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Slaves to their art
With equal parts discipline and passion, a small theater in a kink store acts up
BY DAVE SURRATT

We Las Vegans have gotten very fond of insisting there's no real interest in community theater in this town. In fact, it barely has the ring of a complaint anymore. After years of watching eager new companies rush in to fill an off-Strip drama vacuum only to retreat with their tails between their legs, often muttering about lack of audience support, we've gained perverse confidence in our "no one here cares" diagnosis. And we've begun slapping it onto each new failure with the bitter gusto that replaces hope.

There's optimism left, though, in those who make the shows and those who watch them.

More and more, that optimism has been gathering at Commercial Center's 953 E. Sahara Ave. address and, more and more, it's been finding validation there. Don't worry; this isn't another cruel story to get you excited about the next big thing that might happen. This one's about a big thing that already happened and is still happening. Judging from the number of locals dying to be a part of it, claims of artlessness in Sin City are increasingly hard to defend.

That's the situation inside the Rack fetish wear shop where, past the gauntlet of leather skirts, chaps, muzzles, masks, gags and floggers, you'll find a cozy 100-seat auditorium improbably nestled inside the store. Like its namesake, the Onyx Theatre is dark this rainy Wednesday afternoon. Cockroach Theatre Company -- one of several now using this space -- is well into rehearsals for 7 Blowjobs. Mac Wellmen's still-relevant political satire isn't quite the voyeurist smorgasbord implied in the title, but rather an exploration (penned in 1991, before the Lewinsky affair) of censorship, morality, church-and-state separation and other knotty issues that crop up when seven salacious photos are mailed to the office of a conservative Southern senator. Desks, swivel chairs and potted ficuses define the setting, and if just one of those stage lights overhead were aimed back toward the theater, it would be easier to find a distant seat without noisily banging a knee into the armrest, which I've just done.

Those onstage don't seem to notice. Actor-director Ernie Curcio and his cast are busy polishing scenes from the frenetically written piece, gunning for the nuanced line delivery and comic timing needed to avoid the train wreck seen all-too-often when cocky companies get in over their heads with a work this challenging.

"That is precisely what--" begins actress Mundana Ess-Haghabadi, continuing a steely tirade after crossing from stage left toward Curcio.

"Sit me down on that," he interrupts, suddenly in director mode.

"That is precisely what I'm talking about," she finishes, this time planting a hand on Curcio's shoulder and pressing him down into a chair with authority, right on the adverb's middle syllable, while actors Taylor Hanes and Evelyn Barnett look on from their own positions.

After a few minutes they do notice me. We exchange greetings across a stretch of seats and the performers insist they won't be distracted by my lurking in the shadows for a bit. They're not kidding; after a moment of easy conversation, all four of them are straight back to business and into their characters so deeply it's disorienting, as if our micro-chat had never even happened. It makes sense. You don't make it to the Onyx stage these days without knowing something about how to handle an infinity of distractions, internal and external.

"[In Cockroach], I see a talented company that's been around for years," says the gatekeeper, Onyx Director John Beane, sitting in a T-shirt and blaze-orange beanie at a cluttered desk in the office he shares with Rack owner Michael Morse. "I think [7 Blowjobs] is something that'll interest our public. It's something with courage to it ... courage in the subject matter. It takes a lot to make it really work and they can pull it off."

After lying dormant for years after an initial flurry of inspired, fringy productions, Cockroach has awakened again for a four-show 2008-2009 season. The company plans on moving into their own new space at downtown's Neonopolis later this year, but until then, Onyx remains the best fit for this troupe and the anti-mainstream fare they're known for doling out.

"We've got a lot of people over 50 in our audience," says Cockroach Managing Director Levi Fackrell. "This one's not going to be for everyone necessarily, but we figured anyone coming to see a play called 7 Blowjobs isn't gonna mind walking through a fetish shop. Besides, it's a beautiful theater and I love this space."

