Full Disclosure opens May 7; plays Fri. and Sat. at 8 pm and Sun. at 7pm in private homes around Los Angeles. Tickets: $25; Call 323-274-7737, email
info@chalkrep.com or online chalkrep.com.
Chalk Repertory Theatre exploded into the Los Angeles theater scene with two Ovation Award wins for its show Family Planning. Since then, the company, comprised of UC San Diego alumni, have continued its goal to set theater in unconventional spaces with successes like Twelfth Night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The newest Chalk show, Full Disclosure, opens this weekend and will be performed in houses currently on the market. Founding member Larissa Kokernot directs Amy Ellenberger as Sunny the realtor in Ruth McKee’s self-described “comical tragedy about the people who sell lives they can’t afford to buy.”
LAStageBlog.com caught up with the Chalk Rep ladies as they prepare for their opening weekend and their continued success in Los Angeles theater.
LAStageBlog.com: Chalk Rep is fairly new on the LA stage scene – want to talk a little bit about its inception and/or how you became involved?
Ruth McKee
Ruth McKee: Chalk Rep was founded in October of 2008, when Jennifer Chang was given the opportunity to produce at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. She gathered up the three of us along with Hilary Ward to see if we’d like to form a company.
Larissa Kokernot: Chalk Rep grew out of a need we were feeling to be a part of creating theater in Los Angeles we wanted to see — theater that felt like an event, like something that couldn’t be missed. And we were all searching for an artistic home, a place to bring projects and ideas that excited us, and a place where we could do something about making those projects happen.
McKee: We bounced around ideas and realized quickly we were very like-minded in terms of the kind of work we wanted to do, and also had very complementary skill sets. We knew with our combined energies we could really get something great off the ground.
Kokernot: It’s a powerhouse group of women that all came out of the same graduate program at UCSD — it’s nice to be able to build on the company environment the UCSD program fosters.
LASB: How is it working with your friends?
Amy Ellenberger: We share a common language which makes collaborating a whole lot easier. We also come from a tradition at UC San Diego that fosters out-of-the-box thinking and taking your artistic life into your own hands.
Kokernot: Having friends who are also your colleagues — people who challenge you and push you to take risks and celebrate you — is amazing. I have always been a big champion of company — I think an amazing juice flows when the same group of people work together over time.
McKee: It’s wonderful! All of the members of the artistic circle are people I wanted to spend more time with anyway, so that’s a great perk of having the company. Sometimes we have to schedule special meeting time just to catch up on each other’s lives.
LASB: Your mission statement puts a strong focus on using “unconventional spaces.” Why and where did this idea/mission statement come from?
Larissa Kokernot
Kokernot: At first the idea grew out of Jen’s (Founding Member Jennifer Chang) connection with Hollywood Forever and the idea of producing Three Sisters in their amazing and theatrical Masonic Lodge. It seemed like such a perfect union with the material. And I had just recently produced the first run of Family Planning in homes around Los Angeles (that was June 2008, my second child was actually born half way through the run) with Julia Edwards, the playwright, and another UCSD grad. Taking that play inside actual homes really clicked with audiences — it was theater in a whole new way. It was like theater as a ride, once you were on you were on. It was amazing. It had such a profound and moving effect on the people who came to see it. We decided Chalk had to remount the production. With two shows in unconventional spaces already in the pipeline we asked ourselves, doesn’t this have the making of something bigger, “theater outside the black box,” the idea of “erasing the stage”? These were phrases we grabbed hold of in our initial meetings.
McKee: When we were bouncing around ideas for the company, we wanted to address the question of why people would go to theater in this movie town. We kept coming back to the idea theater needs to be an event and should really take advantage of the fact it is live and you have to enter a new space to watch it. An incredible level of intimacy is reached between the audience and the performers when you take down not just the fourth wall but all of the others as well, and invite the audience into the space with the actors.
Ellenberger: Chalk offers a beautiful hybrid of stage and film that appeals to both camps. Setting the audience close to the action is very similar to the close-up of a movie but with our shows you can feel the actors, you can smell them and sometimes even speak to them although depending on the show that’s not necessarily advised.
Kokernot: And we loved the idea by working in unconventional spaces and creating space partnerships we would be able to channel the bulk of our resources into artists rather than a building. So much of producing theater in this city (or any city) is about renting the space and building the sets and renting (or owning) the lighting and sound equipment. Chalk Rep was about finding a space that opened up the material and then using that space to its greatest effect. The event nature of this kind of theater has also allowed us to generate a lot of buzz as a new company in Los Angeles and attract non-theatergoers to the theater. We love that.
LASB: What do you think intimate theatre offers audiences that they miss out on in larger scale theater productions?
McKee: I won’t knock larger-scale productions but it’s a very different experience seeing a play where the actors are three feet away from you than one where they are 30 feet away. When they’re right in front of you, you become immersed, connected in a way you just can’t be when they are up on a stage and you are sitting passively in your seat.
Kokernot: It feels like people are really craving intimacy these days in their theatergoing experiences. I hear people all over saying it, the best theater experiences they’ve had lately have been in smaller spaces. Having actors doing amazing work mere inches from you is thrilling. People fighting and falling in love and wrestling with the questions of life with only feet to separate you from them — that’s great theater.
