They're rattling cages

By Mike Boehm

April 20, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Quincy Long has secured a reputation for playwriting that’s a little off the wall -- since his 1987 New York debut, critics have described his work as daffy, absurdist and raising “quirkiness to an idiosyncratic art.” But when he was paired with Zoo District, he found himself dealing with people whose idiosyncratic approach to theater struck even him as a bit extreme.

When they first met several months ago, this frequently homeless, fiscally threadbare but determinedly adventurous little L.A. troupe had the New York City playwright worried that it was going to haul the West Coast premiere of his comedy “The Lively Lad” off to even stranger realms than he had imagined.

The play conjures up a fictitious early 20th century society in which teen debutantes absolutely, positively must have their very own enslaved eunuch as a combination guidance counselor and personal assistant. Long never imagined that Little Eva, the rich, exquisitely spoiled, tantrum-throwing 13-year-old protagonist, would be played by a very full-grown adult about 6 feet tall and as wide as an opera diva -- somebody like Zoo District mainstay Christine Deaver.

“I’d heard her described, and I wasn’t in favor of it,” Long says. “I wanted somebody who could play the character sort of realistically, as it has been in other productions.”

Then he saw Deaver audition.

“She blew me away. I thought she had taste, and there was an enormous emotionality about her.” Chalk up another one for Zoo District unorthodoxy.

The result, wrote Times reviewer Philip Brandes, is “a strikingly fresh alternative reality, playing fast and loose with conventional theatrical expectations while consistently obeying its own loopy internal logic.”

Good reviews have been the rule for Zoo District shows, many original plays generated by the company itself. Magical and surrealistic worlds evoked with striking visuals have been a hallmark. “We made pigs fly,” boasts co-founder and former artistic director Loren Rubin. Three years ago, in “The Master and Margarita,” the company’s biggest hit, an innovatively rigged seesaw-like contraption made possible a scene in which a nude actress rode on the back of an actor disguised as a flying pig.

For most of Zoo District’s six-year existence, however, its biggest challenge has been making bucks fly into the till. Company leaders admit that along with the creative highlights and adventurous gambits, Zoo District history has been spotted with missed opportunities and missing ingredients -- particularly the business savvy and impresario spirit needed to attract donors and build an audience.

“Our Achilles’ heel now is fund-raising and marketing,” says Jon Kellam, the artistic director. His ambitions -- some of which he acknowledges may be years from fruition -- include finding a permanent home for the company, amassing enough money to hire pros to manage the business end, growing beyond the 99-seat limit so actors can earn union wages, and establishing Zoo District as an actor-training institute as well as a producer of plays.

Zoo District sprang from a blind date devoid of romantic sparks. Kellam and Tamar Fortgang spent their evening eating steaks and sipping martinis; nothing was said about a second date. But Kellam did learn about Wolfskill Theater, the downtown Los Angeles company where Fortgang was a member. Soon, he and a posse of fellow former Chicagoans were at Wolfskill; there they found a like-minded band of Angelenos, including Fortgang. That nucleus of 14 actors, writers and designers spun off into Zoo District. The name comes from “Drums in the Night,” a Bertolt Brecht play Kellam directed for Wolfskill in 1997, just before Zoo District began. It’s set in Berlin’s Zoo District, which Kellam says is “the downtrodden, seedy bohemian section of town where all the freethinkers live and discuss politics, and where rebellions often started.”

In 1999-2000, Zoo District scored back-to-back, extended-run successes with two original works: “Nosferatu: Angel of the Final Hour,” based on the 1922 horror film by F.W. Murnau, and “The Master and Margarita,” which company member Michael Franco and co-writer Richard Helweg faithfully adapted from Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantasia-like novel from 1930s Russia.

But Zoo District didn’t have the business machinery in place to capitalize. Its next show, company member Ricardo Zeger’s play called “Pathe X,” about Salvador Dali and his Surrealist confederates, was a box office bomb, even though many Zoo District members consider it perhaps their finest effort. The company went into debt. Playgoers from L.A.’s Russian community had flocked to “The Master and Margarita,” but Zoo District didn’t have the time, money or marketing know-how to cultivate them as regular patrons -- or even to alert them about its next show. Yana Shukman, a Russian emigre who had loved “The Master,” says she didn’t learn about “Pathe X” until it was about to close. She loved that show, too, and says the rest of the theater-hungry Russian contingent would have embraced it had they only been aware.

