Tony Gatto and Lulu Brud in "Baby Doll"
In the past 15 years, Elephant Theatre Company has certainly earned a reputation for its provocative and perhaps even aggressive choices in material. Although they typically favor new and original plays, the Elephant artistic directors are certainly not strangers to earlier works that are unconventional and controversial. So it shouldn’t have come as a shock to anyone that they decided to revive Tennessee Williams’ under-produced Baby Doll, which was originally heralded as “lewd, suggestive, and morally repellent,” among other choice phrases.
It also seems fitting that for a period piece, the Elephant chose a director with strong aesthetic ties—Joel Daavid, one of the Elephant’s mainstage set and lighting designers for the past six years. As it turns out, it was actually Daavid who solicited Elephant artistic director David Fofi to mount the play.
“I originally approached David about renting the space for Baby Doll,” Daavid says, “and doing it as an independent co-production between he and I. At the time, the Elephant was looking for a slot to fill in their season, so David approached [co-artistic director] Lindsay Allbaugh about doing it as a part of their season, and they agreed. Normally the Elephant doesn’t do this type of work. Their seasons are usually comprised of original dramas. So to do something of this nature was a definite departure for them.”
Joel Daavid
Adapted from Williams’ one-act 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and released originally as a film in 1956, Baby Doll tells the story of a 19-year old girl named Baby Doll who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older man, Archie Lee, due to an agreement made between Lee and her father that she would remain a virgin until her 20th birthday. Meanwhile, a rival for Baby Doll’s affections arises in the form of a younger Sicilian gin mill owner.
“It’s a story where a man is losing everything, including his wife,” Daavid says. “He’s losing his business, his marriage, and even his sanity. It’s a story of revenge, betrayal, prejudice—there’s a lot of prejudice going on in this time period. We’re in the South in the 1950s. So this Italian man who comes into town, he’s pretty much looked on by the people as one of the Negroes. But I think the bottom line is that it’s the story of a man who wants to do good for his wife, but he makes bad choices that brings him down the wrong path and he pretty much loses everything in the process, including his soul.”
When asked what about this play felt distinctly “Elephant” to him, Daavid replies, “I think it definitely has the Elephant sensibility in the way that we’re producing it. It’s not a very glossy piece. It’s Tennessee Williams, so the writing has that inherent quality that the Elephant likes. I think that was one of the main reasons why David Fofi was interesting in selecting this piece. “
Daavid is also quick to assure audiences that though the play takes place in the 1950s South, contemporary Los Angeles audiences will find socially relevant subject matter. “Sexual politics plays a large role in this play. The use of sexual politics to get what you want. Prejudice, certainly. There’s definitely still prejudice around these days, although perhaps not the same type of prejudice that there was in those days. Thankfully, I think we’re all a little less into revenge than we were back in those days, at least openly.” He laughs.
Jacque Lynn Colton, Michael Wilkie, Chloe Peterson, Marie Burke, Bernadette Speakes and Ugonna Mbele
As Daavid sits on the massive six-tiered set he has constructed at the Lillian, he gives the impression that for him, vision is the name of the game. But holding three jobs — director, set designer, and lighting designer — is a rather daunting load.
“The challenge for me has been stepping out of one pair of shoes and getting into the other pair. It has definitely been a balance as to what I can physically, mentally, and emotionally do in both parts of it. Adam [Haas] Hunter, my associate director, has been my right hand man this entire time and has been essential as that other pair of eyes and offering that fresh perspective. He comes from a movement background, and I wanted that type of sensibility to help tell the story of Baby Doll. David Fofi has pretty much been the mentor of the project, and his background as a director has helped me out a lot in terms of being able to fine-tune the scenes and give a more organic sense to the blocking. For me, it’s all about having a singular vision. But I’m also very open to collaboration, which is why I love working with brilliant people like Adam Hunter and David Fofi, because they bring their own voice to the table. I’m one of those directors who likes to allow their actors to have the freedom to be creative.”
