rubin plays the role of Nesbit’s conniving mother.

Even though “Ragtime” was onstage at the Shubert Theatre when “Harry Thaw” was presented at the Taper festival, Meade says she was inspired not by the musical, but by a People magazine article sent to her three years earlier by her mother that listed White and Nesbit among its picks for the 50 Greatest Love Affairs.

“I began looking into it, and it wasn’t necessarily a great love affair,” she says. “It started off with a terrible rape; it’s a series of horrible, usurious events. She ends up married to an abusive man, Stanford doesn’t help her. . . . I thought it was fascinating.”

Meade bases all of her plays on historical characters. “I find as a playwright, and an artist, I sort of have to,” she says. “It’s not my forte to create a story from its very beginnings.” Her works include “The Twelve Horror-Filled Days of Margery Kempe” (Kempe is a 14th century mystic), and she’d like to write about the role of the Chandler family in shaping Los Angeles. A workshop production of her play “The Wide Open Ocean Ate Aimee Semple Whole,” on local evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s staged disappearance into the ocean off Santa Monica, is slated for September.

Most of Meade’s and Rubin’s work explores the lives of women; Rubin notes with a laugh that for her most recent play “Immortality,” inspired by the Simone de Beauvoir novel “All Men Are Mortal,” she is writing her first male character.

Still, the pair don’t much like the term “feminist.” “I think it would be more mind-expanding for people to think of it as a company, which, because we are women artists, is going to be our perspective,” Rubin says.

They also believe that the term “feminist” implies a more stark, serious tone than their work tends to take.

“We want to be entertaining; we are natural show people,” Meade says. “We like to make people happy; I like to make myself happy. I write to please myself. And I am also a sucker for a nice big fan kick, and a good-looking performer, and a beautiful song, and a funny joke. I am a sucker for a big, sexy show.”

Rubin agrees. “As opposed to minimalist, or something, we are both drawn to the highly theatrical,” she says. “I am not as happy-go-lucky as she is, but I go for big.” *

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“HARRY THAW HATES EVERYBODY,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, Theatre 4, 514 S. Spring St. Dates: Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 27. Price: $12. Phone: (213) 485-1681.