Out Here--Beyond the Mainstream

Artists may race for the cutting edge, but most major Orange County arts presenters must tread gingerly when they try to lead the public to the outer limits of creative freedom.

The Pacific Symphony would like to play for packed halls, so it is not apt to build an evening around experimental music by John Cage.

South Coast Repertory and the Laguna Playhouse, with thousands of subscribers to please and multimillion-dollar budgets to meet, are not likely to mount a program of Samuel Beckett short pieces that move only slightly faster than a still life.

The Orange County Museum of Art, with donors’ sensibilities to consider, would think twice--then think again--before hosting a local unveiling of sadomasochistic nudes by Robert Mapplethorpe.

A survey of offerings for the 2001-02 season by the county’s largest arts institutions reveals mostly mainstream fare. But a significant sprinkling of contemporary and edgy shows on the grass-roots level will cater to more adventurous tastes.

Major arts institutions in most of the United States work under similar self-imposed limitations when it comes to introducing works that are explicitly sexual or violent, unfamiliar, oblique, unsettling or iconoclastic. And, as elsewhere, Orange County art exhibitors reliant on government funding have sometimes gotten into trouble for going too far. The Huntington Beach Art Center’s retreat from cutting-edge displays is a prime example.

For local arts presenters whose tastes and goals dictate moderation, challenging an audience may mean measured prodding rather than wild plunges. For instance, when the Pacific Symphony performs works by unfamiliar composers, it makes sure to balance the evening with crowd-pleasing repertory.

But wild plunges have had a place in Orange County’s artistic tradition. For a reputed bastion of conservatism, O.C. has produced or displayed some out-there artworks and performances during the last 30 years. (See list, page 10.)

Many of the most extreme artistic sorties were undertaken at the county’s universities, protected by academic freedom and excused from the need to pay their own way. Today, a few small venues survive while championing work that is shocking, confrontational or just plain puzzling.

In theater, the aptly named Rude Guerrilla Theater Company is the unquestioned envelope-pusher. The Santa Ana storefront theater made its name in 1999 with the West Coast premiere of “Corpus Christi,” Tony-winner Terrence McNally’s play imagining Jesus and his apostles as gay. In subsequent productions, Rude Guerrilla has not hesitated to bare flesh or portray sex acts and graphic violence. Productions such as Clive Barker’s “The History of the Devil” and Mark Ravenhill’s dark anticapitalist parable, “Shopping and ...,” have won critical acclaim.

“I’m not interested in pornography, but I would take it right up to that point,” artistic director Dave Barton said. “It’s a matter of finding others willing to accompany me on that journey.”

Rude Guerrilla clearly has found a niche: “Corpus Christi,” “The History of the Devil” and “Shopping” drew sellout crowds to the tiny Empire Theater. But a test lies ahead: For the company to thrive, Barton says, it needs to find a bigger home--one with 70 to 100 seats, instead of the 40 in the current space. That will take donations from patrons. Rude Guerrilla has shown that theater on the outer limits can sustain itself in Orange County; it has yet to prove that such theater can grow beyond the grass-roots.

“We’re just starting,” Barton said. “Ask me again in a year.”

In the visual arts, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, a storefront gallery in Santa Ana, has raised its profile by reaching for the edge, says director Barbara Thompson. “Art that is in your face with nudity, profanity and sexual content certainly has been our heritage,” she said. The tradition continues with the current exhibition, “Beefcake-Plus,” a show of homoerotic photography by nationally known photographer Arthur Tress.

Such shows have drawn enough attention to help the artists cooperative recently pay off its construction debt. Now, Thompson said, “it should be smooth sailing for us.”

At the larger, more mainstream Laguna Art Museum, curator Tyler Stallings says that an upcoming show, “Erotic Abstraction from the Collection,” will focus on sexuality more obliquely. But Stallings thinks he has lots of leeway for tackling edgy artists and subjects.

“I think there is an audience out there for challenging work,” he said.

Things might have to be a bit more circumspect at the Orange County Museum of Art, the county’s largest showcase for contemporary art.

