Wilson (lying), Sturdivant, Bartle, Slonina, Griffin and Curtis
Theater folks tend to be different. They’re always so poised, so well-spoken and so ridiculously good-looking. And they always appear to be experiencing every little life moment on far deeper levels, all their happy and sad and angry sagas playing out so damn dramatically.
Theater folks’ artistic struggles are always just a little more glamorous, too. They grow up in Chicago, like Jim Slonina, 34, graduating with an arts degree from the University of Illinois and logging credits with Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the nonprofit Defiant Theatre (where he acted, directed and artistic-directed). Both serious and smirky, they look the perfect part of both the lively-eyed drug dealer with the heart of gold and the intensely cerebral Roman assemblyman, laurels resting on their curly hair and toga draping their slight frames. They win lots of acting awards along the way.
Or, like Wayne Wilson, they hail from Houston and study at Minneapolis’ visionary Guthrie Theatre, London’s Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. They take frequent cigarette breaks, move rapidly and speak even more quickly and goof around between takes by throwing sugar packets and creating naughty doodles. Then they transform instantaneously from aw-shucks 23-year-olds to consummate acting professionals who capture every eye in the room. They too win lots of acting awards along the way.
Bartle and Wilson keep the mood light pre-bedroom scene
In some instances, they meet as Le Reve performers and ultimately, unsatisfied with their roles’ comedic mugging and not-really-all-that-dramatic stretches, they decide to go off-Strip with an independent endeavor. They keep their day jobs, sure, but they begin to dedicate untold hours shaping their vision for the New American Theatre Project, with Slonina serving as managing associate and Wilson taking on artistic-director duties. Above all else, they try to succeed where other Vegas collectives have failed, by not only railing against the region’s “vacuum of creativity” but also by ensuring the business side of things keeps up with the creative side.
They cobble together their first effort, Kenneth Lonergan’s disaffected This Is Our Youth, last spring at Las Vegas Little Theatre, off Spring Mountain Road. The play’s director, Gregg Curtis, notes in the program, “We have taken a big step off the Strip to do our part to infuse noncommercial art into the belly of the commercial beast.” They open the extended monologues of Eric Bogosian’s Wake Up and Smell the Coffee in January despite an unheated space and a chunk of the volunteers (and they’re all volunteers here) down with some serious sniffles. March sees the one-weekend-only variety-show-improv-comedy The Gazillionaire Show at the Aruba Hotel, and a month later they prepare to return with Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things, a work that starts off a romantic comedy and rapidly narrows into a dark drama concerning friendship, love, art, deception and manipulation, not to mention plenty of literary in-jokes.
Wilson splits duties as Adam, an unkempt English-lit student who meets his dream girl in opinionated art major Evelyn (Megan Bartle). Slonina portrays Adam’s abrasive best friend Phil, who is engaged to his buddy’s former crush, Jenny (Erica Griffin). Bartle, glamorous in appearance and speech, has also done the Royal Shakespeare and Guthrie thing; she and Wilson go back several years. Her tone is a purr, yet her timbre is formidable in intention. She’s always thinking, asking and suggesting, and her hunches tend to be correct. Griffin, meanwhile, is all coltish energy, long legs, cascading brown hair and earnest eyes. Armed with an MFA in acting and directing from Utah State University, as well as ambitions as a playwright, she’s studied with SITI Company’s Anne Bogart in New York and appeared locally in Tony and Tina’s Wedding and Noises Off.
A few weeks before the curtain rises, Curtis, on board once again as director, offers his spacious home off Rancho Drive for the post-11 p.m. rehearsals. They laugh, drink wine and Trader Joe’s beer and chip away at Shape’s park scene in the Eden-like backyard, trying to find the perfect balance of friendship and more-than-friendship between Adam and Jenny. They move to the rug on the living-room floor, below Curtis’ “Winter Solstice” sign and Christmas lights, where characters Adam and Phil clash over issues of transformation and honesty. Curtis advises on “taking the suck out of it”; fellow Le Rever Amos Glick corrects flubbed dialogue. (Nine Le Revers ultimately participate in this labor of love, and additional ones will volunteer as ushers and box officers come opening night, though, as Curtis puts it, “It’s not voluntarily, it’s indentured servitude.”) They discuss Vegas’ population boom, the challenge of creating nationally recognized regional theater and the importance of being young and naïvely energetic. “We don’t have the benefit of being starving artists anymore,” Curtis muses.
These multitasking theater folks, when they’re not packing their free time with three to six hours’ worth of Shape rehearsals, meetings and wardrobe-and-equipment shopping every single day, hold Wednesday evening fund-raising art auctions at friends’ swanky homes, complete with live musical entertainment courtesy of Reve cohorts and body-painted models who portray famous artworks come to life. Guests end up drunk, nude and in the pool.
