Honing the cutting edge

Mark Murphy, the recently appointed executive director of REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, looks too refined to be wearing a hardhat. Slim, with delicate features and wearing an Oxford shirt, he’s standing in the REDCAT construction space inside Walt Disney Concert Hall; workers hoist Sheetrock, and circular saws roar through metal behind him. “Frank Gehry has described Disney Hall as a living room for Los Angeles,” Murphy says. “I think of us as the basement laboratory or rec room.”

It would be hard to find a rec room this ambitious. The walls are still unfinished, revealing the dense network of ventilation, optical cable and wiring that makes the high-ceilinged room, which will seat between 180 and 266, look like something out of “Blade Runner.” With sophisticated acoustics and extensive wiring for video and film projection, the walls are seismically balanced so precisely that simply drilling a hole in the wall requires X-raying the concrete for structural soundness.

Today, with a kind of boyish exhilaration, Murphy, 42, is discussing his plans for this $21-million gallery and performance space, which he envisions as informal, flexible, technologically sophisticated. He promises to bring important international groups to town, and to make REDCAT a lab for edgy new programming produced here. Both are skills he honed in his 17 years at Seattle’s On the Boards, an alternative performance space that’s hosted the Wooster Group, Laurie Anderson and Bill T. Jones and nurtured local talent.

As he attempts the mix in L.A, he’ll be fighting a war on two fronts: trying to offer Los Angeles fresh, interdisciplinary performances from all over and to satisfy the educational mission of his CalArts masters in Valencia. Murphy, who arrived in January to consult for CalArts and was named to his current post in October, is an unpretentious guy who seems to thrive on getting people to agree. He’ll probably need his enthusiasm and steady temper in the months ahead as he tries to create a venue that’s one part Brooklyn Academy of Music, one part high-end student recital.

University President Steve Lavine has been seeking a space in the city for 15 years -- a pedagogical version of New York’s the Kitchen -- to bring the school’s artists to a larger audience and to bolster L.A.’s arts community. “It’s hard here to have a career in contemporary-minded performance; dance is almost impossible. And there’s a whole new kind of media art, as well as new-music theater, that are really rich forms in our time but meagerly represented here.

“Our focus is nurturing artists’ careers; that’s what CalArts is about.”

Though there’s some suspicion that CalArts’ brass may see the space as an outlet for projects by students and faculty, not a resource for the city, “The thing it will not be is any kind of vanity showplace for CalArts,” says Lavine.

“The term I often use is that we’re an annex for CalArts in the city,” Murphy says, adding that the setting can benefit the city and the school. “I think more interaction with the harsh realities of the real world can be useful for students and faculty.”

Murphy sees REDCAT’s programs as being one-third artists from CalArts, one-third from the L.A. area and one-third by touring companies. In addition to major residencies by theater and performance groups, the season will include new music, an authors and poets series, and film, video and animation.

He’s still nailing down the rest of the season, but he’s ready to announce some of next year’s programs, which will begin with Dumb Type, a Japanese octet whose performance is based on movement and electronics. Residencies by groups like this will feature performances, discussions, master classes and workshops for artists in the community and students at CalArts.

The artists, says Murphy, will shape the futuristic space. REDCAT will have almost 500 light circuits, more than many Broadway houses, as well as two parallel sound systems, one for film and video, the second for live performance. Signals from the Internet can be projected within the space, and performances in REDCAT can be broadcast over the Internet.

As Murphy puts it: “It’s a well-equipped blank canvas.”

Just how groovy and nurturing will the place be?

Susan Solt, dean of the school of theater, says she’s most interested in making a space for “the imaginative creative artist who’s really pushing the envelope,” as well as offering “a professional component” for students and faculty. Several CalArts faculty members -- say, playwriting professor Suzan-Lori Parks, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Topdog/Underdog” -- would be a natural for the REDCAT space.

But no matter what the balance of CalArts versus non-CalArts programming, the work REDCAT stages may well be less flashy than its recent high-profile productions. Works like its unconventional and much publicized June production of “King Lear” -- delivered with video cameras and an audience that roamed through a warehouse space -- will be difficult for REDCAT to mount. The budget for that production was $450,000 -- a sizable chunk of REDCAT’s entire annual budget, which Murphy says will be at least $1 million and perhaps as much as $2 million.

Murphy says that REDCAT’s fare will be smaller in scale than most of what’s offered at UCLA Performing Arts’ Theater Festival -- chamber music, he says, to UCLA’s symphonies. “The space is designed for intimacy and for a high-impact relationship with the performers,” Murphy says, stressing also the room’s flexible technology. And competition he says, can be healthy.

Village theater over ‘Star Wars’

“There’s a certain enzyme that gets released when you’re experiencing a live performance,” says Murphy, the son of an actor/TV personality, Cullen Murphy, and a painter, Jeannette Murphy, who sometimes designed for the stage. “I also try to be really open and vulnerable to subconscious impact. I think it’s the obviousness of most movies that frustrates me.”

