Theater presenters who dream in words

The brick-walled, high-ceilinged stage of the Ivy Substation is just a few steps from Culver City, which calls itself “the heart of screenland” -- “a delicious irony,” notes Mitchell Gossett.

Bottom’s Dream, the theater company that is run by Gossett and James Martin, operates on an aesthetic that is far removed from that of “screenland.”

The duo produces low-budget plays, with scripts that emphasize the spoken word more than the visual image, and with spoken words that often seem defiantly inaccessible. “If we look at a script and it’s a conundrum, then it’s interesting,” Martin says.

In the first Times review of a Bottom’s Dream production, Mac Wellman’s monologue “Terminal Hip” in 1992, Karen Fricker wrote that actor Gossett and director Martin “present the work with inspired confidence, as if its meaning were perfectly clear. We may never know what ‘Xerox the seat at Del Mar, lose radicals their jobs and pandas their pants’ means, but Gossett clearly does. His assurance allows us to relax into the piece.”

Bottom’s Dream presented a more accessible Wellman monologue, “Bitter Bierce,” in an acclaimed production at the Zephyr Theatre last summer. The duo’s current production, Erik Ehn’s “FireFlow -- Two Tales From Andersen,” is based on material by Hans Christian Andersen, one of literature’s most familiar and embraced writers. Andersen’s language can’t be all that obscure, can it?

“It’s challenging,” Martin says. “Erik is thinking through each story five or six times within a half-hour. Our job is to make it as accessible as possible, to let the playwright’s voice be heard, to not make it more obscure.”

“Sit back and allow it to come to you,” counsels Gossett.

Martin and Gossett met nearly two decades ago under more conventional theatrical auspices. Martin ran a young actors’ program at the Alley Theatre in Houston from 1985 to 1990. Gossett, fresh off a Cornell master of fine arts program, was part of Martin’s company in 1986-87, although, he notes, he had to audition twice because Martin “didn’t see my brilliance the first time.” Most plays they worked on had well-known titles.

Gossett moved to L.A. after his year in Houston; Martin returned to his native Southern California in 1990. Both found work in the fairly standard repertory of the summer theater festival at Occidental College, where Martin had received a master’s in theater.

One day during rehearsals for “Amadeus” at Occidental’s Keck Theater, they began batting lines from “Hamlet” back and forth, and it occurred to them that maybe they should create theater on their own. Soon Bottom’s Dream was born, named after the domineering amateur actor whose head is transformed into that of an ass, in what he later recalls as a dream that “hath no bottom,” in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” To Martin, who played Bottom in an Occidental production and directed a Texas staging of “Midsummer,” the name suggests that “the possibilities are endless in looking at new plays and in pushing the envelope of dramaturgy and language.”

In other words, they weren’t planning to produce Shakespeare or Rodgers and Hammerstein. They were intrigued by a particular genre of contemporary writing -- although, Martin adds, the dense texts they favor often require the same meticulous study that Shakespeare needs. “You look at every word and what it means and how it resonates, and then you personalize it as much as possible,” Martin says.

Keeping it loose

They felt that such work would thrive with a loose company structure. Martin had begun freelance work as an evaluator of theater companies for the National Endowment for the Arts -- a task that he still does -- and was determined “to not fall into the trap of doing seasons, of producing because you have to.”

Their first production was “Losing Venice,” by John Clifford -- the only non-American writer whose work they have staged. That production, budgeted at a mere $2,000 in the tiny back space of the Attic Theatre, then in Hollywood, might have made its money back if it hadn’t been forced to close on the weekend riots broke out in 1992.

Since then, productions have focused on the work of Wellman, Ehn and Ruth Margraff. Wellman, based in New York, has seen only one Bottom’s Dream staging of his work, but that one -- “The Lesser Magoo” in 1997 -- was “a dynamite production,” he says.

Most of Bottom’s Dream work has taken place at Ivy Substation, with assistance from the Culver City Redevelopment Agency. Yet they call the space “our base, not our exclusive home.”

They developed nontheatrical careers during the ‘90s that help them support Bottom’s Dream. Martin, now 54, returned to grad school in clinical psychology and became a social worker; he is a supervisor of child abuse cases for the county Department of Children and Family Services. Gossett, now 44, was a Hollywood talent manager from 1993 to 2001 and is now an agent specializing in child and young adult actors. Gossett acknowledges that Hollywood is “the industry that feeds us” even as he vows “to create a bigger boundary between theater and film.”

A refreshing break

The duo took a hiatus in 2002 and 2003, which coincided with changes in their careers and the use of the Ivy by the Mark Taper Forum as it prepared to move into its own Kirk Douglas Theatre a few blocks away. The hiatus “helped ensure our future,” Gossett says, and, without naming names, recommends a similar break for “a few L.A. companies that are on a wheel in a cage, slaves to their buildings.”

But Martin emphasizes that he wants Bottom’s Dream “to be more mature, to hire more staff.” Even though “FireFlow” has the group’s biggest budget yet -- $12,000 -- he points to set designer Susan Gratch on the stage, working on props instead of the set, and expresses his concern that she has to do both jobs.

“I’d like to make it solid enough to someday pass it on to someone else,” he says.

“Solid” is not a word that you use to describe a dream, however. Perhaps Gossett should get the last word: “Throwing money at a problem is the antithesis of what we do.”

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‘FireFlow: Two Tales From Andersen’

Where: Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Fridays through Sundays

Ends: Dec. 19

Price: $15

Contact: (310) 226-2818 or www.bottomsdream.com