NEWS COVERAGE

Gorilla Theatre gives annual morning Greek presentation

"Tragedy tomorrow. Comedy tonight."

With a couple of alterations, the Stephen Sondheim lyric from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum could be the motto for the Gorilla Theatre Company's annual summer solstice productions of classic Greek plays.

The company alternates Greek tragedies and comedies in what has become a seasonal rite of passage for adventurous theatergoers. For the last 12 years, dawn's early light on the longest day of the year has found members of this scrappy theater company enmeshed in the comic and dramatic machinations of classic Greek theater, out in the open air.

This year's staging of Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds, which opens at 7:30 a.m. Saturday at the Wheeler Amphitheater in Volker Park, seems particularly timely to Gorilla's artistic director and founding member, David Luby.

"The play revolves around what happens when the community doesn't like what people are teaching," Luby says. "We felt it was appropriate right now, with all the discussion about school accreditation, the controversy about teaching Darwin's theories and the talk about the merits of educational testing.

"Although it was written 2,000 years ago, it still has a lot to say about what is happening today."

The Clouds, written in 423 B.C., is a broad comic satire of the philosopher Socrates, whose sophistic logic and smooth rhetoric are the targets of the playwright's barbed commentary.

The company has added an original musical score and borrowed from several translations for this production. A company of about 60 performers and behind-the-scenes artists are responsible for bringing the play to life.

"The ancient Greeks used to perform plays at dawn," says Luby, who by day teaches technical theater at the Paseo Academy of the Arts.

"In their theater festivals that were an homage to the god Apollo, they would begin with tragedies and work their way through the satires and comedies. It was an all-day affair."

Director Dan DeMott was recruited from the theater faculty of Northwest Missouri State University to direct in a style that is unfamiliar to actors trained in a realistic style of performance.

"It's done in a very open, presentational style," DeMott says. "The leading characters all talk directly to the audience at various points in the play. The traditional, theatrical `fourth wall' is completely broken down, and the audience becomes an integral part of the production. They are called upon to make judgments periodically on what they are seeing, and there is a constant flow of interplay with the crowd."

The Gorilla company's annual Greek production is being staged at Wheeler Amphitheater for the second consecutive year because of construction projects at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where the shows have been performed traditionally.

But Luby says the natural bowl-shaped amphitheater provides an environment that is even more conducive to the theater's productions.

Grants from the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation and the Missouri Humanities Council are providing limited stipends to Gorilla members for the first time this year. But the company remains "99 percent volunteer," Luby says. "People do it because they love theater."

Tyler Miller, president of Gorilla's board of directors and production manager for The Clouds, says the group was making plans to expand the annual event beyond the Country Club Plaza area.

"We are currently building partnerships for next year that will allow us to take our productions to four different communities in the Kansas City area," Miller says.

Tentative plans call for the group's staging of Agamemnon to be performed in the Northland, Leawood and midtown, in addition to the traditional Plaza area venue.

"Our shows are unique," Luby says. "Where else are you going to see a play at 7:30 in the morning?"