Troupe mourns stabbing death of fellow actor

Darius Ever Truly had $50 in his pocket and a bundle of passion when he came to Los Angeles from Tennessee a year ago to make his name in the big time.

Colleagues said his brash, outlandish ways helped land him the role of Bobby Seale, the fiery Black Panther Party co-founder, in the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s production of “The Chicago Conspiracy Trial.” When Truly uncharacteristically failed to show up for Saturday night’s performance, the show went on with an understudy using a script.

Stage manager Amanda Bierbauer called around to local hospitals.

“I guess nobody thought of calling the morgue,” said Frank Condon, the play’s cowriter and director.

Cast members learned just before Sunday’s matinee that Truly, 26, had been stabbed to death early Saturday after a party in Palms.

Police have yet to identify a motive or a suspect. The only description so far is of a man wearing dark clothing who ran away after the attack.

“This is a high-priority case, a tragic loss of life,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Ken Garner. “We are working on whether the killer is a stranger or someone he or someone else at the party knew.”

Truly’s father, younger sister and uncle arrived Tuesday in Los Angeles from Memphis, Tenn., and on Wednesday went about the grim business of talking with Los Angeles Police Department officers, visiting the crime scene and meeting with the coroner’s office to collect the actor’s possessions.

“He was a good boy,” said Larry Truly, the actor’s father. “He was a very talented young man and very personable.”

Allyson Truly, 21, said her brother had no time for a girlfriend because “he put all his heart into acting.”

The actor’s shell-shocked Odyssey colleagues testified to his commitment to his craft:

“He had little experience, but he had power and drive and enthusiasm,” said Condon, who cast Truly in the play.

He was definitely a young man on a mission -- which was to succeed at his chosen profession in the nation’s toughest entertainment arena.

Born and reared in Memphis, Truly attended Clark Atlanta University, where he studied theater. For a time, he performed professionally in Atlanta productions, according to his father. Then “he decided he wanted to tackle the big prize: Los Angeles, California,” the elder Truly said.

George Murdock, the veteran actor who plays Judge Julius Hoffman in the Odyssey production, said Truly stepped easily into the part of Bobby Seale, who so disrupts the court proceedings that Hoffman orders him bound and gagged. A review in the Hollywood Reporter said Truly’s “Bobby Seale commands the house whenever he stands to speak.”

First presented in 1979, the play is a reenactment of the 1969 trial of protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, based on official transcripts. Truly portrayed the sole African American defendant.

Ron Sossi, artistic director and founder of the Odyssey and the play’s cowriter, said Truly was “a very dedicated guy, very energetic and feisty.”

Sossi said that among the 37-member troupe, Truly “was one of the strongest in terms of having a sense of activism. . . . He had a strong passion for the message of the play, which is basically the right to dissent without being considered unpatriotic.”

When they learned of Truly’s death, a few cast members sank to the floor and began sobbing, he said. Although most of the cast urged that the matinee go on, some were so upset that Condon decided to cancel it. Tonight’s performance will be the first since the troupe learned of the death.

The Odyssey production was Truly’s second appearance on a Los Angeles stage. A year ago, he earned plaudits as the character Brazil in a Pasadena production of “The America Play.”

(In 2005, he appeared in a production of a “choreopoem” in Atlanta titled “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Homicide When the Streets Were Too Much,” and a reviewer in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote: “Darius Ever Truly, stabbed in a shady deal gone bad, uses his last breaths to share how it feels to die alone, knowing no one cares, not even the paramedics whose charge it is to help sustain his life.”)

Police have released few details about the crime. LAPD Det. Joe Lumbreras said Truly was stabbed Saturday just before 3:20 a.m. as he and a 30-year-old female cousin walked along the 3600 block of South Bentley Avenue. He had been attending a party that grew so loud and large that police officers were called to intervene.

Truly and his cousin “hung around in the area,” Lumbreras said. An attacker, or perhaps more than one, walked up and stabbed them both.

Truly died at the scene of a wound to his upper body. Other partygoers found him lying in the street. Although slightly wounded, his cousin was able to escape.

Police say she has told them very little about the attack. Robbery did not appear to be a motive.

Truly had no criminal record, and police said they did not believe that he was involved in local street fighting or gang wars.

“He was feeling like he was about to be discovered,” Condon said of the actor. He said the theater planned to have someone read an announcement of Truly’s death before each performance of “The Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” slated to run through Dec. 16.

In his brief biography in the play program, Truly dedicated his performance “to the eternal spirit of resistance against all forms of oppression.”

martha.groves@latimes.com

richard.winton@latimes.com