Ellenberger: We want to create intimacy no matter what the size of the venue. The sky is the limit when you’ve made it a mission to work in unconventional spaces. There is always the potential for us to be working in large venues but that shouldn’t stop us from creating an intimacy for our audience.
LASB: Where did the idea come from for Full Disclosure? How did it all come together?
McKee: I first attempted this play about four years ago as a five-character play and kept getting stuck because any of the scenes where Sunny (the character Amy plays) wasn’t on stage got pretty dull pretty quickly. So I abandoned it. Then in the summer of 2009 I was thinking I wanted to write something for Amy and the character of Sunny popped back into my head. I realized there was a way to write it without ever letting her leave the stage and this time it never got dull. Amy and I did a workshop of the play in New York in December 2009, right around the time we were starting Chalk, and Larissa came on board for this run of the show.
LASB: How is it working on a one-woman play?
McKee: Because of that earlier attempt, I had the story pretty clearly worked out in my head, so all I had to do was put it into Sunny’s voice. And knowing I wanted Amy to play the character it was pretty easy to channel that voice! It sounds corny but I really just let Sunny talk and transcribed what she had to say. And then I cut! Sunny is a talker.
Ellenberger: Performing a one-person show is like running a marathon. You have to condition yourself in a totally different way than you do with a multi-character play. You have to start rehearsing early and pace yourself with shorter rehearsals. You can’t start out sprinting with only a little bit of training and expect to make it across the finish line.
Kokernot: This is my first experience directing a one woman show and I have to admit, it’s really different. I’m so used to diving into the relationships in a play and unearthing all the buried emotions but here the only relationship being developed in the here and now is the relationship to the audience.
Ellenberger: I particularly like Full Disclosure because it is unique to other one-person shows. It involves one character, it’s not autobiographical, and that one character directly addresses the audience. The audience actually becomes another character in the show and every performance is different depending on who walks through the door to see our Open House.
Kokernot: We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the story Sunny tells us and how to make sure the audience is following that. We’ve talked about Sunny’s emotional journey in trying to sell this house and how that dovetails with what’s happening in her personal life. I’ve talked a lot about rhythms of speech — what gets thrown away, what needs to pop. It’s been amazing working with Amy. She has such a great hold on the character and has really gotten specific with her. In Amy’s hands Sunny is definitely flesh and blood. And having Ruth with us almost all the time is such a luxury. We’ve really been able to dig into the text and figure out what makes the piece really come alive.
LASB: How is it working in a house instead of on a stage?
Ellenberger: I absolutely love performing in a house. The same intimacy created for the audience is created for the actors. Forgive me, I’m going to use another cheesy metaphor but here it goes: performing in a house is like riding a horse without a saddle. When you’re riding a horse bareback there is nothing between you and the horse. You can feel every muscle of the horse, every twitch, every thought and emotion in its body. It’s the same way performing in a house. There is nothing between you and the audience. You have this hyperawareness of everything they are feeling and how they are experiencing the play. It’s a pretty remarkable feeling.
Kokernot: I love it. Changing the space adds the element of improvisation and keeps everything really exciting and in the present moment which is something I love about the theater — the fact that no two performances are ever the same. That’s even truer when you’re not on a stage where you’ve mapped the entire thing out.
McKee: When I write plays normally, I don’t picture the characters on a stage, I picture them in a real setting. So normally no set design, no matter how beautiful, is quite going to match my vision. This time what you’ll see is pretty much what was in my head. It’s pretty cool.
LASB: How is this show different from or similar to your Ovation Award winning hit Family Planning?
McKee: In Family Planning, the audience got to be a fly on the wall for a couple’s meltdown. This time, the audience is given a more active role. They are directly addressed as prospective homebuyers to whom Sunny is pitching the house. And we’re also doing our best to find homes that are actively on the market rather than privately-owned homes (although we may end up using some). It’s a play about real estate where the house is much more than just a setting; it is the thrust of the action.
Kokernot: I think Ruth nailed it on the head. With Full Disclosure, the audience is Amy’s acting partner — that’s really electric and fun. Thank God Amy’s a stunning improviser.
LASB: What’s next on Chalk Rep’s list of things to conquer?
McKee: This summer we’re planning to do a short play festival, bringing more writers and directors into our community. Beyond that, there are lots of ideas but none we can announce just yet. We’re really interested in developing new work. It’s been a bit of a challenge starting with plays and finding spaces to match them, so we’re thinking about turning that model on its head: starting with the space and then developing new pieces from that inspiration.
LASB: Ideally, what do the next 10 years look like for the company?
McKee: Wow. Well, I think we’d all like the company to grow to the point where it’s our day job and not the job we’re doing on top of our day job and our artistic work. Otherwise, I think we’re now doing the kind of work we want to keep doing. It would be nice if we could pay people better. And it will be nice if it starts getting easier to find the spaces.
Ellenberger: As Ruth said, one of our first priorities is to become a financially sustainable company. We’ve made it a priority to invest in people and that includes our community of artists as well as our audience. The majority of our budget will always go to our artists and making ticket prices fair for our audience.
LASB: Anything you want to add to pitch Full Disclosure to a potential audience member?
Ellenberger: If you’re selling your house and want a unique way to show it, give us call!
Kokernot: It will be the most interesting Open House you’ve ever been to.
Feature image of Amy Ellenberger as Sunny in Full Disclosure