In terms of his principal cast, Daavid is both confident and proud of the cast he has selected. “Lulu Brud, who plays Baby Doll, came into the production very early on. She was a referral from David Fofi. She came in to do a reading for us, and she did so well the first time out, and visually she was exactly what I was looking for with Baby Doll—someone innocent, but at the same time very sensual. She immediately came in with this sense of exactly who Baby Doll was, and after she read, right away I turned to David Fofi and said ‘She’s great! Let’s get her.’ So we went ahead and pretty much hired her on the spot, right after the first reading.”
Lulu Brud and Ronnie Marmo
But in another role, there was a change along the way. “Tony [Gatto] actually came to us later, after we had lost our original actor, who had signed on to do it, but then got a paying job. [Laughs]. And that was a big blow, it really was. So we went to Tony, who is an original Elephant company member, who had actually read for the role. When he came back in to replace the other actor that we’d lost, his performance was considerably different and much, much better than before, and I think that had to do with the fact that he had gotten a second chance. I’m of the school of thought that things work out for a reason, and Tony is just amazing. He is Archie Lee. He plays him like it’s his second nature.”
“Ronnie Marmo, who plays Silva, the Italian, actually came through me. I had worked with him as a designer on a project over at Theatre 68. I like Ronnie because of his back-story. His father had come over from Italy and had to deal with a lot of prejudice, so he opened up to me about that and about his desire to do this role as an homage to his father and what he went through. I immediately felt that he was very passionate about the piece and was really invested in conveying that part of the story in his performance.”
Daavid cites his ensemble performers, in particular, as playing a crucial role in expressing his vision and providing a completely immersive experience for his audience. “Socially, we’re trying to re-create that time period within the piece, and we’re doing that by using the ensemble more like Greek chorus. They’re giving us that commentary on the time period and on the prejudice. The ensemble is the heart of the play in a very significant way. At the opening of the show, there’s a five-minute piece that’s nothing but movement and sets the tone for the entire show. It pulls the audience into this world, not only in a physical sense, but also in a metaphysical sense. We want to instill that heaviness that comes from the daily lives of those Southern workers at that time. This is a working town, and not everybody is doing well. There is struggle here, and we definitely try to incorporate that as much as possible and have the audience experience that through the use of theatrical elements.”
Dave Metz, Jacque Lynn Colton and Tony Gatto
Even for a man with a strong visual aesthetic, the challenge of adapting a cinematic screenplay into a stage play housed in a 99-seat theater has proved difficult. It seems, however, that Daavid has found ample ways to use ambience and stage magic to instill that cinematic quality into his work. “Nick Block, who is a newcomer to the theater scene, is doing an original score. It’s a sort of blues-based, orchestral film score, because the script is actually the screenplay from the movie. It was not written as a play. So what we’ve basically done is created the movie onstage. It’s big. It’s not set in a single room or a single location. The set itself is a unit set, and everything plays on it. We have everything from a cotton gin, a bar, an exterior in the city streets, as well as the house. But overall trying to create a movie like this for the stage has been a big challenge because we don’t have the luxury of flying in scenery or anything like that. We have had to be creative in building this world that all of these different scenes can play on.”
For Daavid, moving into the director’s chair is not about disassociating himself from his designer background, but rather about embracing it and using his skills to further enhance the theatrical experience. “What I would like most is for the audience to experience a type of theater that is different. A type of theater that I have been trying to use as my signature, which involves incorporating lots of different types of storytelling. Instead of just a straight play, where you have just the actors, I’m incorporating theater movement, lights, sound, music in a way that it’s a little bit more organic, but still uses different techniques to tell the story.”
Baby Doll, produced by the Elephant Theatre Company in association with Double A Productions. Opens Nov. 11. Plays Fri.-Sat. 8 pm; Sun. 7 pm. Through December 18. Tickets: $25. The Lillian Theatre, 1076 N. Lillian Way, Hollywood. 323-960-4420. www.plays411.com/babydoll or www.elephanttheatrecompany.com.
