Take a look at this article by Ed Fuentes on Blog Downtown!
http://blogdowntown.com/2009/06/4468-garage-guerrilla-theater-on-main-street
THE DOWNTOWN REPERTORY THEATER COMPANY
presents Max Frisch’s
The Firebugs
425 S Main St. Los Angeles
6th Floor, Parking Structure
June 26-July 11
Los Angeles, CA- Parking garages are inherently unsettling places. Somehow dark and ominous even when brightly lit, they emphasize human isolation and vulnerability; there’s a reason why so many movies and television shows have scenes in which the characters are chased or terrorized in a parking garage So why would the Downtown Repertory Theater Company want to spend the next two months putting on performances in one? According to founder and Artistic Director Devon Armstrong, it’s the ideal setting for the type of theater they want to produce: dark and unsettling.
“The Firebugs”, the first of three plays the company will be presenting in the space, is perfectly suited to the environment; the parking structure amplifies the sense of isolation and alienation that Max Frisch evokes with his text. While it was written specifically about the Nazi rise to power in Germany, the play is equally pertinent in today’s political climate.
The story of Gottlieb and Babette Biederman, who unwittingly welcome two arsonists into their home and then pathetically attempt to befriend them, the play is thematically expansive while at the same time intensely intimate, even a bit claustrophobic. Which is not to say the piece is joyless; in fact, few moments of this play take themselves wholly seriously. The arsonists, while malevolent, often take on a slapstick tone; the woebegone chorus actually parodies itself with its overblown theatricality, and the Biedermanns provide further comic relief with their puppy-dog faith in the power of hospitality. Where drama would moralize, this play satirizes. The Firebugs is a fierce and acrimonious assault on the principle of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.
Firebugs will be performed on the 6th floor of the parking structure at 425 S. Main Street, Los Angeles, 90013 on Fri.& Sat, June 26th & 27th, Thurs. & Fri. July 2nd & 3rd, and Fri. & Sat. July 10th & 11th. Shows start at 7:30 and run approximately an hour and a quarter. This production is sponsored by Tom Gilmore and Associates (laloft.com), Pete’s Café and Bar (petescafe.com), The Pasadena Waldorf School (pasadenawaldorf.org) and Bedlam magazine (bedlammagazine.com).
PRODUCTION NOTES
Initially, when the company started looking for a theater space downtown, they were looking at empty storefronts, but most of these, being very small, limited the types of plays the company could consider. When Tom Gilmore, Jerri Perrone and Trish Keefer of Tom Gilmore and Associates suggested they use the 6th floor of the parking garage at 425 S. Main,, which is temporarily empty awaiting the completion of nearby lofts on Spring Street, they were immediately intrigued. “Although it presents some difficulties logistically”, Artistic Director Devon Armstrong says, “it offers some very exciting possibilities in terms of how the productions can be staged. The lack of a proscenium arch, curtains and a lighting grid dictates a completely different approach from the one you might normally take.. It isn’t even like black-box theater, which is often restricted in terms of space. The challenge here is pretty much the opposite: to take a large and visually compelling space and exploit it to best effect without attempting to minimize it. When our production designer came in to take a look, his first reaction was, ‘What a great place to do theater. Don’t deny the space, celebrate it!’ This is what we’ll be attempting to do.”
The Downtown Rep., as the name implies, knew from the start that it would be seeking a home in downtown Los Angeles, specifically in the Historic District. Wanting to make live theater as accessible as possible to the downtown audience, the company settled on the Main Street/Spring Street corridor, with its high concentration of residential lofts. The idea is to provide a neighborhood theater that people can walk to, or, as the company likes to put it, ‘Theater Worth Crossing the Street For’.
THE PLAYWRIGHT
Max Frisch (1911-1991) was a novelist, playwright and architect celebrated for his post WWII literature. Born in 1911 in Zurich (where he spent most of his life before coming to America on a Rockefeller Grant), he wrote as an adolescent and through his college years, but it wasn’t until 1944 that he began playwriting, 1947 (also in Zurich) that he met and befriended his obvious influence- Bertolt Brecht- and the 50’s and 60’s that he wrote his most venerated plays, The Firebugs and Andorra.
THE ENSEMBLE
The Downtown Rep. is made up primarily of alumni from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. Devon Armstrong is a LACHSA graduate, as are cast members Dylan Wittrock, Connor Kelly-Eiding, MatthewFinston, and choreographer Yael Baifus. Other members of the cast, which include Colleen Kelly-Eiding, Chloe Cheney-Rice, Paulina Bracone and Charls Sedgwick Hall, also have connections to LACHSA. Director Peter Siragusa and Stage manager Jordan Siragusa are long-time friends of several cast members.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR THE FIREBUGS
“The play's allusion to the absurdly blind eye of the world to the mass killing of Jews by the Third Reich is evident. But its themes of denial and self-justification, of good people closing their eyes to their own complicity with evil, certainly have resonance today as well in both Middle Eastern politics and the scandals in the Roman Catholic Church.”
-The New York Times
“a theatrical joy… dresses this obvious political indictment in the flashy glad rags of absurdist exaggeration, an ominous chorus of firemen, herky-jerky rhythms and farcical action… ‘Firebugs’ belongs to a category of plays… such as famous political allegories like Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ and Arthur Miller's ‘The Crucible.’”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Brechtian cutting edge”
-CurtainUp Reviews