While rehearsal goes on, Beane gives his own take on why this is a match made in Sodom.

"Part of it is just the infamy of this location," he says, describing one reason for the growing attractiveness of his venue among adventurous drama companies and audiences alike. It's not everywhere, he reminds, that you can go see a play in a theater encased in a fetishwear shop that's itself tucked into a corner known for gay leather dives and notorious sex clubs like the Green Door, situated a scant hundred feet down the sidewalk from his burgeoning arts culture nexus. All the surrounding sordidness makes people feel they're in the right place for a real theater experience.

"Shakespeare would be proud of that," Beane grins, going on to describe the aesthetic he likes to see -- or smell -- in a company before greenlighting any production at Onyx.

"It's really all about the people involved and ... smelling what's burning in them. If I can get a scent on that, of someone who's got something, some kind of power about them ... even if there's a little less finesse to it ... that's the first thing. That has to be there."

It's a striking departure from what you'll hear from more traditional theater companies proud of their diverse content and cover-all-bases programming. Beane's talk of "burning," "power" and "something" make it clear he isn't looking for mass appeal. His priorities are elsewhere, he'll tell them to you straight, and it's hard to get across with mere ellipses and italics just how infectious his energy is in conversation. One minute the guy's shifting in his seat, fixing his eyes skyward and hunting down the perfect word to convey something ineffable to begin with. Then he's leaning forward, leveling those eyes right at you and exploding into a kind of guttural eloquence, expounding on ideas you can tell have been curing in his mental smokehouse for longer than he can remember.

By the written word, his vision comes out like this, as presented in the mission statement at www.onyxtheatre.com: "We provide a space dedicated to personal artistic expression, free minds, unrestrained entertainment and socially relevant art." Compare that with what appears at the top of Cockroach's homepage ("Cockroach Theatre exists to satify a hunger for defiant theatre in artists and audiences") and you might get a better sense of the anti-orthodoxy overlap that's helped this and other partnerships along. But talk -- like the typical off-Strip theater ticket price -- is cheap. What's really going on here that's so exceptional?

Onyx's history isn't a long one, but has the depth you'd expect from a place three times its age. Rack owner Morse built this cavern himself in 2006 just to alleviate his own disgust with what he saw then as a lackluster community theater scene. Mainstream companies like Las Vegas Little Theatre had the space, while offbeat groups like Social Experimentation and Absurd Theatre (SEAT) had the passion for stage but no real place to call home.

"I knew this community needed a place for alternative theater," says Morse, "and I had the money to get this venue to work, so I did."

Once the space was finished, locals who'd caught wind of the project were treated to a couple productions (Torch Song Trilogy, Sordid Lives) that, while they didn't dazzle utterly, were solid enough and a few notches edgier than the safe-zone comedies and classics audiences had been getting elsewhere in town.

Then came Beane, whose own company, Insurgo Theatre Movement, had already been active for five years in Southern California. Lysistrata was its first production at Onyx, mounted in May 2007, with a script partially modernized by the future venue director. Not a perfect show, but the rigor and vigor this company brought to long-dead Aristophanes' tale of war-weary Athenian women witholding sex from their soldier husbands was undeniable, heralding bigger things to come.

Over the next year, Onyx would see productions of Hamlet (with emotive force Katrina Larsen in the gender-bending titular role), Witkiewicz's absurdist The Water Hen, Emily Lauren's winsome, one-woman burlesque show Sugarpuppy and South Park creator Trey Parker's fake blood-fest Cannibal! The Musical, which generated enough praise and ticket sales ("Lines going out the door," says Beane) to warrant its return a month later for a second run. Even now-defunct New American Theatre Project, the most promising and independent fringe troupe from a year before, rushed to get in on the Onyx action last November, producing Neil LaBute's queasy Bash, a trifecta of unsettling monologues including one man's agonized confession to having watched while his baby accidentally smothered itself under bedclothes.

