Rude Awakening

Is the play the thing in Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s production of “Corpus Christi”? Or is it the notoriety that staging the West Coast premiere of a controversial work about a gay Jesus might bring?

“Corpus Christi,” by four-time Tony Award winner Terrence McNally, imagines Jesus and his apostles as sexually active gay men. Its New York debut last year, and a current production in London, offended some religious groups, prompting protests and even a fatwa--death sentence--against McNally by a London-based Muslim cleric.

It seems a natural for Rude Guerrilla, which launched itself two years ago with the mandate of bringing confrontational, discomfiting theater to Orange County. Its headquarters, the Empire Theater, is a storefront in downtown Santa Ana. The performance space is a black-walled rectangle that holds 50 people in two rows of upholstered theater seats.

“I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t take into consideration that it’s going to be controversial,” said Dave Barton, the theater company’s co-founder and artistic director. “This means we get a certain level of notoriety and make a name for ourselves that way.”

But there is much more to it than sensation-seeking, insisted Barton, his T-shirt soaked with sweat after supervising a rehearsal last week.

At 39, Barton is a barrel-chested, round-bellied man with a deep, unflappably even voice and a broad, meaty catcher’s mitt of a face that’s more dockworker blue collar than uptown artsy. He says he is a longtime fan of McNally’s, dating back to his mid-teens when he saw the 1976 film version of “The Ritz,” a McNally comedy set in a gay bathhouse.

“There I am, this budding [gay] . . . boy, and I remember thinking, ‘This man’s talking to me,’ ” Barton said.

Barton says he was raised as a fundamentalist Christian and attended religious schools, including Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa and Melodyland Christian High School, which used to be in Anaheim.

As a teenager, he said, “I was verbally and emotionally bashing gay people. It’s one of the few things in my life I actually regret.” It was, he says, a way of hiding his own sexual feelings: ‘ “Look at them, look at them. Don’t look at me.’ ”

In his late teens, Barton turned to punk rock--the scars on the left side of his face date from 1984, when, he says, he took a brutal beating from skinheads at a punk show in Los Angeles while trying to break up a fight. He still counts punk as a key shaper of his taste for extreme art, along with books such as “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs and “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov.

Barton attended and dropped out of Cal State Fullerton, then managed a book store at the Orange Mall. He says it had to be evacuated once because of a bomb threat over the Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” the magnet for a 1989 fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.

In the mid-1990s, Barton enrolled in theater studies at Orange Coast College. There he directed his first McNally play, “Sweet Eros.” Rude Guerrilla sprang from his OCC classes; he and his business partners, Michelle Fontenot and Don Hess, fund the theater’s gap between production costs and ticket receipts out of their own pockets.

Among Rude Guerrilla’s presentations has been a Barton-directed staging of “A Perfect Ganesh,” McNally’s study of two American women traveling in India while mourning the deaths of their sons.

Barton says he ordered a copy of “Corpus Christi” as soon as it was published, and read it one day last summer over pizza during a lunch break from his job with an electronics company in Cypress. He says he wept at scenes depicting the humble, generous acts of Jesus.

“No other play I’ve directed affects me the way this one did,” Barton said. “The moments of kindness and gentleness are so different than what we normally do.”

He won’t let his predilection for the dark side desert him however: he intends to make the crucifixion scene excruciating indeed, backed by Internet research into the physiological effects of ancient Rome’s contribution to the technology of capital punishment.

“I think I do violence very well,” said Barton, a fan of bloody horror since he was a kid watching monster movies.

“People accuse me sometimes of being in-your-face, but how often do you go to a play and feel nothing? If somebody comes and sees a play that I direct, they’re going to remember it.”

*

“Corpus Christi,” presented by Rude Guerrilla Theater Company at the Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana., tonight through Dec. 19. Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 p.m., with Thursday shows at 8 p.m. starting Dec. 2. No performances Thanksgiving weekend. $12. (714) 547-4688.

* SAFETY CONCERNS

Rude Guerrilla’s production of controversial play presents security issues. B1