Drawing Inspiration From the Gods

Philosophers from Plato to Paglia have long acknowledged that myth is society’s building block, the barometer of a common world culture extending back to the cave. But just what place does myth have in Hollywood, where the high concept is king and humanistic considerations commonly yield to the youth demographic?

That’s an issue Stephen Legawiec, founder and artistic director of the Ziggurat Theatre, has set out to address, one production at a time.

During the past half-dozen years, the Ziggurat Theatre has made a name for itself with evocative, visually stunning productions inspired by world myths. The company’s inaugural production in 1997, “Ninshaba,” featured two Middle Eastern goddesses as central characters. “Twilight World,” mounted in 2000, was a loose adaptation of the Tereus and Procne story from Ovid’s “Metamorphosis.” In 2001, “Aquitania” employed the French legends of Charlemagne as a jumping-off point for a lighthearted meditation on time and utopianism. “Red Thread,” Ziggurat’s latest production at the Gascon Center in Culver City, opening Friday, borrows freely from a Chinese folk tale for a timely parable about a heroic female assassin who must break her new vow of pacifism to save the kingdom.

Ironically, Legawiec makes a living as a television promo writer--a professional distiller of high concepts. But if by day he is a spinner of spiels, by night he’s a weaver of tales--the curiously timeless original theater pieces that he creates.

A multi-tasker with a vengeance, Legawiec has written, directed and largely designed (sets and makeup) every Ziggurat production since the company’s inception. He comes by his interdisciplinary skills naturally. The son of noted Polish violinist and composer Walter Legawiec and Eleanor Legawiec, a secretary and homemaker, Legawiec was an art major before he switched to acting--a painful transition, as it turned out.

“I went to two graduate schools for acting--first Cornell, then Rutgers,” Legawiec explains. “They both kicked me out. They thought I wasn’t any good. That was a pretty severe experience.”

Experience that later stood him in good stead. “Directing comprises so many things,” he says. “I had a design sense because of art school and a musical sense because of my father. I think that my art and music and acting backgrounds all coalesced into the raw skills that one needs for directing.”

Those skills impressed Robert Velasquez, Ziggurat’s resident costume designer, from the outset. “I like Stephen’s work because it’s so innovative,” Velasquez says. “He writes everything himself, and his work is so unique. That’s the real challenge. You can’t just pull things from costume shops. Everything must be designed.”

After his acting school debacle, Legawiec eventually teamed up with his friend Steven Leon (now a Ziggurat board member) to found the White River Theatre Festival, a Vermont theater that evolved from a summer-only venue to a six-month season. During the winter months, when the theater was dark, Legawiec lived in Boston, where he began toying in earnest with the notion of myth.

“My family is Polish,” he says. “And being a Polish Catholic, you are really steeped in ritual, because of the Mass. I thought a lot about the importance of myth and ritual in theater--an area I had never turned my attention to before.”

Legawiec used his Polish heritage as a starting point for his initial exploration. “I assumed everyone in Poland was working in myth and ritual,” he says. “Of course, that was far from the truth.”

Acting on that mistaken assumption, Legawiec wrote to the Krakow-based Teatr Stary, Poland’s leading repertory theater, explaining that he was a young American theater director interested in observing a Polish theater’s rehearsal process.

To his amazement, his inquiry was met with a firm invitation. “They were very accommodating,” he says. “They sent me the schedule for the whole year and said, ‘Come when you can.’”

Legawiec spent the winter of 1990-91 in Poland, arriving in time for the country’s first post-Communist presidential elections. “It was a very tempestuous time for the country and the theater,” he recalls. “Under the old Communist system, actors couldn’t be fired; they were employed for life. For the first time, the theater was in the position of having to fire people.”

In the midst of the political upheaval, however, the Teatr Stary remained surprisingly laid-back. Legawiec was particularly impressed with the theater’s lengthy rehearsal process. “They would rehearse something for three or four months, until it was ready to open,” he marvels. “That kind of unlimited rehearsal time was a real revelation to me.”

