The apple of his eye

Audiences showing up at Unknown Theater quickly discover that they’re in for anything but a conventional evening of storytelling. Instead, they may find an upside-down room that seems to swallow sound. Or chairs circling a 3,000-pound pile of dark rubber dirt. Or an usher who’ll ask you to sit on one side of the house, your companion on the other.

“I always consider the role of the audience,” says Unknown’s artistic director, Chris Covics. “I think there’s a dialogue. You have to address their expectations, ask them to question their own presence in the event.”

It’s been less than two years since the company opened its unmarked black door on Seward Street in Hollywood, but Unknown has piled up critical raves and a following devoted to the theater’s brand of hypnotic theatricality, post-show bands and club vibe.

“I’m trying to make intellectually challenging theater hip,” explains Covics, who staged the company’s current offering, “The Serpent,” a revival of Jean-Claude Italie’s trippy 1968 meditation on the price of knowledge. “High art and good times need not be mutually exclusive. The less people can categorize a piece of art, the more of themselves they will be forced to bring to it.”

His lofty ambition is matched by a surprisingly bargain-basement sense of invention. The eerily revolving set in Unknown’s production of Harold Pinter’s “The Hothouse,” for example, was designed around the spare tire of his jeep. That is, when he still owned the jeep. (It was recently sold at public auction.) This is a man who does not own a cellphone (can’t pay the bill), is in perpetual danger of being evicted, and often forgets to eat.

“Chris is a bit of a mad scientist,” acknowledges company member Kyle Ingleman.

Covics, 37, grew up in Philadelphia. His mother was a computer operator who worked on the Apollo missions, his father a homicide prosecutor. “My dad put the idea that there is no absolute truth into my head at an early age. That justice is an impossible goal, but that you work toward it anyway. Be idealistic, but not naive.”

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A ‘Midsummer’ payoff

At Oberlin College in Ohio, Covics got hooked on theater. Among his early productions was a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” that featured 10 Pucks flying back and forth on zip lines.

The success of “Midsummer” funded a trip to England, where he found himself being mentored by performers such as Fiona Shaw and Edward Petherbridge. But after somewhat unceremoniously ducking out of an audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Britain’s most prestigious theater academy, he ended up in L.A., working as an actor and photographer.

In 2001, working for Knightsbridge Theatre, Covics gained attention with his staging of Tom Stoppard’s pair of one-acts, “Dogg’s Hamlet/Cahoot’s Macbeth.” He followed up with T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral,” the story of Thomas Becket’s murder in 1170. A chorus of 12 women sat among the audience, forcing theatergoers to empathize with the chorus’ growing sense of helplessness and grief.

“After those shows,” says Covics, “I thought, ‘You know what, I’m going to start a theater company.’ ” He proceeded to spend nearly four years recruiting members, raising money, building a board and looking for a home.

Many of Unknown’s first ensemble members came from Covics’ early L.A. shows and audiences. “I was very impressed with the way Chris integrated physical theater with spoken theater [in the Stoppard plays],” says Caprice Spencer Rothe, who has been with the company since 2002. Covics initially invited her to do workshops with his growing troupe.

“It was a dream,” she recalls. “People with formal training who also lived inside their bodies and were willing to play, to experiment. When it came time to help build the space, I got out a sledgehammer and started helping.”

After looking at 123 possible venues, Unknown eventually found a 4,000-square-foot space used by Time Warner for prop storage in the heart of Hollywood’s burgeoning arts district. “It was white and bland and looked like a storage unit,” says Covics. “We totally demolished the interior, removing 8 tons of material by hand. We painted the whole thing black, then built the entire theater, rehearsed and built the set for our first show, all in 90 days.” By the premiere of their inaugural production, “Johnson Over Jordan,” J.B. Priestly’s 1939 tale of a man wandering through his afterlife, the 50-member company “was just about dead. You could see people’s ribs. We looked like very happy dead people.”

But Covics’ instinct paid off. With the chic gloom of its black-and-red palette and industrial details, Unknown feels more like a rave space than a theater. “I was personally obsessed with the design of this place. I don’t want people to think they’re in a theater, and the architecture is key to that. It’s open, there’s a sense of possibility, of revolution, of underworld exploration. What’s the contemporary urban meeting place? A nightclub. And that’s the feeling I want -- people coming here to be with other people. Not just to hide behind their programs.”

“The fact that there’s no wall between the lobby and the performance space itself really works,” says Jeff Goode, a playwright who participated in one of Unknown’s 2005 short play festivals. “When you go into most small L.A. theaters, you feel like you’re heading down a dark alley. So many companies don’t even think about their spaces. They want to do the show, but how do they make the audience want to see it?”

Since their doors opened, Covics estimates, nearly 15,000 people have come to see revivals of rarely seen works by Pinter (“The Hothouse”) and Kenneth Patchen (“Don’t Look Now”) and dance from Monica Favand Campagna’s TRIP group.

And after nearly every main-stage performance, Unknown features the Fifth Wall, a grab bag of live music, performance artists and slam poets, any of whom may keep the place buzzed for a few minutes or until all hours.

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Off the wall

Goode remembers his favorite Fifth Wall moment: “A drag queen -- he must have been 7 feet tall -- strode through the lobby on the way to the stage. He had a sheaf of bananas and fruit on his head, and I think he was ululating. That image is just burned into my memory.”

Covics has given Goode opportunities as well. “I needed a space for two days to work on a musical. We couldn’t move on to the next step without seeing it. I asked Chris with only a couple of days’ notice if we could use the stage and he said yes. Usually, applying for this sort of access would take much longer.”

As for the rest of this season, TRIP dance is back with “Poisoning the Well,” and after that Covics hopes to stage “Americamisfit” by Dan Dietz. “It takes place inside of a jukebox with a live rockabilly band.” Covics is also setting up an outreach program for at-risk youth, a long-term playwright-actor partnership program and a series of company-driven adaptations of classics.

The activity level is intense, and Covics acknowledges that some members opt out after a year or so. There are no dues, but everyone in the ensemble must work three hours a week, whether it’s running a soundboard or writing grants. But there are always more people auditioning to join -- more than 400 answered a casting notice Unknown posted several months ago.

Morry Schorr, 62, became a member in May 2006 and appeared in “Don’t Look Now.” “I wanted to do something challenging without worrying about the career consequences. That’s what I found at Unknown. The company is a home now.”

“This is the best thing that ever happened to me,” Covics says as a bemused audience follows the barefoot cast of “The Serpent” into the theater for the evening’s performance. “Even though it’s a huge stress generator. Really, I’m constantly on a ladder, and I’m constantly sweating.”

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‘The Serpent’

Where: Unknown Theater, 1110 N. Seward St., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday

Ends: Saturday

Price: $18 to $24

Contact: (323) 466-7781