The Mulatto Soldier
This Friday marks the third installment of what could be a new business model for theater in Los Angeles. Poor Dog Group, a non-profit theater collaborative, has taken root in a bookstore.
“[We're] interested in the bookstore as a model because with a lot of theaters closing, with the economy the way it is – where do performers find places to really work?” said John Kern, one of the founding members of Poor Dog Group. “You can find places to get presented but where do you build the work?”
John F. Kern; Photo by Jessica Emmanuel
Not that PDG develops works with playwrights on original scripts. On the contrary, it’s a performance-based theater company. Stationed in The Last Bookstore, in the heart of a small theater community that’s developing around LATC, on the corner of 5th and Spring Streets, PDG is not the traditional text-based theater collective. The group prides itself on performance and, since much of the text comes from classics and well established authors, a strong sense of history is woven into each performance.
“We’re very influenced by Jerzy Grotowski’s work, the Polish theater artist. He wrote Towards A Poor Theater,” says Kern, who explained Grotowski’s emphasis on “making theater a more essential theater with less things, using what you have. It’s a long Polish tradition.”
In fact, PDG is especially good at using what it has, most likely because it’s a collaborative company consisting of 11 important resources – the 10 founding members, including a dramaturg, an artistic director, plus a set designer – key pieces for any theater production. The group is also inspired by the happenings performances of the 1960s. Happenings are dramatic events based on a blend of non-linear narrative and improv, with few set dramatic points, and can literally happen anywhere from a coffee house to someone’s living room – or a bookstore.
“We’re very much interested in a lot of the work in the mid-’60s…when they were doing work with event-driven theater…It was about using just the resources within the company,” says Kern. “So we have people that choreograph, people that know music, people that can build sets, being very direct about what we’re interested in.”
The group formed about five or so years ago while in school at the California Institute for the Arts. After graduating in 2007, Kern and the other founding members acquired non-profit status and moved the collective to Los Angeles. The group is known for its post-World War II piece Brewsie and Willie and for a pseudo-classic Satyr Atlas workshop at Getty Villa this past February, based on fourth- and fifth-century BC bits by Euripides.
The Cast of "Brewsie and Willie"
Norman Frisch, manager of the Getty Villa theater program, gave the group some Euripides fragments. He had seen Brewsie and Willie and thought the company might find something worth staging in the fragments. “Because we don’t really have a kind of mission other than to really keep exploring and keep exploring history itself,” says Kern. “We’re not reporters, we’re investigators.”
Poor Dog Group’s latest project, appropriately titled Book-A-Month, continues this historic yet ever evolving theater form by not only bringing life to older texts but also by staging this series in a new space.
“Bookstores are closing…why not have small businesses spend their advertising budget on performers instead of billboards?” Kern says. “I mean hopefully, it’s a way to market as well for the shop. So, if it’s a kind of copacetic relationship, it would be really awesome.”
Here’s how it works. The company picked the very first book. The first audience showed up – there are only 60 seats in the house – and watched the show. Then viewers got to browse in the store and pick a book for consideration next month. In the second week, the group presented the same show and a new group of people picked another book. The same goes for the third week. At the end of the month, next month’s book is chosen via a lottery among the three books. Did we mention all of this is done on 15 hours of workshop time and an hour of performance time each week?
The stage at The Last Bookstore
“We have a way – we can work fast enough where we can do that. We’re excited about presenting an hour-long show that’s built in 15 hours. But I think we can pull it off,” says Kern. “I think we’ve done it this time. Can we keep doing it? We hope so. Are we kind of obligated to do it? I think, yes. It’s a statement to say people deserve an hour-long, built thing because really the theater takes place in scene changes and these types of transitions. If it’s not that, it’s just a circus. It’s just a showcase of different acts and that’s not a theater show. It has theatricality for sure but those are independent things. We want to string them together to be able to put together a more comprehensive experience in the evening.”
Kern, who also works in the bookstore, has the challenge of making sure enough people attend the event, as a fair trade-off to the bookstore owner, and also returning the store to its original state for business as usual. Thus there are perks from working in a bookstore, and Kern runs a tight ship.
“Well in this case, we need to be able to control the environment and make a full theater show, so we had to ask him [the bookstore owner] to close the bookstore for an hour and a half,” says Kern. “So at 8, the shop closes. We have 22 minutes to change all the things, set up everything – all the lights, all the sound, video projects – everything set up. The show goes at 8:30. It’s exactly 55 minutes. Then we have literally five minutes to shut down the whole show, return the bookstore, open up the doors and it’s a bookstore again.”
Besides the challenge of not interfering with business, the show must also overcome the landscapes of bookshelves, couches, and cash registers.
Peaches' Minions
“For this piece, we actually put the audience in the middle and we have the show happening on both sides. So we have 30 people looking this way and 30 people looking that way. There’s 30 minutes on each side that have been built so that they work with each other [because] you can hear what’s happening on that side [from] on this side. The sound, the audio design works obviously for that which you are watching but it also works for the people listening on this side,” said Kern. “So we’ve built it like that because we can’t sit – the sight lines are awful in here. So how do you seat 60 people? We thought, ‘Okay. Let’s split the whole thing and then right in the middle. You guys switch sides and the audience gets up and moves on the other side.”
This month’s book is The System of Dante’s Hell by Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) , a 1960s patchwork echoing the civil rights movement with poetry and loose narrative.
“The book is loosely about this mulatto soldier who’s gone AWOL. He has a run-in with a whore named Peaches. The first two-thirds of the book are written with what he calls ‘association complexes.’ It’s like that real poetry kind of writing where if you read it, it’s not necessarily like dialogue or a plot you can follow, with just a lot of imagery about what this guy is seeing,” says Kern. “So it’s very fragmented. Then the last third of the book is a fast narrative about him running into Peaches. It’s amazing when you read it. It switches right at the end.”
Redundant Persona
Poor Dog Group’s third installment of Jones’ book and this month’s final opportunity to become a part of the lottery process for next month’s book takes place this Friday, September 30, at 8:30 pm. Early arrivals are encouraged.
But what Poor Dog Group really hopes will happen is that theater will survive the current economic situation. “We are really investigating new locations for theater to happen. New sustainable models for people to be able to work and build cohesive pieces, longer cohesive pieces. We don’t want to just showcase ideas,” says Kern. “We don’t want to do staged readings. We don’t want to do these quick little projects. We want to have the time – we don’t need a ton of time, we don’t need a ton of resources. But we need some. We want to ask the question – is this a model? Does theater in a book shop work? If theaters close, where can we reopen?”
System of Dante’s Hell by Leroi Jones, presented by Poor Dog Group and The Last Bookstore. Friday, September 30, 8 pm. Tickets: $10. The Last Bookstore, 453 South Spring St., LA. http://lastbookstorela.com.
***All Photos by Poor Dog Group except where noted.