Murphy describes a childhood in Staten Island and Walla Walla, Wash., that was uncommonly distanced from pop culture: He remembers feeling guilty for preferring the plays he saw in Greenwich Village theaters to the Disney films his friends knew. While other kids in the pre-punk ‘70s bought Emerson, Lake & Palmer, he was hung up on jazz and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The teenage Murphy fell asleep at “Star Wars” when it came out in 1977.

He acted locally, doing work onstage as well as on public television throughout high school and college.

After dabbling in radio -- his first job was at a country station in Washington -- and local politics, he leapt back into theater at On the Boards, hungry to be back with creative people.

He started as a PR and marketing director, and in less than four years he’d become artistic director. “On the Boards was an artist-founded organization that was first and foremost designed to serve artists in the development of their work,” he says. “The reason we began to do so much presenting was to expose the artists’ community to what was happening around the world. I found myself alternately playing the role of dramaturge, producer, hand-holder and at times, almost the booking manager.”

Stretching an annual budget that grew from $325,000 to $1.2 million by the time he left in 2001, Murphy found Seattle artists, many of them with little experience, and developed them through programs like monthly 12 Minutes Max nights -- informal curated evenings where artists presented short pieces -- into mature, touring groups. An average of two groups a year toured internationally, and some of his finds, like dance theater group 33 Fainting Spells or “garage orchestra” the Degenerate Art Ensemble, ended up winning awards in Europe. Murphy’s success with this, Lavine says, was a major reason for CalArts’ interest.

REDCAT’s plans to build local talent are what Murphy seems most excited about. Such programs already exist in Los Angeles, some of them long-standing and with a track record of success. The Mark Taper Forum, for instance, runs an annual New Work Festival, as well as Taper, Too, for what the Taper calls “fully staged productions for cutting-edge theater works.” Its laboratory programs develop work by Latino, black, Asian American and disabled playwrights. South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa has a development program called Collaboration Laboratory with a national reputation.

But REDCAT’s programs would differ, Murphy says, by being more interdisciplinary. “A majority of what they develop could be classified as plays,” says Murphy; his projects would be less dependent on text, with strong elements of dance, visual art, video and architecture. Murphy envisions a year-round presence, with an evening based on 12 Minutes Max offered quarterly, then every four to six weeks, and an Interdisciplinary Festival annually. “So there could be a 17-year-old hip-hop dance theater group alongside a veteran writer or choreographer,” he says.

“Mark has a vision that’s not just about the box office, but about process and development,” says Luis Alfaro, the L.A. playwright and performer, who helps develop the work of emerging artists at the Taper. “That’s a very important agenda these days, because there’s not a lot of people doing it.” Alfaro has known Murphy since he performed at On the Boards in the mid-1980s as part of 12 Minutes Max. “Everybody [in the performance world] knows Mark. He’s got a reputation for consistency as an administrator,” in a world with very high turnover.

“Personally, I welcome another player in town embracing contemporary theater,” adds UCLA Performing Arts’ director David Sefton. “And I hope that the powers that be at CalArts empower Mark to run his space without interference.”

REDCAT’s challenge is to find ways to fill its high-tech blank canvas with programming that will serve both the CalArts campus and the greater Los Angeles audience. And so far, Murphy’s optimistic. He’s got allies in the right places.

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Coming attractions

British spectacle and visual-theater artists Moti Roti, collaborating with New York theater group the Builder’s Association.

Brussels-based dance-theater company Rosas, the resident company in the Belgian Opera House.

“Peach Blossom Fan” by CalArts visiting artist Shi-Zheng Chen, who directed “The Peony Pavilion.” The new piece will be a production of CalArts’ Center for New Theater, created for the REDCAT space.

Deja Donne, an Italian-Czech group that unites dance with spoken word.

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Drawing from the faculty

Suzan-Lori Parks: The playwriting professor has recently been given a commission for a work due in 2004, her first piece of music theater. She’s had almost no exposure in town despite acclaim on Broadway.

Richard Foreman: The New York-based avant-garde artist, who runs the Ontological Hysterical Theatre, will put up “What to Wear,” a new music theater piece written with musician Michael Gordon. The piece, to be developed in a residence at CalArts, is scheduled for the 2004-’05 season. Foreman developed “Bad Behavior” at CalArts in 2000.

Morton Subotnick: A music professor and composer best known for the electronic work “Silver Apples of the Moon,” Subotnick will offer one of the first faculty performances next fall, the premiere of a new solo piece, to be presented with the work of a light artist.

The CalArts Dance Ensemble: This modern and contemporary group, which usually works in a variety of styles and with a mixture of guest choreographers with faculty choreographers, will probably give a performance every year.