Honesty That Isn’t for the Squeamish

Dave Barton regrets that he spent his teens and early 20s putting up a false front. That’s one reason why he now devotes himself to staging plays that frankly depict sex, brutality and the dark side of the soul.

During the past five years, the artistic director of the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company in Santa Ana has earned a reputation--and frequent critical acclaim--for taking audiences to the limit.

The Rude aesthetic was on display in the company’s recent West Coast premiere of “Cleansed,” by the late British playwright Sarah Kane--a play largely made up of beatings, rapes, killings, mutilations, extensive nudity and numerous bluntly portrayed sex acts. It fit Barton’s predilection for making audiences face the darkest impulses in human nature--and his insistence that some vision of tenderness and love be allowed to flower amid the bleakness. If a play descends deep into darkness but not to the point of nihilism, Barton is interested.

“I’ve had people tell me that the ending of ‘Cleansed’ is very depressing,” he says. “But I look at it as very hopeful, because you have these two people who have gone through hell together, wounded, messed-up people who reach out to each other. What’s more beautiful than that?”

Barton is 42. His big frame, ample belly, inelegant dress and round, meaty face would be more stereotypical of a longshoreman than an artiste. One of the most resonant experiences he ever had, he says, came during the early 1980s, after that face had been multiply fractured by a gang called the Suicidals during a punk rock show at the Olympic Auditorium. He staggered to the bathroom, where Gary Floyd, the hulking, Mohawked, ranting Marxist singer of the Dicks, saw him and bathed his bloody face.

“It was the most gentle, kindly act, and it was in such marked contrast to what he sang onstage,” Barton recalls. “My life seems to revolve around these light and dark moments and the blending of the two, and that’s often why I’m attracted to the material that I am. Horrible things happen to the characters, but there are some loving moments in all of them.”

Barton credits punk rockers and existentialist philosophers with delivering him from the trap he found himself in during his teens: “a budding queer boy” closeted deep in fundamentalist Christianity.

He grew up in Orange, where he still lives, the oldest of four children of a police officer and a nurse. His mom found Jesus, and as he entered his teens, Barton followed. At his Christian high school, he targeted effeminate boys, hurling epithets, cracking jokes and mocking them with a limp wrist.

“I was a religious fanatic, sadly,” he says. “And as a boy whose sexuality was highly confused, I did my very best to find those who were similarly confused and point the finger at them so people wouldn’t look at me. I’m very ashamed of that.”

He remains a Christian, but his abhorrence of fundamentalism motivated him during the early 1990s as he became a founder of the Orange County chapter of the confrontational anti-AIDS activist group ACT UP. In 1991, Barton and three others disrupted a right-wing Christian conference in Anaheim on “Preservation of the Heterosexual Coalition.” Barton read a passage from the New Testament about the importance of love. He was arrested, tried and convicted of disturbing the peace--drawing a $100 fine and a year of probation.

Soon this veteran of politics-as-theater discovered theater as an art form. After starting film studies at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, he attended an evening of short plays on campus and was struck by how free the student actors and directors were to explore sexual themes and use uncensored language. Barton began taking theater classes and directing plays.

Rude Guerrilla debuted in 1997 with “In the House of the Lord,” a play about an abortion clinic held hostage by fundamentalists. Barton was the director and co-writer, and he felt humiliated when the critics drubbed it. But the company persisted, led by Barton and his two contentious but loyal co-founders--Dawn Hess, a roofing company owner who provided cash and set-building know-how, and Michelle Fontenot, a former girlfriend of Barton’s who made a point of reconnecting with him years after they had broken up. “If there’s a way to ruffle people’s feathers, he’ll find it,” Fontenot says. “He’s fully convinced that society doesn’t feel anything, so if he can do something to change that, he does.”

By its second season, Rude Guerrilla was earning strong reviews. In 1999, it cemented its reputation as the edgiest performing arts troupe in Orange County when Barton directed the West Coast premiere of “Corpus Christi,” Tony winner Terrence McNally’s play envisioning Jesus as a sexually active gay man. In 2001, Mark Ravenhill’s “Shopping and ...” pushed the envelope with its bleak, grisly and sexually violent depiction of people reduced to commodities. It’s all enacted within a coin’s toss of playgoers in Rude Guerrilla’s 50-seat Empire Theater.

Audiences know what they are getting into, Rude Guerrilla’s founders say, so there are never walkouts. “Every once in a while there’s an image where people go, ‘I wish you had never put that in my head,’ ” Barton says. “But anything less than full brutality, full sexuality, full vulgarity, even, is dishonest. I’m not interested in soft-pedaling stuff.”

Part of the fun of doing Rude Guerrilla Theater is hearing gasps from the audience, says Jay Michael Fraley, a CalArts-trained actor who has been a linchpin of many of the company’s signature productions. “It means they’re into it, they’re reacting. I enjoy doing Neil Simon and knowing people have giggled and forgotten their problems for two hours. The difference here is people may go home and talk about it for two days.”

Barton’s obsessions are Rude Guerrilla’s trademark, but he only directs two or three shows each year; most of what the company presents in its nine-play seasons does not involve the baring or mangling of flesh.

“ ‘Provocative’ has lots of different meanings,” says Sharyn Case, who has directed three Rude Guerrilla plays with no nudity or graphic violence. “Dave’s vision is what has guided the theater to what it is, but he lets me pretty much have my head. He’s far too intellectual to do anything strictly for shock value.”

Recent Rude Guerrilla productions have included Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy” and Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” both previously seen at South Coast Repertory. Christopher Durang’s “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” opens July 26; the season also includes the West Coast premiere in September of Ping Chong’s “Truth & Beauty.” In November, Barton will direct the sexually explicit “Sleeping Around,” written by four British playwrights including Ravenhill.

The only thing that seems to make Barton and his co-founders squeamish is the very thing Rude Guerrilla must do in order to grow.

“Isn’t it weird?” business manager Fontenot asks. “We show naked people [simulating sex] onstage, and we’re too meek to ask for money. It’s really pathetic, but it’s true.”

At present, she says, Rude Guerrilla spends just $35,000 a year and rarely is able to budget more than $1,000 per play for props, costumes and stage sets. Actors used to earn $5 for each performance, but the non-Equity company had to rescind that pittance last fall when its rent went up. Barton says pay for actors will resume when Rude Guerrilla can secure an operating cushion of $10,000. Even in lean times, the company contributes 10% of each production’s net proceeds to a charity chosen by the show’s director or suggested by the play’s theme. The donation usually comes to about $300.

Barton, who earns his living as a technician for an electronics company in Cypress, says his combination of Christian and socialist values makes him leery of wealth and constitutionally incapable of asking for money. Others in the 30-member company are trying to take on that job.

“If you’re going to be visionary, you’ve got to grow, and to grow, you’ve got to have money,” says actor Fraley, who serves on the nonprofit troupe’s board of directors.

Given its edgy mission, Barton doubts that Rude Guerrilla ever can grow to inhabit more than a 150- or 200-seat house. He would like to bring a production to L.A. someday.

“If I couldn’t eventually run a theater full time and actually make a living off of it, I think I’d like to work for the post office,” he says. “I love the idea of being able to wear shorts every day if I want to, working outside in the sun and fresh air. And I’m already disgruntled, so I’d fit right in.”

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Mike Boehm is a Times staff writer.