Bleeding Through, presented by About Productions, opens Oct. 31; plays Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 3 pm; through Nov. 22.  Tickets: $20-$25. Shakespeare Festival/LA, 1238 W. 1st St., Los Angeles. 800.595.4TIX (4849) or aboutpd.org.

When Theresa Chavez and Rose Portillo of About Productions took the task of adapting writer/historian Norman Klein’s downtown LA-based novella Bleeding Through for the stage, they realized it would not easily lend itself to translation into a typical stage play.

Theresa Chavez

Chavez explains, “The central focus of the work is the Narrator’s on-going effort to uncover the story of Molly, an elderly Angelino Heights resident who may or may not have committed murder. The text keeps upending itself through the narrator’s interest in digging up all kinds of intriguing notions, facts, information and conjectures about, not only Los Angeles itself, but the characters he’s met in the neighborhood and its film history. He’ll be telling the story one way then stop and go off into a new approach. He is unreliable. The novella is fascinating but distilling the work for the stage has been quite a process.”

Co-written and co-directed by Chavez and Portillo, Bleeding Through is described as a theatrical layering of live music, video and interactive setting, uncovering the narrative ghosts of LA’s historic Angelino Heights district and the adjacent downtown area-a neighborhood where more cinematic “murders” have occurred than anywhere else in the world. This noir-influenced theater work explores the shaping of a city’s memory by commonplace experiences, chronicled history and cinematic influences.

Norman Klein

Says author Klein, “The ‘cinematic murders’ claim is the absolute truth. I have exhaustively researched the history of American cinema for many years, especially film noir, which found its best film locations in downtown Los Angeles.”

Born in Brooklyn, the longtime LA resident is a cultural critic, an urban and media historian as well as a novelist. His books include The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997), Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (1993) and The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects (2003). Klein’s novella was part of the landmark Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (2003), an interactive database documentary which also included a DVD-ROM. It was presented as a traveling museum installation and was a co-production of The Labyrinth Project (a research initiative and art collective at USC).

“The idea for Bleeding Through came when I wrote The History of Forgetting, which is about the erasure of cities, specifically Los Angeles and its downtown area,” Klein recalls. “There were four pages devoted to the Angelino Heights area. When Germany based ZKM asked me to do this interactive project, I went to those four pages and built this fictional chronicle of an old woman who had these rumors swirling about her and her early life in this neighborhood.”

“Rose and I have been developing the work since 2004 at the behest of Klein,” says Chavez. “A stage reading was commissioned by the Edge of the World Theatre Festival’s 2008 Los Angeles History Project and was presented in workshop at the Autry National Center in July 2008. This was followed by a June 2009 concert reading at Shakespeare Festival/LA.”

This evolving workshop process is quite common to About Productions, which creates original interdisciplinary theater works and educational programs that provoke new perspectives on history, humanity and culture. It is dedicated to generating new work through collaboration in order to create artistic and community dialogue.

Now celebrating its 21st year, the company has created and produced multiple theater works which focus on Los Angeles history including LA Real, Know Your Place, Showing Our Age and They Shoot Mexicans, Don’t They? This independent, itinerant theater company’s critically acclaimed productions have been seen extensively in greater Los Angeles, toured nationally and in Canada, and have been featured on national television as well as on local PBS outlet, KCET.

Elizabeth Rainey and Brian Joseph

“We originally planned to premiere Bleeding Through last June at Shakespeare Festival/LA,” Chavez recalls. “But Rose and I came to the decision we needed one more extra stage in its development. This turned out to be a good thing. Following the concert reading, we put on the production as a site-specific performance at a home in Angelino Heights. The concept of performing in the house was correct but we realized logistically we couldn’t do a fully realized production in an actual house. It forced us in a really positive way to re-think the concept of the setting.”

Chavez promises when audiences enter the production’s set at Shakespeare Festival/LA, they will immediately be encompassed by another time and another place. “We take the audience inside this house which we have created within the theatre space. People sit within a semi-sprawling environment that does include a stage. At intermission and after the show, people can go onstage and into the home’s library and delve into the research that is part of the narrator’s world and also into the attic that is part of Molly’s world.”

Abetting the vision of Chavez and Portillo are the creative talents of Vinny Golia (original music), Scott Collins (featured musician) Alkeime Mitterlehner (set design), Francois-Pierre Couture (light design), Pamela Shaw (costume design) and Claudio Rocha (videography). The acting ensemble includes David Fruechting, Brian Joseph, Lynn Milgrim, Pete Pano, Elizabeth Rainey, Ed Ramolete, James Terry and Kikey Castillo.

Kikey Castillo and James Terry

“We’ve been so impressed at how these talented people have so intuitively understood the concept of the work,” says Chavez. “There are actually three Mollys in the production. Molly One (Milgrim) is the older woman the Narrator (Fruechting) first encounters. Molly Two (Rainey) is her younger self, who takes us from 1920 to 1949. Then there is the cinematic Molly (Castillo), the idealized realization of the Narrator’s vision of what Molly would be like if she were on film. I believe this work is going to transport the audience to a very special place.”

Upcoming for About Productions is the 2011 premiere Evangeline, Queen of Make-Believe, co-written by Los Lobos, musician/composer Louie Perez with Portillo and Chavez. It will feature the music of Los Lobos and be presented as a workshop production in June, 2010 in Los Angeles and Pasadena. Norman Klein’s latest work is The Imaginary 20th Century, a historical science-fiction novel.

Feature image of Ed Ramolete, Lynn Milgrim and David Fruechting and all story images by Teresa Chavez.

Article by Julio Martinez