This past August, Good Medicine Theatre Company put up Little Dog Laughed, a caustic, coming-out-themed piece in which Beane acted. Just before that came the darkest, most insidious A Midsummer Night's Dream Vegas has ever seen, infused with lots of nudity, sure, but more importantly with Insurgo's subtler blend of crafted gloom and hypersexuality. That show packed the house with community theater-interested Las Vegans -- the same ones so many still claim to be as mythical as Oberon's fairies.

As for the near future, expect similarly provocative contributions from Good Medicine, Cockroach and Atlas Theater Ensemble, who mount David Mamet's American Buffalo in January, with its themes of theft, betrayal, reconciliation and scalding dialogue throughout. Efforts from outside companies will still be heavily augmented by Insurgo, who holds up its end with original horror spoof Dragula (it's what it sounds like) in October, followed by Vegas local Shawn Hackler's recent adaptation of Kafka's man-turned-vermin Metamorphosis in November, followed fittingly by Tracy Lett's Bug closer to Christmas. More and more, newly penned pieces are taking priority over the older, Tony-winning crowd-pleasers.

"This year we're at about 50-percent original work," says Beane. "We're moving toward a season of all originals. That's the goal ... that current, modern stake in things. That's what saves this place from being a museum."

Suddenly, the originals are pouring in; all this buzz built up around Onyx has led to, on average, a new submission every day from somewhere outside its immediate circle. On top of continued communications from current Strip performers and other contributors with whom he's already forged relationships (after Tropicana-based Second City Las Vegas went belly-up last month, several members formed Improv Vegas, now performing weekly here), Beane's mailbox is filling with entreaties from the ranks of the unknown. One recent week saw four different one-man show proposals sent in by ex-drag queens, choreographers and other former Vegas performers with a desire to get back into the old scene via this new portal that Onyx seems to offer. Of course, true talent is still a universally rare commodity and Vegas is no exception. While Beane loves all the interest and is loath to miss anything that comes in -- he reads all submissions -- he says the presumptiveness of many "applicants" can be irritating.

"How do I say this?" he begins, pausing and looking up again. "Community theater is the karaoke of theater. The MySpace. Everyone can be a star, a celebrity. Motherfucker, no you can't. I know, because I fuck up a lot myself. It's not as easy as some people want to think to do this kind of thing."

Occasional bursts of outrage notwithstanding, Beane doesn't come off as nearly the arrogant bastard he fears when explaining the success of Onyx so far. It's not about one company's genius, he says, but about a kind of genius many more would-be trend-setters might show if they weren't spread so thinly. By sticking to a core creative vision and pushing it hard -- as opposed to chasing all the other beats a modern company is "supposed" to hit, like social programs, classes, second seasons or a special kids' series -- Onyx has avoided dilution into the dull groupthink and complacence that can afflict a maturing company. The gut instincts that drive good art come first, he insists, and nothing should be allowed to compromise that arrangement. True, there's a business savvy that's essential to success here -- as former owner of a small but successful computer company, Beane has that too -- but outside theater groups who share his "art first" sensibility are the ones more likely to bring that requisite fire to the Onyx table. "Why should anyone pay just to see us walking around feeling good about ourselves?" he says.

Back at the rehearsal, Cockroach has moved on to the next scene. In his shredded jeans and button-up, Curcio squats down, stage front, between Hanes and Barnett, coaching them all to rise up with waggling Hallelujah hands on the word "ontological." In another moment, all three are wide-eyed, babbling and gesticulating madly, Curcio still giving directions while standing on his head in a chair. Then they do it all again. And again. They practice the scene as many times as it takes to give Friday's opening night show-goers what these performers are convinced they want and deserve, despite what's become the conventional wisdom about Vegas and the arts.

"Is there really no audience interest here?" asks Beane. "Are we just a bunch of degenerates here who shun real culture? I don't think so. I think there's been more confusion in the ones putting on shows than in the ones watching them."