Playwright set his brain on mishmash when whipping up collage-like salute to U.S. America in a blender

The Los Angeles premiere of Charles L. Mee’s play will open Jan. 23, with previews Thursday and Jan. 22, and run through Feb. 28 at [Inside] the Ford at the Ford Theatres complex, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Los Angeles. Performances begin at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, and 3 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $20 for adults, $12 for students and seniors, and pay-what-you-can for previews and Sunday matinees. For more information, call 323-461-3673 (For group sales - 8 or more - call (323) 769-2147) or visit www.fordampitheater.org or www.thespyants.com.

Charles L. Mee’s play, “bobrauschenbergamerica,” pays homage to our country’s idiosyncratic soul. Mee calls the piece “a wild road trip through our American landscape.”


Playwright set his brain on mishmash when whipping up collage-like salute to U.S.
America in a blender

By Jeff Favre
Posted January 15, 2010 at 12:01 a.m.

Playwright Charles L. Mee didn’t know artist Bob Rauschenberg, and the members of TheSpyAnts Theatre Company had never met celebrated director Bart DeLorenzo.

But this quartet of creative forces has merged for the Los Angeles premiere of Mee’s “bobrauschenbergamerica,” which opens at [Inside] the Ford, the indoor theater at the Ford Theatres complex in Los Angeles. The show is part of the venue’s winter theatrical season.

Mee described the play on his Web site as “a wild road trip through our American landscape — in a play made as one of America’s greatest artists, Robert Rauschenberg, might have conceived it if he had been a playwright instead of a painter: a collage of people and places and music and dancing, of love stories and picnics and business schemes and shootings and chicken jokes and golfing, and of the sheer exhilaration of living in a country where people make up their lives as they go.”

Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, is perhaps best known for his collages, and his “combines” of the 1950s and ’60s, assemblages created with found objects.

The play debuted in 2001 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky., and almost immediately caught the attention of SpyAnts producer Lori Evans Taylor
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“We’re always on the lookout for new plays,” Taylor said. “We applied for the rights, but were turned down because the SITI Company (Mee’s frequent collaborator) were touring it. We applied every year, and then finally they started allowing other companies to produce the show.”

It’s understandable why companies clambered for the rights. Neil Genzlinger wrote in his New York Times review that Mee’s play is “much richer than simply bringing a Rauschenberg artwork to life; it is an effort to see our times as they were seen by this artist, who over his long career has shown how junk can be beautiful and how juxtaposition, the mixing of incongruous elements, can be a statement.”

Given the complexities of “bobrauschenbergamerica,” TheSpyAnts went outside its company to find a director with extensive experience working on Mee plays.

Enter DeLorenzo, who as part of The Evidence Room theater company directed “The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem” and “The Berlin Circle,” and took part in a workshop of Mee’s “A Perfect Wedding.”

“I wasn’t at all familiar with TheSpyAnts when they called me,” DeLorenzo said. “And I don’t exactly say yes to everyone who asks. But I love this play. It’s so much fun. And the company was already familiar with the script, so that’s an advantage.”

DeLorenzo, in turn, enlisted Ken Roht as choreographer. Roht is best known for his annual holiday “99¢ Only Show,” created with props and costumes made from items at 99 Cents Only stores.

“Ken and I haven’t worked together for three years, but he was part of the other Chuck Mee plays we did, and incredibly he was available.”

And DeLorenzo can use all the help he can get. While most of Mee’s plays are unusual, “bobrauschenbergamerica” is composed of 43 nonlinear scenes.

“It’s very complicated,” the director explained. “It’s composed of parts that all seem unrelated — like with Rauschenberg’s collages — and each one needs to be given its own integrity. It may not seem like it, but all together there’s structure and it does tell a story, even though it’s kind of like taking six plays, putting them in a blender, and serving only the top half.”

For TheSpyAnts, getting a slot for this season’s [Inside] the Ford series and producing a high-profile play should only increase the company’s reputation.

“We’re celebrating our 10th anniversary,” Evans said. “I’m not surprised that we’re still going because the core members are still here. And this amazingly theatrical show, which is probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen, is a wonderful opportunity for our company.”

@TO-Tagline:— E-mail freelance columnist Jeff Favre at jjfavre@gmail.com
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