A more profound revelation was to follow--Legawiec’s visit to Jerzy Grotowski’s theater and archive. “I didn’t know much about Grotowski at the time. I just knew he was important,” he says. “I talked to the people who ran the archive, and they gave me Grotowski’s book, ‘Towards a Poor Theatre,’ and videotapes of his productions. That night, I slept in the theater. I read the book from cover to cover and watched the videotapes. It was a surreal experience.”

And a life-altering one. “Grotowski talked a lot about myth in his book, and it was clear that all his staged productions used ritual in a big way. Grotowski’s philosophy really had meaning for me. And I was also struck by the idea that Grotowski spent a year or so on each individual production. He had no time limit.”

Returning to his Vermont theater, Legawiec chafed at the strictures he’d formerly accepted as routine. “When I was confronted with my short little two-week rehearsal periods, I didn’t feel I could go on,” he says. “So I proposed to my non-Equity actors, ‘Give me two extra hours a week to work on a piece. Maybe we’ll perform it, maybe we won’t.’”

That venture, the Invisible Theatre Project, resulted in “The Cure,” later remounted in Los Angeles in 1998. Subtitled “A Dramatic Ceremony in One Act,” the play also marked Legawiec’s first experiment with invented language, a technique he returned to in 2001’s “A Cult of Isis.”

Although the words in Legawiec’s invented language pieces may not be intelligible, the meaning is--a distinction Ziggurat member Jenny Woo appreciates.

“When he experiments with invented language, Stephen is trying to tap into the subconscious, to express something more guttural and emotional,” Woo says. “At other times, his work is very verbal and intellectual. You have to listen to the words and really pay attention. But the invented-language pieces do the opposite. They distance people from the literal understanding so that they can merely feel.”

After his Vermont theater folded, Legawiec moved to L.A. and set out to form a new company, implementing the principles he’d developed with the Invisible Theatre Project. Actress Dana Wieluns, a charter member of Ziggurat, then known as the Gilgamesh Theatre, remembers those days.

“I responded to an ad in Back Stage West that called for actors interested in a long rehearsal process and new theatrical forms,” Wieluns says. “I remember the ad made that distinction. It was a call for actors wanting to work in the theater as opposed to film and television. That first piece, ‘Ninshaba,’ rehearsed for six months.”

In L.A., where actors routinely ditch small-theater commitments for more lucrative bookings, Legawiec’s leisurely process was a hard sell. “On that first project, we started with nine actors,” Wieluns recalls. “By the second rehearsal we were down to six, and a week later there were only three of us. The others realized they couldn’t commit for that length of time.”

What inspired such loyalty among the die-hards? “The reason I keep working with Stephen is that he’s one of the few people who embraces the theatrical,” Wieluns says. “He wants to put on stage the kinds of things that can’t be committed to film or TV. I think for Los Angeles that’s a unique thing.”

An unapologetic purist, Legawiec views the gap between theater and other media as a great divide. “It seems to me that the spiritual component exists in the theater as in no other medium,” he says. “I’ve never had a spiritual experience in the movies, the feeling that you’re part of something larger, or you are beholding the mystery of life.”

Legawiec routinely travels the world to research his plays. On a trip to China in September, he immersed himself in Chinese opera, a style that influences his staging of “Red Thread.” The play derives from an obscure folk yarn written during the Tang dynasty. Despite the antiquity of his source material, Legawiec’s updating resonates in ways he never anticipated.

“The story’s about an assassin who swears off killing just when the kingdom needs her most,” he says. “Coincidentally, the play deals with war versus pacifism during a time of crisis.”

The timing may be coincidental, but the message of “Red Thread” is as fresh as when the story was written 1,200 years ago. That’s typical of the Ziggurat Theatre, as it crosses cultural boundaries and spans generations in its own continuing saga.

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“RED THREAD,” Gascon Center Theatre, 8737 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Date: Opens Friday at 8 p.m., then Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends June 16. Prices: $15-$20. Phone: (310) 842-5737.

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F. Kathleen Foley is a regular theater reviewer for Calendar.