And after pondering the dead birds on the back patio of Wilson’s Summerlin two-story, they adjourn to his living room at around midnight on Fridays. They rehearse arguments and munch on trail mix. Slonina thinks the scene’s still “kind of wonky,” so they perform a “speed through” reading in which they rapidly spit out lines to better familiarize themselves with cues. They move to the kitchen for the coffeehouse scene, where they perfect their sipping poses using wine-filled mugs. And they all look remarkably comfortable and frustratingly charismatic in the sparse beige surroundings. It’s all in the shoes: Clad in gray All Stars, checkered slip-on Vans and something black, lowriding and patterned with badass skulls, they constitute the artsiest, most exclusive, downright coolest crowd in all the city.
Soon they return to set up shop at the Aruba Hotel, a camo-green old-school oasis formerly known as the Thunderbird Hotel that rests in all its hip, throw-back glory a block or two up from the “Welcome to Fabulous Downtown Las Vegas” sign. In a room beyond the palm fronds and giant wooden hands, the theater folks rearrange dusty black chairs and swat at flitting gnats as they add physicality and movement to their almost-learned lines. They settled on the venue after witnessing the Cockroach Theatre make good use of its dark expanse, thick wooden beams and quirky 8-ball bar stools. Now, over the happy shouts from the swing-dance class over in the Aruba Lounge, they read through the park scene at a handsomely carved rectangular table, sip Bud Lights and Fat Tires, fret about the echo and check their breath, as this rehearsal marks their first attempt at the Big Kiss scene.
Theater folks know all the world’s a stage, that the men and women are merely players, that a sizeable chunk of humanity’s daily humdrummery is all just a bunch of acting, anyway. But once associate artistic director Will Sturdivant arrives from Minneapolis, things elevate from a bunch of acting to true suspensions of disbelief.
Another Guthrie veteran and frequent Shakespearean, Sturdivant co-directed and performed in Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. He stalks the perimeter with clipboarded script in hand, furiously scribbling throughout scenes. He’ll silently mirror the lines the actors speak, hand over his heart and fingers fluttering for emphasis. Rushing forward to leap into the middle of the action, he gestures madly to indicate appropriate times for “trying it just to see how it feels” and “take his energy on that!” Instead of actors losing their collective shit on stage, they become authentic college students authentically losing their shit in authentic coffeehouses. Over and over, he and the four break their characters’ transformations, betrayals and ruptured relationships down to the smallest breaths, glances and ellipses.
Now that Sturdivant’s around, Curtis turns to production logistics. Not only is he Le Reve’s robe-wearing, stick-wielding Morpheus, but as director of the Los Angeles-based aerial troupe AiRealistic, the former champion gymnast and De La Guarda bounder was also instrumental in the show’s creation and implementation. Under his guidance, NATP’s production value has evolved from This Is Our Youth’s no-moving-parts minimalism to his latest gadgetry: rigging up two rectangular wood-and-metal contraptions that will raise, lower and reconfigure as couches, a bed, a projection screen and a theater marquee.
Meanwhile, folks on the production end have separate meetings to talk projectors, sound systems, DVD players, coaxial cables and fade-to-black machines. They weigh the benefits and down sides of borrowing, hitting the Salvation Army or purchasing from Best Buy with plans to return the items upon Shape’s completion.
Sometimes the theater folks sit out on the back stoop, sipping beer, smoking, gazing toward the Aruba’s lushly secluded pool. Occasionally they read through scenes in the waning sunlight. Wilson shouts, “F--k you, you heartless c--t!” at Bartle, or about Picasso taking shits, or about turning babies into lampshades, and it never crosses their minds what vacationers on the other sides of the nearby motel doors must be thinking.
Wilson describes how he and Sturdivant have been trained to tell stories through words, just as Curtis has been trained to tell stories through pictures, and how the combination will be something truly unexpected. Curtis, meanwhile, describes how multimedia displays and multiple seating configurations mark Shape as NATP’s most ambitious project yet.
Then, come dress rehearsal night, when sniffles once again run rampant and their on-set entourage swells for the first time to a dozen or so designers, technical types and fashion consultants, those mobile contraptions finally herky-jerk into place. The park swings suspend from the ceiling, and they’re tested with a great deal of hesitation and nervous laughter. The theater folks dirty their stocking feet as they run around half-naked between scenes, familiarizing themselves with their characters’ slicked hair, glasses, jackets, bandages and layers of fat. Now no one jumps in if lines are flubbed, if motivations are missing. To them, this isn’t even a dress rehearsal. Theater folks know there are no dress rehearsals in life.
They think—they know—they’ll succeed where many local-theater upstarts floundered before them. Still, they’ll remain anxious right up to opening night, because that’s how theater folks are. As actors, their world is one of making the introverted extroverted and living and dying by audience reactions—emotional, physical and monetary. As the NATP, their curtain is drawn, and they have no intention of closing it soon.
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New American Theatre Project presents Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things
May 29-June13 (8pm Tuesdays, 4 and 8pm Wednesdays, 3pm Sundays), $20. The Aruba Hotell, 360-9959.