“We are careful on issues of sexuality and violence,” said marketing director Brian Langston. Youth education is a large part of the museum’s mission, and kids on school tours have to be considered. But an upcoming show featuring paintings by F. Scott Hess will include depictions of male and female nudity. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t put up an erotic show or an exhibition showing violence, but we would probably have to put out [warnings] or close off sections of the gallery during school tours,” Langston said. The museum’s past credits include, in 1988, the first retrospective of work by the maverick, sensationalist, UC Irvine-trained Chris Burden--proof that what was once radical can, over time, become regarded as the start of a new tradition.

“The power to shock people in the art world is an ephemeral power,” Langston said. “People get it and move on.”

South Coast Repertory is the county’s leading example of an institution that grew from cutting-edge roots to establishment status. It began in 1964 as a storefront theater programming a mixture of classics and contemporary works--including challenging plays by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Joe Orton. In 1970, South Coast offered the West Coast premiere of “Saved” by Edward Bond, in which bored teenagers stone a baby to death in its carriage. That scene is still considered one of the extreme moments in modern theater.

“Many people got up and walked out,” recalled Martin Benson, the theater’s founding artistic director. The rules have not changed since then, he says, in the choices that he and co-founder David Emmes make while programming for a nationally prominent, $8-million-a-year enterprise with 17,854 subscribers.

“We have no limits” when it comes to depicting nudity, sex and violence, Benson said. “But we abhor the notion of gratuitous language and violence.”

South Coast continues to use nudity on occasion--including its productions of the critically lauded plays “Wit” in 1995 and “Six Degrees of Separation” in 1996. The theater also remains capable of provoking audiences to vote with their feet. Walkouts were numerous during last year’s world premiere of “The Hollow Lands,” a lavishly mounted three-hour play by Howard Korder in which South Coast invested $750,000. It portrayed the early 19th century American pioneer experience as an exercise in rapacity, racism, megalomania and mass psychosis. The production had some flaws, Benson concedes, but he thinks the play’s debunking of national myths contributed to the decision of dozens of viewers nightly to leave early.

“We’re not doing our job, in a sense, if some people don’t find our work objectionable,” he said.

Over the past decade, the Laguna Playhouse has emerged from a long tradition as a community theater of lighter fare and familiar classics to pursue a new direction as a company intent on making a deeper artistic statement.

The audience has turned over considerably, says executive director Richard Stein. A recent staging of David Mamet’s foul-mouthed modern classic, “American Buffalo,” was one of the playhouse’s edgiest choices. Stein said he received about 30 letters complaining about the language, out of 13,000 people who saw the show.

“The most gratifying thing was hearing from trustees on opening night,” Stein said. “They came up to me and said, ‘This was terrific, not at all what I expected, a wonderful theatrical experience.”’

Artistic director Andrew Barnicle says he has no strictures against nudity--which has not been employed at the theater over the last decade--but he feels no reason to be cutting-edge for its own sake.

“In an area as large as Orange County, with so many different theaters of different sizes, anybody who wants to find something can find it. The storefront theaters in Santa Ana are doing some pretty outrageous stuff, and that’s a great thing,” he said. Barnicle sees “a balkanization of audiences” in which some are up for challenge and confrontation, while others want reassurance and familiarity.

At the Grove Theater Center, the county’s smallest year-round professional theater, that balkanization is about to bring on a change in marketing strategy. Next year, the Grove will offer two subscription packages, says executive director Charles Johanson: the Main Street series for fans of easier plays, and the Adventure Series for edgier tastes. It reflects the split nature of a theater that programs crowd-pleasers by Neil Simon and Noel Coward, but also recently offered such rarities as a “Hamlet” in which the prince of Denmark was played by a woman and portrayed as a lesbian, and “The Beckett Project,” a glowingly received mounting of demanding short plays by one of the 20th century’s most important and difficult absurdists. “The Beckett Project” attracted enthusiasts from far outside the theater’s usual radius, Johanson said, prompting a return engagement next August.

In classical music, orchestras and presenters have a similar challenge. Dean Corey, executive director of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, described an experience he had at a 1994 concert when the London Chamber Orchestra played “Shaker Loops for Seven Strings” by minimalist composer John Adams, a repetitive but hardly ear-shattering work.

“A man sitting next to me said he could not believe his ears. He was astonished that something could be so awful,” Corey said.

Last year, the Pacific Symphony gave time on one of its programs to two early piano concertos by contemporary composer Lukas Foss.

