Big Cheeses to Break Bread With RATs

The RATs are coming to town.

The acronym stands for--take your pick--Regional Alternative Theater, Radical Alternative Theater, or Room and Transportation. The latter refers to what one RAT will try to provide for another who’s passing through town.

Whatever the exact meaning, the annual RAT conference is a gathering of small, struggling theaters that aim to be on the cutting edge, wherever that might be. Right now, it just might be in Los Angeles, where the conference is being held for the first time, after earlier gatherings in Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis and New York.

The RAT movement was inspired by a manifesto by playwright Erik Ehn that appeared in 1993 in Theatre, a journal published by Yale School of Drama. Ehn proposed a “Big Cheap Theater” network of nonprofit, sub-150-seat companies that were committed to experimental work and community outreach. The members would trade productions and do co-productions, agreeing to host fellow RATs in their homes when they visited from other cities. The companies would be membership-based, not subscriber-based. The “big” referred to the size of the artistic ambitions and imaginations, but the “cheap” challenged the theaters to create their visions with hardly any money.

In his proposal, Ehn mentioned 11 possible member companies, none in Los Angeles. However, when a small group met in Iowa in late 1994 to organize the network, one of those invited was Mitchell Gossett, of Culver City’s Bottom’s Dream. He became an active RAT. Two years ago he invited fellow Angeleno Lee Wochner of Moving Arts to the RAT conference in New York.

Since then, Gossett and Wochner have spearheaded a growing RAT movement in L.A., including an active Big, Cheap Theater e-mail network. This week, the local movement will host the conference, to be held at Culver City’s Ivy Substation on Thursday, at Los Angeles Theatre Center Friday and Saturday, and at a still-to-be-determined site on a beach--probably in or near Santa Monica--next Sunday.

All sessions are free and open, so the organizers don’t know how many will show up. But people from at least 17 local companies are participating, and around 30 or 40 representatives from some 25 out-of-town companies are expected.

The opening day in Culver City will feature Caridad Svich, a playwright in residence at the Mark Taper Forum, explaining “How to Work Within an Institution and Still Be a RAT.” That evening will also see the premiere of a project Svich curated: “Stations of Desire: Saints, Sinners and In Between,” written by 13 playwrights through an online collaboration and featuring RAT actors from across the country. Also on the Thursday agenda are sessions in which the Actors’ Gang demonstrates its acting style and late-night programming is discussed.

Friday’s topics at LATC include private publishing, issues of language, “Running a Theater Without Driving Yourself Crazy,” opera and alternative theater, a live Webcast production from two coasts and, in the evening, short excerpts from dozens, or maybe hundreds of new plays under the title “Night of 1,000 Playwrights.”

A Saturday seminar is expected to be the most contentious. Called “RAT Trap--Large Organizations: Helpful or Helpless?,” the panel will include RAT guru Ehn and RAT activist Nick Fracaro of Brooklyn, plus two more established theater community leaders: Lars Hansen, president of Theatre LA, and Ben Cameron, executive director of the much bigger Theatre Communications Group, which held its own conference in San Francisco in late June. RATs often express disdain for the TCG and its larger constituents, though there is a little overlap between the two groups’ memberships.

Other Saturday subjects include a writing process called “Shape Scenes,” marketing on the RAT level, online activities and two or three performances. At some point as the weekend ends, the conference will witness the results of a challenge issued on Thursday, in which five competing teams will see what they can do, on a scavenger-style budget, to interpret a particularly difficult set of stage directions.

Since the entire RAT philosophy is based on spending hardly any money, “a huge dilemma” is built in, acknowledged Gossett: how to compensate artists--which was one of the main subjects of concern at the just-completed TCG conference. However, just about everything at the RAT conference itself--including the use of the facilities--is being donated, and A.S.K. Theater Projects has offered to pick up some of the production costs.

Information: (310) 281-9517. *