New Theater Group Discovers Westside in ‘Fear and Misery’

What’s this?

A new L.A. theater group, whose name translates as rich in hope , with a maiden voyage production titled “Fear and Misery of the Westside”?

Hoffenrich founder and artistic director Mike Stutz clearly has some explaining to do.

“The way I think of it is that there are problems and answers,” 25-year-old Stutz says, accenting his words with firm hand gestures as he sits outdoors at a Santa Monica cafe. “ ‘Fear and Misery’ represents the problem. What Hoffenrich does with our outreach to school kids is part of the answer.”

First, the problem.

During much of this volatile year of growing national discontent, unrest in the streets and charged politics, playwright Steven Wolfson has molded his reflections on living in Los Angeles--particularly in the Westside area he says is “grossly” mischaracterized as being purely an enclave of the rich--into “Fear and Misery.”

“But it wasn’t enough to do just another L. A. play,” Wolfson said. “I find that a lot of work set here and now is massaging the audience, or giving them the cheap thrill of being voyeurs.

“I was in the Hollywood public library, looking through the section on Bertolt Brecht--whose plays I really love--and came across this odd creation of his, ‘Fear and Misery of the Third Reich.’ It’s a collection of 24 short scenes that pulls away the curtain and looks inside the domestic lives of people in Hitler’s Germany. Taken as a whole, it draws a view of a whole society.”

So, with Wolfson transplanting the action to the land of beaches, the 405 Freeway and Beverly Hills--as well as the poorer neighborhoods of Venice and the Pico Corridor--is he telling us that we’re on the cusp of some American Reich?

“It isn’t that literal, and an obvious difference is that we’re doing this, while Brecht was never able to get the play staged during Hitler’s rule.”

(Brecht had nearly as much difficulty arranging a U. S. production after he exiled himself to Los Angeles in 1941. Finally, the first production of Eric Bentley’s translation was staged at UCLA at the end of World War II.)

As he worked on the play in the Mark Taper Forum’s Mentor Playwrights Project workshop under the guidance of director Peter Brosius, Wolfson, 26, found that the alienation Brecht saw in Hitlerian society was at the core of his own L. A. examination.

“How do we expect communities to come together, as we’re hearing so much in the efforts to heal the city, when we’re really one big dysfunctional group? My central character, Angela, is frustrated that she can’t bring people together, so she turns to the heavens, believing that the angels the city is named for will come back and save it just in time.

“But, of course, this won’t happen. Believing like this or getting your $75,000 Mercedes may buy you time to think that things will be all right, but time is running out. Everyone will have to deal with AIDS, homelessness, divorce.”

Angela’s and the other Westsiders’ escapes from alienation take them in the play from designer restaurants on La Brea Avenue to a visionary experience at the statue of Santa Monica, patron saint of the seaside city. Interspersed are the kind of mundane Brechtian moments Wolfson translated into a distinctly Westside accent.

“I’ve had friends,” he says, “who were closer to their housemaid than their parents, and they would rather die than see her go. So it’s a real crisis in the play when this happens. It’s a way of showing, in miniature, the deep-set problems people hide from.”

Director Brosius calls Wolfson “very quick and sharp, and he managed to create in this play a cry of consciousness and a wake-up call. I like how the play blends a critical sensibility with delicious comedy, while at the same time asking what is divine in the individual.”

San Diego-born Stutz, who looks every bit the robust, athletic type you’d see on that city’s Pacific Beach any weekend of the year, seems at first an odd spokesman for a program of theater and social justice. But his descriptions of his day-to-day hustling for “dollar bills and change” to fund Hoffenrich’s various projects suggests fund raising as a sporting event.

“We’re way too new to attract big donors,” he says, noting that the $6,800 raised thus far is $2,700 short of the budget goal. “And we’re wary of public funding: Will it be there tomorrow? I started with my own money, but it didn’t come close to what we needed to do. So I’ve talked to everybody, from my father--who said it wasn’t exactly the soundest business decision--to people on the street. Literally coming up to people and asking for anything.”

That can mean not only money, but volunteered time. Stutz says that members of the setup crew for “Fear” are having their first contact with the theater, and that the Hoffenrich actors were told to get rid of their regular jobs, since being in Hoffenrich meant more than putting on a play.

Which brings us to “the answer.”

During most weekdays, Stutz and his acting quintet will be found at Montebello High School, leading students in a crash course on theater, art and “opening doors.”

“I had led Shakespeare workshops at Montebello in the past, but now, with our company, we’re able to expand into showing them how to create their own theater,” he says.

“We first talk about the entertainment they enjoy, and how theater history has influenced what they see. Then, we move them into an improv around the theme of the First Amendment and censorship. It gives them the confidence to put together a little play around a theme they really care about, like how cuts in school funding affect them. They can get their real feelings out there.”

Giving young people alternatives where none seemed to be--and in a school where even sports programs may be threatened with severe cuts--appears to be an obsession with Stutz, who sees theater as a key way for those at society’s margins to find a voice.

“When I went to UCLA, I worked at Unicamp,” he recalls, referring to the university-sponsored camp for underprivileged youth. “My pals told me there was no way I could bring gang members together for anything . But it happened, because they could adopt characters and make contact that way. Same thing at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, where I worked with abused teens. With play-making and improvs, we got disturbed kids on their feet in one session.”

Another margin Hoffenrich’s theater strategy plans to invade in the near future is the street. Stutz’s playwriting friend Nathan Canby has written playlets using direct quotes from public officials, which Hoffenrich actors will play out at street corners, park benches and other public meeting places.

“We want to place politicians’ rhetoric in public sites,” Stutz says, “with the actors in street clothes and no makeup. They’ll just show up in a crowd, and start talking. We have a piece called ‘Jesse Helms on the Bus,’ which we’ll do once we get the OK from transit officials.”

Stutz pauses, then reflects: “There’s a lot of theater right now that’s full of hate. I’m interested in getting an audience to the point where they’re not hating, but wanting to take an active stance.”