Surviving the Lean Streets

As a small, struggling grass-roots theater company, the Hunger Artists could be excused for spending the days before Christmas longing for some Santa Claus of thespians to drop down the chute with a sackful of goodies.

The theater, on the second floor of an office building in downtown Santa Ana, is equipped with scavenged “hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs,” as Mark Palkoner, one of its managing directors, puts it.

The 45-seat space on Fourth Street is two blocks--but a cultural world--from the aspiring-to-gentrification Artists Village. There, theaters, galleries and restaurants are part of a vision of a vibrant, arts-driven night-life scene that aspires to be the cultural magnet for Orange County Bohemia. The Hunger Artists’ corner is part of a bustling barrio business district where shops and offices cater to the needs of a Latino immigrant community.

Given their druthers, the Hunger Artists would move to a bigger space in a tonier, higher-rent spot. Given the reality that they head into their 2001 season with $1,000 to their name--just enough to open the year’s first production--the Hunger Artists are reconciled to staying put.

Instead of hoarding its resources, however, the troupe has let the spirit of giving take hold. The Hunger Artists are putting on a holiday benefit show, “Home for Christmas,” which will raise money for a volunteer agency that helps children in need of foster homes.

The show will also mark the theater’s first collaboration with kids. Three company members will play adult roles; about 20 children from St. John the Divine Episcopal Church in Costa Mesa will play the wards of an 1850s orphanage run with Dickensian callousness.

The play will be staged Saturday afternoon at the Hunger Artists Theater, and Sunday morning in the 100-seat sanctuary of St. John the Divine.

The production’s linchpin is Larissa Cahill, a Hunger Artists member who also is director of Christian education at the church. After giving birth to her second child a year ago, Cahill wondered how to keep up her involvement with Hunger Artists while also raising her family and doing her church work, which includes running the Sunday school. She and Hunger Artists artistic director Melissa Petro hit on turning the church’s annual kids’ Christmas play into a joint production. Cahill, 28, picked Court Appointed Special Advocates as the production’s beneficiaries after seeing one of its fliers at Orange Coast College, where she was taking a child-development course.

Cahill wrote the 40-minute play, which includes several traditional songs, after brainstorming with her Sunday school charges. Concepts such as “Santa gets kidnapped” and “Santa becomes a terrorist” gave way to the more traditional concept of beleaguered orphans fleeing cruelty, surviving on the streets of New York and finding a caring home.

As director, she has found her child actors, ages 4 to 13, sometimes better-prepared in their line memorization than the adults.

Palkoner, who plays a crusty but kindly shopkeeper who adopts two waifs, providing the happy ending, says the Hunger Artists players are “trying to subtly teach [the kids] theater etiquette”--including such niceties as not stopping a rehearsal scene to blurt out what they think should be changed (some actors never do learn this).

The Hunger Artists have a bit of a history performing for kids, if not with them. Two years ago the company put on a family-oriented Christmas show, and each year it does street performances in the Artists Village as part of the Imagination Celebration children’s festival. The first time, Palkoner recalls, the Hunger Artists didn’t take into account that they would be performing on a cobblestone walkway; their dramatizations of Spanish folk tales included a bullfight sequence that earned applause for its spills and thrills, but cost the actors in bruises and blood.

Cahill, who has coordinated those kid-oriented events for the theater, would like to start a formal children’s theater wing at Hunger Artists.

For now, though, survival is the main concern.

The Hunger Artists started five years ago, launched by students from the theater program at Orange Coast College. The company became known for tweaking classics with new concepts: Noel Coward’s upper-crust British comedy “Private Lives” became “White Trash Privit Lives,” set in a ramshackle American trailer park. The company has done an all-male take of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and an all-female adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” set in a beauty salon instead of on a farm. It straightforwardly has tackled Kafka and Chekhov and Ariel Dorfman’s political drama “Death and the Maiden” and will do the same next month with Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love.” Dax Kiger, husband of South Coast Repertory’s literary manager, Jennifer Kiger, will direct “Fool for Love.”

Palkoner, who recently took over as co-managing director with his wife, Jami McCoy Palkoner (she plays the cruel orphanage mistress in the Christmas show), says this year’s “Madame Guignol” production took in $4,500, a box-office record for the Hunger Artists. Typically, Petro said, audiences total about 200 to 300 over the course of a three-week run; the theater gets by on an annual budget of about $12,000.

During the past year, the company made its first major transition, managing to soldier on after the departure of co-founders Shannon and Kelly Flynn, a wife-and-husband team. The couple moved to New Haven, Conn., where Shannon is studying stage directing at the Yale School of Drama.

The Flynns named the company after a Franz Kafka story in which a man’s art is protracted self-starvation, and he pursues it with single-minded purity, whether he is drawing crowds or being utterly ignored.

The Hunger Artists have had two or three nights when absolutely nobody came, Palkoner said. But true to the vision of their Kafka namesake, the show went on anyway.

“Our point is, regardless who’s there, we do it for ourselves. Everybody in the company loves to be on stage and create things.”

SHOW TIMES

“Home for Christmas,” Saturday, 4 p.m., at the Hunger Artists Theatre Company, 204 E. 4th St., Suite I, Santa Ana; Sunday, 10:30 a.m. at St. John the Divine Episcopal Church, 183 E. Bay St., Costa Mesa. Performances are free, but donations for Court Appointed Special Advocates will be accepted. Reservations required for Saturday’s show because of limited seating. (714) 547-9100.

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Hunger Artists Theatre Company, 2001 Schedule

“Fool for Love,” by Sam Shepard, Jan. 12-Feb. 4.

“The Big Table,” a new play by Adam Martin, Feb. 23-March 18.

“Voyeur,” adapted from Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rear Window,” June 1-24.

Show to be announced, Aug. 3-26.

“Madame Guignol’s Macabre Theater,” original sketches, Oct. 12-31.

Information: (714) 547-9100.