“We got letters, very divided opinion,” said John Forsyte, the symphony’s president. “Musical modernism is very difficult for audiences here in Orange County--and in Los Angeles and New York City. It’s very hard.”

The Pacific Symphony tried to sweeten the Foss package by pairing it with favorites by Debussy and Saint-Sans. Last year, it offered its 16,000 subscribers a tubful of sugar--the epic romanticism of Erich Wolfgang Korngold--to help some medicine go down: Anton Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, a six-minute intellectually challenging masterpiece of 12-tone music. Conductor Carl St.Clair led the orchestra through two renditions of the Webern, not because the audience wanted an encore, but because it had been restive the first time through.

It is important nevertheless to press on with new music, Corey said.

In November, the Philharmonic Society will present the U.S. premiere of “Soon,” billed as “a choreographed ritual drama” by filmmaker Hal Hartley and composer Jim Coleman inspired by the 1993 showdown between the FBI and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians.

It is part of the annual Eclectic Orange Festival, whose mission is to showcase new and unusual works as well as familiar ones presented in unexpected ways.

The first festival in 1999 drew about 20,000 to its 17 events presented over six weeks. Last year, 30 events over seven weeks drew about 45,000 people around the country.

This year’s festival has been scaled back to a more manageable 26 events over six weeks, according to the Philharmonic Society, but already ticket sales have surpassed last year’s. The first event--Mark Morris’ staging of Rameau’s “Platee”--opens Sept. 28 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Another highlight will be the world premiere of Tan Dun’s “Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon” Suite for Erhu and Orchestra (Oct. 19 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre).

“This is important work. It reflects our time and how we think about things,” Corey said. “There’s no time like now to get started on it.”

It is important not to underestimate the audience, says South Coast Repertory’s Benson--and not to abide by the common conception that Orange County is too conservative to accept the unconventional.

“We’ve been told...that we were too daring and if we would play it safer we would draw larger audiences. That hasn’t been the case. It’s been a credo of ours to not be out beyond our audience, but to lead our audience instead of playing to their safe comfort zone.”

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Here are a few historic scenes from the O.C. edge:

January 1968. State senators convene a hearing in the Fullerton City Council chambers to vent their outrage over a student production of “The Beard,” by hipster poet Michael McClure. On the line is the job of the Cal State Fullerton drama professor who supervised the invitation-only staging. The play envisioned a profane tete-a-tete between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, ending in explicit sex. The university president promises this won’t happen again; the prof keeps his job and the senators’ quest to legislate against obscene performances on public campuses is blunted.

1971. Chris Burden turns a Santa Ana art gallery into a shooting gallery. The recent UC Irvine art school graduate deliberately makes himself a target for a friend firing a .22-caliber rifle at his arm. Expecting a flesh wound, Burden gets more than he bargains for and winds up in the hospital. But it’s all for art’s sake, insists the creator of this performance piece, titled “Shoot.” The episode cements the reputation of UCI’s art department as a caldron of cutting-edge work, and it propels Burden toward his standing as a highly respected figure whom Times art critic Christopher Knight has rated “among our most significant artists.”

January 1992. Three actresses from UC Irvine’s graduate school of drama hang naked from meat hooks. They appear to be bleeding from their private parts. It is a scene from drama professor Keith Fowler’s nightmare-inspired campus staging of “Hamletmachine,” a symbolic, forbiddingly dense work by German avant-gardist Heiner Mller that depicts harrowing, misogynistic violence and employs extensive nudity.

1995. An art installation called “Our Dilemma” is pulled from the opening exhibit at the new, city-financed Santora Arts Complex in Santa Ana. Religious protests have broken out over Connie Sasso’s work, in which condoms are suspended in yellow and brown liquid in jars draped with rosaries. Sasso’s piece is a protest against Catholic doctrine concerning women’s reproductive rights.

1995. The inaugural show at the city-funded Huntington Beach Art Center includes a bucket filled with fake urine and feces--a comment by the artist, a local high school student, about living conditions in Third World countries. The Art Center goes on from that controversial opening to make a national name for itself over the next four years. Then city officials decide there is too much emphasis on contemporary and cutting-edge art to attract the donors and visitors needed to break even financially. The curatorial staff disperses in 1999 and the museum takes a more conservative tack.

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Times staff writers Vivian LeTran and Chris Pasles contributed to this story.