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THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK | January 18, 2005, Tuesday

Actors Exit One Troupe To Build Another

By DINITIA SMITH (NYT) 1282 words
Late Edition - Final , Section E , Page 1 , Column 6

For Craig Smith, the musical "Dames at Sea" was the last straw.

Mr. Smith had been an actor at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Company for 30 years. He had devoted his life to the ideal of classically oriented theater, holding down a day job as senior editor at the publishing company Elsevier, rehearsing and performing nights and weekends. But now the Cocteau had changed. A new artistic director was appointed in 1999, and he was bringing in new actors and choosing new kinds of shows - musicals, like "Dames."

Last August, a month before "Dames" opened, five of the theater's 11 trustees resigned after a contentious board meeting. Over the next several days, four disaffected actors, including Mr. Smith, left too. So what did they do?

What else? They created another theater company, the Phoenix Theater Ensemble. The company finished its first production Jan. 9: "The Trial," Jean-Louis Barrault and Andr? Gide's adaptation of Kafka's novella. Campbell Robertson called it "a promising debut" in The New York Times, and it sold out its five-week run.

"We felt absolute relief," Mr. Smith said. "Everything was so public that we were on the line."

Now comes the hard part: doing it again.

Creating a new theater from scratch, particularly at a time when arts institutions everywhere are having trouble raising funds, is not an enviable task.

But the difficulties paled in comparison to the desire. For most of those involved, acting at the Cocteau was almost a religious experience. "As Peter Brook says about the theater," said Angela Madden, who was with the Cocteau and is now with the Phoenix, "there is something very holy about it. It's almost like going to church."

Above all, what mattered was the ensemble nature. "It doesn't matter what role you're playing," Ms. Madden said. "The bottom line is the show, the production. From the lead person to the third swordsman."

The Cocteau built a reputation as a meticulously directed ensemble theater, its actors working in symbiotic rhythm, intimately acquainted with one another's strengths and foibles. "There wasn't an actor in New York who wouldn't kill to work there," Ms. Madden said. "Every time you did a production, the buzz would be, 'Did you see that show?' "

The disaffected members wanted to recreate that experience with the Phoenix.

Above all, they resolved to be an "artist-directed" ensemble, Mr. Smith said, with each member serving for one year as director, or "tie-breaker."

But to do that they needed money - for legal fees, for office expenses and to mount a production. The group incorporated. Three former trustees of the Cocteau joined the new board. In September they held a fund-raiser at the Den at Two Boots restaurant. It was a screening of "Waiting for Guffman," Christopher Guest's satire about a group of amateurs trying to put on a play, "so we wouldn't take ourselves too seriously," said Elise Stone, Mr. Smith's wife, who is also an actor with the new company.

Another fund-raiser followed. A mailing list was created. Friends and supporters, former audience members at the Cocteau, sent checks. All together, the company raised about $40,000.

"We had a lot of advantages," Ms. Stone said. "We have a large audience base following us from over the years. If we were very young we couldn't be doing this."

For their first production, the members decided on "The Trial," the story of a man who wakes up one morning to find himself accused of an unnamed crime and embarks on a nightmarish journey. It is "a true ensemble piece," Mr. Smith said, and a choice true to the theater's new mission - to mount "plays that demand to be done on the stage, rather than on film."

But they had to find a theater. "We have a lot of friends in New York," Ms. Stone said. One is Jonathan Bank, director of the Mint Theater on West 43rd Street, who told them they could use his space.

For the lead role of Joseph K., the group went outside, to John Lenartz. "Everybody assumed we were doing this to produce ourselves in plays," Ms. Stone said. But Mr. Smith, who is 55, said he did not want the part of Joseph K.: "I don't think I was right for the role, one. And two, I'm too old." Instead he played the Advocate, whom Joseph entreats to help him, and also a Waiting Person.

In true ensemble fashion, the 14 cast members had multiple roles. Ms. Madden, for example, played Miss Burstner, a neighbor, and one of the simpering schoolgirls who flutter about Joseph K. Ms. Stone played Mrs. Grubach, the landlady, as well as a Young Girl and a Little Girl.

The longtime familiarity among the actors was critical, said Jason Crowl, who played Titorelli, the artist who finally reveals to Joseph K. the truth of his horrible situation, as a sinister, epicene figure. Mr. Crowl left the Cocteau about two years ago because he was unhappy.

Mr. Crowl, who describes himself as transgendered, said, "I wouldn't have made Titorelli as interesting as he was if I didn't know the people in the cast and couldn't say, 'I'm going to make him freaky and androgynous and hope everyone is O.K. with that.' "

To direct, the group hired Eve Adamson, who founded the Cocteau in 1971 and resigned as its artistic director in 1990.

In the spirit of the new collective, actors, director, designers and stagehands were each paid $500 for the entire run.

This spring, the ensemble hopes to produce a series of plays in bars, appropriately called "A Play in a Pub." The first would be "A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot," Tennessee Williams's play about two prostitutes in a bar during a convention.

Regarding presenting plays in a pub, Ms. Stone noted that in Shakespeare's time, "audiences ate at the theater while the play went on and they socialized." So, Mr. Smith said, the company expects the audience to "go up to the bar and order drinks" during the performance.

The company also plans to commission works by both new and established authors.

Whether this shoestring operation will be able to pull off such grand plans is not certain. One cause of the fallout with the Cocteau was the ambition of its new artistic director, David Fuller, to put the company on a surer financial footing.

The actors, he said in a recent interview, "were incredibly overworked and underpaid," and he wanted to make the Cocteau fully unionized, with health and pension benefits for all. He reasoned, not illogically, that musical theater would bring in new, and bigger, audiences.

He was right. His 2003 production of "The Threepenny Opera" was a success and drew people who had never attended a performance by the Cocteau before.

As for the Phoenix, even without all the necessary funds in hand, it is making plans. Next fall, members want to mount "The Infernal Machine," an adaptation of the Oedipus legend by none other than Jean Cocteau.

"You put yourself out there," Mr. Smith said. "You're really taking a risk." That, he said, "would've bothered me at one time. But now it doesn't bother me at all."