Once an Altar, Now a Stage

An out-of-place object becomes an accidental piece of public art in the parking lot of downtown’s defunct St. Vibiana’s Roman Catholic Church. The cream-colored cupola that stood atop the church’s bell tower for more than 100 years now lies sideways on the pavement, as if someone ripped the top off a wedding cake and dashed it to the ground. Next to the cupola is the church cross, also resting on its side.

Both the cupola and the cross are victims of the 1994 Northridge quake, when severe damage led to hotly debated plans to raze the Spanish Baroque cathedral at 2nd and Main streets to make room for a new cathedral. Instead, St. Vibiana’s will be redeveloped into a complex containing a performing arts center, hotel and restaurant--as a new cathedral, Our Lady of the Angels, goes up nearby.

But for now, the cracked and peeling St. Vibiana’s is being put to remarkably effective use as the home of “Crossings,” a refreshing, emotionally direct production from Cornerstone Theatre Company, using updated Bible stories to explore the journeys of Catholic immigrants to Southern California.

The six plays, mixing professional actors with community members in the Cornerstone tradition, make up for the lack of experience of the non-pros by reverberating with the same sort of uninhibited passion that shook L.A.’s Catholic community over the future of St. Vibiana’s.

Written by Cornerstone ensemble members in collaboration with five parishes of the archdiocese of Los Angeles, the production is part of Cornerstone’s 3 1/2-year Faith-Based Cycle project. Most of the community cast members hail from the participating parishes: St. Philomena Church, Aumonerie Catholique Francophone de Los Angeles, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church, St. Frances X. Cabrini and Ascenscion Catholic Churches, and the Arab American Community of St. Joseph Catholic Church. The plays’ content represents Cambodia, Mexico and Arab and African nations.

Directed by Steve Kent, the peripatetic production leads audiences from a makeshift parking-lot amphitheater with a pile of dirt as its stage; up five flights of stairs to a rooftop which, through watery sound effects, believably transforms into the swaying deck of Noah’s Ark; into a peaceful fountain courtyard that becomes strife-torn Zaire; into the gorgeous abandoned sanctuary, used here to set the scene for conflict in the Middle East.

In “Crossings’ ” most arresting visual effect, a line of red sand dividing the room in half stands in for the River Jordan.

Coincidentally, “Crossings” opened during the run of another major site-specific experiment, an all-female “King Lear,” presented by the Center for New Theater at CalArts in the Edison Electric Building at the Brewery Arts Complex. But whereas “Lear”--a much more high-tech affair, complete with large-scale video projections and a riser platform that rotates the audience to follow the actors--used its multiple performance spaces mainly for visual and dramatic effect, “Crossings” redefines the term “site-specific” by integrating the literal facts of St. Vibiana’s’ own troubled history into the story.

The final play of the sequence, “The Upper Room,” written by Cornerstone associate artist Bernardo Solano and based on the Pentecost story, brings all the characters of the previous stories together. In Solano’s work, the real-life conflict between those who would rescue the old church and those who preferred a new cathedral in a better neighborhood becomes a handy metaphor for the breakdown of custom and culture inherent in the immigrant experience.

And along with his use of the local news, Solano also references national headlines, with pointed references to the current sex abuse scandal dogging the Catholic Church.

Shishir Kurup, a member of the Cornerstone ensemble, provides an equally irreverent presence as Isaiah--in Alison Carey’s “Replenish the Earth,” which opens the evening with a reworking of the Tower of Babel story playing off the language barriers of L.A.’s multicultural population, then in “The Upper Room” as Izy. Kurup’s Isaiah also turns up between acts as a sort of guide-narrator, frequently breaking the fourth wall by needling audience members about their own religious beliefs and practices.

The plays in between are somewhat less topical, and less comic--but no less effective. Though these dramas (and the occasional inside joke from Kurup) may resonate more strongly for Catholics, immigrants or Catholic immigrants, the universality of experience presented in “Crossings” provides a general audience with just enough separation between church and stage.

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“Crossings,” St. Vibiana’s, 215 S. Los Angeles St., Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. No performance on July 4. Ends July 7. Suggested donation $10 or pay what you can. (213) 613-1700, Ext. 33. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

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Shishir Kurup, Michelle Lamar Richards, Bernard White, Peter Howard, Armando Molina and Page Leong...Ensemble

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Written by Alison Carey, Evangeline Ordaz, Bernardo Solano, Howard, Kurup, Leong and White. Directed by Steve Kent, with co-directors Kurup, Howard and Molina. Scenic design by Christopher Acebo, lighting design by Geoff Korf, costume design by Lynn Jeffries, composition and sound by Paul James Prendergast, production stage managers Paula Donnelly and Bridget Kirkpatrick.