A giant beard made of hundreds of paper butterflies. A half-bird, half-woman with a 25-foot wingspan. A colorful zigzag of puppets, actors and local residents in parade along the beach, on the way to a shipwreck. It seems more dream than reality. But like their vision for a new theater company, the founders of Santa Monica Rep fully expect to bring all this to life. Their plan to build a professional repertory company from scratch’no theater house, little money and one dedicated actor’seems audacious, bordering on crazy. But Jen and Eric Bloom and Sarah Gurfield have more than enough experience to know what they’re getting into. And they have an abundance of energy and wildly creative ideas. Add some help from the community, a dash of magic, and it begins to feel more like a fait accompli. The company’s first full-fledged production’of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest”is set for August 10-14 at the Annenberg Community Beach House, where the three are artists in residence. ’This play has everything in it, everything and the kitchen sink,’ Jen Bloom says. ‘There’s a wedding, a shipwreck, a monster, magic, heartache, compassion.’ It’s also a fitting choice for the new company’s first work because it was Shakespeare’s last play and ‘he was surrounded by a repertory company of actors his entire life,’ she says. Audiences don’t have to wait until August to see what the group is up to. The company plans to stage open rehearsals in public venues beginning at 4 p.m. Friday, July 15 at the Beach House (updates are available on Twitter@santamonicarep). These ‘pop-up’ rehearsals will happen out in the open, amidst whatever happens to be going on, and are meant to allow passersby to see and comment on the work. ’There’s a real folk tradition of doing theater live and rehearsing it live,’ though not in American theater, Jen notes. Audiences seem hungry for an understanding of how art is constructed. ’People are so fascinated with process,’ Jen says. ‘I think people spend so much time watching reality TV [competitions]’that this is affecting how they engage with artists. They want to see the work before it’s done, they want to feel like they’re a part of something'[to say] ‘I was there when you started making that.” Community involvement is a key tenet of Santa Monica Rep’s mission. The company hosted two ‘community builds,’ where residents helped assemble puppets (a key element of this ‘Tempest’). Small children cut out construction-paper fish and glued them to long sticks, and created anemones from twisty crepe paper and paper cupcake liners. Grown-ups helped build prototypes for large-scale puppet heads to be used in rehearsals. During one build, scenic and puppet designer John Burton told a story about his encounter with a huge pelican sitting atop a short pole; he was enthralled with the mechanics of its beak. While he was talking, Jen was inspired to consider the pelican as a model for the Tempest’s harpy, a bird-like monster with a woman’s head. Just minutes later, Akemi Gutierrez, an illustrator who once worked as an animator at Disney, appeared with a whimsical sketch of the would-be puppet’s head. This sort of integration of life into art and vice versa seems part of the working group’s DNA. It was a love of the community, a feeling that they had finally found a place to call home, that prompted the Blooms (who have been married three years) to start the company with Gurfield, who was born and raised in Santa Monica. While living in North Hollywood, the Blooms built a small stage in their backyard to produce live music and artists’ salons with a core of about 20 artists. ‘By the time we left North Hollywood, we had audiences of 75 people in our backyard,’ Eric says. ’We felt really at home once we moved to Santa Monica,’ he continues. ‘And when you feel at home in a place, you want to give back to it what you’re good at. Theater’s what we’re good at, so it just seemed like the obvious thing.’ Sarah Gurfield (busy at the time of this interview) has directed both film and theater, including work on Broadway for the award-winning Roundabout Theatre and at Carnegie Hall. Eric Bloom is a graduate of the University of Maryland theater department and co-founder of the campus’ first all-sketch comedy troupe. An actor and producer, he works fulltime at the Broad Stage as a production associate. Jen Bloom, who has a master’s degree in acting and directing, was on the theater faculty at Providence College and Rhode Island College for five years, and started two earlier East Coast companies. ’I’ve been doing theater my whole life; it’s my preferred medium of storytelling,’ Jen says, adding, ‘We decided to do this so that we could control our own destinies.’ ’There are all these small, sort of non-professional companies’ in Santa Monica, Eric says, and ‘there are a couple of dues-paying houses, but there wasn’t a repertory resident company like you’d find in Costa Mesa or San Diego.’ But why puppets for ‘The Tempest?’ ’I fell in love with puppets a few years ago,’ Jen says. ‘What I love about them is that they can do things humans can’t.’ They also evoke surprisingly real reactions from the audience. ‘People see how they work’you see the man in the black pants, you see the person operating the marionette. They know that saber-toothed cat is fake, but they scream every single time. There’s a real atavistic quality’to me it’s the most theatrical thing ever.’ The cat she’s referring to is a smilodon she built in collaboration with the Jim Henson Creature Shop. It was a project for Los Angeles’ Natural History Museum, where she writes and directs theater pieces to educate audiences about dinosaurs, evolution and animal behavior. She translates research-heavy scientific information about how the animals move, eat and attack into accessible theater, aided by the appeal of realistic, large-scale puppets of the long-ago creatures. ’At the museum we have several types of puppets. We have full suit, we have marionette, we have stilted creatures, we have hand puppets, we have full bunraku (traditional Japanese style puppet theater),’ Jen says, clearly delighted by the myriad of options. The work, now part-time, also taught her ‘how to engage a 3-year-old, a 33-year-old and a 73-year-old using the same material.’ The wide-ranging audience for ‘The Tempest’ will sit outside the Marion Davies guest house at the north end of the public beach house (at 415 PCH) and the seven actors (playing 24 different parts) will work on one of three open-air levels’the ground floor and one of two balconies. They won’t wear microphones, so Jen was very demanding about the actors’ ability to bring a strong physicality and precision in language to their roles. ’L.A. film actors can’t always do that,’ she says. They’re trained by film and television to work ‘small.’ But a yoga workshop helped sort out who could rise to the occasion. ‘I found that yoga was the quickest way to get my actors to a deeper and more authentic place,’ says Jen, also a trained yoga teacher, ‘because endorphins literally start firing and then they have to be on their voice and their breath has to be deeper in their body. No one has to talk about psychology ‘ just do some ‘down dogs’ and stand up and you’re gonna be intense.’ The group launched the company in 2010 with a series of readings at the Santa Monica Public Library and things took off from there much faster than they expected. Now they’re thinking about a permanent venue. ’Your audience needs to know where you’re going to be all the time so that they don’t have to guess,’ Eric says. ‘That’s going to be the one thing at the top of the list that determines whether Santa Monica Rep has a long life or not’how quickly and sustainably we can find a home.’ But first they have to finish paying for this play. The Annenberg arts residency covers about half of the production costs, in addition to making the guest house available as a stage. A grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation allowed Jen to hire a professional staff manager and professional actor (Eric). But, ‘We need to raise at least $3,000 more to cover artist fees, designer fees, materials, nuts and bolts like water, snacks and all that,’ Eric says, adding ‘We definitely need to start putting money into an operational budget so that we can produce a show in the fall, or the spring at the very latest.’ They’ve launched an online fundraising campaign through Fractured Atlas (a national artists’ sponsor) and Indiegogo at santamonicarep.com. ’There’s just no way around it,’ Eric says. ‘If you’re going to build a theater company, you’re going to have to ask your community for money.’ But he, Jen and Sarah are set to offer a great deal in return’the stuff of dreams.
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