Governance was another problem. Zoo District began as a democracy, but the core committee of about a dozen “Zookeepers,” as they were called, often argued endlessly trying to make decisions. The company changed its tack in 2001, electing Rubin as its first artistic director and forming a board of directors. But Rubin left the company after a year, feeling undermined because the board failed to raise enough money to finance his plans, while others in the company lost enthusiasm for “Amerikafka,” an original play he had tried to shepherd into production. Jef Bek, a composer and musical director who had won two Ovation Awards for sound design, also became disenchanted and left.

Raising funds from members

Amid this upheaval, Zoo District had to borrow money from a couple of company members, Franco and Charlie Wilson, to keep afloat (Wilson, the troupe’s treasurer, says there’s a plan to gradually pay down that $16,000 in-house debt; otherwise, he says, Zoo District has been breaking even). After staging three to five plays a year from 1998 to 2001, Zoo District failed to mount a production in Los Angeles during 2002.

Those troubles did not prevent big thinking -- and recently that has yielded a series of special projects rare for a small theater, all funded by grants or donations that have helped Zoo District’s financial prospects.

A $25,000 grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, a foundation that promotes cultural exchange with Eastern Europe, helped send Zoo District to a theater festival in the Ukraine last September to stage Franco’s adaptation of another Bulgakov novel, “Heart of a Dog.” Franco donated a chunk of his own money to make the trip happen, and the show ran for three performances in an 1,800-seat theater.

Shukman, an attorney who is now a Zoo District board member, says festival organizers told her it was the first time an U.S. theater company had performed in Kiev. “It was like nothing they’d seen before,” she says, thanks to Zoo District’s highly stylized acting approach, which is based in techniques from commedia dell’arte. Inquiries have come from other Russian and Ukrainian cities, Shukman says, but at this point “we cannot afford to go back.”

Another $25,000 grant came from L.A.’s A.S.K. Theatre Projects to help fund “The Lively Lad” as part of its “Hot Properties” series at [Inside] the Ford. A.S.K. served as matchmaker between Zoo District and playwright Long, who previously had workshopped the play under A.S.K. auspices.

Although “The Lively Lad” keeps Zoo District momentarily in Hollywood, the company has returned to its downtown roots. Paul Solomon, a downtown developer who became a fan after seeing “The Master and Margarita,” donated rent-free use of a warehouse, dubbed “the Metal Shed,” on Mateo Street until next winter. After that, his building plans may require Zoo District to move again. Climate control proved a problem in the first show there in January -- blankets had to be passed out to shivering attendees of “The Bloody Chamber.” Zoo District doesn’t plan to perform there again until early next year, when it will present a new play whose themes, scenes and plot lines will be pieced together during an almost yearlong process of rehearsals at the Shed. Kellam, who is directing, wants the piece to reflect on the Middle East upheaval that led to war against Iraq.

Also on the agenda is a September production of “The Taming of the Shrew” at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown L.A.. The company looks to the production as a happening, a high-profile linkage of theater with historic preservation and downtown revitalization. Scenes will be played in the lobby and other locations around the ornate, recently restored 1926 vaudeville venue, whose owners are giving Zoo District rent-free use of the site. Michael Shamus Wiles has watched Zoo District since its inception -- he was the artistic director of the defunct Wolfskill troupe, which lasted a few years after the Zoo District founders met there and launched their own company.

The foundation grants and space donations during the past year show that “they’re getting much better at playing the game” of parlaying a good artistic reputation into tangible assets, Wiles says. He credits Zoo District with weathering the cycle of early promise followed by financial setbacks and internal upheaval.

“Many a theater company has gone down when a lot was put into a show and the return wasn’t there,” Wiles says. “Or companies get scared and decide to play it safe. Zoo District has done a pretty good job of exploring and pushing themselves while still staying financially solvent to mount their next production. I think this is a group that wants to rise and meet expectations.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Zoo District, play by play

1997

“The Descent”*

1998

“Top Girls”

“Metaluna and the Amazing Science of the Mind Revue”

“The Face of Evil”*

1999

“Scenes From an Execution”

“The Hostage”

“The Two-Character Play”